The Turbid Ebb and Flow

In the dream he was in another country that was not this country and the girl who knelt by him was not this girl. They knelt in the rain in a darkened city and he held his dying brother in his arms but he could not see his face and he could not say his name. Somewhere among the black and dripping streets a dog howled, that was all. He looked out at the lake where there was no wind but only the dark stillness and the stars and yet he felt a cold wind pass. He crouched in the sedge by the lake and he knew he feared the world to come for in it were already written certainties no man would wish for. He saw pass as of a slow tapestry unruled images of things seen and unseen. He saw the she-wolf dead in the mountains and the hawk’s blood on the stone and he saw a glass hearse with black drapes pass on a street carried on poles by mozos. He saw the castaway bow floating on the cold waters of the bevispe like a dead serpent and the solitary sexton and the ruins of the town where the terremoto had passed and the hermit and the broken transept of the church at Caborca. He saw rainwater dripping from a light bulb screwed into the sheet iron wall of a warehouse. He saw a goat with golden horns tethered in a field of mud. Lastly he saw his brother standing in a place where he could not reach him, windowed away in some world where he could never go. When he saw him there he knew that he had seen him so in dreams before and he knew that his brother would smile at him and he waited for him to do so, a smile which he had evoked and to which he could find no meaning to ascribe, and he wondered if what at last he’d come to was that he could no longer tell that which had passed from all that was but seeming.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1994)