Absent Wanderers

As it had been in their time and before time could recall, the men sent their young boys off into the desert when they reached the age of fifteen. The lands that grew out around their village were vast, bigger than a man could walk over a moon’s age, and wide enough to hide the Ndi Ichie that dwelt there. The boys would go alone, one at a time, the second heading off when the first had disappeared into the shimmering horizon, and so on. The men walked with them in the morning out to a flat stretch of hard packed sand. It was where the gods had drawn a barrier between their world and the world of men. The men pointed out away from where the sun rose. “Go straight and do not look back,” they told their sons.
         The boys were all scared, but they did not show fear. It was a sign of weakness, and the Umuagbara spirits of the desert would not allow any boy to grow into a man if he was weak. They carried no food nor water, no weapons to protect themselves or to hunt with. They wore leather bands around their waists and nothing else. If they walked for the sun’s full arc, sleeping only when its last rays had gone below the earth and rising each morning at dawn to walk again, then the spirits would protect them and keep them alive - but if they rested too long, or if they retired from the day’s walking too early, the spirits would abandon them and the desert would take them to their graves.
         Each boy knew this and believed it. The journey into the desert was the most important event in their young lives. They would return as men, or they would die. Their fathers had done all they could to prepare them for the long ordeal. Now the spirits would decide who was worthy of manhood.

---

         When Daniel picks me up he’s already speeding, his eyes ping-ponging around behind his thick glasses, and all I want is to be left alone to sit and watch TV, but he asks me to come with him and after saying No five different ways with varying degrees of seriousness, I relent and we go out to his car and drive off into the night. The world around us is purple water colors with black trees cut out along the edges of the car windows. We rush past the strips out onto the freeway, where Daniel slingshots around dark red brake lights, blabbering on about his new band, how they’re getting a label together, and how he knows a guy who can mix an album professionally. His phone rings nearly ten times, once for every minute we’re driving. It’s always the same muffled voice on the other end, a voice Daniel identifies as Max. Daniel asks where they are to meet, if it’s the restaurant on the right or left of the freeway, and whether Max is being watched. Eventually we whip sideways down an exit ramp into a parking lot bathing in semi-golden light, a flashing neon sign above us reading Jimmy C’s. Daniel circles around the lot until he spies a dirty looking kid wearing a white dress shirt and a pair of faded jeans. The kid’s hair hangs down to his shoulders, and looks thick and matted even from a distance. Daniel slows to a stop and the kid comes over and hops into the back seat.
         The kid turns out to be the one and only Max, and as he closes the door after him he starts laughing into his cell. Daniel drives around the lot as Max tells his whoever about a baby, or a babysitter - I’m not interested - until he sticks his hand between his mouth and phone and whispers ‘two-twenty’ to Daniel before continuing his conversation. Daniel steers around a lamp post with his left hand and grabs something from the sun visor with his right, handing it back to Max who in turn takes it and replaces it with a plastic bag filled with a number of white pills. Daniel scoops it up before I can get a good look, but I’m not really looking anyway so it doesn’t bother me one bit. We pull into a parking spot in front of Jimmy C’s and Max hints to his whoever that he needs to go. The baby comes up again. As Max is saying his goodbyes, two uniformed deputies come out of nowhere and walk right in front of us. I don’t even think about looking away, instead smiling politely and making brief eye contact as they passively glance at us through the windshield. They’re gone before Max hangs up. A nervous screech I slowly recognize as laughter bursts out of Daniel and he leans in close to say ‘That was almost a heart-attack, wasn’t it?!’ I force a smile and nod my head, but honestly I hardly noticed them.

