Come one come all they say, here at the desert market. Step right up they say. Hats spin while faces contort in the exclamation and receipt of rhetoric. Spectators allow themselves to be influenced to varying degrees. Homeopathic remedies are described in the least accurate of terms in conjunction with the fleeting memory of those plants which have become ingredients which have become an amalgamation of all that our species dares to hope and fear.
Potatoes are meticulously compared to other potatoes by vendor and customer alike. Sproutings are viewed with suspicion. Hourglasses are stacked and packed, but have fallen out of favor in the years since the clock’s invention, that machine which has been called the first automatic device with practical purposes whose invention and whose invention alone is responsible for developing the notion of temporal progression as production. Perhaps it is for this reason that the hourglasses remain untouched, the relocation of their contents left unexamined in all their granular detail. In any case, an hourglass is entirely made of sand (given the glass, given the sand), and can be reused indefinitely through inversion. Batteries are unneeded and hands do not lose their rhythm and the ticking and tocking in silent rooms which so oppress my children during their latest exam are absent too.
Of course, our eyes betray us yet again. Many hourglasses house not sand at all, but materials such as powdered marble or pulverized eggshell. The origin of the hourglass remains unknown. In any case, here, at the market, jam and homemade ketchup are sold in mason jars. Emptied mason jars are returned to this or that booth for the sake of this or that fifteen percent discount on the next filled mason jar. The vat of returned jars is looked at with disdain by those unfamiliar with this cycle. The tangled mass (a whiter shade of pale, of course) is looked at with disdain by myself, by myself.
My companion is growing weary of my silence. I remind him of his agency: there are 7.6 billion humans currently alive. He reminds me of mine: I chose to come. All proceeds according to a script preceding time.
I leave the market and walk amongst the dunes across the road. This was once an enormous lake and more recently a picturesque stream. Now, dunes. They remind me of a movie I once watched as a graduate student which reminds me of a book I once read as a college student which reminds me of a story I once read in middle school as a prepubescent, an unfilmable story whose protagonist undergoes a profound physical transformation as a consequence of his unfailing timidity in the face of an overbearing family whose burdensome expectations have driven the protagonist to a small success as an unassuming clerk as well as a much more substantial ruin as a result of the profound physical transformation which not only invalidates the protagonist’s ability to execute his clerical duties (in doing so expunging the trifling success of career), but, in fact, renders the protagonist physically crippled (according to the rather convenient criteria those of our species use to judge such things) and incapable (or unwilling) to leave his room for the scant remaining days of the protagonist’s scant years of life.
The movie was a modest commercial success and a much more robust critical triumph (according to the hacks and nonsense we use to judge such things). The book on which the movie was based secured the reputation of its Japanese author in this country. The story on which this author’s oeuvre was built continues to be taught at our nation’s schools, continues to be misunderstood by teacher and student alike in my classroom as well as the classrooms of my peers. Perhaps due to cultural platitudes regarding loyalty and respect and community, perhaps because of our collective reluctance to self-critique in the face of complicity.
The dunes are not to be mistaken as beautiful. It ought go without saying that anything worth scrutinizing reveals itself as grotesquerie. We grow bored by the hills of grass upon which our houses rest, and the hilly streets upon which the unibody frame of our cars scrape and grind during our daily commute to and from work. Work! We touch different quadrants of a specific screen (glass, sand) in a particular order, every morning, while leaving one door for another, in walking down the cement path on our hill of grass, a path not quite up to Joseph Campbell’s standards, though there is a resonance in recognizing that this path inevitably leads to a machine which claims the lives of thirty-seven thousand people per year, in this country. The most courageous act we undertake is in getting behind the wheel of an automobile, insurance agents will tell you, though if they neglect to mention that getting out of bed requires the greatest fortitude of all, I will not.
Nature’s agnosticism towards our species is never so breathtaking as in the desert. I know not how to express my gratitude at being seen in this way, except by staring into the eternal stare of annihilation: a dune becomes an expanse of flatness becomes a valley becomes a dune once more, the raw material of time tracked through the conduit of the perpetual present. We are addicted to lying: to each other, to ourselves. Hips and dunes alone do not lie. Not unlike our sentence structures, the shape of any dune belongs to one of the following categories: simple, compound, or complex. There is no compound-complex dune, however. Wind blows (here or there, there or here, here and there, there and here) or refrains from blowing at all. Nothing remains but submission to the cycle.
Ordinary beach sand is excessively firm for volleyball. It breaks the fingers of those who dive. Tears the hamstrings and knee ligaments of those who plant this or that foot here or there. Creates this or that dune to be demolished in the simultaneous construction of this or that dune through the planting of this or that foot here or there within the designated parameters (lines) of the volleyball court. None of this can stand, and so the International Olympic Committee has devised a recipe. An industry trade secret, publicly-available specifications are lacking in the precise proportion of the dirt, clay, and silt particles which collectively shape the size, hardness, and (well) shape of the grains. Drainage between such grains is so efficient as to make impossible the generation of castles.
