Fake Empire | Alexander T. Damle

            In the end we all fall apart. A few missteps too many, a miscalculation, a wrong turn on the wrong road. A grand cosmic conspiracy against us all from birth, supernova swirls of cinnamon and honey, ether in a deep void as we all fall apart every waking moment of every waking life.

            I knew as I walked into that liquor store with a beretta under my arm tonight was my tonight to fall apart but I didn’t know what else to do so I did it. I knew I might get caught, I knew the take wouldn’t be great, but I knew I needed the money so I did it. What I didn’t expect was the shotgun from under the counter, the clerk’s blood on the bottles of good tequila behind him.

            From there, I expected a sentence, harsh, murder, probably murder one, and I expected I would deserve it.

            What I didn’t expect was being made an example out of. Mistakes, sure, but that doesn’t make me stupid. So when the prosecutor argued that the violence of my case was particularly egregious, particularly brutal and cold and uncaring I was lost. But then I knew it was quite a time since the last death penalty conviction here, so I figured the prosecutor was just trying to make points for some upcoming election. He said some other things but only now do I understand them but that doesn’t matter.

            When the sentencing came, I braced for the worst, for life, for death, for anything but what I got. A new technique, the judge said, for convicts who demonstrated particular psychological conditions. I didn’t know what that meant but I think I do now.

            The last of the free men. I once knew a man who called me one of the last of the free men.

            Free from what? I asked him.

            I never worked a real job. Never payed taxes. Never bought a house, never had a loan or a mortgage, never got married. Not for me. Freedom, that was my game. Even if I had to buy my freedom with a gun

            But then the judge said the words, and that was my fate, only fifteen years, it seemed easy. I didn’t understand what he meant when he said it was an alternative sort of prison.

            Appeal was rejected.

            First they took measurements. I asked and no one gave me a straight answer and many didn’t look at me.

            Then one night I got taken from my cell and driven by one whose eyes stayed on the roads, a guard with an AR-15, me alone on the bus but for the watchers.

            The building was not like other prisons. There was a guard, but he didn’t look like a prison guard. He looked bored, not the sociopathic eyes that I’d grown accustomed to. He led me down a corridor all in white.

            At corridor's end two more men met us. They sat me down in a chair, and one of them stuck me with a needle and it all went dark.

            Those were the last faces and I remember them, every acne scar and sunspot, every mole and fleck of hair, every gesture and facial contortion. Every millimeter. Because those were the last. Right before the needle went in one of them said almost silent

            Sorry.

            When I came to I wasn’t sure I came to. All was white, flat, unshining, pure. I tried to move, and found my body paralyzed. I felt as though I was lying down, but unsure on what. I tried to turn my head and found it firmly affixed in place. I tried to tell how far from my eyes the white in front of me was but I couldn’t and can’t.

            And that was all I’ve seen and felt since those last faces, at least in the traditional sense.

            For the first period, I tried to mark time, but found myself increasingly unable. I tried to talk, but couldn’t hear the words mouth formed, and figured this was some mechanization of whatever held my head and holds it still.

            I tried to count inside my head, but without sound I couldn’t focus, couldn’t understand even the idea of the words within my head. I tried to make the numbers the only thing in my mind, but every so often my thoughts would wander and if they wandered slightly they wandered completely. I tried to hear, strained myself, realized I could hear static, a TV mistuned.

            I think it was hours but it may have been minutes and then I see the first images and I’m not sure if a time has passed or not since then beyond moments but I saw an image and I see an image, not before me, not between eyes and white, but within, at first simple, horses racing fast across a great field of green underneath vast snowcapped mountains.

            I try to find a reality or unreality to define what I see but I can’t then I hear their hooves clobbering the earth below and I don’t feel it in me but I know the feeling and that is as good as feeling.

            The horses they reach the side of a stream, and they stop and they all drink of the water and I feel it trickle cool down my throat, and I feel the warmth of the sun beating down on the back of my neck, my bare arms, I run my hand through the coat of a nearby beast and it runs as silk in between my fingers and I’m carried back to youth, riding low across the Montana sky, the flesh of two creatures made as one, country unkept by the rider or the landowner or God himself and the animal responds to me as my own muscle. The mountains that beat down upon and around us stretch upwards to the lower reaches of the heavens and they too become as one, then we’re heading fast in towards a little ranch home set out amongst the endless nowhere, and I think I see a face in the window then again all I see is white and all I hear is static.

            I read once somewhere that in conditions of total sensory deprivation, human beings will often experience vivid waking visual and auditory hallucinations.

            They will also lose time.

            Experience a psychological disconnect.

            Lose the self.

            The past.

