The Shaman and the Wanderer

The Shaman and the Wanderer

A.C. Valdez

The man sat in the cafe. From the window of his booth he could see past the city lines, and out into the desert, its flats and the mesa mountains. Small and vague shadows, which could only be assumed to be birds of prey, circled the sky in wait probably for some other unseen figures. And the sun peered over the mountains, and cast their misconstrued forms in black over the basin in the distance.

It was morning and he sipped his coffee, iced, as morning and afternoon and evening in the swelter may as well be all the same. His book and papers were neglected as he opted instead to stare out through the window, far, and imagine great battles upon the desert floor. He imagined also stories he had read, perhaps of El Camino Del Diablo— its travelers, who’ve come seeking freedom or refuge or things unbeknownst to themselves, turned around in the desert with the clustered and rotating night stars, guided by hope or hallucinations of beautiful springs or beautiful women or other figments of a desperate mind. Or of the lives and empires of crime which flow through and uphold the city and possess that desert. He traced back in his arsenal of memories how far violence and death and other known terrors had preoccupied the land and others like it. Lands like where Moses led the Israelites for forty years. Like where the destruction of mankind was conceived. Like where tales of humanity are lost, lifted away with sand in the wind then forgotten. And when he grew bored of that he chose to survey the room and its occupants.

He was what most would consider a lonely man, in his mid twenties, and he often found himself feeling pulled between living inside or outside, comparing and contrasting in his head what was intended for man by nature against man’s own will to break the mold, as well as the plausibility or futility of it. Man is a social animal, but is the crowd not what flushes away any and everything profound?— art, knowledge, victory, suffering, true friendship? True love? In his thinking his eye was caught by a couple, around his age. They were similar in height and both considerably attractive, and they waited in line to order their drinks. He wondered about them— how far they’d traveled to get to the point in which they are now, where their parents and their parents were from, what went on in their minds, who or what they are, if they knew who or what they are, what drinks they would be getting?

He quickly grew exhausted of this and of himself, yet refused to turn inward and instead grounded himself in the senses. The aroma of coffee was delightful, and the sounds of laughter and the human voice, which truthfully were ones that he loved, fell on his grateful ears. In a corner there were children playing, a brother and sister, sword fighting as knights of the middle ages did, but instead with straws. There were teenagers sitting in groups and distracted on their phones, not knowing this moment to be as valuable and fleeting as any other. He looked at the couple, then outside. He looked outside toward and into the desert, and reflected on his place within it, and the desert's place upon the vast Earth, and the Earth’s among the heavens, and so on. Yes, this moment as blessed and worthless as any other.

Through the window the couple from the line passed in an embrace, holding the drinks which they had waited for. They passed in front of his gaze, but it was not altered from its fix on the ominous beauty in the distance, where hawks circled and where travelers starved and where the sun set and rose without yield. No, not altered, not pulled away from the vastness beyond, whatever it may be.

He finally decided, whether or not he knew it, and he looked down at his book and his papers with some disdain. With his last sip of coffee he rose, and along with the plastic cup he brought his book and his papers to the trash, and dumped them. When he got in his car he sat parked behind the building, in its shadow. He sat there for nearly an hour, rummaging through cassette tapes meticulously. He found the cassette, then turned on the vehicle and inserted it. Driving through the traffic and hum of the city, the concerto played, and he listened to each note as if he hadn’t heard it plenty of times. When he reached the outskirts of the city he drove on, out into the desert wilderness on a dirt road.

When he reached his spot, far from civilization, he parked his vehicle. He left it on momentarily so he could continue to hear the music, and as it peaked, as the piece reached its magnificent violin cadenza, he convulsed as one might convulse by the climax of other means. He turned off the car and wandered out into the desert. He had no water, no food, and he walked through until dusk, both determined and uncaring. He seemed in search of things intangible, and he trekked as such. If a fellow traveler or passerby had asked him to reflect on his being there, would his sentiment have changed? He thought this among other thoughts, but there was no such individual anyway. He wandered on.

