EIGHTEEN

The World

[Early Spring, 2006]

What remained of the day’s light filled the slate of sky above with an even sepia tint, fading in its time back toward dark. There was nothing of the sun to be seen, and the light itself was so mis-directed and confused, it itself didn’t know which direction it came from.

I followed my nose along the straight lanes. I took turns down the crooked paths between encampments. I could feel and often see the eyes following me where I walked, and though I know I looked at least a little like these others did – enough, it seemed, to pass for one of them – they all carried the same question: What are you doing here? What, exactly, are you doing here? I imagined, at least, this was the case. My judgement was likely clouded, and my sensitivities were no doubt far too acute. But it was true that I was being watched – only an idiot wouldn’t have noticed that much – and it may have been also true that the eyes that followed me were, by their nature or acquired temperament, suspicious, shadowed, gleaming with the potential for wonder that had been stifled and turned by hard experience to expect always the worst that humans were capable of – whether they were suspicious or not specifically of me. My hat and badge, if poorly worn, were at least enough, it seemed, to mark me as belonging. The hat, so badly abused and crushed and ill-fit, was still the sheriff’s hat, and it was my head this rested on. And the badge, well… someone had been kind enough to pin it to the wrapping of bandages that covered my chest and restrained my arm while I was unconscious. So that was the first thing anyone noticed about me, all prominent and shining (sort of) against a field of near-white. Breathing hurt, yes, movement hurt, yes, and my left arm had fallen asleep, but at least I was marked for admittance and allowed to go on my way. And I worried how things might go if I’d not had these.

Everyone I’d seen yet had been police of some sort, and they weren’t necessarily local. In fact, it seemed very few of them were. Aside from Khenbish, who could be nothing but Mongol, there were as many white Europeans and black Africans as Asians, and mixed in as many ways as were possible, and most of the Asians were smaller – as almost anyone would be – and all were identifiably police, by their uniforms if not by their behavior, all of some nation or union or fledgling state, or of some dirt-township somewhere in the world. They came from all over, as far as I could see, and represented a truly cosmopolitan mix of people of every sort. Except that they were all the police. If anyone were not entirely obviously so, it could only mean one thing: they were the secret police, and must carry a badge somewhere, and almost certainly a weapon, if only in their hearts.

I did not have mine. I’d traded the gun away. I worried about this for a moment, but then came to my senses. So what if I did? What difference could that possibly make here? What would I do with a gun, if I had one? What had I managed so far? No, I was better off without it. But the absence was… conspicuous.

My nose led me ahead. A scent came from somewhere, and it wasn’t the smell of flowers, and it wasn’t the smell of shit. It was a good smell, something warm and rich and sweet and heady, a smell of a favorite food, something familiar that I couldn’t quite place, and the most welcoming thing I’d had the chance to sniff in what seemed a very long time. But I couldn’t make out where it came from. The scent was as directionless as the light, or as confused as Dead Tom had said that sounds could get on the steppe. So I followed after the smell, first one way, then suddenly another, then looped back and around between the tents, near-stumbling over lines of taut cord. It was making me crazy, this tantalizing smell, because it wasn’t just familiar, it was something so close that it could have been a part of me and maybe once was, something long lost but never quite forgotten. Only now I couldn’t figure out what, or where, it was. Some bit of my soul that hadn’t made it back from Fake City, perhaps? The price for admission into the land of the dead?

I stepped out from between another of the army tents and a circular, semi-permanent gher, and found myself again on the straight main road. Riders on horseback trotted slowly down, deeper in toward the mountains as the sky now visibly darkened. A number of small motorcycles, all with the same Cyrillic logo on the tank, were parked to one side, not in any tight formation, but in a loose scatter, like horses tied to whatever hitch was available.

A nagging sensation like an itch inside my head made me think to look up and to my left, where another short mountain stood apart from the rest, rugged and low, with a well-trod path leading straight up the steep side to its peak. At the top, behind a cordon of yellow ribbon that flapped in a breeze – clearly stronger up there than it was down here – a single figure stood, a man, square and square-shouldered, square and solid. I couldn’t see much of him, no detail, not from this distance, but I could tell that much. He wore a tan uniform without a hat, and so stood out from all this surrounding blue, even if he were not the only one dressed this way. But he was the only one on top of the mountain, and he seemed to be looking right at me. I froze. I stood staring. I took my hat off, cradled it under my wounded arm, and scratched the top of my head in a sort of nervous frenzy. The figure on the mountain lifted a hand to shade his eyes from a sun that wasn’t there. When the good smell caught up with me again, it seemed to be coming from far down the road, where the riders were heading, so I put the crushed and ruined hat back onto my head and followed after them, turning to look every so often back up behind, toward the hill. The squarish figure remained above, and seemed always to be watching me. But then it seemed like everybody was.

•

My feet carried me along, one and the next, over the trampled ground. As most people tended toward one direction, I followed after them down the straight lane toward the mountains, now a mere outline of dark against dark. The mountains’ small profile was lost to the dimensionless evening, and they had the reduced scale of much larger peaks in miniature, the serrations of their ridgeline seeming much higher and further off than I knew them to be. Not everyone came this way. I glimpsed various small clusters of officers grouped around the fires of their respective camps, forming conclaves against the coming night in the glow and warmth of living flames. But enough people did carry on ahead that I could see how a general movement was at hand. I trusted – I hoped – it might bring me closer to the intriguing smell that had urged me this far.

In fact it did. After some distance, the lane ended in a focal point of several such lanes, at the heart of a rough semicircle. And what lay in the center, and what the general tide flowed toward, was a larger fire, or a cluster of several fires, around which a loose crowd gathered. I couldn’t see what was at the center, but I could smell its goodness now, immediate and strong. With so many people gathered at the pit, it seemed I had two choices: I could hang around at the edge as I was, or I could try and get to the center. I decided on the latter.

Dozens of backs were turned to me. The cluster was a tight one, and around to the other side of the fire was no better. Finding a space between two bodies where I could put myself was, it soon became clear, just not going to happen, and I would have to be aggressive if I was to get any closer to the fire and whatever secret it held. I checked my resolve: how much did I really want this? I didn’t know for certain, but for the first time in a very long time, I felt hungry, and the rich combination of fragrance smelled so good. I stepped up, reached forward to touch the shoulder of a man in front of me, but was stopped when another hand fell on my own shoulder from behind. Surprised, I turned to look.

There was a shadow. The light of the fire could not reach her face, only the oddly reflected glow could, by chance, highlight here a cheek, there a slope of the forehead, and there, a strange strand of her full, dark hair. But I could tell she was a woman, and slender, and her long hair fell dark in a smooth, straight sweep over her shoulders, and if she were in uniform (though I could easily assume she must be, since everyone was) I couldn’t see the uniform by any of its telltale markings or detail. All of this was hidden in shadow. She was just a form. “Please,” she said, her voice was soft and familiar, soft and deep and breathy, soft and gravel and not pleading but insistent that I recognize her.

