Alone in the Dark
He runs around his room in a frantic back and forth, looking for anything that may have escaped his notice. Ten years old, he has never been camping before, but the idea seized him by the throat, a rise of euphoria that has made it slightly more difficult to breath. Sleeping under the sky like a real gaucho, his father teaching him the secrets of the land, he could hardly believe it was real. The sun had already started to set when his father first came into his room. The orange-red rays illuminated his figure in a fiery aura as he stood in front of the window, making him hazy, hard to see clearly. He had been gone for nearly a week and the boy was wondering if he would ever return. He bit his lower lip, uneasy under his father's gaze, waiting for him to speak. Get ready, the man finally said, weariness in his voice. Pack your bag for camping. We're leaving in half an hour. The boy immediately perked up, a hundred questions waiting to burst forth, but his father had already turned and was walking down the staircase. Half an hour wasn't much time, and he knew when his father said half an hour, that's exactly what he meant. He decided he should start getting ready right away. But what does one bring on a camping trip, he asked himself. As the deadline approached, he had assembled most of the essentials. Binoculars, slingshot, toilet paper, change of clothes, comic books, potato chips, and lighter (stolen from his mother). His eyes scanned the room again and he dropped to his stomach, cheek pressed to the floor to look under his desk. Aha, he said out loud, snatching up the flashlight from the floor. At nearly the same time his father's voice calling from downstairs caused him to snap back up to his feet, sling his backpack haphazardly over his shoulder, and head rushing out the room. His father was already standing by the front door when he came downstairs, hand on the screen door, ready to go. His gaze scanned over to take in his mother, willfully facing in the opposite direction, her back to the both of them. Her shoulders rose and fell in heavy waves, her hand unsteady as she brought her cigarette to her lips in repeated drags. He tried to call out to her, tell her about the camping trip, but she merely raised a hand to silence him, waving him away, not bothering to turn to face him. His father motioned him out the door with a nod of his head, waiting for him to go out before closing the door behind them. Readjusting his grip on his backpack, the boy walked out to the worn-down pick up truck in the driveway, pulling himself up to sit in the passenger seat. As his father swung up into his seat and turned the key in the ignition, for just a brief moment he saw his mother's face looking out at them through the kitchen window, twisted in anguish, before she closed the blinds. His father pulled out of the driveway and headed down the road away from the city. The sky was beginning to darken and the boy sat in uncomfortable silence, looking down at his folded hands as there was nothing to see out the window except scrub-land. He found himself wishing his father would say something to break the silence, turn on the radio, anything to relieve the tension hanging in the air. He didn't know exactly how he felt about the man sitting next to him, there were a number of conflicting emotions at war inside him. He knew his father cared about him, would never let anything happen to him, but there was a hardness in him that none of his friends' fathers possessed. He was a Father in the biblical sense of the word, with a capital F. He only spoke when necessary and when he did it carried the heaviness of divine command which brooked no defiance. It was night now, but the two kept driving, making their way farther away from civilization, moving deeper into the desert. The boy didn't know how long they had been driving, the clock in the dashboard having been broken for as long as he could remember, but it felt like eternity. They were crossing some boundary in time, unstuck from the present, moving back and away into the primordial mists of the ages. His father had turned off the main road a while back and was heading into the wild lands. His face betrayed no emotion, his black mustache framing his mouth set in stone, and he drove confidently with one hand on the wheel. How he chose to navigate, the boy had no idea, as the landscape looked the same to him in all directions. They had passed an arroyo a while back, but since then the land had been mostly flat, mostly barren, with some withered sagebrush scattered at random. Yet his father was driving with a purpose. There seemed to be a definite goal ahead. When his father finally brought the truck to a stop, he had been dozing off. He blinked his eyes uncomprehendingly as his father motioned him out the door. As he stepped outside, he looked around, but could see nothing of note. There was a thin sliver of moon in the sky that provided scant light. Not much, but enough to see by. His father instructed him to start collected brush so they could start a fire, pointing him in the opposite direction. The boy began heading away from the truck, straining his eyes to look down at the hard packed ground for anything remotely flammable. He found some dry sticks and twigs here and there, scratching his hands on