by Zoë Ferraris
She took the bottle, wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her sleeve, and took a tentative swig. She winced as she swallowed, blinking furiously.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “Just keep coughing.”
She gave another obedient cough. It brought more tears to her eyes.
“I thought you were Mabus,” she croaked.
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Just keep drinking.”
He put the car in gear and began to pray, Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim.… When he touched the gas, the wheels gave a jolt, but the car didn’t move. He pressed harder. Again, nothing. He pressed a little harder and heard the wheels slip, spinning uselessly in the sand. “Dammit.”
Miriam gave a soft moan of dismay.
His hands were shaking as he took them from the wheel. They had two choices now: either try to push the car out of its rut, or stay where they were and wait out the storm. He looked past Miriam to the window. As the storm bore down, columns of swirling sand rose around them like angry geysers. Between heavy gusts of lentil-thick air, he saw the camel still standing there, taking its meager shelter by the side of the car.
Still blinking through tears, Miriam watched Nayir move with fluid strength as he reached back and collected a rope and a frightening-looking knife in a black sheath that he belted to his waist. Then he climbed into the backseat and leaned over into the rear, hauling all his gear forward onto the floor beside him. She watched him put on a pair of hiking boots.
“We’re going to have to wait here until the storm blows past,” he said. “It might be a long wait, but you can’t be afraid, all right?” She nodded. “Just relax,” he said. “Breathe slowly, and you won’t pass out.”
“Okay.”
“And whatever you do,” he said, looking straight at her, “don’t get out of the car.”
She nodded. He handed her another headscarf.
“What’s this for?” she gurgled, coughing again.
“Help me get the camel into the trunk.”
“What? Why?”
“Once the storm is over, the Rover is going to be stuck. It’s going to take more than two of us to get it out. That camel will be our only way of getting back to the road by Mabus’s house. We may even have to go farther, to the next town. And who knows what the dunes are going to look like once this is over?” He motioned to the window. “We might need the camel just to get out of here.”
“Okay. But is it going to fit?”
“It will be tight. Put this around your head. Tie it tightly and then wind this one around your face—including your eyes. Just leave a tiny slit. Take shallow breaths, and don’t faint. Keep breathing no matter what.”
He bent into the rear once again and brought out a box of tissues. He tore one into strips and handed them to her. “Put these in your ears. Get as much in there as you can. Hurry.”
He wrapped a piece of cloth over his nose and mouth, and knotted it securely at the back of his head.
“I’ll get out,” he said. “But I want you to climb back here. I’ll push the camel in, and you pull. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He covered his face and slipped out into the storm.
She balled the tissue and forced it into her ears, ignoring the pain and pressure of adjustment. She tightened the scarf around her head, then tied the other one around her face as she’d seen Nayir do. Then she scrambled into the rear, climbing over the heaps of gear in the backseat.
The trunk seemed much too small to hold a camel. With a wild roar and a flurry of sand, the rear door swung open, letting in a maelstrom. She squinted through it to see Nayir haul out two large jugs of fluid, probably gasoline, and set them on the ground. The camel was standing beside him, the skinny old thing lashing like a kite in the wind. Nayir handed her the camel’s reins and she took them and began pulling, but the beast only reared away. Miriam pulled harder.
The camel resisted. As Nayir bent over, trying to force it to step onto the gasoline canister, the beast shook its head in an obvious sign of reluctance. The sand was blowing violently into the car. They were so close to the bottom of the dune that it was as if a line of men were standing just behind Nayir, tossing buckets of sand into the trunk. Miriam noticed with alarm that the camel’s legs were buried to the knee and that it was dancing to free its feet.
Miriam scrambled forward. All her pulling was doing nothing. She got out of the car on the camel’s other side and they both bent down, grabbing its legs in a vain effort to lift it into the trunk, but they managed only to frighten the creature more. It was jumping up and down, shaking its head and making a terrible noise deep in its throat. Where Miriam went to grab the camel’s leash again, it kicked her hard in the leg and she fell backward into a churning pool of sand.
