The Half Full Moon

Introduction

“New Moon come out and give us water,

New moon let it thunder down on us,

New moon shake water down on us.” Traditional Bushmen song.

Going back to that time when he was lost, addicted, destructive is like the finisher of a race standing again with his towel at the starting point.  Maybe it is a humbling feeling; perhaps he looks at those first moments with amusement.  But there is certainty about when and where it was that it started – this race towards realisation. 

What happened was very simple.  Once upon a time, he was me.  He was me flying in our massive helicopter over a desert in Africa and we ran out of fuel.  We made a hard landing in the desert.  One of us went to look for help, the other stayed to look after the equipment.  Days passed.  If you want to know what happened, that’s what happened. 

Inside the desert, when I was alone, I met her, and your guess is as good as mine.  I may have invented her.  People don’t die and return the next day, over and over again as happens in computer games.  We have one life.  Life is pretty clear cut in the city, with its glass and cement, with rules and office politics. 

You spend some time in the desert and you see that it’s not what you see that is real, but what Is, is real.  You are one of the petals of the flower of life.  Conceivably, without you, a flower might fail; a raindrop might be torn to vapour as it falls from the sky. 

It is not hard to know these things once you know them.  You wonder how it was that you learned not to know. 

If none of this makes sense, that is fine, because that day the machine broke high in the sky above Africa, nothing made sense to me either.  I didn’t know that nothing made sense.

Perspective provides wisdom with its window.  Without perspective, there is nothing to see however much is known, or felt, or fought.  And perspective only comes after a journey, a climb, a move and the change that all this brings. 

Birth is wonderful and full of fresh wounds for a new world.   So turning back now, back to the start seems almost quaint, but this is the beginning of being born into the world. 

One

THWUMP, THWUMP, THWUMP.

A moment ago the blue world was awash with sunbeams, and now it is silver with the moon’s spidery trails running through the ship. 

He is asleep.

Has night come so soon?  .

This is a dream.

Dark snakes writhe and spin in his head.  The smoke in the machine, in the man, drifts slowly out into unimaginable halls of desert dry air.

The rotor blades have stopped, and some light returns.  It is still day after all.  The present moment is revealed.  It is the roar of real pain.  That is how it starts for him.  He cannot see anything.   The ship must be in the dust now, the engines are hissing and steaming, fuel is spraying onto the hydraulics – he can smell it – but the rotors are silent. 

There is a little whisper off the land, like a whisper waking a baby that had crashed to the floor and slumbered there.   Now, on the ground, it stirs like a beetle with crashed wings, the wind picking at them, like pages in a book.   A baby, a beetle and a book.  These may compare in some way to his helicopter here, in the desert, but really, nothing real can be explained.  It can only be experienced.  It can only be known for what it is.  It is an odd thought, for him.  It is strange to be bleeding in the half light, to face flames of burning pain, and have a clear, simple thought emerge.  Not only this, but every sound – he can hear every individual sound.  There is no din, no clatter.  Just a soft sigh.  A rustle.  His own breaths. 

The metal groans a little as the ship slips deeper into the dune.  The pain calls to him.  He flees to the darkness, where even the pain becomes dim, the roar replaced by a cat, its whiskers tickling the whorls of his ear, the purr throbbing but warm from the cat’s throat.  It is not a cat.  It is not a dream, but it seems he cannot abide reality for more than a few mere moments.  He is in the habit of avoiding life, even when he believes he is a patron of truth.  He sees the surf; he sees an avalanche, all these tricks to diffuse the terror of the pain.  He can endure anything, but not this bellowing of blood.  If he can pinch his eyes shut, maybe he can forget the crack in his skull.

But you cannot find peace by avoiding life.  He has heard that somewhere and he knows it is true. 

A cricket chirrups.  His pinched eyelids soften.

A cricket lives out here, in the dust. 

It can’t be that bad.

His heavy heavy lids lift a little.

The sun also, rises.

It is dull behind them.

