I didn’t back down. You couldn’t show revulsion or hesitation in a place like this, with no one in charge and no shelter to speak of. I don’t usually talk about it, but back then, the sand was everywhere, drowning us on dry land. You had to learn to breathe it no matter how much it burned.
His hat tilted and almost fell off as he jerked toward me. The hat would have been too small for a man’s head if a man could be his size. He was large and dark like a tarp. Something under the hat must have held it in place. I kept expecting it to fall. The hat wobbled precariously above us. It made me nervous. I was scared I’d have to catch the thing, scared of looking at whatever was concealed underneath.
He made wild gestures, crinkling the plastic seams of the cape to imitate speech. The best I could make out was something like Gone down barrel-catch, which didn’t mean much to me at the time. This was before the big sweep, back when we were either sent here or crashed. Maybe the equipment had failed. Maybe we’d lost our navigator to some pestilence. I can’t remember. The sand had this way of dulling your perceptions, blurring your memory. I can’t recall if we were hijacked or off-course, or if we had planned to come here in the first place. All I know is that once we’d arrived, none of us had any other choice.
Anyway, by the time I’d found him, I was pretty much on my own. If there were any others, they either didn’t see him, or they won’t come forward and admit they did. I try to keep my opinions to myself. After all, I’m just one particular in a bigger chain of events. Maybe we were supposed to forget everything and I’m the one at fault.
Up close, below the hat, he wore spectacles with wire frames and circular lenses, but of course, he had no eyes. Just these old-timey eyeglasses stuck right onto the flat black plane of the cape where a face should have been. Something orange held them up in the center. I thought of a carrot on a snowman’s face, like you’d see in a children’s picture book, but the orange object was angular and broken, made of metal or some hard plastic. I’d never made a snowman or seen a real carrot, but I knew what they should look like. This object was not a carrot, much less anything organic. That’s why it frightened me when he cornered me and gestured, and the plastic cape crinkled and said: Eat.
The flat black tarp of him had unfolded into a malignant pattern that boxed me in. I tried not to react out of panic, to hold my ground as the orange object shifted position. The geometry of it was all wrong, and it was no longer a part of the makeshift face. Rather, it moved independently. I’d say its shape expanded like a crystal, except there was no pattern or logic to its movement and growth, no regularity to the way it changed. It hovered over my upturned face, taking on an almost liquid form.
For a moment, it hypnotized me, in a way. The brilliant orange shone smooth as before from the textured ground of the black cape. As the composition altered, it took on a heated glow, like melted glass. In fact, the way it turned upon a lengthy dark appendage, spinning closer to my gaping mouth, approaching in constant motion with increasing opacity and liquid blur, it reminded me of glass being blown, rotated on a long hollow tube. Irradiated droplets seethed upward from the glow, and I was suddenly confused about which direction to evade or embrace.
They surrounded me, the others, or maybe it was the sand spinning gusts in the shapes of the others. The sand was everywhere, drowning us on dry land. I’d learned to breathe it, to take it, no matter how much it burned coming in, going out, or getting stuck in the pits of my lungs.
Then something else came in, sliding in, like a long liquid black appendage opening a hole through my groin and upward to the spot between my clavicles. I couldn’t look down to see what sort of giant needle threaded me. I only knew it moved through the front of my body with slow deliberation, as if surgically assigning a displaced spine.
At this point, I couldn’t escape. None of the others tried to help me. I don’t know how many were left by then. Maybe there were no others and never had been. Maybe I’d been stranded, or worse, sent here alone as some sort of bait. I considered the possibility I was disposable. The true aim of the exercise remained hidden from me, even as I was held by the immense threading and the planes of the cape.
Droplets fell from the orange tip of the object, tasting of licorice, a flavor I disliked. However, part of me welcomed it in this situation because it neutralized the sting of sand and the agonizing thrust of being gored. I couldn’t tell if the altered effect was from the liquid cooling within my tissues or from the particles being heated to the melting point. The relief was so great that I didn’t care if I was pissing myself. I’m still not sure if I urinated or if something else sloughed away. At a great enough intensity, heat and cold are indistinguishable. Both feel like fire. Too many signals hit at once and the brain gives up.