---

         The first boy to set off was named Chidubem. His father sternly pointed across the sand and Chidubem started walking. He was the strongest of the young boys, and his father was very proud, but if he did not return no one would ever remember him. It took Chidubem twenty minutes to vanish from sight beyond the dark red horizon. His father turned and walked away from the group to return home.
         Then Uzoma started walking, beginning his journey. He was the shortest and weakest of the boys, but his father still loved him very much. Uzoma was struggling to hold back his tears, and most of the men expected him to start crying and fail the spirit’s trust before he took a single step. He kept his face straight, however, and no tears fell from his eyes. Thirty minutes later, Uzoma had become a small black dot.
         The sky was turning blue as the sun slowly rose over the others’ heads. The next boy to go was named Ejike. Ejike’s uncle had to point him on his way, for his father had died the year before to disease. Ejike left without speaking a word. He went slowly, deliberately, measuring each step against the last, practicing his stride and matching it to his intake of breath. He would not allow himself to falter even once on his journey. He had no one living before him. He had to become a man to preserve the line of his father.
         The desert surrounding him was familiar in theory, since his entire life had been spent at its edge, but now that he walked in it the sand felt strange beneath his feet. The footprints of Uzoma and Chidubem stood out clear in the sand, but Ejike knew not to trust them. The path he walked was his own, and though he went after the other boys he could not follow them. Instead he let his shadow be his guide, keeping it stretched out dead straight before him, and knowing its straightness and length kept his direction true to the sun’s path.
         It was not long before he no longer felt the eyes of the group on his back. He knew not to look back - the spirits took it as reluctance - but he could tell that he was alone. He was further from the village than he had ever been before, and the reality of what he must do was beginning to set into his thoughts. He had been taught to never question his elders, especially not his father, so he had only listened when the man told him of what would happen on the journey. Ejike had nodded and agreed, and been confident in his father’s knowledge. But it was different out there, alone, with no one to rely on but himself, and soon Ejike realized something: his father had never told him how to find the way back.
         Fear gripped him then, and threatened to turn his head. He wanted badly to let it, but the sun burned its heat against his back and a cool sweat broke out over his body, and the sweat invigorated him. He knew his father had survived the desert, as had his father before him, and Ejike would make sure to be no different. The spirits of the sand would keep him safe, and they would return him to his village when his journey was at an end - and, he thought, his mind dispelling the fear quickly under a newfound strength, even if the spirits abandoned him, he would force himself to become a man. The desert could not beat him. Ejike wanted to smile but he did not. He kept his face emotionless, his eyes cold and hard. He made himself follow his shadow’s point.
         In time, Ejike’s throat grew dry, and he wished for a drink of water. There was no water around, however, and even if there had been, Ejike would not have drank it. His trust in his father’s teachings was too strong. He kept walking, focusing on the shadow that lead him on, and the thirst got worse. He ignored it. It was then Ejike looked down at his feet, and noticed that the footprints of the boys who had gone before him were no longer there. He had forgotten them, but their sudden absence made him uneasy. Where had they gone? Again, fear threatened to take hold of him, but he fought it back and continued to walk after his shadow. It was hard for him not to wonder about the boys’ fate, however, for when he looked around he could find no sign of them. The footprints were nowhere to be seen, not trailing off away from Ejike’s path or ending suddenly behind a sobbing, fallen body - they had simply disappeared. It was as if the boys had vanished.

