One:
The desert isn’t a desert.
Two:
The desert is and is not empty.
Three:
Emptiness is as much a question of scale as it is a question of perspective.
Four:
It’s hard to see with dust in your eyes.
One:
There is a road through the desert. It doesn’t snake or bend. In the day it shimmers and at night it is dark. It is both alike and unlike other roads in other deserts. The road is a particular road to an imaginary place.
All places in the desert are imaginary.
Two:
All places in the desert are real.
Three:
The road is a combination of asphalt and stone. Parts of the road appear black because they are new. These sections exist nearer to the county seats and occasionally by high fences topped with razor wire. The black roads hold white lines.
Four:
From the airplane, a solitary traveler can see the great expanse of red stretching from the Mountains to the Other Mountains. The landscape of the basin resembles an old palette, the paint piled up in places and crusted over. A noxious blue swirls in a grey pool. A solitary traveler leaning on the pane of the airplane’s little oval window can see many things, but few details.
He follows the lines on the land—beige, dusty roads.
One:
Agriculture.
Two:
Permaculture.
Three:
Literary culture. Yogurt culture. Cancel culture.
Four:
The flight attendant ascends the aisle bearing aloft a tray of snacks. When she is not hurtling through the air at great speed and perceived stillness she lives in an inland city at the eastern edge of a coastal megalopolis. She ascends the aisle because the plane is rising. A small plastic cup of ginger ale hisses by her ear. She can see the light catch the fizzing bubbles as they leap out of the cup and are lost into the circulating air. She distributes the snacks, but keeps the hissing cup on her tray as she descends to the rear of the plane.
One:
If one were to scoop a same sized cup as the one perched on the tray held aloft by the flight attendant from the inland city into the soil directly below the airplane at that very instant, the very moment that the plane passes silently above the scabbed red wash, one would find an effusion of microbial life that, in terms of individual organisms, would outpace the entire population of every human being living, dead, or yet to be born.
Two:
Wait one more instant to scoop and the cup would collide with an old service road and you’d find nothing at all.
Three:
You could dislodge a pebble or something. A crushed up plastic cup with a pebble in it. Very natural here in the desert.
Four:
The solitary traveler removes a plastic cup of yogurt from the bag at his feet. To this cup, a miniature wooden spoon in a plastic bag has been, in some distant factory, adhered with a small bit of glue derived from a natural rubber.
The adherent is invisible, as are all things to the solitary traveler whose face is still pressed against the pane of the little oval window.
Though the world rolls beneath him.
Though he rolls, too.
One:
While it is true that the desert is not, in fact, a desert, it is nevertheless also true that the desert is a place.
Two:
A place is divisible into infinite subsectional subplaces.
Three:
But also, like, think of a room. A room is a place, a house is a place. A room is therefore a place within a place, but a sofa within the room is not a place. It’s a spot. So, as it seems: the subdivision is not infinite.
Four:
Seated on the aisle near to the solitary traveler is another man. The middle seat between them is empty and the second man has piled up his newspapers, files, and various technological detritus. The solitary traveler thinks gratefully that at least they won’t have to fight for the armrest. The second man thinks that he would like another scotch.
One:
We speak of landscape and seascape, though the first can refer to an actual place and the second only refers to images.
Two:
There are no airscapes, few skyscapes.
Three:
Skyscrapers and fire escapes.
Four:
The solitary traveler leans his head on the pane of the little oval window to his right and below him is the red land and to the side of him is the wing of the plane with its big shaking engine and beyond that the sky is blue and it is yellow toward the distant blur where the world bends away from him and still a deeper blue up where the sky bends above him. Smoke curls from a faraway patch of greenish grey.
He eats a spoonful of yogurt.
One:
Strictly speaking, there is no one particular point in the column of air over a particular place where the location, however minutely it may change in the perceptive field of a particular observer, shifts from being in a place to being above it.
Two:
And yet it happens.
Three:
Ten feet, give or take.
Four:
Flying over the desert, the solitary traveler feels the cold, dry air of the air-conditioning vent, which he’s positioned to blow directly on his face as he rests on the pane of the little oval window. He has also taken over the other air-conditioning vent, the one normally meant to service the middle seat, and has angled it to blow on his hands.
