Desert Caravan

There’s something shiny in the desert. Some tiny, scintillating thing way out on the horizon. It’s barely discernible, easy to miss if you aren’t looking. Pinched between the edges of the sky and the sand. Under the hot, hot sun, its bleary image quivers.

On a sand dune far from anywhere, there was a convoy passing. Men led camels leading wagons loaded with big bushy bushels of bushbaby hides. The men were hot. They were tired. They had been walking for days. Their coarse beards itched and dripped with sweat. The desert all around was void of life for miles and miles.
At the crest of this particular dune, where the grade flattened to just about nothing, the captain of the caravan paused. He wiped his slickened brow and peered off into the sands. A brightly undulating blip caught his eye. Tiny, pale, firelike. It ditted and dah’ed foreign messages through the sweltering air.
With his bare eyes, baked to little beans after days of schlepping under the desert sun, the captain gazed out at the curious blip. He leaned onto the outer edge of one sandaled foot, then the other, cooling the blisters and chafes. That dot, wavering, winking, would not let his eye go. He shut his eyelids, rubbed them, opened them again, and there the dot was. Its flicker stirred something inside the weary trailblazer, perhaps some dormant, melancholy lust. He felt a hot lump in his chest and thought he heard the distant moan of a conch. Slowly at first, one frail step in the sand, then two, then into a headlong trudge, he went after the little white light.
This was not the most responsible decision. As company leader, he was duty-bound to orient his convoy efficiently as they traversed the long, empty canvas of the desert. Such an errand as he now indulged would have them skewing off on a course perpendicular to their intended one.
The caravanhands, surly and disputative from the heat, were not enthusiastic to follow the divergent meandering of their foreman. A sort of inertia held them to their original path. But after calling out to the captain in hot-blooded confusion yielded no answer, then, with mumbles of dissent, follow they did. Foot after foot through the golden sand, camel reins and tapir snouts in hand, the crew walked behind the captain, trailing his delirious whimsy.
Time passed. Part of an hour. The company slogged updune and downdune like little tugboats in a sea of dry mozzarella. The sun seethed down their necks.
After they ascended several ridges, the captain felt — with the intrinsic gauge of any good navigator — his goal drawing nearer. He halted. The thought came upon him to glance back, just to observe how far in its pursuit he had traveled.
When he turned around, however, and peered beyond the throng of men and animals, he found that his footprints did not extend back over the crests he had crossed. Nor did those of any of the beings in his command. In fact, not only were their tracks absent from the adjacent slope, but they quickly took a ninety-degree turn and reformed the path that the caravan had been following before he ever became distracted. It was as if they had made no progress at all, but simply walked in place on top of the sand.
The captain scratched his sweaty head and swiveled his sweaty feet. He told his men to stop and pointed out the dubious backtrail. For several minutes, an argument ensued over whether they had surmounted three dunes or four — either of which would have put them farther than they presently stood. Eventually, one proponent of the three-dune postulate got fed up and drew his sword and chopped the head off the nearest four-duner, and that pretty much settled things. If a private poll was taken, each man would have maintained his original opinion, but now they held it more quietly than before.
The captain scratched his head again. He looked out to his faint, flickering treasure and decided that it did not, after all, appear much more within reach. Yet, the mere sight of it dispelled the bulk of his disappointment as the wind would a wig. He passed into visions of lilymeadows and violet honeycomb, scents of lavender and sweetened cumin, waterfalls of tangerine (no pulp), and one universal motherly voice — or perhaps it was many voices — telling him funny secrets in a tongue he could somehow understand. Bound up in the sensory bliss, he stepped forward in the sand.

Then, he stopped himself. Visions or no, this captain was a thinking man, a seasoned traveler with years of critical navigational experience. Drawing on these deposits of knowledge, he turned around, stared down the stunted trail of footsteps, and began to march backwards. The troops watched, dimly dumbfounded. He gestured for them to copy him. Further grumbling and griping resulted, but they obeyed. They found this assignment much easier to fulfill themselves than to impress on the animals.

And so, the merchant cadre proceeded in reverse, for exactly as many dune mountings (depending on who you asked) as they had achieved before — that is, in the forwardfacing direction that was still oopsie-daisy-ways to their initial purpose in venturing into this unhappy domain. The going was predictably slower and more onerous by this second method, with the tricksy, sunbaked sand scouring their ankles, and the mulish slopes perpetually threating to trip the men and topple them over. But on they marched.