---

         “What’s up, man?” Max says from the back seat as the cops walk into Jimmy C’s. Daniel turns around in his seat and shakes his hand. “Not shit, just driving around.”
         “Yeah?”
         “Jeff and I might go try to see a movie or something.” I perk up at the mention of my name and mutter something like, ‘aww yeah’, something like that. Max leans forward to take a look at me. I look back and offer my hand in greeting.
         “What’s up? Nice to meet you. I’m Jeff. How’s it going?” That’s all the friendly greetings I can think of so I stop talking and smile slightly. Max takes my hand and shakes it, says “Pretty good, man,” with an awkward slant in his eyes, and leans back.
         “Daniel,” he says, and I slink down against my chair and let my eyes and face droop back to their comfortable apathetic pout, “how’s that album coming along?”
         “Good man! Real good! We’ve got Jessie and he’s got his own studio pretty much, you know? All the songs are already written and everything, we just need to get in there and... like... play ‘em, you know?” I hear everything I heard on the drive over again, but this time I smile and nod through it all instead of commenting, and at the end, “It’s really shaping up, for me and for everybody. We’re totally gonna make it. It’s awesome.”
         “That’s bad ass, dude. Really, good luck on that shit,” Max says. He shifts a lot, I notice, between the left side and right side of the backseat. “Sounds like you’ve got good times ahead.”
         Daniel agrees, “Yeah, yeah totally.”
         “Sounds good,” Max says. “I wish I had it easy like that.”
         Daniel frowns a little. “Well... you got it pretty good, right?”
         “Hardly, man. My kid has like, some kind of intestinal disease, or something. Seriously, he’s just a baby and already he’s gotta go get surgery and shit. It sucks, man.”
         “Oh, damn. I didn’t know,” Daniel admits. “Yeah... yeah, that’s pretty gay.”
         Awkwardness between friends is harder than that between strangers, because it’s only socially acceptable to run from strangers. I can’t run and neither can Daniel, so we adopt the typical sorrowful expressions and concentrate very hard on our knees. Max runs his hand through his filthy hair and scratches at his stubbled cheek. I see all this in the rearview mirror, but I stay low to it, so as not to catch a glimpse of his eyes. The sounds of a busy road swirl around each and every street lamp off to our left, and to our right the parking lot lamps cast dusty yellow cages around empty theater stages. The blackness, emptiness of a parking lot at night is surreal when seen next to a jumping, lively, well-lit neon joint like Jimmy C’s. My face sits reflected in the car window between two of the parking lot lamps’ circular beams. They’re flattened against the asphalt,  and the shadow between them is all the more darker for their presence.
         Daniel speaks up, clearing away the silence. “Well, look... Max, we’ve got to be heading out, you know?”  I nod slowly. “We’re gonna go try to see this movie and stuff, so...” Max is quiet in the back seat. “Sorry to hear about your kid and everything. That really sucks.” I nod a little faster.
         “He’s not my kid...” Max says softly, under his breath. I hear it fine but Daniel doesn’t catch it. “What’s that, man?” Daniel looks back at him in the rearview mirror. Max meets his gaze, his eyes shaded by tangled hair.
         “Nothing. You’ve got to go. I understand.” He opens the car door and steps out. “Enjoy the movie,” he says. He shuts the door and walks towards the shadows of the parking lot, then stops and seems to change his mind. He turns and heads towards the front door of Jimmy C’s. As he passes in front of us, he turns and waves, smiling.
         “Oh fuck, man,” I say, starting to sense something bad going down. “He’s gonna rat us out to those cops!”
         “No way, you think?” asks Daniel. “No, Max is a cool guy. Don’t worry about it.”
         “Why’s he goin’ in there, then?” I ask, my nerves tensing up.
         “Maybe he’s hungry? Shit. Maybe he wants to spend some of that two hundred twenty dollars I gave him.”
         “Then why’d he smile at us?” I ask. “Why’d he wave at us like that?”
         Daniel watches Max go inside Jimmy C’s. His face is calm, much different from the excitement with the sheriffs earlier. “Did he? I didn’t notice.” He pauses. “Jeez, Jeff... you’re the sober one here. Don’t start getting all paranoid.”
         “Exactly! I’m sober, you’re not! Pay attention to the sober person!”
         “You need to chill out,” Daniel decides.
         He reaches for his keys dangling from the ignition and pulls them out. Hanging off the ring is a black plastic film case, and Daniel pops off the lid and reaches inside with one finger. He takes out a small, white, rectangular pill.
         “What the fuck, man?!” I spit, glancing at Jimmy C’s windows trying to find the cops inside, see if they’re watching us. The neon makes the windows shine pink and green, and I can’t see through the glare.
         Daniel examines the pill, ponders something, then breaks it and hands me half.
         “Take this, dude,” he says. “It’ll calm you down.”
         “Yeah, cool, I’ll take it, but not in front of these sheriffs!”
         Daniel seems to understand where I’m coming from. “Alright, good idea. We’ll head back to my place.” He’s fast out of the spot, cuts around a lamppost and slides back onto the freeway. We slip effortlessly around the far-too-slow cars as the strobes of screaming moths blend the shadows together into a river of reds, oranges, and purples. I swallow my pill. It’s Xanax, a personal favorite.

