The Boy

The Sun

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
                                -Shelley

The First Night

“What strikes me about this desert,” said the boy to the burning tree, “is how, when everything grows still and the wind dies – at precisely that moment – I feel that, somewhere, in silence, a river flows. There, in the stillness, is a strange and deep sense of an undying, boundless movement – almost as though I am a single note in the middle of a symphony, and at that precise moment when every thing ceases to move, the conductor has pointed his baton at me, and I am held inside this instrument that is my body, and if it does not sound its note, the symphony will never finish, and the composer will never hear his masterpiece and the conductor points and points and points. When all around is quiet, I become afraid of even being alive. And yet only in that moment of fear have I ever begun to wake up.
“The conductor pointed today, and it was so painful, I screamed. There was no one to hear me and no reason that I shouldn't just fade into the quiet, but I screamed. No reason, but still my voice cracked and I began to understand what water is for the first time in my life. I pray to the God of my father for water, and in this night all that finds me is earth and fire – a burning tree – and still I sit here, left with a whisper like death. It stands to reason I ought to spare my voice. Then again, who knows when I might find water.”
The boy didn't have a compass, and he didn't have a telescope. Without water, he had walked beneath the blistered desert sun. Without hope, he was alone and caged on all sides by the same, endless, dune-haunted horizon. Nevertheless he walked.
That day, the boy had spent his time in thought as he stared at the sky and sand before him, haunted by constant glimpses of a tree with burning branches in the dark whisps of one stormcloud or another. Every time he supposed himself suddenly able to discern the tree-cloud's shadow, he quickly became convinced that he was only confusing it with a distant dune. It seemed to him as though this cloud must forever lie beyond his horizon and out of the grasp of any he would ever see.
That first night, a tree weeping fire haunted the boy's dreams.

