October 27, 2020.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #16:

Fait Accompli, Chapter Seven.

Knowing you're being watched is a feeling right up next to knowing you're coming down with a summer cold. There's nothing distinctly wrong, nothing physical that can't be ascribed to other, more obvious causes, but you can feel it hot and alive, somewhere deep in your chassis. You just know. I knew when the Duckys had their twin gunsels trailing me across the wharf, I know when the house dick is home when I go visit the hotel Annie Xiu lives at, and I know I'm being watched now. I can feel their eyes on the inside of my head.

Maybe it's the angels watching me, ready to snatch my soul out of the desert air. Or maybe it's vultures who are waiting patiently for a dinner of offal and sweat-marinated fat. I decide to surprise them, whoever they are, and spin around on my bootheel.

A human head ducks down behind a tent, maybe eighty feet away. I shout hello and come out here, but they do not, which is impolite. I glower at them from afar.

I know that this is all likely simply delirium. I know that I am likely lying at the bottom of a dune, trembling, my eyeballs baking in my skull and the last of the water trickling out through my glands, my brain fevered and nearly boiling out of my ears. I will likely die before I figure any of this out.

Still, I get out my heater, just in case. I don't like all this sneaky business, hallucination or no, and I shout at the hidden figure, come out here, I want to talk to you, but it stays hidden. O well, if Muhamed won't go to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Muhamed, which is something Annie Xiu says a lot and I've never really understood.

I walk through the clusters of tents cautiously, holding the heater at my side. I let my bag of supplies fall into the sand so as to be less lop-sided and approach the tent I'm pretty sure was the one the head ducked behind, although as my perspective changes, I'm not so sure. The tents are almost identical, and blur together in their multitude.

Not just almost identical, I realize. That small tear in the canvas, down at the base near the door, the particular rash of weathering across the right side. They’re not almost identical, they are identical.

This is discomfiting, to say the very least, but no immediate action suggests itself to deal with this information so instead I continue towards the hiding place of the human head.

When I arrive, I peer around, cautiously, and find the human head attached to a human body. A young white man, his face worn and leathery, his blond hair caked with sand. He wears army fatigues, but not any army that I recognize, and they appear to fit him ill. He is gaunt and clearly malnourished, poses no threat, and I lower my weapon to show him that neither do I.

Hello, I say to him, and he looks up at me with hollow, terrified eyes. Hello, he says back to me, and I think well now we’re getting somewhere.

You’re hiding from me, I suggest. He nods. I tell him my name and he says I know.

How do you know that, I ask him. He shakes his head, and says, it’s too much. I can’t tell you, it’s too much.

I say O.K., whatever.

I ask him why he’s hiding from me and he says it’s his job. This doesn’t make sense so I decide to file it away and return to it later.

O.K. What is this place.

He tells me it is a camp, don’t I see the tents. I say yes I see the tents but I have never seen a camp with ten thousand tents in it, it seems excessive. He says it’s seven thousand, five hundred, and twenty eight tents. He indicates with his sunworn hand: the tents stretch towards the horizon.

I say wow, that’s a lot of tents. He concedes that it is.

His voice and mannerisms are queer to me. While we talk I attempt to figure out what it is that are odd. His accent doesn’t seem as if he’s foreign, I’d guess west coast or middle America, but there’s a lilting, tripping sense of naivety in it, a backwards sort of language construction that doesn’t sit right on my ears. I knew an enlisted cook who got a German bullet lodged right inside his temple who afterwards spoke in a similar fashion. I file this away too.

I say: why are the tents here.

The tents are here because they were brought here by Army men, he says. Are you an Army man, I ask? He looks shy when he says no. I think about the fire to the north and get an itching behind my ears. I ask why the Army men brought the tents here, and also if he’s not an Army man, why is he wearing some sort of Army fatigues.

He is nervous, and his eyes keep flicking towards my gun. I display it non-threateningly and explain that I am a detective from Frisco, sent here by the University to look for two missing men.

Who? He asks. His eyes stop flicking, and now settle on mine, level and cool.

I asked you a question first, uh. I realize I don’t know his name and ask for it. He tells me Harry and I say good to know you, Harry. I asked you a question first.

He closes his eyes. He seems exhausted from our brief conversation. Without opening them, he says, the Army men came here to build the Tower.

What tower, I ask.

Look, Harry says, and points to the south. I can barely see through the heat haze, but he’s right, there’s something there. There’s movement, dots that could be people like ants on a dropped ice-cream cone, and something larger. Little lines in the shimmering waves of heat, moving together, joining, slowly becoming vertical. There’s something beautiful about the coordination of the movements.

I turn around to ask more questions but Harry is gone. When I look around I see that someone’s stolen my bag full of supplies from the sand, and all my water and gin, too.

Well, I say out loud, to whoever might be listening. God-damn me, I guess.