OLDUVAI
HIPPOCAMPUS OLDUVAI
He was crossing the
Today they had moved relatively fast
over the hard ground. It was a bumpy, nauseating ride under a sky painfully
bright as welding metal. Maybe the
driver felt a gamy wobble in a wheel, or heard a knot in the engine’s throat;
the truck stopped and the passengers who had reason to expect that nothing
quickly solved would have justified a halt, climbed down to stretch their legs
or find a smidgen of shade beneath the chassis.
Past a certain point of discomfort relief becomes an irritant. It requires too much ingenuity to enjoy. He would have preferred to sit passively and
stew, but he did not have the energy to resist the surge of the crowd. Once on the ground he filled the anomie of
sudden elbowroom by deciding to take a piss; the jiggling had stimulated his
kidneys although he could not gather enough spit to keep his tongue from
sticking to the roof of his mouth.
Modesty, solemnly and gracefully kept in a Moslem country, pushed him
away from the truck about thirty steps.
Not just the transubstantiation of his tongue into frozen clangor would
suggest an ice shelf in this part of the desert. Not a blade or tussock grew anywhere. The ground was scoured of any rock larger
than an egg, as if a glacier blanketed it, and the bleaching glare had the
needling saltiness of fierce cold.
Pissing is generally a solipsistic act, cozy and smug, a bit
megalomaniac. Here there was no shrub to
curtain the indulgence. The sun
immediately peeled the stain. A yellow lens held together by surface tension
would lie briefly on the hard pan, but rapidly the sun shaved it down to a
sheer shadow.
He had adopted the practice of kneeling to
pee while in public as he had seen other men doing, to honor Mohammad they had
explained to him. When he was alone he
reverted to habit. In this case the custom saved him. No sooner had he begun folding down to his
knees then he blacked out, which would have given him a nasty bump had he
fallen from the globe straddling colonial stance. As it was, he fell from his knees and awoke
when his hands hit the ground, a split second, but his amnesia was complete.
He
awoke knowing absolutely nothing and facing complete emptiness. Had he fainted at the threshold of
A second may have passed before he
remembered who he was, and even that count may have been lengthened by the
absurdity of Jed Canto, American, being transported in the blink of an eye to
the middle of the Sahara. The blink of
an eye, no more, and pursed in that thimble of black-accommodated more
impossibly than a genie-and pouring out the spout of his re-opened lids, came
loci of attributes able to catalyze out of nowhere pebble and kneecap and along
with them a geometry of association having his identity as its axioms: an
expanding four dimensional topology containing the route to this place not
starting merely in a deduced Agadez, but with flickering entrances from
childhood books starring the big cats.
This cascade of ever fuller distillations from a dizzying vanishing
point explains why he could think for an instant yet sheer alloyed from
emptiness that he had landed on an asteroid, and why this absurd reflex of
reason would leave the film of an idea over the more completed Sahara: other
equally possible portals had only been passed over only by chance when he
exited the natal void.
He returned to the truck on wobbly feet, hung-over
from the blackout. Apparently, the driver had meant this to be a briefer stop
than it was turning out to be, and since everyone else was already aboard, Jed
was the truant. He was being hustled along by the lorry boy with those part
majordomo and part hysterical gestures he has found typical of Arabs, put on
display as an example of European opulence.
That night they slept on the hard pan near
the lorry. A rumor of scorpions
percolating through the language barrier-something about a circle of rope
around the sleeping bag-was disregarded because of fatigue, but a sense of
pre-creation lingered, of a clock or compass whose points were the zodiac
superimposed on what he saw. Laying on the bare rock he watched a crescent moon
rise-a silver ark-and on the shore of the cold reaches of space where his
travels had brought him, he looked through an open eye into the pitiless beauty
of a heaven etching destiny.
A little before noon. Two hours later they would be in Tamanarasset. The truck halts. The driver points to what looks like a goat
trail meandering off into a narrow cut in a bare rock cliff. He wonders if he is being exiled because of
yesterday, but goes anyway, made docile by fatigue and still apologetic for
straying and ready to make amends. Less
drastically, maybe he is being made the butt of desert sarcasm: Here is a place
equal to his grand deference when pissing.
The path leads to a trickling spring
painting the palest green around it.
There is a small rectangle of stones nearby, the remains of a rude
dwelling that would have had space only to cache a hermit. From which direction had the hermit
arrived? By foot, from Tamanarasset, the
passage here would have only taken a few days, but the compulsion was towards
incalculable space, and the genius stretches back for years and leagues. Long ago, the
What
eye looks through mirages and sees water in the desert? A tally of this eye would include the
integral sight of a dream and the dilated vision when falling into injury or
love at first sight. Such an eye dredged
in clarity may see the ocean which was once here. The hermit sets out on its
endless fathoms with nothing more than sandals.
After
walking the ocean he may need to settle where he can hear its combers without
interference from camel’s braying or bargaining in the market. Possibly, with their advantage of
foreknowledge, a flock of migrating birds may alight here to dip their bills in
the ribbon of glisten coming from the rocks, and he might recognize someone among
them, maybe even himself, given such an eye, and feel that here by the spring
the shell between this world left high and dry and the gleaming ocean on the
other side is already fractured.
Jed drank from the spring. It was so thin
he was forced to sip it as gingerly as hot tea. On the way back he realized he was following
the steps of the old ascetic. This goat
trail marked where he had avoided this very stone and where he would have gone
around the shoulder of the cliff, all preserved exactly on this ocean bottom, a
text written as he waded through his double vision. So, the driver and lorry boy had seen
him. The same voyagers who gave space in
every sentence to the editing hand of Fate that may blink at seventy years and
without crowding fit eternity in a tear drop, these voyagers had seen the
fissure into which Jed had fallen and the fissure in his eye when he returned.