The Second Night

“It's this darkness” said the boy to the burning tree. “I don't even know how I exist in this darkness. When the sun grows out of the ground each day, I know that something begins and I know that it must continue and I know that I must flee my shadow and chase that light until the darkness I bear from my shoulders goes under and dies and is reborn before me. Then I begin to chase it, and to flee from the ever-dying light until the dark, dark arms reaching forward, always forward, embrace everything beyond me in their despair. But when rusty dusk lets her fingers slip from the apple of the earth, I am lost. How can there be a difference between day and night?
“You, at least, fight it” he said to the burning tree. “You, at least, are a sun by night and a bright shadow-maker by day. Why am I always in shadow? Why can't I hide from it, at least for a time? You even now bring me light and darkness – sunlight and my own, haunting shadow. But how can I fight my own shadow? It's my own ghost that follows and falls and jumps before me. I do not understand why I'm so haunted by myself.
“Oh,” sighed the boy, “what I wouldn't give for a Prometheus. They taught me about Prometheus in school, did you know?
“Only I don't understand why you had to come to me. In the Greek Myths, at least, man makes his own fire. He's taught by the gods, but he learns, and he makes his own fire. Why do you come to me in my night? I don't even know why I'm talking to you. It's ridiculous, really – as silly as Melville's chapter on the whiteness of the whale. It's as though I'm walking in circles about myself only so that you can watch me walk in circles around myself. By day, you live up there beside the sun – always a step ahead of me. By night, it's as though I'm the one up in the clouds, and always circling like a vulture. But what around? I am no compass.”
What the boy said, of course, was not strictly true. His world was not as simple as his thought made it appear. Of course, he fully believed that, in one sense or another, he had spent and would continue to spend his desert nights, as he phrased it, “in the clouds;” however even if one were to take his words in a strictly metaphorical sense, and I assure you that to do so would be to ignore a large part of what the boy thought himself to mean, to accept the metaphor as true would require complete ignorance regarding the great and long periods of silence that punctuated the boy's sentences. Indeed, the boy would even, though he most assuredly never admitted it and may perhaps even have remained unaware of it to his dying day, fall asleep mid-sentence only to wake up some time later and continue his thought where he had left off. Whether or not this sleep, interspersed as it must have been with dreams, affected the boy's words or thoughts, it is impossible to say.
Further, the boy's walk was not nearly as simple as he supposed. He thought, due solely to the fact that every time he looked up at the sky he saw the sun in front of him, that he must always be walking east and toward the sun. The fact of the matter was, however, that the moment he would begin to lower his head, often to the point of staring only at his shoes as he walked, his path would become quite erratic, often veering to the south, at times to the north, so it would even appear to a vulture's eye as the wave-like writhings of a snake. The remarkable ability of his to make this mistaken assumption was due to a rather peculiar habit of never looking up unless he had decided to look up. In the often long and drawn-out time between the decision and the action, his course would consistently veer itself westward to face the rising sun without his ever being aware of his having veered at all.
It is entirely possible that the boy's blindness to the way of his desert meanderings was due solely to his interest and concern for precisely why he was wandering in the desert. This seems a rather likely reason, especially as it explains his strange and amicable reaction to being visited nightly by the burning tree. This concern for what the boy had once mutteringly called “the face behind the veil” might also serve to explain the path by which the boy had found himself spending these past days and nights in what he referred to as “The Great American Desert.”
The boy had run away from Church. His parents, a pair of liberally-minded Unitarian Universalists, had long seen something like this coming, and had agreed between themselves not only that it was necessary for their son to rebel at some point but also that the best thing they could do for him would be to let him rebel. They had, perhaps unreasonably, no fears for his survival or safety in Southern California. They had faith that, be it days, months, or even years, he would return to them, and so it was that there were no missing-child reports matching the boy's description. He had owed his survival, so far, to dumpster-diving as he had headed west, as best he could tell, deliberately avoiding what roads he could and always refusing to fall asleep on the inside of any city. This had been difficult but so, said the boy to himself, was he.
And he was.
On the second day, the boy had wandered across a well, stranded as everything was in the desert by sand, and only after he had sated his thirst had he noticed an old man whose face was wrinkled like a child's, with a smooth, balded head and nicotine-stained skin sitting there, next to the well, obviously awake, but with his eyes closed, and mumbling the same incoherent sort of un-word every several seconds.
Heat was a foregone conclusion in all deserts, and this realization made the boy wince immediately after he had attempted to engage the monk in conversation by mentioning that precise foregone conclusion. The monk's only reply had been to look up at him, and it was only then that the boy had realized that the monk was blind. Being careful not to make the same mistake twice, the boy decidedly failed to mention it.
The boy, asking how long the monk had been sitting there, had been met only with dark laughter aged and cracked. The boy had once heard from a classmate that the Buddha had discovered the great secret of life – that life was an endless circle of suffering whose center was everywhere and whose circumference was nowhere, and that life could be avoided by closing one's eyes an ears and mouth, and stepping into the darkness of oneself. The boy had asked the monk if he had achieved enlightenment, but this time he was met only with black, sand-smoothed silence.
“That man will never smile” the boy had said to himself, walking east, away from the well and its water.
That night, the boy's silent sleep held no dreams.