The other man has taken note of this discrepancy, and though only his papers and cords and the neoprene sleeve of his large tablet device lay strewn about to his right—which is to say nothing in need of coolness, items possibly threatened by the movement of air—he feels little remorse in reaching up to adjust the little knob where the air comes out so that it faces straight down.
If the solitary traveler says anything, the other man will shrug and say Fair is Fair.
If the solitary traveler gets up to go to the bathroom, the other man will adjust the little knob so that it directs its cone of air toward himself.
This is his plan.
One:
There’s a dog down there.
Two:
Where?
Three:
In a dry pasture, on a long chain.
Four:
The solitary traveler doesn’t say anything, he merely stares at the little knob for an extended interval before he resumes his survey of the red, blasted landscape outside the window. He thinks to himself, I hate this man, and takes in another mouthful of yogurt, which he realizes is raspberry flavored when a small seed becomes lodged in his upper left molar. He hadn’t previously tasted anything at all.
The other man rifles through his pile in the middle seat with no discernible intent and takes a long look at the solitary traveler leaning stoically on the pane of the window. He observes that the traveler is well dressed and determines to himself that he would like to make a comment about this fact.
One:
When you talked about a room earlier, why did you think that would be the best way to approach what is or is not a place?
Two:
That wasn’t me.
Three:
What? Oh, I don’t know. Say a plane then. And a row of seats. Is that better?
Four:
The row of seats in which sit the solitary traveler and the other man are just behind the exit row. Neither man would feel comfortable assisting the crew in the event of an emergency situation.
The other man browses the in-flight catalogue, the airline-branded travel magazine, and the laminated safety guide as he considers how he will begin speaking to his seatmate.
The solitary traveler can feel, on some obscure psychophysical level, perhaps related to pheromones or to magnets, that his neighbor wishes to have a conversation and he thinks again to himself, pressing himself harder into the pane of the little oval window, Goddamnit, I hate this man.
One:
We’ve been talking about deserts.
Two:
What makes a desert.
Three:
Desertification?
Four:
The other man opens and closes his mouth a few times while staring at the solitary traveler. The effect is amphibian. The other man thinks to himself, I really should say something about that tie. Narrow ties, haven’t seen one of those in years. Not since Bristol and that day at that ruined port, the one from the War, he thinks. Haven’t seen a narrow tie since Henry walked along that sea wall at the ruined port. Perhaps I should talk to him about Henry. He was beautiful, then. All narrow with sharp edges and the way his tie blew up past his dark hair as he stood smoking on the sea wall and I knew my mother would smell the cigarettes on me and I wondered if I could maybe jump in the sea to wash off the smell but it was cold, that day, and I wanted nothing more than to watch Henry’s dark hair thrown about by the wind. And I told Henry that I was worried about the smell and he told me Don’t Be Such A Knob and he was right. Beautiful and right.
One:
I mean, seriously, what made you so literal minded.
Two:
Yeah, think of the possibilities.
Three:
Jesus Christ.
Four:
And Henry was never so beautiful and angular as he was then, right at the beginning of everything as he stood on the sea wall and I thought of Mother and, god, that little narrow tie. I wonder what happened to that tie. I wanted so much to wear it, to feel it tighten round my neck, but I was so ashamed to ask. My rubber coat made me sweat and it hung heavily from my shoulders and the ankles of my pants were muddied with the white grey musty slop that accumulated about the base of the sea wall and was probably full of asbestos or some other terrible chemical from the time we as a species and as a civilization didn’t care much about such things.
But Henry turned to me and he smiled and he said he was going to London that night and wouldn’t I like to come.
One:
If we were talking about desertification, don’t you think we’d mention draught, or deforestation, or some sort of water drainage?
Two:
Seepages. Shrinking aquifers.
Three:
Fine.