One of the men scratched at the bristly hairs on his wrist as he walked. His poor skin was so dry that some of it crumbled off. He looked at the raggedy molting patch and was surprised to find freckles on his charred-olive skin. Another walker tried to tally the footsteps in the sand behind them (or ahead, if you like), but realized that he had never learned to count past nineteen. A third man was slipped by a sandy upslope and lost his grip on two of the pack animals. They wandered semi-urgently back to the original trail as if to resume their duties, while the handler scooped out handfuls of scalding hot earth-pepper from his clothes.
Of the thirtysome men who comprised the caravan, seven thought, fondly or otherwise, about their wives; eleven thought about romances that ranged in intensity from long-term, lovey-dovey entanglement to anonymous rendezvous; twenty-one about loves unrequited, unexpressed, uncomprehended, unrealized, unadulterated, unvalidated, and in terms of the impression they would leave upon the world, nonexistent; two about their pet cats; one-point-two-nine thought about same-sex partners; and one, alone, about that glittering aurora on the horizon. Would it lead him to the edge of the desert? To the fringes of a different terrain? Or deeper inside, to the epicenter of all that ghastly sand?
The convoy commandant was never seen as a particularly capricious man, and much less one with a monomaniacal streak. Yet, could any of his underlings have observed him, spearheading (or spearrearing) their weary, sunbeaten pack on that backward march, they would have been flabbergasted by his steadiness, his stolidity, the unwavering, predestinate pistoning of his knees, and the expression on his sweat-smeared visage that bespoke a devout parchedness. It was an ensemble of superhuman discipline.
The captain had led his company over a full nine dunes when he once again felt impelled to turn around and confirm his progress. He wound down his march and came to a rest. His followers, most of them lacking eyes in the backs of their heads, were unable to halt in concert with the captain and bumped clumsily into their fellows, creating a scene like an exodus of bowling pins. The commander paid them no mind. He sighed deeply. He looked beyond his men and over the tracks dotting a dead line through the sand. A cool draft of success blew through his smoldering soul.
Then, he turned around and felt his heart fall as hard as a narcoleptic goose. Way out in the sandy offing, the object of his desire twinkled faintly, more faintly, more obscurely than ever. For every step his squadron had invested in its pursuit, the beacon had taken four in retreat.
The captain squinted. His mind whirred. There was no whisper of a sandstorm on the rise, no atmospheric interference of any sort. But still, something was working against him. Some interloping operator, maybe divine, maybe mortal, wanted to keep him from his prize. This was slash and burn — though there was little to slash and less that was not already burned.
Most of the caravan saw the hard disaster that had struck their chief. They followed his gaze to the horizon. Some saw no change in how far their soft-shining target appeared. Others could not catch their eye on it at all, and to tell the truth, were unsure they had seen anything in the first place. None could fathom its importance to the captain or the swanlike spelunking it had perpetrated in his heart.
For his part, the captain could fathom very little. Malformed half-thoughts, wild droves of them, darted in and out of his mind. Why had this …? Was someone …? All he wanted was …
The commander stood stock-still on the ridge, a statue to himself, perspiration streaming down his back. He rode parched and crumbling waves through time. But of all his surroundings he was unaware. He might as well have been stretched out in his tent fast asleep, dreaming.
He tried to apprehend the feelings that beset him, to track one down and interrogate it. Why did he long for this Fata Morgana? Did he covet it as he coveted a precious stone? A brilliant pebble to fix in a ring around his finger? Not quite. As he desired fame, then? Or property? No, far from it. As he desired to extricate a rock from his shoe? No, no, it was ardent. Did he yearn for it the way he yearned for the home of his childhood? For food in his belly? Closer, yes, but something less animal. This glimmering enigma … he desired it as he would a part of himself, some integral shard that long, long ago in the preamble to history, was split off from the man and made to wander the desolate fringes of the world alone. He felt connected to this thing, invisibly, unaccountably. Yet tenderly and inseparably, as something he was fated to recover. Fated, yes, fated to find it. Fated, that’s it, that’s it exactly! Fated!