He senses the familiar upholstery of the space ship.  There are flashes of ochre fields.  There is the sigh of the veld, on its breath the fresh smell of crusty air telling him how thirsty it is here for all things, not just a thirty three year old man. There is the faraway knitting sound of a small derelict acacia, its long white thorns knitting against each other in the still moving air.  And in the stillness, he is not alone.  Can one ever be alone ever again in this world, he wonders?  He hears the big shoes scuff the powdery sand.  He is a chubby man, the flight engineer, with his grey beard, and twitching eyebrows, stomping around outside. 

John.

Dry blood on his forehead. 

Inside the ship, he closes his eyes again, while oily snakes slick past his ears, filling one, trickling down a slim fold in his smooth neck.  He greases his fingers and stretches towards the light.  The black glistens red, and quickly hardens on his skin.

He draws himself back into the dark, sniffs at his fingers.  He accepts, with some alacrity, how enormously dry out here it is.

He knows the next few hours will be hard.  And if it is another day, it will be one of the harder days to have to endure in his life.  He has been strong before.  He has been in a car accident.  It will be like that, just longer. 

Now, what was the hardest thing?  When he left home the first time?  When he was six, when he was in hospital for ten days and it felt like months.  It felt so long when he came home the room felt bigger, the bed felt lower, the grass outside had changed.  Would this be hard like that?

His reflection becomes more and more introspective.  He is aware that he is only semi-lucid.  He should be doing something probably.  He is not sure what he should be doing.  He is just cowering, bleeding.  Has he begun to wait, or is this recovery?  Is this what he should be doing?  Is this best?  But before he sinks into it completely, something happens.  Something that has not happened to him since he was the young boy building helicopters with glue and balsa wood.

He hears words, someone else’s words, echoing:  My life has been stolen from me.

Usually his words speak.  Or they become his own.  His belief lives in them.  But here it is again, Virginia Woolf, or Tolkien, or some other popular fiction, floating in his brain as prominently as something Robin recently said.  They are like the words of his father, asking him to see something that has been lost.  Words asking him to accept them for who he is.  But they are unsolicited words, and when they come to him, he not sure whether to trust them.  He has been so long divorced from reality, from truth, that he finds himself tone-deaf to even the ring of truth.  He struggles to listen.

In the dim place in his brain where lost things go, another message finds its way under the door, a little envelope to open his eyes over.  These thoughts are his own, but somehow, they don’t seem to be his.  It has the same effect – pleasant but troublesome – as the sexual urge.  It is his, but it also comes over him.  These thoughts emerge now, like tears in rain.

We are wrong.  We may be alive but we have all lost so much time believing in strange, outlandish things.  All waste.  All the things we do…

He swallows hard.  His tongue is thick and dry.

He is looking forward to when the world will seem all right again, and these grave impulses will seem less urgent.

But he knows he has stepped, inadvertently, into a great hall of mirrors, a kaleidoscope of truth.  The knock on his head has silenced the humdrum, the jingles, the spin.  There is, instead, the roar of pain.  The real roar of pain. 

Eyes meet and the daisy thought explodes in a flutter of petals.

“What happened?”

“What happened?  Andy, look around you.  We’re in the desert.  We crashed.  You hit your head.” 

His voice feels far away from me.  He sighs.  He is a complaining, worried, old person.

He reaches towards the patterns of thinking that were leading him…somewhere…out of nowhere.

“Have I been sleeping?”  His voice echoes against the hull.

The old man clicks his tongue impatiently at the younger man. 

“This is your fault.  You are to blame for this.” 

There’s something bitter and sweet on his tongue.  He crawls to a place where he can spit and retch but he inadvertently gulps the purple poison snake and burps a liquorice vapour.

He swallows more sour acid.   He presses the pain in his head, and on his hand is a big splodge of dark blood that looks like a palm leaf.

I don’t know if I’m going to okay. I may not be okay.

“Don’t you remember what happened to you?”

Something is slowly forming.  Perhaps it is a memory, or an impression.

“C’mon Snook, we don’t have time for this, we’ve got to get out of here.”

He cannot make sense of the whispering in his head.  The moment he tries to move, to do something, his pain tackles him. 

I can’t be sure that I’m okay. 

He is suddenly cold, and faint, and thus immobilised he needs to be reassured that he is all right. 

