A young engineer sits in the back of a government motor carriage. He cannot make himself comfortable and so shifts his body in unnatural ways and peers in every direction, infinitely conscious of his escort’s gaze, avoiding eye contact at all costs. He has not slept in some time. Though his complexion is the color of warm sand, he is visibly sickly. His newly shaved face is aflame with razor burn and shimmering in the desert heat. The pomade in his hair commingles with sweat and falls across his forehead in gray streaks. He futilely dabs at himself with a handkerchief. The sunlight, having been magnified by the car’s windows, blinds him. The sensation of the suede upholstery against his fingernails fills him with dread. The slight smell of onions, its origin unclear, hangs in the air.
He is being taken to meet an Englishman. The road suddenly becomes straight after winding for many kilometers. The landscape ahead is flat and cracked and dotted with dry shrubs. The sky is pale blue, so pale as to be nearly white. Everything is open all around, and there is nothing. The world is empty. He is told the oil company expects great things. He is told there is a long way to go yet, that he should sleep through the remainder of the journey. He is told they need him rested. The voices travel on gusts of wind but the air is flat. The voices are somewhere else. There are gaping mouths. There are mouths like slits and they are whispering. He can hear a million voices but it is silent. There is an island somewhere in the world filled with voices.
He coughs. There is phlegm sitting at the back of his throat. He feels the globule pulsating like a second heart, a subtle organ of terror and disgust pumping its humors into the lining of his esophagus so that he might speak some vile directive into the world. He will have to engage in a form of leadership soon. No, he will have to learn how to project the illusion of a form of leadership. He will have to become pliable like clay, like a new kind of clay made in factories to be the perfect material for plying. He could invent it himself if he wasn’t busy being carted across the desert. He will have to get used to being carted across deserts by men who terrify him. He thinks about power and how he feels none of it within him and how he feels that every cavity and structure of his body is clogged with phlegm.
Someone lights a cigarette. Far away he imagines the smell of rain. He is reminded of a time when the promise of his life was a frightening beacon in squalid brick hovels. It occurs to him that the fear has been with him all the time but its source has changed. He breathes deeply and finds the pace of his breath quickening. He digs his nails into the suede upholstery and finds himself propelled into a spiritual gutter, overcome with nausea. He smells sweat and cigarettes and men. He is in a bathhouse. He is sitting at the bottom of a well, waiting for the rescuers to find him. He knows that when he is found he will be taken to the school headmaster and then the university administrator and then the governor and then an Englishman and a series of Englishmen. He knows that when he is found he will be forced to meet his fate.
He feels his face and finds it has the texture of sandpaper. He is certain that every texture in the world is an outward protrusion of one of hell’s foulest evils. He closes his eyes and imagines a self-supporting tower. It is the epitome of balance and the nearest thing to perfection. It is tall but not too tall. It has no need to reach into the heavens. It has no need to graze a celestial body. An ill venus would only serve to corrupt it with unearned extravagance. Kings dare not sit upon it because there is no throne there. The tower is unassuming–that is its beauty. It exists only to prove the sufficiency of its design. The atmosphere is rarefied because there is no industry. There is only the tower. Suddenly the air is tainted by the faint whiff of onions and the tower crashes to the ground and all hope is lost.
An old woman, draped all in black, stands at an intersection. There are no villages in sight. Her gaze meets that of the engineer for a single moment. He remembers her. He sees her sitting atop a pyramid of skulls. He sees her standing in a garden handing him a box of candied plums. He sees her standing at the bottom of a well, staring up, drowned in stagnant water, unblinking. He understands implicitly that she exists only on this stretch of road in this particular desert. He understands that there is nowhere else for him to be either. He thinks about the tantalizing promise of choice and the terrifying burden of choice and the deadly illusion of choice. He decides that he prefers being powerless. Sweat is pooling at his lower back and he feels like the most disgusting creature alive.
The driver yawns. The engineer yawns. The sun is setting. There is yellow grass on the side of the road swaying in the evening breeze. There is a blur of yellow and green and brown morphing and pulsating outside the car as it flies through the air. There is life somewhere in the world but there is no life in the car and there is no life in the desert. There is life in the desert. There are a million people in the desert and they are hiding. They are living in the great flat uncovered land and they are hiding and they do not want the car racing through the desert to reach its destination. There are communities dancing to the rhythm of drought. No, they know where the water is. They are dancing to the rhythm of secret water. They are dancing to the rhythm of the ancient secretion.