---

         The desert had been a place of fear for the tribe for a long time. People heard strange beasts crying out at night, and men had gone missing more times than could be assumed coincidence. Ejike felt the searing heat on his back, heard the stealthy wind cutting its way slowly through the earth, and he was not surprised a man could find his end out there. The other boys must have been taken by the Umuagbara, Ejike decided. They had not been worthy. Moreover, they had allowed their fates to be decided against their will. Ejike felt no remorse for them.
         He walked for an hour, focusing on his shadow that was beginning to shrink in front of him. “The sun moves quickly,” he thought. “No matter how far I walk it will still out distance me.” He looked up to see the sun hanging over him. Sweat got in his eyes and he blinked it away.
         Ejike thought of many things. He thought about his mother, how she cared for him always and loved him always. He thought of his father, how he had looked as he lay dying. He thought of his blood, and his need to carry it over the generations. He thought of himself, how he was made, and what his place was in the eyes of his people. He thought about the desert, and the spirits that dwelt therein. Finally he thought about the sand, and how deep he would be able to dig in it if he needed to. Deep enough, he decided.
         An hour later, Ejike’s feet were growing tired. He dragged them along, one after the other, slowly following the tiny little head of black that poked out away from his feet. At times he thought the head was moving ahead of him, like a big spider crawling away, but then he realized it was not. He walked in that way as the sun eased itself over him, and his shadow began to point back across his tiny line of footprints. Ejike did not look back. He had learned from his father what to do when his shadow moved behind him. He would use the sun as his guide, and follow it until it fell below the sands.
         As dusk approached, Ejike’s throat felt as rough as a leopard’s tongue, and his strong legs were threatening to buckle with each step. Ejike kept his eyes on the setting sun as purple shadows drew themselves beds against the sand. Its slow descent below the horizon was aggravatingly prolonged. The heat was replaced with a soothing cool that Ejike knew would soon turn freezing. He would lie under the warm sand for the night, he decided. A tiny hole to wrap himself up in would do well against the cold of the moon. Ejike waited and waited for his time to rest, and finally it came when the sky’s color drained away, revealing a star-speckled dome that stretched around the breadth of the world. Ejike fell to his knees with relief. The first day was over. It was now time to sleep.
         He dug a hole in the soft sand and lay in it under a cover of more sand. Sleep came easily to him, for he was truly exhausted.
         Dreams took him over, and in them he saw his father as a tall black tree against a red sand dune. His father spoke to him in the language of the Umuagbara. The words were long and breathy, and foreign to Ejike’s ears, but he understood them somehow.
         “Go back, son,” the father tree said. “Follow the sun’s path no longer.”
         Ejike tossed and turned in his bed, and he kicked up bursts of sand that carried off on the night’s blowing wind. In his dream, he spoke in the tongue of his tribesmen.
         “Father, I must become a man - not for fear of death, but for you, and for your name to live on past my time. I have wanted this since you died.”
         “You will be a man, in time. It is not for you now. Go back and be with your mother.”
         “No Father, I can not. The journey into the desert is hard, I know that well now, but it is not above my reach. I will succeed. Have faith in me.”
         “The others have already gone back, Ejike.”
         The sand dune behind Ejike’s father began to sink into the earth. Slowly the sand built up around the father tree and around Ejike. He couldn’t keep on top of it and the sand began to choke him.
         “They’ve gone back?” Ejike asked, surprised. “Then they are cowards. They will live as women! I will not let your name and my name be tainted so! I will have many sons in your honor!”
         “Ejike,” the father tree said, the red sand building up around its trunk, “do you know what your name means?”
         Ejike struggled to keep his mouth above the sand, but it still poured in, clumping under his tongue with saliva.
         “It is an abbreviation of Ejikemeifeuwa, and means ‘As Chukwu wills it.’ There is no way to overcome the will of Chukwu, my son. Take your life at a leisurely pace.”