She screamed but only managed to let in a mouthful of sand. Struggling to sit up before the sand swallowed her completely, she flailed and turned over, getting more sand into her headscarf. It poured in like water, and she scrambled to her knees, spitting and blinking. She couldn’t see anything. She stood up, but the wind lashed her so fiercely that she lost all sense of direction. Moving blindly forward, hands outstretched, she opened her eyes, then immediately regretted it as the sand cut a new prescription in the one eye without a contact lens. She lurched forward, the sand rising to her knees. It was like swimming in rapids, untethered to land. Sand came in sheets from both sides, shifting like a pack of dogs on a leash. It blew grains up her nose. She couldn’t breathe except in spasmodic gasps when her body forced her to take in air. She gasped, but her lungs rejected the fine granules of dirt and dust, closing off her throat. She wheezed. Short little breaths. Don’t faint.
A hand on her back. Nayir clutched her shoulder and wrapped his arm around her torso before she blew away. He leaned against the solid air, forging brutal strides. Miriam’s mind was lost in her body; now she was her nose, pressing out sand. Now her hand, gripping Nayir’s arm in the darkness.
Something dribbled over the ridge of her lip and slid into her mouth at a jagged angle from the pressure of the wind. She tasted it. Blood. The sand whipped her like a million fragments of glass. Minuscule bullets of crystal and rock had torn sluices on those parts of her face where the scarf had blown away. Her eyebrows and her nose were wet with blood. She squeezed Nayir’s arm to remind herself that he was there, that she hadn’t slipped away. She felt the strength of his hand, the solidity of his grip.
An eternity later, just when she was about to black out, she felt a sharp yank and was thrust into the car. The door slammed behind her as buckets of sand blasted onto her lap, across her face, and down the collar of her robe. She tore off her scarf and blinked, seeing fragments of light and darkness, the red of blood, grains of sand in her eyes. With her tongue, she stroked the inside of her cheek. From the gum line she extracted a silver dollar of grit and spat it out. She used her fingers to scrape the rest of the sand from her mouth. She coughed again, then sneezed, ejecting a bitter muck onto her sleeve.
She opened one eye, tender and filling with tears, then the other. She was alone in the backseat.
She scrambled into the front. Sand was rising up the side window like an hourglass. Had he gone after the camel? Was he out there somewhere, suffocating in sand? She climbed across to the opposite window. Nothing. The light was dark red, turning to brown. She maneuvered into the backseat and then into the trunk. No matter where she went, she could see only sand. She slumped onto the trunk floor, her eyes stinging badly. She wiped them gingerly and felt wetness on her face. Her sleeve came away bloody, and the pain was so sharp she wanted to cry. She didn’t resist. The tears, she thought, would at least clear the grit from her eyes.
She heard a sharp thud like a footstep on the roof. Then another series of thuds, like several people clattering around. She looked up. The roof was slightly indented by the weight, so she climbed back toward the front, scrambling over the seat and falling to the floor, unable to move.
A pounding above made he
r open her eyes. She saw the edge of a knife slice through the roof, get stuck, and retract. Another thunderclap. More feet? The knife came in again, and this time it stuck. She swallowed and felt a river of sand cut new grooves in her throat.
Nayir had waited for the sand to rise high enough so that he and the camel could climb on top of the car. It didn’t take long. In that time, he tied another swatch of fabric over his face, then another covering his eyes. He knew he had to work on touch alone. He tied the camel’s reins to his torso, fastening them with a slipknot in case the poor beast got sucked beneath the sand.
Once the sand had begun to bury the Rover, he climbed from the hood onto the roof and took the knife from its sheath. With some effort he managed to tie a rope to the hilt of the knife. All the while, the wind whipped torrents around him. He knelt down. With repeated jabs he dug the knife into the car roof until it had cut a thin hole and become wedged there. He pushed it in as deep as it would go, hoping Miriam had the sense to leave it alone.
