A Gun in the Sand

I woke up in a dark place, lying on my back. I groaned as I pulled myself upright into a sitting position, clutching my head. There was pain there, dull, and pounding. Had I been drinking last night? No, this didn’t feel like that kind of headache. The pain was fading away  quickly, at least, which I was thankful for.

 

Still, I was having trouble remembering what happened the night before. It was like every time I tried to pull my mind back to last night, the memories slipped away into nothingness.

Frustrated, I turned my thoughts away from what had been and examined where I was.

I was sitting on what felt like fine black sand. I picked up a handful of it and felt it run through my fingers; it felt soft and smooth, very different than sand I had felt at the ocean. The light was very low. I could see a few feet in front of me, but no further. Try as I might, I couldn’t make out the source of what little light there was.

I patted my pockets, looking for my phone. If I could turn on the phone’s flashlight app, I’d surely be able to get a handle on this. I found it, not in my pocket, but lying in the sand next to me.

“Oh, shit shit shit,” I muttered, wiping the sand off of it, praying there was no water damage or sand stuck in the jacks. To my relief it turned on just fine, with full battery. I sighed, audibly, at my good fortune. No signal, and the clock was displaying 99:99, but somehow I had full battery. Good enough. I clicked the flashlight app.

What I saw was sand, and darkness – nothing I couldn’t already see. Of course, now I could see sand twenty feet off in the distance instead of just five. Whoopee.

“Well,” I said to myself, “That is most distinctly unhelpful.”

“I bet that light ain’t gonna help,” said a deep voice from just behind me. I nearly shat myself.

“ Bwah!” I exclaimed, spinning around so fast I fell flat on my ass. My phone went flying off into the distance. “Whaddafuck?”

Before me stood a tall, thin figure in a black jacket. He had one hand in his pocket, and the other one casually hanging by his side. So surprised was I by his sudden appearance that I almost didn’t notice he was holding a pistol, the same kind the army I had used in the army. Even in the low light, I saw its polished steel glint with a mirror-like sheen.

“Jesus Christ,” was about all I could say.

The man let out a dry, rasping chuckle.

“Interesting choice of words.”

I pulled myself back up to my feet, slowly, palms extended out in front of me.

“H-hey man,” I stammer out, “I don’t want any trouble, ok? What do you want from me? Money? My credit card? You can take ‘em, let me just…”

I reached for my wallet only to realize it’s not in my back pocket. I froze, one hand in front of me, and one hand digging into the ass pocket of my jeans. Holy shit, I was going to die here, in this… wherever I was.

“Don’t bother with any of that,” the man said. “I don’t want your money. I want your help.”

I had serious doubts as to whether that was an improvement in my situation.

“Okay, uh, let’s talk then. What do you need help with?”

The tall guy sighed, and shrugged his arms in a hopeless gesture.

“We need to get out of here.”

“Uh, okay,” I said, unsure of what he meant, “you mean off this beach?”

He looked upset with my answer.

“Look around you, man! Where do you think we are?”

“Uh,” I said, mind racing, “a beach? At night?”

The man in the jacket scowled at me.

“A beach, huh? You hear waves around here? Do ya?”

I swallowed, nervously.

“Well-”

“No!” he shouted, interrupting me. He crossed his arms, letting the silver handgun rest on his elbow.

“This ain’t no beach!” he continued, leaning back and frowning. I was vaguely aware that he was making a very important point, that I should be paying attention to his words, but in truth the only thought going through my head was gun he has a gun gun gun gun there is a gun oh my God oh my God he has a gun.

I nodded.

“Right,” I said slowly, “no waves. No beach. Makes sense.”

I paused, my own words finally connecting with my brain.

“… no beach?”

The tall man nodded.

“Now you see it. No beach. Some kinda desert, maybe, but not a beach.”

My brow furrowed involuntarily, and I put my hand to my chin.

“So, like, a desert? But there certainly aren’t any deserts in Rhode Island, and it isn’t really all that hot here… We must be indoors then, right? This is some kind of big room full of sand, maybe? Though, I must say, that sounds patently ridiculous.”

Now it was the other guy’s turn to look confused.

“What in the shit is a Rhode Island?”

I paused, a little stunned. This guy had a Jersey accent. He was white, with short brown hair, and a bit of stubble around his chin. He looked and sounded like someone I might have bumped into on the street.