Sandpits are apparently a somewhat common name, elsewhere, for the sandboxes of which we are surely all familiar. The metaphorical resonances of this play suggest a foundational freedom. Burden the individual with only the limitations of their imagination. Plastic shovels scoop this or that clump of sand into this or that plastic bucket, to be dumped into the appropriate area and subsequently transformed into a form thanks to the malleability of its nature given it is not sand exactly — or even a clump of sand — so much as so many thousands and millions of individual specks of rock and mineral particles finer than gravel and coarser than silt.
Homeowners have been known to discourage the loss of this “sand” in the adjacent land by threatening their children with punishments of varying severity. Homeowners have been known to discourage the contamination of the sand by rain or animal waste by covering the designated sandpit with a sort of lid (usually of plastic or wood, often of tarp) when not in use. Of course, some dampness is desirable so as to maintain the coherence of the sand, and no matter the regulatory habits established by the homeowner, the sand will dirty over time.
It is in the nature of things (in nature, in things) that the sand too will be replaced. Wood chips have become an increasingly common substitute in school playgrounds and municipal parks.
You see, there is a particular kind of sand central to the making of concrete, and given the relentless growth of our cities as well as the relentless demolition of what has come generations before so that we might replace these constructions in our own image for a few generations before they too are demolished, it is in short supply. So, you see, the United Nations has concluded that sand and gravel mining “greatly exceed natural renewal rates.” A black market of sorts illegally trades this variety of sand from one country to another, from one construction firm to another.
Sand is a seventy-billion-dollar industry in this country.
This walk amongst these dunes in this city is a familiar one. The thinking of these thoughts is familiar too (the latest inversion of the same glass hour). Then, something new: I spot the man and woman of the pit. The man and woman are intertwined through the mechanism of the flexibility of our limbs and limbic system, having fallen into the dune quite by accident I imagine, given the genteel nature of their clothing. A picnic blanket is absent, and only a single bottle of water (or what passes for water, at any rate) is passed between them.
Consider the pose of the couple of the pit. Upon a closer look, the man is less a man than adolescent, and the woman practically a geriatric. Upon her breast lies his head, at just the same angle as that most famous recent photograph of a Swiss couple, missing for some seventy-five years, found frozen within a shrinking glacier. Eighty-five years ago, the couple had tended to a farm, and had apparently fallen into a crevice on their daily walk to the cows in need of their daily milking. Their youngest daughter was a mere infant at the time of their disappearance. “We spent our whole lives looking for them,” she has said to a newspaper reporter, “in the hopes that we might find them, might convince them that our desire to abandon the farm was less a rebuke of their own decisions than an important manifestation of the human need for agency. The farm had been in our family for generations, you see. While I do not remember them, exactly — given the human mind is incapable of forming memory until its second or third year — my siblings, god rest their souls, lived in constant fear of our parents’ return and retaliation until their own untimely disappearances or deaths.”
The belongings of this couple remained intact, and their bodies perfectly preserved within the ice. There is no information regarding any thoughts the sole remaining child might have had upon seeing her parents in the flesh, looking (for the most part) some fifty years younger than herself. DNA testing verified their identities within short order, and the ski lodge above which their farm once operated has seen a surge in tourism as a result, this year, despite the slush and poor snow, despite the effects of climate change which facilitated both the discovery of the Swiss couple and a reminder of what remains beneath us, just out of sight.
Be that as it may, the couple in the dunes remains remarkably calm given this resemblance. I remain remarkably calm given my resemblance to the other one hundred and eight billion of us to have ever lived, the hundred billion to have already died. In this way, those famed philosophers of Kansas were right.
We are created during a process few outside the medical profession understand in its requisite detail thanks to our collective fear that by acknowledging that we too are animals, the rationalizations for our subjugation of other species would seem stupid to an even greater swath of our own.
Sand is invariably formed through the gradual disintegration of rocks thanks to the efforts of time. These rocks are invariably formed through the gradual accumulation of eroded bits of other rocks. A noted geologist has written of this cycle: “liberated, buried, exposed, and liberated again.” The sand remains remarkably calm given the absence of this memory and the presence of the latest gust of wind.
Our phones and mirrors and houses and roads and filtration systems and cast metal molds are made of sand. The list goes on and on. On and on a lake becomes a pond becomes a duned desert, a man and woman become a memory become a shell of themselves awaiting discovery in the desert of a former lake. Here we lie, in a sandbox of our own making, just beyond the desert market.
•••
Samuel Rafael Barber is the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message (The Cupboard, 2019). He has degrees from Brown, Arizona, and Columbia, and is a PhD student at the University of Denver. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Chicago Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 55.1 years.