Killing Juggernaut

Here I go, pressing my hopeless pen to this paper as if it matters. And now that I’ve begun I don’t know what to say. You’d laugh, all morning I searched for things that weren’t where I left them. The gulls were making a racket as I dug up the last of the potatoes, ready to fight me for scraps. Anyway the rocking of the boat is making me queasy so I haven’t eaten today. Halves of conversations, thrown up into the air and sucked into oblivion. I should be positive, I’m speaking to the page with my ink.

My boat is taking me to Africa. I feel like I’m in a movie from the legendary days with movies. The main character, the outlaw, goes off to the desert, into hiding, looking for absolution. Or to be forgotten. Maybe the outlaw is tired of deserts, but it really is the only thing left for him to do. Or maybe he’s finally crazy and the other options don’t appear to him anymore.

Now that I’m actually writing this down the whole thing seems neurotic, but I’m going there to find a circle of stones in the desert, just to complete my movie cliché. It’s huge so I can use it as a beacon to help you find my book. This is insane—but I don’t know what else to do… I feel like I need to tell you, whoever you are, what happened to humans, which is what I am and what made all the jumbles of ruins you’ve probably found in every crevice of this forsaken planet.

I’ve never been to the Sahara Desert before, but the stone circle I know to exist in its dead center tugs at me like a dense weight. Long ago I saw a photograph of it, the circle made of stones set straight into the sand, like they are part of the sand, like an unmoving part of an ocean. It’s the center of a big compass rose, by which I mean it is surrounded by four arrows pointing north, east, south, and west, like on a map. Others who lived quite a long time before me made the compass rose and I need to travel very far to get there.

If I don’t reach the stone circle or you never find it, I’m off the hook and all the insipid writing I’ll fill the rest of this journal with will be solely for the purpose of giving me something inane to do with my time. Even if you ultimately come along, there is only the tiniest imaginable chance that you’ll eventually stumble across this, but I might as well write with purpose. So, congratulations! You have just found my book and my body buried in this circle!

You will probably find the remains of many other animals scattered here and there, likely fossilized. You will know if you find human remains because we have skeletons that have fingers good for grasping on the two limbs close to the head, a wide pelvis attached to two long limbs for walking, and a sphere-shaped skull that would contain a brain. On the front of the head are two eyes and a nose for sensing the environment. Below the nose is a mouth, which is the entrance for food and breath. But if you could only see the exterior of a human who is alive, you might see a face smiling and resting her cheek in a propped-up palm. Light would gleam on one side of her face, keeping the other side dark. You would see the waves in her hair.

I’m sorry. I need to keep my writing simple. Humans eat plants and animals. Animals and plants become larger as they eat food until they can reproduce, or create a new individual called an offspring. They do this by combining the genes from two parent individuals. Genes are encased within a cell where they code for the cell’s protein structure, and many cells of different kinds make up an individual. Humans of reproductive age range in height from about 1.3 to 2.2 meters. I myself am an impressively average 1.8 meters tall.

I guess I need to explain that we have invented ways to compare one object to another. One meter is the distance light can travel in approximately 3.34 billionths of a second, and one second is the amount of time the Earth needs to accomplish about 11.6 millionths of a rotation around its axis. A full rotation of the Earth, called a day, endures 86,400 seconds that humans divide into 1,440 minutes or 24 hours. A complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun lasts 365.24 days, which is equal to 12 months or one year. An orbit of the Sun, with all its planets and debris, around the galactic nucleus takes 225 million years. These are hard figures that I can rattle off and brace myself against like a weight-bearing limb.

This boat, John’s boat, is largely automated… good thing since I don’t know how to sail. I grew up inland, never even saw the ocean until I was much older. Now the waves lap my hull and force me, as if I’m dreaming, to look at the way they rolled up onto the sand of the coast. The way they pushed froth and new sand laced with particles of shells up on the beach. I knew some of the debris dancing in the swash—fragments of plants, canvas, chips of wooden beams, white bits of PVC tubing, and bright silver aluminum struts. The sand was hard to look at because it reflected the goddamn egregious sun. In the distance was an odd triangular shape on the beach. And I moved toward it in desperation, pleading for it to be a tent.