I long for Robin.

He finds himself gazing at the gleaming aluminium floor when his blue memory yields his mother to him.  She is softer and more beautiful now and he is only a seven-year-old sitting cross-legged and crying on the skin pinching red brick patio.

The fun is sapped from him by this fiercely hot December day.

The cicadas are sizzling, the lawn is humming under an electric mower, and she is pressing her red fingernails lightly over the burnt red crust forming on his knee.

The gleaming aluminium is back.

I feel the metallic spike of pain; I taste my own blood off my grubby fingertips, just as I did then.  I am even more despondent; because I know it’s gone.

He knows he is old enough now to have to live with no mother in the world and his childhood suddenly, at this moment, seems irrevocably lost. It is a shocking conclusion, a dreadful revelation that has stolen up on him – why, why now? – why on this day of all days? 

He has to endure this misery while an old impatient man, calls to him.   He realises that he is not used to physical suffering. 

He realises that he is ashamed because he has a sudden need to cry. He feels trapped in his own body, trying to avoid himself, and the world.  He observes this, from some vantage point in the darkness, and he calls out, softly, in the shadows:  We men can be such babies.

            *            *            *

John steps away from the door, and the younger man is relieved.  In a few moments he will recover himself, and then he can face the world…whatever is out there.  A few moments pass, and then he is able to lean on an elbow.  Vacuous wastes are revealed through the Mi-26’s sliding door.  He sits up with some difficulty.  He has injured his neck.  Turning it sends a white hot spasm of pain down his shoulder.

“Come, let’s go.”

“Where?”

There is a tremor in his voice:  “There is nothing here.  And the radios don’t work.”

Then the old man points a finger.

“And your phone?” he says, eyebrows quivering.

At that moment it chirrups to life.  He strains to reach and then flip it open.  When he recognises the number his heart puffs a few small blue-green butterflies, and he notices a full strength signal. 

“Hey.”

“Hi lover.  I just called to say I’m already missing you.  I know you’ve only been gone a few hours butuRRRppppp.”  He frowns at the display.  The full strength signal is gone, and so is Robin’s singsong voice.  He shakes the phone but it is no use.  He prods the display like an infant reaching out to the unreachable snowy images pixalating through a television screen.

His eyes meet John’s.

“You see, nothing works here.  Everything’s dead.  We can’t stay here.”

“No.  I’m staying here.  I have to stay here.”

John appears below, on a sand dune.  Grass brushes his brown legs like dry feathers.  He is looking tensely to his left.  His face is creased up against the harsh glare of the African sun.  Without looking anywhere in particular he says, “Andy, we’ve got to get moving.”

“I can barely sit up John.  I’ve hurt my back.”

“Are you sure?”

The younger man shifts his position.  It is a mistake.  Fingers of pain claw at his face.  His face, though thirty three, is unwrinkled and unused to pain.   He tries to keep a straight face, but can’t.

“I’m sure.”

“I’d hate to leave you here.  What food do you have?”

He is grateful for the kindness of these words.  This is more paternal.  This is better.

“Just a few cheeserolls.  Oh, and half a bottle of Karoo water.  You?”

“Still have some of my Subway.  I still have all my water.  I hate sparkling water, but it’ll do over here.”

“Are the radio’s out?”

For the first time John looks at him.  “Jesus, wake up Andy!”

But Andy says softly, “I’ll be okay here.”

The older man’s eyes travel, searching the horizon, then drop back down on him  “Jesus, are you sure?”

“Sure.  I’m sticking to my guns on this one.  Go.” 

I seem to be testing how it sounds, I seem not to be myself, I seem not to know what it is I am supposed to say or do and I suppose I am not sounding very convincing to John.  John doesn’t budge. 

“I can’t leave you here man.  It may be days before I come back.”

“I have a bit of water and bread.  I’ll be fine.”  Even I am reassured by this pretence, this show of words.

“Jesus, are you sure about this?”

I wish he would stop saying ‘Jesus’.  I wish he would just shutup. 

He clears his throat. 

“Andy, are you sure?” He says slowly and severely.