The moon is a crescent. There are jackals howling in its direction. They are praying in its direction. There is an ancient reed flute playing the saddest melody imaginable to all the crepuscular beasts of the world. Fires alight on the horizon. Buildings burn with discontent. Smoke rises out into the sky and colors it and plays with the oncoming night. A million crescent moons hang in the loud and silent corners. A million banners rise and fall. Jackals hold banners aloft and they are kind jackals but they are baring their teeth and the banners are worn with years of disappointment. The hackles are raised on all the world’s hairy beasts.
The sky is black. The earth is hidden beneath its veil. There are shapes moving about in the night. They belong to the dark. They are viscous and their surfaces absorb starlight. They are making plans. They are following the orders of a blind master. No, they are acting on their own. They are a hive mind belonging to the desert. They are the children of dust and nothing. Their chittering awakens no one. The stars decry the machinations of men and earthly things. The celestial bodies loathe the erection of towers and other bodies. There is a war in the night but it is not the ancient war described in ancient texts. There are not two sides. There is a war in the night being fought with electricity and desperate words and gnashing teeth and fire, but it is not the honorable dance of light and dark, because that dance was never scheduled and the great hall was demolished. The shadows are dancing toward the Englishmen.
There is something rearing back on its hind legs in the middle of the desert. It is slick with excretions. It has an elephant’s tusks, a vulture’s talons, a tortoise’s shell, and a scorpion’s barb. It is crowned in turquoise and limestone. It is an old woman. It is the congealed flesh of every thing that has died in the desert. It is roaring and its roar echoes a ballad of patriotic fervor. It is the exsanguination of coincidence. It is amassing an army of shadows. It is the syrup of a million years, the singing stone that calls forth legions and will call forth more men than any mythic cause in the histories of doomed emperors and will crush bones and drown men and drain them of all that made them what they believed they were or could be. It is the infinite oozing void, the rainbow, the technicolor mirage. The sky will burst open with metallic locusts and invisible caravans and hordes of men in linens and men in khakis and men not dressed for the desert. The light will fade and the fires will die out and the rains will fall and the desert will swallow up every last thing and the beast will gnash and devour and rip the world to shreds.
The engineer jerks awake. The sun is rising. There are pistachio shells on the floor. He is drenched in sweat. The air is clouded with smoke. There are bathhouse memories playing in a cinema in a city a hundred kilometers away. There will be minarets on the horizon in another hundred kilometers. The road stretches on forever. The morning hunger pangs dance with anxiety in his gut. The knowledge that the world will end dances with the promises of childhood. The memory of a dream fades and guilt rises up to the back of his throat drenched in bile and phlegm. The alchemical properties of blood remember the conquests of a thousand years and choose to remain the same. The driver coughs.
Someone speaks about rest. Someone mentions bathing. The road is straight and will be winding soon. The road will be long and the journey will extend beyond the road. Voices on an island in a cold sea will be speaking over each other and are speaking in tandem and will be speaking to voices on other islands and landmasses forever about the nature of the desert and the gifts of the desert and mountains and marshlands. The engineer wonders what would happen if he threw himself out of the car at speed. He imagines the husk of his body hitting the dusty earth and bouncing along the dry sea like a pebble and his bones breaking and his neck breaking. He steels himself. He is going to meet his fate and fate is an Englishman.
The sun is shining. The young engineer feels old and cannot imagine what it would be like to be an old man. His face feels like an infant’s face. He imagines an old woman and she is his wife and he is his wife and his marriage will join nations. He is married to the desert. He is married to an Englishman. He looks at the rearview mirror and nearly meets the eyes of his escort. He sniffs. Black liquid is streaming down his face. He smells onions and salt and cigarettes and men and putrid flesh. There is death on the horizon. There will be towers on the horizon and they will be topped with minarets in the shape of onions poking the sky and bothering the things in the sky and opening the sky and raining terror on the land.
A government motor carriage is speeding through the desert. It is traveling on the only road in this part of the country. Its destination is predetermined and its passengers know there is no avoiding fate. The oil company is expecting their arrival. The men inside are all the color of the desert. They belong to the desert. The oil beneath the earth is expecting their arrival but it is impatient. It is seeping. The men are seeping. The reservoirs of their bodies are full to bursting. A million creatures are seeping from a billion orifices and they are all going to explode. The earth is black. It will be seeping from a million holes. Its heart will petrify. The sky is yellow and everything smells like burning.
-- Arzhang Zafar is a writer based in Philadelphia.