To leave the line then, to forsake His personal migration, His own singular path or forgetting — repenting the axis entire, Ben takes off in any direction opposite, out, only out, into the open to wander again within the world of direction, of progress and forward, onward and upward due west. Yea though He walks through the valley of the shadow of death, how it’s worth it, there’s nothing much else to do. He heads toward the tinsel, Him fearless of evil, with only a rod and a staff, which are one and the same and discomforting, by now without an underwear change — out to Angels and its Holywood, passing over playa to plagued, past saltpillars of snow formed to His form and none other: apparitions, Himlike white specters, frozen in their own autochthonous escapes. Don’t look back. Don’t turn around. Every three or so steps, He shambles into a length of railroad track, 4 x 8½ gauge its iron quaking, hot to melt the fall as if a train’s fast approaching, though none ever does: tracks snaking over and under the dunes as if boundaries to invisible countries, borders writhing like worms strewn across the emptiness of the earth; the track rough, battered, barbed, occasionally surfacing, then submerging again, winding veinlike, mained, through the rises and falls of the sand in its dunes. After four exhaustive five exhausted days, fording washes dry turned tundra, sidestepping sidewinders, tumbling weeds and mossy boulders better hazards on a roll, Ben begins finding these longer lengths of track, then descent, and then nothing; hombre, we mean nil. Then, other even longer lengths of track ahead, these at an impossible angle of turning from any section previously found. These discontinuous stretches lie scattering the pale, small stitches on the flesh of the desert, as if holding together the grains below, binding the sand to the fundament, the grounded, down to earthed, wounded in valley — the lengths that once joined these sections made timeline of the discrete, gone, disappeared, maybe quakeswallowed: a punishment if not undeserved, how incurred. He nothing else to do follows the directions these markers might indicate to any mysticism inept; follows them far until they have Him at a loss, turned around on Himself and Ben has to rest and so sits down finally here — around this dim camp coiled in a valley between two risen dunes, one the sun, the other the sacralized moon. Sitting His legs crossed in the native style at a flame fricked of His own creation, sparked by two scraps of track, ties He lies with then falls asleep with in His hands, slitting both wrists with them and so becoming His own brother — to live for Him this life upon a shade’s awake. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them. Praise be to God.
