by Brian Short
The window, street, room, street, the window; I was in the window; I looked out onto the street. The room, in its dim luminance, was behind. The room was a BOX that contained both myself and the dim luminance. The window, night, street, window; for how long had I been in the window, staring out, in the narrow, dark, dim light? For how long had I been…? It seemed like always. Always me in the window, always the street below. It hadn’t always been night, no, I knew that much. The room was a BOX containing dim luminance and… The little roaches scurried past. They went about their roach-business in the dim-dark, in the narrow, dark, near-light. They crawled into my coffee cup and died.
I could feel I was dissipating. I was like a cloud. It… just like a cloud in the sunny summer sky: fluffy, puffed, growing thinner, then away. Maybe I should have worried about this. But what was left to worry? A narrow shell? A distant, dim dark? Some spark? No, a hollow. What was there, without a…? Hollow.
Once, there’d been a person. He was named Finch. Had I been Finch? No, no… that wasn’t right. A finch was a kind of bird. It was the sort of bird that flew stupid into windows and died. Boom! Broken necks were common to the death among the finch-birds. So, I thought, was a heroin overdose, but that didn’t make any sense. But if that were not the case, if I were not the finch-bird-person, then who was the person? I mean… Because I was fairly certain – certain enough, certain as anything – that the bird-person had not been me. No. No. I was here in the window, in the window in the night, all night, I was in the window and I had not smashed against it and died.
I had not overdosed on heroin and died. That was him. He was gone now, off into the flutter-land, not here, not me. I… I was here.
Wait… what would I actually know, and would I know, if or when I’d…?
The thing in the window was an empty thing. Right. The thing in the window was an…
No, not empty: the thing outside the window, quick and cold, the thing in the sky-air. That thing that was there. I would call it. I would call it: Mosquito. That’s it, there you go. Because who do you know? You know Mosquito. No, wait, you don’t. But the thing is… Thing. Is. Mosquito does know you.
And there was this. There were, I mean, there were these things too. One, two… three things; three new things, and he… he… (who again?) he…
Well, shit, he’d just left these things on the table here, that guy, whoever, the little table near beside where I, where… I…
Look. Listen.
Here: these things he. He. He just left this, this… these things here: this… agh! A gun? Bang: a gun. A badge, policeman’s badge, all shiny; sort of shiny. And a hat hat hat, what a fucked-up hat, what am I supposed to do with a fucked-up, crumpled hat, just left like that? Left here, like that, hold onto it, I guess? I guess…?
Okay fine.
BOOK THREE
VALLEY OF THE SNAKE
ONE
The World
[Late Spring, 2006]
“Dalanzadgad,” the woman in the window seat beside me said, looking out through the oval port at the approach of flat terrain which rose gradually up to meet us. Her finger pressed bent against the glass and left a greasy smear. She turned to me and smiled: all but toothless, utterly mad. I smiled back as agreeably as I could. Small mountains scrubbed past in the distance, as they had all throughout the flight since Ulaanbaatar. The small, Russian-built, propeller aircraft in whose metal hull we sat shivered and moaned around us. We bounced in air currents, shook, then were steady again. I looked out the window past her. There it was: the city. A grid-work of small shapes in the dirt – ribbons of gray, packed earth roads and miniature geometries, hints of their former primary colors now drained skull-dry. Some were boxy, some of them were round. The round ones I recognized as ghers – portable, silken houses that could be rolled up and slung on the back of a camel or a truck. Here, however, they seemed to be permanent, with fences around them and roads running past. My traveling companion for this flight – a round woman, her round eyes pits of dark, unsteady mania, maybe a dozen years my senior, maybe more; it was hard to tell – said it again, “Dalanzadgad,” pressing her finger on the glass, “where everything is the same.” She spoke now in English, overloud, for my benefit.
“Yes, the same,” I agreed, nodding, nodding. Only a moment later did I realize that I didn’t know what she was talking about. “The same as what?” I asked.
