“Just put it on,” he said. He was holding up his own now. “I live out here. I know what I’m doing.”
I watched him press it to his face and ears. Now they looked covered in a thick layer of oily gel. I pressed mine to my face as he pressed masks over the faces and ears of GPS and Carpe Diem. The moment it was on my face, I felt it go from cool to warm like my own skin. Like it was alive. I frowned, slowly letting myself breathe. There was no resistance at all. I could also hear just fine.
“Without these masks, you won’t last long,” he said, helping GPS step into some kind of protective bright yellow jumpsuit. “Your face, ears, and lungs are now protected from the dust.”
When DNA was done, I looked at GPS and Carpe Diem and stifled a laugh. They looked as if they’d dunked their heads in buckets of water. And Carpe Diem, in particular, didn’t seem to like the mask because her eyes were wide with shock. With the tight yellow jump suits, they both looked like aliens. “Steer suits aren’t cheap,” he said. “If I had all my cattle, we wouldn’t be able to go. I’ve never gone into the Red Eye with my cattle.” He frowned. “Until now.” He reached for the off switch of the anti-aejej.
“Wait!” I shouted. “You’re turning it off?”
“Of course! You think an anti-aejej will be able to hold back Red Eye winds?” He laughed loudly and shook his head. “Oh, no no no. Maybe for a few minutes, but this small solar thing’s battery can’t withstand that kind of weight for long.”
Fumbling with anxiety, I wrapped my veil more tightly around my head, thankfully my heavy long skirt and a layered top were otherwise good for the dust storm.
“If you can’t quite see me, then stay close to the cows,” he said. “GPS will let you hold on to his horn.”
Just before he clicked off his anti-aejej, I looked ahead. I could see where it shifted from high winds to near madness. My God, we are going to walk into that. On purpose, I thought. Yet again, I marveled about how much my life had crumbled in a matter of forty-eight hours. What I saw up ahead reminded me of footage people on the Mars colonies were always posting on their social network accounts. The cloud of dust looming ahead of us was monstrous, spanning the entire horizon and lifting to block out the sun. In a few minutes, it would be like the night. “How the hell do people live in that?”
DNA laughed. “Some people like the dark.”
My heart was pounding in my chest. “Really?” My voice shook. Why did I come out here? There are better ways to die, I thought. But I didn’t really want to die any more. I had no foreseeable possible logical future, but I didn’t want to die.
“Who is this Baba Sola?” I asked. “Why can’t he come out of it and meet us here?”
DNA’s laughter was beginning to unnerve me.
“You’re just asking that now?”
“It’s never too late,” I said, irritably.
He turned off the anti-aejej. The force of the wind would have knocked me over if it weren’t for my ground grasping autobionic feet. I grunted as my body flailed a bit, then I leaned forward, sand slapping at my clothes. The mask was incredible. I felt nothing on my face, though I knew sand was grating at it. I could breathe perfectly. Not one grain of sand got in my mouth, and I could look around without sand getting in my eyes. It was almost like wearing a diving mask underwater, except the gel perfectly fit my face and made dwelling in the dust almost like a natural state. Still, the steer didn’t seem to like this “natural state”; they moaned miserably and crowded closer to DNA.
My feet were made to adapt to any terrain from icy to uneven gravel, and I want to say I walked more easily than DNA did. I mean, he wore only a pair of thin flip flops. However, this was more his terrain, and his gait was as smooth and unhindered and probably just as painless as mine. Then the sharp rocks graduated to sand and we were trudging up the first dune when the sand storm swirled around us. And still we kept walking, slowly, beaten by the sand. When we reached the bottom of the dune, the steer refused to go any further, simply sitting down, all pressed together as they groaned with confusion.
“Come on,” DNA shouted. “They’ll stay here. We go a little further.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he is always just beyond the worst of it,” DNA said. “That’s what they say.”
“Who is this guy?”
He shouted something in Pulaar and trudged on, leaning into the sandy wind. I followed him. I’d come this far, I would keep going. Plus, though the wind and sand whipped the exposed parts of my body and collected in the folds of my clothes, my cybernetic parts moved me on as if it were a clear sunny day with no breeze. Yes, these parts of me loved the desert and dust. My human parts were what suffered.
At some point, I grabbed his hand and his responding grip was strong. We moved into it. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I was in the dark and in that darkness everything disappeared, except me and what I was left with. Those men had had it coming, but so had I. I’d always had it coming. In the dark this was all clear. I emerged from the warm protective darkness of my mother’s womb poorly made. A mess. And then years later, fate had unmade me. How dare I embrace what I was and wasn’t, and build my self? Arm leg leg arm head, I am my own Allah, I thought in the dark. Three years ago, I’d made this argument to my ex-best friend Dimmy who was Muslim and he had slapped me for blasphemy. I’d never talked about it with him after that day, after that moment. And the idea had grown stronger in me. But I had a lot of nerve. And now I was in the dark.
The madness stopped. It stopped so suddenly that I will never forget the sight of it. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. That was the sound of every grain of sand in a thirty-foot radius suddenly stopping its tumbling motion and dropping. Both DNA and I were showered with sand, our feet and legs buried nearly to our knees. DNA coughed and stepped out of the mound, letting go of my hand. I looked up, seeing the clear blue sky above, the dust storm whirling outside the radius. We were in the eye of a tornado in a hurricane, or maybe it was the radius of a powerful anti-aejej.
“Fuck!” I shouted, kicking my way out of the falling sand trying to bury me.
“Quiet,” he hissed, despite the roaring of the wind around us. And somehow above it all, I heard him. I shook sand from my skirts and hair and was just beginning to feel like the worst was over when I looked up. I shuddered and grabbed his hand, pressing close to him. He was already also looking up, and he responded by pressing close to me, too. “I could have happily lived my whole life without seeing this,” he said.
Together, we waited for gods knew what. I noticed first. The fact that the storm seemed to be opening, expanding, widening, without shrinking or slowing down. And there was something that looked like a tent yards away. But how was that possible. Though it was fairly calm, it was still windy. And inside, the tent seemed to have a glowing heart. A fire.
“There,” I said, pointing. “You see it?”