“You speak English,” I said, and winced. Speaking hurt, breathing still hurt, turning around had hurt. Unfamiliar and normally unnoticed tissues connected to my ribs pulled and strained at every effort alarmingly.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said softly, almost a whisper. “Haven’t I?”

“I’ve, uh…” I started. “I’ve been around…?” But it was true. I knew that silhouette. I knew that voice, though I’d not expected I might ever hear it again. But where were the stars, behind that blanket of sky? The sky now showed nothing but darkness, thick and heavy and close.

“Oh, it was you,” she told me. “I’m certain of it now. You’ve lost something important, haven’t you?”

“I’ve… what?”

Her silhouette watched me.

“Vivianne?”

She stepped away, and just as light as a summer breeze, was gone, her shadow merged into every other shadow, and every other shadow merged into the void. I looked around from one shape to another, then back at the massing of human shapes, formed into the fold around the pit, pulling off my hat and scratching at my head with my free hand at some subtle itch too deep inside the bone to reach. The hunger was gnawing at me now, a thing too long unacknowledged. I felt my stomach turning over on itself, turning inside out. Again, I stepped forward towards the crowd, now a flicker-outline against the growing flames in the pit. The crowd, if possible, seemed even tighter than it had before, and more intent in its focus. But so was I, and I reached my free hand out to grab at the shoulder of the person directly ahead…

And felt another hand again on my own shoulder from behind, and it pulled, and forcefully spun me around. “Gah…” I said, wincing.

“So here is where you’ve got to.” A dark shape followed by another, much larger dark shape.

“Dead Tom, is that you?”

“Aye, tis so, and the peeled man Khenbish. So you thought you’d have a wander, is that it? We’d waited for your return back at camp, but you never showed.”

“No,” I said, “I did! I came straight back and you weren’t there. Neither of you.”

“It’s not so. You see, we waited for you. Right there, long time, we waited for you, figured you were just having an especially long piss. But then, after so long, we thought how maybe you weren’t enjoying our company, so you’d struck out on your own. Began to feel a little offended, we did.”

“No! It’s nothing like that, I swear it! I came straight back and you weren’t –”

“So you say, so you say. Don’t worry about it. Been given the brush-off by better than yourself. Khenbish, however… well, he tends to take things rather personally. He might not be as apt to forgiving as I am.”

The large shadow stood there, darkness on darkness, arms folded over his great chest.

I scratched my head furiously, then said at last, “Ack…!” as my knees gave out beneath me and I started to drop.

The large shadow reached forward and grabbed me by the good arm, holding me up. Again. I dangled, boneless. The Mongol had reflexes lightning fast, I had to admit.

“Relax!” said Dead Tom, or at least his smaller, dark shape. “I’m just winding you up! Truth is, we knew you were confused, out crossing the street in a traumatized state. Figured you’d find your way back, sooner or later.”

“Epff!”

“Or not. Out like that for three days, you’ve got to be hungry. When was the last time you ate?”

Ate? When was the last time I’d ate? Or, er… eaten? But all I could say, dangling by my arm, was, “Pfeck!”

“Oh, no. That’s much too long. Come on, then, this way. ’Bish, let’s get him to the soup, what.”

But it wasn’t soup they brought me to, not exactly. The large Mongolian supported me – really, all but carried me, since all the strength had left me now and I was useless to move on my own – while Dead Tom pushed his way without difficulty through the gathered mass at the fire, clearing a path for the three of us. And once the crowd had parted, and Khenbish set me down in a clear space near the flames where I dropped to my knees, my legs folded uselessly under, I could at last see these things that had been concealed before.

Two great kettles were suspended over the flames on a grate of metal re-bar, and one of the kettles was being removed by two men who used poles to support and carry it, linked through the kettle’s handles, and set it off the fire onto the sand, near me. One then began to ladle dark and steaming liquid through a strainer and into proffered cups, and this I came to recognize as the source of one familiar scent: black coffee, boiled cowboy-style. I’d not recognized it alone, since it had so completely combined with that other smell, so rich and sweet, that came from the second of the kettles – that still on the fire, where someone fed shaped blobs of dough into the boiling oil, while another turned them and pulled them again out using a pair of sticks, laying these into towel-lined pans. Doughnuts, of a sort.

“Stand aside, then. Give us room. We’ve got a critical, clinical, chemical emergency here, it’s truth. Our man can’t be left to wait; he’s well unto dead already. I should know. I’m Dead Tom.”

Someone took up the chant: “Dead Tom! Dead Tom!” soon taken also by the others surrounding until a proper chorus had formed. The rhythm of the words soon matched the pounding of blood through my heart and the rush in my head, and I felt as if my bones and entire body shook with each beat, though I could scarcely hold myself upright to receive the plate now offered, what Dead Tom held out, freshly served: in one hand a metal plate, an irregular shape upon it of fried and still-glistening, greasy dough; in the other a metal camping cup, full of rich, if muddy black coffee, unsweetened, unwhitened – just the way I liked it.

The chant had developed, simplified, and quickened, now to “Dead! Dead! Dead!” and I looked up into the grinning man’s eyes, wet, reflective, now lit by fire, their whites, so wide and open, and the asymmetric streak of white through the stubbled hair, and the strange lumps of his skull, and to his teeth, gleaming wetly, lips pulled back in either a grin or snarl, I couldn’t tell, then back again to the eyes, too wide, really, really much too wide.

•

To the best of my knowledge, I’d lost my old camera to the road when I’d dropped my pack outside Dalanzadgad. But here in the darkness of the tent where I’d been set, and sat, and where I should by rights lay sleeping now (but couldn’t) the giant Khenbish had stolen in all but silent, and stealthy as a cat, to set the thing beside me. My machine. He’d muttered something when he saw that I was awake, and I’d understood the Mongol words no better than I ever had, yet somehow was able to read his meaning as: your gun is gone, you will need this. Yes, I’d thought, yes, I will. I’ve set the weapon down, I’ve laid it down. I’m unarmed, and I do need something, you’re right. Jacket in a cold land, umbrella in the world of rain. This will protect me. If anything can.

Khenbish the giant – did he bow, only slightly, as he backed quietly, and shadowed, again from the tent? He did.

I picked the camera body up in my hands and felt its familiar weight, the pebbled surface of its metal face and cold, smooth back, the stiffness of the leather of its protective half-case, screw-attached, and whip-thin, worn strap. I turned it over to stare into the extension of cylindrical eye-lens. Not that I could see anything inside it. I couldn’t. But I would swear this was my same camera, my antique Nikon, a stripped-down, minimal machine, older than myself and better, and more reliable. Certainly more loyal.

Square on the cot, I sat. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. Yet I scarcely had the will or strength to move either. From a nearby fire, the flickering shadows of shapes and humans – of human shapes – were cast against the wall of the tent from outside, as if on a movie screen.

I unlatched the back of the camera, ran two fingers inside. Celluloid stretched across the film gate, from at one end a canister to a winding spool at the advance. The thing was loaded, ready to shoot. I was ready to shoot. There.

