“They have buried me, killed me a thousand times to fit in a thousand tombs with no names.”
“Who?” cried Ahmed.
“The dreamers that do not dream, the dreamers that do not do. The doubters who kill the dream. The walking dead who see birdless skies and shipless seas and horseless highways with not a carriage, not a wheel. Those who bed early and rise late and sleep at noon and eat figs and drink wine and cherish only flesh. They, oh, they, they, them!”
Ahmed stared down, blinking wildly, trying to find what was described.
“But they’re not doing anything! They’re all asleep.”
“Their silence stops my ears.” 1 hey re snoring!
“They breathe in but not out. They take air and give nothing! I die of it!”
And Ahmed saw the cause:
The cities slept and the dust buried the sleepers, who were as dust, and the dream died in them, the bones of dreams with no flesh, with no men to man them, no pilots to steer and guide them, no flesh for the bones of the Oblivion Machines. They were ghost kites, ruins in the sky destined to tatter and snow into dinosaur graves and elephant tombyards.
No man stirred.
“How can they hurt you, Gonn? They’re not even moving.”
“They play at Statues and would make me one!’
“They don’t know you exist!”
“Truth! And their not knowing further diminishes me. Witness, I lose substance, flesh, and weight. I melt with disbelief.”
And as Ahmed watched, this, too, was true.
Great Gonn, as if burned in a sluice of invisible flame, flailed out arms and legs that were dwindling to shank and marrow. Where vast balcony chest was, now ribs emerged. His chin sharpened to a sword, his nose a razor, his lips a waxen grin over death’s-head teeth.
“Oh, great Gonn, stop!” Ahmed cried.
“I am a tombyard god. Only living flesh and blood and human dream can help. I, a whale, am now carp and minnowed fingerling. Who will save me?”
“Gonn, oh, Gonn:” The boy writhed to find the words. “Me!”
“You!?” shouted Gonn. “Have you learned the first lesson well?”
“Yes!” yelled Ahmed.
At which Gonn’s face suffused with pinks and crimson fires and his diminishment ceased and his bones, his ribs, sank back in refurbished skin.
“How dare you!”
“Because I’m the only one awake! Do you see anyone else? I’m up here, Gonn, but they don’t know I am here, either! Oh, blast them, Gonn, and burn the fools!”
And Gonn gained further weight. His lips hid his skull’s teeth. His sunken eyes blossomed in fuller lids.
“Would you be a god; then, like Gonn, and forgotten and maybe dead before your time?”
“Why not?”
“Courageous boy.”
“No, only mad!”
“Madness is courage! Your madness is a meal. Fatten me!”
The boy seized Gonn’s hand. Gonn, a balloon, ascended.
Ahmed stared at his hand gripped in the fist of this sick deity made well.
“It works!”
“Aye!” laughed Gonn. “Prayer builds a mighty fortress upon air!”
“I never pray!”
“You do1. He who speaks tomorrows prays!”
Ahmed scanned the sullen dunes and sunken rums.
” Peach me more, Gonn. How to fly higher and longer and swifter so—”
“So?”
“I can fly over these ruins and towns and shout.”
“To waken the dead?”
“Some must hear, mustn’t they? Some will wake, yes? If I keep on shouting.”
“A lifetime of shouting? To tell them what?”
“Look here. How high. How great. What joy. You, too!”
“The simplest songs are best. You have sung one. So now you are Gonn the insignificant on his way to being son of Gonn, and a mighty god.”
“I just want the world to be mighty]”
“Unselfishness; that earns you another thousand years in Paradise.”
“Not Paradise] I just want people out of bed. And I want to be with you, Gonn, forever!”
“Nol For now that he has a son, Gonn must partake of Time. Take me back to where you wept me awake. Bury me. This time with happy tears.”
“Oh, Gonn, don’t be dead!”
“Ah,” laughed the god. “I will not die! In the moment of your birth, child, did you not know that my symbol was stamped on your brow?”
“Here?” Ahmed touched his brow.
“My immense thumbprint, which hides in the maze of your secret self. What you can bel That thumbprint is all your future life, dream, and doing if you act. But in the hour of birth, that great thumbprint vanished, sank down into your brow to hide unseen—”
“Unless?”
“You seek a lifetime’s days for it, in mirrors where you drink deeply to find the you that is truly you, and be a being born into this earth to become.”
