Now the cab had left the rows of tenements. The road smoothed, stretching long and empty over a flat expanse of shimmering desert. The country was still in the midst of hurried growth. Oil derricks stood gaunt on the horizon. Superhighways cut the desert only to die sand-covered deaths far from where they had begun. Many roads led nowhere, just winding and winding in circles as if someone had built them as playthings to while away the hours and then, tiring of the game, simply abandoned them unfinished.
Ahead, between desert dunes that shifted like the tails of dragons, lay the encampment. He had visited it daily, moving in among the goatskin tents and aluminum huts with his tape recorder over his shoulder, watching his footing on the hard-packed, excrement-covered sand and stopping now and then to speak with the Bedouins and Kuwaitis who, after eying him suspiciously, always turned their back on him. Packs of howling dogs roamed the encampment fighting over scraps from garbage piles; flies by the thousands had followed people from all parts of this land and now circled in dark clouds, landing to pick at festered sores. The sick who had hobbled from the desert villages kept to themselves; Naughton had seen them kicked and beaten to the ground when they begged food from others.
In the encampment, as in the city, a firm line was drawn. On one side the poor made their beds in simple tents or on the sand; on the other the wealthy sheiks constructed elaborate flowing tents with rich carpets, employing servants with fans to beat away the flies and servants with guns to beat away the beggars. For one of the wealthy to cross that invisible line was suicide. Naughton, on his fifth day as an observer, had seen one of them, drunken with hashish, stumble over that boundary into the realm of the poor. At once he had been seized and thrown to the ground by a score of men as others watched with glaring eyes and the women screamed in wild laughter. The man had tried to get away but they tore his robes and kicked him back, naked and bruised, like a thin dark dog turned from the house. Naughton watched it all silently, realizing from the burning faces that his interference would mean his death.
The cab turned onto a long unpaved road that led directly into the midst of the encampment. Naughton could see the sun glinting fiercely off the aluminum-walled huts. He could smell the stench of the human specimens gathered there, waiting for…whom?
Naughton asked his driver, “Who is this man?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes in the rearview mirror never acknowledged a question.
Naughton leaned forward. Perhaps the man hadn’t heard. He said in a louder voice, “This man they’ve assembled to see? What do you know of him?”
When there was still no answer Naughton muttered a curse. Try another tack. “Is he a prophet?” he asked.
Backward bunch of bastards, Naughton thought. Bastards all. This bastard was just as uncommunicative as the rest had been. He settled back on the seat, feeling the hard springs beneath him, and watched the line of huts come up to meet them.
It was worse than it had been the day before. The huts were packed side by side like sudden slums constructed in the desert. Lines of clothes hung from roof to roof. The beggars assailed his cab as it wound its way through the haphazard dwellings; they grinned through broken teeth and shouted foul curses at him after he’d passed. The sand was churned as two beggars fought, rolling over and over into the road as a crowd of people screamed with delight and passed money from hand to hand. Naughton’s driver blasted them with a horn and swerved. Naked children moved through the tents in the quarters of the sick, throwing rocks or sand at the bedridden. Everywhere clusters of ragged people swarmed like mad frothing animals and Naughton saw a man with a knife, stalking a woman who fell to her knees and screamed for mercy. Naughton wanted to strike out at them, to wipe them from the face of the earth as cleanly as if he had created them to begin with.
The cab slowed as a group of beggars hammered at the hood. The driver shouted, “Get away or I’ll run you down!”
Naughton reached over to roll up his window, heat or no. When he did someone caught his hand and squeezed it tightly. He looked up into the pleading dark eyes of a young girl, possibly fifteen or sixteen, who stood pressed against the door of the cab.
She said in a faint, tired voice, “Money, please.”
Naughton saw that she might have been pretty but for her protruding bones, sunken gums, and listless eyes that made her appear already a corpse. She must have gone without food for days. She whined, “Money, please.”
Her fingers were digging viciously into the flesh of his hand. He reached into a pocket for a few coins and gave them to her. “Here,” he said. “For food.”