The figures on the screen moved in short motion. They gesticulated, they wavered, they took small steps forward and back, or sat otherwise still and shook in the flame-light. One stood, hair gathered in a single, long braid in back; a woman – I had no doubt of that once she’d turned and I’d seen her figure in profile. She stood stern and straight, and held the others rapt, Khenbish and Dead Tom and one or two others less distinct. Or so it seemed, so I imagined. I recalled how there’d been a woman present when I was found, and wondered if she was this same one. I’d seen more men than women so far in this place, though the women weren’t so scarce. She could be anyone. Yet there was something that told me, she was the same person.

I put the camera onto the ground beneath me and lay back again over the cot, facing up toward the stretched ceiling and pole at the center that supported it. Here the firelight reached only faintly, but it reached, and its glow colored the faded fabric with a wan shade of orange, and warmly. And if I could not sleep, I could at least watch the light, which was attractive in that it was warm and it moved, and was faint but faintly there, at least, and there, in it, I could snatch the small details out of the shivering dance of it – ripples in the canvas folds, and the hanging of frayed seam strings, and the blur of a stain of mildew out of some long campaign or damp storage. The air shivered with this faint firelight, and all the while I could feel my heart pulsing in the veins of my neck and head, bulging thick and blue-red (so I imagined, because it felt like this), and these were things.

My hands lay cold and weirdly at my side like flippers. Useless on land. I would… I would once sit facing a wall, and sometimes, after a long time like this, the wall might change.

I put my hands up to my chest instead and crossed them at the wrist, to lay there like the dead. But that was no better.

Voices and laughter ran outside. Did these others never sleep either? If not, what else would they do?

I could get up. I could go to look.

And so I got up, came near to the wall where the shadows wavered, and reached forward, but didn’t touch the screen. Putting my head near it to listen, I heard only muffled sounds. Voices and laughter. Words. Other unstructured sounds. Things not words. The flick of sand-flecks striking fabric, blown by gusting wind. And then the voices, or only one voice, different this time; I understood it. I understood what it was saying. “The skies,” a man said – he spoke English, “where I grew up, these same skies, they all were so full of… of fine, small, dark things… of little fine dark things… and they… they all knew me. They knew something about me. I think they did. I think they all knew my name…” And I stepped away from the fabric wall of the tent. It was buckling slightly and rippling waves in the wind, and I stepped back again another step. I had known that voice. I had heard it before.

The woman’s shadow grew in clarity and density as her form approached the other side of the wall between us, as if in silent response, and then it stopped where she and I stood equidistant. Neither of us moved. Each of us regarded the other. After a moment, I held my hand up, reaching toward it again, but again not touching the screen. A moment later, she did the same. Closer to the fabric, her shadow was more sharply-lined and did not waver so much as the others did, further off. Her head tilted to one side in apparent curiosity. Her fingers brushed the air near the surface. Her hand turned. I was certain that if I should touch my hand to the fabric, she would do the same, and we would be together this way, connected, if through the thin substance of this tent wall. But I did not do this. Instead I stepped back. The woman withdrew her hand, but stayed at the fabric.

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

The silhouette didn’t move. “We know you aren’t who you say.”

“I’ve never said anything,” I protested, “about who I am or I’m not.”

“Your badge,” the voice corrected, “said you were Friendly. But we know you’re not Friendly. We know that much.”

“I never said I was.”

“You wore the badge. But you aren’t Friendly.”

“So you don’t believe me?” I asked.

“No.”

“Does it matter then what I say? Or what I don’t say?”

“No.”

“And you won’t believe me either way.”

“No.”

“But I can be Friendly. What if I told you I can be Friendly?”

The silhouette stepped away from the membrane, became larger, more diffuse, until the flames took it and cast it elsewhere, and it was gone.

•

By daylight, in the pickup’s rusted blue bed, we jostled over hard bumps in the land and scrub, each knock sending my bruised rib screaming back at me so that I rode with my teeth clenched the whole way. The others in the truck-back jostled with me, their expressions all flattened, their faces giving nothing, but I could expect none of them hurt like I did. Every breath was painful enough already.

The sun above shone down direct through a cloudless sky, drying us and the ground, pulling water from the scrub, burning our faces, pulling water from our skin. We’d brought water for ourselves, to replace what was lost. Water, coffee too. And doughnuts – rough-hulled, hand-holed, and knobby, but good.

Khenbish had not come along, having something else that needed taking care of back at camp. Dead Tom rode in the back with me and four others. In the cab there were three more to make nine altogether, and we did not follow a road. Not out here, not this far, where the road didn’t reach. The driver took us to somewhere else. But with or without it, the driving was much the same.

The others were all heavily armed – machine guns, rifles, sidearms, and God (or a munitions expert) only knew what else – but not me. All I had was my camera. And yes, this was my camera, down to every particular, every scratch, back again, returned from the long road. Dead Tom kept looking at me with that sly smile of his, like he knew something, sitting propped up opposite me against the wheel well. The others little noticed or paid me any mind. I may’ve thought to ask what he was thinking under that scratch-face and wise-ass smile, and for that matter where he’d gotten that white splotch in his hair, but the noise and the wind back here prevented anything being heard below a shout, and I wasn’t ready to start shouting. I held my hat to my head with my good arm, and cradled the camera with my other, no longer bandaged to my chest. Luckily for me, nothing was broken, only bruised and torn and sore. But my arm had been wrenched hard, the socket hurt down at its core, and my forearm was bruised blue and yellow to my elbow. My ribcage looked much the same, purple-yellow, when I’d seen it in the light. Any rotation made a tearing sensation deep inside my shoulder, and the whole thing ached, everything ached. But still, at least it wasn’t broken.

The driver hit the brakes and we all slammed forward in the bed. I barked, dazed with pain, smashed by a tall, dark-skinned man against the cab. The truck slid sideways in the dirt, and by the time we’d come to a stop the others, excepting Dead Tom, had already jumped out, guns at the ready, sprinting toward a low rock hill, shaggy with wild grasses up its side. Tom was kind enough to wait for me to recover and crawl down from the truck, which I was able to manage myself, if slowly.

“What is it,” asked Dead Tom, “that actually happened to your gun? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I thought I’d told you,” I said. “I traded it for the motorcycle I rode out here.”

“So you lost it.”

“Lost it? No, I traded it. I didn’t lose it. I needed a ride or I never would’ve gotten as far as I did.”

“You surrendered your weapon,” Dead Tom accused me with those gleaming eyes, “whatever the reason. Meaning that you lost it.”

“Well, I guess, if you look at it that way…”

The others in the group had raced to the other side of the mound. It was only perhaps a hundred feet or less wide and all of twelve high. What I’d not been able to see from where we’d parked was the gaudy setup of oddly-painted monsters for use as targets. There was a purple triceratops painted onto a sheet wrapped over a bale of hay, already shot to hell but still recognizable for what it was. Or maybe that was Godzilla. Next to it was a tall, furry biped that I guessed must be Sasquatch, done in brown and white. Mannequins – of course – lay in varied arrangements, none of them whole, all neon-colored where bullets hadn’t stripped and chipped the paint. Their parts were scattered, mostly arms and heads. The torsos remained upright, mounted by the legs. An old television lay in dust, its screen a ruin. There was a tin-foil robot, assembled from boxes, now frozen in its attack, that had never stood a chance yet stood firm in its resolve. Other hay-bale supports retained targets more conventional: silhouettes of bad men, concentric rings, the like. There was a photograph of a bunny. I could see why the targets were all to this other side: the terrain here was softer, dirt-covered, less bare rock and less apt to ricochet the fast-flying metal.