The sand continued to climb. Every minute, he had to pull his feet out of the sand that had gathered around them. He packed the new sand beneath his shoes and made sure the rope was still tied to his waist and that the camel’s reins hadn’t slipped away. As the minutes went by, he felt his clothing being shredded, felt the wind strip an old layer of skin from his body. He oscillated between numbness and a raw, burning pain.
He prayed that the camel would last at least until the worst of the storm had passed. Not only was it his main protection from the wind, but if it fell, he would be unable to lift it above the new layers of sand that formed every moment. Nayir pulled himself close to the camel’s face and felt for its mouth. Although it was choking on a fistful of sand, the camel seemed all right. Nayir pried open the sides of its mouth to swipe out the dirt but only succeeded in letting more in. It sputtered and clucked. Standing perfectly still, paralyzed by fright, it snorted mechanically through large sticky nostrils caked with a layer of sand and snot.
Below, Miriam stared at the knife tip poking down through the roof. She assumed it was an anchor of sorts, a means of finding her once the sandstorm had ended, but she had no faith that Nayir was surviving above her, that he wasn’t being strangled by sand. A few minutes later she noticed a thin layer of sand pouring in around the knife. It formed a small mountain in the backseat. She touched the sand packed around the knife, and it spilled to the side, letting in more.
Awakened by panic, she climbed up from the floor. She tried pinching the hole in the roof shut with her fingers. It took two hands to stop the downpour. After five minutes of exertion, she dropped her arms.
She pulled the tissue from her ears and stuffed it into the fissures. It wasn’t as strong as her finger, and it held for less than thirty seconds before popping out, sending sand shooting into her hair. She rummaged through the equipment for something sturdy and found a roll of electrical tape. Scraping her nail along the roll, she found the end and pulled a strip. Stuffing the tissue back into the hole, she then patched the whole area with what must have been six feet of tape. It seemed to be holding.
She climbed into the front seat. She wasn’t sure why she felt more comfortable there—perhaps because it was the most open space in the car. She fidgeted, wiping her eyes, trying not to think about how long she had left, how much oxygen remained. Occasionally she stared up at the knife, now bundled in tape, wishing it could bring her news from above.
* * *
Nayir climbed higher. Small kinks in the rope marked the places where it had been bent in its packaging. He counted them with his hands, feeling each curve, ticking off numbers as he passed. He guessed he had risen two feet, and they hadn’t seen the worst of it yet. The wind, although powerful, remained directionless and choppy. The heart of the storm would be fierce, lashing him from one side with a force capable of lifting a car. The rope that tied him to the camel was cutting into his skin and now soaked in blood. He hoped that when they hit the center of the storm, he would still have the strength to hold on.
Miriam wondered if Nayir was always this brave, or if he switched on only in dangerous situations. She closed her eyes. Suddenly hot, she stripped off her cloak. A minute later almost all her clothing was off and she lay across the front seat, gasping for air in the sand-choked car and in the odd moments of lucidity wondering why everything was so dark.
Nayir was fighting unconsciousness when the vortex hit. Even though he had slipped into a dreamlike state, all orifices plugged by sand, he could sense that the worst was upon them. Like a large, clumsy hand the wind seized him and carried him aloft, way beyond the pinnacles of the mosques and the noble cube of the Kaaba. He felt his body slanting sideways, anchored only by the cord around his chest. He was a carpet, sailing in a fairy-tale dream. A thrashing kite. Between the moments of vertigo he was aware of a dead weight by his side: the camel, free-floating and whipping around him like the sand itself. He kept his eyes closed and prayed for the sky.
44
The hand that gripped the rope awakened and squeezed. He felt his shoulder respond. He was still attached to the rope. He lifted his head, shook it. The sand fell away. Eyes came open. Darkness became bluish. He blinked and felt the tears pushing crust from his eyes.
When he tried to move his legs, he could feel that they were buried. He wiggled his arms instead, freeing the right one that was tangled in the rope, and busied himself kicking and struggling until he managed to climb onto the new layer of earth.
It was dark, but the landscape was bathed in moonlight. He peeled the scarves from his face and saw that they were wet and dark: bloodstained. He continued blinking, letting the tears clean his eyes, and found the spot where the rope was sunk in the ground. He knelt unsteadily and began digging away, but the sand was too loose. Every hole he dug only filled up again.
