Work in Progress

I’ve started the next installment of DRIFT:

I learned two things about Rachel Proust as we pursued the Martians through the Zagros Mountains. One, she was a liar; and two, she hated me. The first I didn’t learn for a long time. The second was apparent as soon as I became conscious after leaving Cyrus and Yazata. I was not at all embarrassed that I had tried to stay. I wanted to go back. I would go back today if I could. But I started to vomit uncontrollably and that stopped Rachel dead. She turned around on the saddle, a stack of thin pillows, a carpet and some folded blankets strapped to the donkey’s back.
“You are not only a coward, you are a disgusting coward. They told me you were a man.” She spit. “You are a pussy.”
My donkey stood still, waiting for instructions, evidently not caring what the pussy riding on its back thought. The first thing I planned on doing, once I got vertical and could catch my breath and wash my mouth out with water, was to make the fucking donkey learn who was boss. My feet and hands dangled close to the ground, but I had no strength; I was limp.
“Need a hand getting off the donkey?”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up.” I couldn’t get a grip on anything. My face rested on the donkey’s warm, redolent flank. I kicked and wriggled and finally somehow flopped off to the ground, not a controlled or dignified landing. I stood up and searched the saddlebags for a canteen.
“It’s hanging by a strap right there, you’re looking right at it.”
I filled a tin cup, washed my mouth out and drank the cold, stony water down. Then I stepped into the crude stirrup, a leather thong with two loops on either end, swung up on the saddle and took the reins. We had been idle long enough for a swarm of biting black flies to discover us. In seconds I was slapping my bloody neck. They were all over Rachel, who nevertheless seemed indifferent, perhaps because she was a pile of shit, used to being eaten by flies.
“I saw them last night,” I said.
“Who?”
“The space cunts. I followed the lights up this road but lost them in a narrow canyon.” I slapped and slapped until my neck burned. “These fucking flies!”
Rachel ignored me and them. “How’d you do that? Astral projection?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“It’s something in the Arak. They call it the snake. When the snake bites, you see what the gods see.”
“Gods? I thought you were Jewish.”
“It is a manner of speaking. I would also point out that in Genesis the plural is used, Elohim not El, a theological inconvenience.”
“Follow this track to a narrow canyon. I don’t recall the distance. I was flying.”
Sure enough, motorbike tracks were everywhere. The road was rough, maintained by the locals to a minimal degree, as they, like Cyrus, disdained the world. Disdain is not strong enough. I encountered hospitality and hostility to the world at large in equal measures and in the same person, getting food at someone’s door or drink from a well. But it was a worldly disdain—the hostility of people who knew the world, not of those who had never seen it except on TV; the Timonian rage of curmudgeonly poets of the capital living in rural exile.
The road was a dirt track, pitted and rocky in places, wide enough for a lorry to pass, with smaller roads branching off into rural lanes to isolated hamlets and family farmhouses, dirt tracks between summer and winter pastures in the high mountains. The water was sufficient for a small population. There was traffic but the fresh tread of two motorbikes stood out. They would be traveling fast until they reached the mountain passes, where roads would be buried under avalanches and rockslides.
That night we camped out in the cold, sleeping on the saddle cushions under thick wool blankets. I had built a fire earlier from pinewood and wild pistachio branches, oily trees that produced a strong, red flame and smelled like turpentine and incense, the scent I had smelled at Cyrus’s. As I fell asleep I thought I heard a motorbike kicking gravel and opened my eyes to see two headlights flickering away into the snow covered mountains.
“Rachel,” I said, “wake up. I saw the lights.”
“I don’t care what you saw, let me sleep.”
“I thought you wanted to catch them. I thought you were in a hurry.”
“I got no sleep last night because I went out searching for you, like an idiot. And I am no idiot. The insult is that you would make me feel like one.”
“I can’t do anything about that. You feel what you feel.”
“What I feel is rising contempt and anger as well as a rage that will not let me sleep.” She kicked off the blanket and walked out of the circle of light.
“Where are you going?”
“To urinate, if you will agree!”
Patience, I said to myself. “We are at a disadvantage. They could be twenty or thirty miles away before we wake up.”
“They are Martians. They teleport to their destination. But they must find the children first, is that not so?” she said over her shoulder as she squatted.
I watched Rachel Proust piss and pull her pants up over her beautiful pale ass. “Yes. I mean, we assume so. We assume they are together. But we have no idea how the children are traveling.”
“That is not true. I know,” she said, lying back down and turning on her side away from me.
“How do you know?”
“Cyrus’s brother Hans—”
“Hans?”
“Told me that he had heard from neighbors that they had sold food to three foreigners with an Azerbaijani guide traveling by horse. Their destination is Jerusalem.”
“Why Jerusalem?” I poked the fire with a stick.
“I’m bloody cold,” she said. I tossed on a knob of pine, which smoldered before breaking out in flame. “Do you have any booze, or did you drink it all?”
“I’m taking a break after last night.”
“The angels will sing. Give me the bottle.”
I gave her the bottle of overproof vodka I bought in Baku. She pulled the cork and chugged, gasping. “Jesus fucking christ! Is it napalm?”
“Burning pitch from hell.”
She snarled. “What do you call a dead sea that dies?”
“The dead dead sea?”
“Indeed. They are going to Jerusalem to sell their eggs. There are many black market genetic labs and fertility clinics in Jerusalem, it is a special business of our fearless idiot Mayor Bunny.”
She turned back on her side and I stared at the bottle of vodka. My hangover was the lingering kind, the kind that crumples you up and no matter how you try to smooth and flatten yourself out the wrinkles remain. “This is hopeless,” she groaned. “Why did you have to wake me up? Listen, I need you to fuck me.”
“What! But I don’t want to fuck you.”
“I don’t care what you want, I need you to fuck me. It is the only way I will sleep.”
“So masturbate. Thats’s what I do.”
“If you think I didn’t already try that you are stupider than I imagine.”
“You told me no sex.”
Rachel pulled down her pants and got on all fours. “Don’t even think about putting it in my ass.”
I took a long slug of vodka and fucked her from behind.