At once, the captain dropped onto his shoulder like a felled tree and commenced to roll downhill in the direction of his destiny. His chassis and legs he kept rigid, while he slackened and flexed his arms in cycles, operating them like floppy flagella. The going was easier than it had been on foot — but new challenges were not shy to appear. With every revolution of his prostrate body, he found fresh regiments of sand thrown up to impede his progress. They mired him, flanked him, phalanxed him, used his convexities against him. On his exposed flesh, they burned and scored and stuck themselves in uncomfortable cracks. But he granted them no quarter in his heart, and sure enough, little by little, his momentum grew, and he sped and smoothed and sped some more until he was practically bobsledding down the slope.
His goons, men unburdened by genius, watched for a few seconds in confusion and judgment. Then, suddenly afraid of being left behind, they fell to their sides and copied the captain’s example. Thus, the entire duneside ignited with the flailing bodies of men, plowing through their grunts and the gushing sand. The animals followed, too, although they opted to remain upright.
The supine caravan again summited no more than four but no fewer than three of the trenchant crests. Again, the chief halted at the peak of the final dune, and again, he rose to his feet to brush the sand from his ears, nostrils, and gums — no, not again, that happened for the first time. But again, his entourage, unmindful of their conductor’s instinctual pause, tended to roll into one another, their forearms flying and berating and leaving bruises, their bodies piling up like a mass grave of the undead. It took several minutes for them to disentangle and regain their posture.
In the meantime, the captain had closed his eyes meditatively. He drew a deep breath, pulling from the zoë of the air and letting it flow through him. He was ready for his fate. But when he trained his peepers on the horizon, what met him was a sight so repetitious it could make Ravel retch. Way out there on the hem of the world, hardly a hair closer to his embrace, that glistening inamorata teased and teased.
The captain fell back to his knees. He placed one hand over his heart as if he might pull the battered muscle out and cradle it, and pet it, and whisper to it. But it hung on inside his chest like a prisoner in chains. He was defeated. His heart felt like an aborted basket weaving. Like an onion peeling away to nothing with no one there to cry. He knelt in the sand in the kiln of the desert. But at that moment, he might as well have been standing on his head at the frigid nipple of the icecaps, or falling forever through the gaseous swill of Jupiter, or squashed by water at the base of the deepest, darkest ocean trench. In his heart, he would have felt the same.
The men, observing their commander’s colossal grief, the cause of it yet beyond them, did the considerate thing and stood quietly by. Some toed the sand idly. Some tried to practice their timestables. Others hummed little tuneful nothings — a bit loudly, in the hopes that the captain would notice and later remember them minding their own business. Others pondered what ailment had befallen their employer. Were these the spasms of heatstroke that flung him continually to the ground? Had some repressed memory from childhood come unleashed and torpedoed to the surface of his psyche? Had the hollow circuitousness of his occupation, and correspondingly, of his very existence at last become dispiritingly clear to him? With his focus, regularity, and fairness, the captain long had culled an oaken respect from his men, if not what they would call their love. But his present behavior was, to say the least, erratic, and it began to eat at their respect like a horde of termites.
            One of the merchant walkers was a teenaged boy with pimply cheeks and, the doctors said, one arm that was slightly longer than the other. Among the caravan, this self-conscious lad came closest to bearing real love for the poor commander, who had years ago saved the boy’s father’s life in the midst of a monsoon. Moreover, the youth was smitten with the captain’s niece, inflecting a spritz of fear to his already complicated feelings for the older man.
When he saw the captain collapse in the sand, foiled in some unknown conquest, the boy was unsure, madly unsure how to respond. A strange brew of pity and fealty poured off his body in droves, stowing away on the armada of teenage hormones shipping out from the harbors of his every pore. All told, he was extraordinarily sweaty. The boy approached his commander with trepidation. His prolific sweat seemed to lubricate his joints, quickening his movements even as it augured his arrival by several yards. He placed a soft hand on the captain’s shoulder, then yanked it away nervously. He chewed his lip, reached partway out again, eyes shut. But his belly squirmed and yellowed, and he retracted the hand. The captain sat unmoving — lost through a wormhole of thought and emotion. The boy opened his eyes, nibbled his other lip. His water-logged armpit itched.
            “Sir? Maybe this isn’t the best time,” he said, “but, well, I’d really like to marry your niece.”
            Immediately, he wondered where he had found the impulse, not to mention the nerve, to spill those particular beans. Stupid, stupid! he thought. But it was too late now, too late to suck the words back in or rewind and never have dribbled them out. Could he just walk away? Zip his lip and deny everything? Me? No, not me. I believe an insect whistled by and made a certain racket. No, that wouldn’t work, too many of the other men had heard him too clearly, they must have. And besides, there were no talking bugs this far out in the desert. The boy found himself waist-deep in a mire of his own pucky. The only course, it appeared, was to wade on.
