A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
And then he opened his eyes. A textured vertical line split the sky from the earth like a god. He could barely make out the dim blue on his right from the white and gray on his left, but the taste of sand in his mouth reminded him he was still alive. He didn't need a reason to get up and see that barren wasteland dotted with raw shrubs and rocks. The mountains in the distance, the clouds staining the sky, the sweat beads on every inch of his skin, and only one question in his head:
"What the fuck am I doing here?"
Unsteady, dehydrated, adrenalinic, that was the first of a wave of questions that rolled over like an avalanche sweeping through a forest:
But... what's... what's my name? Who am I? Am I dead? Who am I? Where am I? How old am I? In purgatory? Who am I? Nebraska? Arizona? Am I afraid? Should I be afraid? Where am I? Why am I here? Kaliningrad? Thirty years? Forty? What year is it? Where am I? What do I look like? Am I hungry? Or thirsty? Am I asleep? Am I dreaming? Am I hallucinating? Am I sedated? In a hospital? Is there anyone? In a coma? East Germany? Is this real? Can I get out of here? What if it's not real? Am I alive? Do I have a family? In Heaven? Is there no one here? Married? Where am I? Divorced? With children? Am I dreaming? Am I being punished? Where am I? Am I gonna die here?
The panic broke into a sudden gag reflex that made him fall to his knees and bring up everything in his guts. As he wiped the last threads of saliva with the back of his sleeve, an ever-clearer claim pushed its way out of that profusion of thoughts:
I'm fucked up... I don't know why, but if I weren't... I wouldn't be here.
He straightened his back, placed his hands on his knees, and tilted himself back on his heels. He took a deep breath, feeling a solid stitch as he puffed up his chest, which deflated immediately in pain. A broken rib. At least one. He remained motionless, freezing all vital functions he could override. Then he resumed breathing cautiously, gauging carefully the moment the pain flared up, and adjusted his breathing pattern. After a few seconds, he felt the blood flow wash through him, and the foreign body that seemed borrowed slowly became familiar as he clumsily loosened up.
The world regained the vivid colors and shaded reliefs his retinas had been denying him until that moment, and he realized an array of assorted medical products surrounded him: syringes, catheters, broken bottles, bandages, an overturned stretcher, a paddle from a defibrillator, and even the defibrillator itself, all scattered across the ground. Before he could even frame the view to find himself in the picture, a raw squawk chimed behind his back. He turned around by instinct, wielding an imaginary weapon. A taciturn vulture was gawking at him as it pierced its claws through the sockets of its forty-year-old lunch, dressed in a paramedic uniform, resting in a pool of his own blood. A few yards beyond that, crashed against a boulder, was what had once been an ambulance, a defeated motley jumble in a rubber smudge pool, charred charcoal black like a fiendish accent in the terrible immensity. Doors wide open, maimed and contorted, unable to be closed again. The front part buckled and twisted against the rock. More syringes, catheters, bandages, and broken bottles scattered around and topping the scene off. No news on the other paddle.
The vulture cawed its disturbing shriek, which caused in him such horror that he could not help but try to go kick its skull. The bird then cursed him a third time and soared away. It perched on a nearby branch and gazed back at him in silence. It wanted him to leave. Or die. He got the message. He stood still, staring at the wind. Then he looked down at the body. He picked up some gauze and surgical scissors lying on the ground and cut through the man's clothes. A hole in his right side. Possibly a bullet. He looked around him, wondering whether he should feel like he was in danger. If there had been an actual gunfight, the body would have some more holes spread across it. Or maybe the shooter had left him for dead and walked away. Maybe not. Maybe the shot had come from afar. He looked back at the wound. Less than half an inch. He supposed a high caliber gun would have left a bigger mark.
He remained crouched, staring at the wound.
There was no shooter anymore.
He reached down and searched the man's uniform pockets. His attempt to find any identification proved futile. He glanced around at the rubble. No ID card. A gun some yards away. He lurched for it and clutched at it. Black steel. Wooden handle. He grabbed it with both hands and aimed at the bird. He stood, aiming for a few seconds. Then he tucked it in the back of his jeans and kept scouting the area.
He staggered towards the ambulance—what remained of it. With each step, he noticed an ever more vivid odor of raw barbecue. As he glanced through the shattered window, his eyes confirmed what his mind dared not suspect: the former driver was now just as human as the ambulance was an ambulance. A juicy piece of baked meat in a giant sand frying pan.
He felt like an actor with no script among the props of a finished scene. Why had an ambulance been driving through a desert? Why had he been in the ambulance? Why had it crashed? Why was he the only survivor? He crouched in silence and searched for new thoughts, feeling the raw sand in his fingertips, the lines they carved on it. He stepped back a few yards and looked at the path cut by the vehicle. Although faint, he could make the tire tracks out, heading straight toward the horizon, zigzagging suddenly and dying with the upturned wheels. Whatever disturbed the driver had taken place right before the zig-zag, so he would have to sidestep the last part of the tracks; given that this was a wasteland, there was no need to travel in anything but a completely straight line, dodging occasional obstacles.
He scrambled up the boulder to make out more of the tracks, which danced in the heat haze as they scribbled towards the horizon until they merged with the sky. He drew the gun and used it as a ruler, overlapping the barrel with the tracks. As he suspected, the two lines it drew made a square and a triangle. He kept the gun in his right hand and used his left hand to shade his eyes and further dead reckon the vista when he noticed a sudden twinge in his face. He searched with his fingertips and found the relief of a set of stitches that formed a miniaturized railway track beginning about two finger-widths over his left eyebrow, disappearing where his eye socket began, reappearing immediately below it and cutting a straight line past his nose, crossing his lips from top to bottom, and ending approximately one finger-width underneath the left side of his lower lip. No matter how softly he touched that fresh wound, he felt a pain like a nail driving through his face to the back of his palate.
That explained his amnesia, and the ambulance: he was the patient.
If that assumption was correct, the assumption that the ambulance was driving in a straight line made even more sense, since it would have been in a hurry to take its patient to the hospital. He plotted the imaginary line the tire tracks would follow right up to the opposite horizon and stared in that direction. There, in the distance, he thought he saw the ground end, giving way to what seemed to be a gap. He looked at the gun. It was better to keep it out for the time being. He recomposed the parts of that man in the desert, the man that was him, a man with no name, no face, no past, no future, only the present as a certainty, and climbed down again to firm soil with the sole intention of picking up the trail to wherever his original journey was supposed to take him. He looked at the driver for the last time.
Guess I'll have to trust you on this one, he said.
Or he thought. He wasn't sure.
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