The very least I could have done was take Eunice with me. Never has a second passed during the last two months that I don’t regret this conversation:

“I don’t think it matters anymore.” That’s what she said as she fiddled with the cowpea’s spade-shaped leaflet. We always kept a seedling in our little room, on the collapsible table by the corn plastic window, to remind us of happier times. She tried to tell me that it didn’t matter as delicately as she could, like I was the leaf and if she pressed me too hard, I might snap right off.

I answered, “Yeah, maybe not.”

She was sitting at our little table so that the window light made half her face glow and the other half dark in contrast.

“Then why bother, Trick? Maybe we should just try to get through this, huh?”

“I know,” I answered her, “but maybe there’s still a chance that we can go somewhere better.” The words sounded worse than pathetic. “What if Apeiron’s still coming?” There it was, the name itself, my pathology. All our lives we’d been skirting around it like we were orbiting a massive mistake.

She looked up at our patched tarp ceiling with that golden glimmer in her eyes and said, “No, oh, punkin. Oh, please, please see that that thing’ll never ever come back. We oughta stop relying on that.” She looked out the window and rested her cheek in her palm. It was an old topic, we’d said it all before. In some way I knew she was right and I’d probably go all the way out there and there would be nothing as always.

“But everyone’s desperate. They want to know if Apeiron’s coming back. If everybody panics then we’ll be finished, especially if they think we ignored the possibility of help. I at least need to find out what’s going on. Nobody else knows how to do it anymore.” Anna’s battered face crossed my mind, along with all the video static from the erratic connection.

“I don’t care, you’re not still young. You shouldn’t be doing these sorta things. It kills me.” The golden flakes in her eyes, which usually just pop and drive me up the wall, searched my face for signs of relinquishment. The decades had passed and as we held our footing she always analyzed everything with that golden glint.

“I know.”

She frowned and said, “I can’t go with you. If you go you’ll have to go by yourself. Is that okay? Everybody’s still frazzled. They need some sense of stability. They need someone to tell them that we’ll be okay.” With a grimace, she started to break. “Please, Trick, I don’t want you to go.”

Here’s the coup de grâce: I took her other hand and said to her, “I know. I really really don’t want to go either. But you know I’ll be back as fast as I can. Two weeks tops.” The death blow. I should’ve said okay, I’ll tell people I won’t go, I refuse, we can send someone else, or even tell them a little lie, that I found a way to keep an eye on the Array from home, anything.

Eunice shook her head with annoyance and momentarily took her hand back to wipe her face. “You’re so stubborn, ya old bastard. Why do ya have to be so damn charming?” Then she smiled at me with a mournful expression and the dark brown waves in her hair caught the light. I gave her my most pitiful and helpless smile in return and she got up from her chair and came around the table to kiss my forehead. “I can’t help but worry,” she said. “You’re my fella.”

In my nightmares, restrained shivers pulse through my body as I approach the odd triangular object sticking up out of the bright sand on the beach. It’s blazing white from my angle, but I can tell that at least part of it is canvas and I plead with the goddamn universe for it to be a tent.

Her skin was warm against mine in the morning. She smelled sweet, always faintly like a honeysuckle flower, her hair brushed my face. My tickle grass, I called it. I kissed the back of her neck. Everyone needed me to go, they had become desperate. First they were scared, then defensive, then enraged, and at last naked in desperation. Time to be honest. The grotesque fact is that I wanted to go and I went with intention, telling myself a sad but neat story: I knew the colony needed her guidance and she knew I needed to go to the Array.

I stare down at my shrunken penis, willing it to dribble into the boat’s urinal. Give it time. Just relax. I try to steady myself with the swaying of the boat. It’s almost like the boat’s saying What’s wrong, can’t relax? For ten days now I’ve been sailing into this vacant expanse. I will hopefully reach the compass rose within a month and a half.

