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A record of the adventures of James, who in his 31st year left the human world and came to the desert.
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7.02.2003
Welcome to the land of disaster. Smell the dry smoke in the air, and feel the locusts tangling in your hair as they attempt to fly away. Watch the croaking lizard scamper among the rocks in the cracked, empty riverbed, and watch the eagle descend and lance it with acute talons.
Rub at the sand scratching your eyes. Listen to the distant whirr of some hidden storm frothing beyond the horizons, coming to erase all that this place has left behind.
Two kinds of people live here: the strong and the clever. All the rest die.
posted by Sam at 11:31:00 AM
10.29.2002
The torpor persisted for at least another day. James became well-acquainted with the pattern of scattered bumps across his ceiling. In them he saw the faces of long-lost friends, girlfriends who never called him back, his dead father, a kangaroo, and scenes of mayhem.
He continued to look far into the abyss.
posted by Sam at 1:46:00 PM
10.22.2002
And then his eyes opened, this terrible vision dissolved, anchored to his bed with the sheets wrapped around his right leg. It was dark, the ceiling blue, and the eerie green blink of the LED on his alarm clock caught the edge of his vision. Nausea swept through his body, and he shivered.
posted by Sam at 5:01:00 PM
His hair began to stand on end, first on the back of his neck, then on his head and his arms. The droplets of water dried off his body the moment the struck. He faced the madness alone.
posted by Sam at 1:29:00 PM
10.16.2002
Birds like bugs, everywhere, on everything. Coy-looking things with hard eyes and shrill calls flew overhead and perched on the rocks. The mix of bleached-out feathers and black beaks made them look like gulls at a distance, or dominos.
James was walking towards something, a human figure in the distance he couldn't make out. The desiccated earth crunched beneath his bare feet and poked at the tough skin. Birds jumped out of his path as he neared. They landed on his shoulders, picked at his tattered brown shirt until he swatted at them, shooed him away. Still they came, calling their companions. The birds massed in the sky, and a thundercloud did the same over them. They swarmed around him and tried to block his path, but still he walked toward the figure on the horizon.
Whoever it was seemed the nexus of the stormclouds; slivered triangles of azure sky pointed in to the black outline, but the dark thunderheads above rolled out and back, towards James. A grey bird with a green eye and a white beak marked with a solitary orange ring flew immediately before his eyes, landed on his nape and drilled its beak into his shoulder.
The thunder rolled and cracked, momentarily drowning the dirge of the birds. James flinched and swatted.
The bird lifted off a few inches, then relanded. More birds came down and copied this brave soldier. James flung his arms about him and broke into a run, but the birds gave effortless chase. He felt a warm spot covering the ache in his shoulder. The ashen rain began to fall.
posted by Sam at 4:16:00 PM
10.01.2002
He woke, then languished in bed for the rest of the day, listening to the sound of messages left on his answering machine: first Jake from the cube next to him, then his boss. Then the receptionist and her sunny voice requesting that he call back to make an appointment with Human Resources so that they might conduct an exit interview. The whole time he made out patterns from the nonsense of plaster on the ceiling. Faces, roads, satellites, enigmas. The cotton sheets twisted around his torso.
Sometime after the receptionist's call, beyond sundown, but before his girlfriend left a message on the answering machine, he fell into another sleep.
posted by Sam at 3:52:00 PM
9.27.2002
Answers arrived in dreams. Nearly twenty years had passed since James had been to New Mexico and beyond, in the fringes of the desert. His dad had taken him hiking with a group of fathers and sons, largely as a way to encourage campfire talk and perseverance in the boys. The other boys, though, were aggressive and malicious, and had preyed upon James' quiet nature. They hounded him recklessly, snakes snapping at his heels; the fathers were unanimously amused. The exercise in character-building became a wound, a scar. Beautiful boy, they called him. Beautiful boy, can't you take the trail? The landscapes of his dreams at night appropriated the landscapes of the trail for years afterward.
So the night after leaving the cube farm behind, he dreamed himself walking the scrubby trails again, no longer a youth, but still the beautiful boy. Past the Ponderosa Pine and around the granite peaks he wandered, to a cracked white land beneath a blue sky. Though a sun hung heavy in the sky, it showed no compass; no trail guided him from an A to a B. He sat cross-legged in the sun and dull flowers sprang up around him. The mountains in the distance melted away, and at its zenith, the sun shined straight down on him. The reptiles crawled into their holes, and the cacti swayed to an unheard tune, beyond his ears.
posted by Sam at 4:23:00 PM
9.26.2002
He was in the middle of proofreading a small correction in the punctuation of a memo that had no bearing on his professional career. "Should we use a serial comma or not?" read the red ink at the top of the page. In the printed text, the same smooth red line circled two words, "staples" and "and". A wisp of dust rolled across his grey pressboard desk until it stopped against a discarded black pen. All human voices seemed sucked from the air and replaced with the click of computer keys on all sides. The low buzz of fluorescent lights pressed down from overhead.
A little bell sound came out of his computer when an email appeared on his screen, asking him if he'd seen the new style of letterhead.
Then the computer froze, gone dark and blue, flushed down. The only explanation was the clatter of computer keys on all sides. Someone in a cube several rows over, a woman, laughed out loud then stifled it with a hand. He got up from his chair, walked past the blue faces in the grey cubes, and was already taking a peppermint candy from the receptionist's glass candy jar on the big brown desk when he realized he would be leaving the building for the last time.
"Are you going out for the afternoon?" she asked, with that pleasant, rehearsed smile. James unrolled the loud cellophane wrapper and popped the red and white candy between his cheek and teeth.
"I'm never coming back," he said. "It's been okay knowing you." With that, he got in his car and drove away.
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