Four:
And then Henry, Henry, Henry, as he hopped down from that sea wall and the narrow tie blowing in the breeze off the grey waves, that wind that blew through the ruins of that distant factory, Henry as he strode through those puddles of mud that splashed whitely on his leather shoes and his black pants and the tie flapping away like a snake possessed, Henry as he walked toward me on that cold, wet day on that forgotten shore on that sunken, miserable island, that cold, wet, dismal place, where Henry walked toward me that day and he gave me a shove and I fell backwards, ass first into the miserable seeping slop, and Henry as he laughed and lit another cigarette and I watched his cruel eyes as the rains began and his black hair stuck to his forehead and I’d never been so cold. No, no, can’t speak of that, that day. Best stay out of the cold.
Where’s that woman with the scotch, the other man thought, completely, with his whole mind.
One:
The singular most important thing to consider is that nothing is empty.
Two:
Except nothing. Nothing itself.
Three:
Haven’t you stopped to consider that the descriptive processes of outlining emptiness might, actually, themselves be a sort of desertification?
Four:
The solitary traveler with his face pressed to the pane of the little oval window sees a shape out in the desert redness of the land beneath him. It resembles a nipple.
The other man pulls up the in-flight map on the little screen inset into the seat in front of him.
Ah, so, we are above it, he thinks.
The other man looks to his right at the solitary traveler with his face on the pane of the little window and he notices how firmly the forehead of his seat mate is pressed against the plastic surface, how his chin is pushed so tightly into his chest, how his eyes are inclined downward as if trying to look around the body of the plane.
Ah, so, the other man wonders, perhaps he sees it down there.
One:
The nothing that is nothing, truly.
Two:
Unbounded, definitionally.
Three:
Though I suppose even nothing is filled with the absence of a thing, which is something, isn’t it?
Four:
The solitary traveler pushes his forehead against the glass, pulls his chin tightly into his chest, inclines his eyes downward, trying to make sense of the shape in the desert beneath him. It appears first as a circle with a central point, then as a spiral, then as rings within rings. First it appears grey, then a dull white, and then, as the plane passes above the strange circular formation out in the middle of the blank redness of the basin, the entire structure becomes blindingly metallic, a shimmering disk with a tall central point, a brilliant tower in the center of supplicant rings.
The solitary traveler squints and rubs his eyes. He feels a tap on his shoulder and turns to see the other man holding out both his hands, index fingers curled outward from the palms, bobbing up and down, signifying, he thinks: below.
One:
Indication.
Two:
Suggestion.
Three:
Indigestion.
Four:
The solitary traveler turning his face away from the little oval window on the side of the airplane positioned at cruising altitude above the metallic structure deep in the redness of the desert sees the two hands of his neighbor extended toward him with their two index fingers inclined downward. The two digits bob up and down and behind them in the shaded darkness of the plane’s interior, the other man’s face contorts into a grotesque sort of smile that is both half a nod and half a vaudevillian’s rocking, twisting eyebrows and is, in total, altogether strange.
The solitary traveler stares expressionless at his neighbor.
What, he says.
That’s mine, down there, the other man says.
The solitary traveler thinks, What, again, but says nothing.
That’s mine, the other man repeats. I bought it.
One:
There are many places on the land that through human ingenuity or by spiritual ordination become more than simple locations.
Two:
There are places on the land upon which Man turns his energies and from which he draws them. These places are both shrine and talisman, the sign of the work and the work itself.
Three:
There’re plenty of piles of garbage and bullshit, too.
Four:
That’s mine, it’s mine, the other man repeats and repeats, his hands still extended toward the solitary traveler, the pointing, stabbing motion of his index fingers taking on a new urgency and assertion in the white light of the small oval window.
Oh, says the solitary traveler and turns his face back toward the exterior of the plane.
Yes, yes, the other man continues, I bought it. Somewhat recently, I admit, and at auction, but it is all so very exciting. I’ve started thinking of myself as a sort of farmer.
The solitary traveler turns his face back to the other man, whose grotesque expression remains fixed behind his pumping hands.
And what do you farm, the solitary traveler asks.
Ah, says the other man, relaxing finally into his seat, his eyes squinting with pleasure.
Ah, he says. I farm light.
One:
It is entirely possible, given the structures of modern Physics, to wager the conjecture that of all the trillion billion million atoms in the universe, there is only one electron.
Two:
An infinitesimal particle, moving across the space of the universe at the speed of light, backwards and forwards in time, present at the beginning and at the end and all points between.