You know, it first came to me as a pacifying bedtime story. I can still recall my mom, Delilah, sitting on our heavy prehistoric flower-patterned couch. On her lap, my seven-year-old head protruded from an afghan that smelled like baking bread. She sighed and turned off the news and I asked her what the matter was. She didn’t speak for a minute and then she told me that many thousands of years ago the Sahara Desert wasn’t a desert at all, but was full of plants. Traveling people with no home came to a special place there, which is now called the Ténéré. There they found all the food they needed in the savanna, the nearby forest, and the large lake. They decided to live in the Ténéré and for two thousand years it was their home. They were the Tenerians. But the winds gradually shifted during that time and the Ténéré became very dry. The plants died and the lake became much smaller. The Tenerians hunted the animals that came from far away to drink at the lake. For a while this worked well. Yet the sands came to the Ténéré and the lake dried, and the Tenerians had to go farther away to find food. My mom told me that they made a large compass rose out of stones set straight into the rippling Sahara sands so they could always find their way home. Well over three thousand years ago the Ténéré became a desert and its people were consumed by the sand.

That story was all I could think about for a while. After a long time… or what seemed like a long time to a kid… I asked my mom if it was true. She smiled at me and searched through her old boxes until she found a magazine, which I think belonged to my great-grandma. Her gracile hands peeled it open and the pages, which were still a bit glossy, crinkled and cracked, as if encrusted by centuries of disuse. Inside was a mesmerizing photo. It showed a circle of stones in the middle of the compass rose in high definition. Every speck of sand crystallized. The mysterious Tenerians that roamed through the dunes in my head had actually lived, breathed, caught fish, and so on. They set out on epic journeys. My daily child life resumed and I chased other goals always with the constant distinct knowledge that at a very specific spot on the surface of the Earth, in the Ténéré Desert in the middle of the Sahara, there existed a massive compass rose, a beacon, to guide drifting people home. I think every time I visited my mom or returned home to Eunice from a long journey, the compass rose came up from the depths and lurked just beneath my skin, and I felt on some subconscious level that it was bringing me home like a lifeboat.

“Go, for crying out loud!” Yes, I actually yelled it, reprimanding my own junk. What an absurd useless thing. Just relax. At last a pathetic stream trickles down the hole.

Now there’s nothing but the compass rose left. For years I’ve had this insane idea that if I simply took the right steps in my path, if I always had backup plans and looked at the route ahead, I would get to where I needed to go. But, oh ho, that’s not true! You can ask the right questions, travel down the most informative avenues, and arrive at the best answers, and still have absolutely nothing to show for yourself.

The shimmers race beneath me in the perfect blue like wasps caught in the wind. Day after day I wake up and see nothing. I have three jugs of water left, which I have to use very sparingly. I keep them covered so the water won’t evaporate and I try like mad to capture more condensation. A child’s fantasy: is that all that’s left, some damn symbol in the emptiness? The blank pages filling the remainder of this journal stare at me and are expectant. What I’ve written so far is like touching an object shrouded in fog and giving it a silly name. I need to tell you what you need to know, as simply as I can.

I am seventy-one years old now at the time of my death. The condition in which you found my skeletal remains depends on the amount of time elapsed between my writing of this book and your discovery of it. With luck the desert sand will cover me and its elements will eventually replace those in my tissues so that my body should be preserved as a fossil for your discovery.

The year is now 2241… How can I talk about years? This number means nothing to you. Writing the amount of time between any event and my present is utterly meaningless without knowing the amount of time elapsed between my time and yours. Hmm… Ah… shoot. Well, I’m hoping you can solve this problem by learning the age of my remains, which can be done with a little knowledge of chemistry. Someone more educated than me should be teaching you this—but by grand default I’m now the best chemist. Huh, what an odd and sordid concept. I guess I’m also the top engineer or surgeon or artist or potter. Racing car driver. Food critic. Anything. I’m the world’s leading alchemist.