His eyes were tired and dull. His hands were aged but not worn. His clothes, faded, broken blue jeans and a stained long-sleeve t-shirt were out of place and reminded him that he did not belong here and that he had travelled a great distance and with great care to be precisely here. The tiredness in his eyes was seeping into the rest of his body causing his shoulders to slightly slump forward.
He slowly unclasped his hands and pushed his headphones deeper into his ears and turned the volume up a little more. Then, reaching into his jeans pocket he pulled out his cell phone to check the time. It was nothing more than act of habit. There was no signal out here and he was so many time zones away from the place that used to be home that the time was inconsequential. He merely noted that nearly twenty minutes had elapsed since he had last checked and he was mildly interested that it had in fact seemed like hours.
He stared at the alien lighting of the phone for another few seconds then pushed it back into his pocket. The movement caused cool sand to trickle into his shoes and down the back of his jeans. His mind lazily rested on the sensation and he vaguely considered how this sand differed from the sands he had experienced on nearly-forgotten beaches. This desert sand was wind-worn, not water-worn, and it carried a life-draining dryness that was subtle and dangerous.
The tishoumaren rhythms circled into his ears and around his head so that the voices seemed to be coming from above him. He looked up and fixed upon the large African moon sweeping to the west of where he sat and he felt the icy sensation of the impossibly bright clusters of desert stars wheeling and blurring beyond his periphery. He felt light and disconnected and momentarily felt that it was the earth, his patch of sand that was spinning and swirling under the fixed glow of the moon.
He was utterly alone and infinitely small and he hated and dreaded the sensations. He only managed it because of the drugs and chemicals flooding his brain and bloodstream. If he was going to have to be alone, at least he could distort it and warp it into a floating surreal fog that would let him re-create his reality into something warm and heroic.
He reached up and ran his hands through his hair…dirty and sweaty…pushing it off his forehead and behind his ears, careful not to dislodge his headphones. More sand ran into his shoes and jeans so they now felt heavy and dense and he drifted along the feelings of immobility, sensing the fear and the comfort and the sinking tiredness. Habitually, he reach for his phone again, his movements slow and exaggerated and sensitive. His knuckles rasping on the stitched denim of his pocket, the adjusting of his position putting him a little deeper in the sand…little things that somehow seemed significant to him. He did not notice the time, but instead scrolled to his text messages and re-read the only remaining entry, sent from his youngest brother a few minutes ago or last week… or longer. He couldn’t remember and didn’t care to.
“Mom thinks you’re suicidal…I said you liked pussy too much.”
Should always listen to your mother. The thought struck the man funny and he smiled tightly and imperceptibly into the lunar-lit desert. With an effort he reached into the ragged backpack beside him and dully re-examined its contents, assuring himself that he had gotten rid of anything that could possibly identify him. He had dropped his keys into an open latrine in the dirty ghetto just outside of Bamako. He had burned all the contents of his wallet in the burning barrel two nights ago listening to itinerant guitar and njarka players near Timbuktu. He had torn off all the labels from his prescription bottles on the jeep ride to the fringes of this section of the desert.
An impossibly large desert. And impossibly anonymous. This desert showed you precisely how small and insignificant you were and it did not care whether you stayed or not. You were nothing to this desert. The man was comforted by its empty indifference. He shook the contents of one of the bottles into his hand and washed the pills down with a long pull from the dirty plastic bottle in his pack. It was not water and he grimaced with weary satisfaction. He leaned back into the sand and tried to look at the sky, but it was circling too quickly for him to focus and he was so tired. He wanted to sleep.
Not yet. Not just yet. Soon. He knew that he was probably good enough for sleep, but he was careful and sadness was starting to worm its way in and he was afraid of its distraction. The wind picked up and far off the man could see and smell the rising wall of dust and sand piling high into the air. In the moonlight it was only perceptible as a slightly grayer ruffle spread on the western horizon. Soon it would turn the moon itself into a muted dark orange blob and then it would be on top of him. But not yet. He still had the time he needed. The time he wanted.
He sat for a while longer, deliberately thinking of nothing, until the rising breezes carried lightly stinging flecks of sand. With a great exertion of will, the man sat up enough to open his pack and get the orange bottle of pills and the dirty plastic bottle. He swallowed most of them and waited. The music above his head spilled over him and into him, pressing him back into the sand. After a while…short or long, he did not know… weariness and weakness began to overpower him, so with the last draining sips of warm bitter vodka, he swallowed his 198th, 199th and 200th vicodin and lay down at last to sleep. Good night moon…
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