Wherein we get back to the adventure and this goes on for a while.
Metaphorically, many have walked across a desert. They talk of trudging through a wasteland, often before, after, or during a long dark night of the soul. Along this journey, they question aspects of themselves. Perhaps they find themselves broken. Perhaps they are walking towards rebirth. Other times, they are just letting go, leaving their internal possessions on the dry earth behind them as they move forward.
Very few people have actually walked across a desert. It sucks. Really, when you’re walking across it, the last thing you’re thinking about are your soul, the state of your life, or all the things you want to leave behind. Well, possibly the state of your life, but in a very specific way. As in, “What the fuck choices did I make that brought me here, walking across a fucking desert in the summer without water?”
I missed water most of all.
I had little in the way of belongings when I woke up in the basin. A bowler hat, a torn blanket, and pants. Not even the shirt off my back. I don’t know who absconded with my possessions, but I had only the clothes I was wearing, and the two things I dropped immediately before the match: the blanket and bowler hat.
As I walked, I wished I had taken a bigger drink from the trickle of water in the basin. It was tepid and tasted more of rock than water, but later on as the heat of the day beat down on me, I would have liked it. I wore the hat and was wrapped in the blanket as I walked. These made me hotter than I should be, but the alternative would be to have my bare back and shoulders exposed to the baking sun. It might have been cooler for a while, but I would have eventually been heavily sunburned. Sunstroke would have been another possibility. I had enough sense to keep covered, even if that meant I was dripping sweat under that blanket.
I wasn’t even sure where I was. When I woke up, I realized I had no idea which direction the train tracks were. If I could find those, I could follow them in some direction to civilization. I picked the direction I thought it was in and walked a straight line. Hours later, I realized I had picked wrong. I wasn’t even sure what state I was in. I started in what I believed was Texas, but it had been so far west it was practically New Mexico. For all I knew I was in New Mexico now. Hell, maybe even old Mexico.
I was lost.
It wasn’t perhaps the desert you might think of. I was not walking across sandy dunes with the Lawrence of Arabia music playing in my head. No, this was hard cracked earth, covered with rock formations that provided shade for just the moment I walked past them. Sometimes there were patches of dead grass poking through the ground, but everything was parched. Clearly rain came here sometimes, but much of the summer it was dry, baking rocks and the hard, crumbling ground. It was truly an empty wasteland that had me scaling and stumbling over rock outcroppings more often than walking on flat ground.
It was late in the day when I stopped to rest. I had been walking for hours. My feet hurt, my legs were weak and my lips cracked. I should have stopped earlier, but I kept walking. Somehow I felt I would get somewhere, and I wanted to get wherever it was quickly. Resting would acknowledge that I was going to be walking a long time. But late in the day, when the sun was strong and the earth hot, I knew I needed to rest.
I stopped in the shadow of two rock formations. One looked like an enormous wang, while the other looked like just a bunch of rocks. It would be more poetic if it were like a set of breasts or had a vagina-like opening, but alas, whatever celestial entity responsible for erotic sculpture had taken a half-day when this one was made. I sat down in the shadow against the giant wang, so I would at least be staring at the rocks that didn’t make me giggle. Giggling hurt and made me cough, I found.
I’m not sure how long I sat there. My memory was fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t fall asleep. I did feel numb, and while I was no longer standing, the heart ground and uneven rocks did not make it comfortable. I was woken back to alertness by a hiss. My eyes opened and my semi-blurred vision looked around for a source. Seconds later I found it.
Across from me, about five feet away on the non-wang rock formation, was a snake. It curled around the rocks, but was clearly looking in my direction. My body tensed. I really didn’t have much experience with snakes. I’ve seen them in books and at the zoo, but I didn’t really have any real world experience. At pet shops they were always right next to the tarantula cages, so that was an aisle I walked down without turning my head. Spiders wig me out.
The snake stared at me as it slithered around the rock. It seemed to be moving closer.
“Nice snake- … -ie,” I ventured and immediately discovered there’s no snake equivalent of “Good doggie.”
The snake must have agreed with me, as it opened its mouth wide with a very large hiss. With its mouth open, I could clearly see two very large fangs. I did remember from grade school science class that fangs = bad. Poisonous. This ain’t no garter snake, I thought.
A few seconds later had me in a panicked rush, fumbling as I pushed myself off the ground, all the while keeping the snake within view. My numb left arm didn’t help. I managed to get myself on my feet and trying to push off the wang rock when disaster struck. I had kept my eyes on the snake the whole time, but it turns out that snakes are much more clever than I had known. The snake I watched was just a diversion.
For the other snake.
With a violent hiss, I saw a flash of movement and then a sharp, hot pain in my left thigh. I saw another snake, twin to the one I watched. Its jaw was fastened around my thing. I panicked and fumbled around, the snake holding on for dear life. I grabbed the first thing I found, a rock (no surprise there) and began beating the snake with it.
Of course, beating the snake with a rock also meant beating my own thigh and the snake bite wound on it with a rock too. Imagine a man jumping around, beating own thigh with the most persistent snake in the world flailing its hose like body through the air, the man screaming in pain each time he hit himself, the snake hissing muffled whimpers.
Eventually the snake let go and fell to the ground, dazed. The other snake had wriggled across the ground towards me, but I through the rock at it, and it backed off. I knew I couldn’t stay, so I limped away as fast as I could.
