And then Christ Stirs on his Cross | Alexander T. Damle

           The Preacher, his face shadowed under a wide brimmed cowboy hat, folds of his body obscured within the deep black of his cassock, rides a buggy pulled by a single horse through the empty streets of the place, paint stripped off the walls by the whipping force of sandstorms, the road covered up to his horse’s hooves in a perfect white sand, it pushed up in between the corners of buildings, swirling thick through the air, kept out of his eyes only by the hat’s brim. Every so often, limbs poke up through the sand, of trees and dogs and horses and men, signs of a time fast on its way out the door. Most of the shops lie empty, looted, burned, broken, forgotten like the old gods, forgotten in the face of the Desert.

            The Desert, huge and empty and vast, impossibly vast, sweeping in from the east and west and north and south at once, cutting off all lines of communication, all routes of escape. This used to be a land of great metal birds, man-made stars, towers to challenge the gods, now, though, now it is a place of war and oblivion in that little eye of the storm not yet claimed by the rising tides of sand that took this town not six months before. The Preacher finds himself in what was once a town square, children running free, young men and women looking furtively at one another, mothers and fathers bathing in the mid-afternoon sun, but today still there is but one, held up on a crucifix in the center of town, the Christ image no longer even a metaphor, instead the actuality of a society content to embrace old-world hell.

            And then Christ stirs on his cross.

            “Hello Father. Fine day today, isn’t it?”

            “This town cleared out months ago.”

            “Ah, well, that is simply the way of the Desert. What it takes away, it grants again to those willing to receive it.”

            “You’ve been up there for six months, no food, no water...?”

            “Of course. So what brings you this way Father?”

            “My congregation is lost to me, and my faith is in danger of following. I thought maybe, the Desert... it could offer something, some hint of God.”

            “Hah, well, Father, the Desert will offer something, but I’m not sure it could rightly be called God.”

            “Something is as much as I can hope for.

            “That’s the damn truth, I’ll tell you. You know, I got put up here for trying to tell them that the Desert would save them? That’s what I get for trying to help, I guess.”

            “Do you... do you want me to cut you down?”

            “No, no I don’t think so. Although... Father, do you have a gun?”

            “I... I do... in these times...”

            “No need to explain to me, Father. All I ask, though, is that you shoot me.”

            “What?”

            “It would be a great act of mercy. Immortality is not such a great thing in times such as these.”

            “I can’t do that.”

            “Why?”

            “I have my God to think of.” Then the man on the cross starts laughing, and, as the preacher rolls on down the road, out of earshot, the laughing just grows more impassioned.

            On the edge of what used to be the city is only the Desert, all the other cities that came before this one long ago swallowed totally by the sands, eaten up to the tops of their highest buildings, very steel warped by constant wind and sand. The Preacher looks out across the white sand, contrast under sapphire sky, not a cloud in sight, not in the million miles forward that the Preacher’s eyes, they still human, can see. With a flick of the reins, the horse begins a slow walk that shall mark a time immarkable, the man’s future and the future of the beast called God.

            That first day in the Desert lasts for years, not a sight on the horizon, not east nor south nor north, and, soon, too, the town behind to the west is gone to the faint summer breeze, its memory a blaze cut into the trunk of a tree. For years the sun moves not, and the horizon stays eternal, and though he knows time is passing the man feels not age nor thirst nor hunger, and he sees the faintest glimpse of what the man on the cross called immortality, but immortality is measured in a time longer than years, a time that years cannot themselves fathom, a time marked a million times over by the births and deaths of a billion stars, all existence began and start again, all in the confines of that first day in the desert.

            As time passes, in the shining white, the reflective blue, the Preacher begins to see what in the cities turned to burning hell he could not, images of beginnings and endings, mere snaps of the fingers, twists of the wrist, turns and turns of a coin spinning on a bar room table, a bullet burrowing into skull, over and over, beginning and ending, sand swirled up with breaths of wind, air dry as hell, and still yet the horse does not falter, and the man does not tire, because that then is the nature of eternity.

            The Desert is a place without motion, and in a place without motion, how can one have time? Where the sun no longer circles the earth, but remains hung eternal above the canvas white, individual granules of dead stars and blown up presidents, afterbirth of the big bang, glass and stone perfect, the man may move forward but if the sun does not, no way to count the days, then time is no more than a turn of a wagon wheel, and what then is that?

            Occasionally the man turns around in his seat to see the wagon tracks behind him, small ruts cut through hot snow, crescents of horseshoes, vanished again as the wind blows, in their brief existences the only signs of time in a place without interruption, of unbroken immovability.