         Ejike spat sand from his mouth and started beating at the swiftly rising earth with his fists. Tears ran down his eyes, but he did not care for they were tears of anger, not fear.
         “No! I will be a man! Damn Chukwu who says other wise and damn you! You are not my father! You are not Ndi Ichie! You are some lost desert spirit and you tempt me with cowardly retreat! Away with you! I have not much time to sleep before another day’s walk!”
         The sand rose above the father tree’s limbs and swallowed it away. Ejike could fight the sand no longer, and it took him down as it poured over his head.
         He awoke, sputtering and coughing sand. The hole he dug himself had collapsed and buried him in his sleep. He brushed it from his face and stood, letting the rest fall away. He spat and blew his nose, and he let the tears roll from his eyes, cleaning them of the tiny grains. The dream had unsettled him, and he took a moment to recover.
         What was the meaning behind the spirit’s words, Ejike wondered. Take life at a leisurely pace, go back to the village with the others, for the time of manhood will come again? It was not what Ejike wanted to hear. Had the others really gone back? Were they now, as he stood in the middle of nowhere, hungry and thirsty, were they eating fresh goat meat and drinking cool water? A phantom taste of roasted meat made Ejike’s stomach growl, and the thought of water nearly made him bite his tongue for want of drink. The others would have those things, why not he? The desire to turn back was strong in Ejike’s mind, but another stronger desire was to move on. He felt that all the water he could drink would not be enough to make him go home. He cared not for the others, had they really returned. Ejike would return a man, damn Chukwu’s will. It was all for his father. It was all for his name.
         He rose and found his shadow’s point and started walking, the day’s journey ahead weighing heavily on his mind but inspiring his legs, also, to move, and to succeed. It was only after a few feet did Ejike notice his mistake. The sun was too high. It had risen long before he had awoken from his dream. The day had already began. Ejike had slept too long, and now he was starting late. The spirits’ would forsake him. He had failed the test of manhood.
         His feet continued to move even as he realized his failure. The shadow that stretched out before him did not sway, nor did it shrink into a ball of twitching fear. It moved on, and Ejike followed it, knowing it was not all for naught. “The desert is my enemy now,” he thought. “It wants to kill me.” His feet kept walking, his shadow stayed straight and tall. “The spirits have forsaken me. The desert will try and take me to my grave.” Ejike moved on anyway, despite his failure. He had said before that the desert would not beat him. He held himself true to that belief.
         When the sand that blew around his feet became sharp, and cut into his ankles, Ejike walked forward. When the wind blew at his eyes and dried them up to match his throat, Ejike walked forward. When the dunes that circled the world he knew turned black as pitch and his eyes dripped so saltily with pain that it took all his strength not to tear them loose from his face, Ejike walked forward. And when the sun - the glowing orb that had guided him over his journey - crawled down to the earth to tap him on his shoulder and wrench out every last drop of moisture from his body, Ejike walked forward.
         Hours passed, and it seemed many days had passed during those hours, and the skin Ejike felt was his own began to fall from his bones. The water he needed so desperately was far away, back home in a well, but not by his side, not in his flesh, and not in his blood. The path of the sun turned so many times in those few brief hours Ejike forgot his shadow’s aim. Instead he followed the footprints of Chidubem. ‘Guided by Chukwu’, is what that name meant.
         Back in the village, the men and women stood around the inside of their hut and silently wept, for their sons had all failed, every boy deemed unworthy, lost to the desert’s hunger. Only one had returned alive, the frail, timid Uzoma, who had gone back mere hours after his journey began. His throat was chaffed by sand, and his feet bled from seeping blisters. When asked what had happened, why he had returned, he replied, softly, “I was tempted by a bending palm. It offered me safety, it offered me comfort. I could not resist. As I walked back, I saw the foot prints of the boy who followed me. They suddenly ended, directly under the sun. Who was that boy? Ejike, was he?” Uzoma rest his tired head on the lap of his mother and closed his eyes. A single tear fell from between his golden eyelids. “He must have gone to some other place. I know not what fate has befallen Ejike.”