“As everything else!” As she cackled at her own joke, her eyes rolled toward me, sparkling, flashing, and her whole fat body shook. The engines screamed, the wheels, with a groaning, descended from the belly of the plane, while we in the metal tube reconnected, by degrees, with the flat earth. Here was Dalanzadgad, entry point to the Gobi, where everything – everything – was the same, and we had arrived.
As the airplane taxied down the runway toward the squat, blue cinderblock building of the airport terminal, the woman launched into a steady stream of talk. She may have been singing, albeit without any tune. By now she’d abandoned – or perhaps exhausted her knowledge of – English, and spoke instead a rollicking babble of the harsh yet rolling Mongolian tongue I’d grown accustomed to hearing, though as yet could understand nothing of. Every so often, she looked to me. It was almost as if she were speaking to me, though this was not the case. She spoke into the fuddled air. I smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, like a pleasant if dimwitted bird. This made no difference to her. I could’ve simply ignored the woman; she did not need me. My audience was a provisional convenience. It had been this way for most of the flight. So I was taken by surprise when she turned again to me and said, switching once more to English, “I’m going to tell you a secret!”
I lagged a bit in catching on, and was slow in asking, “What secret? Why?”
“Aha! Why? Yes, why. Listen to what I tell you: I am a very important person.” Her eyes suddenly widened in shock, as if I’d said something to challenge her, which I hadn’t. She continued. “You don’t believe me? You don’t know who you sit next to. Listen: I own a gold mine. Yes! It’s a very big gold mine, and I employ hundreds and hundreds of people. The mines produce much gold, and I am very rich, and everybody for miles around depends on me for their work. I own everything! Ha!” This time her eyes narrowed with suspicion, again in response to something else I hadn’t said. “But you don’t believe me.” She poked me hard in the chest, then said again, “You don’t believe me.” She folded her thick arms over her own thick chest and nodded, saying, “Someday, you will.”
I didn’t know what to tell her, so I said, “Okay.”
This only made her go harrumph with contempt.
By now, we’d rolled to a stop. The engines were cut and the ground crew approached the airplane, while from inside, the hatchway was opened by one of the pilots and a stairway unfolded out from the fuselage. We stood and gathered our luggage from the netting overhead, and before long, were poking our heads out and blinking into the sunlight and dry air of the Gobi. I stood at the top of the steps and searched the horizon, over the low, flat buildings.
The flat earth, the distant mountains… wind swept up the dust off the runway and threw it by handfuls into my face. I shut my eyes against it. When the assault had finished, I faced what I thought might be west: he would be out there. The sheriff. Sort of. The sort-of sheriff. He would be somewhere. I’d followed him this far – and this was pretty far. I’d started at one side of the planet, and this was the other side. There was no point in stopping now, though I’d all but forgotten why I’d begun this pursuit. Not that I’d ever known what, exactly, I’d hoped to accomplish… there was simply nowhere else left for me to go now, and nothing left to do. If anybody held the key to my lost friend Mosquito, it was him. He’d seen it too. He’d seen it. I’d only beheld it; a thing of the mind, a voice, an image, a… feeling. But the sheriff had faced it, had faced into it. He’d been changed by it. He’d been made new.
The money was gone. I’d had money, enough to get me here, but now it was all spent or stolen. My passport had
been stolen also – or confiscated, or whatever that had been. In any event, I didn’t have it. But I did have the magic, and that would be as good, at least for travel within the country. It seemed to work okay. The badge, the shiny badge; the hat, crumpled and unrecoverable, yet functional, and highly so, as a hat; and the, the… the gun! Yes! The gun!
