Planological Fiction-in The Desert

In the Desert

A handful of sand falls through his fingers. The quiet shuffing the only sound he hears. He watches a sloping pyramid form beneath his hand. No two grains the same, he knows that, though he can not tell. It is all one to him. The shifting dun hills and the flat declining light. A single brush, a single daub of paint, a single stroke made this land. His hand is empty now and he looks to the horizon where the sun lately passed and he tilts his head and now he listens for those honeyed voices that are said to lie so sweetly. He hears nothing. He did not expect it would take this long, but he is a prudent man and from among the few items in his sack he draws a thin wool cover and pulls it across his shoulders. Perhaps these serrated rises stifle their reach. An overlook, a promontory of some sort would be better. A broad valley at least. Where the sound will carry. The dark gathers about him but what matter is that, he asks himself, and he collects his sack and climbs a shallow drift and walks along a ridge. The sand shies from his feet and already its warmth is fading. He sleeps in the lee of a ridge and wakes in the night to find the wind risen. Sand lifting like some great avian flock, wind making the sound only wind makes. He stands and ignores the stinging sand and he listens. The stories tell of a wind that blows in the shapeless hours of the desert dark like horses great-maned and frothy wild and of the voices that follow like herdsman and in the stories these voices speak to pilgrims with an irresistible music and what they say is not known, what deals brokered. Desert djinns or demons, who can say. The wind passes and the night is once again still and he waits and listens and hears nothing. Wipes a pale mask of sand from his face. The ridge behind him has flown elsewhere and he walks about and he sees nothing. He hears nothing. It is a test, he realizes. I must prove myself. He smiles. I will push deeper. 1

A second day follows. A third. He drifts beneath the heat of a silent sun and the winds do not return. The dunes have moved on, migratory beasts. He crosses a wide salt pan where once was a lake and sees the skyline of ancient cities in its fuming. He is not fooled. In the gray light of the moon he enters a stand of laggard dunes and in the moon’s gray light he eats the last of his bread. He is a prudent man, and a full skin of water still remains. He knows he can live without food, having once fasted for forty days. It was on the third day that his hunger ceased and by the seventh he wondered why he hadn’t stopped eating years ago. He had hoped to free himself from his body and meet God like a storybook prophet. He had hoped to see the spaces between, or beyond, and while none of these things happened he had felt as though he was being watched by something bodiless and intent. His will being tested. It is the sort of thing God does, he thought. God or gods or the kin of gods. He did not mind. This was also a test, he knew that now. A test like all things, and proctored or not a score would be rendered. Whatever prize the desert voices offer that soldiers and kings alike give up their families, their fortunes for, it must be earned. Rightly so. He nods to himself. On the sixth day he passes over a ruin swallowed by the desert. Walks through bony spires like skeletal fingers, wonders the shape of the structure beneath. A temple or a fortress, he is sure, death and riches the foremost concerns of all men, in all times and all places. Poor memorial of a people long forgotten, now nameless and beyond recall. The crown of a stone stupa breaks the surface of the shifting sands like the wheelhouse of a shallow water shipwreck. He walks on, does not stop to inspect the intricate carvings. Scoured nearly to erasure. He does not speak their language, and besides, he knows the story they tell.

On the seventh day a storm. The sky black and buzzing, clouds of sand like locusts and a dry static crackle. He had been watching it since first light. A furious wall in 2

support of the sky’s blue dome. He thought to run but where would he go. So he waited. Drank the last of his water and pitched the skin. Watched the storm’s slow march and thought of ancient armies. Above him the sky is cloudless and the sun intolerable. He is lying on his back now and he shimmies to bury his legs and save them a scorching. Not that it will matter. He watches the storm wall. The slow advance. The slightest hint of movement. Like the rippling of a tapestry as someone passes by. From this distance it is a swath of ash, a patch of black lambswool. He is not fooled. He knows the fury it wields, and he knows it is the wind that lives in stories and that the wind is the breath of the voices of the desert. He has acquitted himself well. They will speak to him, he is sure. He opens his eyes and knows he has slept. The storm wall only incrementally closer. He wonders if it will reach him before night. His skin blistered to hide with the sun of half a lifetime, he does not burn easily. But he is hot now. This part of the desert flat and flat. Another trial, he thinks, and he smiles. Drapes himself with his wool cover and beneath it he sweats and he is thankful for the shade and the heat and the dark soon close his eyes again. In his dreams an empty boat lolling in ocean swells, a bell with no tongue. Warm summer rain shattering on slow combers. Somewhere a dog barks. He is floating, rocked from crest to trough, and now the swells are hands and he is carried above a crowd and he is looking at the sky and he is afraid of the people below. In a room lit only by the light that streams through a single frosted window he watches a young girl playing with dolls at the edge of shadow. She is his mother. Something squeals in the darkness behind him. The girl vanishes. He looks at her dolls and they are his brothers in miniature. He hears her crying in the inky shadows and he wants to reach out to her. So much he would have her tell him. He turns away and into the street and a wolf lies dead and rotting before him, yellow eye bulbous, its tongue swollen and obscene. People and carts of all sorts pass by and no one bothers. 3

When he wakes the wind has risen and it sounds like flies. The sun slunk behind the growing storm is the color of urine, faintly glowing. All the world to his sight a dimming sea of vagrant dunes and bleached badlands. Now he feels the first pellets of windwhipped sand. He listens. It will not be long now, he knows this. He tries to clear his head. The city of his birth, the crowded streets. A dusty floor and a bowl split and rice still smoking at its lip. Babies wailing and no one to hear them. Old men and old women toothless and sunken, begging inaudibly at the market's fringes, loose skin folded like glaciers. In dirtfloored rooms in the recesses of great sunbaked mud buildings a motley of paper lamps veil flames that dance in silhouette like tiny courtesans and in their flickering illuminate the almond eyes of orphans bought and sold like chickens. Nights in a far country. Barbarous faces and the cruelty of laughter, the cruelty of silence. Audacious spires gleaming and wreathed by clouds, both in the end diaphanous. Men warring for colored paper and women whispering in their sleep and all the while the warming wind knows nothing of the skins it touches and mountains turn to paper. These have been hard years. He bears the scars of their passing, has this in common with the land through which he has passed. But he does not pity himself. He has seen worse, so much worse. And he has come to this droughty purlieu of his own choosing. Upright and afoot. A single act of one's own is enough, he thinks. He smiles and the storm's cyclonic drone fills his ears and drowns his flickering memories likes leaves slipped under a lake and he watches as they fade from sight and they are all he possessed of the world left behind. In the moment before the storm wall reached him, before those fabled winds lifted him and carried him off to whatever end, he thought of his dream and wondered what meaning it hid, what message. His mother as a child, toy brothers. A dead wolf. Cities and cities and the roads and wires that seemed to him now like scars or the stitching together of scars, depending. He wondered if it was not the hope of prizes that drew people to this soft place but something else entirely. And then he heard them. The voices 4

of the desert that some say are sirens, others angels. He heard them and they spoke to him and it was not what he expected and the long unjust history of man did indeed cease to exist if ever it had, and what was promised, what vows exchanged who can say, or whether in that final moment he wished the world back. This prudent man who was never known to daydream.

Dawn broke on the eighth day and its fire lit a sky crystalline and blue and he would have thought it looked much like a tropical sea, had he ever seen one, turned upside down by some inversion of the inner workings of things. The day began hot and grew hotter and no wind disturbed the sand as it steamed noiselessly. A difficult day, he would have said. Another trial. And he would have smiled. And the desert would still be flat and silent, mutable and stormprone, hypnotic in its shifting sameness. This place lonely as all others.

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