“It’s less how I look at it than how it is that matters,” Dead Tom said. “What do you think this lot will think? We’ve got standards to keep to. We’ve got our code, our principles. Honor.”

“I have this.” I held up the camera.

“That won’t keep you safe. I doubt that’ll even keep you awake.”

“Yes it will! You don’t understand –” but a burst of rapid gunfire cut me short. I winced.

Dead Tom never even blinked. The smile remained. When the frenzy reached a pause and the machine guns fell silent, he answered, “Some might tell us that police don’t need a firearm. I might’ve said the same once. Since I’ve come here, though, I’ve seen different. I’ve been informed. I’ve held a weapon and found it’s known me better than I knew myself. I learned something about myself then. That’s when I learned the truth, the truth of the law.”

“He showed you this?” I asked, expecting he would know who I meant.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Another volley of fire ripped the air apart. Mannequins chipped, shivering, and their frenzied bits flew. The photo of the bunny was torn to shreds and the head was blown straight off the robot. Bullets by the hundreds pocked the dirt with tiny explosions in the scant space of seconds and then were done.

“My point,” he continued, “is that, without your gun, you’re not police. You’re not police, you’re not here. Yet here you are. Why is this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because we’ve allowed it.” He raised his rifle to his eye to sight along it, and squeezed off a single round. From this distance it was hard to be certain, but I thought I’d seen one of the tiny lizards get launched off a mound and spatter a splotch of red in the air. “So far.”

“He doesn’t have a gun,” I offered.

Tom lowered his rifled and looked at me. “How do you know that?”

“I… I just…”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s… I…”

“Nobody knows that. Not even me.”

“No! Look! That’s not true! You do know it! I just told you.”

Dead Tom eyed me with deep suspicion. Another round of gunfire from the others made the steppes sound with echoing thunder. All had targeted the empty television set and sent it skittering and finally aflop with a lethal group aim to the top, and yet the firing continued for what seemed a very long time afterward, uselessly, but to a point. Tom may have flinched, a little. I’d tucked into a ball and covered myself. Also useless, but also to a point.

When the firing was over, I unwrapped myself from myself and stood.

“He doesn’t make the law here,” Tom said, calmer now, but not any less suspicious. “The man is transparent to it. Might be, there’s nothing of him left but this thing, the spirit, what he serves. Law’s bigger than any of us, or all of us put together. Might be, the man’s his own gun, that’s the case. It’s instrument, like. Still, it doesn’t answer my question, does it, how it is you know this to tell me. And now, since I know, what that means, or what it makes me, according to the new reckoning. I’ll have to change my name now, looks like. I’m no longer Dead Tom, not to the world, and not to you. I’m Tom Who Knows Also, And Is Also Still Dead. This’ll be my new name. Learn to say it. Because what you know, I know too, and that’s because you told me. Seems to me that you’ll need a new name yourself also, but I’ll leave you to puzzle that one out on your own. But what I still don’t understand is why you come wearing the badge of Friendly.”

“It’s true, it isn’t mine,” I confessed, “and I can’t explain it.”

“No. No, you can’t, now can you? Any explanation would only be a poor fit to the truth. And you’re not the police either.”

“I’ve tried. It didn’t work.”

“Of course it hasn’t worked. It’s not the sort of thing can be faked. The Law knows the Law, knows it well. Might say it’s an expert. And knows just as well what isn’t. And yet…”

I winced in preparation for the next volley of gunfire, but it never came. When I looked back to see what was happening with the group, I saw they’d all lit cigarettes or were otherwise standing about at their leisure. Break time.

“…Here you are. Why is this?”

I scratched my chin and thought about it, then blurted, just as sudden as it had hit me:

“The Magic!”

Dead Tom studied me – or Tom Who Knows Also, And Is Also Still Dead – a dark glimmer to his eye, and finally, he nodded, while all about us a darkness came and enfolded the steppe. Clouds rolled in, obscuring to deny the sun of its formerly assumed rights to the sky. In their footprints, slants of rain or dust – more likely dust, I figured (and was wrong) – pointed toward where the sun once stood, as if mockingly, or perhaps in honor of its former position. Now everything was brown, the color of rust, or slate, the color of the buried dead. I felt a drop smack my head, then another. And soon the smell of dust newly wetted filled the damp air and everywhere I looked was rain. Magic had brought the rain. Magic had always brought rain.

•

Through the glass, the officers struck a pose they may have intended as foreboding, yet they were far too genial about it. Or, alternately, they might have intended geniality, crowding in close together to fit inside the frame, arms around each other’s shoulders in a show of bonhomie, but the implied threat could scarcely be well-hid for all their heavy belts and weaponry – if not for their stony, cruel faces and dark looks down the lens. I waved them in a bit closer to one another. They were, the three of them, cooperative enough; they crowded in more tightly, though in truth it wasn’t necessary. There was plenty of room in the frame. I just wanted to see if they would do it. I clicked the shutter and lowered the Nikon, thanking these men even as I wound the film absentmindedly ahead.

They smiled and nodded, breaking apart, going on as they had before I’d stopped them.

Without a light meter I could only guess the exposure. I didn’t even know what film was in the camera. Though it was without a doubt my own camera, and would likewise have whatever film I’d last put in it, I couldn’t recall what that may have been. But it was bright again, the rains had passed, the sun resumed its domain as sovereign of the sky, in all perplexity, washing light and with it a dull warmth throughout this region, our Valley of the Snake.

I walked on, my legs unsteady, my feet always managing to find the unseen rock or patch of soft sand or trip over a stick or otherwise slide out from under me. I wore a fool’s grin permanently plastered over my face, not that I was that happy; I was not. My face had just stuck that way now, with my lips peeled back to show forward my teeth.

I used the camera to navigate through the camp, holding it before me like a divining rod, measuring through its lens a scene here, a scene there, but shooting very little. I had only the one roll of film, and I didn’t want to waste it. But I followed the frame, or what I sighted through it, toward interesting groupings and odd angles and shades and lines, if mostly for their compositional sense.

I’d always done better with shapes than people.

The camp seemed a different place by daylight, everyone so purposeful, if not busy in the typical sense. People here seemed to be waiting for something. I couldn’t guess what and they wouldn’t say, but they waited with purpose. I would have called them idle, if it weren’t for this sense of purpose in how they waited about. If there were preparations being made to undertake a coup, or if this were an army forming for war – however abstract their enemy may be – I couldn’t see how it was being done. Our drive out to the shooting range had been only fun and games, boys blowing off a little steam was all – hardly serious training. No, something else was being prepared for here. The waiting was the object. At least for now. There was little organization about this whole gathering, apart from the shared meals among tented groups, and the communal fire pit with its coffee and doughnuts for all. But that all seemed more a neighborly thing. Someone, though, had thought out a basic infrastructure to the encampment, what with the plan to the arranging of sites, the rental toilets, a supply of water and goats.