The girl caught up the money and stared directly into his eyes; he felt a tremor of panic at the point-blank gaze. She suddenly hoisted up her long dirt-edged skirt so that he was staring into the dark triangle between her bony thighs. Across her legs were rough-handed scratches, blue-black bruises; scores of open sores gave forth a yellowish liquid that had flowed almost down to her knees. He started in horror and when she saw his eyes she laughed wildly, spraying spittle. And she was still laughing, her skirt up like a whore’s banner, as the cab pulled away. Naughton shivered with the bestiality of this place.
At the other side of the encampment they came to the clean tents of the wealthy, scattered across the flatland and up on a rock bluff over the assembly. Here there were the odors of spices and rich perfumes, of burning incense and flowing silks. Great gleaming cars, their back sides raked by the rocks and bodies of the poor, stood attended by armed servants. Naughton noticed the dented front grill and shattered headlamp of a nearby Mercedes-Benz. Dried blood was smeared along a fender where something or someone had been struck down.
Naughton paid the driver and asked him to come back to pick him up at dusk. The driver’s eyes were impassive and Naughton knew he would again have to walk back to the highway before finding a ride. He slammed the door shut and the cab roared away in a flurry of sand and dark exhaust.
You bastard, Naughton said to his back. All of them bastards. He plugged the tape recorder’s microphone into its jack and strung its cord around his hand. Moving among the tents of the wealthy, he saw the suspicious eyes of the armed servants. He started to approach one but when the man dropped his hand to his pistol Naughton moved away toward the stench of the packed dwellings.
It was then that he noticed a new addition to the encampment, something that must have gone up during the night. It was a huge oval tent staked out on a clean white spot of sand, removed from the encampment’s dirty rectangle. Trucks with electrical equipment had moved around it and Naughton saw workmen fencing in a generator. The folds of the great tent undulated sluggishly in a hot breeze from the Persian Gulf. There were no other dwellings near it and Naughton was drawn by its solitariness. His boots sinking in the sand, he started walking toward the equipment trucks.
“Hey! Sorry, old boy! I’ve already tried that. No luck.”
Naughton turned.
A man wearing a khaki desert suit had come from between two of the tents. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered specimen; his exposed arms showed cords of muscle. Two cameras were slung around his neck and clicked together as he approached Naughton. In his late thirties at least, the man had a tangle of light hair and gray eyes that had become red-rimmed from too much sun. He’d been badly sunburned; some sort of greasy ointment was applied to his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He said, “I’ve already tried the workmen. But they don’t know anything. They’re only employees.”
Naughton said, “I was hoping they might tell me something about what’s going on here.”
The man shrugged. “They were sent from the city. They don’t know anything.” He held out a hand. “I’m George Kaspar from the BBC. Scouting a documentary. About to burn alive in this damned sun. Who you working for?”
“Working for?”
“Yes. Your paper. You’re an American, aren’t you? Don’t tell me the networks want something on this.”
“Oh. No, no. I’m Donald Naughton; I’m a professor of
theology at Boston City University. I’m doing field research for a book on messianic figures. And you’re right about the sun. I never thought it would be like this.”
“The eye of the beast,” said Kaspar, nodding up toward that blazing spot of fire. “Look at me. Fried alive and raw in a dozen places. You’re here with a group?”
“No, regrettably alone. Had to finance the trip myself.”
Kaspar grunted. “Goddamn,” he said, brushing at a fly that had attached itself to his forearm. “Bloody things just suck at you until you’re as dry as a bone.” He held out a canteen. “Here. Better take this.”
“Thanks. I’ve got water,” said Naughton, indicating the canteen beneath his jacket.
Kaspar laughed and took a drink. “Water, hell,” he said. “That’s good whiskey. And God knows I need it. Here I am up to my ass in sand and God knows where the rest of them are. A cameraman and two assistants, out fucking around somewhere in our van. They up and left me out here. Fucking buggers. Three days out here and I’ve had it.” He narrowed his eyes seriously. “I mean it. Fucking had it. All this sprawled out here, this stink and…you’re a writer? You’re writing a book on this bloody mess?”