            A future

            hope

            even short term memory and understanding

and

            time

            and you slip and fall and you can’t get up and it’s raining down on the roof and

            a car pulls up and you get out and there is a gun in your hand and then there isn’t and blood

            wait

            stop

            focus

            can’t lose yourself. think. find a line. follow it

a path

            a way to think

            something to think about

            picture someone, something, somewhere

            It’s January and the night is cold.

            You’re cold or are you warm is it hot are you dressed are you naked are you free or are you caged are you here or are you nowhere how long have you been here or were you never here shapes and colors simulacran forms drift in through those supernova ether pipe dreams pills and tabs and strange smokes and

FOCUS

It’s January and the night is cold, Christmas lights all around you, you’re spinning in circles, you skate around a rink, faces flash by melting together and apart all at once a hundred eyes and smiles, dimples, cheeks red, laughter and the sounds of sweet classical music, Brahms, maybe. You see repeated as you skate by a girl in a red hat and you ponder why then you remember the girl with you, tall, blonde, her hand in yours and you look at her and you smile at each other, and you stumble but she catches you and you mouth her name to her, to yourself and then she smirks.

            “What, need to remind yourself the name of the girl you just kissed?”

            wait, wait, none of this is real what the fuck what the fuck I can’t talk to you because you aren’t real none of this is real and the white is before you again and again with the droning on buzz

            the girl, I knew her, when I was just a kid, I even thought I loved her I think but she’s not here anymore I think she might even be dead or maybe I’m dead I can’t remember, but why did I see her, her of all people, here, the end of all things, here where there is only pain.

            Remember. Stop. I have to stop my own mind, draw it to a halt before me, a carriage. A horse and carriage.

            Another night, this one warm, May, maybe April, and I’m dressed well, a suit jacket with coat tails, top hat, gloves, and across from me is a handsome man dressed with the same 200 year old style as myself, and I think I’ve known a part of him, but not this part. We’re both laughing and I feel a little bit drunk, that wonderful stage of tipsy right before your mind stops working. He begins to speak, and I follow, though I know not how.

            “Oh, and did you see that redhead! Her breasts, my my!”

            “Redhead, oh you and your redheads, always the redheads. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you had a weakness for the Irish stock.”

            “Hah, well, Catholic girls, you know what they say.”

            “You may, I prefer higher company.”

            “Higher company? Oh please, I saw that brunette you were with, Marie - I’m sure you know the rumors.”

            “Please, I’m sure if she truly slept with a woman they weren’t completely nude.”

            “Haha, you must stay away from those artistic types - they are all so, well, you know!”

            Then our carriage comes out from the woods the horses carry us through, and our driver glances back at us briefly, his features old and refined. The air rushes by and I feel it pull at the hair of my mustache, pinch at my cheeks.

            All around us are stars, then we are crossing a bridge, and I see mansions on a not so far off shoreline. I turn back to my companion, and his face has taken on a tone of slight seriousness.

            “You know where we are, right?”

            “I... I’m not sure.”

            “Do you know when?”

            “No.”

            “Why do you think that is?”

            “Because I’m not here.”

            “Where are you then?”

            “Nowhere. A white room.”

            “How long have you been there?”

            “I have no clue.”

            “Will ever you be free?”

            “Yes, but I’m not sure any of me shall be left to feel freedom.”

            “How did you survive before?”

            “When?”

            “Forever into your past where you can reach. Everyone always tells you all your mind allows, and yet when have you been free, you, the last of the free men?”

            Then the white is there again and the buzz and I try to focus again.

            And I can’t and I can only see what I see, not what I know is there.

            I try not to get lost, try to be as not this room if it is truly a room and not itself a hallucination

            and with this thought it all goes lost to the the ether and the void and the meaningless meaning of it all and I am christ upon his cross condescended down upon by the man in washington as the poor all look up and I look down and it all comes around and back again as the start and again timeless and deliverance forever after dying as we began and as we loved and fucked and prayed as the we all fall in love with our internal notion of death and we let it withhold it and I’m seeing and witnessing and becoming in the beginning and the inevitable heat death of

            the universe as it is always and forever

            forgot

zion a million men chase after but the hooker down the block tells you it’s here baby just a few dollars

            then the girl she walks out on me as a car flips over and over and over an embankment

            blood entombs us as in death

            I see flashes of reason in the un-time before and after

            and I feel a million little needles all stuck into me at once

            steve mcqueen stands before a judge and mutters about a wasted life tom hardy nude wrestles guards as covered in grease paint and malcolm mcdowell his eyes pried open and does he see what I see?

            the gun and I feel its weight in my hand again and this time the blood is mine

            I see his family crying at the trial

            then I’m in a river somewhere and it’s nighttime and I’m walking out into the current and it covers my mouth and then it’s within my nose and then it’s my eyes and they burn and scream out for me to stop and then

            wait

            lost again

            the beginning

            There must be a beginning.

            The white. The buzz.

            And then I stare into the white and I know not for how long I stare.