Had he managed all of this? I didn’t think so. It didn’t seem much like him. But somebody had. They’d done it around him.

The police were still watching me, everywhere I went. I could hardly go unnoticed, though the camera should have properly rendered me invisible. If I put it down, if I carried it by my side, I could see how eyes followed my erratic progress through camp, as if they were all of a single mind and all thinking the same thought: Why is he here? And: For how long will we allow this? Conversations stopped, entire groups, those who stood in circles and those who walked alone, heads all swiveled in my direction to stare impassive and silent until I’d passed. If I put the camera up again to my eye, the same thing happened, but through the lens this behavior seemed proper staging and natural enough, as if everyone were characters adopting poses in an enactment. It was clear no one was fool enough to believe that I belonged among them, that I was police, like them. The word, or something else, had traveled quickly around. This wasn’t simple paranoia or supposition; I’d already been called out.

It was like this: I’d put the camera up in front of my face and found in the viewfinder, framed square and center, a very tall, Nordic-looking androgyne, large and muscular and solid, but neither clearly a man nor a woman. Her/his uniform all but glowed a perfect and unsullied dark blue. He or she stared directly down at me with the most complexly-featured face I thought I’d ever seen – hot and cold and cruel and gentle and sharp and soft, all at once. The face seemed to hold everything in it. And the sun, at that moment, had just chased off a cloud and its light revealed a bright halo about the head and neck of fine hairs, over-lit, and somewhat, slightly back-lit, and the hairs extended the light; they were themselves a subtle light, a finer framing of the golden-white glow, and I stood slackjawed, through the glass entrance… until the androgyne swung his/her large hand – a blur entering from frame right, and at the same moment I clicked the shutter – and slapped me in the side of the head, and hard, like the hand was a wooden beam. I went straight down without a wobble. The camera, launched out of my hands, flew through the air.

“Oof!” I said as my face hit the dirt. My ears rang.

“Oi!” chorused a group nearby who’d seen the whole thing.

My camera, though I didn’t know it yet, had been caught mid-air by a nearby Japanese meter maid.

“Fotografieren ist nicht erlaubt!” barked an angry voice, high and melodic, though clipped in barely restrained fury, and once I’d got my face from the dirt again and looked up through watery tears, I saw that the androgyne, wavering above me, was its source.

He/she looked ready to crush me.

“Ent… entschuldigung… bitte,” I sputtered, spitting dirt from my teeth.

“Es ist verboten,” the blond androgyne said, more calmly now. He/she hovered a moment, then turned to those who stood around gaping, and said, either in warning or by way of explanation, “Keine Fotos…!” and stalked away.

I’d not considered yet what may’ve happened to the camera as I rolled into a crouch, picking myself up from the dirt by slow degrees. It was all I could manage just to kneel there, wheezing in labored breaths, until the young meter maid brought it to me, crouching down to my level. “Very nice camera,” she said in halting English. “Old. Nikon F. 1965, I think. Yes? Very good shape.” She handed my Nikon back to me with a polite bow. I took the camera from her small hands and looked over the body and lens – all undamaged – then looked up at her. She seemed quite young. She smiled shyly.

“My father is a collector of old cameras,” she said. “He has… one hundred or more. All work. If they don’t work, he fixes them. It is an uncommon thing.”

“Yes. Thank you,” I said, wheezing. “I don’t know… how… old it is. My father… You’re probably right. 1960s… Thereabouts.” I spat blood onto the dirt. “Old as me. Older.”

She nodded. “You can’t blame them for their distrust of you,” she said. “They know you are not like them.”

I looked up. “I’m not police.”

“Nobody thinks you are police,” she said. “You are not like them.”

I was confused. I couldn’t follow her meaning.

She must’ve seen this on my face, because she explained, “You were… not called, like them.”

“But… but I was.”

“Not like them,” she said, and shook her head quick. Her short, dark bangs fanned back and forth over her forehead. She reached up, laid a gentle hand on my shoulder, and said again, “Not like them.” She then handed me a small slip of paper, stood, and bowed again. Then she left. I watched her go. Her uniform seemed to overwhelm her small, slight body, but she moved with a slow and easy grace, all the same, and glanced once back over her shoulder, giving me a curious look. Then she vanished into the dispersing crowd of onlookers. I unfolded and looked at the paper. It was a ticket, written up in Japanese. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed she’d written me up for blocking a thoroughfare.

It was after this that the permanent grin got stuck to my face. I knew it was there; I knew my face was like this now. I’d felt my lips stretch back and stay that way, but couldn’t do anything about it. I smiled at everything and everyone I saw, though what I felt was something very different. Not smiley. I stumbled about in the dust while the sun traveled slowly overhead, careful now to ask permission through my weirdly gritted teeth before snapping any pictures. Usually, the officers were happy enough to comply. It was all in good fun, and they may’ve taken my smile for friendliness. Or something. And I was also careful, unless saying either “please” or “thank you,” to say nothing at all. This may have lent me a certain air of legitimacy, which I would settle for if I could not achieve the invisibility I preferred.

As the sun moved, the low mountains grew shadowy and defined. In midday, with the sun directly overhead, they just seemed like a bunch of plain, dull rocks. But in the side-light, they became cold and mysterious and held secrets, even more secrets than regular mountains. It was clear, just from looking at them, that they must. At the peak of that small mountain closest among us – largely, I realized, around which the whole camp was constructed and to where I stole a look now and then – the lone figure stood and watched from within his cordon of yellow tape. By far too distant for me to tell, in truth, he still always seemed to be looking straight at me. This would’ve unnerved me, except that everyone did this wherever I went, so in the balance it seemed normal. I looked away. I looked again. I lifted the camera, guessed my adjustments, and clicked off a shot. Then I took another, widening the stop, and another, widening again by one more. The day was fading. The light was thin. The figure looked down on me, side-lit, low-lit, getting swallowed in the shadows and growing dim.

“I know you,” I whispered, lowering the camera again.

The figure watched from high up, holding a hand between his eye and the lowering sun.

I looked around myself from side to side, then back up at the figure. I took a deep, painful breath and shouted, “I KNOW YOU!!” The words tore at my throat.

The air had grown cold and a wind started blowing. On the mountain, the yellow tape flapped in a stronger breeze than this. I looked around myself again and found that everyone nearby had stopped to stare at me. Damn their eyes, I thought, it’s not any of them, it’s him.

•

Near the central cookfire was where the goats stayed penned behind a rough, square fence. There was a good flock of them – or was it a herd? Twenty or more. I supposed it must be a herd. They stayed mostly content, they ate both what was given them and what wasn’t, and made sad bleating noises every now and again, owing to some internal prompt they had, however inexplicable. They seemed sometimes almost to be talking, in human voices. Almost. Trying to. As if they wished to, but couldn’t quite muster it.

