Heart of the Mojave

Empty, yawning desert—the heart of the Mojave. Obelisks of triumphant stone reign their terror upon the land, breathing life into the local fauna. There is respite in the shade. Underneath the aching sun, heat beats down in such force as to demand evasion—and evade the animals did. Into the shade, among the sparse vegetation, beneath the ground. Jackrabbits drilled their holes into the loamy sand, only to perk their heads up in paranoia.

Dividing the desert was the road. The road stretched out for miles without any tributaries; no towns, no rest stops, no life—not the human life of the sort we’re so accustomed to. But in the vast expanse o nature, the ground lay teeming with life—all beneath the ground, the shade.

A car ripped down the road, rattling the rusty mileage markers in its wake.

“What you doing?” Emily sat at the wheel, one hand grasping a cigarette, the other clutching the wheel with dire force.

“Just counting the road markers,” Joseph said, his hand clutching the ceiling handle with anxiety. “...To see how far we’re along.”

“When do you think we’ll be there? To the next petrol pump, I mean. We’re starting to run low on fuel.” Emily’s eyes stared straight ahead. Metallica blasted on the car’s stereo; the A/C was working on full throttle.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see the road sign for it. I just like counting the mile markers...”

“You asshole! We’re running out of gas and all you can think about is this arbitrary measurement system.”

“Jeez, relax. If we run out of gas, we run out of gas. Can’t do much to change it.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry, I just get anxious when the light comes on.”

“Don’t you think that’s kinda fucked in a way? How we’re trained to react to things like that.

I wouldn’t read that much into it. Ah, shit. The engine’s sputtering.”

“Pull over here, where the car won’t fall into the run-off ditch.”

“Yeah, I see it, I see it.”

Emily and Joseph stood by the side of the immense, concrete tract. Their heads poked up from the ground in increasing agitation. Joseph looked west; with the sun glaring his eyes (and lacking shades), he had resorted to filtering out the light with his hand on his glazed, wet brow. Emily made her perch staring eastward. In neither direction was a sign of human life to be found.

Eventually dusk had set in. A penumbra glazed on the surface of the parched ground, light receding into shade, the sun dripping below the horizon of the Mojave. A chill swept in. The highway was an aching void of possibility; but that seemed hopeless as no other vehicle had passed by in a number of hours.

Time stood still in the wake of absolute silence. The only noises that seemed to exist were the ones which could never be heard—the pulsing hum of radio signals from distant cities, the hiss from some violent snake many miles away. Absolute negation in the wake of death appeared to create more sound.

The silence, however, was eventually broken.

“Hey, what’s that sound? It almost seems like music,” Joseph said, the sweat on his face evaporating into a frightened chill.

“No, I hear it too. I think it’s coming from that campfire over there.”

“Who’s there?”

“We came from the road...” Joseph rubbed the back of his head in anxiety.

“What road? I don’t see any road.”

“I assure you it’s there, even though it’s dark and can’t be seen.”

“Ah, but where there’s a road, there’s traffic; and where there’s traffic, there’s noise.”

Emily interjected—

“But what if the road exists, but there’s no traffic?”

“That’s not a road, that’s just pavement!”

“Look,” Emily said. “We didn’t come over here to get into a semantic argument. We’re just passing through to get to LA...”

“One doesn’t merely ‘pass through’ the desert. You either succumb to it, or make it succumb to you. Most people choose the former. Hence, LA. But either way, you’re part of the desert now. So, which will you choose? Mastery, or serfdom?”

“Hmm... and which happened to you?” Joseph said.

“My boy, if it isn’t obvious to you, you’re much more dumb than you look.”

“Mind if we sit here a while?” Emily said. “Our car broke down and...”

“Sure, I don’t mind.”

A pungent odor made its rounds through the campsite momentarily before dissipating into the desert ether—the old man had cracked open a bottle of bourbon. He offered some to the travelers, who refused. The starry dome overhead shifted, little by little, a long night among long days.

“Hey,” Joseph said, breaking up the drunken ramblings of the old man. “Were you playing any music earlier? I don’t see any instruments lying around.”

“Desert tricks.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nah, I wasn’t playing any music here. Must’ve imagined it.”

“We could’ve sworn...”

At this the old man fell silent, cocked back his head, and began to snore. The campsite was an unnatural crater of light in the wake of a vast, dark plain of night. Throughout this crater, an abstinence of conversation reigned. Joseph stoked the campfire, placing logs into its flame; despite his best efforts, it neither grew nor shrank. In a desperate attempt at staying warm, Emily drifted closer to the fire, only to find it emitted no heat.