The Third Night

“They taught me in middle-school that less than twenty centuries ago, they burned people at the stake for believing in strange things, and that they weren't as enlightened as we are today. But in high-school, a graduate told me that they really burned those people for not believing in the strangest thing of all.
“But you burn for everyone, don't you?” he said, smiling enigmatically at the flames that spiraled upward from the soil.
“Why waste words?” asked the snake as it continually coiled and uncoiled itself beside the boy and the warmth of the fire.
“Can there really be waste in the desert?” countered the boy.
“And, of course, you never do know when you might find water” the snake sighed. “But that was a fluke – an incident, and even indecent.” The snake chuckled softly to itself. “Come now,” it added more cautiously, “you know that monk had four arms and two legs. It seems to me at least a simple matter of hallucination – a bit of Buddhist monk here, a bit of Hindu deity there – all just a compound mixed of simples from encyclopedias and quirky dreams. And if you can even go so far as muddling out a holy motley from the East, how hard could it be to fabricate a well, water, and an answer to thirst?” It suddenly occurred to the boy how the snake gradually uncoiled itself as it spoke, yet magically seemed to end every sentence in such a way that you would suddenly realize, if you were paying attention, that its head had become a black point, peaking a stack of layered, concentric circles, and spouting forth a red, forked tongue.
The boy laughed. “Little wonder they once called you 'adder.' Your calculus is, I admit, quite impressive.” The boy paused, and the smile dropped from his lips. “Though I should warn you. It's nothing new, what you're saying. I've had nothing to do these past few days but walk and think, and I've already thought of that. But if the monk was an apparition, my friend, then perhaps you can help me with another small matter.”
“If only I knew French,” sighed the snake, “I might be able to answer such compliments gracefully. Why can't I know French? You'd think that you would be able to at least imagine my knowing it, even if you don't actually know it yourself. I mean, even gibberish would do just so long as you thought it was French.”
The boy stifled a delighted giggle. “Oh, you're quick, too! So you didn't actually hope that I wouldn't notice what a 'motley from the East' a talking snake is? Or is it really more that you noticed that I'd noticed, and so you gave up the game?”
“Once more! What a language the French have, really! I'll never forgive you for this, you know.”
“I never asked for your forgiveness.” The boy's face had begun to look suddenly grave as he turned and stared once more at the fire-tree. “It's like it's born, lives, and dies every night” he added, all laughter gone from his voice.
“Well,” said the snake, “if we've dismissed with the pleasantries, I do have a serious matter or two or three left in me.”
The boy seemed to be deliberately not paying attention.
“Why don't we start with civilization? You could head West, preach the desert to the cities until you've gathered enough men and women, and return. There are wells enough. There's bound to be agave around here somewhere. Regardless, all you need is generation. After all, there's something about the desert; that scream; the black cold; the ache of hunger. Just think – fermented agave nectar as good as communion wine, free hippie love, and every night riddling out the mysteries of existence about a book-fed fire. It's a new name for life. That's what you've found – a new word by which to name yourself.”
“You really do like words very much, don't you? Perhaps even at the expense of the reality beneath them. As far as I can tell, new name or not, it's still life, and still, when it's over, vultures pick at my bones. Regardless, you're deluding yourself. This isn't any 'new word' at all. It's just walking like a man with thoughts forever spiraling down until they fall out of his mouth just to be gotten rid of.” The boy slowly enunciated his last six words as he cast a scornful, sideward glance at the snake.
“It's only an idea. There's no need to get angry” said the snake, deferentially. “But alright. If not a civilization, the least you can do is make yourself at home. All this pointless walking, and for what? All you've found is more desert – not the most useful thing, sand. When you were back home, you drank books like a camel drinks water, and now all you do is roam and roar like a lion. What's the use? Why can't you just teach yourself how to live in one place here instead of all this senseless wandering? Look – it doesn't take much to survive with shelter, agave, and a little bit of brains. Just find some shade, silly boy, and these Eastern motleys, at least, will leave you in peace.”
“Whether I walk in the light or I wither in shade, my friend, I nevertheless live, and I nevertheless die. And the more I walk, the more that is enough for me. You will not change that, for all your incandescent thoughts.”
“I understand” said the snake, in a tone that was at once condescending and comforting. “If you must walk, you must walk. But I will make you a deal, my friend. I can give you a path that's above and beyond any desert. Your thoughts may fall upon you now, but I can help you to walk against their tide. Replace your horizon with clouds. The vultures will never pick at your bones. If you will give your body to my teeth and to the tincture of my blood, then, my friend, I will make your soul to soar and your thoughts to sing like the breath of angels. If you will not make home for others or yourself, then I can, at least, take you home at last; to where you have always belonged. This is all that I ask. Will you be married to the sky? Will you rise to meet its rain – at last?”
The boy's scowl had deepened, and his forehead was wrinkled with thought, and sweat fell from his temples, drop by drop, and hissed as it hit the parched earth beneath the tree.
“I am no Phoenix. I am this world's, and not my own.” As he spoke, the fire from the tree ate away his hair, his clothes, and he began to see the world as if for the first time in his life. With one step, he took the burning tree in his arms and pressed his chest and his heart to its trunk.
In the precise moment that the boy joined the tree in his embrace, he saw, caught in the crook of its burning branches, the smiling, paternal face of a man in the dark of the new moon. And as the boy's thoughts began to disappear, his thin, blood-dried lips cracked open to reveal a grin, and in his last moment, the sound that broke forth from his body was that of simple laughter – sounding and resounding like a river of joy rushing out from the mouth of a child.
The next day was rain. And all that remained of three days in the desert were vultures, concentric and circling around the ashes of what once was the body of a boy.