He stopped and peered as a scuttling monstrosity moved across the trail. He felt sure it was a mirage or a hallucination, but it got closer and closer and refused to go away. It emitted an irritating wheeze of labor as it crawled along the sand like some kind of crustacean. He didn’t see a head or even a visible torso, only limbs and clothes and boots, and finally it stopped a ways off as if sensing his approach. It was a kind of person-thing, horribly deformed and hunchbacked, with too many arms and legs and dressed rather strangely in oil cloths and rags.
He reined in Fancy and they both stood silently, one across from the other, the desert between them.
Is this real? he wondered.
Then another crazy idea: that he had never actually left his wife and kids, that he’d only been killed or some other tragedy, and that this was his journey through the Spirit World.
But what is real?
He suddenly remembered something the Apache medicine man had said that time they’d rolled into town. He had looked right at Little Brown Jonathon, speaking emphatically, and Little Brown Jonathon had translated his words as—We come because the spirits want us to come. You think this is your town, but it is not your town, neither is it your desert, but it is their desert, their town, and someday you will know this.
At the time, he had written this off as savagery, as ignorant superstition, but now with the desert bending eastward with him and the appearance of the bizarre creature standing across from him in the sand, there could be no doubting his words.
The question repeated itself:
What is real?
The bizarre apparition—undoubtedly a mirage, but wait no…—scuttled forward on its many legs, which were all bent slightly at the knees, kicking up a cloud of dust, and it began to wheeze again. But he couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from—for there was no chest, no lungs, no head. The thing came closer then, passed right beside him. Its arms, brackish-colored like water in an old pond, waved in the air, and its fingers curled and gesticulated, making curious signs and symbols, tracing patterns, and sometimes trails of golden light followed in the wake of these fingers. Many, he noticed, where pointing east, and pointing frantically as if to say Something is coming.
He watched, his hand poised above the butt of his revolver, ready for anything, but it just kept swishing and jerking until it had passed him. It scampered away and soon was gone. Eventually he rode on.
* * *
That night he built another fire, and he ate, and this time he didn’t bother tying Fancy to a tree. He sat staring into the flames, thinking about the red river bending through space and linking up with the cosmos at either end.
A shadowy figure emerged from the dark and sat opposite him.
“You come to a bad place,” the figure said. His voice was gravelly, but recognizable.
Indian. Apache.
He continued, “Bad spirits dwell here, bad spirits suffering and wandering and hungering for food—food like you and I eat—but where they are there is no food, no happiness, no sleep, not even words. They are lost, you see, and they want to get back to this world.”
To this he had no reply, nor did he really care to respond, for doing so seemed to validate the presence of the other, to confirm it, and if he ignored it then maybe it would stay a fake, and then it would go away and leave him alone.
“You are already in dream daze,” the figure said. “They are working on you. Why did you come, I wonder? But it does not matter. You are white man, and white man knows nothing of the Spirit World. White man sees only his machines and his sciences and his books. This is sad. This is why you can be influenced so easily. Because you do not know.”
“Go away,” he said.
The Indian chuckled. “I will go. I can fold into the sand like a snake. I can lift into the sky like a bird. Did you know that if you extend a line outward from yourself to infinity, it will come back and meet up again from behind you? That is because infinity is circular. So which way do you head? East? I can only tell you that east is also west. There is no end, and there was no beginning.”
He rose suddenly, pointing a finger across the fire. As he turned to leave, the flames threw light on his appearance. Gasping, he recognized the Indian as the Apache medicine man who had spoken to Little Brown Jonathon that day in town.
The medicine man glared at him before vanishing into the night.
* * *
He figured he’d been traveling for almost a week. He was still doing good on food, water, and provisions, but he would need to find a town soon. He wished he had brought along the map he kept in his desk in the study, but he had been so out of it when he left that it never crossed his mind. He hadn’t come across a single person yet, either, aside from the medicine man—and of course… that spirit.
He noticed a series of lines in the sand and halted Fancy. He sat atop the steed with the sunlight slanting at his back. It was a curious configuration of lines and shapes, drawn with what appeared to be a stick or a sharp-edged instrument. Their chaotic arrangement had no noticeable ordering and was instead scattered across the sand in horrible disarray, looking like something a child would draw.
He dismounted and walked among the lines and shapes, careful not to disturb them. In some he did notice a careful, almost painstaking pattern—if not a pattern then a deliberateness that was dreamlike, in a sense not really there, yet it was there.
Several rock piles were stacked neatly here and there, some in circles, others in triangular formations. They were spread among the gouged lines, in a way keeping them contained and also indicating a kind of perimeter.
He came across the most striking rock formation somewhere near the center of the lines. Four large piles were set into a square with smaller piles forming concentric rings inside the square. The smallest circle was formed by six stones. Inside that lay a photograph.
He bent to retrieve it and although he was aware of his disturbing the exact order (chaotic though it was) of the ritual site, he had to have a look. In the crumbling yellow frame, cast in monochromes of black and white, he saw Isabel and his two girls looking out.