Impaled on the cape’s glowing member, I shuddered, stunned into a weirdly aware state of mental numbness. What I felt wasn’t what I’d call fear anymore, or physical pain, although there was a considerable amount of pain. The sand was neutralized, but something else had taken its place, something worse than fear or pain. It was an emotional possession, a transcendent state of shock and loss connected with the land that had begun to quake around us.
The sand was full of the debris of distant antiquity, bits of buildings and artifacts worn down by time after an erstwhile siege. These pieces of dust seemed like splintered parts of my being, now screaming as they blasted apart, drifted, and fell. Recurring explosions thundered an ancient city into ruins, transferring this unknown past atrocity into my future, connecting every lost thread of memory with my present dismal emotional ecstasy. The shape of the man’s cape folded in sharp planes about me, a thick tent of protection, not easily torn asunder by the soaring rubble of a demolished land.
The sand remembered, the land remembered, and I remembered, infected with what I had to think of as implanted memories. It was inconceivable that I’d been here before, so far from home, although when I tried to think about it, I couldn’t picture any home except the ship, and when I tried to picture the ship, I saw nothing, but could only feel the tension and movement of it sickening me, the idea of a soft bladder floating within an abyss before it broke.
Fragmented ground soared up and thickened the air with each repeated impact. Flying motes of dust persisting into the present, charged with an unspeakable history. I wanted to duck, to run. The man’s cape crackled from its folds with its strange replacement of speech as fire fell from the sky and tortured the land, destroying the antiquated city and its inhabitants. I struggled to recognize the nature of the populace through the debris, to know them as my own or sort them as other. I tried to understand the cape’s language, and to remember my body and my place before I was trapped here, but I could do neither.
It could not be true that I had always been trapped here, though the evidence suggested it. Even now, it cannot be true that I remain trapped for no comprehensible reason in this hallucinatory place.
Perhaps travelers before us brought this future legacy like a crime. But was I criminal or victim? Perhaps others traveled in ships like ours, I thought, and this is why I am being attacked. Then I tried again to picture our ships and how we came here. I strained to imagine a group of weathered travelers walking out from a base camp, burdened with supplies and technical gear, low voices testing the parameters of new camaraderie. Explorers and scientists, maybe, or perhaps diplomats sent to make amends. But all of this rang false.
Unable to imagine a vessel of any kind, anything beyond that upsetting watery sensation of a membrane breaking, I remained paralyzed and unsure if we were meant to come here, had slaughtered our way in, or crashed in an emergency. Further, I was no longer able to clearly state in my mind exactly who we were.
I cried out for the others to help me, whoever they were. The man who was not a man shook and flapped with the bomb blasts that ripped open the land around us, releasing more dust. His impaling organ shook me, and his cape crackled like electricity with screams of the wounded and loud wails of mourning; with the echoes of high-pitched shrieks demanding vengeance for the irretrievable dead. Stones of an ever-decimated city crumbled down in the aftershocks and flew at us anew with each repeated hit. I cried out for the others to help me, if there were any others, if there ever had been. I hoped they heard me. I could see only vague outlines of others like a seared afterimage, shadow figures haunting the assembled atoms in the swirling sand, grey substitutes cloaked in static. They surrounded me, immobile and indifferent, like a circle of standing stones.
Or I think I cried out. The rupturing volume of the blasts was like a needle in my ears, filling them with high-pitched fluid. The numbness in my shocked brain leaked into my aural canals and through my sinuses, sinking down the back of my throat. When I made muscle movements toward speech, I may have been merely deluding myself. Perhaps I only tongued the thick air incoherently and drooled when I thought I wailed, for the stones stood silent. No one moved to help me, if anyone was there.
The land shook. The hat fell off. I didn’t want to look.
My limbs shot out to catch it, to stop it, to seize it, and cover his shame. But my limbs were like putty or fawn’s legs, unreliable and inept, and the man who was not a man had no shame.
Beneath the hat he grew another geometrically perverse appendage or message or weapon, perhaps I should say it was all three in one, orange and luminous as a glowing city at night, jutting forth in angles like miscalculated ice crystal formations. With some unknown source of internal light shining through its unreliable surfaces, it sparkled amorphously in mottled shapes, lacking any symmetry. The smell of burnt grass and an unappealing sweetness wafted out like exhaust. Some sort of cremation was taking place.
