traces

July 2019

The boy’s footsteps were not worth much. Perhaps, if he’d captured a particularly moving photograph, or an expertly done plaster cast had been forged from the tracks he left, they would have achieved something for him — but as he looked back on the imprints that were pressed into the infinitely stretching desert, they were nothing. Still, he trudged onwards, projecting a grim compound of saliva and sand onto the ground at lackadaisical intervals — whenever a mouthful of grit became simply too much to have to put up with alongside everything else. If this had been a movie, he thought, his mind still clinging on to the imaginative scraps he’d had to salvage from the wreckage that was life before this — if this had been a movie, there would have been a powerful shot of the sun as it beat down onto his back to juxtapose the rest of his sweating body. As he had realised long ago, however, his rhythmic heartbeat was the soundtrack to no film — this was real life, whatever that was supposed to mean. There was truth in some of his absurd wonderings, though; for one thing, the sun was definitely there, dragging out the remaining few ounces of strength he could find in his exhausted limbs. Every inconsequential step he took seemed to further aggravate the burning rays that were currently in the process of grilling the boy in the same fashion as one might blowtorch a crème brûlée. He sighed again, wiping another few gallons of sweat from his brow. Resisting the urge to turn back, he grimaced against the hot wind that teased him with its freedom and pushed forwards, the sand crawling agonisingly in between his toes, rubbing against every inch of blistered skin that the boy dared to sacrifice to the desert. In the blinding delirium that emerged somewhere between thirst and exhaustion, he was close to laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all — the multitudinous miles of untraversable desert and, in the middle of everything, a barely-clothed boy with no supplies but for a can of expired mung beans and an empty canteen jogging against his spine with the backpack they were carried in. He was nothing. Nothing but the tales he had been fed about the rattlesnakes that haunted these dunes, and bandits that wouldn’t hesitate to take either your money nor your life on these deleterious tracks. Not entirely to his surprise, the boy hadn’t seen any trace of such ruffians, and the only rattling noise to be heard in the stifling quietude was the wheeze of his dog-tired breaths as they crawled in and out of his chest.

It wouldn’t be long until fatigue pushed him down into the sand — he considered himself at least smart enough to recognise that — but the only thought on the boy’s incoherent mind was that he had to get as far away from those slums — ‘home’, allegedly, as he could before, in short, he… could not. It was with weary acceptance that he tramped through the blazing heat, therefore, no longer paying heed to the bleeding blisters on the heels of his feet. Having lived right on the borders of Egypt, he realised with a peculiar pang of what could have been curiosity that he could well have crossed over into Libya now. Kilometres ago, there had been the sporadic trace of humanity, but now he bathed in the solidarity of his own breaths that split the silence. Still, he walked, paying little attention to the skin that peeled off of his forearms, to the searing sensation that attacked the back of his exposed neck, to the churning apprehension that followed him in this threateningly empty world. Vaguely, the boy registered the pain that begged him to turn back, choosing instead to drum his stiff fingers on the empty canteen that had found its way into his palm. The rhythmic tapping distracted him well enough, and with newfound indifference, he pressed on.

Nobody had ever really talked about the sheer endlessness of these dunes. He was reminded in passing of the stories he’d heard whispered past twilight, of sailors left on the open ocean, their only company the irrational fears that accompanied the haunting inability to see anything but blue, blue, blue. Stories, he reminded himself, the two syllables barely cutting through the distracting ringing he’d not even registered before. At this point, his limbs were next to numb — testing it, the boy pinched the sensitive skin of his left wrist and was perhaps more disturbed by the lack of feeling than he would have been by the pain itself. With a shocking burst of emotion, the boy stopped abruptly, only now latching on to the fact that, through everything, he was scared. Isolated, hysteric, haunted, angry, terrified. Now that they’d started, the flurrying chain of worries that washed through his drifting mind would not stop, drawing him away from the distracted state of consciousness he’d been surviving on and instead back into reality, the one place he’d staggered all the way out here to escape. Now he felt the excruciating sting of sand rubbed repeatedly into raw skin, the pulsating agony of every inch of charred skin that the sun had touched, the racing desperation of the heartbeat that had been begging for hours now for him to stop. That, he decided, was the reason for the way he tripped on the way to taking another step. That, he realised, was the explanation for him buckling entirely and finding a mouthful of sand and darkness waiting for him a split second later. That, he later discovered, was his breaking point.

In another world, he might have screamed. Whether out of pain, helplessness, or fear, the boy never quite found out. The fact was, though, he did not scream. It was far too late for that. There he lay, his eyes, hair, clothes, mouth, so full of sand that it was as if he’d been deliberately buried for a practical joke. This was what he had come to do — at the point of setting out onto the desert, he himself hadn’t been all too sure but now every single piece of his fragmented jigsaw was coming together. Lying in a pool of resurfacing memories, the boy watched them all flit by like a foreign film, too quick to hold onto, too slow to ignore. All of the silence, the struggle, the doubt, the unashamed fury at the appalling conditions he’d had to put up with his entire life were here, summed up into a single string of words that were almost too frenzied to get a hold on. The boy grasped hold of his makeshift rucksack, pulling out the can of beans, pressing his calloused hands against the warm metal. His mother would have cooked these in a curry for him tonight. He knew because he had seen just this morning her ration of coconut milk hidden behind the curtain that separated their ‘rooms’. If the boy had not been entirely deprived of all bodily fluid to the point that even his sweating had stopped, he knew he would be crying. Finally, the incoherent of words straightened themselves into a single, comprehensible sentence that ricocheted through his mind as he whispered an inaudible prayer that his mother would at least relish her double servings of coconut curry tonight.

I have come here to die.