It was night and his car and his home were now things of another lifetime. The dark sky was not so dark, mottled with further and closer stars, and the very tip of a bright disk some unfathomable distances away lay dormant in the cosmos— Andromeda, the sister galaxy, ever slightly peering. He walked through the night, under these stars, and under the shadows of the mountains around him, with hardly any noise except the occasional commencements of small creatures or the howling of larger ones, and the whispers of a light breeze. He walked until he slogged, and for a man thought to be all encompassed in himself and of free agency, he found himself cursing god on his knees. He sat defeated at the foot of the shallow mountain, his knees dug in the sand and feeling the pebbles dent his skin through the fabric of his pants. It was here when he looked up to the moon, which was a white sliver past the mesa mountain top, and it was there where he saw the shaman.

A man bewildered and crazed, with all worldly knowledge and superficialities having drained from his mind and proven irrelevant, he trekked up the rugged rocky and sandy mountain. The cloaked figure remained, unmoved, and stood brooding as an authoritative figure still shadowed despite the moonlight. He found the shaman on the ridge of the mountain as unchanged as the mountain itself.

“Water. Please”, he told the shaman. The shaman did not respond, and no face could be seen behind its black veil. “Please. Help me.”

After some time in the still darkness the shaman spoke. “Did you not wish for this? To be a wanderer? One who traverses a world away from that of men? You continually chose and wished to walk the rope, and now that you’ve looked down at the chasm below, you wish for a savior instead?”

“A savior?”

“A savior. Men or gods, both the same.”

“Water. Please.”

“Say it. Say you wish for a savior.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, just give me some water.”

The shaman reached into his cloak and paused. “What is your name?”

“My name?”

“Your name.”

“It’s—”, the man ceased his speech. “I— I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Sit”, the shaman said, and pointed to a large rock engulfed in the sand on the flat of the mountain's crest in which they stood. The shaman sat on a similar rock, opposite him, and in between them burned a fire. The shaman handed the man a canteen, and he consumed all the water within seconds. Besides that, there was no sound in the firelight besides the fire itself. After some time around the bright warm flames, and staring out from the mountain peak into the desert plain and the night sky, the man rose up from his rock.

“I’m heading back down now. I have to keep going. Thank you for the water.”

“Back down?”, asked the shaman.

“Yes. I have to keep walking.”

The shaman, though his face unseen, undoubtedly stared at the man, and in a few seconds after their exchange of words began to exhale short laughs under his breath, and then finally burst out into a laughter which rang throughout the entire valley and upwards into the cosmos. “Keep walking? That’s it. Here is where you’ll stay forever.”

“What? Says who?”

“Says you. You’ve chosen a savior. You’ve sat down upon the rope over the treacherous void in which you chose to cross, and there you will sit forever, unchanged.”

“Bullshit. You’re crazy, man.” The man walked to the edge of the mountain top and looked for a path down, back into the desert flat. He could not find one, and after covering all coverable ground, even the spot from which he arrived which now seemed gone altogether, he sat back down, defeated. “How?”

“Ask yourself.”

“Is this because I drank your water?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not my savior. You just did me a kind deed so I can stay alive and continue. That’s all this was.”

“Men or gods.”

“C’mon, man. Let me back down. Just because you helped me doesn't make you my savior”, the man now pleaded.

“You’ve made these rules for yourself. Don’t blame me.”

The man kicked what looked to be a loose rock to send it flying off the mountain, but it did not budge and instead the man injured his foot, cursing and crying out in pain. “Come on! Help me! I don’t want to stay up here with you. Isn’t there anything I can do?”

The shaman sat stoic, and observed the man in his agony. “One thing. But it’s not for you.”

“Not for me?”

“No. Not for you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not strong enough.”

“Bullshit. You don’t know me.”

“I know enough to know that it’s not strength which drew you out here.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Passion, maybe. Intellect, maybe. But strength? Not so much.”

The man limped back to his rock and sat down holding his foot. He stared into the fire, and the shaman into him. “You say I’m not strong enough— that strength didn’t bring me here. But I’m here now. Who’s to say strength can’t get me out? That I don’t have, according to you, enough in the tank to keep on my journey?”

“By your standards.”

“Whatever. Just tell me.”

“Many have perished here, and that may or may not have been a testament to their strength. But what did that matter to them? You are for a different reason. Your journey, it lay elsewhere. You are here to run away from it.”