“What...” Emily paused, her mind wracking for explanations.

“What is it?” Joseph said. “Something on your mind?”

“This... fire. There’s no heat coming from it.”

“That’s nonsense. Here...” Joseph crept mere inches close to the fire, only to feel the lack of warmth.

“What the fuck.”

“I know, right?”

“Something strange is going on here...”

At this, the old man ceased his snore. The campfire burst out, sending visual radiation for miles in either direction, and promptly vanished. Emily went up to the old man, his shade barely visible in the dark. She checked his pulse.

“He’s dead,” she said.

*****

A rusted truck barreled down the road, engine whining, high-beams on. Need a lift, the young anonymous truck driver asked. Do you have an extra can of gas; yes; could we use it we can pay you etc. An ordinary conversation. The type that gets you where you need to be, yet doesn’t strike a chord.

The travelers continued down the long, vacant road. It was dawn.

Their travels ensued, boredom crept in. A witty comment which was disregarded by both of them as not being so witty was made every once in a while. Their minds turned to other matters; the city that laid sometime ahead. Eons it seemed. They just wanted to be there.

The magic of the trip had collapsed under itself. As the desert came to be populated, the atmosphere of the car grew cold as a desert night.

Eventually arguments sprouted up between the two, petty at first. I paid for gas last time; no you did; whatever I’ll just pay for it (they both walked away from the interaction more sour than before).

The arguments accelerated to a feverish pitch. In some motel in some unknown town the two quarreled, the battles being that concerning character rather than over some subtle slight. Joseph sat by the edge of the road, and stuck out his thumb. Emily owned the car, and continued her quest for LA.

*****

Mark seemed an interesting fellow, though somewhat peculiar. He was headed down to New Orleans to see the scene there. He recounted the battles he fought in during the War. He showed Joseph the bullet wound that had grazed his left forearm, long since scarred over.

“Got this in my second tour. Son of a bitch that was, let me tell you. Never seen so much of them in my life, them poking their heads through the bushes; like rats! Rats, I tell you. There they went, skimpering about, their guns poking out of the bushes.

“It became pretty fucking clear pretty fucking quick that we were surrounded at that point. Bushes on all sides, jungle rats on all sides. I was lucky to get out of there alive, I tell you. I barely know how I got out of there myself, to be quite frank. It must’ve been... what do you call it?... Divine Intervention. Because I know without some angel or demon or whatever the fuck (I don’t know which it was, to be frank), I wouldn’t be picking you up outside a TESCO.

“Anyway, there I was, last man standing. I didn’t even have a fucking gun! I was the radio operator. The last time I had shot a firearm was in basic, so yeah there was a fuck ton of standard issue around me, didn’t matter. I couldn’t hit one of them even if they were painted bright yellow.

“So here comes the barrage. They see me standing there, and fire out, missing me by the skin of my teeth. Just grazed me. So instinct kicks in, I drop making out like I’m dead or something. And I’m thinking... any minute now. Any fucking goddamned minute and they’re going to come and check to see if I’m really dead.

“Then I see it on my kit. The radar, I mean. There’s a gassing plane just 15 miles off. One of those suckers could be there in 3 minutes. It’s a long shot, but I signal the plane and slip on my mask just as them rats are coming out of the bushes.

“One by one they prodded the dead with their bayonets. Any minute I’m thinking ‘I’m next.’ Flashes of the bullet that would soon graze my head went through that very same head you’re looking at right now. Then they got all excited like and started yelling gibberish in that foul tongue of theirs. I was face down, couldn’t see barely any shit without moving my head, didn’t want to give myself away.

“Then it happened. The floods of gas swept through the jungle. I took slow, deep breaths through my mask. Didn’t know how long it would last, I only had enough in the tank for 20 minutes. After 3, and the choking noises stopped, I got up and walked away.

“But it ain’t so simple as that, you see. The thing about that gas... it lingers. Usually goes after about an afternoon. The shit they had back in the Great War don’t hold a fucking candle to the shit they got now. Bet it lasts even longer than it did ten years ago, when I last served. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that right now, I’m fucked. I had narrowly escaped death once, I doubt I’d escape it now.

“Then another idea struck me like a sack of bricks. You see, we were fucking around the woods earlier, and there was a cave about 500 feet off from where I was sitting. I knew it was a long shot, but if there was any good air in a 15 minute distance from me, it was bound to be there.

“Now you can’t see jack shit in this gas. It’s bright white and stronger than any valley fog. I only had a vague sense of where this fucking cave was, and I immediately headed off in that direction. I wasted a good 10 minutes just looking for this dismal hole in the ground. Eventually, I stumbled on it. Fell down a good 40 feet, and landed in some underground lake, my gear dragging me down all the while.

