Salt (21 page)

Eventually she came through and sat in the co-driver seat, but she was still abnormally silent, and sat with her hands in her lap. It did not look comfortable. The darkness thickened around us, and soon all that was visible from the cab was the Venn diagram of the three headlight spots on the salt before us. When a small stone, or a patch of salt-grass, slid across this shape of light it was possible to snatch a sense of movement, but when the path was clear (and I was travelling along a well-travelled path) the lights seemed motionless, silver-white, and the night around us was darkened further in contrast.

After a few hours I began to grow tired of this weirdly dissociated travelling. My mind moved into a near-fugue state, staring at the bubbles of light on the ground ahead, almost to the point where the white circles hallucinatorily lifted upwards and danced in the sky. I was not exactly tired – not sleepy, at any rate – but I decided it would be best if I stopped driving. I pulled the car off the road, and halted it.

Rhoda Titus looked at me, so I looked at her. I realised that she required an explanation (even though it was obvious what I was doing), and I realised at the same time
that it was somehow inappropriate in her conception of the hierarchy to ask for one
. It is a bizarre creed. We sat for a moment, and to attempt to put her at ease I decided to say aloud what I was doing.

‘I have stopped,’ I said. ‘I am not sleepy, but I think it best to stop, to go through to the back, to lie down.’

She did not reply to this, although her eyes opened slightly as if in repressed panic. My vision was weary from the travelling and I found
it hard to decipher this, why she might be scared, why she might now be gripping the driver’s wheel with unusual force. I could not be bothered to decode these fathomless signals, so instead I rose out of the driver’s seat and went to the rear of the car.

I opened the door and stepped through into the airlock chamber, an uncomfortably tight fit, even for a relatively short man such as myself. Then I was outside in the cool darkness, and my mask leapt at my mouth. I went round to the side of the car, and pulled free the car supports so that, should I still be asleep or disinclined to get up at dawn, the Devil’s Whisper would not knock the car flat over. I fixed one, then the other, and then wandered right around the car on the outside, just to check if it was all right. The night air was cool on my skin, and the yellow lighting from the inside of the car spilled out. Rhoda Titus was still sitting in the cabin, illuminated vividly in the windscreen: still sitting stiffly gripping the wheel, with her eyes wide. It was impossible, I decided then and there, to reach empathetically and enter her consciousness. It was blank, a blot. I shooed it away from my imagination, climbed back inside the car, and pulled my mask free.

‘You’re free to spend the night in the driving cabin if you like,’ I called through to her. Perhaps I was a little angry with her. ‘Or you can come through and pull out your own bunk. It makes no difference to me.’ After this I pulled out my own bunk, climbed into its envelope, and turned to face the wall. I spoke out the lights in my portion of the car, but the light in the driver’s cabin spilled through, casting out pouring shadows at the back and greying my bunk. After a moment it seemed that Rhoda Titus was not coming through, and so I called to her: ‘The light in the driving cabin is distracting me from sleep: I would like you to speak it out.’

For the first time that day her voice came, ‘Does it respond to common speech?’ It sounded fractured with lines of exhaustion.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Did you not hear me speak out the lights here in the back in common speech?’

She said, ‘Lights, out’ and the whole world went dark. I shuffled in bed to get myself comfortable but there was something, some little
grit of irritation that was preventing me from drifting to sleep. Presently, I heard Rhoda Titus rise, with a clicking of joints, from her sitting position, and attempt to come through to the back; but of course in the deep blackness it was not easy. There were several small knocks, bangs, and I could hear her sucking in breath to prevent herself crying out. It was ridiculous.

‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said, my face to the wall. She froze. ‘If you are coming through, why did you not speak on the lights?’

She breathed several times, and then said, in a low, hurried voice, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘You disturb me with your banging about. Lights on,’ I said. Bright electric light, the colour of condensed orange juice, filled the space. I turned over to look at her standing there, although the light made my eyes wince. She stood like stone halfway through the driving cabin hatch.

