What's worrying him? he wondered.
He wasn't sure whether he'd spoken since the drive started, or even how long they'd been on the road.
He knew he could check his watch but somehow it didn't seem important. They'd left the city behind and now everything was the same, sand and more sand and the hot sun and the glare, Bletchley shifting gears as they drove more deeply into the desert, Bletchley's good eye flickering toward him every so often.
Ever east, my child, thought Joe. Stop look and listen. Mingle.
Ought to mingle and say something, he thought, and was immediately surprised to hear his own voice asking Bletchley a question.
Do you have a family?
Bletchley shifted gears.
What do you mean? A wife and children?
Yes.
No, I don't. I've never been married. I was too young before we went to war the last time, and after that there were those years spent getting patched up. By then I was too accustomed to living alone to be of much use to anyone.
You weren't though.
Weren't what?
Too old to get married.
When?
After you'd been patched up. When was that, a couple of years after the last war? You must have still been in your early twenties.
Chronologically, but in other ways I didn't feel that young. Nothing very chronological about life, after all, it doesn't always follow a logical sequence the way we like to pretend. Some people stop growing in their early twenties. Just stop, say that's enough for me, and get off and sit down beside the road for the duration.
Ever east, my child, thought Joe. And when you finally reach. .
Besides, continued Bletchley, I still had hopes. I was trying to have a glass eye put in and when they couldn't do it in one place, I'd try another. Paris, Johannesburg, Zurich, I kept making the rounds. The last operation wasn't that long ago.
Oh.
Just three years ago, in fact. They'd done all the rebuilding they could by then, and the glass bead stuck in at an angle was the result.
The glass bead game, thought Joe. That has to be one of the worst.
So I finally gave it up and accepted the fact that I'd have to be a monster.
Children don't understand things, said Joe. You can't expect them to.
No that's true, you can't. But what about mature men and women? What can you expect from them?
Joe gazed at the desert. The glare off the sand hurt his eyes and he pressed them shut. Bletchley was shifting gears, not waiting for an answer to his question because there was no answer.
On the mesa in Arizona there had been an old woman with a badly deformed face, born that way, so severely deformed she had been hidden away since she was a baby. Throughout her entire life she had never been known to leave the little room where she had come into the world. Many nights Joe had sat up with her in her little room, listening to her sing in the most beautiful voice he had ever heard, a startling voice filled with wonder for all the things she had never seen or known. She sang for hours and when she ended they would sit together in silence for a time, then the old woman would turn her back and Joe would get up and leave without a word. To have said anything would have been cruel beyond belief, for her singing was all she had of the world, her song the flight of her soul.
Hungry? asked Bletchley. I brought some things. I thought we might stop for a bite along the way.
***
They sat on the sand, squeezed into the shade beside the small desert car, Joe with his back against one of the warm tires. Bletchley opened some tins of marmalade and biscuits. There was also a thermos and two battered cups.
Joe took a few bites and all the food tasted exactly the same, a harsh metallic flavor. He fumbled with a cup and finally let Bletchley fill it for him. The liquid, cold tea or whatever it was, also had a harsh metallic flavor. Dully he watched Bletchley spreading marmalade on a biscuit, an action that seemed to go on forever.
What's the matter? asked Bletchley.
I was going to ask you the same thing. You seem to be moving very slowly today.
Bletchley put his hand on Joe's forehead.
You're running a bad fever, he said. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the change in the water. It happens fairly frequently.
Time and change and the water, thought Joe. Not exactly the trouble you'd expect to find out here where there is no water, but it's best never to rely on appearances. And sand and more sand and utter desolation, just as Liffy said. So it's not all green hillsides on the journey to the East, ah no. There are wastelands to cross, my child, before you sleep. Wastelands, bright and deep. .
***
They were driving again, Bletchley shifting gears, the glare off the sand intense. And for Joe, sinking more deeply into his fever, the sky and the desert had lost whatever boundaries they might once have had.
I've known men who've followed the desert, Bletchley was saying, adventurers who see it as a primeval force, like the sea. But there are dangers in the desert that a seagoing man doesn't have to face. The sea, with its overall evenness, tends to moderate men by suggesting an essential balance to all things. But the desert, with its harsh extremes, can have just the opposite effect by making things seem clearer than they are, so you always have to beware the temptation of idealism. God knows human affairs are murky enough, but out here there's the danger of forgetting that, because everything is so stark, so much itself.
Appears to be, that is.
Bletchley shifted gears. They left the paved road for a rougher track.
The fact is, he continued, we're apt to romanticize things we don't understand, what we were talking about earlier. Take that old expression, to follow the desert. It gives an impression of adventure and makes one sound like a wanderer, but the bedouin aren't really wanderers. They always have their home with them, their tent, and their country is always with them, the desert. An outsider, a northern European, will view it differently. But that's because a northern European is accustomed to seeing his home and his country in a different light. Less of it.
Joe nodded. Puffs of smoke had appeared on the horizon, followed by a spatter of dull muffled booms.
In another moment they had rounded a dune and Joe could make out a battery of British howitzers parked off in the wastes, raising great clouds of sand as they methodically fired into the desert. The front lines, he knew, were many miles away.
What are they doing?
Bletchley turned his head to get his eye on the battery.
Shelling the desert, he yelled above the booming salvos
The empty desert?
Looks that way.
But why?
Who knows, maybe they thought they saw the enemy. It's impossible of course, but they might have thought they saw something.
Just thought they did? wondered Joe. Well why not. It could be a case of right you are if you think you are, the desert as you like it.
But as they drove along above the camouflaged battery, Joe sensed there was something even more out of place than the vast stretches of barren desert separating the howitzers from the nearest German units.
He concentrated as best he could and at last it came to him.
They're facing east, he shouted. Isn't that the wrong way for them to be fighting the war? The Germans are to the west.
Bletchley snorted, yelled.
The wrong way? But how can there be a right way to slaughter people? And anyway, mirages are common enough in the desert. I don't have to tell you that.