            After a period that cannot be marked, the Preacher sees, far away, too far to reckon with the eye alone, but not so far as not to matter, a great white cloud blocking out the blue sky, and it moves faster than he can think after so much time of un-motion, and he realizes it is a sand storm, and, looking about at the flat white all around him, considers that he may be, already or finally, depending on the demarcation, well and truly fucked.

            Then, without warning, the sands are upon him, and in the same moment that his horse vanishes in front of him, his hands in front of his eyes are gone, and his flesh is cut by a thousand razor blades, and he throws himself down in the bed of his buggy, hoping for some salvation in a place where God has no jurisdiction, sheriff over the county line. His hat is held to his head by a thin leather cord, and it pulls at his neck, and he’s worried it’s going to snap, and, without it, he will be blinded, a thought absurd when, by all rights, he should now be dead. But the Desert does not will it, so he isn’t.

            Then he sees nothing, black velvet without end in all direction, then, from nothing, there is everything, all shapes and colors, first flat, an infinite pin head, then expanded out into three dimensions around him, a wash of red and blue and yellow and gold and orange and white, planets and stars hurtling about him with an impossible force, gravity itself F=m*a, but the mass so grand, so all encompassing, as to be nameless, and the speed itself, the very essence of motion, the very process of gravity rendered legion and nothing all at once.

            He sees men dying in great clouds of white, ripping through cities a mile high, skin peeled off faces by the sands, cars tipped over by sheer force, then the first men building up and up and up and up in the name of mounting a direct challenge to God, and blessed with the punishment of miscommunication in consequence, the genesis of every war, the flint to every burning love, all at once, and the great tower falls until it’s resurrected then the sands come to fell it again.

            The vision lasts for years, seconds, minutes, centuries, millennia, it matters not, for the motion is no more than illusion, a dream to keep him through, through the sandstorm. And then all at once, he’s laying in the bed of his buggy, and the horse is nuzzling in the sand. He sits up, gets back on the seat, takes the reigns, and, for the first time since he found his way to the desert, he sees something that’s not white or blue.

            As he approaches, what was a blur on the horizon takes form, old, wind burned steel, rising thirty stories into the sky, empty windows where glass once was. He reaches the base of the spire, and sees now that it is the forgotten crown on a great city, lost to the shifting sands, the swirling wrath of God, opposition to man’s arrogant optimism, punishment to generations of hate, lust, fear, pain.

            The Preacher leaves behind his horse and buggy, tying them off to a protruding piece of rebar, and steps through one of the empty windows. The room is full of sand halfway to the ceiling, and in his six and a half feet of height, the Preacher is forced to crouch. In the middle of the room, massive in its hollowness, sits a girl, no more than twenty years old, auburn hair once pretty now matted with sand, stuck to the side of her face in a bloody clump. He approaches her.

            “Father. Look then, at what your God has wrought.”

            “I see a room. A girl.”

            “Look again. See what I see. A people left to suffer and die in nothingness, tossed off as a joke, we but the left behind.”

            “We fall as Babel, for our arrogance.”

            “The people of Babel lost their ability to talk.”

            “Yes.”

            “We can no longer live.”

            “We live after a fashion.”

            “Only until the sands take the rest of us.”

            “They take not us.”

            “Because we see that which the rest cannot.”

            “Which is what?”

            “Only you know that.”

            “I see here only God.”

            “If you see God here, go upstairs, and know it is the same for 29 more floors.”
            So the Preacher does as the girl says, half crawling up the stairwell, choked as it is with sand. At the top of the stairs, thousands of bodies, all packed and piled together, ripped apart, men and women and children, some holding on to each other, many half eaten, the remnants of lives forsaken, left behind by God. He sees the bodies, and in the bodies he sees their final moments, their resting actions, pushed up and out of the city by the rising Desert, looking for the highest platform, some last pinnacle of human achievement to stand upon, in the hopes that, as the sands come, again they shall leave, but instead they find themselves trapped, first by the sandstorms, then by the very essence of time, all dying slowly of thirst and starvation, trying to gain some last essence of nutrition from the flesh of one another, some final hope of love clinging to each others’ bodies in their final moments, desperation that, if on earth they find hell, the place beyond can be only heaven. But, in seeing this, the grand achievement of God’s plan, the Preacher sees that there can be no heaven left, that whatever heaven they once had was what laid on the earth unmarred by the sands.

            He goes back down the steps. Looks to the girl.

            “You see then?”

            “I see... something. But I must ask - why do you stay here? ”

            “Where else should I go?”

            “Cross the Desert.”

            “There is nothing across the desert.”

            “There must be.”

            “No.”