Three:
The luminous and the numinous.
Four:
It is not so much that this other man, drunk, mired in his mess, compels the solitary traveler with his charisma, nor could you call it charm, nor even strictly speaking intention of any sort. Rather he is fascinating, the way an old rusted train car might be fascinating, or a ghost town, or the shattered glass of an automobile accident when it’s all that remains of an impact long since cleaned up, the cars gone, insurance forms filled out, parties bitterly parted, cash dispensed, when it’s just a bit of sparkle on a dusty curb on the side of road where no one else is driving. A road in a desert, say. And then the sun hits an edge and you look down and there, without realizing it, there you are.
The other man talks and talks. He begins to mention something about a tie that the solitary traveler cannot quite understand. He talks about his farm, yes, a real solar farm. A station out in the desert dryness harvesting energy from the air, the sky, from the invisible brilliant light. Funny how light is, you can’t really see, says the other man, you can only see it on things, brightening things. Like salt for food, makes things more themselves. And I take this invisible thing, or really my guys do, or really the big mirrors do, the guys just watch the mirrors, and I make it: something. And it makes me: money.
Imagine him with a straw hat and bit of wheat dangling by its dried out stalk from the corner of his mouth, denim overalls, a red handkerchief in his pocket, leaning picturesque against a gigantic rectangular mirror angled upward to catch the sun. He talks about real estate and foreclosures and power and energy and debt and futures. The future, of course. And, satisfied as if after a meal, hands clasped across his gut and leaning back in the chair, the other man asks the question the solitary traveler has been dreading since he sensed an oncoming conversation. A question with no answer, it feels, and yet the one he must now ponder, turning the words over in his mind like a watermelon hard candy in his mouth.
And what do you do?
One:
It is another condition of modern physics, when considering the orbit of one massive body, be it particle or planet, around another object of greater mass, that the velocity of its rotation is unevenly distributed across the axis perpendicular to the center of the greater object.
Two:
The velocity of the outside edge and all points between is greater than the velocity of the inside edge. And this variability results in what we call gravity, for it is not the greater mass that pulls in the object, but rather this distortion across its length that bends the orbit of an object toward its inevitable destination. And depending on who you ask, this distortion is one of Time.
Three:
A fact known to any baseball player swinging a bat.
Four:
Well, the solitary traveler thinks. Well, again the word, what do I say? The other man gazes at him with wet, expectant eyes, whiskey dampening his upper lip.
Well, says the solitary traveler, I’m coming back from a funeral, which might have been true except it wasn’t.
The other man closes his eyes, nodding, a sound like ah ah hmerghl comes from behind his pursed lips, his mouth closed tight, so tight that little dimples have appeared on his hairless, utterly smooth cheeks. He gives the impression of a hardboiled egg. The solitary traveler imagines dunking the other man in a bath of ice water.
I’m very sorry, the other man says, his lips clicking as he pulls them apart. Very sorry indeed.
Yes, well—well well, why do I only say well?—it’s over now. Back home. Nothing to be done.
The other man notes dimly to himself that this is why this young man seated next to him here in the plane is so dressed, why he has on a suit and a tie while anyone else his age surely, certainly would be wearing something soft and cottony, or perhaps spandex, or perhaps some new elastic he hasn’t yet had the opportunity to know.
Ah, ah, yes, and, where then is home? The other man asks.
One:
And so it is that space, evenly demarcated on a rectangular plane exhibits qualities inexplicable by a simple geometry when it is transposed onto the exterior of a sphere.
Two:
And so it is that the shape of the desert that appears cartographically coherent on a map, the map on a screen inset into the headrest of a plane, for instance, is nothing more than a projection, inaccurate, rudimentary, in short: a metaphor.
Three:
Projection being nine tenths of the law.
Four:
Where then is home? Isn’t that the question, the solitary traveler thinks, shifting in his seat, the strange vinyl or polyester of it beginning to heat uncomfortably beneath him. What do I do and where is home. He thinks of a highway in the desert, or rather one in another desert, a high desert, nearby but distinct. It is an alpine road skirting dark jagged mountains to the west, a road through the interior of the exterior, the inside edge of the West.
