when the sun passed through me

I am without a body, but I can touch a hand to my shoulder and cup what feels like my collarbone. When there was light, I crouched on the long curve of the earth and the heat of the world rose against my lips.

If I am still here, there must be something for me. Something made, something promised. A precious object, a lesson to learn. A crown for me, or the rack. Some purpose tying me to this place.

* * *

When I was alive, I owned a car. Not an electric one, either. I had an antique petrol-powered car with a permit to drive as fast as I wanted across any continent. I remember being very wealthy. If a thing didn’t exist, I could have it built. The implant was one of mine. And mine, the only one.

I remember those early days. When the implant did as promised, and I found myself in the desert where I died. It was strange getting used to my new form, if that was even the word to describe it. Time passed slowly. The days and nights would chase each other like two emus, one white and one black, across the landscape. Always past, always present. I listened to the slow reverberance of tides in the earth’s core.

I walked through the scrubland to the place on the road where the wheels drove into the asphalt, making hieroglyphics. I put my hands on the seething, dark stripes, likening their warmth to the feeling of an amputee’s limb. A phantom sensation. Some stray sentimentality for the world I no longer wholly inhabited.

One day, while I stood on the road, a car arrived. It was a dimpled red ute with water-damaged solar panels. The tray had a dog in it, a black Staffy. The car stopped near the black marks on the road and a woman got out. They seemed like flickers to me—fast-moving candleflames.

Out of curiosity, I passed into the dog. The creature was curled in the shadow of a rolled tent, digging its face into the canvas. Its tongue was dry and its stomach throbbed for food. Its eyes were closed, but its mind had a kind of light pointing to the woman like a polestar. The light moved as the sound of boots padded softly on the dirt and then clopped on the tarmac. The dog’s ears flicked and it looked around. The woman had a disk of light around the crown of her head. The tail started to wag as the woman groped through the folds of the neck for the collar. A piece of metal snicked.

“Up, Pudding. That’s a girl.”

The dog struggled to its feet and shook itself. The wriggling pleasure of the act coursed up its tailbone to the tip of its snout, like being wrung out. Blearily, it looked around. The woman clicked her fingers. The polestar light glowed brighter around her head. The dog put its front paws on the edge of the tray and leapt onto the hot road.

“That’s a girl. Come on.”

The woman was tall and dark. Like her shadow, she crossed the curve of the world in long strides. Her form was solid, as mine had once been. The sun did not pass through her. It stopped at her, held temporarily in check.

The dog followed her eagerly. There was a cancer inside its belly that I could feel like a lump of jet, while its empty stomach gurgled for food. When they reached the wreckage, the woman stared at it while the dog went ahead, following the scent of dead meat.

The crash: the birthplace of my new existence. For a night, a rose of smoke had bloomed over the engine. Black paint had peeled from the metal like many puckered mouths. My body burned; the implant had activated and performed its last command.

Outside myself, I had wept and screamed, holding my unseen fists atop my head. The stars crept on in silence and the earth dully sang and I remained.

Remained . . .

By morning, the land had draped the car and my old body in a veil of dust, fine and red. By evening, my dead face looked just like anything else in the desert. The inside of a split branch, a lizard carried by ants, silver moonlight on the hills.

The dog didn’t take long to find my carcass. The woman started to yell, stamping her tan-colored boot. But the dog had its teeth in my forearm and the flesh was coming apart like pulled pork. Inside the dog, I too could taste it. The tendons rubbed and snapped like elastic bands.

When I was little, my sister cut her big toe at the beach. She cried; I held up my finger with a drop of her blood on it and absently put it inside my mouth. With this same detachment I engaged in my own devouring. The elbow, the rotator cuff, the jaw—an ancestral prototype, not parts of me anymore. I took a kind of pleasure in it, glad my old body was disappearing. It was impossible for me, in those moments, to feel grief for something that had become so foreign. Like getting rid of some rusted car part that had long ago lost its function.

At last, the woman succeeded in reaching through the metal of the car to seize the dog’s collar. She pulled, and I felt a piece of bone get briefly caught inside the dog’s throat. “Off, Pudding! Holy shit!” The woman kept dragging the dog back even as we howled, the howl becoming a kind of strangled yelp around the cinched collar. The dog coughed all the way back to the ute. “That’s so wrong,” the woman said over and over.

I left the dog’s body and walked ahead of them a while. The woman hurried, and they moved right through me and out the other side.

The woman locked the dog onto the hot ute tray by its collar, then opened the driver’s door and sat on the front seat with her knees pointed to the desert. With a shaking hand, she turned the ignition and picked up a dusty smartphone. I crouched on the warm tarmac. Her voice reached me over the desert wind and the throb of molten metal spinning at the center of the world.

“Hello?” said the woman. “Yeah, I found an accident about forty k’s from Tennant Creek. South . . . Nah, I did. Wasn’t the cleverest . . . Yep . . . Look, it was pretty obvious . . .”

She set the phone back onto the dashboard, swung her legs into the cockpit, and closed the door. She rubbed her face with her hands, staring out at the desert. The dog whined.

Out of interest, I pressed myself into the tiny gap between the door and the jamb and slipped inside her body through the skin, just as I had with the dog.

