Canvas by Richard Strachan

Let us dispense with Beppe from the start. He was not real. He was transparently fictional, a phantom conjured up by a dying consciousness - my own - to help it cope with its current conditions. This much was clear.

Come on my friend, he hollered. You’re going to lie down on this beautiful day? Ah, don’t lie down in the dark …

There was sand in my mouth, a muddy paste that bubbled with my spit. Precious, not a drop to lose; I licked with a tongue as rigid as a stone.

Then I was standing, with no recollection of the moment before I had fallen. Overhead, the sun threatened me like a brandished fist. The sand curved ahead, a wave, a tide, and there was no sound amongst us of a distant shore. Just Beppe and me, adrift in desert. Endless.

*

Had there been wreckage? Perhaps I had stumbled from it in a trance of self-preservation. Had there been spewing fuel-lines, twisted machinery, blood sheeting down my face? I couldn’t say. What wreckage, what machinery? There was only scrubland and thirst, an inch of water in my canteen, Beppe at my side - relentless, upbeat and unconvincing. Before the scrubland there was nothing. There was only scrubland and my animal tread and Beppe.

First there was a spiny waste of rock and dirt, seeded with tallow bushes a foot high, a rack of knives on each bladed leaf. I imagined roots that stretched a mile underground, wriggling desperately like white worms through the dirt in search of the meanest drop of moisture. No matter how hard I tried to avoid their leaves, the blades would always cut me. Beppe skipped ahead, dancing merrily between them, scurrying back to show me the rocks he had found, the jewel-like clusters of crystal or the polished ebony discs. I said nothing. At that stage, I was not yet ready to engage with him, to give him the satisfaction of acknowledgement.

At one point, with my water gone, I took my clasp knife to the stem of one of these bushes, cutting into the flesh with the feeling that I was severing a tendon. Beppe watched me, his palms flat against his thighs, his jovial unshaven face uncomfortably close to my own.

He is not real, I thought. Yet I can smell the breath from his mouth. He stinks of meat.

It don’t look too good, he said. If it was me, I wouldn’t recommend!

I cut a strip of flesh from the plant and ate it, spitting out the husks of bark. A woody, musty flavour, the hint of rotting fish. I retched into the dirt.

You see, said Beppe. He was delighted, and tugged at my shoulder. You must listen to Beppe, he is your friend!

 *

Beppe had at first walked some distance from me, loping up ahead or often far behind. Now, if I turned to look at him or if he turned to look at me, I would give him a weary wave. He would shout encouragements.

You do so good!

Or:

Keep it strong, my brother! Right?

And he would give me the benefit of his grin, two thumbs stabbing up towards a sky as vast and pitiless as the ocean; gleaming steel dripping out in a wash of tempered blue.

Sometimes I felt my mind turn and settle into the furniture of old memory. A lawn dusted by a garden sprinkler; the view from the top of a street that seemed desperately familiar. The silence of an empty room; the comfort of voices nearby. A ragged swatch of canvas, caught in the wind. I would wrench my presence back into the moment, back through memory into this granular sea, the tallow bushes by now burned away to nothing and the scrubland itself rolling back into pale, shifting sands. The diminuendo of a desert wind peeled back the top sheet of the dunes. Earth diminished into sand. Somewhere I had taken the wrong turning, struck out in the wrong direction, and I was now too far gone to turn back. For the first time, I spoke to Beppe.

‘What should we do?’ I asked him. ‘I know you are the least convincing hallucination I have ever seen, not that many have crossed my path, but if you have any ideas you would like to share with me please do so. I hope I haven’t offended you.’

You not offend Beppe, don’t be worried!

‘Do you ever say anything at a normal volume?’

No! But do you, my friend? You say all in a whisper, and who else can hear you but Beppe?

‘I’m dying of thirst. I know it. Thirst, and … some kind of emptiness. There’s no stimulation here. Do you understand? Just blank, forever. A non-space. I will be dead soon, Beppe.’