But that cannot be…
In the photograph sat Isabel in a fine flowing white dress wearing her favorite hat and the two little ones (although not so little now) standing to either side of her in similar dresses and then, shockingly, standing just behind her with a hand on her shoulder, was some older gentleman wearing a suit and tie, not a cowboy either, but a university type.
Isabel and the girls looked older, then it hit him that the other man was her new husband. Then he even recognized him. He was Mayor Fronton’s youngest cousin who had come to town recently from New York City. He’d been given a place in the mayor’s cabinet, and his name was Ralph Fronton or something or other, and he’d only met the man once or twice—but as he stared into the photograph, paying close attention to Ralph’s hand placed intimately upon Isabel’s shoulder, he knew the truth.
He thought about that morning a week ago when he had packed his things without telling a soul and then slipped out of town like a shadow. Could Isabel have remarried so soon after his departure?
Maybe several years have passed…
This thought made him sick to his stomach. Casting the photograph back down, where it landed gently among the rocks, he turned his back on the scene and mounted Fancy again, and then passed by the great effacement of lines and rocks marring the desert and continued along his way, heading east.
* * *
Throughout the days he made steady progress across the miles of rocky terrain, up and down mountainous stretches, plunging through craggy ravines and over blistering stretches of sand and desert. The sun seemed to grow hotter each time it took to the sky. He discovered a number of streams trickling down from the mountains, which the parched earth sucked dry almost as quickly as they entered the desert. But Fancy drank her fill and he was able to replenish his canteen. It was quite disorienting to experience these watery veins gouged into the rough har
d sand that always surrounded them, for it was like seeing the earth exposed. And he thought of the Sacrifices of Christ and the Eucharist, things he’d heard the pastor speak about, and he imagined the water flowing through the earth as the blood flowing down Christ’s arms on the cross.
He drifted further and further into what he believed was delirium. He saw no one. There was only himself, his mind, and the brilliance of the atmosphere. He tried speaking to Fancy as though she were another human being, but this fell short.
You come to bad place.
The medicine man.
White man sees only his machines and his sciences and his books. This is sad. This is why you can be influenced so easily. Because you do not know.
None of this did him any good—his thoughts did him no good. He was losing faith in thinking, and gradually this non-thinking ate away at his mind, dissolving it. He was then left with his automatic tasks: riding, fire-building, collecting water, staying hydrated, watching the desert for signs. He became conscious of the penetration of his thinking into the desert environment through which he rode. Before long, he was irretrievably lost.
* * *
The night he saw the lights in the sky was the night everything came to an end. He had set up and built a fire on the edge of a windswept bluff. He had gathered dried mesquite and stacked it into a pile beside his fire pit.
Fancy had wandered off into the desert—which she had done before but always returned, come morning—yet this time he was aware that she mightn’t return. The degree of confusion and absorption taking place was so high that he felt certain it could go no further. Since becoming aware of this great truth, he knew Fancy must also be aware, for he and the horse were now one and the same.
What had appeared in the sky was so mesmerizing, so awe-inspiring and so severe that he couldn’t possibly go back to his old way of riding, fire-building, and water-collecting. It occurred to him suddenly as he glanced around that at last all things had ceased to point east, that now they pointed in a new direction, toward the sky where the lights and cosmic phenomena had appeared.
He had come as far east as he could travel, and the desert would yield no further passage, for off the edge of this bluff dropped a sheer cliff wall of hundreds of feet. The lines of gold, like sunrays darkly illuminated, scored the heavens, arcing to and fro in a dizzying array of celestial splendor. He had witnessed several expanding bluish explosions, great round rings of color arcing outward from a single point like rings on the surface of a lake. Interweaving through those rings and sunrays dove a fiery red comet, a blazing hot missile carving up the night.
This he paid close attention to, for whenever it hovered in place momentarily, instantly it seemed to spring again into erratic flight. With each upward-downward corkscrewing movement, it appeared to get closer to the surface of the Earth.
Eventually it grew so large in the sky that little else could be seen, and then it resembled a tunnel or an opening, bright red and spinning, and it was accompanied by a sound, the harsh titter of steel rubbing on steel. The blooming cosmic bouquet above him, spreading dreamy petals in a fanning display, yawned toward the edge of the bluff, screeching and tittering and buzzing. There it set down in the sand and he found himself standing before an upward-slanting causeway to the heavens.
Beside him, the fire went out.
He felt pulled—roundup was the term that came to mind, the way cattle were done—and soon he was floating forward on a curtain of air into the throbbing red tunnel. His body suspended mid-flight, his feet dangling, his arms outspread and his head thrown back. He was carried toward a pinpoint of color, a little gouge in the fabric of the world, whence the red beam originated. He tried to think but there was no thinking and so he was carried dumbly into the center of that pinpoint, growing smaller, until the universe closed around him.
