ONE

“New Moon come out and give us water,
New moon let it thunder down on us,
New moon shake water down on us.” -Traditional Bushmen song.

When I walk into his camp, I find him without his shirt, sitting by a small fire. I have walked for many days to find him, the cool air around us, now that the Kalahari day is dying. There is also the sigh of the veld, telling me how thirsty it is here.
He looks at me and I see something, small stars and blackness, shining in his eyes.

“Don'’t you remember what happened to you?”
I feel something slowly forming.
“
It is strange to see my father here, and he feels it too, I can tell immediately. I know that feeling of wanting to be in the wilderness, on my own, and yet, here I am, an invader of space. There is nothing to say, for the moment.

The spaceship is gargantuan, and my brother, I suddenly realise, the wise, but alien pilot. Now he is a stranger to me again. Not vulnerable but powerful, not cheerful, but brooding and guarded, and absent. There is nothing to say to him now.
I am gazing at the gleaming aluminium floor when my blue memory yields, for some reason, my mother. I have not seen her or even dreamed of her in years, but a vision of her descends on me now, in this place.

She is softer and more beautiful and I am only a seven-year-old sitting cross-legged and crying on the skin pinching red brick patio. The fun is sapped from me by the fiercely hot December day. The cicadas are sizzling, the lawn is humming under an electric mower, and she is pressing her red fingernails lightly over the burnt red crust forming on my knee.

The gleaming aluminium is back. I feel the metallic spike of pain; I taste my own blood off my grubby fingertips, just as I did then. I am even more despondent, because I know I am old enough to have to live with no mother in the world and my childhood is now inconceivably lost.

I hear my father's distant voice, I hear the tremor through the sandpaper: “There is nothing here.
I say: And the radio’s?
Don'’t work.”
“And your phone?”
At that moment it chirrups to life. It's a big satellite phone. I strain to reach and then flip it open. When I recognise the number my heart puffs a few small blue-green butterflies, and I notice a full strength signal.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi lover. I just called to say I'’m already missing you. I know you'’ve only been gone a few hours butuRRRppppp.”
I frown at the display. The full strength signal is gone, and so is Robin’'s singsong voice. I shake the phone but it is no use. I prod the display like an infant reaching out to the unreachable snowy images pixalating through a television screen.
”
My father appears below me, on a sand dune. Grass brushes his brown legs like dry feathers. I hear the crunch of diminishing footsteps.
“
Thank God you're gone.
I don't understand what he means.
There is a diary on his chair. I glance up as I open it, to make sure he is gone.

My brother's familiar scrawl.
Day 1
My hands begin to sing with blood, and my foot also fills with pins and needles. I lie there, feeling life flow in and out of me. I see a stream of blood drying on my fingers. I look closely and see that my nails must have banged against the ceiling when we landed, and my fingernails sank into their beds of skin like spades in sand. I put my middle finger in my mouth and suck it. Then I lick my index finger. My other hand is fine. Soon fresh blood flows out of the pink crevices over my still glistening nails.
I sink into darkness and when I awaken, the dust has turned to dusk, and darkness has fallen on everything close to me. I am surrounded by my own doubts. I slip away once more and only snap awake because an icy wind is snaking against my neck. This time I feel more awake, and stunned by my condition, and that I have chosen to stay here. A movement confirms that walking even a few steps is out of the question.
I see my fingers are covered in red again. I open them and they feel sticky. I feel something itchy on my eye and prod it with a bloody finger, and then feel my lip tickle and prod my lip, smearing blood there too.
For some reason someone’s philosophy begins to play softly in my ear.
Welcome to the desert of the Real.

When I find it takes time to put a face and a context to those words, I give up. There are other ideas distracting me. My mind is racing, even though my body is trapped.

And then my eyes travel beyond the dead instruments, the rubbery seats, the bright seatbelts, the flares and fire extinguishers. I see beyond this. I look further beyond the door, I see the heavens. I see the cosmos, sparkling, bright and magnificent. I only see a quadrant of it, a sweep of stars and planets. This is what ancient men watched every night, over the millennia. They learnt which stars were planets, by following their movement. They gave the stars names. I would one day learn that the ancients, some of them, believed that the stars are great hunters.
I look and gasp. I am so stirred by the stars, that, despite my agony, I move through the pain, I emerge from the black ship, and walk out of the reach of the black blades.

My neck still hurts when I turn it, and I clutch a big coat, thin but long like a blanket, around my shoulders. I glance upward. I feel like a bat, stuck to a massive dark, undulating ceiling spanning an incredibly far below city, with its swathes of stars, and hotspots. I shuffle awkwardly, and glance beyond nearby diamonds, to smaller, deeper pinpricks that the fogs and pollutions of Europe, America and Asia have always hidden away.

What did my brother say once? I have not realised our significance in the universe for some years now. I have been lost in my errands. His errands? Flying equipment to the Towers of Orapa - probably the world’s largest diamond mining operation in the Kalahari Desert.
And my errands? My paintings and harmless musings far from here, while he slowly bled to death.
These thoughts and unthoughts go through my mind like a television show. I begin to move back to the metal Ship that brought him here - here to all this space.

The heavens wheel away like some child’s gigantic bicycle wheel within the immense darkness of a garage floating in some forgotten neighbourhood somewhere. I scramble onto my seat, cooled by the air, and press my skin against it. I drift off, but am resurrected from oblivion by howling, the roars of lion, and much later, an early jet, blinking red and drawing an oceanic chalky skrr against the lightening night sky.

I sit in the cold blackness of the space ship. I chew absently on a cheese roll. I chew it a hundred times until it is a milky mush. I take a small sip of water. The bubbles seem to hook against my cheeks. I swallow and then lie back, staring at what is above me. I can hear the ships huge double rotors press against the air. I can feel the sand push heavily against the wheels that have spooned into the dune, and the belly that is crushed hard against the dunes shoulder makes little grinding noises as though both are engaged in a constant tug of war.
I cannot remember our fall from the sky.

I see my father with the kettle steaming beside the yellow flickering fire. It'’s your fault. You are to blame. He says none of this.

It occurs to me, as I fade once more, that a grain of sand can break a machine.