SEVENTEEN

The World

[Early Spring, 2006]

I reach out and I can touch the ten thousand things. Yes. My fingers sweep the dust. Yes. There are objects, and I am one: a thing with them. Yes, yes. I begin with a grain of sand.

Everything is exactly the same. I’ve been told about this, and it is no less true than anything.

At the edge of the city, where Dalanzadgad ends and merges with the Gobi, the roads are long ruts in the dirt, and a long, straight line of telephone poles without wires follows the road out for some miles into the emptiness. So I walked at a regular pace with my pack slung over my back, the hat on my head, the badge on my chest, and the gun at my hip. The sun was a spot near the wavering horizon, and the further that I walked, the closer the sun grew to that horizon, and if I stopped, the sun stopped also, though the horizon, such as it was, continued its wavering.

There were hills, mountains, hills.

The dirt blistered.

Stopped, still, I watched the sun not move.

When I resumed walking, the sun dipped suddenly lower, closer to the wavering ground, the hills and mountains, etc. The earth reached forward, up to touch the sun, and started eating it, it started eating the sun, because the sun was red and ripe like a fruit, and big and swollen like a fruit.

There was a certain buzz. It came from somewhere, approaching.

Up ahead, I saw a small dot.

The buzz grew louder, the small dot larger. A trail of dust fanned out behind it.

A rider on a motorcycle.

Well, now, what do you know?

I watched the rider and bike get closer, getting slowly bigger all the way. The buzz seemed more a ripping sound, the closer that it came, as if the air were being steadily, carefully torn open along a seam.

The rider must have seen me too. He raised an arm up in greeting. I raised my arm up too.

Not paying attention to my feet, I took a misstep and stumbled.

The rider, still distant, also faltered. I saw the bike wobble. I saw him recover. The bike straightened.

I stopped walking. I waited.

The bike faltered once more and righted.

I held my hand up to shield my eyes against the sun, directly as it rested at the edge of the earth.

The bike flipped over in the air.

The rider flew and tumbled.

Both fell flat, though not at once, and stopped, and the sound of the rip through the air stopped also, and everything stopped, and I dropped my bag in the dirt behind me and ran panting, barely able to breathe, toward the heap of the man and the bike beside him. But I need not have worried, because in a moment he got up again, dusted off his dirty robe, and walked over to his overturned bike and started kicking it and swearing. I stopped beside him. His face was red. He swore a red streak in Mongolian in pure anger, and his anger was a stream of a pure and perfectstream of a pure and perfect thing. I’d never seen such perfect anger. And then it stopped. Neither he nor I could breathe. We stood panting, not getting enough breath to breathe, and needing air. I noticed that he seemed like a young man, though he may not have been young at all. There was a cut on his face that was bleeding.

He said something. I said something. No one understood anything.

He kicked his fallen motorcycle.

I looked down at the machine laying on its side. On the tank was a logo in Russian. The motorcycle seemed indifferent. I looked up at the rider. I shrugged.

He kicked the bike again and looked to me questioningly.

I shrugged.

Looking more closely at me, curious now, he pointed at my hat.

I shrugged.

He made a gesture of grabbing a nonexistent hat from his own head and crumpling it up, throwing it onto the ground and stomping on it, then looked up again to me, a question on his face.

I shrugged.

He stepped in more closely and looked at the badge pinned to my shirt. He looked up to my face, then down again at the badge. Then he pantomimed, as if he held a cloth in his hand, rubbing the badge to a shine. He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

I shrugged.

Unexpectedly, he pounded my chest twice with his flattened hand and looked at me. When I didn’t respond, he did it again and looked at me.

I shrugged.

He pointed at the gun in the holster. I took it out.

He pointed his own hand, as if it were a gun, at the sky.

I pointed the gun in my hand at the sky.

He made an imaginary trigger-pulling motion with his finger.

I pulled the actual trigger with my finger and the gun percussed, the recoil shook my forearm numb, and my ears rang with a high, bright, piercing noise, the right one worse than the left.

He nodded his approval.

Something fell and hit the earth. We both turned. The heap of feathers and broken body of a turkey vulture, bloody hole through its side, lay not fifteen feet away.

I looked again toward the bloody rider. He smiled and nodded his approval.