Somebody shoved me from behind with their heavy, green duffel bag (so much, almost exactly like mine) and made a sound like “dooshk,” that could have meant either move your ass or I’m sorry, or nothing at all. In any event, it nearly sent me toppling down the metal staircase. I recovered my balance and moved quickly then, chasing after the rest of the disembarked crowd, who all moved gaggle-like. I fell in behind the woman I’d shared my row with. She all but waddled in a long, rolling gait, swinging each leg out stiffly with each step, as if these limbs had come loose at the hips. She carried no baggage – she had nothing but what was on her person, and that was nothing, and I realized then that she was still talking, that she had been all along; that the rolling sound I’d been hearing had been her voice and not the wind, though I wasn’t near enough to listen – to be expected to listen – nor was anybody else. It didn’t matter. I caught up with her in a moment and adjusted my stride to walk beside her, as if, of course, I’d been there all along. She turned her head, said something to me and laughed. I didn’t know what was funny. I smiled back as her eyes met mine, but then abruptly she wasn’t laughing anymore. She squinted. Her forehead gathered in wrinkles of distrust. She peered at me with deep, deep suspicion. I continued to smile and nod, imbecilic, as if that were all that I could do. In fact, it was.
The… the gun! I felt its weight at my side: my hand went to it, loose in the loose holster around my waist. I’d carried it with me on the plane like that. Smile.
Shiny, shiny badge, pinned to my chest. Smile, nod, smile.
Hat: my hands went to my hat. But for being tied to my head, it should’ve flown off in the wind.
Okay, listen: I’d got my soul back. That was the good news. Perhaps my traveling companion didn’t understand this. Perhaps there was no reason she would. But it had gone missing; it had wandered off, my bleary soul, to somewhere dark and somewhere that was nowhere and it had carried on in some half-dead half-life on its own without me, forgetting me, forgetting itself, and, but… stumbling forward under the sun and blue-splotched sky, battered, as we were, by the wind, the wind throwing up sand by the fistfuls at our eyes – that was the good news. And. But. OFFICER… no, Sheriff Friendly had lost me again, true, and that was frustrating if inevitable. In-ev-it-able. Everywhere, always, he was a step away, another step further on, leaving these word-crumbs behind for me to pick up and follow. Always, it seemed, everywhere, I would be struggling to catch up. But whatever that was for, that, that – at least I had my soul again, and I could be clear enough in that I was here, that I was this person right here, and not dead and not somewhere else or someone else, and not somehow too abstract to even recognize myself as myself or remember anything.
“…because I saw its tail. It was only that one time, but that was enough.” I looked up. This was my companion talking. Her voice had resolved itself, or I had come finally close enough to hear, and realized in that moment that what she spoke was English. She seemed to snap back between the languages – the Mongol and my own tongue, perhaps also others – if not at will, exactly, then at the sudden slippage of linguistic gears. Though if she were talking now to me, specifically, it was anybody’s guess. She looked at me, it was true. Her black hair flapped about her face. Her gap-tooth shone. Her suspicion had dropped, for the moment, judging by the grinning slack of her face. She said, “It was hollow inside – no bones, cartilage, no meat – made, I’m certain, out of papier-mâché! But it snapped and it coiled, the same as a real tail. That was all of it I saw. It was enough, though; it was enough. The tail dragged off into the darkness of the round, dark tunnel and it was gone, beyond the arc-lights, beyond the radius. We’d blasted the tunnel, of course, using our bombs. These were my men. Nobody was going to take away my men. Maybe that was what had called it to us, blowing up those bombs underground. Maybe that was also why it left us. And you? You could’ve pulled a truck up beside it. If you were the driver, you could’ve parked the truck right there, right up beside it – always a job for the right man – always a place for the police, right? Right up beside us, right there in our pocket! Hah! And its width was no greater than that of the tip. A truck, the size of… No! Listen! – and you – its circumference… everywhere… center nowhere found…”
At first, when I’d got my soul back, this basic thing of being just and only me was everything. It was amazing – that I could at least, at last, be that: I/me. Being, at all, was sort of a big deal.
After only a short while, though, I swear, I’d started to take it for granted again. I could see this happening, by degrees. It’s awfully hard not to do this, really, and the reasons are sort of obvious. Even if they’re not obvious, they sort of are: you’re there, and then you’re still there… and after a time, however long, of still just being there, where it is that you are, doing what it is that you’re doing, you sort of accept that it’s how it is. Not the sort of thing a person would think much about until they haven’t got it anymore, for whatever reason. And when that happens, things get complicated. Things get weird. It gets, for instance, awfully hard to find yourself, even if you are right there.
