Shiroi yasumi no basho

Blanco lugar de descanso: Sección de cuentos y sueños. No todos son míos por cierto.

lunes, junio 07, 1999

The desert (incomplete)

The sun came up that morning, intense and really hot, it started shining right at my face and into my eyes, I turned around to avoid it’s bothering shine, when suddenly, I noticed my bed felt... like earth... like sand more like. I woke up like having been shot in the leg and looked all around me with my eyes wide open. Sand, sand all around me, sand and more sand, sand up to the farthest hill, dune after dune... a desert. I stood up very slowly, the sand sticked to my body because of the humidity it was releasing at the terrible heat that whitened the landscape. What was this? A desert, that was pretty clear, but I didn’t go to bed to the last corner of the Sahara. As a matter of fact maybe I did, for I didn’t remember what happened last night, this whole was pretty... insane, I started fearing that would be the solutions, until now it seemed the most logical one. I could perfectly feel this wasn’t any kind of dream, I felt it all real. Watching all the surroundings, I looked for the highest hill i could climb, it was all pretty alike, hill after hill, it was all at more or less the same height, as it is in any normal desert. The sun was hot as I had never felt it before, well, what can anybody expect of a New York born kid, the hottest climate ever been there was... well, not like this. I located what seemed to be the highest hill around. I ran towards it, the sand was hot as well, and I was full of it, my shoes, my T-shirt... I didn’t receive any curious surprise when arriving the top of the dune, it was more desert, anywhere I decided to look at, it was nothing but an immense and dead sandbox. But wait now, there was a strange thing towards the sunrise, it was more sand, but it’s color, it seemed to differ from the rest of the ground I could see. It differed indeed, at a beginning I thought it was merely a visual effect, I wasn’t used to so much sun hitting my eyes, but it was indeed a strange coloration, the sand there was blue, blue as if tainted with ink. I walked towards the strange spot, it seemed to be close when looking at it on top of the hill, but as I advanced I noticed it was at several kilometers. As I approached, the spot increased in size in my sight line. Suddenly, I saw the top of a strange and big peace of junk, some sort of a crashed plane, but it wasn’t a plane, it wasn’t anything I had seen before, and I couldn’t imagine how it had been before having crashed... or anything that had left the thing in those conditions. The blue spot surrounded the destroyed structure. I immediately stopped walking towards it, just some meters before I stepped on the blue sand, that defined a perfect line before me. –A container- I whispered. Some sort of a chemical transport must have crashed here, at the middle of nowhere, and spilled all this blue thing that now tainted the sand. If so, the thing could be evaporating into some poisonous gas. No, I would already be feeling something. Still, if it had been important or dangerous, why didn’t anybody come to clean this mess? Then a program I once saw on TV came to my mind: Sand storms, there are sandstorms in the desert, very often, but the sand described a perfect line before me, which meant it hadn’t been moved a single bit, nothing had touched it since the accident. Still, this didn't explain what the hell I was doing here. I couldn’t have been in the plane... or whatever the thing was, for in a beginning, I didn’t even know what it was, or what the blue thing could be. I started to think of all the things that the blue thing could be. Of course, I didn’t know to many blue chemicals, actually, I didn’t know any. I then thought, that maybe the crash took place not long ago, more than that, it had been maybe at the same time I somehow arrived here. Which must had been the last night, So then the people that owned the crashed thing and the blue stuff, had to come around to see what the hell happened to it. If so, my salvation was in waiting in here, until the rescue team, or maybe the company or corporation or anything arrived. I smiled slightly. But now then, what if this thing had an arrival date, and what if they wouldn’t notice it’s disappeared until it doesn’t arrive, maybe a week from now. I would die within the next day! Smile vanished. I had to enter the crashed machine; after all, communications are typical of any cargo transport. Since I had shoes on, I would at least be able to see if the bottom started to melt or something when stepping on the blue sand. I couldn't smell anything. Nothing happened, I slowly stepped into the sand. It didn’t feel any different to the rest of the sand; it was just blue sand. I approached the scrapped structure, I saw a little inscription in the exterior: “Don’t hold on the door when opened”. At least it was human... for a moment I made fun at my own observation, but at an end, I had to expect anything out of all this, after all, I had waken up at the middle of the dessert. The structure now started to have some sense and form, it seemed to be a large Jumbo-like little plane, a wing was completely smashed against the sand and the other one was broken and incomplete. Then I saw what would pretty obviously be a door, the door to the interior. The thing had indeed crashed from a high flight, but now then, it hadn’t left any crashing path, like any plane that crashes does, or any pieces of itself behind. It was all there, as if suddenly, it had fallen from the sky in straight line. Maybe it had been some kind of helicopter, some Russian secret project, some American one... I was obtaining more questions out of all this, but no answers, and now I was starting to have strange paranoid thoughts of military projects involved. I was starting to drive insane maybe. Since the door had some sort of lock on it, I started pulling it and pushing it to open or activate anything. Suddenly, air valves at the sides of the door threw vapor to the exterior and the door opened upwards, a red shine came from inside, I stood still, fearing to encounter the least expected thing inside... the answers to my questions...After while, no thing really happened, but as the steam dissipated, I could see farther inside the cockpit. After a while, I realized the cockpit was indeed empty, I entered the ship to see if I could find something related with the pilot of this thing. I approached a large console, full of buttons and switches, equipped with tree different screens above the windshield. The console was dirty, full of... pizza, there was pieces of cheese hera and a salami there, an empty coke dumped in the back of the seat,