Heaving, he turned himself back in the direction from which he had come. What he saw crystalized his vision, and somewhere deep within he felt the wailing of his own suffering, his own meaningless existence, and it unfurled upward from his stomach, spreading through his limbs like growing vines which bore fruit and flowers, and even though he couldn’t recall the where and when he knew the familiarity of the vision. With eyes melting and mouth mute he howled tonguelessly at the horror grinding its tall mono-wheel across the cosmos.
There was the river, vast and red, flowing from end to end and filling up the universe with its bubbling waters of pain and suffering, sprouting florae unfettered in groping knots of vine and bush, sagging stalks balancing wide leaves and tapering petals, huge blooms of foliage like ferns, and within this jungle madness lay the thumping heart of the river—a beating, pulsating dimness.
Dead center, floating in the bubbling red waves, spun the Earth, a globe of colors: whites, blues, greens—and ringing the cylindrical crust was a host of shattered humans like marionettes, broken and despairing, and each being held an oar and each rowed time and time again, never in any particular fashion, and never any faster or slower than the rest, and the Earth spun round and round like a top.
He accepted his fate and felt himself drawn back down, back toward the Earth. He tried to find something recognizable (he remembered a good deal about a desert) but only the intensity of his vision remained. His hands found oars, giant flesh-things unlike any normal oars—and then they were even attached to his elbows. This last little mindplay, God’s final sardonic ruse, and then those strings of sanity to which he clung so passionately snapped and went reeling into the darkness.
He experienced only his non-thinking now, and yet he knew what he had to do. As he fell into place with all the rest, picking up the delirious motions with graceful ease, he rowed his oars mightily, and he heaved, and he pulled the Earth along on its great circuit of infinity. He soon found himself laughing. His oar-arms pumped up and down and he laughed even more, and it was not an amiable laugh, but the hysterical laughter of a madman.
* * *
For a long time he lay facing east, which was also west, observing again and again the births and deaths of the great sun, until his bones had dried and his skin had turned black… soon there was nothing left of him but sand.
GOLDEN DOORS TO A GOLDEN AGE
Thomas had been complaining since he’d joined them back in Boston. Short, bald, fat, four-eyed fuck that he was. He claimed to be an esteemed mathematics professor from… somewhere.
“I need the inhaler again,” he was saying. “I’m having trouble.” He took a deep breath, the wheeze rattling his chest.
Ron kept charge over the inhaler. He had found it lying in the road a few hundred miles back—a small blue disc with the word Advair written on the side.
“You just used it an hour ago,” he said.
Ron the philosopher. Ron the reader. Even now, during this time when nothing seemed to matter, he was devouring a collection of Russian short stories as he walked, occasionally peering over the top of his book. And still all of his academic learning didn’t matter out here on the road, where everybody was equal.
“The dose is supposed to last twelve hours,” he added.
“But I’m dying,” Thomas complained.
Ron sighed. “Wait a while, see if it kicks in.” He was older than the rest, the oldest in fact at sixty-five, but his age did not show. He had a lightness about him, and something of a carefree attitude. His skin was smooth, bronze colored, and almost entirely free of wrinkles. He still had a patch of brown hair on his blockish head—and if anything he appeared twenty years the junior of Thomas, who was in his fifties.
Elaine supposed things like beauty (which she still possessed), and hair color (hers being blond), and youth (which fled her in 2010 when she turned forty) didn’t seem to matter anymore. Aestheticism had gone out the window that morning in December when the sun rose on a world suddenly darkened by cosmic chaos. Nothing, nothing at all really, seemed to hold much beauty anymore.
Except Diana.
She looked at the woman. In the beginning it
had been the two of them, the two girls. The men came later. That initial year, the most trying year, they were two frightened women looking out for one another, sharing each other’s hurts and pains.
“I can breathe fine and I had a hit same time he did… same time we all did,” Diana said. She turned to Elaine. “He may be twenty years older than me, but I don’t care. No senior citizen discounts on this trip.”
Elaine laughed, but her insides were melting. She felt them crumble apart, and then grow back together. Whenever she was drawn to Diana, drawn to her romantically—whenever she felt attracted to her—this happened. A combination of sexual excitement, romantic longing, and moral shame. It was strange to experience all three at once. It felt like her soul was shattering.
“If he’d shut up for five minutes,” Diana continued, “instead of being a windbag, it might let him breathe easier.”
“You should tell him that,” Elaine said.
Diana took her hand, yet her immediate reaction, in spite of all that had happened, was to shy away.
In Leviticus 20:13, the Bible states: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death…” The voice of her father, the pastor, condemned her even after his death. An absurd string of questions ran through her mind—Does loving Diana tarnish my reputation as a religious scholar? Have I committed career suicide? What about my eternal soul?
She pushed the questions from her mind and clasped Diana’s hand tighter. Her lover smiled, and she thought to herself, Some things are just meant to be.
* * *
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