Sam Harris and the Search for Life

He is hot, damp from sweat, and miserable. Sitting in the shadow of a great rock, he looks at the hostile sun. He doesn’t like the way it seems to be enjoying his misery. He looks down at his feet, trying to figure out what to do.

He never paid attention in geography class, so he doesn’t know where he is. He looks around at the alien landscape. The sand is strangely red, dotted by vast, red rocks, like the one he is sitting beneath now. Mountains and valleys are visible in the distance, though he can’t tell how far away they are. To his left is the plane, wrecked and ruined by its joust with the great stone. Teddy’s body lies in the cockpit, covered with glass.

Sam looks at the body, and broods. He blames Teddy for all of this. Teddy, his cousin, flew cargo planes for Hormel Foods. Sam, taking a business trip to California, decided to pocket the money he received for travel expenses and hitch a ride with Teddy. Sam, a nervous flier, had been surprised to find that Teddy spent most of the flight reading a collection of Marmaduke comics, studying the book with great concentration and intensity, trying to riddle out each joke, breaking out into bawling laughter when he finally figured out why each one was funny.

Sam tried to assure himself that the autopilot did most of the work, but when Teddy leaned over to show Sam a particularly funny instance of canine antics, he seemed to hit something he shouldn’t have, and the plane began to dive to the Earth. Teddy tried to wrest the plane from falling and keep it from striking the fast-approaching sea of red below, but he succeeded too late, bringing the plane level just as it neared the ground, smacking into the great red rock.

Miraculously, Sam survived completely unharmed, though Teddy seemed to have died instantly, some of his blood grotesquely spattered over the open pages of Marmaduke.

Sam doesn’t know what to do. He looks up at the sun, afraid of how evil it looks, of how it seems to enjoy his pain.

He cowers in the shadow of the great rock, and whimpers, whispering to himself, “Help me, please. Help me.”

He wipes some sweat from his forehead.

“Somebody help me.”

***

In spite of his terror, the heat lulls him to sleep, and he dozes for a couple of hours. When he awakes, he is too dazed and confused to feel fear. He just feels a sharp and stabbing hunger, and a dry sort of thirst. The plane doesn’t have water in it, he already checked. Perhaps the worst part is that the plane is well-stocked with food. Teddy had been flying several metric tons of SPAM to California. If he wanted to, Sam could probably gorge himself on enough of the canned pork to last him several lifetimes.

He looks at the sun. His fear, though, is that eating the pork will just make him thirstier, and quicken his dehydration.

He rubs his hands, needing something to do, needing a distraction. So, neatly and meticulously, he takes of his shirt, and wraps it around his head. Surprisingly, the act makes him feel better, and he is ready to brave the heat. He stands, steadies himself, and decides to go off and look for an oasis, to search for water in this sea of red.

He walks out from the shelter of the great rock, and starts his wanderings in the desert.

***

He wanders for several hours, still completely in the dark as to where he is. The only subject he paid any attention to in high school was math, since he thought that would come in handy someday. To his surprise, when he got a job out of college, they gave him a calculator, thereby rendering the one thing he knew useless. He felt there had been a lesson in this, though he could never figure out what it was.

He looks around as he walks. The desert reminds him a lot of a picture book of Mars he had when he was a kid. But I can’t be on Mars, he thinks.

Still, the big rocks lining the landscape seem incalculably old, an inhuman history written into their stratified layers and folds. For some reason, the thought of how much time is written into these rocks causes him to shudder.

He wanders on. Maybe I’m in Mexico, he thinks. He doesn’t know enough to understand if a flight from Newark to L.A. would pass through Mexico. He tries to remember the names of those states in the lower-left corners of the United States. Texas? he thinks. Am I in Texas?

He is looking for an oasis, but the funny thing is, he doesn’t even know if an oasis is a real thing, or something that only exists in stories. He stopped reading once he reached high school. For some reason, it was precisely when he stopped reading stories that he lost a good grasp as to what exists in the world out there, and what exists just in books. He knew fairies and dragons weren’t real, but, secretly, he didn’t quite understand whether knights and pirates were real, or whether they only resided in books. The same applied to the oasis. The concept seemed too magical to be real.

