Sandgames

I.

The war has been raging on for ten years now, the walls everywhere are scarred with gunfire, the desert is littered with the remains of artillery convoys and flask jackets, canteens, demolished rifles, shards of tires, glass, shrapnel, helmets, and dismembered limbs. I find the valuable things, the pack of cigarettes, the comb, the photographs, and steal off with them. My sole company are the dead men I meet on the way and whose pockets I swipe clean; they don’t care about their possessions, it is the look on their frozen faces that tell me what they truly lost. This one that I stand over is a corpse infused with the warmth of the sand. His eyes posses a strange height and temperament, as if he has climbed the summit of a monolith and looked down to see the great veneer of a thousand civilizations molding the earth beneath their feet into ziggurats and pyramids, tunneling and heaving mountains of rock while the bounty of fauna scatter away and myriads of birds flock the little men laboring as kings languish in the sun beneath the canopy of umbrellas held by gorgeous wives and daughters. He had seen how frantic it was and died from his heights ashamed of it all. He did not play the sand games, hunt or be hunted, he was lost in time and did not think to care for his life a little more in the skirmish. I touch his immaculate face, the thick sandpaper of skin and smooth curves of cheekbone and nose and jaw. He smells like a dead man should.

II.

The color of sand turns orange overnight and still there is no sign of goats on the road. Days pass and I forage in the thorns for berries. The perils of the desert, when not even a single creature dares to listen to the wind, is like a void swallowing you whole. Desert lore comes lapping with every ghostly drift and blue moon, I laugh against the fly swarms that stick to my dry lips. They are the lore my grandfather would tell, about the wild spirits and feminine night sky. How I’ve forgotten them. Where are my dreams? Where is my rifle?

III.

Forms and figures emerge in the wild movement of mirages: deer horns and demon horns, caravans and giant birds’ head. I carry my burning hands and feet like a burden. I should’ve known from the outset that even the silky evening would suck the life out of me. I step, really asking my legs to bend and not go loose. Mischievous limbs, how I love you. With contracting balls of muscle and my spine arched, I make sweaty thrusts like a gyrating animal up and down slopes that are too much for me. I see the poverty of my health in the color of my urine. I make intonations of discomfort with no one around to listen to them. I pant like a dog and in some ways it is cooling and ventilating. Rusted tanks sit in the dunes, an army has left its tracks here, they’re on the move home, bored to death by the stagnant battles. In the stillness and in the heat I am seized with the desire to kill. I wear a patch on my shoulder where I was once wounded by a bullet. I wish to kill the man who fired it off. The razor blade in my hand shakes and glints, I hold it to my wrist, the air feels dreadful. There’s no one to kill out here but myself.

IV.

In a doorway draped in wind, sand, and cloth I am offered a cup of goat’s milk. At first appearance the hut looks like the insides of a cave, charred as it is by a dung-fueled hearth. I begin to speak to the man, I tell him that we are doomed in life as we are in battle in spite of walls that ought to protect from sand and sun. The real war is with the elements. I have studied rock and stone and I’ve learned nothing from their immutability, except that we shall all erode like them. A world with no vegetation, no shade, is a horrible world. He smiles and scratches his beard. “Yes,” he says, “the world is dreadful, but its essence is barely visible. We live only for a short time, how shall we really know it?" I hear in the north is a big river, I tell him that once I find it I will swim in it until I die. In the absence of water I am like a madman. “In these trouble times,” he says, “we are all like madmen.” No, I say, we are like rabid dogs, ready to rip each other’s legs off at first sight. I stand up and step out of the doorway into the veil of ochre-toned light, the blistering sunset performs ablutions on the man’s hut. It says, earth people live here, they are blessed. I snarl at it and curl up on the ground where I will sleep for the night.

I dream. I dream that I am in land of the notorious army, in the zone of the death squadrons, where I tip toe past a desolate ammunition compound. It is an outpost in an apocalyptic country, where war takes place in peoples homes, and it is part of day to day life for a child to kill for their country. I wake up in the old man’s cave, I rub my eyes and see his daughter’s hands folding a white piece of cloth and the cattle’s snout ruffling in the fodder and I wonder if it was my country that I was dreaming of, but it is too peaceful in this secluded hut to believe that it could possibly be.

V.

In a unfamiliar town I see everywhere unwashed feet and plenty of food. I don’t have a mind, I look about and learn as I see, food and feet and corrugated metal, sonorous platitudes and half-fermented beer. I grapple with lofty descents down odd corridors of rock, I’m not well suited for this kind of terrain, not like the agile children and stray dogs who follow me for their own fun. In the town there are bricks strewn about and vacant mud huts. I look out from the highest spot towards the desert I will walk across. What a promenade to hell. I can always shift my weight around and change directions, it would be easy but I continue with the path I have given myself.