            “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I mean, I think about her all the time. Your niece, I mean. Sometimes I fall asleep thinking about her, and when I wake up, I’m still thinking the same thought. And I’m not sure if I really slept at all, you know?” He scratched his head. “And sometimes, I can smell her even when she hasn’t been around in a long time. She’s got this smell, this really special smell. It’s like …” He scratched his shoulder, groped for the word. “Barnacles. Like barnacles. On a dock. When the tide starts going out.” Scratch, scratch. “She smells like barnacles do when the tide starts to go out.”
            The captain, who had been stony and silent through the confession, remained stony and silent at its closure. He just knelt on the sand, a light wind lapping at his hair. His eyes were closed, and his chest rose and sank with shallow breaths. He heard nothing. Or if he did hear, he made no sign of it.
            The besotted youth waited. He waited for his captain’s big paternal grin, his jubilant embrace, his ecstatic, wet-eyed blessing. None came. Then, he waited for a bowel-rending, heavens-dimming eruption of igneous fury and unequivocal rejection. None came. Then, he waited for any response at all. Then, he waited to see whether the poor man was awake. Finally, anticipating no answer, he backed away — like a boy from his father’s study in the late, late evening — his feet crunching in the sand. One of the other men sniggered none too discreetly. The boy slugged him in the shoulder then went back to staring glumly at the golden sand.
            The light wind flushed through the air one last time, then petered out. The sun lounged over the land, immersed in the endless blue sky. Suddenly, the heat was far less enmitous. To most of the caravan, all feeling and action seemed easy, bald, set to the LO setting.
            One of the camels, a lanky and dimwitted soul who was given the name of Hernie, leaned over to his friend, a tapir called Buckmuck, and asked, “Buckmuck, why are we not moving?”
            Buckmuck grimaced and leaned away, in part from the flagrant obliviousness of the question but mostly from the unseemly oral machinations by which Hernie had voiced it, wobbling his big rubbery lips and gnashing his long dirty teeth. This was a behavior as common among camels as it was repugnant, in Buckmuck’s opinion. The tapir blinked a few drops of spittle from his eye and said, “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”
            “Ohh,” said the camel. He clacked his teeth, turned the matter over in his mind — a procedure analogous to folding an elephant skin from inside a sock drawer. Finally, he let out a flummoxed sigh.
            “Buckmuck, what does that mean?”
            Buckmuck rubbed his beady eyes. “That one there. He’s in charge, right?”
            Hernie considered. Considered. Considered.
            Considered.
            “Right,” he said.
            “Well,” said Buckmuck, “obviously, he’s experiencing some sort of angry fit. Something must have happened to set him off. He might not look it right now, but inside he’s practically exploding. Only he can’t afford to do anything about it — like, say, break the water jugs or chew ravenously on the hides. You see, to express his feelings. So, he’s doing everything he can to hold all that rage inside him. He can’t predict or control what he’ll do if he lets it loose, so he has to lock it up tight.”
            “Ohhh,” said Hernie slowly. “He’s mad?”
            The tapir nodded. “Undoubtedly.”
            “Mmmm.” Hernie chewed on nothing. “Because I thought he might be sad.”
            “Bah. Impossible.” Buckmuck would have spit in derision, but he had trained himself to curb that habit since it tended to leave his nose wetter than the ground. “Sad? A brute like him? No. Those animals don’t feel sad. They don’t feel sympathy. Their innards are black, Hernie. All they feel is wrath. Jealousy. Pride. The impulse to beat the helpless, to drive the weak as their slaves. To raze and destroy whatever they can. They’re fire on two legs, Hernie. They think the world is their sandbox. They won’t know a blue feeling until they take the yellow pigment out of their money.”
            Hernie furrowed his clumpy brow. He thought for a long time. Then he said, “Mmmm.”
And then he said, “Because he sure looks sad to me.”
            “Bah.” And here the tapir did spit, forgetting himself. A thick gloopy globule doused his nose like a pool noodle.