“Sure, I’m sure.”  The dialogue alone is suddenly tiring.

“There’s nothing here,” John says. 

He rubs his head.  He coughs.

John shakes his head.   “I’ll send someone back for you.”  And then the crunch of diminishing footsteps.

His hands begin to sing with blood, and his foot also fills with pins and needles.  He lies there, feeling life flow in and out of him.  He sees a stream of blood drying on his fingers.  He looks closely and sees that his nails must have banged against the ceiling when he landed, and his fingernails sank into their beds of skin like spades in sand.  He puts his middle finger in his mouth and sucks it.  Then he licks his index finger.  His other hand is fine.  Soon fresh blood flows out of the pink crevices over his still glistening nails.

He sinks into darkness and when he awakens, the dust has turned to dusk, and darkness has fallen on everything close to him.

He is surrounded by my own doubts.  He slips away once more and only snaps awake because an icy wind is snaking against his neck.   This time he feels more awake.  He is numbed, stunned by his condition, and that he has chosen to stay here.  A movement confirms that walking even a few steps is out of the question.

I see my fingers are covered in red again.  I open them and they feel sticky.  I feel something itchy on my eye and prod it with a bloody finger, and then feel my lip tickle and prod my lip, smearing blood there too.

For some reason someone’s philosophy begins to play softly in his ear.

Welcome to the desert of the Real.  He finds it takes time to put a face and a context to those words.  There are other ideas distracting him. His mind is racing, even though his body is trapped.

And then his eyes travel beyond the dead instruments, the rubbery seats, the bright seatbelts, the flares and fire extinguishers. He sees beyond this.  He sees further than he has ever seen before. 

Beyond the door, I see the heavens.  I see the cosmos, sparkling, bright and magnificent.  I only see a quadrant of it, a sweep of stars and planets.   This is what ancient men watched every night, over the millennia.  They learnt which stars were planets, by following their movement.  They gave the stars names. He would one day learn that the ancients, some of them, believed that the stars are great hunters.

He looks and gasps.  He is so stirred by the stars that he moves through the pain; he emerges from the black ship, and walks out of the reach of the black blades.  His neck still hurts when he turns it.  He clutches a big coat, thin but long like a blanket, around his shoulders.  He glances upward.

He is a wounded man from the west, standing alone, beside his broken machine.  He is bleeding, but he is here, looking up into the vault, mesmerised by stars he once saw as a child. 

He feels like a bat, stuck to a massive dark, undulating ceiling spanning an incredibly far below city, with its swathes of stars, and hotspots.  He shuffles awkwardly, and glances beyond nearby diamonds, to smaller, deeper pinpricks that the fogs and pollutions of Europe, America and Asia have always hidden away.    He has not realised his significance in the universe for some years now. He has been lost in his errands, flying equipment to the Towers of Orapa – probably the world’s largest diamond mining operation in the Kalahari Desert. 

These thoughts and unthoughts go through his mind until at last he begins to move back to the metal Ship that brought him here – here to all this space. 

The heavens wheel away like some child’s gigantic bicycle wheel within the immense darkness of a garage floating in some forgotten neighbourhood somewhere. He manages to scramble onto his seat, cooled by the air, and press his skin against it.   He drifts off, but is resurrected from oblivion by howling, the roars of lion, and much later, an early jet, blinking red and drawing an oceanic chalky skrr against the lightening night sky.  

He sits in the cold blackness of the space ship.  He chews absently on a cheese roll.  He chews it a hundred times until it is a milky mush.  He takes a small sip of water.  The bubbles seem to hook against my cheeks.  I swallow and then lie back, staring at what is above me.   I can hear the ships huge double rotors press against the air. I can feel the sand push heavily against the wheels that have spooned into the dune, and the belly that is crushed hard against the dunes shoulder makes little grinding noises as though both are engaged in a constant tug of war.

He cannot remember his fall from the sky. All he knows is a deep sense that it is his fault.  All this is his own fault.  He is to blame. It occurs to him, at last, that he is not a third person, but a first person.  He is I.  And so, all this is really my doing.

And then it occurs to me, as I fade once more, that a grain of sand can break a machine.