Khenbish kept the animals, tended to them, talked to them in human words (perhaps to teach them some they could use later, when they finally got the voice). It might be said he loved them, though in loving them, he could still be brutal as needed without so much as a flinch. I learned this. I watched as he, with his horribly scarred arm, stroked the head of one of the bony animals, speaking to it softly, a whisper in its floppy ear, a tender gaze into its slotted eye, a soothing hand upon its nervous flank. Yes, he loved these creatures well.

I’d taken a spot to the side of the clearing, leaned myself against a post in the ground, and lowered to sit for a time. My legs were sore from walking the whole day long, and my neck hurt from always looking side to side. I set the camera into the dry dirt, with care. Here the heat from the fire could reach me, and it was welcome. Since the sun had dropped away, now the night was truly cold. Maybe not so near to freezing, not quite, but cold enough still to chill the bones. From where I sat I stared into the fire, with its twisting, short flames, and I stole long looks towards the tender Khenbish as he talked to his special goat, singled out and separated from the fold.

This one got unique attention.

He tethered it by the neck with a rope and led it from the herd, out a gate from the pen and some distance away. I watched him walk with the animal. Both seemed happy enough. Content to be as they were, going slowly along. Curious to see what the man had in mind, I got up and followed, keeping the camera at the ready. I’d been shooting, however conservatively, all day, and didn’t know that I had much film left – in fact I was certain the roll must be almost done, but all the same, I knew I had at least this frame presently advanced. Following, I didn’t try to stay hidden – there was no sense in that – but I did keep my distance and reasonable stealth, if only not to disturb his concentration.

He devoted his attention entirely to the animal, talking to it with gentle care as if to a child. The goat followed at his side willingly, never needing to be urged or pulled or pulling. The two just seemed to be taking a nice walk. After a time, out of sight from the other animals, in a clearing where no one else gathered but still near enough the fire to catch some of its warm light, if not its actual warmth, the two stopped. He knelt down beside the animal. The animal looked up at him, as if in recognition – the coming flood, the necessary return, the blessing – and waited in peace as Khenbish pulled his long knife with the oddly curving blade from its sheath, while with his other arm he enveloped the goat’s head and lifted, lovingly, its chin. With a single stroke the blood began to spray. I clicked the shutter. The animal twitched, groaned, but it did not scream. It bled. It wilted, settled, and by degrees died. As the light slowly fled from its open, gold eyes, Khenbish began the gutting and skinning he was so very good at, working quickly and with no hesitation, using practiced hands.

“He really is an artist, isn’t he?”

The voice, so suddenly, and so near to my ear, made me jump and drop the camera. “Dead Tom,” I said, recovering. “Hello. Yes. He is good at what he does. The animal doesn’t seem to suffer.”

“God help me, I swear he makes them want it in the end. I worry he might do the same to me some day.”

“You’re afraid of him?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I’m afraid of him. The flayed flayer? Physician, I say, thanks but I’ll just heal myself. It’s the tenderness, innit? You can see how he really loves the creatures. Not in any weird, sexual kind of way. At least, I don’t think that’s it. But he does understand their spirit. He knows how to speak to them, he understands their innate gentleness.”

“And he kills them.”

“Yes. Then he kills them.”

We watched. The skin was already nearly removed. The viscera lay in a glistening pile. The creature’s eyes stared off in slotted amazement, gazing toward oblivion. What had been a goat now was food, and ready for the fire, a poem made in meat. The once-neat officer’s uniform Khenbish wore was now darkened with blood, and wet stains crossed his bulletproof vest, which he always wore, no matter what.

“Do you know the story of his arm?” I asked.

“Aye, a little. The details he’s never been much forthcoming with, but the sense of it is he was grabbed up by the secret police regarding some kind of who-knows-what situation and they thought it prudent to ask some questions of him.”

I watched the large man work. He was mostly finished, cleaning up, it looked like, a detail here and there.

“Was he, what, some kind of revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary, or something?”

“Khenbish? Nah, hardly. He was just there. Looked like he might be good for a laugh, is probably how they saw it. Or maybe they saw some money in it somewhere. I couldn’t say. It could be he was involved in some illegal trade.”

“Though he was police himself?”

“Don’t act so surprised. Illegal trade is only trade that hasn’t had the right people bought off, and you can’t always tell who they are to buy them. Sometimes there’s a great long line of ’em. Any number of things might’ve earned him that skinning, or maybe nothing at all.”

“That’s terrible.” I grew quiet for a moment, considering how the large man could’ve simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how easy that might be. But if I were to choose someone for a random skinning, it would hardly be Khenbish. “You say the police did this? They will do this to their own.”

“It’s complicated, no doubt.” Dead Tom sighed. “Actually, it may’ve happened in Kazakhstan. I’m not sure. The man who did this, though – who ordered the flaying, and who questioned him – he is local, though ‘local’ out here can stretch for a rather long way, as you can probably see. He’s since been reassigned to the airport in Ulaanbaatar, I hear. Perhaps as punishment for taking things, from time to time, a little too far. Though a man like him has his uses. As do we all.”

“As do we all,” I echoed, taking a look down at the skin of my own left arm.

The animal had meanwhile been mounted onto a spit and handed over for someone else to roast. The cook rubbed the meat in a handful of spices then put it onto a rack over the fire to turn. As further testament to Khenbish’s skills, the pen full of goats to the other side of the fire had not been disturbed by any of this. It was likely fair to say they’d not heard or understood what was going on with their comrade. To consider that they had, and were fine with it, was too horrific a thing to think about.

“Truth be told,” Dead Tom continued, softly, “I think the whole experience has made the giant rather extraordinarily sensitive, in a particular way.”

“What way?” I asked.

“Ah, well. He’s open now, innit. Open to things a person might otherwise not be.”

“Open?”

But for those who had gathered near to the fire, a full dark was on us. coffee would soon be brewed, and there would be roasted goat as well. From where Dead Tom and I knelt, we could watch the crowd flux. Movement stirred through these bodies. Some turned to stand nearer the flames, or to those they found familiar, of their likeness or like-kind, others to move aside or find some better, more accommodating spot, away from smoke. An agitation stirred at the pen of animals, first there, along subtle currents, answered in nervous bleats and complaints, and it likewise soon troubled the human crowd as well. Heads turned to look toward some approach – an unquiet ghost with appetites and sorrow, perhaps? And soon a voice pierced the murmuring numbers, a weird, wild laugh, followed by a slew of speech. We watched the crowd part, the voice resolving, all allowing passage through of some…

•

…some kind of jolly, fearsome, thick woman pushing her way through, appearing at the flame, her dark eyes wide and glimmering in wonder at the sight of this fire, as if she’d never seen any such thing before. The heat, the light…! Her wide mouth hung open. She held her arms out far to her sides, hung thick with loose flesh, as if she meant to grab and encompass someone in them, crushing them to death. She looked around from side to side, her eyes rolling, her neck straining, and she was speaking – yes, she’d been speaking all along, she’d never stopped speaking, even when howling with laughter, the words just kept coming – and this had been what started the goats, since in their animal ways they weren’t stupid – but what she said made no sense. At first, I didn’t recognize any of it. But then I did… at least in bits. She spoke French, she spoke German, she spoke in something, maybe Japanese. Something. Some great mash-up of human language, shifting one to the next in seamless succession, speaking to no one in particular and none of it making more sense than the last, until here, at the edge of the fire, she stopped of a sudden, as if suddenly run out of words of any sort. Her eyes turned again, turned straight ahead, and I think in that moment, through the fire, she saw and recognized me. Her eyes locked on mine and I could hardly look away. And I certainly recognized her, though it took a moment for the pieces to fit together.