•

Now I made the tear in the subtle substance of the night, though there was no one to hear it. The bike rattled beneath me, and it carried me with it, though the sun had fallen far enough below the ground to leave nothing of itself behind, and the star-parts and little light-specks above, though impressive enough to see and impressively bright, did little, did nothing in fact, to illuminate the dirt ahead. The motorcycle’s headlamp did that, at least for a short ways. I was riding on faith. Mostly, I was riding on faith. I could at least follow the ruts in the road. The ruts were the road. I wasn’t sure about my direction; I’d meant to keep traveling straight, but then the ruts back some distance I think had diverged, and I think I’d followed them very gradually to the left. I wasn’t sure at the time, and had told myself not to worry about it, but it troubled me now.

But then, it didn’t matter? Did it?

Did it?

The weight against my hip, at first such a bother, which became in time an accustomed one, was now conspicuous in its absence. The gun… I could never exactly call it my friend, now could I? It had seemed a fair trade, but now I missed the thing vaguely. The nomad – who clearly hated this bike, though for what reason I couldn’t fathom – would no doubt make better use of the weapon than I ever could, and I needed transport. But I worried how the integrity of the magic might be compromised. Did its three pieces all need one another to work? Would I be able to get by with what remained? The hat was tied to my head. I’d learned the hard way not to cram it into a bag, and besides, didn’t even have a bag now (mine was still in the road outside of town, where I’d dropped it). The strap cinched tight under my chin kept it securely enough, and this was the only helmet I had, though its brim flapped insanely in the wind if I turned my head up. Down, it wasn’t so bad. The brim bent down to encompass my neck. The nomad had also, as an afterthought, handed over his goggles for my eyes, to keep the dust out, before limping off toward Dalanzadgad. Useful. The badge on my chest offered little protection from anything, but there it was, all the same, whatever it was good for.

I could see the outlines of the landscape in a general way. Mountains remained mountain-shaped, reasonably far off, dark against dark, filling in the dark, snuffing out the stars if they got close enough. Mostly, though, the ground was passably flat. The occasional crossways rut interrupted the bike’s steady momentum. I didn’t know if these were intersecting roads or washouts from flooding, but I had to keep an eye out. Hitting any at too high a speed could wreck me, or at the very least shake me up bad, as I’d discovered.

I snuck a long glance at the sky. It really was magnificent out here, with nothing to interrupt it, no city lights to obscure it. The wide belt of the Milky Way hung stretched over the blackness, a clustering of white toward its nexus, a scattering of blinking bits beyond, which, though I knew it wasn’t, not even a little, still felt very close, like I could, and probably should, reach up and touch it. But a hiccup from the motorbike brought me back, and with a sick worry: how much gas was left in the tank? I’d not even thought of that before. And what would I do when it ran out? I could stop and shake the bike back and forth to hear what sloshed around inside, and maybe gauge from the sound how dire things were getting, but that wouldn’t change anything. So I kept going. There wasn’t exactly a gas station I could just pull into. And since it didn’t happen again, not after listening carefully for quite a while, I decided the fuel wasn’t – not yet – an immediate problem.

What was a problem was that the bike jerked quite suddenly to one side. My hands hadn’t done it. The bike itself had. It was just a little wobble at first, just enough to make me catch my breath. We carried on steadily as before, though I was now wary and alert. A while later it wobbled again, and harder this time, and I knew there was nothing I’d done to make it happen. The ground seemed smooth enough, no worse than it had been. It wasn’t the terrain. No, it was the bike. I couldn’t see how, but the motorcycle had shaken itself off balance, as if agitated by something. What the fuck? I thought, and then said out loud, “What –”

As if gagging on something, the engine shuddered and slowed, suddenly enough to nearly throw me over the handlebars. I recovered, but the bike only chugged and stammered, coughing and rushing, growling evilly. Maybe, I thought, it really was the gas…?

Then the engine revved, as if in warning. I would’ve let go the throttle entirely, but couldn’t get my hand to un-grasp while the bike stuck and lurched, hitched and bucked. No, this wasn’t the gasoline running out, it was something else… I decided to shift down from fourth to a lower gear, but as soon as I squeezed the clutch, the handle went slack – had the cable broken? – while at the same time the engine wound up as high as it would go. It roared. It sang. My fingers seized into a death grip on the handles as the motorcycle shot ahead, spewing dirt from the back tire until it gained traction. Momentum kept us solidly upright, but we sped along much too fast for the headlamp to shine out any threat ahead, rock or ditch or body, in time for me to swerve around. So far there was nothing. The dirt blurred past like water. I thought I saw one or two small things scurry desperately away.