            Maybe I sleep sometimes but if I dream maybe I’m awake and if I see black maybe I’m dead.

            This time, I go about it differently, rather than finding a world, I construct one, from the white, from the darkness behind my eyelids, from memories and movies and old songs. And my world gradually takes shape.

            First a beach, at night, islands in the water towering up in rocky stone capped in tropical greenery then the beach itself, lit by a thousand burning lanterns, hold onto them, the light, then stars above, paint the Milky Way - no, Andromeda, can’t tie this world and the past together too tight, must build a new world free. The stars, so many, vast swirls of existential universe, an exposure painting cast against the black, a million worlds to explore all within the confines of this world constructed from nothing.

            Then a roof and the walls to match, harsh, modernist lines, concrete, glass, steel, within articles of basic comfort, a bed and table. Not much, not at first.

            Then I draw myself slowly unto the world. Arms and legs and a body, but not the one I was born with but the one always desired, not perfect, but close, beautiful and strong.

            I try to hold myself to the world, feel it, breathe it, paint on the scent of saltwater, plant life, something cooking... somewhere, and behind the house now, a small jungle, but wait, a road through it, and a motorcycle, old and expensive, something else better than the world I had. I think to myself I’ll have to learn what it feels to ride a motorcycle, learn it onto the basic properties of the world of my construction but first I must own the world.

            The sand, I feel it beneath me, under foot, sliding, cool, what does sand feel like, how does it behave?

            I walk for a while. I’m not yet sure how long a while is. I know I’ll have to have days and nights but this will come with time when I’ve come to understand time. As I walk, more islands form up around me, more stars in the sky, more lanterns, eventually create a town with a bay and boats and lights and I create people but then I see one of them and it looks at me and I turn back and hurry back to the house because I’m afraid of what a person who comes from me could be.

            Then I sleep. I’m not sure what sleep is in this place

            I see white then I see black.

            I dream but it’s all a dream and can one really fall asleep within a dream and dream anew?

            Eyes

faces

            pain

            love

            sex

            mine in hers

            And then there is sunlight and I awaken and look out the floor to ceiling windows I built and I see the sea once more, and from the night comes the waters gentle lapping at the shores illuminated now by a bright two suns in a sparkling rippled sapphire and I walk out my back door and take off my clothes - I don’t remember their creation but now I see and feel them - and I run into the water, feel it warm against my flesh, and I dive down and I see fish and seaweed and coral, a million kinds all there immediate for me and from me.

            Eventually I swim back to shore - I consider if I took a breath and realize I hadn’t because what is oxygen but an excuse? and once ashore I let my body lay under the sun and just watch the cloudless blue sky.

            I’m on the motorbike I made from my mind and, having never ridden a motorbike, I imagine the idea of it, half horse and half car, the dreamy proclamation of some friend long ago - “It’s like flying.” And that’s what it is, and each turn feels effortless, the dips and bumps in the road constructed naturally imperfect feel as nothing.

            Then I find myself in the town, the buildings painted bright, key lime and powder blue and salmon pink, the architecture soft lines, comforting to the modern harshness of my home. I look about in hopes of finding a path forward, and I see a little coffee shop with a sign in the window about “Free Pie Today” and I think why not, so I push open the door. 

            There is a girl at the counter, my age, give or take, long brown hair, skin tanned, green eyes.

            “Hey, what can I get you?” I sit down at the counter in front of her.

            “A coffee and a slice of pie.”

            “Sure... let’s see... blueberry with a scoop of vanilla ice cream?”
            “How’d you know?”

            “Heh, it’s an art.”

            “Some art. You read minds beyond pie?”

            “You know, I dabble.”

            “Oh yeah? Tell me about me then.” She slides me a coffee. It’s cheap and oily and it’s exactly what I need in me, the flavor reminds me of somewhere I once knew.

            “Well, let’s see... you were born in the west. Wyoming or Montana, probably. Maybe Colorado? But I’d side with one of the former. You were always unsettled as a kid. Born in the right place in the wrong century, or some such nonsense...” She looks at him. “That’s it, isn’t it - you wanted to be a cowboy. Wild Bill Hickock or some shit.”

            “Not bad at all. But how’d I end up here?”

            “Hmm, well, I’d guess you fucked up somewhere along the line. Forgot you don’t live in the old west. Came here to run away.”

            “Damn. Dabble? You could make a profession of it.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Sure.”

            “So what about you, you dabble in anything, other than trying to find an excuse to shoot someone?”

            “I’d like to think I’m a kind of artist.”

            “A warrior poet? Hah. Go figure.”
            “Laugh all you want... someday I bet you’ll end up with something I made on the wall of your shop here.”

            “We’ll see about that. So what, you a painter or something?”

            “Yeah, something like that.”

            “Well, I’ll tell you what - you paint me something, I’ll take you for dinner.”