“Uh,” I said, a little unsure of my footing, “where are you from?”

He scoffed.

“Dude,” he said, “I’m from Kabul.”

“You mean, like, the place in the middle east?”

He tapped his head with his index finger and gave me a condescending look, as if I was the last guy in the room to understand the punchline of a joke.

“Um, hello? Yes, my man, obviously. In Afghanistan. Our capital city. Can’t you tell? Listen to my goddamn accent, dude, I’m a city slicker. How do you not know this? You raised under a rock or somethin’?”

I wasn’t really sure what to say to the guy, so I opted for total honesty.

“Um… Not sure how to tell you this, but you sound like someone from America. You’ve got a really heavy New Jersey accent, and you look vaguely Italian. You don’t look, uh… like you came from the middle east.”

He stared at me, eyebrows creased in concern, and he looked at his hands and arms.

“Nah, no,” he finally said, “no, no, no. That’s bullshit. I know what I am, man, and I ain’t no American. Not one bit.”

He crossed his arms again, and chewed his lower lip, looking at the sand. There was a moment where neither of us talked, or moved. Finally, he looked up at me again.

“Do you know who you look like?” he asked.

“Uh, I dunno,” I answered, “a skinny Polish guy who grew up on the coast of the Atlantic? White?”

“No,” he said, “you’re a tan-skinned motherfucker with a big nose who looks like an Indian guy I knew named Rajit, and you’re speaking perfectly fluent Pashto.”

We both stared at each other, appraisingly, unsure of what to say next. I looked down at my hands, which were pale white, as always. I touched my nose, which felt the same as it always had. Not big, by any stretch of the imagination. He broke the silence before I could.

“I seriously need to know what the hell is going on. Something is really fucked up about all this.”

“Yeah, right,” was all I could muster up. I wasn’t sure if I believed any of this, but the guy had a gun, and I didn’t he got to make the rules today.

“Like I said,” he continued, ignoring my weak affirmation, “we need to get out of here.”

He stuck the gun in the pocket of his black jacket, and began pacing in a wide circle in front of me. He chewed his nails while he walked and, looking down, I saw that he was barefoot. I realized that I had been barefoot this entire time as well. Had someone taken my shoes?

“Well,” I said, “can’t we just… walk away? This sand can’t go on forever. There’s gotta be a door or a wall somewhere, right?”

The faux-Italian looked at me with sadness writ large on his face.

“You don’t think I tried that? I woke up here, same as you. You were lying down next to me in the sand, with a gun by your side, fast asleep. I walked away for what felt like half an hour and found myself right back next to you.”

“You walked in a circle?” I asked.

“No!” he shouted, hands raised upwards in frustration. “I didn’t walk in a fucking circle! I walked in a straight line! This place is just wrong, man! There’s something messed up going on here!”

This time, I was the one who let out a chuckle.

“No way. You walked in a circle. Here, let me find my phone, we’ll turn on the light, and we’ll walk together.”

He looked unconvinced, but didn’t voice any arguments. I picked up my phone from where it had fallen before, and gently blew the sand off the screen. I turned the flashlight app back on, and we began to walk.

The sand was flat in all directions, as far as I could tell. We trudged along for what felt, at least, like along time. I walked in front, my phone held up in front of me, and the tall man behind me, keeping close to make sure he didn’t lose me in the darkness.

The darkness itself was strange, too. It felt weighty, pressing in on all sides with an almost animalistic aggression. I told myself it was just my imagination. Darkness was darkness, just a lack of light. Nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t alive, and it certainly couldn’t move a little closer every time I looked away. That was crazy.

There were no stars overhead to guide us. I did my best to keep moving in a straight line, but I couldn’t be sure that I was succeeding. I tried my best to put that out of my mind, along with other questions that worried me at the moment, such as “Where am I?” and “Am I even alive?” I couldn’t even remember my own name, I realized a start, then quickly pushed that thought out of my mind as well.

I didn’t like thinking about those questions. Best to leave them for someone else.

The sound of our footsteps in the sand was the only noise I heard. After a few minutes the soft swish-swish of our feet was starting to drive me nuts, so I started talking.

“So, Afghanistan, huh? What’s that like this time of year?”

“It’s pretty awesome, man. Beautiful mountains, clear blue skies, and just absolutely stunning landscapes in every direction. Getting a little cold, since winter’s pulling in, probably around 10 degrees. Not too bad, though.”