“And what if I do not find my brow’s thumbprint?”
“You need but look each day to find a line; at dark, another line; until, full grown, you gaze into your glass and all is there. Is your brow large enough to share space? Is there room for my body, arms, legs, head, and clamorous mouth in that skull? Permission to hide?”
“Oh, Gonn.” The boy laughed. “Welcome!”
“Then hide me so I’ll live, child, behind your eyes. Quick, a few last lessons. So!”
And hand in hand through clouds and sky, Gonn shadowed the tombyard cities and avenues of dust, and gave the boy more flesh and mightier if unseen wings, and Ahmed cried down at the vanished places.
“I’ll be back! I won’t let you rest!”
And fly they did until, exhausted, they simmered down to the volcanic pit where Gonn had ascended to shadow the heavens.
“The sun sets. Before it does, you will find your caravan, child.”
“But I am lost!”
“Once, yes, some hours ago. But fly high enough, look long, and there it will be.”
“I can’t leave you here,” the boy wailed.
“Come back many years from now when, as a man, you have invented air and swum in clouds and moved the world from place to place in your own Oblivion Machine. And dig and find your great Gonn’s golden face, as it was just at dawn this day, and fix it as medallion to your lightning device and we shall fly again. Done, Ahmed?”
“Done!”
“Now weep to wet the sand and lubricate my way.”
And Ahmed loosed his final tears, which did just that.
And Gonn, with a mighty laugh and winking both his golden eyes, sank down and down like a massive spike driven by a last blow of light, until his own wet eyes were gone and then his brow and then his windblown hair and the sand settled, blowing with the breeze of dusk.
Ahmed wiped his eyes, searching the sky.
“I’ve forgotten already.”
‘No,” came the whisper from the sand. “First left.”
Ahmed lifted his left arm.
“Now right.”
Ahmed lifted his right arm.
“Now left and right, right and left, up, down, down, up, left, right. Sol Ah1.”
And Ahmed flew.
And, exhaling, Ahmed thrust himself across a desert span to be gentled down where the caravan lay asleep with beasts and where his father, awake and grieving for his lost son, plunged from his tent to stumble in surprise upon that very son and not know him in the dark and, knowing him, fall to his knees and crush Ahmed with weeping and praise God who is the One God.
“Son, oh, my son, where have you been?”
“I flew, Father. See. Above to the north. Those clouds. I lived there a while. There were a thousand ships around me in the air that crossed the moon. I was lost, but he led the way across the night.”
“He?”
“He whose feet drink of the earth and whose head knows the sky. And you cannot see him, Father, for he is hidden.” Ahmed touched his brow. “Do you not see the smallest print of a great thumb?”
Ahmed’s father looked deep into his son’s face and saw there the sky and the night and the far traveling.
“Praise Allah,” he said.
“Oh, Father,” said Ahmed. “If one night I should again fall from the caravan, might I land on a marble floor?”
“Marble?” The father shut his eyes and thought. “In a northern place where scholars live and where teachers profess and professors teach? Teach what?”
“The air, Father, the winds, and, perhaps, the stars.”
The father gazed into his son’s face. “It must be so.”
And among the sleeping camels in his tent Ahmed was laid to rest and during the time before dawn called out in his sleep.
“Gonn?”
“Yes?” A whisper.
“Are you still with me?”
“Always and forever, boy. As long as you loom my shadows between your ears. Paint pictures on the inner sides of sight so never to be alone. Speak, and I manifest. Whisper, and I shuttle and weave. Call, and I am the companion of light. See!”
And within his brow, indeed, Ahmed beheld heaven swarmed with circling craft shaped of gold leaf and silver foil and silks the color of the moon.
“Oh, Gonn,” whispered the boy.
“Say not my name. I have another now!” Fading. “Ahmed. Call me that.”
“Ahmed?!”
Silence. A dawn wind.
Sleep. And in his sleep, Ahmed saw himself grown and in a great craft with rotary blades whose rushing fans stirred the hot sands away and away until he stared down to see:
There in the sand a face of beaten gold, with the eyes of a god and the smile of a reborn child.
And the medallion was plucked from the sand and placed as emblem on his craft, and Ahmed flew away to the future.
As the sand, emptied of treasure, cooled, and the future arrived.
The End
Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