“A professor,” Naughton corrected him, shielding his eyes from the sun to look over his shoulder at the men connecting the generator cables. “I wonder what they’re up to over there. Have you heard?”
“Hell, yes. I’ve heard this and that and this and that and all of it lies.” Kaspar slapped at a fly circling his head. “The BBC tried to find out what was going on through diplomatic contacts. No luck. Then through personal friends. Nothing. Just a great mess of these buggers out in the desert waiting. That’s all they’re doing…just waiting. I saw a couple of fellows from The Times here yesterday, a correspondent from one of your magazines, and a few others from area publications. But this mass of humanity is sickening. I was told to get my ass out here; I wouldn’t have fucking come if it were left to me. I’m going to have to go to the hospital when I get back.”
Naughton started walking away from the huge tent toward the smoking expanse of huts. Kaspar walked with him. “You’re not going into that mess, are you? Hell, it’s a risk of life in that bloody caldron.”
They left the opulent tents and crossed that invisible line over into the other side. The odors of excrement, both animal and human, and the odor of something else, indescribable in its baseness, hit them full in the face. Kaspar drew back but then followed Naughton when he saw the other man was going on.
“What’s this about a book?” Kaspar asked. “You’re working on a book?”
“Yes. I needed firsthand contact with a mass religious assembly like this to—”
“Fucking buggers,” Kaspar said. “Fucking buggers to leave me out here. I’ll fix their asses.”
They walked shoulder to shoulder among the walls of goatskin and hot blinding aluminum, hearing everywhere sobs and shouts, screams of wrath and wild uncontained laughter. They ran into a whirling black cloud of flies. The fires of burning garbage piles glowed orange around them; the smoke drifted down like a yellow door cutting off retreat. Rounding a cluster of aluminum huts Kaspar gasped audibly and stepped back, bumping into Naughton. Before them a pack of dogs spun in a mad death fight, their slavering jaws snapping the air, over a thick piece of tattered bloody meat. Neither Kaspar nor Naughton dared even guess what the mauled bit of flesh had been; they made a wide circle of the dogs and heard their growling fade in the distance.
“I’m going back,” Kaspar said after another moment. “This is too bloody much for me.”
“Go ahead. But it’ll be easy to get lost back there,” Naughton replied.
“The hell with that,” the other man said. He waved a hand and turned to retrace his steps in the opposite direction.
But then he had stopped, frozen in the sun, and Naughton heard the click-click-click of his cameras bumping together.
Naughton looked to see what was wrong. As he spun around, he was aware of figures darting amid the murky haze of yellow smoke, shadows hiding behind walls and water barrels. The smoke began to burn the back of Naughton’s throat.
Kaspar said, “Great Jesus! Who is that there? Did you see them?”
Naughton stood still and watched but they were hiding. Around the two men the yellow walls dropped until they were as close and tight as those of any prison.
“They’re following us,” Naughton said finally. “Come on.” He grasped the man’s shoulder and pulled him along as they ducked through the narrow alleys. When Kaspar looked back Naughton felt him go tense as he realized they—whoever they were—were still behind them, following just out of reach and then hiding when the two men turned to see.
And finally Kaspar turned and shouted, “Get away you bloody bastards!” and was answered by a thin piercing laugh that came to them through the silence of the smoke.
They went on. At all sides they were haunted by shrill laughter, mutterings, and screams. Dark faces watched them; the dark faces held red eyes and had gleaming yellow teeth as sharp as those of the dogs that battled for garbage and human refuse.
At last they came to the far side of the encampment where the sick were banished from the rest of the assembly. The sun burned down on pitiful bodies coughing thick liquids and blood into the sand. Some lay on cots, others sprawled out on the ground as if claiming the right to die on a particular spot. Stepping among the huts and bodies, the two men continued to look back to make sure they were not still being tracked.