“Oh come on, man. What the fuck does that even mean? What are you even supposed to be? You—”

“Silence!”, the shaman yelled, and when he rose from his stone the flames rose with him. The man cowered, holding his foot like a wounded animal. “You wish to continue?”, the shaman asked, and the flames roared.

“Y— yes. I wish to.”

The shaman had circled the fire and now stood directly in front of the man. “Stand”, the shaman ordered him. When they reached the highest bluff of the mountain the shaman ordered the man to stand on its very edge. “Do not move.” The shaman revealed his pointer finger from the draping sleeves of the cloak, and placed it between the man’s eyes.

Upon contact the man was shown all the truths of his thoughts and actions, the truths of his truths. He traversed the crevices of the universe in which his mind dreamed of, and fought or befriended the dragons which lay deep in his soul. His eyes returned from the back of his skull and he fell to his knees. He vomited. When he finished he looked up at the shaman, and began to weep. “I know. I know who I am— who you are.”

“What else do you know?” The shaman continued to look down at him. “What else?”

“That it’s up to me… to build and burn as I please. Not you. Not anyone else.”

“And?”

“Nothing. I know that I know nothing.”

“Well done.” The shaman pushed the man off the bluff and he fell backwards, plummeting with a view of the night sky behind the cloaked shaman perched upon the red rock in which he fell from. Backwards he fell, screaming crazed during the descent. The shaman shrank down into nothing, and the cloak lay voided on the floor, and the fire burned out.

The man returned to consciousness, gasping, with his seatbelt nearly asphyxiating him. His car was teetering off a shallow dune not far from the dirt road, he was pulled down by gravity against the seatbelt at his neck. He grabbed the belt and using his bodily strength, the most he could muster, he pulled his neck up and away from the belt. He used his left hand to open the door, which was ninety degrees from its typical fixed position as a normal, functioning vehicle. The car reeled on the dune. It was not a far way down, but if it were to fall, it would likely land upside down, maybe crushing his skull or breaking his neck or other things which a primal part of his mind could picture in seconds and without words.

He unbuckled the belt, and his body slipped down, as it now had no restraint. As the vehicle teased its descent he gripped, from around the outside, the frame of the back passenger seat window. The remaining glass shards fixed to the frame sunk into the palm of his left hand, and all he could do was grip harder and yell in pain. With a burst he pulled himself by frame and simultaneously kicked off the driver's side floor, then rolled onto the top of the dune. The results ensued, and from his place on shifting sand he watched the car flip over and fall onto its top. It was as he thought, and the cabin crushed under the weight of the rest, immediately in the sand.

His hand was bleeding, and it ran down his arm to elbow. He stood up and took a step then yelled again in pain. His foot was indeed broken, and he walked in a hobble to the dirt road, then collapsed to his knees. He looked at his own hands, his blood which seeped from the left, bright red in the oxygen. The oxygen— the breath in his lungs. His beating heart— still beating. He touched his face and smeared that blood on it and he touched his body all over, his heart— yes, still beating. He stood up, even on the broken foot, and he laughed. A laugh of unexpected victory, one which is amplified by the flow of tears rather than brought to cessation, and he yelled at the sky in triumph. He yelled as a young child might yell into a great mountain gorge, in an act of defiance against parents or fear. He yelled at the setting sun, orange and hazy past the mesa mountains, and at the young moon, now glowing and awake in the calm dusk.

In his hospital bed he lay as a recovering husk, and here from his window there was no view of the desert, but the city, and still the night sky. He wrote, I yearn for something unknown to me. I yearn for something beyond riches, beyond the most beautiful women, even perhaps beyond the stars. Perhaps what I yearn for encompasses every dead star, traveling forever as cosmic dust in the vast void. Perhaps it encompasses every word ever spoken— stories told in extinct tongues by extinct peoples, as well their flesh and bones given back to the Earth. I say I yearn most of all to know, but maybe it is most of all to conquer. What is it I wish to conquer? This uncertainty? This need for permission? The only thing which is certain in life has loomed over me for all my time, yet now I’ve cheated it. This “it”— what is its origins? Yes, they do lay in me. I yearn to know, I yearn to conquer. Most of all I yearn to know what yearns, and then I yearn to conquer him. I will. By any means, help or no.