“Noblesse oblige, you understand,” the woman said. “It’s in the blood. Naturally. I’m of high birth, and must always consider those of lower station. Yet what the family has given, the blood cannot give. What the blood has taken, the family cannot get back. It is our destiny, in that case, to remove objects, one by one, out from the path of progress, and we are nothing if we are not progressive. Listen…” She stopped. I stopped. She faced me, and her face changed. She said, “I am an angel, sent here to Earth. I am going to help… the entire human race!” Her face changed again; the lines of concern again furrowed topside, and her eyes were squinty with distrust. “You… you don’t believe me! Bah! I haven’t got time for this.” And she stormed ahead – or did as close to storming as her loose-jointed legs would have it.
We’d stepped around the short, squat airport office: a blue, cinderblock building big enough to hold a ticket desk, nothing else. In front, a gravel lot was filled with cars, Land Rovers, Jeeps, and Russian four-wheelers. I hung back from the woman, walking slowly, putting distance between us; it was clear she didn’t trust me, not anymore. I couldn’t blame her, though. There was little basis for trust between us in the first place. She owned a gold mine. She was an angel. She was a very important person. I… well, I was the law, or at least its representative, or at least appeared a little as if I were so – and if maybe not in these dry lands, then maybe somewhere, because the horizon was wide, and the Dalanzadgad skyline low. Everything was the same. She’d told me that, and it was true. Yet appearances were not to be trusted, and far less, words between strangers.
Some twenty paces ahead of me, the woman had come near the street. From somewhere just out of sight, a black Lincoln Town Car swept in and braked to a sudden halt just in front of her. Two men in dark suits stepped calmly yet swiftly out of the back from either side and closed in on her. She held her arms out in surprise, like a bird, once she saw what was happening. She didn’t try to run. She didn’t even try to fly away; neither with bird wings nor the wings of an angel. She only stood, her arms held open, as if to embrace the shock of sudden violence that descended on her as the two men, both in glasses not quite dark enough to entirely hide their eyes, grabbed her by the arms, one upon each, as if she’d held them out for just that reason – though it had never been her intention, I would’ve put money on it – and shoved her bodily toward the idling car. And as she went hurling at the open door, she looked back, her eyes met mine, and she smiled.
My legs had stopped moving entirely. I stood right there on spot. I was a tree, a telephone pole, a
concrete bird.
One of her abductors followed her into the backseat of the car. The other shut the door behind them and circled around back to the other side. That was when he noticed me. He’d seen her look to someone; he’d seen her smile, as if all of us were in on the joke, and now he saw at whom. He paused for a moment to assess what this was, this… thing: I/me, the American, wavering in the sun, concrete bird or telephone pole; wavering, though not from the heat: the hat (badly damaged), the badge (shiny, shiny), the gun (loose, hipshot, holster-hung) – he decided it was none of his concern, or at least no worthy threat. He got calmly into the car, which then, in a spray of gravel and dust, sped into horizonless distance.
•
If anyone else from the crowded lot, fellow travelers disembarked or those who’d come to pick them up, had noticed what just happened, they didn’t let it show. All went about their business as though it were normal. Maybe this sort of thing was normal: just another abduction by the secret police, or whomever. Perhaps everyone knew to leave well enough alone. I didn’t. I walked out to the street-side where the car had been, my rucksack flung over one shoulder, and watched the receding trail of dust. They hadn’t gone in toward the city – they’d driven off in the opposite direction, into the Gobi, following a straight, rutted dirt road, and I stared after them for several minutes until the car, now a tiny speck in the distance, wavering in latticed striations of true heat-shimmer, wobbled first off to the right, then veered angrily to the left, then circled around and around aimlessly (daesil? widdershins? – fuck, I didn’t know) until it chose a proper direction and straightened, then vanished behind an outcropping of gray-brown mountainous rock.
I set off in that same direction on foot. My business wasn’t in Dalanzadgad either. It was out there, in the west (that was west, right?), where the sky-hung sun fell in slow degrees towards setting, dipping toward, eventually into, the far edge, into the Valley of the Snake.