Ahead: in the distance, the shadow-shapes of mountains grew steadily closer, loomed larger, folded the horizon in jagged suggestion of blind, high rock. And was that a glow I saw at their base, however faint, of some width? Up above: I watched a single star drop straight down from the sky and vanish. It left no line of vapor wisp behind it.

I held on.

•

When the engine stopped it stopped all at once. The rear wheel froze. The front wheel, not tied to the engine, also froze, but for no reason, and however fast the machine was going, it suddenly wasn’t anymore. It slid, it tumbled the difference between zero and n, but I wasn’t on it; I went over the handlebars and kept going, flying through the dark, flying splayed, cartwheeling, caterwauling, as the sound in my head and the sound that I made most closely matched the sound of the wind, and the level wailing of the ripping noise, gone, was replaced by a sudden, sick freedom from gravity. That seemed to last for a very long time, though in truth it probably wasn’t near as long as it seemed. And if my eyes were open, everything I saw was blurred together and meaningless. And if my eyes were closed, it was the same. And the difference of “up” or “down” was likewise no difference; I couldn’t tell. All of this lasted as long as I couldn’t tell, and when I could tell, I’d hit the earth again, hard, and slid, and tumbled, as, I swear, I could hear the bike still slide and tumble through the rocks and scrub and dirt, like me, until I was flat, and I stopped, and the bike, somewhere else, also stopped, and then I knew the thing I was flat against was “down” and all the rest more or less was “up.” For what it was worth.

I didn’t know yet if everything hurt. I couldn’t move. I knew breathing, once I started doing that again, was really hard and really hurt. It seemed I could expect, in time, the rest of it would hurt a lot too. But there, for now, there was the sky up there, all bright and dark, all close and far. All I had to do was face it, and that was easy. It was just there, and it was friendly; I knew that. The sky was FRIENDLY, I knew, I knew it.

But then, after a moment, darkness slid off and was replaced by greater darkness, and I stopped being. I’d gone away, replaced by nothing, and wasn’t there.

•

There was a terrible light somewhere, and with my eyes closed I could see the light but not tell where it was from, and with my eyes open – as they might suddenly spring open and then fall shut again – I couldn’t see the light, but could at least see that it came from overhead. If my eyes sprung open and I took three breaths, they would again fall shut, and then I would see that terrible light. But I couldn’t tell where it was from.

This recurrent cycle of opening the eyes, closing the eyes, seeing the light, not knowing where it was from, lasted for a day. A week. Several weeks. Stretching on into months. But then, I think after nearly half a year of this, the quality of the light changed and became more intrusive, and a voice accompanied the light.

“Oh, well, see there, he’s moving.” Heavily accented English – no, Scottish, I thought, maybe – a man’s voice, reedy, wispy, yet hoarse.

This was followed by something that made no sense. Another man’s voice, deep and guttural, menacing, but smooth as honey at once.

“Look. You can see him breathe. The chest. It moves up and down.”

A woman said something, a string of words that may have been German. Her voice was thin by comparison to the other two, and some distance back. But it carried, by other means.

“Nah,” said the first. “Look, there’s his pulse. In his neck. He’s alive.”

The second man made a noise utterly incomprehensible. “Banged up, to be sure. Mess of broken bones here. Cuts and scrapes. Took a hard spill, no doubt, but he’s still twitching. Looks he’s one of us. That’s a badge pinned on him. Hat’s all of the kit too, see?”

I opened my eyes and the light remained. That wasn’t the rule. The light was supposed to leave when the eyes were open. This light was wrong. I blinked. The wrong light hurt to look at.

The woman grunted something.

“Don’t know where his gun’s at. I don’t see it.”

She grunted something more.

“He’s paid his admittance. We can let it pass for now. Though I’m not sure what to make of this.”

I looked down to see him rummaging through my pockets. The light illumined his head-shape, thin white hair over a knobby skull. The source of light floated above in an unsteady waver and shone in my face. The woman spoke sharply and the man at my pockets looked up.

“Well, quid’s in, our good man would seem to be awake.”

His face came to hover over mine, eyeballs flickering one to the other of mine, his long nose as knobby, his face all as bony as his skull. He wore three scars uneven across a cheek, his left. He said, “Welcome, good fellow. You’ve made it, if just barely. Tell me something, though. Your name, is it really Friendly?”