After wandering for some time, he stumbles upon something. It is a hollow pool, dried out, forming cracked curves in the ground. The sight fills him with an awful heaviness that fills his heart. He sits by the pool, dejected, and clutches absent-mindedly at the sand. There’s a dead tree hanging over his head, and it makes him feel no better.

He looks at the sun. It is starting to sink below the horizon, and he remembers hearing once that nights in the desert are freezing. With nothing to keep him warm, he takes his makeshift turban off, buttons his shirt up, and crawls down into this hollow pool.

He curls up tightly, hoping it will at least protect him from the wind.

***

He awakes, pleasantly surprised to discover he is still alive. It is morning, and the heat is beginning to affect his brain. The vastness of the sky bothers him, for some reason. He wonders if it ever ends.

Remembering how his makeshift turban made him feel much better yesterday, he takes off his shirt and tears at it, stretching out the fabric, carefully winding it around his head. Again, it makes him feel better, as though his brain is now shielded from the sun.

He recalls his quest, and decides to head out and look for water again. He walks over to the dead tree, and yanks a surprisingly sturdy branch from it. It will serve him as a staff. Leaning on it, he begins to leave the dead oasis, but then he realizes he doesn’t know which way to go.

Crippled by indecision, he spends some time just looking off into the distance, wondering how to proceed, when something small and green on the ground catches his eye. He looks down. There is a small gecko, scurrying along the ground.

He has felt very, very lonely since coming to the desert, and the simple sight of another living creature comforts him. The gecko is still for a moment, and then it begins to scurry away. Sam, not wanting to lose it, hurries after it, hoping it will lead him to something good.

The two wander the desert for some time, until the lizard leads them to another rock, a big, sheer-facing cliff that seems to never end. The heat has rattled his brain, and, looking at the layers of the rock, he thinks he can detect some strange, foreign language written in it. He shakes his head, realizing there is nothing there.

Too exhausted to keep going, the sun still overhead, he sits down and hugs his knees to his chest. He looks into the distance, still not sure what to do or where to go. Then he looks over at the lizard, sitting calmly in the sand and resting, and this, for some reason, comforts Sam.

He looks back at the sand. He feels lonely. More than that, with all the time to think while wandering the sand, he has come to realize that he was lonely back home, too, and he will be lonely when, or if, he ever returns.

He suddenly feels an intense need to unburden his soul, to shed his secrets and share them with another soul. But there is no one here.

He looks down at the lizard, almost embarrassed by the idea. Overcoming his hesitation, he begins to speak to the lizard, and he tells her about her, and all that went wrong, and how much it has haunted him for all these years. And the lizard seems to listen, and Sam grows eager, telling the lizard the entirety of the story, feeling much better when it is over.

Night has fallen, and, his story done, Sam feels a deep hunger strangling his gut. He wishes he had something to eat or drink. Then he casts an eye at the lizard, still unmoving, but then his eyes dart away, ashamed at the thought. But then his stomach twists itself into an odd shape, distorted by its pain, and he looks back at the lizard. It makes him sad that it doesn’t take him long to decide.

He picks up a rock, and, hesitating for just a second, he brings it smashing down onto the lizard. To his horror, the blow only wounds the gecko, and it writhes about, wracked with agony and pain, shocked by this sudden and unprovoked malice.

Panicking, needing to free the lizard from its pain, Sam picks it up, and tears off its head. It dies in an instant.

Sam looks at the severed, little head, looks into the eyes, now dead and lifeless, and he begins to cry. He eats the lizard all the same.

It makes him feel no better.

***

It is his third day of wandering. He doesn’t feel he will last another day. His lizard is gone, residing in his gut now. It feels terrible there, like his stomach is trying, and failing, to digest a heavy mixture of knives and glass. He walks without much purpose now, simply waiting to die as he stabs his staff into the sand again and again, letting the stick itself pull him along.

He doesn’t really feel hunger or thirst anymore, feeling strangely detached from his body. He wonders if this is the first stage that comes when dying. He feels only the stick stabbing the ground again and again, dragging him along.