In a maze of pits, miners crack at the exposed earth with thin pickaxes. Laborers haul out dirt and rock from a dark tunnel. I look and do not learn but continue with my pilgrimage to the river in the north. In a litter of garbage I find an unopened can of sardines. I put it into my brown and dusty carrying sack slung across my back like a mummified dog. It is full of bread and water and the precious things of the dead. As I step onto the sand and into the vast desert I feel self-assured, like I am impervious to dust and wind and transient as the day.

VI.

Night comes quick, like a bag over my head and I am chased up the waterfront with spasms of frenzy by the horrors of the past, crying out loud, “Wood mustn’t burn! There are hardly anymore trees left!” I see a man and his wife go behind a bush with a lamplight and I see the glitter of fires at the edge of the desert. It is a row of campfires troops have set up.

The sight of a soldier on patrol several feet away from the waterfront makes my heart race. I leap into the hut of a blacksmith. An old frail man squats on the ground and labors over earth, charcoal, wood and water. He offers me his black hand, scolded and burnt as if brandished by fire. I retract in horror. A wisp of smoke comes from the charcoal pit and the frail man gives a tubercular cough, spitting blood into the mound and seemingly making the ambers glow. “I’ve been stripped, looted, and sold,” he says in a dry voice, he sounds like the desert if ever it spoke. “So, I’ve been shot at for no reason,” I respond. His little boy sleeps, “when will the boy raise arms? Never I hope,” I say and leap out of the warm sooty hut. I pace myself as I hurry out of the waterfront area. I walk into a grove of palm trees, I can hardly see but my feet guide me. I lie beneath a tree and pull the big leaves over my head and sleep better than I have ever in my entire life.

VII.

Found cold in the morning, the soldier was bobbing up and down in the water with a perfect instrument of death stuck to his chest, a sword or bayonet. The word “traitor” is written on him. I feel strangely sinful for pulling his body on land and rifling through his coat pockets. His eyes give me a cold glare. I can see this man was no good, and he squandered his life selfishly as an opportunist and a liar. His comrades killed him and dumped him into this lagoon for his dishonesty towards them. Dead bodies are different when they are the result of murder rather than the victims of war. I stop what I am doing and let him be, the buoyancy of a dead man in the water is the sign of his bad deeds, or so I’ve been told.

VIII.

   Twenty-six miles back I hear bursts of gunfire, I’m afraid of what night may bring. There is wood and flesh and the aftertaste, the fine cadence of darkness. I am but a man with his heart in the heat like the barbed wire in the sand. Here there is no rule of law, everywhere quickly forgotten. People just want the rains to come. Even the desert dreams of the ocean, but not a drop of water will come. My feet look like tree barks, my stomach burns, my ears are buzzing, my mouth is parched, and the river is far away.

IX.

In the beginning there were the remains of an ancient cow, time was drifting apart and stars were forming constellations. Then came the fabrics of light and the grass began to sprout. The bovine came to life and the goat and the camel were born. Now we have frail animals and a country of graveyards. He walks toward me as if he is born from the sun, moving sluggishly with his heavy ammunition belt sagging at his waist. His skin looks as rough as a reptile’s scales, and his gait is near-reptilian as well. He is lean and wears his uniform in tatters. I say to him, “Hello brother, what lays on the other side of the desert?”

He gestures so, with his hand, to the hinterlands, “Bombs are being dropped out there. They have declared war against the desert,” he tells me meekly then begins to do a crazed and pathetic dance with his frail arms and yells out that he is the fiercest fighter ever to live. “The enemy has evaporated by my hand!”

“And what happened to your troop,” I ask. He looks at me angrily as if threatened.

“I ousted them when they would not follow my command! Oh, how they laugh at me and left me to my own device. I go now to take over the capital,” he tells me raising his finger in the air.

I said nothing more besides, “Good luck, brother, let God be with you.”

We are two dead men parting ways. He slinks off into the haze of the desert heat, probably to his own demise, lacking any sense of reality. Off he goes to play his own sand games, but war is a losing game. The beast leaves its herd to wander the desert alone, the gazelle thinks he is a lion, even nature does not know itself. The vulture hovers above, ready to pick at what little is on my bones if I should kneel over and die, for the world was made this way, from abundance to scarcity and from scarcity to dementia, and somewhere along the way is death.