1001 Nights Cast

However hard they work at it, they just can’t seem to get it in all the way. He’s pushing in from his side and she’s pushing from hers, folding it and crumpling it and tucking it under and trying to squeeze it in this way or that, but whichever way they try, the hole they have is just too damn small to accommodate it all. As soon as they get it all in on the one side, a bit pops out on the other, and endlessly like that—unruly parts refusing to stay put and constantly popping up or falling out of their assigned place.

This is week three or four by her count. They’ve been on the move with the goods, as he likes to call it, since before the weather changed. They drive further in with their van every day and at some point in the day, every day, they try again to bury it, hoping that the ground here might be more receptive to digging, that it might be more soil, less rock. If anything though, surfaces have gotten more and more resistant, more and more impenetrable, each hole smaller than the last one, the burial of the goods an ever growing impossibility.

Some days they move on right away, leaving in their wake a trail of holes. Other days they stay. Set up a camp. Make a fire. Cook some of the rations. Feels like a picnic, or an adventure almost.

*

Days come and go and nights too.

He talks. Monologues mostly. He tells stories about a man he once knew, or about things that happened when they were growing up, and why they went down the way they did. He tells a story about a man he once killed, or saw killed; she’s only halfway listening.

At the end he says, ‘You try to do the right thing, but sometimes it don’t work out.’ Or he says, ‘That’s how that was and there was no other way around it.’ Some days he hums, mumbling to himself between the tunes. ‘And this one—is this one too sad for you?’

Then, with a shake and a jolt of his shoulders, as if to bring himself back from some undeserved indulgence, he looks vaguely in her direction as though to establish that they’re in the same place, that they’re in this together.

She watches him when he talks and when he’s quiet. She watches the long shadows their bodies cast at sharp angles. Even at noon the shadows are very long. The sun never very high up. She watches the moon, always directly above her head. She is certain that they are somewhere really far north. Occasionally there’s an animal, or a shape, moving away from them, shrinking as it recedes.

Some days, unexpectedly, he says, ‘If it comes to that, I’ll do the right thing.’ She smiles back—admiringly, fearfully, with reverence and awe and trembling.

*

Then they dig again. In silence. With the goods in the car, on the seat, softer and less solid than the day before.

*

After some weeks, or months, but in any case long after either of them had stopped keeping track of time, he is not there when she wakes. She waits some, looks in all directions, walks the perimeter of their resting camp. Nothing. All around nothing but the straight solid line of the horizon.

She considers driving off. With the goods in the back seat—hastily, and without a plan. She considers driving off without the goods, leaving everything here, piled up by the rocks or scattered around for the animals. She considers looking for him some more. She stands next to the van’s window for a very long time.

Does nothing. Thinks nothing.

She stares at the stuff in the back seat. It has grown since they first set off. Things happened along the way; they accumulated additional goods. Stumbled upon some crap, some minor trouble. A few people got in their way and they did what had to be done. The soft ground they occasionally chanced upon often had things buried in it already—they had to unearth these first to make room for their own large bundles. He insisted that they take with them the things they dug up, or maybe she did. Can’t leave a trail behind. Can’t mark the places where the goods are buried. Their fingerprints all over the stuff.

With the sounds of the animals emerging from somewhere in the distance, she starts unloading the goods. In a sudden spurt of action, she builds a small mountain of bundles, bags, and parcels in the clearing behind the van. It takes all day, no breaks. She doesn’t think about anything as she moves back and forth between the van and the pile. It’s all high speed and urgency. It’s hard work and when it’s done, she sits calmly in the empty van and watches the mountain in the rearview mirror. The moon comes out and she feels dwarfed.

The noises continue. She turns the van on. Then off. Then on again. She paces around in panic.

The mountain towers behind the van. The moon above the top of her head.

To stay would be madness.