“When I fail, you must win.
“When I falter, you must race.
“When I sleep, you must fix your eyes on the stars to learn their journeys. At dawn the stars will have left their celestial roads, their Kings highways as faint breaths printed in the air. Before the dawn erases it, you must print it in your mind to show the way!”
“Can I do that?”
“And win a world and change men’s destinies in clouds and flight? Yes] If you fly high you cannot escape Time, but you can pace it, and in the pacing, finish as its keeper.”
“Still … I have never flown!”
“There was a day when you never lived. Would you have hid forever in your mother’s womb?”
“Ah, no!”
“Well, then, before Time buries us, hear this—”
Gonn stretched his arms to the sky.
“I am the god of all the heavens and airs and winds that ever blew the earth since Time began, and all the dreams of men at night who wanted flight but lost their wings. So! I will summon windship ghost craft, to sail down Time to cross your sight and joy your heart! Now lo! hark, look, to truly see1.”
Gonn in that instant exploded up till his nostrils plumed the clouds to crack the sky:
“Let all the kite machines arise, let storms of time erupt to summon ghosts. Hear me, all you north winds that haunt the lands. All the gales that rise from the south to fire summer around the globe. Hear me, east and west winds, full of flimsy skeletons of impossible machines Hear!”
Then Gonn the Magnificent gestured like a player of harps.
“Ahmed, who knows the future but does not know he knows! Run, jump, fly!”
And Ahmed ran, jumped, and then . . .
“I fly!” gasped Ahmed.
“Indeed!” Gonn wove his fingers to pull the strings of this puppet. “But if we go north we miss what lies south. If we go west we shun the mysteries of the east. Only if we fly in all directions can we find what we seek. Wings, boy. Wings!”
Ahmed spun about, crazed and alarmed. “But if we fly in all directions, how can we arrive somewhere? Are there no maps?”
“Only those written in your blood.”
“But,” cried Ahmed, “oh, god of confusions, where are we going?”
” Yestermorrow! ” Yestermorrow!?”
“That which once was and that which will be1. Locked in your heart, remembrances of lost time. Ghosts buried in the past. Ghosts buried to be awakened, in the future.”
“In what year?” cried Ahmed, upside down.
“Any year; there are no such things as years. Men made up the names of years to keep track. Ask not the year.”
“What day, then, and what hour?” Ahmed felt the words spun from his mouth.
“Clocks are machines that pretend at Time. There is only the rising and the setting of the sun. There are no such things as weeks and months and hours. Say only that we move in space.”
“Toward what once was? Toward what one day will be?”
“Clever boy. That is all that Time truly is. The past we try to recall, or the future which is just as impossible and unseen!”
“We move both ways, then?”
“Truly, that is our motion. Witness!” And Ahmed looked down and saw: A vast sea of sand which lay shore upon shore upon shore, surfing itself, falling to lay itself out in shuffles of white, flourishes of stone and rock and pebble that had gone through the granary of the sea a million years ago, before the sea pulled back to leave this endless desert and men to stake their tents and drive their camels and raise the walls of cities.
But now it was all stillness, a great blanket of silent dunes from which, here or there, soft liftings of sandbanks appeared as if, beneath the surface, the limbs and torsos of buried gods were hid.
And here and there, half seen, the covered, the masked face of an ancient worshipper of the turning stars and the passing wind and the unseen years sifting like the merest veil of sandstorm, here a nose about to break through, there a chin waiting to tremble, a mouth to speak, though choked with dust. And beneath yet another dune, a blunt forehead, a brow lost in its own past, gone lunatic with silence.
“Oh,” gasped Ahmed, flailing his arms in panic to swim the air, “what is buried here? A city long dead or a city as yet unbirthed, waiting to be born?”
“Both!”
“How can that be?” Ahmed sank, then rose, exclaiming, “How so?”
“One is lost memory. The second is remembered forward beyond tomorrow. We call that ‘dream.’ To recall rebuilds the past. To imagine builds the future. One city fits within the other. Life sits in death.
Our futures rise from the grave. Two cities. One unreal because it has vanished. The other unreal because it rests in that living grave between a sleeper’s ears. The past exists because it once was real. The future exists because we need it to be real. Look upon this phantom scene.
