Vicesimus Quartus Gradus

Marsden’s boot pressed into the ground with that satisfying crunnch again, then again, his ears relishing the noise. The sole of his boot molded the cracked dirt with the softness of a thumb rubbed over a lover’s wrist, leaving a signature of love imprinted upon the wilderness by which he was so smitten. The wilderness enveloped him, its comfort tight and warm around his soul.

The cacti, denouncing the desert’s parching heat with their stores of moisture, surrounded him. In his periphery they became silhouettes of the friends he once knew. They disappeared behind him as he walked.

The sand, cracked dirt, parchment drawn upon by the beasts and vipers and birds, gripped Marsden’s attention as he soaked in every detail. His dreams rendered the minutest detail of the landscape with picturesque accuracy. A detail which escaped even his waking mind, but which to his unconscious self seemed the most important fact of all Creation. By morning, the detail is wiped away by the silent wind of vanity, the destroyer of record in both dream and reality.

Marsden wondered when he, too, would be removed from record by the wind, falling to the sand, collapsing into dust.

Later, later. The answer is always later.

Presently, a pain seethes on his forearm, tearing attention away from the wilderness. Marsden turns to a deep gash on his arm, shabbily wrapped in bloody bandages. He pauses his step and places the pad of his finger and thumb on either side of the fleshy crevice. Pinching, he hears the gentle gsh of flesh reuniting, of blood being roused from pools within his skin. A thin streak of bright red appears on the darkened bandage above the gash. The pain subsides, and he carries on, scanning the desert for a suitable place to rest for a moment.

He settles upon a slight dune to rewrap the gash. Then he takes a sip of whiskey.

Overcome by temptation, he turns his head back along his path, scanning the horizon. There is nothing to see but the edge of where he has been and where he can not reach. Yes, the town is out of sight, put behind him. But for all his love of the wilderness, he cannot kill the adulterous longing in his heart for return. He cannot put the dusty, pale boards out of mind; the packed, trodden roads out of mind; the jesting and birthing and rearing and gossip and betrayal and joy and hatred and murder and music and drinking and preaching and cursing. Those things which seem to evade the erasing wind, stored away from the weathering wilderness. But surely they, too, must succumb and meet their end?

Even the cactus dries up in the scorching sun.

A bead of sweat rolls over his dirty face, trudging over his pores and flecks of sand, parading through his hairs, desperate to touch down on the sand and burst into mist. 

Marsden tears his eyes away from the horizon, stands, rightens himself, and hears that satisfying crunnch again, moving away from that temple of man and into the heart of the Earth.

How far? He wonders, How far must I go to be apart from them?

And in the back of his mind, the itch to turn whispers, always swaying like a sign in a breeze, always lurking like a spirit in a graveyard, coaxing one more glance toward the town, on threat that this time, when he glances, he will take a step toward it.

How far? He wonders, How far must I go to be apart from myself?

When I go until I cannot go any longer, will I at last collapse into dust, and will then my stricken pile be dismissed from corporation by the first gust? Will I be but as hundreds of flecks, irrevocably separated, yet unified, still clinging to legacy, my legacy, the murderer, the healer, the griever, the rejoicer, the regretful, the contented, the proud, the generous, the wise and the fool? Apart, but bound together by the air which roused my selves from their former companionship and cast out to all the world? Apart, but bound together by origin; I will cease to be, and be yet.

Then, I will still be when I am no more? Will the wind return and wipe my remains away, completing my destruction? Surely, they are doomed to be washed away by the wind, and so I have left them. But here, too, the wind snatches the sand, and the animals lay their corpses down, and they become dust.

I thought that here, surrounded by the death of life, that I could wrestle the wind into submission? That apart from them, nature would preserve me? 

No, I am them, and they are me, and here, too, the wind will reach me, and I have no better chance of wrestling it away when comes that fateful morn.

Marsden spat through a frown, scorning the wilderness as he might a challenging duelist. 

Whether I wrestle here, or I wrestle there, the match is lost.

With the sun rising overhead, Marsden continued trudging through the desert, away from them and toward his end, contemplating these and other matters.