I was lying down in the sand. At first I thought the gathering darkness was the final breakdown of my sight, or my soul beginning to leak out my eyes. But no, it was just the night falling around me.

Beppe was gone. I called to him, but there was no answer. The desert unfurled in silence, perfectly flat. The profundity of an empty place, making me feel strangely secure. Before long I had the makings of a fire. Sticks protruded from the sand around me - not sticks, I saw, but bones. As the flames grew I looked into them and thought, You are probably not real either.

Before I fell asleep, shivering despite the fire, I thought of a girl’s face, a woman’s face, the tender attention of a family. They waved, they held me close. Were they mine? Was this my daughter, my wife? Perhaps once I was the kind of man who would be missed. If missed, who would come to find me?

I dreamed of burning metal, that flap of canvas.

*

I came to myself in motion, strolling as if on a quiet Sunday afternoon along the ridge of a sand dune with no idea how long I had been awake. I was mildly surprised to find myself alive. And there was Beppe again, at the base of the dune grinning up to me with his hands in his pockets. I could smell him from here.

‘Where did you go last night?’ I asked him. He shrugged. ‘Were you scared of the fire?’

I was there all the time, he shouted back. It was just that you couldn’t see Beppe.

I laughed and felt a weak affection. Beppe, his whiskery face, his ragged clothes and irrepressible enthusiasm. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps I would not have lasted this long without him.

Then, a glint in the distance. I looked and felt love surge in my heart. Beppe nodded, cocking his head towards the sight. A silver star cast down to earth. A blur of green around its edges. No mirage, but water.

‘Beppe, do you see it!’ I struck out my hand as if I could pluck it from the ground. ‘Water, for God’s sake!’

Not just water, not just the substance that would save me, but a break in the world around us. Instead of sand, an image. Instead of waste, something had been created, a picture that I ran towards with more energy than in my healthiest days.

The sand grasped at my feet. I muttered prayers and fixed the oasis with a steel eye, willing it to stay in place. Be real to me, I said, be real, as Beppe is not real, as none of this can be real!

It didn’t move. I saw the tree green and forceful, erect above a disc of blue water.

‘Water at last, Beppe, water!’

Beppe had got ahead of me and was standing on the edge of the pool. He smiled and shook his head, and I threw myself forward, already feeling the water as cool and transcendent as a baptism.

Light, a white pain that spread across my face like fire. I flung my hands into stone. Beppe laughed, and it was only now that I understood he was not my friend. He was not here to help me at all.

What I had thought was water was a dusting of quartz, a smear of crystal in the sand that caught the light and threw it back in the image of a pool, limpid beneath a sheltering tree. I stood up and laid my hand against the trunk, and the whole structure disintegrated with a powdery smell of cinnamon. The tree was a brown mist on the breeze; then nothing at all.

I wiped my face, taking away a hand covered in blood from a hundred little cuts and abrasions. The pain of it burned like shame. Beppe nodded, an ironic smirk on his face. I licked the blood from my palm.

 *

Now at last the desert expanded. I had seen what it wanted to show me, and it was finally free of its need for the illusion of realism. Now it could indulge its deeper fantasies.

As I walked, I saw creatures ponder themselves into new shapes, from animal to vegetable to mineral, flickering away at the crux of their transformation into a drift of colour that seemed less a shade than a suggested emotion. Human figures would tirelessly beckon me forward, revealing only the shrouded backs of their heads when they turned to face me, their bodies then recombining when I tried to touch them into spilled ink or a glissando of musical notation. Dunes blinked into eyelids; a vulture rose from the ground, morphing into sadness. Black cubes born in the sand fell upwards to bury themselves in the guts of the bloody clouds.