If I did not belong in this place, I was at the very least allowed, if not quite accepted. But her? She would have no pass, no pretense, to people to speak for her sake. But she did – at least she said she did – have her own gold mine.

“Ayah? It’s good I found you,” she called across the fire. “We are more than one, aren’t we? You, I? But now together. Tell them! Tell them what I told you! About the snake! They won’t listen to me, but you they might. Are you well? Have you succumbed to law? But you were the law, yes, no? I rememberrrr… My escort… wait! My escort…” She stepped forward then, into the pit, over the rock partition surrounding, and directly into the fire. The flames gasped and flared, and flew up around to engulf her, and all the while the others only watched, amazed, staring. Her burning form staggered and stepped forward, her arms, still held stiffly out at her sides, reached and turned, her torso pivoting – but still she struggled, like a woman possessed, taking one difficult step and then another across, and finally entirely through the flames. She emerged at the other side of the pyre, a little darker-singed for her troubles, but otherwise entirely unharmed. Even her clothes remained unscathed, aside from blackening here and there, and some of their substance lost.

The penful of goats bleated and screamed horribly.

I didn’t see how the police reacted to this. I could only gape wide-eyed as she came to stand in front of me, that grin now even more wide across her face. My own mouth stretched back of its own accord at this, as if in sympathy, which she mistakenly took for a smile in return. Maybe that was for the best.

“My escorts…” she said, “are all dead. At least, I can’t find them. They weren’t ready. They didn’t know! They were weak! The… sun? Worms take… take them, yes. And the sun? This sun… the hollow bodies, the groundless, sucking… and an echo fills, takes them… them… They never will, but we, you and I, we can forget. You and I. There’s no need to waste more words between us. I’ve seen things since we last talked. Things, yes…” And then she began babbling in Russian.

Dead Tom leaned in near to me and said, “Do you want me to kill her? I wouldn’t mind.”

I looked at him, at her, at him again. “Thanks, but… I don’t know if you can. No offense.”

“Anyone what lives can be killed and die.”

“True enough,” I said. “You’d’ve killed me only earlier today. Or so you’d have me think.”

“Oh, believe it, I still might.”

I nodded. “She says she’s got a gold mine. She says that she’s hiring.”

“So she’s here, what, recruiting?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Ayah? You think I crossed the sea to be ignored by you? By you?” the woman said, annoyed. Her face contorted into a petulant scowl, which was no more or less frightening than her happy smile. “I tell you, inside the tail of the hollow snake, every sound I make rings and rings! Hollow inside, hollow out! And you… you will listen!”

“Okay,” I said.

Dead Tom nodded his agreement, though he watched the woman very closely.

She gave him a suspicious, squinty look, then turned again to me. “Our hearts aligned,” she said, “and we… we are of the same kind. Agreed, then.” And her eyes sparkled – somehow, though the fire was behind her – and she turned and trampled off, though with difficulty, her legs swung stiffly at her hips, and disappeared, wobbling into the shadowed murk.

“Did that just happen?” asked Tom.

“Probably not,” I said, “but we’ll never know for sure. Likely as not, though, it’s her persistence that’s key to her success.”

“God love her for that.”

•

The shadow returned to my tent wall that night, a woman’s form, faint at first and misty-blurred by the light of the small campfire that cast her. She approached, large, wavering, and unfixed, and as she neared shrank and sharpened her edges to a certain clarity. I watched this happen from my folding cot, where I lay without sleeping. My eyes were open, and I lay on my back to study the canvas ceiling. The movement caught my eye; I’d been watching for it.

“You’re here,” I whispered, sitting up, wincing from the pull at my rib-meat.

“I haven’t got long.”

I stood, with effort, and made careful steps to the wall, where I raised my hand while at the same time the shadow raised hers from the other side. But neither of us touched the fabric, or through it, one another.

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

“That doesn’t matter now. Too much has already happened, too much time has passed. What I believe or don’t believe isn’t of any consequence anymore. Things are changing now. I don’t know if you can feel this, but I think that camp will be moving soon. Our work isn’t done – we’ve barely even started it – but the wind has shifted. Now it’s coming from the northeast. The snake is shedding its skin. What we’re becoming is something different altogether, something new. Isn’t this good news?”

“I –”

“Don’t answer this question. This is not a question for you to answer. There can be no answer to the question. Of course it’s good news, but you wouldn’t know that. You’ve only just started. The work we’re doing is the work of the body, and the pictures of the body will reflect this work. You’ve been here before, but you know about this. You’ve been here always, but you don’t know about this. You will need to make the world, but you also don’t know about this. Are you ready?”

“No.”

“Don’t answer this question. This is not a question that can be answered. There is no answer to this question. When you’re ready you will be ready, but not until that happens. Have you seen the snake yourself?”

“Yes.”

“This is the question you may answer, but you have answered incorrectly. You have not seen the snake. When you see the snake, you will know you’ve seen the snake, but not until then. Then you will be ready.”

“No.”

“That is the wrong answer.” She stepped away from the wall and was gone.

I lay back down and stared at the tent’s cloth ceiling. Was it true, what she’d said? Was the wind that stirred the cloth tent’s walls and lifted its ceiling, only to let it drop again, truly coming from northeast?

•

Come the daylight I stepped from my tent with my lips already stretched tightly back and stared at the even gray sky above. There was little wind, and the air had a chill to it. My neck hurt when I looked up, and my eyes watered. I was looking for something, but for what, I didn’t know. But I didn’t see it. Or I did. I couldn’t tell. I stared up at the sky and watched and waited.

When nothing presented itself, I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, felt the pull of torn muscles, and let go again. With the handy travel toothbrush and toothpaste package that someone (Khenbish?) had been kind enough to leave beside my cot, I took a metal cup to fill with water and carried it with me to the latrine. The metal cup, already cold to the touch, became colder with the water from a five-gallon jug I filled it with. There was little activity in the lane yet, it still being quite early, but a few persons here and there went about their mornings as well. A man on camelback some distance up the road led another camel by a rope in steady, deliberate steps. I opened one of the toilets and stepped inside, then latched the plastic lock behind me. Light through the plastic turned the interior greenish and cold, but I could see.