I didn’t know if he meant celsius or fahrenheit, but I said it “sounded pretty nice.”

“Hell yeah. How about you, man?”

I didn’t answer at first, not knowing what was even worth talking about in Rhode Island.

“Well, I like a couple miles from the beach, so we see a lot of boats come through. That’s pretty nice. The trees are starting to change color, so everywhere you look you see reds and oranges.”

“The beach?” my companion asked, “you mean, like, the sea? The ocean?”

“Yeah. Not much to look at, really.”

“Oh,” he said, “I dunno about that. I never even seen the sea, man. I don’t live anywhere near water. Hell, I’m lucky to see the stuff when I take a piss!”

He laughed, and to my surprise I found myself laughing with him. I couldn’t stop; I laughed until I almost cried. We both did. It wasn’t even a funny joke, but we laughed anyway. I think we just needed to release some of the built-up stress we were both feeling. When we stopped laughing, we just stood still for a few moments, grinning like idiots.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

He thought for a moment.

“Dunno,” he said. “Can’t remember. Just kinda know some stuff about myself.”

“Same here. No idea who I am. Not a clue, just some random memories floating around my head. I don’t like to think about it.”

There was a pause.

“Do you think we…” I almost said “died”, but I cut myself off. I didn’t want to be the one to ask the question that I knew we were both thinking.

“Do I think we’re dead?” he said, catching my drift. “Who fuckin’ knows, man. All I know is I haven’t been hot or cold since I got here, and I haven’t been hungry or thirsty even once. Fuck, maybe this is just a dream. Sure ain’t no seventy-two virgins waiting for me here.”

He kicked the sand as he said this, and it sprayed up in a fan of fine black particles.

“You religious?” he asked me.

“Ah,” I said, “not really. I mean, I was raised Christian, but… I just kinda stopped going to church one day in college, and never really looked back. Don’t know why.”

“Huh,” he grunted.

“How about you?” I asked. He grimaced.

“Oh, very. I didn’t have much choice, honestly, but I don’t think I would have done things any other way. My dad raised me real hardcore-like, very strict. Said I had to do all sorts of shitty things. A few days ago, they said I had to…”

He paused, and abruptly grabbed his stomach as if in extreme pain.

“Ah, fuck!” he yelped, falling to his knees.

“What? What?” I asked, helplessly, kneeling down to him.

“Ah, my fuckin stomach hurts! Holy shit! Ah!”

He curled up into a ball, and started to cry. I didn’t know what to do, or how to help, so I sat down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He lay there, in the sand, groaning for a few minutes. There was sweat beading on his forehead, but as time went by, he seemed to be doing a little better.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He rolled onto his back, and stretched his arms out in the sand.

“Feels like I just got hit by a truck.” He pushed off the sand and stood up, wincing slightly as he straightened out. “Let’s keep moving.”

“But-” I started, but he interrupted me with a wave of his hand.

“No buts. Let’s go. We haven’t come across our own path yet, so maybe we’re doing something right.” He had an angry look in his eyes, like he had just seen something that really pissed him off.

“But your stomach-” I began, but he had already started walking. I was about to say something else, but I noticed he had his hand back in the pocket of his jacket – the pocket with the gun in it. I jogged back up to him, and resumed my position in the front of our two man line.

I tried to make some light conversation with him, but his mood had soured considerably. All I received in reply to my questions were one-word responses or toneless grunts. After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, I stopped trying.

We walked. For how long, I am not sure. Time seems meaningless when nothing around you moved. There was darkness all around, and nothing ahead but soft black sand, and the sound of our own footsteps fading into the void around us.

“Wait a second,” I said, coming to a stop. “I see something up ahead.”

There was something in the sand, something I couldn’t quite see, and that my eyes were refusing to focus on. It was black, and about 30 feet ahead of us. As I walked towards it cautiously, I saw it was not a thing, but a lack of things.

In front of us was a hole. I gigantic, gaping hole that stretched on and on into the darkness. I could not see the other side, or even if there was another side. There was simply nothing, as far as the eye could see. It stretched straight down at a very nearly ninety-degree angle from where we stood, going on in every direction.

There was nowhere left to walk to. Our journey was at an end. I sat down in the black sand, and just stared into the yawning abyss before me, saying nothing. After all, what was there left to say? I sat, and I stared.