The contours refused to stabilize before my glazed and staring eyes. I could not reconcile the mobile glow of its transitory fluid with the sharp serrated spaces created by its frantic internal construction, nor could I make sense of the unbearable smell. Additional planes thrust upward from an ever-shifting center, and I saw that a traveler in this place, in this consumed and discarded land, with no one in charge and no shelter to speak of, may wander for eternity as in some abyssal hell, where once there were fruit trees, and acts of loving communion, and songs among many families.
The others, if there were any others, if there ever had been, were members of these families, as I must have been, as all of us were, for there was no other place, no other land. Even those who denied its existence still dwelled here.
The memories flooded me. The cremation was a flaying, a peeling off of layers later laminated into one map of a city forever in flame. As our seared skins reconfigured, I went back to an inconsequential day spent among siblings and neighbors when we played outdoors in the warmth of a joyous sun, sweating, running, and laughing. The creatures in my vision were children, though they looked nothing like me. Or perhaps I had finally grasped the truth, and this was what I’d been all along. This strange shape was mine. This bright place was home. And although the heat of burning flesh was still in our future, we were far from carefree. Split into teams and territories, an argument soon broke out.
Our game stopped. One older child seemed to stand up for me, and I realized I must have been called a cheater or a liar. I fought back tears of betrayal, struggling to understand the rules of play and my standing in the unfamiliar hierarchy of this game in this place so newly sprung from memory. I was overwhelmed by the language that hissed and popped around me, by the sensations of my alien form’s undefinable emotions. They created hideous repercussions throughout my body.
Perhaps prone, perhaps shrinking, I turned upward as the gestures of the conflict arched and flitted above me. They crossed like fleeting shadows, growing larger and smaller, longer and shorter, circling as if time orbited at an accelerated speed.
My accusers called out across the garden for elders to come and judge. The mediators who approached had no faces. Something familiar in their aspect made my heart break, for in the moment that their sympathetic warmth touched me through my unsettlement and confusion, my parents were gone. I recognized them, but immediately an intractable cloud darkened the noonday sun, and the obliterating fire ended all reconciliations, arguments, and futures.
Or perhaps I never knew my parents. Perhaps I had no memory of home besides this foreign glimpse implanted where the sand and shock had burned it out of me, because I had died in infancy. Lacking any experience of life, my tiny ghost remained tethered to the land in cruel intimacy and unfulfillable yearning. No Eden displaced by historical chronology, grief reverberated through the crashing artillery and trembled in the volatile, cryptic speech of the man’s black tarp.
His movements mirrored mine. Together we gaped, though only I had a face.
The plastic cape, its texture like embers in imitation of alligator or crocodile skin, withstood the liquid fire raining from above. Orange turned white hot then blue. As it hit the cape, the blue ran in rivulets through the furrows of the embossed black surface, tracing pathways like a river being born, a mind made innocent by electricity, or a drug caressing the inflamed corridors of thick, hungry, branching veins.
As capillaries filled with information, the others let fall their skins out across the burning sand. The stones of the lost city sank into rubble. If there were any others, if there ever had been, they were flayed and encoded as the plastic crackled with messages and stank from the heat, assimilating skins in an approximation of speech.
We went down barrel-hatch, me and him, below the head, where the cape’s utmost appendage unveiled its meaning as a perverse city in miniature. We watched the lives we might have led there. It stood forever luminous in an opening sandless expanse, impervious to war, the inconceivable shapes of its inhabitants proliferating in terrifying color and beauty. It was the hopeful cancer that grew from the man’s brain, our shared weapon against atrocity, and it was mine to eat.
I received the inflamed organ in the same way I had received the hot or cold poker skewering my heart and scrotum, the spine of my new inverted form, the fear simultaneously protecting and murdering me. In this place, the distinction becomes meaningless.
If I ever had a body, if I could have ever inhabited a ship, the fiery deluge erased all that. It is inconceivable that I survived. If the burned skins of the others saved me, if there were any others, if there ever had been, they made a womb of charred flesh heaped upon my incubator. My infancy was insulated when they hurled their bodies over me in panic as the pediatric ward imploded. It is inconceivable that anyone would bomb a hospital.
Traveler, receive this birth in black tarp, this disintegrating city of snuffed light, as the diseased food of your replacement archeology. Within the dead city, what you’ve come to kill will consume you. Cradle the hell you have made. You cannot read me without stepping into my irradiated infant skin. This is no Eden, but a collective infection of chronology. To read me is to breathe our history. We are the wounded, we are the territory, we are the map.