The toothbrush was a godsend. It was just what I needed. After several days without brushing, my mouth had grown fuzzy and tasted terrible. I’m sure my breath was no better. Maybe that was why Khenbish (or whoever) had thought to bring me this gift. I didn’t exactly smell good either, but that I could deal with later. In the green plastic toilet, the camp felt both some distance away and somehow also closer. Sounds turned hollow and immediate. The light scattered. What wind that blew made a thin whispering against the rounded corners of the structure. I tore and unwrapped the plastic from the toothbrush, dipped it into the cup of water, and laid a portion of paste across its bristles, then scrubbed at my teeth deliberately and with relish. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth from the cup and spat into the tulip-shaped urinal.

God is good.

I finished by taking a long, easy shit.

God is very good indeed.

Last night’s goat had gone down well.

I washed my hands with the remaining water from the cup.

Stepping out again from the little toilet box, I grinned my death-mask grin at the day, which had turned brown-red, and was smacked in the side of the face by a stiff rider’s crop.

By the time I realized what had happened, I was struggling to regain my feet, laying once more on my injured side in the dirt, dazzled by the pain in my ribs, my eyes swimming.

“Sorry!” said the rider on camelback. He held back the switch he’d been using to drive the animals, and had absentmindedly flicked me in the side of the head with. “I didn’t see you there! But I couldn’t have hit you that hard. What are you doing on the ground?”

But that wasn’t what he said. Or that was what he said, but he’d said it in Uzbek, a language I didn’t know a word of – except that I’d understood his meaning perfectly well. Between or behind the actual words, I’d sensed a meaning that was clear enough – what this rider had meant to express, the moment before he’d said it, in pictures and feeling-tones and colors, and…

The tall camel he rode turned its lumpy, peanut-shaped head to look down at me, its jaw slung, lips jutted askew. Its tethered companion behind wasn’t the least interested, and stared off into space. Half of both their rough fur coats seemed to have sloughed off in worn, rough patches.

I wobbled up, struggled stiffly, fell back, flapped my arms, and grinned idiotically at nothing.

“Are you drunk?” The rider asked.

“No, sir, not drunk,” I managed, stuck there, “only amazed. It’s true, what you say, another blow to the head, and what’s that? I’ve had a few already. No doubt there’ll be more. Sir, you’ve given me no trouble whatever. No. You’ve done me a service in fact. I think… you see, I’m a whole again. I wasn’t before. Not even all that long ago. And my mechanical nature… help me, will you?” I held up a hand, and the rider offered me down his crop to hold, so I grabbed it. I pulled myself to my feet and swayed there a moment, then let go. “Much better, thanks. But… ah, my mechanical nature… how to say this? It’s been upset. The robot, sir, is disturbed. Displaced. Dear God. The whole thing comes apart, falls to pieces, and now at last I’m seeing clearly. I am seeing… for the first time… everything.” I didn’t know what I was talking about, but neither could I stop myself. It didn’t help that my lips had pulled somehow even further back over my newly-cleaned teeth (at least they were that), revealing, to the full, my stiff, stuck, idiot’s grin.

The rider looked down at me, his face a puzzled mask. The gleam off his policeman’s badge flashed, drawing my eyes to it. So I rubbed at my face fiercely, as if trying to wipe the whole thing off. But the flesh only bounced back, and my wide-fixed smile was still there.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me. I am… not myself. I… never was myself. I’m one person, yes, now, it’s true, but that person isn’t me. I don’t know who it is. Can I give you something? I have no money. Can I give you… my time? I’ve learned so much since I’ve been gone. I’ve learned that the Law has… it has… a part for me. A part in the play. I think. The play of Law? Please, give us this chance. We will show you everything to be true, because everything is true, and you – you’re also a part of it! You don’t believe me? Why? I know – you shouldn’t – I know. And you know this too. That’s why you don’t. But that’s just where it begins. It begins with the Law, you see, with disbelief, and this is everything. You, me… everything. Wait!”

But the rider had goaded his camel forward, and the second animal followed as well, turning away. All turned away from me and kept going. On. Into the sun. Toward the mountain. Toward light.

“Wait!”

Only there was no waiting, there could be no waiting. The Law was not fixed; no, it was a changeable thing. Mutable. Ever-constant, ever-shifting, becoming new. It had to be. I knew this, so why should I be surprised? “Good point,” I said aloud, to no one. “I knew this was coming. The Law demands it. The Law allows it. We’re instruments, just that, no more no less. I couldn’t hold still if I wanted, and that’s not what I want.” Was I becoming like her? But I couldn’t stop myself. “I want motion. I want to see some difference between things – the one thing and the next, the first and the other things as well. If they’re all the same, that’s no good. Everything needs to move and keep moving, and so do I.”

And so I walked across the little dirt road into camp, mumbling. “The ground under my feet: good. The air on my skin: also good. These are two things, and I’ll swear they’re not the same. She doesn’t understand this. As far as she knows, there’s only gold and what isn’t gold. What’s the use of it? There is the Snake, yes. She will recognize the Snake. Good for her. I’ll still take the differences between things, even if there’s no profit in it. Not much profit in anything, so far as I can figure. Such is my lot.”

Both Khenbish and Dead Tom were up and making a breakfast of coffee and bread and oats. No doughnuts as far as I could see, but those would get made in the center of camp at the large cook-fire where the colander of oil was kept. The two looked up as I approached, muttering. “There you are, my friends. I call you friends. Is there anything else I should call you? Do you wish me ill? It would neither surprise nor trouble me, nothing does anymore. I’ve lost my capacity to understand the difference between things and am sad, if only for this reason. Yet who needs a reason for sadness? You understand sadness, don’t you? The both of you? In whatever language. Damn it! Everything really is the same. I don’t think I can stand it. Let me borrow your gun and I’ll shoot myself, before it gets any worse.”

The two traded looks.

“Coffee ready yet? No, wait, don’t answer. I’ll see for myself.” Putting my face near to the little metal percolator over the fire, I watched the liquid inside bubble slowly through the glass nubbin up top. Thin and watery and just beginning, it looked to me. “Nope, not ready. See, there’s a difference right there. A thing not ready. A thing only beginning. That’s what it’s like when it’s new, isn’t it? Because in the beginning, just at first, a thing isn’t ready yet. It’s new. That’s how it was with the world, when first the world was first made. Would you like me to tell you about that? A story, how it was when we made the world? What do you think?” I looked from one to the other of them. “No? Never mind then. Another time. It may seem relevant another time. I know this. I’ll wait.” I stopped talking. I smiled. More precisely, my lips stretched more tightly back. “We’ll talk instead about something more immediate and relevant to our current situation. See? The wind comes from the north. Clouds overhead. These things would hardly seem significant of themselves, but don’t you feel, both of you, my friends, that a change is or must be coming? Or if not the change itself, what necessity lies behind it? Why the change needs to occur, to cause a difference, a movement, a recognition of how one thing before is not like another, or much like itself even afterwards, that is, what difference a change has wrought? Is this not the Law, irreducible, yes? Yes: the movement, the recognition. This is love, what we serve. The flesh and the body of Law. Please, we’re all servants here. We know one thing from another – we do – if we know anything. If we know ourselves, I mean…”