I heard a click from behind me, and turned around to see what it was. To my surprise, my companion had taken the gun out of his pocket, and had cocked the hammer back.

“… What are you doing?” I asked, unsure if I would like the answer.

To my surprise, the tall man answered me, in stark contrast to his recent silence.

“Back there, when my stomach hurt, I remembered something.”

I said nothing, keeping my eyes on the handgun he had started waving about as he talked.

“The bad news,” he said, “is that we are most certainly dead. I remember exactly how I died, you see. The good news,” he continued, “is that I know why we’re here.”

He took a step towards me, gun still in hand.

“Funny thing, y’know, is that you were there.”

I felt a dull ache in my head again, like when I had just woken up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You were there,” he repeated, “but you weren’t dressed in a T-Shirt and jeans like you are now, friendo.”

“I wasn’t?”

He grinned, but there was no humor in his eyes.

“Oh no,” he said, “you was dressed up nice and fine in your prettyboy American body armor, weren’t ya?”

As he said it, images flashed into my head faster than I could process. The dull pain in my head erupted into a roar, and fell face down into the sand, clutching my head and screaming. At least, I think I was screaming; the blood in my ears was pounding so hard I could hear little else.

“Ah, you remember it now, eh? You fuckin’ see it?” I felt him press his foot onto my back, pressing me flat onto the sand.

I did see it. I saw everything. I saw him walking towards me in a black jacket, only he didn’t look like he did to me here. He looked like a regular Afghan man, in a black jacket. No italian in his blood, no Jersey accent. There was something underneath the jacket, something bulky. He was walking towards a bus full of kids.

Someone had yelled “fire”, and I raised my rifle. Pointed it dead at his face. And then, he had looked at me. He had seen me, clearly, through my sights, and looked me straight in the eye. My finger faltered, and I just sat there, doing nothing.

And then he clicked something in his hand, and just… exploded. Four kids dead, twelve others injured. Suicide bombing, they said. Not your fault, they said. Not my fault, I repeated. I remember thinking those words as I had put the gun in my mouth, and brought my finger to the trigger.

He kicked me, bringing me back to reality.

“I was wondering,” I heard him say, “why I was here with you, some fuckin’ American asshole, in this weird-ass place where nothing looks right. Oh, but now I know! I know, sure as hell. This is about finishing the job!”

I felt something hard press against the back of my head. I didn’t have to look to know it was the gun.

“It has to be,” he continued, manically,” it has to be be. I’m not gonna be stuck here forever. I won’t! I can’t! I’ve done too much!”

I could feel his hand shaking as he pressed the gun harder against my skull. I heard him sniffle, despite the pounding in my head, and realized he was crying.

“Please,” I said, my words muffled by the sand, “don’t do this. You don’t want to do this.”

He barked out a short, humorless laugh that sounded almost like a sob.

“You know,” he said, his voice strained, “you’re right. You’re really, really right. But I gotta. Can’t go this far and pussy out now, y’know? Gotta end this, and get on with this whole afterlife thing. Gotta! Gotta do it. Just gotta do it.”

His hand was shaking more, now. His gun – my gun – was rattling against my skull, each hit like a nail being driving into the spot where the hole in my head used to be. I braced myself for the bullet. I wasn’t sure that I could die here, in this place that wasn’t a place, but pain was real; I knew that much. I knew what a shot to the head felt like, and it wasn’t pretty.

But the shot didn’t come.

I heard a click, like the sound of a firing pin hitting a bullet, but there was no gunshot. There was only a soft thump next to my head. I opened my eyes, and saw the gun lying in the sand next to me. I turned onto my back, to face my companion, but he was gone.

His footprints in the sand ended exactly where he was standing. He hadn’t taken any steps, hadn’t jumped off the side of the sheer cliff wall behind us, and he certainly hadn’t flown away. He was just… gone.

I picked up the gun. It was loaded. Aiming it up in the air, I pulled the trigger and expended a round into the pit behind me. There was nothing wrong with the gun, at least. I unloaded the clip, and saw that two bullets were missing.

He had tried to shoot me, he had really pulled that trigger. And now he was gone. I stood, staring at the gun in my hand, mind a blank. Maybe one bullet

Making up my mind, I turned back towards the pit that surrounded this dark, sandy place, and hurled the gun as far as I could into the darkness beyond. I didn’t hear it hit the bottom, even though I waited for what must have been minutes.

And then I was gone, too. And it was good.