He couldn’t. When the taillights shrank to a distant scarlet flush he returned to the road, massaging the soreness between his thumb and index finger. In that busy afternoon his palm had had two more opportunities to callus.
A half kilometer from the village the flicker of a campfire jumped through the underbrush. With the pickup truck halfway over the horizon, curiosity rather than fear led Akhmed back into the forest. He crept with the faith that the flames spoke louder than the frost beneath his boots. There, in the clearing, a man made of shadow passed pamphlets to that shivering brightness. The dogs, lounging beside the fire, heard him before the man.
“It’s Akhmed,” he called over the dogs’ growl. Never had he understood the obligation Khassan felt for those filthy, diseased animals. His son made him a pariah, but the dogs weren’t helping. Another handful of pages fluttered into the fire. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Khassan was studying the sheet of paper in his hand, where in the fifth sentence of the second paragraph, in the gap of a missing comma, he found the sorrow of his life. The sentence described the upbringing of a minor eighteenth-century tribal leader, and it would be the last time human eyes would read the name of the tribal leader’s mother. “A punctuation error,” he said, with the tremble of more ominous inaccuracy. “I’ve read through that paragraph hundreds of times and never caught it.”
“Don’t do this,” Akhmed said. He could have reached out, caught it, and kicked snow on the fire, but the page with the punctuation error was already smoke, and the name of a mother who died two hundred and twenty-three years earlier was already lost. He emptied his lungs but his sigh wasn’t finished; it went on emptying him. One spring day, when Akhmed was a child, Khassan had led him to a logging field a half morning’s walk from the village. Men with roaring orange saws had leaned into beech trunks and the trunks had spumed clouds of sawdust and groaned as the green treetops toppled. He was eight years old and the stumps were shorter than he was. “Hundred years to get that tall,” Khassan had said, and turned for home.
“I was thinking of someone I lost many years ago,” Khassan said. “She called me a coward once. It wasn’t what she said, but the way she said it. As if her judgment just passed through me. As if I were a cloud.”
The fire had thawed the overhanging branches. Droplets sliding down the slender fingers turned to steam before landing in it. Nothing Akhmed could say would put this man back together. “You were a good husband,” he said. “Your wife loved you.”
Khassan looked confused, as though he hadn’t been thinking of his wife at all, and reached to the ground for another stack of pages. “My wife didn’t, but thank you,” he said, nodding to the fire. “Forty-four thousand three hundred and thirty-eight pages. It took five hours to count. Over twenty trips to carry them. No wonder these pups are so tired.” He knelt and patted the bald dog’s stomach with an awful affection. “Each page averages three hundred and fifty words. That’s fifteen million words I’ve written.”
“There are more words.” The firelight twitched across their faces. It was all he could say.
“There are more writers.”
“You can’t do this.” He spoke from a fear that closed his stomach into a fist, helpless like a child, his emotions a magnification of what he detected in the elder. If Khassan lost hope, where would Akhmed find it?
“You wouldn’t understand, Akhmed, but you might, if you reach my age. I was thinking of the stories my mother used to tell me about princes and warriors who went to great measures to ensure their names would endure, and were punished by Allah for their pride. I want to be forgotten. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
“What are you saying?” Akhmed asked, though he didn’t want Khassan to say any more.
“I’m saying that I want to disappear.”
Once, while hunting in these woods, Akhmed came upon a doe flopping on the ground and struggling to breathe. A distended pink wound spread her hind legs, and her snout held a