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 up 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 the left, but the taste of sand in his mouth reminded him he was still alive. He didn't need any reason to get up and see before him that barren wasteland, dotted with raw shrubs and rocks. The mounts 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 which made him fall to his knees and drop everything his guts kept. As he wiped the last threads of saliva with the back of the 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 up his back, placed his hands on his knees and tilted himself 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 jadedly resumed breathing, carefully gauging the moment in which the pain acted up, and assumed that breathing pattern. After a few seconds, he felt the blood flow wash through him, and that foreign body which 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, allowing him to find out he was surrounded by an array of assorted medical products scattered across the ground; syringes, catheters, broken bottles, bandages, an overturned stretcher, a paddle from a defibrillator, and even the defibrillator itself. Before he could even begin to frame the view to find himself within 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 on the sockets of its forty-year-old lunch, dressed in a paramedic uniform, resting on a pool of his own blood. A few yards beyond, crashed against a boulder, from what had once been an ambulance, barely withstood a defeated motley jumble on a rubber smudge pool, charred until becoming 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 halfway topping the scene off. No news on the other paddle. The vulture cawed back 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 sored away as he stood looking at it. It perched on a nearby branch and silently gazed back. It wanted him to leave. Or to die too. He got the message. He stood still, staring at the wind. Then he looked down at the man. He took from the floor some gauze and surgical scissors and cut through the cloth. A hole on the right side. Possibly a bullet. He looked around him, wondering whether he should feel in danger. If there had been an actual gunfight, that body would have some more holes spread around it. Or maybe the shooter had left him for dead and walked away. Maybe not. Maybe it had been from afar. He looked back at the wound. Less than half an inch. He supposed a high caliber would have left a bigger mark. He remained crouched, staring at the wound. There was no shooter. He reached down and searched in the uniform pockets. Any attempt to find an identification proved futile. He glanced around at the rubble. No ID card. A gun some yards away. He lurched for it and clutched it. Black steel. Wooden handle. He grabbed it with both hands and aimed for the bird. He stood aiming for a few seconds. Then he tucked it in the back of his jeans and kept scouting the place.
He staggered towards the ambulance. Whatever 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 to suspect; the former driver was now just as human as the ambulance was an ambulance. A juicy piece of baked meat, in the midmost of a giant frying sand pan.
He felt like an actor with no script among the props of a finished scene; why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Why would he be in it? Why did it crash? Why did just he come through? 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 away and looked back at the path cut by the vehicle. Although timid, the tire tracks let themselves be made out, being born straight at the horizon, suddenly zig-zagging almost at the end of the path, to finally die under the wheels above. It was easy to think that whatever had disturbed the driver had taken place right before the zig-zag, so he would have to sidestep the last part of the stretch; given that it was being transited through a wasteland, there was no need not to travel in a completely straight line, except to dodge occasional obstacles.
He scrambled up the boulder in order to gain yards against the horizon and make out more stretch 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 seemed drawn with a square and a triangle. He kept the gun in his right hand and used his left hand to shade his eyes to further dead reckon the vista, when he suddenly noticed a twinge in his face. He searched with his fingertips and found the relief of a set of stitches that seemed to form a miniaturized railway track, which began about two fingers over the left eyebrow, disappearing as the eye socket began. It then immediately reappeared down in a straight line cutting close the fledging nasal fold, crossing the lips from top to bottom, and ended approximately one finger underneath the left side of the lower lip. No matter how softly he touched that fresh wound, pain came through like a nail right up to the rear of his palate. That gave an explanation to his amnesia, and the ambulance; he was the patient. If that assumption was correct, the fact that the ambulance was driving in a straight line still made more sense, as it was in a hurry to take the patient to the hospital. He mentally stroked 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 ending up, 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, with no name, with no face, with no past, with no future, with the present as the only certainty, and went down again to firm soil with the sole intention to pick up the path from whatever that journey was meant to be. He looked at the driver for the last time.
"Guess I'll have to trust you on this one" he said. Or perhaps he thought. He wasn't sure.
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