‘You are a strange woman,’ I told her. ‘Why do you stand there? If you get into your bunk, we can speak off the lights and both sleep.’

At this she began hurrying, pulling herself through the hatch, stumbling into the back. She could not find the bunk strap, and then she could not unhitch the bunk. I sighed, I think I remember, and offered to get up from my bed and unhitch the bunk for her, but she gabbled no, no, that she would do it herself. And eventually the bunk unhitched itself, and she climbed into the satchel and lay still. I spoke out the lights and soon after I was asleep.

The next morning she seemed a little easier with me. I woke before her, sometime after noon, and got up and washed, and went into the driver’s cabin. There I sat and watched the bright landscape around me whilst I ate a breakfast of grain and pasta. I pondered waiting until sunset before driving on but decided against it: the car, after all, was fairly well rem-shielded, and the dark-driving was tedious to me. And so I geared the car and started off.

The tremble of the engines woke Rhoda Titus, and after a little time she came through and sat next to me. Why she should be happier in the morning than she had been in the night was too much for me to understand. Perhaps, I reasoned, she was fearful of the dark.

But she said a good morning to me, and asked how I had slept. This was another cultural difference, I think; for she could hardly have had a genuine interest in my sleeping, and said this only to placate the person she perceived as being higher in the chain.

The afternoon’s drive took me through metal-bright sunshine and the white salt desertlands past the last outposts of the Als settlements. The track faded on the ground before us; the few cars that had passed this far south before had left no tracks deep enough to withstand the Devil’s Whisper. For as long as the Aradys sea was to our west the ground was rolled smooth by the wind, and the car moved smoothly forward. Soon, though, we passed the southernmost extremity of the waters away to the west: and now, for the wind, there was nothing but planet-belting salt desert: a complete latitudinous stretch of emptiness. The terrain changed: dunes of salt gave our journey rise-and-fall; and the further south we travelled, the larger the dunes became, until we were travelling along the spines, or diagonally up the face and down the slope of the megadunes. This was a landscape that presented a certain bleakness of view and, of course, driving now became a matter of mere monotony; yet I began to find it rather soothing. From the peaks of dunes, rivulets of finest salt scurried down the face, balanced by the wind and then released like Moses’ spring by the wind. A thousand scurries of salt so fine as to virtually be a fluid: they glittered. Driving became determined by a slow rhythm, the gradual rise, peak and then the gradual descent as we moved over dune after dune; and this rhythm was a sinal one, almost organic. It was the slow in-breath and out-breath of the flotation tanks. It restructured the circadians of everyday life at a more deeply peaceful level. And as we travelled, the extraordinary beauty of the world through which we moved settled slowly at the bed of my soul, like a rich sediment.

Rhoda Titus, however, did not like it. She became increasingly bored as the day stretched on; she began fidgeting, humming to herself until I told her to stop (and she did stop, although without the abject terror with which she had regarded me the day before). Then, as the sun finally set, there became almost something sullen about
her, something as of a child. She began saying things such as, ‘How terrible this landscape is, how wasted and terrible’ and then she might sigh and say to herself, ‘Well, it must be to God’s purpose, I suppose.’ Then, from memory, she might quote some section from the Bible, some passage about the destruction of Sodom and the sowing of the fields with salt.

After sunset we stopped and ate some food. Abruptly, in the midst of eating, she looked up at me and said ‘I don’t know if I’ve said how grateful I am to you for taking me on this drive.’

I was in a peaceful mood after the beauties of the day, so I let this idiocy pass, and continued eating. But she continued with her hierarchy rituals, and thanked me several times. Eventually my patience was eroded, and I started shouting at her to be quiet, not to try and afflict me with her ridiculous rigidist perversions. At this she became very white, pale as the salt itself, and her mouthful of food went unchewed. I, of course, felt better for the expression of my anger, and finished up eating swiftly; but she was too blocked inside to allow the flow of her own angers to come out, and it was easy to see the harm this ‘repression’ did to her. Her eyes were rheumy, her face began to flash with red blushes. But she said nothing, and I went through to the cab and started the car again. She did not join me. I drove for four or five hours through the darkness, and when I came through to the rear she was in bed, with the lights on, and her back to me. I got into my own bunk and spoke out the lights. Sleep came easily.