I took a breath to respond. It didn’t work, so I took another. And each breath brought back the light of pain, and still it wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t speak, and so I took a third, hard breath to speak – I had to take it ragged – but still I couldn’t speak, and the light came back so bright it took up everything, and I was gone.

•

When I came back, my eyes opened onto a shade of green. Suspended by a pole, the green flapped, it fell and rose, first in currents gentle enough to suspend a wavelike motion, then next in sudden snaps, one-two-three, then ease and release. The roof of a tent. It lifted and dropped. The wind of the steppes. The light that filtered in now passed through this, and gently, even and green. But I was suspended in the cloth of a cot, and looking low over myself, I found I was enwrapped in bandages over my chest. One arm also, my left, was restrained against me.

The fug in me cleared out enough that I realized two things: first, that I hurt, and second, I needed a piss badly.

There was no one in the tent but myself. I needed a piss, badly.

I bent my knees and lifted my legs and hurt. I swung my legs and sat myself up and hurt, and hurt badly, and needed a piss, too, very badly. I swung my legs over the edge of the cot and sat up, and my feet found the ground, and I hurt, and hurt badly, and I needed a piss now very badly too, but sat for a moment, now taking it in, taking the green of it in, the warm and easy green of it, and there was the light, the easy green light, though it hurt, and I sat and I looked, and I looked into the green, and the green, easy as it was, and warm and easy, it still hurt, and hurt badly, and I needed a piss. I breathed in: hurt, hurt. I sat there. Green, easy. Hurt. Breathing out, I needed to piss, and so stood, wobbled, caught myself against the cot – just a touch, light, was all it took to steady myself. But as soon as I let go and lifted my fingers I wobbled again, unsteady. There again, touch the cot: steady. Good. The smell of something. Good.

No, not good. The smell of something. Steady. Not rot, not mold, not good.

Touch the cot: good. Steady. Lift the fingers, let go the cot. Wobble.

Step ahead, good, steady. Enough.

Hurts. I breathe. Need to piss. Hurts badly. Stepping steady, now: no, wobble. Touch: steady, and good. Now wobble.

Free hand reaches, finds the flap, moves aside the flap, there’s light.

I step outside the tent, flap falls back, blink into the steady, even light.

There’s no sun. Where’s the sun?

People.

•

Everywhere, the people, for as far as I could see. Uniformed mostly, in varied shades of blue, but not all of them blue; some dark, some washed pale, some black or deep gray or pale gray; some quite proper, cut and clean, while others seemed discards thrown from a drawer of extras, worn sloppy, or barely worn at all. The first figure my eyes fixed to was a man in a heavy flak jacket who sat on an upturned bucket beside the next tent, smoking a cigarette and staring into the dirt. He looked up, saw me looking at him, called something to someone I couldn’t see, but kept his eyes all the while on me.

I nodded slightly in acknowledgement.

The man stood. He seemed a giant. He seemed at least ten feet tall. He stared down at me, the skin of his face weathered and dark, weathered by the sun and the wind, his Asiatic eyes narrow, dark, and squinting.

I looked away, then looked back. His gaze was still fixed on mine, and I couldn’t move. After a time spent in this silent detente, I found my own eyes drifting down over the mottled scarring that covered the entirety of his left arm – I could scarcely have helped myself, had I known what I was doing – the terrible, raw redness and visible patterning of musculature underneath was as fascinating as it was hideous. I stared openly. The monster, made self-conscious by my attention on his disfigurement, turned to move the arm behind his body, found that he couldn’t, so instead, walked toward me. His face became impassive, neither hostile nor anything else, and as he came to stand over me I wobbled on my feet, little specks of gray liquid dots swarming in my vision as I looked up, up, up at him.

He said something. His voice was thick and sweet as treacle. I’d come to recognize the sounds as Mongolian, but still understood not a word of it.

When my legs collapsed under me, he reached out with the hand of his wrecked arm and grabbed at my arm – my good right arm, the one not restrained in bandages – and held me up. Without any seeming effort, he dragged me by the forearm to the bucket where he’d been sitting a moment before and set me down on it.

“Thanks,” I said, my eyes wide.

He looked at me, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, and shook one forward to offer it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. My eyes were wide. They swam with spots.

The monster lit the cigarette for me from a rangy metal Zippo he pulled out of a pocket.

“Thanks,” I said. My eyes. My eyes drifted over the ruined flesh of his arm.

He snapped the lighter shut and took it away, looking at me looking at him.