When I had made some distance, I looked back. I couldn’t tell if the snakes were following me, but I knew if I collapsed on the ground, they would catch up to me. Animals are good at sensing weakness. At least, that’s what the all-knowing hosts of survival TV shows say. Even with the possibility they’re shoveling shit for the syndicated shill, I’d rather hedge my bets and believe them than wake up breakfast for a predator. I knew I had to keep walking, no matter the pain or how tired I was.
My heart rate eventually slowed after I had walked a while, but then increased. The second increase wasn’t the fight-or-flight adrenaline surge. No, this second heart rate was the I’ve-had-too-much-Dayquil-and-something-is-definitely-wrong pulse. I could feel it in my chest. I knew without proof that this was the effect of the snake venom. I didn’t know what type of snake it was, nor would it have helped me know how long I had after being bitten. But in my current state, I imagine anything would be deadly within twenty-four hours. If I didn’t die outright from the poison, it would debilitate me enough that the desert itself would do me in. I kept walking.
The sun went down right around the point I started feeling light-headed and dizzy. Admittedly, dehydration had me feeling light-headed much earlier. But this was different. I was dizzy like fluid was sloshing around in my head. Any slight title of my head from perfectly vertical would give me vertigo, as if my brain plunged to that corner and bunched up. I began to wonder if there was any way I could seatbelt my brain into its proper spot in my head. That thought alone worried the hell out of me.
As night continued, my symptoms got worse. When it first got dark, I was thankful for my blanket and the warmth it provided. But then I began to feel a coldness that was inside the blanket. Ice that rain through my veins, something I could feel even in my numb left arm. My legs felt the coldest, and I was amazed I was coordinated enough to keep moving.
Eventually the ice disappeared and my blood felt lukewarm. This ended up to be more disconcerting. I began to feel as if I were melting. Not like I were going to all at once going to fall apart into a steaming ooze wondering what a world, but something slower. As my arms dangled at my sides, I felt as if my skin could no longer contain me. Imagine that your skin suddenly became more porous, so that you felt that your substance was going to leak out your fingertips and fall to the ground. I kept raising my fingers to my eyes, to see rivulets of myself flowing down, but I only saw my regular skin, strangely pale.
The moon was full and provided a strange radiance. When I looked up at the sky, I noticed the clouds were moving across it far too fast. Instead of the lazy movement of clouds, unhurried and unstressed by the day, these moved rapidly across the sky as if in time-lapse video. The moon was never fully covered by the clouds, its light showing me enough to keep walking.
At some point, I realized I was being followed. As I scaled a ridge, I looked back on the broken earth behind me and saw a dark form. I focused my eyes, but it seemed to have hidden itself in the shadow of rocks. A few minutes later, I looked back again, and saw its dark form. No matter how far I walked, it was always behind me. In my weakened state, I found I could not lose my pursuer. I could not judge if they were gaining on me, but how could they not?
I walked faster, knowing that the dark presence was gaining on me. I began to feel goose bumps on the back of my neck from its malevolent stare. I knew that I had to somehow outpace it, to somehow find someplace safe before it overtook me. If it caught up with me, I knew that everything was lost. I found myself involuntarily touching the hand-shaped bruise on my arm.
I was sweating profusely. After the long day, I didn’t realize I had enough fluids to sweat. My arms shook and my whole body was very cold. My head throbbed, but I knew that evil was still following me. Every time I looked back, I could see the darkness shaped like a man. Over time it had gotten bigger. It must have been seven feet tall now, but I couldn’t be sure. The rocks and desert gave me no sense of scale. All I knew was that it kept following me. No good could come of it.
My breathing was heavy and I could barely take another step. It was still behind me, but I wasn’t sure how long I could keep moving. I climbed another ridge, using my hands as much as my legs to move forward. My hands were bruised and scraped. I hoped safety was just past this. I hoped there was some sort of a finish line. I pulled myself to the top and looked out.
Disappointment struck as I saw nothing for miles around. Desert, rocks. Not a road, rails, or the faint reflected lights of a rest stop gas station. After all my walking I had gotten no farther to anywhere. I was still lost. I looked behind me. There was the dark shape. It had stopped moving, watching me as I stood and stared at it. I could only feel fear as my eyes tried to discern its dark form.
I turned my head back and looked out at the nothing, taking a shaking breath and wondering if I had the strength to keep going. I could give up. I could sit and wait for darkness to catch up with me. Or I could go on. Futile as it seemed, I could go on walking and let my end come from exhaustion, rather than a willful surrender.
I decided to go on. I took a step forward but my shaking leg did not support me. I tumbled down the ridge, bruising myself on rocks and cracked earth. My head came to rest on a few blades of dead grass. I stared off into the distance in front of me.
It was at this moment that strangeness overtook me. Like the flickering of an old television being turned on, something appeared in front of me. Where once there was nothing but an endless expanse, now there was suddenly a house. A mirage, I guessed. Some snake bite hallucination. Something false. I was sure of it. Just seconds ago there had been nothing.
I stared at the house, trying to discern anything about it, but my vision had grown dim. I remember just the pale, sad face of a young woman staring at me from the house’s window before I lost consciousness, not knowing if I’d ever awake again.
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