            “That your way of asking me on a date?”

            “No way, I just need an excuse to redecorate.”

            Down the street, I find an art supplies store. It seems a little convenient, but then again, little seaside towns like this always seem to have their share of drifting artists. I also pick up some dinner - fresh fish from the market, take my bike back to the house.

            That night, I learn to paint again, like I did when I was still a kid back in Montana. It wasn’t just a line, about being a painter. It surprises me how naturally it comes back, but then, I suppose it should. I consider what to paint for her wall, but then I remember a herd of wild horses galloping under an endless blue sky under mountains of impossible dimensions, and I know.

            The next morning, I manage, somehow, to fit the canvas on the back of my bike, and, true to her word, the girl from the coffee shop takes me out to dinner.

            Time passes, days to weeks to months, and somewhere in there the girl and I start sleeping together, then she moves in, and through it all I’m painting more, getting better. And then the months become years, and, somehow, against it all, I, of all people, end up married. In the back of my mind is some life past, where I hated the very idea of marriage and called myself the last of the free men, and killed a man to protect such an ideal, but this is the lingering memory of a long dead man.

            I’m happy now, here with my pretty wife and my art and my house by the sea, the beautiful cliffs and the wonderful seaside towns. And I’m happy, but I’m bored.

            So one day I say to her that we should see another world, and that night, we lie under the stars twinkling away above, lanterns all among us, sipping good tequila right out of the bottle, my arm around hers, her head nestled against my bare chest. Above us, stars start to fall. And then she points upwards toward the heavens -

            “There. A million other worlds. Let’s go to the stars. Find your freedom.” And I look down at her, into her eyes that sparkle with the falling stars and flickering lanterns, and I kiss her perfect lips.

            In the morning we begin to build, casting the shapes of a rocket ship out of parts bought at the garage in town, and it slowly comes together, more days and weeks and it must be perfect because in it we shall have my freedom.

            One day we know it’s ready so that night we stand together among the lanterns, her face looking upwards to the stars and mine eyes looking downwards to hers because I’ve found now my freedom in her.

            We climb aboard and strap into our seats and I take her hand in mine as the thrusters engage and our bodies are pulled heavily downwards with the g-force and we greet the heavens, stars above and soon below and all around us.

            They are our beginnings and our endings and they are become us and we them, the whole profundity of existence laid out towards an imagined horizon, and as I see their beauty I see more everyday hers.

            We ride the stars for a time that feels immortal, in a place beyond day and night, sun and moon, the little mechanizations of the heavens that we call time as we stand on firm earth.

            And then I hold her in my arms and she looks at me and she smiles and I smile back and that’s what matters and

            wait

            no

            no

            no

oh god no no no

            white

            no

            and I see her face still and I try to hold onto it and her and I see her face and I kiss her and draw her in close to me and the white and I see her face

            a buzz

            slipping, she’s slipping, I can no longer feel her warmth against me but still I see her and the buzz is subsiding and the white is taking over and suddenly I feel something strange, impossible, weight hung down below my head and I try to move my fingers and no longer do they caress the beautiful girl, but they twitch barely at the end of atrophied muscles in a white room and

            no no no

            she’s slipping and I see her face and then I hear her once more

            “Go now and be free.”

            And then all I see is white but I feel my body restored to me and then the grips on my head are slackened and then a tall man wearing white is standing over me and he’s checking my eyes, my arms, my reactions.

            It’s a blur, it’s all a blur, the getting out, my possessions returned, a meeting with a shrink to make sure I’m what they made me and I am.

            And then I’m outside and the sky is not so blue as ever it was on my beach, the stars shine not with the infinite sheen of the heavens so created, the women not so pretty, and she’s gone.

            The usual processes of prisoner release, a halfway house, a job placement and I exist but so does God and Death and you don’t see them bagging groceries and exist is all I do because I can’t live here anymore, but then one day on my way home from the grocery store I pass an art supply store and I buy paints and canvas.

            On the yawning blank before me I see her face so I paint it and I find my hands captured by a deeper force as my mind in that white room and I paint a beautiful girl on a beach at night lit by a thousand lanterns looking to the stars and it comes natural and comes beautiful and then I paint more, each day and pretty soon I’m out of the halfway house and I sell a painting or two and I find a pretty town by the sea and I find a place and in the night I watch the stars and I paint what I see beyond the black and sometimes I see white and hear a buzz as I’m drifting to sleep but I know it’s not real, they told me when I came out it would happen sometimes but I’m not always so sure.

            And then one day I meet a beautiful woman and some day, as lines are starting to appear on my face deep and my hairs are starting to grey, I walk down an aisle and tell the woman I do, and after the wedding, I see a man I haven’t seen since I saw some aspect of him in a carriage in a world that’s not this one nor the one I made, and he looks at me with disappointment.

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.