---

         It isn’t long before we see the red and blues screaming behind us, barreling towards us with all the intensity of a thousand murderous wolves. Daniel spits in anger, flecks of it hit my arm. We’ve got a few more miles of freeway before us, and Daniel won’t wait to use them up. He grabs his bag of pills and tears it open with his teeth, then he pours them all, all twenty/thirty, into his mouth and begins crunching away. He swallows the lot and almost gags, but he’s able to keep them down while still miraculously keeping us both alive amid the whipping blurs of cars.
         “You’re fucking crazy,” I say, silently thanking God I’m not holding.
         “What choice did I have, man?” he asks. “What choice did I have?”
         We eventually pull into an abandoned shipping company’s parking lot. The faded sign reads the essential names and numbers in an uninspired font that seems to only come to life under the glare of a flickering street lamp. The cops have a beef to settle with somebody smarter than us, and they take it out on us, and before long Daniel and I are both handcuffed sitting with our legs crossed on the oil-stained asphalt as the two officers go through the car. Everything has a sickly orange sheen to it that reminds me of a stomach medicine I had to take when I was a kid. Daniel and I don’t talk. One of the cops asks questions but we don’t answer. I’m surprised to learn that Daniel has a warrant out for his arrest, even more surprised when they take him away in the back of their car with his car keys still in his pocket. We make eye contact before he disappears back up over the freeway. The best I can think to say is ‘I’m sorry,’ and I hope he can read my lips. I’m left standing alone in the empty orange parking lot. It seems a quiet, apathetic kid like me does little to excite the policeman psyche.
         It only takes me an hour of walking down the dark sidewalk, passing ghostly buildings with hundreds of jet black spider eyes, seeing silhouettes off in the distance behind unidentifiable shadows and closer ones under overpasses, before I find a bus stop. Thanks be to any and all gods when the route listing posted there tells me the bus goes down my street. I sit on the bench, which is strangely comfortable in the evening air, and wait for I don’t know how long. I’m joined by an old man. He comes out of nowhere and I almost jump when I realize he’s staring at me.
         “You look down in the dumps,” he says, eliminating any chance I had of pretending to ignore him. “Mind telling me what’s wrong?”
         I do, at first, and I think I’ve always minded and would always mind telling anyone what’s really wrong, but something about the old man hits me in the gut, and that blow is enough to let at least a few tears well up in the bottom lids of my eyes. Maybe it’s the Xanax, maybe it’s the night air, or maybe I’m tired of keeping myself inside all the time, but I turn and look at the old man and I smile, and I tell him everything, not just about Daniel and Max and not just about the police, but everything, my whole life, and when I’m done I feel so goddamned depressed I want to die. The old man just smiles, and it’s so warm and understanding I can’t help but look away in disgust. I pray that he leaves as my cheeks flush red with embarrassment, but he stays, and stares.
         And then he stands up, and he reaches out his hand and points on down the road. It’s black as coal and seems to go on forever.
         “You see that road, my son? See that road someone built there?”
         I look, and I nod and say, “Yeah, I see it.”
         “See that street lamp over there? The one beaming its light so brightly down you can’t hardly see nothing by it?”
         I look, and I look all over the road, up and down both sides, but I see no street lamps at all. The road is bare, and dead, and there’s nothing making it brighter.
         “No, I don’t. No old man, there are no street lamps here.”
         The old man turns towards me and pats me on the shoulder. He looks me in the eye and I meet his gaze.
         “Exactly,” he says.


THE END.