Thank you, thank you, why the hell hadn’t he learned to say thank you in Persian? Or Farsi, or whatever it was called instead of learning from the internet a few ancient prayers in an ancient tongue. The father gestured to Marty to get down, pointed first at the sleeping bag and then to a road. Off he went toward what seemed to be a mosque under construction or a shrine. Poor people—judging by their clothes, camped alongside a wall. No, this was not what he wanted. The plan was to sleep out alone under the desert sky. Where in his solitude Nietzsche would assure him he was on the road to becoming the Übermensch, superior to other men and having no need of them. Or by repeating Good Thought, Good Word, Good Deed, he would open himself like the real Zoroaster—his own Zorro—to revelation.
Back home everything he read was true as long as he was reading it except for the nights when it was just as clear that everything, everything was a lie.
Back on the highway, his legs pumped him through a landscape even more barren than the bleak scrub of the high desert at home. There were supposed to be mountains somewhere but as far as the horizon all he saw was flat. At least that made cycling easy. But there was nothing. Not a rock, not a tree. No sound but the wind and the clicking of the cards in the spokes. The clicking was getting on his nerves. Nietzsche wrote never give a hand to the weak. Zorro said never withhold grain when people are hungry. Yes no yes no clickety clickety click. He’d made a commitment: secrecy, solidarity. He rode to clear his mind but his mind was still running, Brent saying, If sabotage is necessary, hypothetically of course, If you were to do it,
What if?
Marty pedaled. What if someone else said yes? What if he and Lori had stayed together? He should never have let her go. And what had happened to the Iran he’d seen in photos?—the snowcapped mountains, verdant green valleys, the gardens with their fountains and pools? Where were the nightingales? Pomegranates and nightingales. He would lie down here entirely exposed. How would he even relieve his bladder? But then night fell sudden and black and no one could see him.
He woke in pain, lying on broken ground. His piss evaporated as soon as it hit the earth. He mounted his steed. Where had he gotten the idea he had to make this trip by bike?
Day followed day. He had believed he would tolerate the heat. He had biked north through the California desert on the way to Brent’s retreat, which was why he’d run away, why he was here, but this desert, this heat—he’d had no idea. And tolerance: a sad and lukewarm concept. Maybe this was what he needed, the sun to purify and scorch his soul. He followed the highway. His back hurt, his knees hurt, his head was pounding. Should he have had the bike customized? He’d been so confident, paying then riding it straight out of REI. Blisters broke and streamed on his hands and his ass. When he stopped in a village seeking cold water, people offered him hot tea. And he needed a shower or a public bath. He was not an adventurer or a world traveler. He was a pilgrim. Not a saint who required this self-mortification. But maybe this was as it should be: Nietzsche said you have to walk to think but surely cycling was better. Cycling he was nothing but hurting flesh. Body only, his mind and soul, too, were gone. In that absence, Universal Thought, a Mind calling to him from beyond his own, would find the space to enter. Wasn’t that the point? The wheels went round. The preventive Lomotil he’d swallowed left him constipated, his stomach cramped.
He stopped to check the tires. In this world, he thought, it is entirely normal to go from elation to despair. The sheer joy of being alive, and having been born in America which meant he could do anything, be anything, achieve whatever he set his Übermensch mind to. There was that. There was also reality. Which was enough to make anyone deflate.
The tires were fine and the chains. All systems go. Onward. Trying to travel in the hours before sunrise, stopping before the worst heat of the day. An hour or two after dusk. If there was scenery, who knew? In the dark. Or head bent over the handlebars, what was there to see? Empty space. Sound reaching him as in a dream, distant calls to prayer. His own mind and soul silenced. He was only a body and then, transcending pain, not even that. He was Martin Keller but he didn’t know who he was. Whenever he stopped, dehydrated and dizzy, people greeted him, eager to know where he’d come from. When he said Germany, they told him his country made the chemical weapons Iraq had used against them. Men showed him their scars and talked about a war he’d never even heard of. When he said America, they told him the US had supplied those very weapons to Saddam. But whether he claimed to be German or American, after they said what they had to say, they embraced him and invited him home for tea or dinner or for a place to sleep and he was excited and surprised and grateful but in so much pain (though no one had used a weapon against him, the damage was all self-inflicted) all he wanted was to curl up in a ball in some cool dark place alone.
He slept on his stomach to spare his sunburned back and neck and the skin on his arm, seared where bare skin had touched metal. The only part of him that didn’t hurt was his penis and that was what had him most worried because it had tingled a while before going entirely numb. If he were alone, he would think of Lori (or better yet, dark luminous Persian eyes) and he’d touch himself for reassurance—or to know the worst.