The Rum & Whiskey Part 2

The Rum and Whiskey

Mistofer Christopher

Part 2

Four hours later, 1:00am in the morning, the tourists and the Bedouin sat under a black night blanket of 10,000 stars.  The desert was large and I was small.  The vast desert silence was so polite that merely our presence and laughter were raucous and obnoxious.  I said to the group:  “I’m going to bed now.  I want to see the sun rise over the desert.” 

I shuffled across the sand towards my tent, with a heavy sleep stupor, definitely not from whiskey.  I opened the cloth entrance backed with a skinny metal framework and paused to see what was house for the night.  Inside there was a bed frame with a mattress sitting on top.  “Wow! I was really roughing it.”  I removed my dusty shoes and jacket and crawled into the bed with my street clothes and sank exhausted into the mattress.  Right before my body lost all consciousness and control and slipped into overnight autopilot, a reminder popped up, the last tab that I left open in my brain. 

My eyes flashed open with unusual energy.  I thought:  “You’re in the desert Miller, the empty quarter, the alone place, the dark so dark it makes a black man…I guess black.   The stars will be so bright I can pick them from the sky and chew the silver with my eye, the silence so silent that I will hear my blood coursing like a river, and feel the bass throb of my heartbeat like the one throng stomp of a Debke circle.  I will be one with earth and heaven, sky and the sand, God and man. 

I sat up, got up, and got out, unzipped my tent and dragged my tourist mattress about thirty 6 foot 3 man paces away from the camp, South, East, North, I don’t know.  I threw my mattress on the ground.  It landed with a dull thud on the sand.  I lay down and looked up.  Stars as shards of glass sprinkled across a blacktop sky.  With each silent tick of a second, someone smashed a silent crystal chandelier…the glass went everywhere.   First stillness, then my ear calibrated to hear the breeze’s whisper. The silence smashed over me violently like a tsunami with its destructive wake of hush, quiet and calm.  I closed my eyes.  It was the same blackness.  Open Close.  Close Open. It was the same.  I raised my hand, tried to find it.  It was the same. Close open.  I waited a few seconds, the shards appeared again…