The following day Rhoda Titus was cowed, her head sunk so far forward that the back of it was of a level with her shoulders. But the rhythm of our driving was set. We woke at noon, ate, and I drove on until sunset. Then I would batten down, and we would eat again; and after food and the Whisper I would drive through the radiation-quiet darkness. As we moved south it became hotter, although the cabin kept the temperature at a reasonable level. From time to time we would stop and I would step outside and walk around the car, just to stretch my legs and admire the view. The heat was fantastic in the early afternoon; a positive pressure on the skin of heat, and the view
of salt dunes sparkling away towards the west. On our fourth day Rhoda Titus came out herself, holding her hand over her mouth to ensure she breathed through her nasal implants. She had not been out for days, and it was, she said, easy to forget the presence of chlorine and take in a choking lungful; after which the body reflex took over and coughing would automatically draw great shuddering breaths after it, which would only make things worse. I winked both my eyes at her over the snout of my mask.

But the world! My heart crumpled and filled like a lung, like a spiritual lung, in the oxygen of its beauty. I had rolled the car to the peak ridge of a megadune, and we stood looking east, where the great ripples of white powder, the standing waves, shrank in their perspective towards the world’s-edge. The shadows cast by the reclining sun stood out very black against the silvery-white of the salt itself, a barred range of black haloes about the white peaks. Then, to turn west and to bring up the hand like the peak of a cap to guard the eyes against the brightness of the sun, a white sun, tinted into a pale pink the colour of flesh by the refraction of the approaching horizon. Here the dunes possessed the eye, like the curves and the sockets of a body, swelling and retreating. Where the light caught the billion crystals of the summit of each dune it was shredded into spectra that threw out reds, pale greens, mistral blues, faint traces of all colours scattered in the air.

I dropped to my haunches, and put my bare fingers through the dense salt that made the dune. Up by the mountains, where the land has more shelter from the winds, the grains of salt tend to be much bigger, and to accrete in a variety of micro-shapes. But out here, in the bareness of the deep desert, the wind was the hammer that broke the salt into very fine globular grits. They rolled and trickled over the dunes like water flowing over water, the corners of each grain all worn away from the crystal. The grains rolled so smoothly over one another that putting a finger through the slightly stiff outer crust (which was the creation of the great heat and the slight moisture in the air) it felt like immersing the hand in water. I reached out a handful of the grains and held them in the cup of my palm, and it was
fascinating to swirl my fingertip through it. To draw spiral patterns, like shamanic signifiers. A few grains adhered to my index finger after I had done this, and I brought my finger close to my eye to examine it. The grains were so tiny that they fitted inside my fingerprint ridges. I had a sense of the dislocation of scale, as if the megadunes through which we travelled were only the indentations of a titanic fingerprint, and the car but a miniature grain of salt rolling from peak to trough.

I poured the salt from my hand, and the sweat on my palm held a patina of salt, like the dusting of sugar on a doughnut.

I breathed in and lifted the mask with my left hand, so that the salty finger could go into my mouth. Then, the tart tang of salt on the tongue, gritty but giving the sensation of biting down on the grain even as it dissolves in saliva.

But the wind was starting to stir, and the sun was near enough the horizon to presage the Devil’s Whisper, so I stood up, and returned to the car to brace it against the coming tempest. Rhoda Titus followed me, puppy-like, with her hand still over her mouth.

After we had retreated back into the car, and as we sat eating, whilst the rising wind outside began its grinding ascent to that world-scarping intensity, Rhoda Titus spoke to me, for the first time in days. She did seem calmer.

‘Mr Technician,’ she said. ‘It is difficult for me to know how to address you.’

I finished my mouthful and looked at her. ‘I do not see the difficulty.’

‘I seem . . . to anger you.’

This was so straightforward that I said nothing. After the silence had stretched a certain distance, she said, ‘So it is true?’