            The Preacher un-hitches his buggy, and heads forward through the Desert, ever east, towards some alleged, dream-state salvation, an impossible escape from a land endless.

            White sand and blue sky, sun immobile, land unchanged. Little can be said to re-describe places such as these in any way of new worth. But still, the Preacher forges on, though the land shows no sign of his struggles, beyond the tracks behind him, and, as the sand grows more densely packed, even these fade into the deep wells of memory and circumstance.

            White. Blue. Nothing else. Even the occasional breezes are now something of an earlier time. The Preacher, then, is left only with those two colors, and the slightest squeak of the wheels of the buggy. Beating on, endless, forgotten, purposeless, forever. Images come to his head of the people of that great city, rising up through it’s tallest citadel for... for something. They knew that they would not be saved, even if they could escape the sands. No one has ever been saved from a place where the Desert has taken hold, and yet still, still they climbed and clambered and beat back against the assuredly millions of others who, they too, wished a space in those last free stories. The fear of death, or a lust for mortal life? They were a people who had long ago stopped believing in heaven, the Preacher a man long past his time.

            Beneath the sand, how many dead? How many bodies curled against one another for a last comfort, or thrown wild, in some final struggle for salvation, all monuments to God’s great distaste for his creation. In this thought, the Preacher finds again his faith. Nature is not vengeful, spiteful, it simply is. Forces colliding against forces, chance against happenstance. This, the Desert, it’s something more, something altogether more thought out, more sadistic and evil, inherently designed to undermine man and all his love and passion. In this thought the Preacher finds again his faith, and in the next he learns to hate God for all He has done to us, sands swallowing us whole, for no reason but that there is no reason. As in all things.

            In the time since the last town, an entire universe has lived and died, it and all the infinite life forms within it, but this is not something that could ever be known, understood. The human mind doesn’t do so well with time. It starts slipping past seventy, eighty years. How, then, can it even begin to comprehend an eon, a dozen eons. Especially in this motionless place. White. Blue. Again.

            And then the Preacher sees something on the horizon, and he thinks it is a dream for he has not seen anything since the spire, and even that is recessed long back into his memories, back behind the folded shrouds of the endless sands. The something is soon a mountain range, and with what feels a time impossibly fast, it is rising up above him, the period from blur to towering leviathans a period in the mind of the now immortal Preacher.

            As fast as the mountains came upon him, the sandstorm comes faster, and he is lost in it without warning or time to prepare. Choked back deep within him is the memory of the first sandstorm, and he knows he survived it, for here he is now, but he doesn’t remember how. As the sand cuts into his skin, through his clothes, he finds himself in a room. In the room, a man sits at a desk, typing impassionately away on a computer. Outside the room’s one window is a perfect dark, the kind of dark the earth never had. In the room, the Preacher sees god, and he is disappointed. Then he is in a city, a city he recognizes as the last city, and he sees the Desert folding in on all sides, people cowering together in the few square miles left, trying to hold each other close, love just a little more, even in the face of the Desert’s final judment, and he knows that they are all long dead.

            Then he’s back in the sandstorm, and it’s only getting worse. The horse is barely stumbling forward. But then, out of the swirling oblivion, the Preacher makes out a huge door, lit up with a single oil lamp, swaying with the wind, but sheltered from the sands by the door itself, a door that seems to lead underground, and without second thought as to the great cosmic strangeness of finding a door in a place such as this, the Preacher urges the horse on. The distance closes slowly, and he sees bits of blood fly up about him, from the back of the horse, his hands, chewn up by the sand, and he has a great wonder at this display of mortality. Upon reaching the door, it opens, seemingly on its own, but standing on the other side is a man, short, hairy, wearing loose fitting robes. The stranger helps the man and his horse inside, demonstrating an obvious relief at being able to close the door against the storm behind him.

            “Father, welcome.”

            “Where...?”

            “The last place.” The Preacher looks at the room he’s just entered, at the bottom of a small slope down from the doors, a vast space, nearly empty, occupied only by a large wagon, and a few horses who wander about freely. At the back of the room, stairs lead further down. “Follow me, your animal will be fine here.” The two head down the stairs.

            Tunnels, rocky, air thick with moisture, the very sensation of humidity foreign, alien to the Preacher. He feels he should be more shocked by his guide, another presence after so long alone, but, in the end, another after such a time alone is simply to give a body to the voice within your head.

            The two step through another door, and inside lays a desk and chairs, carved straight from the stone of the cave’s walls. They sit.

            “What is this place?”

            “End of the road. End of the Desert.”

            “Who are you?