Kaspar said, “What is this place? What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know,” Naughton said. “Something’s gone wrong—this is madness.”
“Madness?” someone asked. “Madness? Who is there?”
Naughton looked around. An old man, so thin his bones seemed to bear no flesh at all, sat in the sand with his back to an aluminum wall. His skin was almost black while the hair on his head was white and clean. The old man sat cross-legged, his frail straw arms in his naked lap, and Naughton saw that he was staring directly into the afternoon sun. His eyes were incredibly black hollows. Naughton knew the eyeballs had retreated from the sun’s power; the old man had been burned blind.
“Madness?” the old man asked again, tilting his head to catch the voice he’d heard. “Is someone there?”
Naughton bent down, squinting against the sun reflected off the metal wall, and softly touched the old man’s hard cheeks. The old man started at the touch and jerked back but Naughton said, “I mean you no harm.”
“Where’d those fucking buggers go?” Kaspar asked.
“Who is there?” asked the old man, fumbling weakly for Naughton’s hand, his own hard fingers searching, searching, then finally lacing with the young American’s.
“A soft man,” he said as he felt Naughton’s hands. “No work against the weather. I’m blind.”
“Yes,” said Naughton, staring into those deep sockets. “You’ve blinded yourself.”
“Just up and left my ass here,” said Kaspar, his expensive Nikons cracking together like pistol shots. “I’ll kill them.”
“There were men following us,” Naughton said.
“Yes. I hear the beating of your heart. I smell your fear.”
“I’m an American,” Naughton said. “I want to know what’s happening here. Have these people gone mad?”
The old man smiled, showing yellowed teeth broken and ground into stubs, and shook his head as if he had just heard a joke. “Mad? Mad? No. There is no longer any madness. There is now only what is.” He turned his face toward the heat of the sun and its golden fire settled in his sightless eyes. “I can still see the sun; I am not yet blind after all. And while I can still see there is no hope.”
“What?” Naughton asked. “What?”
Kaspar said, “Let’s get out of here, old boy. Take to the desert and get back to the highway.”
“I came to this place with my daughter and her husband,” the old man was saying. “A new life, they
said. Here we will find a new life, they said. And here they left me. I don’t know where they are. She was my daughter until she reached this place; then I knew her no longer. I must burn it out. I must burn it out.”
“Huh?” Kaspar said. “What’s that old cock talking about?”
Naughton leaned forward. “Who have these people assembled to see? Who will give your daughter a new life?”
The old man nodded. “Yes. A new life is what she said.”
“Who will give her a new life?”
The old man groped for Naughton’s face; his fingers traced the lips and nose, felt along his cheeks. “Can you help me find them? Perhaps they will still go back with me. Help me.”
“Come on, Naughton. He’s crazy.”
“No!” Naughton said harshly over his shoulder. He turned back to the old man. “I’ll help you. But who…what is the name of the man you’ve come to find?”
The old man smiled again. “Baal,” he said. “Baal.”
Something clattered off the wall of the aluminum hut and fell to Naughton’s feet. A rock.
He looked up to see Kaspar ducking, shielding the lens of his cameras with one hand. And beyond Kaspar ragged hollow-eyed men and women stood in a semicircle. Naughton could hear their breathing, coarse and hot. They held jagged stones. A thin Bedouin in gaily colored rags reared back and threw his weapon. Naughton dodged; the rock sang past his head and cracked off the metal.
“Jesus Christ!” Kaspar shouted. “Have you people gone fucking nuts? I’m a British citizen!”
Someone else, a woman, threw her stone and Naughton heard Kaspar grunt. Then the air was filled with them, clattering off the metal wall and striking Naughton on the arms he had brought up to protect his head. He looked down and saw that a stone had struck the old man; his head was gashed above the empty pools of his eyes. Kaspar shouted out in pain and staggered back, holding his chest where a shattered camera dangled, the lens dripping glass. Then Naughton saw another stone strike Kaspar directly on the head and he fell to his knees, his head dragging.