The camel was lying some distance away, its head poking out of the sand like a gravestone. Nayir’s eyes were still blurry, but he went to the animal. It was dead. Sticking his arms into the sand, he could feel that the beast was lying on its side. Reaching even deeper, he was able to find the animal’s pack and retrieve the Swiss Army knife he’d stowed there after he’d tried to coax the camel into the trunk.
He made a thin cut along the camel’s neck. The trickle of blood that came out was enough to dampen the sand, and in minutes he was able to excavate the animal’s trunk enough that its stomach was half exposed. He had a crazy idea, something he’d once heard from a Bedouin. He released the pack and hauled it onto the sand. Removing the canteen, he took a long drink, then picked up the knife.
Slicing deep through fur, peeling back skin and muscle, he exposed the camel’s belly. Now that his eyes had adjusted, the moonlight seemed sufficient and he was able to liberate a long section of the animal’s intestines, scooping them out with care and laying them on the sand. It took him a while to unwind them and find the ends, but when he did, he sliced them off cleanly and turned back to find an artery. A minute later he was drawing the animal’s blood into the channels of the intestines by sucking one end like a straw. When he started to taste blood in his mouth he spat, knotted both ends, laid the length of guts out like a rope, and dragged it back to the place where he had dug himself free.
He swept away the sand and, cutting a hole in one end of the intestines, squeezed them to spray blood on the sides of the small hole. Aiming it like a garden hose, he pushed the sand back, widening the hole wherever possible. He dug with relentless concentration, throwing bloody sand to the surface in handfuls, until he felt the hard metal of the Rover beneath his feet. He looked around. The top of the hole he had dug barely reached his hip. He scraped enough sand to kneel down and bang on the roof. “Miriam!” he shouted. “Miriam!” He wiggled the knife and felt the metal shudder slightly.
Jerking out the knife, he plunged it in again and began to saw, grunting with the effort, all the while shouting Miriam’s name and getting no response. He wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the roof, and neither was the
knife. It snapped, the handle breaking cleanly. Cursing, he stood up and fumbled for the intestines. There was a little blood left, and he began to work on the sides of his trench, widening it toward what he hoped was the rear of the car. He finally reached the side window in back. Digging down, he took out his Swiss Army knife and began banging on the glass. It took three tries before it cracked. He pushed the pieces inward, careful not to let in too much sand.
He stuck his head in and looked around. A crumpled form lay in the front seat. He could see the faint white of her skin in the darkness. He dove in, plowing through the heap of sand on the floor. Miriam was lying there in her underclothes. He placed a hand on her neck, felt the soft thump of blood. A pause. Thump.
He rummaged for his canvas tarp. He shoved his gear off the backseat and spread out the canvas. Angling his hands beneath Miriam’s shoulders, he lifted her over the front seat and laid her gently on the canvas. He wrapped the ends around her and knotted them. She didn’t stir. The air around him smelled of her scent, green like trees in a morning dew.
A few minutes later he had her out of the car and was lifting her up, pulling her to the surface until the moonlight hit her body and she rolled to the ground with a thud. Then, before the tunnel collapsed, he went back below, pulling up water and rations, her clothing, his cell phone, and the tent. He poured a trickle of water down Miriam’s throat, but she didn’t respond.
Face caked red with blood, hair sprinkled white, he wandered off to perform a different kind of ablution, to scrape the dirt from his clothing and body with sand and spit, if he had any left.
45
There were two aspects of silence, one transcendent, eliminating the ego and filling a person with sensations of connecting to a universal spirit of consciousness. The other was a negation of everything, a frightening loss of one’s sense of time and identity, a cruel sensory deprivation. He was experiencing the latter now. Beside him, Miriam lay in a semiconscious daze, a sheet of wet canvas rolled around her head, intermittently moaning or asking for water, but mostly unresponsive. The periods of silence were filled with the worrying whisper of the djinn.