In the woman I found a name—a hard diamond around which swirled oceans of many mixtures. Purple-black guilt, silver hope, gnawing desire. She was fixated on Darwin. There, she prayed, she would find her great work. A community, a lover, a bounty. Everything, she believed, would be worth its price up north. I empathized with her. There was something in this world for me, too. Something promised. I just had to wait to find out. The universe would make manifest my secret reward.

I stayed with her while she rolled a cigarette. In my life I’d never smoked, and it was strange embodying someone while they went about a mechanical, practiced skill like rolling a cigarette. She put it between her lips and lit it. In the back, the dog whined. The smoke filled the woman’s lungs. I could feel the resistance of the membrane, the sticky tug of her breath. 

She ignored the dog, felt as if it had suddenly become a kind of a monster for eating my body. A creature of backwards grace. In the hot sun, she could hear it whimper.

When I emerged, I felt satisfied. Free. This woman was still bound to death. She lived in fear of it. She was terrified that her life would hold no authenticity or meaning. But I had fooled death. I’d avoided a mechanism that had ground its cogs across this desert a billion times and one more. Like a matador, I’d sent it off through the scrubland with its perfect programming undismayed. If death was a gust of air, I was a fish hidden in a pond.

I smirked as the woman eased her foot down and the vehicle lurched into the first step of a movement. It passed on silent and electric toward the haze and I watched it quiver and hasp in the road heat like the desert was a wet half-eye closing upon the dancing shape.

I did not feel cold as the night came on. The stars were brilliant in the galactic sky. The wind had a mouth and it called to me as if it were death’s blind twin, searching for that soul whom its brother had left uncounted. The only thing I could really feel was the small bit of warmth from the marks where my wheels had bitten the road.

* * *

The days, the weeks, the years came on. A group of men took my car away, stripped no doubt for its petroleum engine. People built huge powerlines connected to giant road trains that each stretched for kilometers of rattling carriages. Bombs fell, lighting the distant hills in starbursts, illuminating the undersides of black caterpillars of smoke. I witnessed armies of trucks move up and down the road like titanic animals dragging themselves from hibernation, the inheritors of mammalian rule shrouded in red dust. A township budded, blossomed, and withered away in the span of a hundred seasons. 

People stayed for a hundred more in its husk, using open fires to cook, hollow-eyed and starving as though they were hemmed in by some moat in the outlands beyond the hills. Sometimes I joined them or passed inside a member of their clan. But my presence would often be greeted by a collective shiver like a tidal passage. They would make signs to some god or machine of theirs and swear someone was pissing on their grave. My death-spot was a haunted site and they avoided it, except for the brave children whom I watched from my place on the road. The years went on. The town swelled again, slackened, and finally died, the walls the final things left standing. The wind continued to comb the landscape as if in search of me, grinding the stones to finer dust with each one of its bawling cries. I remained. In the far darkness constellations moved.

One night, the sea came in. It covered the parched desert in slow crenelations. When it covered the road I realized I could walk upon its surface. But as the depth of it increased, I spent more time underwater, in the silt of the drowned desert on the tarmac near the wind-razed foundations of the village walls. I stood there and pondered the plan the world had for me. I wondered when my crown would finally come.

When I finally rose from the depths, I lay on my back beneath the stars. I lay upon a mirror that curled completely around me. The firmament’s many fires rotated overhead and below me they rotated the other way. The deep underneath and the empty highness were one sphere. The moon did not block the sun when it passed between it and the earth; it made a black hole rimmed with flame. Booming through the vast depths I heard the song of the earth, many keys and octaves changed since I left my body.

One night, a fire appeared in the sky. It filled the world with such brilliance that the very ocean bucked and issued its vapors like the ghosts of everything that had ever lived. The dog, the woman, the bombshells, the township, and the car I’d died in all went up towards that great conflagration. I found myself sinking lower and lower as the sea begat itself to the light, until I was on my back against the seabed. Here, detritus and debris lay on the sand and underneath was the tarmac, and below the tarmac the molten song reached a kind of screaming crescendo as the core’s metal boiled to plasma. I stared straight ahead. The fire blossomed in silence and finally filled the sky and swallowed the earth and me.

The light stayed for a long time. It guzzled and vaporized until there was no seabed to lie on, just me in the center of the fire, and I willed myself to explode or turn to ash to somehow join its radiance. On and on it burned, so it was as if I had disappeared within the flame, but I knew that there was still a me and I could still touch my hand to my shoulder and cup the edge of my collarbone.

In the quasi-darkness that followed I saw each one of the visible stars scatter its mass, exploding in snowy beams and halos. I wondered whether the universe really did have a plan for me. Or if my existence was a kind of rack upon which to lie. I thought about how the dog had cowered on the ute tray in the frying sun while the woman’s mind was occupied with other things.

Everything went out, at the end. The stars each disappeared and the heat of them spread evenly to all parts of the hollowness so that there was no more movement, no more combinations or separations. The light finally stopped, and it was silent and dark and cold. I rubbed my hands together.

When things started to happen again, it was all very different. Even I could no longer sustain myself as I once had. The world shivered and started to move again in another form, and out of some mercy or exacting law, it did count me among its pieces.