There was colour for the sake of colour. There was imagery for the sake of imagery alone, until the whole desertscape seemed little more than a machine for the generation of these images. I began to think of the desert as a thing, an entity in its own right, inscrutable in all its purposes. Its means of communication was not the individual images in themselves, but the flux between them, the strengths of their juxtaposition. The desert was like a prism that let the light through, and each beguiling image constructed by that prism, blurring finally into a mist of geometrical shapes, was just the reflection of something that existed beyond the desert, something that I would never reach. Memory, perhaps, or just the small scale of the normal life that I had mislaid somewhere along the line of my disaster.

But such variety becomes banal after the first exposure. No combination of the bizarre and the mundane can survive its first initial shock, and eventually you will gaze on monstrous tongues enveloping disembodied torsos with the same heavy-lidded indifference with which you greet the road outside your house every morning. As the sand inverted into sky I found myself walking amongst the entrails of the dawn, looking only at my own feet and plodding onwards. Nothing now could compete with fatigue and the pervasive grip of thirst. This place, I was sure, was just where a consciousness came to drown, suffocating in the glut of its own productions. I was certain that I wasn’t in a real desert at all, even though I was scorched and parched. I was in a nursing home perhaps, succumbing to a final illness. I was in the eternally extended moment of a car crash, having suffered catastrophic brain injuries. I was slipping into the medicated afterlife of a euthanised terminal illness. I had choked alone on a scrap of food sent the wrong way down my windpipe.

Even Beppe couldn’t distract me now. No matter how much he capered, always nipping at my heels, or how much he remonstrated, I refused to pay him any more attention. Once, falling down the sheer side of a dune that had transformed itself into the glossy flank of a giant Bakelite telephone, I was sure that he had tripped me up. I rolled to the bottom. Beppe was soon patting at my shoulders, trying to tug me along the ground. I brushed him off and stood up. There was a sour, boiling taste in my mouth. I could hardly draw my tongue back behind my teeth.

I’m sorry boss, he whimpered. He slapped my back, but I was already on my way.

I slept that night beside a whispering stone. I did not expect to see the morning. I looked up and saw in the black welter of the sky a thousand silver stars, creamy nebulae, galaxies uncoiling in a helix of light and colour - all the wonderful indifference of space. It took my breath away, but even the stars soon began to fade. The ring of light from the fire was all that was left of the world. The desert had expended itself, and it was not just darkness that surrounded me, but nothing, nothing at all. I lay down on sand as soft as feathers; or perhaps I had just lost the ability to feel it. All my senses were slackening. In the emptiness behind the fire came a hypnagogic parade, a blending of shape and colour that I understood were the rods and cones failing in the soft material of my eyes, but the images still seemed significant to me, and comforting. Then the shapes and colours reformed themselves into the images of a woman and a child, the possible wife and possible daughter that I had perhaps abandoned when I struck out into this zone of abstraction, in search of whatever it was that I expected to find, and whatever it was that I had discovered instead.

I rolled over, my face in the dust. The stone beside me said, Almost time, in a voice too faint to hear. I tried to nod. I glanced over, and in the short flames at the edge of the fire I could see Beppe’s eyes, glimmering in the dark, his smile slowly unravelling towards me.

 *

They shot the creature before it had a chance to eat much more of the body.

'Over here,' one of them said. 'I've found him. Poor bastard …'

He was still quite recognisable. He was lying face down beside his crashed machine, and the canvas of its torn wings flapped in the breeze. One of the men dragged the dead animal away, and the other slotted another round into the chamber of his rifle.

‘Shame,’ the other said. He picked through the wreckage. ‘Did you really expect to find him alive?’

‘No, but … there’s always a chance, isn’t there?’

‘Out here? There’s never a chance.’

They bagged the body and loaded it in the back of their vehicle.

‘Still,’ he said. ‘It could be worse. At least there's no one waiting for him back home. I hate breaking the news to the family.’

………………..

Richard Strachan lives in Edinburgh, UK. He has had stories published in magazines like Interzone, The Lonely Crowd, New Writing Scotland and Gutter, and won a New Writer's award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2012.

Twitter: @richstrach