There is a motel somewhere along this dry road behind the mountains, a cheery, red-roofed place, which stands with its little outbuildings and its artificial lawn and its shallow pool beneath a sheer wall of granite, a wall cut through with a dark band of diorite and lit up from bellow at night with bright lights that fade before reaching the top. The lights, brighter than day at the bottom and fading as they rise, as if to say that the cliff, when considered as such and from such a perspective, might as well be an infinite cliff. The solitary traveler thinks of this motel, where sometimes he stops in late at night and sits darkly in one of its little outbuildings and takes pulls from a bottle and once did something far more drastic, this little motel at the base of infinity, perhaps he could say that this is home, but what a thing to say and how exactly to say it.
One:
And yet were it not for this approximation of demarcation, this line cut through a plane simulating the surface of a sphere—a sphere hurtling through space around the greater mass of a nearby star, which is to say bending, warping along that perpendicular axis that one might use to explain gravity—how else would we say where a desert ends.
Two:
Thinking nothing of particular instances of ecology and geology but simply rather the averages by which we define their distribution—less organic matter here, less conglomerate rock, say, more of the exposed batholith running under the western edge of such and such a continent. From a distant enough perspective these averages tend to blur and then you have the problem of all land, comparatively speaking, as desert.
Three:
And yet here come mountains, riding the curve of the Earth.
Four:
The solitary traveler repositions himself again on the synthetic fabric of the window seat and looks again out the little oval window. Snow dots the landscape and from a great fissure in the earth a column of smoke is rising. There are several of these columns, in fact, fires distributed with irregular but on the whole even distribution to the north and to the west. The air turns a pale yellow outside the little window. They have returned to the lands of fire, the solitary traveler thinks.
The other man feels a bubble rising in his chest as he contemplates the silence of the solitary traveler to his right. A comparative silence, the roaring of the plane now circumstantial background, ignored, relative space and sound both partaking of their contingencies. He leans forward, expectantly, thinking to himself yes, yes, this should continue. Perhaps we can keep speaking. Perhaps he is impressed. Perhaps he’d like to visit the farm.
The solitary traveler turns his thoughts over in his mind like a bar of soap in the hand. He is nobody, to himself, he thinks. He can never go home again.
One:
So much of smoke is vapor.
Two:
Volatile gases, compounds lighter than air, for a time, before accumulating in the atmosphere and descending.
Three:
A general flattening. Of light, of distance, of breath.
Four:
The other man feels the conversation ending, senses it in the back of his mind like a beam of metal sinking into some patch of distant mud. He wants so very much to ask the solitary traveler to his right if he would consider coming to visit the farm. His radiant mirrors, his rings of light. He imagines a smart little sedan, or maybe a truck, yes, a truck, gliding up the road from Tonopah. Gravel crunches every so often, but the sounds are all soft, muffled, stilled by the gentle breeze of the air conditioner as the truck glides up the desert highway past the chain link fence and the company logo, down through the middle of the rings toward the central tower itself. All the light focused up there at that central point in the tower where the light becomes energy becomes industry. The other man has not been up to the tower—to do so would mean stopping up the work, which in turn means slowing down his investment—but he imagines a room at the top, brighter than any other he’s ever seen or seen by any other, a room of total light, light compressing, light as matter. And he imagines a chair, simple, industrial, metal, a chair in the middle of the light where he could ask this solitary traveler if he would like to sit and experience it, the radiance, his radiance, the light.
And the solitary traveler presses his face against the little oval window and looks out across the burning landscape that once, perhaps, in another life, could have been home. He’s lost track of how many fires now, all the columns of smoke combining in a dark cloud above the land, above the plane and its window and its gleaming wing. And the smoke cloud resembles rain clouds, rains that never fall anymore on the land that once, perhaps, might have been home. And he looks out to the west, further, and the solitary traveler sees, at last, the glimmer of the sea beyond.
Isaac Zisman is a writer living in Oakland, CA. His writing has appeared in the American Alpine Journal, The Millions, No Contact, Fence and elsewhere. He’s currently at work on his first novel. Twitter: @octopus_grigori
minor literature[s] 