Feeling detached from his body, his mind begins to wander, and it keeps dwelling on all the things he could have done differently when he was with her. Talking to the lizard (who now dwells in his gut) awoke in Sam all the old feelings he still carries around for her.

He had been with her for only eleven months. They had gotten along great, and it was the first time he was really in love. On their first Christmas together, he proposed. She didn’t say anything, but locked herself in the bathroom, crying. Humiliated, his face red and hot with tears, he threw the ring into a corner of her apartment and stormed out. He never spoke to her again, and she never reached out for him. It was a strange way to end things.

He has always regretted the way it ended, and he has always regretted spoiling what they had with that proposal. He starts to wander if he could have done things differently. He wonders, if he had played his cards perfectly, could they have been together forever?

He keeps thinking of her as he wanders, imagining a life where the two of them are still together. He imagines a great cathedral, and himself standing at the altar. And he sees her walking down the aisle, the white veil obscuring her face, though not for long. And his heart is full of love as he stands beneath that impassive, crucified face. Then he dreams, as he walks, of pacing around the hospital room, praying for her as she tries to bring new life into a world of thorns. And he dreams of a daughter born, and he imagines every facet of her face, and he dreams of a home they all share, and he imagines each and every room of that home.

Walking in the desert, he dreams this life into existence, watches it unfold, and sees his daughter grow up, and leave the house. It is just the two of them now, washing dishes after a nice dinner, and then, out of nowhere, the thought occurs to him.

This never would have happened, he thinks. Any of it. It was never going to be.

He doesn’t know how he knows that, he just does.

It was never going to be, he tells himself again. It was never going to be. I’m sure of it.

He shakes his head, and the scales of the dream fall away from his eyes, and again he sees what’s before him. What he sees is a big pool of water, and he rubs his eyes, wondering if he is dead or still dreaming.

No, it really seems to be there, a big, blue pool of water.

He is nearly dead from exhaustion and dehydration, but the sight of the pool fills him with a new sense of life, and he hurls aside the stick, and races over, leaping into the pool and plunging to the depths. Under the surface, it is dark and cool, and it fills his body with a thrilling rush of cold. He swims up, and breaches the surface, gasping with joy, his senses restored to him, feeling hungry, tired, and thirsty again, but also incredibly full of life. He takes in big, greedy gulps of water. It tastes funny, but he doesn’t care. He is glad to be alive. He feels as though he will live, even though he is on the verge of fainting.

As he continues to take in great gulps of water, a voice says, “What are you doing in my pool?”

He looks up, half-expecting to see God, but it is only a big, heavy man covered in sunblock, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt, holding a Bloody Mary in one hand. Only now does Sam notice the house behind the man. Treading water, Sam also realizes that he is in someone’s swimming pool, and the strange taste of the water is the taste of chlorine.

In spite of everything that has happened, Sam is deeply embarrassed, and he looks sheepishly at the man.

“I got lost,” is all he says.

***

On the flight back to Newark, he stares at the clouds beneath the plane. He wonders what lies beyond them.

He spends some time thinking about what his life will be like, now that he has survived his first brush with death. He had spent several days recuperating in a hospital, and they told him he was fine now. So here he was, going back to his old life, his old job, his same old family and friends. But that is all okay, he thinks.

He accepts how his life has turned out, and he also accepts the fact that his wanderings in the desert probably won’t change the trajectory of his life at this point. He is too old for that.

Later that day, he is back in his apartment, and something bothers him. So he goes a few blocks down the street, to a pet store, and buys a tank, some materials, insects, the right lamps, and a green, little gecko.

Back home, he sets up the tank, and lets the gecko wander its new home. He pulls up a chair, places an insect in the tank, and watches the gecko eat it. Seeing the gecko makes him feel a twinge of guilt over what happened in the desert. He reaches into the tank, picks up the lizard, and lets it wander over his arm. He looks at it and smiles, glad to be of some use to it.

So not much changes in his life after his journey through the desert, but he has a new friend, and he is glad to care for it, and show it love.

He pats the lizard’s head fondly, glad to be of service.