Last Stop - Part 2

The trader tore the dead skin mask off his face, and threw it away with disgust. His nostrils flared like the sails of a boat as he took a few deep breaths. He hasn’t had anything to eat or drink for two days; his head was dizzy, his body weak.

 

“Good,” he muttered to himself. “It won’t be long now.”

 

The sun had set; the temperature was dropping fast. The man stopped, turned and looked back at the oasis he had just left behind. It was nothing more than a dark shadow between mighty sand dunes.

 

“The ‘Last Stop’ will be my ‘First Stop’ if I ever return here,” he thought and mused for a minute about how much things depended on one’s perspective. However, he didn’t plan to return. He wasn’t walking out into the desert to get enlightened and to bring a message of hope back to humanity; he was walking out to meet his death.

 

His feet sank deep into the sand; he was panting and, despite the cold air, sweat was trickling down his back. His head hung low as he kept putting one foot in front of the other with a stubborn determination as if he had an appointment he didn’t want to miss. Something moved across the sand with a rattling sound, and before he could ascertain what it was, his reflexes made him jump. He lost his balance, fell, and rolled down the sloping side of a sand dune. At the bottom he came to a halt, and didn’t have the strength or the willingness to stand up or to move anymore.

 

“Last stop,” he thought and waited for some grand emotion or special feeling to arise, but there was only exhaustion, fatigue and drowsiness. His breathing slowed down, and he made a few little moves with his hands across the surface of the sand hoping to feel a little warmth, but he was disappointed. An urge to hold something soft and warm, the desire to hug someone tightly attacked him with vicious ferocity, but he was a lost soul out on the sea of endless fields of undulating dunes. It was all a mighty graveyard made up of tiny, dead, fragmented pieces of a broken world, and soon he’d be swallowed by it forever.

 

He rolled over onto his back and looked up at the cloudless, naked sky that was strewn with myriad stars. It was another desert up there, and each star was a grain of sparkling, shiny sand. As above, so below. He felt so utterly alone; his body started to convulse as if he was going to vomit, but his desiccated body could only produce a few warm, wet tears. He wept for himself, and for the tragedy of every life that starts and ends in solitude in the desert of life.

 

The sound of crying woke him. He opened his eyes; the desert sky was still above him watching him with countless brilliant, cold, twinkling eyes. Somewhere very near a baby was piercing the otherworldly silence with rhythmical, powerful cries. The man moved his swollen tongue over his dry lips and with a groan crawled toward the sound.

 

“Why won’t you just let me go?” he hissed, shooting an accusatory look at the sky.

 

The cries continued uninterrupted, and soon he was looking at a baby boy wrapped in a thin, white, linen shroud. The man looked around dumbly and whispered, “Hello? Anyone here?” There was no answer, but at the sound of his voice, the baby stopped crying and was looking up at the man. The stars above were reflected in his big, innocent eyes, and the man had a very strange feeling. An inexplicable recognition coursed through his body from the top of his spine down to the soles of his feet. Looking down at the baby was like peering into a mirror that reflected not the dry, coarse, crumbling sand dunes of his own visage, but the depths of his inner being.

 

He slowly reached out his hand and placed it on the baby’s chest. It held the man’s gaze, blinked twice, closed its eyes and seemed to have gone to sleep. The man felt an overwhelming sense of love for this tiny creature and lifted it up to hold it close to his bosom. As he lifted the white bundle off the ground, sand trickled out from between the folds. The trickle turned into a steady flow, the bundle got smaller and lighter and there was more and more sand.

 

“No!” the man shouted desperately. “No!” He moved the little bundle around clumsily in his big hands, watching the baby’s peaceful face turn to sand that trickled down to his feet. He fell to the ground with his chest heaving, gasping for air. The thin, white shroud was empty now save for a handful of sand. The man dropped to his knees and was wading in the sand, digging, throwing handfuls of it into the air. “No! No!” he kept screaming as the sand fell back on his head like rain. He gathered up the shroud, buried his face into it and wept.

 

When he cried himself out, he stood up and stumbled around for a while not knowing where to go or what to do. The white shroud was like a flag soldiers wave on the battlefield as a sign of surrender. Holding it up to the sky he fell back down on his knees feeling humbled and powerless as never before. Life was an infinite circle and he was in the center of it. Wherever he looked he saw himself looking back at himself. The endless desert, the cold, shimmering stars, the innocent eyes of an infant - these were all him and there was no escape, there was nowhere to run. His plan of self-immolation seemed pitiful and pointless now. Love awakened in his heart for that ageless, timeless, eternal infant that he once was. Nothing else mattered, but that feeling of being accepted unconditionally. He needed to get back to the oasis, back to life, back to the first and last stop.

 

Every step now was a gift, but his body was failing. His head hung lower than before, his feet moved slowly in the sand. He wrapped himself in the white shroud and moved through the desert like a ghost or an angel. He didn’t feel cold, hungry, or thirsty anymore; in that white shroud he was a newborn soul being carried by powerful, invisible hands. Then, something long and thin moved at his feet.

 

“Rattlesnake!”

 

He tried to step back but staggered and fell. The long, thin apparition snapped back, and soon a human hand reached out toward the man to help him sit up. The hand belonged to a young boy of about fourteen years of age. He was lanky, and had lush, curly hair about his oval face. He helped the man up, and went back to what he had been doing: swinging a lasso over his head. It was the rope the man took for a snake.