“So you’re awake,” came a voice, hoarse and reedy. But the monster’s face hadn’t moved or changed. It was unreadable, stone as a statue’s. I stared into it, and was blank. The man stepped away and his face was replaced by another, smaller and bony, his nose long, his cheekbones high and prominent. His dark, short crewcut had a wide, white streak through it. “You’ve been out for three days.” His blue uniform was rumpled, but spotless. Shiny brass, like mine, glimmered. He wore the button-activated microphone of a communications device velcroed to his shoulder.

“I’ve…” I dropped my cigarette in the dirt, bent to pick it up, brushed the filter off and stared at it now, instead, as if I couldn’t make out what it was. But I could. My bladder ached.

“Just like the lizard god ’imself,” this new face said. “Except,” he paused, “no one really believed you were dead. Only sleeping. Only caught in the dream, as it were. But now you’re up and blinking at the sun, and there you go. You must hurt something ferocious.”

“I need to piss,” I said. The fact. “And I… don’t see the sun.” My voice was dry as the dirt.

“Neither do I,” bone-face man told me, “but there it is. I’m Tom, Dead Tom. They call me Dead Tom. And you’ve met Khenbish.”

“Khenbish,” I said.

“The giant Mongol, just now. He was with us when we found you out there in the desert. It was his ears that heard your scooter crash. He knew where to look. Tracing back a sound like that, a sound out from the steppe, can be difficult. It can be downright impossible, the way the air shifts and moves and the sounds seem to come from everywhere or nowhere at once, if they reach you at all. But not to a Mongol. No one understands this desert like they do, born and bred to it. He knew exactly where to go, like a dog to the bone. Lucky for you – you were still a mile from camp. I’d say you owe the man your life.”

“My life.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“Does he… does he want my life? Do you think?”

“Maybe. Remains to be seen what he wants. Khenbish doesn’t talk much.”

“What’s happened to his arm?” I asked.

“That. Yes. Well. Nasty business that. You see, he was flayed.”

“Flayed?” I dropped my cigarette again, bent again to pick it up and dust it off, and nearly pissed my pants.

“Only the one arm, but yes. Like I said, he doesn’t talk much, but particularly he doesn’t talk about that.”

“Um.”

“Aha. Probably best not to notice it at all, you know what I mean.”

It was a little late for that. I noticed that my mouth felt full of fuzz. I’d been, after all, asleep for three days.

“Er, I, uh…”

“Yes?”

“Really need to piss. Right now.”

“Latrine’s just around that way. Go on, have your piss. I’ll be here when you get back. So will Khenbish.”

I stood, saw the little dots swarming before me and wobbled, but was able to stay upright as I made my way around the tent that I’d just come out from. In back was a lane that cut straight through the vast encampment, tents all in a line, more or less, and stretching back to some far-off vanishing point to either side in varied sizes and colors. Most were military green and heavy cloth like this one, some were small two-person tents, lightweight and easy to carry, brightly colored. And more people in uniform. Hundreds of people, milling about. Though could it be called a uniform if they were all different? Different, perhaps, but all of a kind. All of like-kind…

A woman demonstrated to a small group nearby her technique of grabbing and striking with a nightstick, in fluid slow-motion. The others, maybe six of them, watched attentively. All, students and teacher alike, wore guns hung from complicated equipment belts.

I found a bank of plastic stalls across the lane and up a short distance, took an open one, and once inside, unzipped my fly and let go. The urine came out in a bright yellow stream that seemed to go on forever. It made a flat, yet resonant sound as it dribbled through plastic piping and into the tank. I held the cigarette in my lips while smoke curled and twisted around my face, shut my eyes against it and held my breath.

Leaving the plastic toilet again, I took a long look around, up and down the lane where I stood. The door slammed shut behind me. This camp was settled amidst the foothills of a range of short, jagged mountains, their peaks no more than a few hundred feet above us, but the ground here – that not interrupted with bursts of deep gray rock – was otherwise flat. To my right the range grew deeper. To my left lay the open expanse of the steppe. The impromptu class on nightstick technique had dispersed already, its members moved on. Others milled about with less coherence. No one seemed to pay me any mind, so I crossed the lane back to where I’d started.

Dead Tom said he’d be waiting when I got back, but all I found was the upturned bucket. The giant, Khenbish, was also nowhere around. Looking inside the tent where I’d lain for three days I saw only the cot where I’d slept. The tent next door was likewise empty. I was on my own.