            While Buckmuck cleaned himself up, his friend continued to eye the vanquished man in the sand. The captain still did not move, save for the infinitesimal pumping of his chest and the wordless whisper of wind that had returned to tickle his hair. The camel sighed compassionately and shrugged. (It was fortunate that none of the men was riding on his back at that point, as they surely would have been crushed to death.) Thus resigned from the commander’s impenetrable despair, Hernie started himself up a game of solitaire, moving the cards around at a tortoise’s pace with his hulking yellow chompers. No sooner had he laid out all of them in their little columns than a gust of wind bustled by and whisked one of them away from the pack and out on its lonesome over the acres of hot, golden nothing. As he later deduced, it was the king of hearts. This made Hernie feel sad.
            Meanwhile, inside the captain’s impregnable pod, a tornado of dark sensations was afoot. For years, it must have been brewing on the neglected back plains of his mind — this black storm of thwarted desire and interminable desperation — and now, it was ripping and ravaging through the capital city. The image he projected to his companions, so still and pensive that it was almost serene, was, in truth, the utter opposite of the carnage transpiring under the surface. Within, it was bedlam. It was duck-duck-goose at the gates of the Inferno. Rational thought was deposed, and his mind collapsed into an apocalyptic tussle for the fate of the world. Arms were hewn. Blood rained. Dirt was thrown in eyes. Fire consumed the bodies like carrion. The caravan captain stood amid it all, enervated, benumbed. He could not mediate; he had no more thoughts; his sentient mind was disabled. All he could do was wander the smoking, roiling battlefield in a daze, his face and purview stained with blood and viscera, and pass out cups of water to the contenders.
            By the time Hernie had finished his game of solitaire, the sun had set, and darkness had spread over the desert. The noxious wind had abated, and the searing heat of the day was relieved by a subtle, simmering chill. With the night had encroached a cover of high, wispy clouds that had no earthly business hovering over such a dry and desolate place. But just as the camel laid down the fifty-first card on its proper stack, the clouds dissipated in one uniform breath, like a threadbare sweater finally coming apart from every weave at once. Hernie’s cry of delight over his victory (incomplete though it may have been) was sublimated under a chorus of gasps.
The caravaners, milling around a campfire, stared up together at the night sky. The stars were out. Shining like little diamonds in the enormous black crown that wrapped around the world. Trickling down from the zenith in a shower of indescribable beauty. Stars beyond number. The men in the desert were awestruck. Those who were standing sat down, and those who were sitting leaned back with their palms on the sand and gazed up in wonder. The boy who loved the captain’s niece tried to draw her face in the stars and found her in a hundred patterns. He smiled. All the men smiled. There was so much beauty around them. Stars beyond number. Stars that flickered and shimmered and coruscated against the dark sky in a great sidereal polyphony. Each one blinked to its own rhythm; each one coded its own messages of amour; each one bellydanced through the night for all to see.
            One of the men could not avert his eyes even as he wandered away from the fire to relieve himself. In his rubbernecking, he stumbled into the captain, who was kneeling just beyond the reaches of the firelight. The boss fell over into the sand, face first, so his eyes and mouth and nose were once more filled with earthy grit. But the collision wrested him from his paralysis, and once he had scrubbed and sputtered all the sand off of him and had seen the curiously craned necks of all of his lackeys, he, too, turned his attention to the skies.
            What the men saw and what their captain saw were not the same. For him, the heavens were not festooned with celestial splendor but drenched in shadow, deceit, and mockery. The stars he saw were dull and dissonant. The black sky was home to an orgy of tricksters, interlopers, imposters. Billions of fiends and devils in disguise. Billions of soul-sucking zombies impelled to feed instead of to heal. He saw these terrors and felt terrified. He was not fit to lead his men here.
            The very sight of the stars began to make him feel woozy and sick. Each twinkle became another arsenic twinge. He bent double, threw his hands over his eyes, fell to his haunches on the ground. He curled up to hide, hide himself from the lights that nauseated and tormented him. Hide from the lights, hide from the sky, hide from the noise …

When he woke up, day had come again. The sun bore down over the desert, blank and burning as ever. There was no wind. The caravan, having deemed him a lost cause and elected a new leader, was gone. He sat up and looked over the ashy remnants of the campfire and the long line of footsteps trailing over the dunes and out of sight. He was captain of nothing now.
            He stood up and turned around. Way out in the distance, away from the tracks of his vanished caravan, over the dreamy waves of schlieren that rose off the land, a tiny white light twinkled on the horizon. He began to walk toward it, not making a sound, save for the scratching and rattling of his feet in the hot desert sands.

ξ

Ben Peterson lives in Anchorage, Alaska. He is a fisherman in the summer, and during the winter he makes ice cream.