            “Someone just like you, someone who saw the sands coming, collapsing in on us, and saw the Desert as my only chance.”

            “Why do you stop?”

            “When I saw the door, found the tunnels, I just wanted to get out of the sand, needed something... solid.. You probably don’t understand it, how long you were out there... it will take time. You will first have to relearn the very concept... but I found this place and decided I was done, and that I would stay here.”

            “The mountains...”

            “Others have passed through here, leaving to try to cross the mountain. None have returned. That is the way of the Desert. You cannot turn back.”

            “How can you know?”

            “Try it. You won’t make it ten minutes beyond that door, you will simply find yourself walking back towards it. The Desert does not like losing its prey.” The Preacher stares intently at the man.

            “What do you think it is?”

            “What?”

            “The Desert?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “You can’t stay here.”

            “Why?”

            “Because you can’t. This isn’t how man should die, living forever in tunnels beneath the shifting sands. Alone.”

            “What do you suggest then?”

            “Cross the mountains. You stand right at the end of the Desert, and yet you fear to press on. How many ages have passed since you set out, and yet here you stop, when you’re so close. The others... there must be others, if we just keep moving.”

            “It doesn’t end. The mountains are no different than the spire, no different than the door. They’re teases, hints that this place has an end, that things can change. This is eternal. I know not what lies on the other side of the mountains, but I do know that if ever we found another place with even a fraction of the comfort of this one, it would be after a time I can’t even consider.”

            “Then you are a fool.”

            “You don’t get it, not yet, just how long has passed. It may be you never will.”

            “Don’t worry, I know.”

            “What about you, then?”

            “What?”

            “What do you think the Desert is?” The Preacher smiles long at the man, and, truthfully, he no longer knows the words for what he knows in his heart, and finds in general that the gift of language is long departed, part of a world before the sands.

            “Were you ever a religious man?”

            “No father, I can’t say I was.”

            “Then I’m not sure I can answer your question in a way you will understand.”

            “You think this is the work of your God?”

            “Who else could it be, but He who allowed the Fall as punishment for curiosity, who smote so many innocent children for the sins of their fathers, who, most of all, bestowed us with love only so we could feel loss. In this I see only God, no man, no aspect of nature itself, was ever so hateful as my God. He gave us civilization so he could take it away, and he leaves us alive so we may suffer ultimately, the only comfort left to us the memories of our long dead loves. It’s a dark place, inside your own head.” The man is quiet for a while.

            “Why do you still seek to challenge Him, then, to cross the mountains?”

            “It’s not a challenge, it’s what he wants.”

            “How, then, can you still act as his servant, in the face of such evil?”

            “What choice do I have?”

            The Preacher and his horse set out again across the Desert, this time seemingly not so far to go. After eons of endless travel towards an empty horizon, the passage from the door to the foot of the mountains is short to the point of being almost unnoticed. The white sand and blue sky seem even purer with the slate greys of the mountains before the Preacher.

            A part of him had feared that, upon reaching the mountains, he would have to abandon his horse and buggy, but that fear should never have even struck him, for the Desert has provided in all else, so of course it provides in this. A well worn path winds up right from the end of the Preacher’s passage through the desert, straight up into the mountains.

            There are no trees, no grass or animals or signs of life, just stone, harsh, jutting stone, fractured and broken, all along its tension lines. The Preacher remembers that only the youngest mountains are so harsh, but he reckons that, whatever God is, He’s long past caring about the geology of the basic blueprints of his creation, content now to simply torture without remorse what little he has left upon the earth

            The road does not turn, and it has no switchbacks, even where the steepness of the slope may suggest that they are a necessity, but the horse does not seem to struggle despite. After the Desert’s flatness, the altitude makes the Preacher feel dizzy, but the upwards trek, especially on the timescale of recent events, is blissfully short.

            As the Preacher sees that he is beginning to approach the summit of the peak, a great fear develops in his heart, a fear that on the other side there will be... nothing. No salvation. He has convinced myself, at some deep level that on the other side of the mountains will lie an ocean, one of the oceans long since disappeared to the Desert, an ocean with thousands of people settled at its edge, living normal, happy lives, lives of distance, with a death as the great promise at their end, the motivator towards progress, development. But he knows there will be no ocean. After as long as he has traveled, he knows no sea can still sand, no earth as he ever understood it. He knows he exists in a state past time, when the very essence of existence has laid down and died, and the only ones who still stand are those too stubborn to recognize the essential failure of eternity. True sons of God.

            Then the Preacher reaches the summit of the mountain, and below, stretched away impossibly towards a vanished horizon, lies the Desert, the same in front of him as behind, beyond eternity.