“This was it, I thought. Gas above me, water below. I’d sink to the bottom and die, unaccounted for. No one would find my fucking body. The quartermaster would just sit at the site of the massacre, and think ‘where’s Smith? He was with battalion 7-B.’ And then the letter would be sent off to the family, and my mother would hold out some vain hope for my return.

“But none of that happened. The adrenaline kicked in, and I could see it—an underwater passage. I dropped my pack and swam up to it, and came on some pitch-black room.

“I gasped for air, sweet sweet air. I could hardly believe I was alive. Even then, the whole thing seemed like a dream. I got not one, not two, but three fucking breaks. A whole chain reaction of unfathomable events. And then I thought back to my initiation to the force. I had scored well on the ASVAB, was no good with a firearm... and made radio operator. If I had had a fucking gun in that fight out there, I would’ve been blown to kingdom come along with the rest of those chuckle-heads. And then there was the fact that I wasn’t shot to smithereens. All the events that came to pass, all the crap that happened out there... and I managed to make it out alive. The whole thing seemed so uncanny to me as I laid there dripping wet like a new-born baby. It still seems surreal to this day.”

“Wow,” Joseph said. “I... don’t even know what to say.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what you’re saying, but I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been thinking this whole time: ‘This guy is full of shit.’”

“...”

“Yeah, I know. But before you cast judgment, think back on your own life. Hasn’t there been anything that’s happened that seems so uncanny, so... weird... that even you couldn’t fucking believe it? Now amplify that feeling by a thousandfold. War is already a 1000 times more fucked up than ‘reality’ is. Now you bring that supernatural event into war, and well...”

“Did you ever go back there? That cave, I mean.”

“Of course I went back there. Who wouldn’t? It was the weirdest fucking shit that happened in my fucking life. I needed to see if what happened really happened. So I went back to that far-off land when the War was over, got some local to show me the jungle. And eventually... we found it. That cave, I mean.”

“What was it like?”

“Everything was just as I thought it was. There was the field, and jungle on all sides. And the cave just a little ways off, with its long drop into this terrible lake. Yes, it was just as I had remembered (except the gas, of course). But that wasn’t even the weirdest part.”

“What was it?”

“I stuck my flashlight down that abysmal hole, and there was a skeleton.”

“...”

“With dog-tags and everything.”

Joseph was staring out the window, suddenly regaining consciousness of his surroundings. He looked out at the mileage markers.

“Pull over.”

“Eh? You weren’t that frightened of my story, were you?”

“No... that’s not it. Just, pull over.”

“Alright, be my guest.”

Joseph stepped out of the car and into the blistering heat of the Mojave. Yes, this was it. Although the scenery was vacant aside from the volcanic necks which poked out of the ground, he could feel it. He looked at the mileage marker. Yes, this was it... where he and Emily had pulled over all those nights ago.

“Hey... Joe?” said the seasoned veteran. “You said it was Joe, right? You have to wake up.”

“What?”

“You have to wake up.”

*****

“Sweet dreams, I take it?” The old man threw a log into the fire. It was still the dead of night, the fire kept the cold at bay. Joseph gradually came to and realized where he was. Emily was beside him, also coming out of some deep slumber.

“Misanthropes abound by this campfire!” The old man spoke as the flame erupted in a violent cacophony of crackling. “I had taken you for a nastier sort: those socialite parasites who claim to love freedom so much yet are strung along with artificial amusements so easily. What do you hope to find in LA? Because whatever it is, you probably won’t find it there... not really. Everything there is distilled to its most vapid level. Not like in the desert. You want to pick up and look at a rock, you pick up and look at a rock... in the Mojave. It’s there, inextricably linked along with the rest of the desert.

“In LA, hucksters sell pictures of beautiful rocks. Beautiful they are, but they’re not there. And you buy it, frame it, put it on your wall when you get home, and convince yourself you’ve been to the desert. But you haven’t really. Not by a long shot.

“Have you been to a city? It hums. It lives—it’s a body unto itself. And like any organism, it needs cells to carry on. And before you know it, you’re making the city live—you allow it to breath. And you’ve helped create a monster: it swallows fresh air and pisses pollution. So let me ask you this before you go—what have you done? What do you want to do?”

A rattle and clank emerged from the road. A man got out of his truck and looked around, swearing he saw a campfire. He quickly disregarded it, and drove on.

But no one—not Joseph, not Emily, and especially not the old man—gave a start or turned their heads. Instead, they stared at the fire, and dreamed of the stars.