their bristles at first before learning how to grasp them more gently. As his arms piled up with sticks, his back began to feel sore from the constant bending over. He wasn't so excited to be a gaucho anymore. He wished he was back home, reading his comics stretched out on his bed. Finally when thought he had enough, he headed back in the direction of the truck, now just a small dot in the distance. His arms full, he walked shakily, unsteadily, dropping sticks here and there, but he managed to make it back to the campsite with most of his stack intact. His father was already there, crouched down on his haunches as he assembled his kindling for the fire. He motioned for the boy to drop his pile next to him, and he set about picking the most choice pieces for the fire with an expert hand. Soon the fire was roaring, and the boy sat back on his heels, staring into it, mesmerized by the dancing of the flames. He was tired and hungry, and the warmth of the fire made him want to curl up and sleep right then and there. But his father had other plans. First you eat, he said, tossing a paper sack full of beef jerky at the boy. He stood in silence watching as the boy ate the jerky. It was hard and tasteless, and he ate it without smiling. The man continued to feed the fire, and when the boy had finished eating, he passed him a canteen and motioned him to drink from it. The boy drank his fill and handed it back to his father, who refused, telling him he should keep it. Now his father walked with a heavy gravity and sat down directly across from him, the fire between them, but their gazes connected over the top of it. Pay attention, the man said, for what I am about to tell you is very important. -The desert is the truth of the world. All those lush, green forests, the grasslands, the rich soil of the farms, they are the illusions. The earth dreams and we, as imaginative beings, are easily drawn in by its dreaming. But even now the desert is reasserting itself, dispelling illusions, taking back its birthright. Eventually the earth must reawaken, and when it does, the desert will be all that remains. -Since the dawn of our people, the great men have gone to the desert to test themselves, from Yeshua down to the present. It is a hard land, capable of breaking a man, but it is also capable of elevating you. He paused here, licking his lips, as if what to come was harder than what had preceded. -There is a darkness inside us that whispers. You have surely heard it, in the dead of the night. In the bustle of the day, in the cities and towns, it is difficult to hear over the noise. It is speaking always, though, and in the intervals of silence you can hear it. And nowhere can you hear it as clearly as here. In the rarefied air of the desert, it is amplified. -I will be leaving soon. Don't ask me why. I cannot tell you, and if I did you would not understand. I will look after you from afar, but I will no longer be able to stand by your side, to shield you. You must learn to fend for yourself. -That is why we are here. You must learn to live with the darkness inside of you, learn to control it and not be controlled by it. And to control the darkness, you must confront the darkness. At this, he suddenly leaped to his feet, kicking the fire with his heavy boot. It sailed through the air, small flames breaking off in a dozen directions as the wood scattered. As they hit the ground, these sputtered and quickly began to die, deprived of their former structure, conducive to life. The boy too jumped up, fear shaking him into action. The scant moonlight had now become obscured by clouds, so that the only source of light was the now dying fire. Ten years old and still scared of the dark, he began manically trying to rekindle the dying blazes, piling on brushwood, blowing on it like he'd seen done in the movies, but it was no use. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had a flashlight in his backpack. Digging it out in the light of the dying embers, he smiled as he flipped the switch. He jiggled it back and forth, back and forth, before his smile disappeared. There was no light. The batteries were dead. Stupid, so stupid, he murmured to himself, eyes filled with tears. The last thing he saw before the darkness took hold was his father's figure disappearing into the shadows, a faint flicker illuminating his expectant expression. And then nothing.
Diego jerked awake, thrashing his legs to kick off the hotel room covers. In an instant he was up and standing over the bathroom sink, scooping up the running water and pouring it over his sweat drenched face. He was breathing heavily, as if he had just finished a long distance sprint.
Spitting into the sink, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. He was his father's son, that much was for certain. The hardness was there, behind the eyes. But still nascent, not hard enough.
The dream had been haunting him for a number of years, keying in to some primal terror deep within his soul. It all seemed so vivid, so real. Had that night out in the desert really happened?
Dream or memory, what was the difference?
He needed to get some rest, he had a big match the next night in Albany. He wasn't worried, though. The waking world was nothing compared to his dreams.
Bone was a ghost, but he knew nothing of the darkness.