Tell me, what is lost, what is yet to be found? What left behind, what far ahead? Are they not twins? Is not the future a mirror reflecting the past, aching to be born? Be silent. Witness. Then speak!”
Ahmed hovered and stared, stared and blinked, scanned this wasteland lit by sunrise a thousand years past or sunset in a calendar as yet unprinted. And then he said:
“I feel . . . many men, many women lost under the sand, coming and going with their sons and daughters. I feel great stones. Is this a graveyard, then, with catacombs and tombs along this dry sea? Catacombs, tombs, mummies, death!” shouted Ahmed, wrapped in ice, drowning in cold winds. “Death!”
“No!” cried Gonn, reaching out to seize the boy. “Cellars. Library cellars to be filled with thoughts, fancies, impossible futures brought to life!”
“Death!” Ahmed cried, and then, looking to the far countries of sand where untouchable beasts walked away and away from him, “Father!”
“Do not cry out to fathers,” said Gonn. “Cry out to yourself to be saved.”
“Death!” And Ahmed, in one mournful cry, fell.
And as he fell, swift, diminished, exhaled, punctured like a vast aerial balloon, so fell Gonn, moaning, into the dunes. Where he struck like a mighty meteor, only a crater of dust showed his ruin, even as Ahmed, similarly fallen, did not sink to dust but sprawled, stunned, to pick himself up under an empty sky and an empty procession of moonlit dunes.
“Gonn!” he said.
No answer.
“Gonn!” he bleated.
Silence.
The merest suction of sand dimpled in, murmuring, near his cheek.
“See,” said a hollow whisper. “What?” said the lost voice. “You …” More sand sank upon itself. “. . . have done?” Fading: “I die. You . . . have . . . killed . . . me.”
“No!” Ahmed clutched at the funneling hole in the dune. “Come back, Gonn. I need you!”
“No …” came the voice beneath the sand, “not me …”
Ahmed dug frantically and groped and dug only sand and air.
“Gonn. Where are you? Rise.”
“Your father weighs me down.”
“He can’t. He mustn’t!”
“He is your past. You must be your future. Put him away. Remove him from my limbs, my heart, my head!”
“How, how??!!” Ahmed dug deeper to nothing and more nothing.
“Avert your gaze. Look not to horizons with blood of your heart and beasts that stay fastened to the earth. Dance upon my grave.”
“What?”
“Dance. No more tears or I am flooded as well as brought to slaughter. I am almost gone. Dance.”
And wiping his eyes and looking not at the horizon where his to-be-forgotten father lived, Ahmed danced.
And beneath the cold dune long after midnight he felt a stir, a mighty commotion as if a god’s heart had started up.
And he danced more.
“Sing …” said the mighty whisper.
And Ahmed not only danced to kick away the dust, but sang as if from the highest minaret in a great land, and the large heart hidden grew larger and banged itself to life.
And if for an instant Ahmed lifted his gaze to search the land, prepared to cry out, then the huge heart slackened and the sand froze, so that he fixed his gaze only on his feet, which moved and leaped and pummeled the hidden heart as he shouted wild words of love to exhume, to revive, to prolong, to rouse.
“YesV came the mighty whisper, the buried voice. “Ah, yes, son of my heart and life, he who dances to waken fire and know no limits to the sky or earth. Dance, sing, dance, there!”
And with this last explosion, the sands were riven and, like a mountain, a storm, a celebratory rocket, Gonn was rebirthed, soared, and lifted Ahmed with him.
Among the clouds, both laughed and Ahmed’s tears were tears of relief and joy, and so accepted, as Gonn hurled questions:
“Does the caravan exist?”
“No,” said Ahmed.
“Do you see it anywhere?”
“No,” replied Ahmed.
“And the men of that long march?”
“Are gone,” Ahmed responded.
“And someone’s father with them?”
“And that father with them.”
“Which means this present cannot blind you to the future? Good,” said this great mouth in this great head on this great body. “See morel Be a proper gravedigger. Let your soul instruct your heart, let your heart speak to your tongue. Exhale. Celebrate. Shout!”
Ahmed inhaled deeply of the high sweet clear-water air.
“Let go!” said the huge mouth, almost engulfing him.
Ahmed exploded out all of that incredible air.
And the dry sea below, the ocean tide of shore on shore of dunes shouldering dunes, shivered.
” Again!”
Ahmed exhaled.
And the sand swarmed