 

They didn’t speak, and as the man sat panting, watching the boy, he had the same, familiar feeling he had had earlier slowly rising up from the pit of his stomach. “This can’t be!” he whispered as he observed the thin limbs, the way the boy held his head, the dogged determination with which he tried to lasso…the nearest star, it seemed. He shot a few looks at the man, and his eyes were the same mirror he had seen himself reflected in earlier when he stared into the infant’s starry eyes.

 

The man slowly approached the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy hung his head in shame, and soon lifted his eyes to the sky again with such longing, such desire to reach up there, to pull himself up, or to pull one of the diamond buttons from the black coat of the night down. They sat on the ground silently, facing each other. The man looked at the lasso and smiled. How he wished he had the boy’s mad, beautifully naïve and innocent wish to “reach for the stars” again. How long ago it was that he had felt that way about anything!

 

The feeling of love for this boy arouse in him just like it did earlier for the baby. He rolled the white shroud into a scarf, stood up, walked behind the boy’s back, blindfolded him, and sat down facing him again. The boy tightened his grip on the lasso, but soon his fingers relaxed and as his breathing slowed down, a faint white light began to pulsate under his shirt. He put both his hands above his heart and the light grew stronger.

 

“So obsessed with the stars up in the sky that you forgot the one glowing inside of you,” the man whispered with a smile. The boy kept sitting and holding his bright white light in his cupped hands. The light grew bigger until it enveloped the boy completely. The man let himself fall back onto the sand and watched the sky and the brilliant white light rising and rising till it was indistinguishable from the countless other stars above. Then all the lights went blurry, the man wiped his teary eyes, stretched out his two arms like Jesus on his cross, and he fell asleep with a feeling of immense gratitude in his heart.

 

When he woke, it was still dark. The boy was gone, but he left his rope at the man’s feet. The man pushed himself up and started walking. There was no hesitation in his steps now - it was as if he knew exactly where he had to go - as if he was following his guiding star. He walked for a while until he saw the flicker of flames dancing in the distance. As he got closer to the small campfire, he saw a young man sitting on the ground hunched over, staring into the dying flames. His two hands hung limply next to his body. His wrists were slit and thin, very thin streams of blood were seeping out of his wounds like strains of red thread or yarn coiling, swaying and moving slowly about the young man. They slithered and formed a continuous, unbroken line of patterns on the sand. The area around the fire looked like the torn up pages of a book whose letters were written in red. The young man, who looked to be in his early twenties, was already buried ankle deep in a mess of jumbled up red yarn.

 

The man cut two short pieces of the rope he had been carrying, and tied them around the young man’s wrists to stop the bleeding. Then, he picked up one end of the blood-red yarn and started to weave it, fuse it with the rope he had. He worked quietly, watching the young man. The lanky arms and legs, the curly hair, the oval face were familiar sights by now. He was looking into a mirror that shows how things used to be, how he used to be.

 

When the young man came to, he watched the man working for a while. He understood, and they continued together to organize the crimson threads into a strong, unified line. They worked from both ends and soon met in the middle holding onto their own end of the line that buzzed, sizzled and whispered words and secrets like a telephone line stretched out between the past and the present. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Then the young man’s face turned serious; he raised a hand and pointed to a certain direction beyond a tall sand dune. The man nodded, smiled again and started walking in the direction the young man had pointed him. After a few steps, he had a strange sensation, as if someone had hugged him tightly. It was a pleasant feeling, warm, reassuring and loving - a thousand words and more whispered in a touch. It was the rope they had woven together, the other end of which was in the young lad’s hand. He tugged on it gently, smiled, walked to the man and placed it in his hand as a gift.

 

The man crossed the towering sand dune in front of him with difficulty - one step at a time, falling to his knees and getting back up again, panting, and crawling, but he made it to the top. He flopped down on his belly; the sand was between his teeth, in his nostrils, stuck to the damp skin on his face. He rolled over to face the sky, and his eyes searched frantically for the little white light that had led him there. He couldn’t find it; it could guide him no further.

 

As his heart slowed down, his panting subsided and the pulsating, throbbing blood in his ears quieted, he heard soft singing in the dark. It was a woman’s voice, a familiar voice, Her voice, and it made the hair stand on the back of the man’s neck. The singing turned into a mocking laughter and a dark shadow moved over the man. He wanted to sit up, stand, and run after the ghostly voice but he hadn’t the strength. There was laughter again, but it turned into screams, and unintelligible words that were full of pain and hurt and blame and accusations. The man gathered all his strength and pushed himself off the ground. He stood feebly, facing a dark, swirling cloud that looked like a black funeral dress flopping, flying in the wind. The man uncoiled the rope that was once bathed in starlight and woven with the very lifeblood of a young man. It was all the man had to capture, restrain, pacify, calm and rein Her in. 

 

He was sure that if She felt the warmth of the words that lived and spoke and sang and throbbed in his blood, She would understand. “She must know! “Can you not see?” he shouted. But, the howling, the screaming and the swirling intensified, and in the confusion the rope got wrapped and entangled around the man’s neck. She dragged him down the dune and left his broken body lying in the sand before she let out a final scream and spread the wide, flowing folds of her black dress as if she wanted to swallow the sky and all its stars.

 

The next morning, people in the oasis called the “Last Stop” became aware of some vultures circling in the distance between two tall sand dunes. They dispatched some soldiers who later returned with the body of the trader that had come through there just the day before. They erected a makeshift tent outside the city walls, and appointed a young widow to try to nurse the man back into health. She sat by the unconscious man, wiped his brow, and examined the curly beard, and the oval face.

 

“They say you will not see the light of another day,” she whispered to the man. “But, I think, you will. You will.” From under her long, black dress she produced a little book that she had bought off the man just a day ago. She opened it, and read,

 

“Sometimes, you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself.”