Blue

"Check this out," she says, rummaging in her backpack, "You have to see this."

Her voice is high and oddly accented, uptilting at the ends of sentences.

She is one of those who lead me to doubt my own mother tongue, to suspect that the streamlined constructions of educated foreigners, or the Frankenstein soothings of train announcements and customer support lines are the real language, and the stuff we chew from our Anglophone cradles is only so much mud, so much heartfelt and obsolete mud.

Bugs swarm around the bare white bulb. When I first saw the room, in the slanting rays of early morning, the hour that makes magic out of dust, the mosquito nets hung like disintegrated sails above the ranks of single beds. Light streamed in through a window with no glass and no frame and you could see the blisters and bubbles in the thick white paint. The battered beds as objectively beautiful as the still lives of any worm eaten master. A backpacker sat on one of them half shrouded in the mosquito net with his bare brown legs revealed. He was smoking a joint. The blue-grey smoke solid as sculpture in the sidelong light. I saw him smoking on the unmade bed with the empty souls of the mosquito nets and the bare concrete floor about him and the naked bulb wired up in the middle of the ceiling with the black wire taped along the wall through the door to the kitchen, and all I could think was that I had to have a photo. I had to have a photo to hold the moment tight. To stop it slipping away and leaving me vacant, kicking around for a stimulation already gone, a nerve flooded and fired and died. But when I reached for my camera a thousand insecurity whinged in my head. How would I frame the shot? Would I be able to capture the light? What settings should I use? Would the picture be the one that bloomed in my heart? Would it trample the memory rather than capture it? Was the spell breaking, yes the spell was breaking, you cannot live the moment and record it at once.

She rummages deeper.

"In here somewhere."

Her vest falls forwards and I see long tapered shadows beneath her collarbone and light knitted shadows between her ribs and the fleshy uncertainty of the tops of her breasts. In the world where I want to live my hands are already on her waist, my lips are on her lips. There there is no gap between desire and deed, no dead moments where doubts split and breed and grime the cracks of bright volition. There time flows unheeding and unhesitating and sparkles in the sun and is dimpled by the rain and life is borne with it like a log to the sea. There we live naked and flower-strewn, there everything is permitted and nothing is thought and not enacted and we roll naked on a blanket of flowers, touch each other on a blanket of flowers.

"Gotcha."

She pulls out a drawstrung pouch of hi-tech fabric, the kind that comes with ten year guarantees and booklets of hybrid words and reassuring pictures, water rolling off in bright clear pearls, sand and stone leaving no scars, mud flaking tracelessly away. She pinches the black toggle and slips it up the drawstring and widens the pursed mouth of the pouch and slides out a long white scroll. I watch her unroll it, skinny blonde magus preparing a spell. Something of my distanced and likening perspective must have reached her because she says, I know, I always feel like a wizard when I take this thing out. Her voice uptilting. She lays the page out flat on her lap and the yellowed light beats off its surface, white and smooth with a low sheen. I can see the magic asleep inside it. Spawn of the same technology that made the pouch, that makes all things in our magnificent multifarious world, the moist dark heart of our ingenuity and curiosity, the soil our own soil beget within us, where forms emerge undifferentiated and undescribed and only in the describing do they become at all, birthed by the same ceaseless chatter that fills our mouths and phones and screens and minds, and hidden within it, and as hard to find as gold in silt, yet once released upon the seething intelligence of the world these vacuous words become indestructible, irreversible, cleaving ever tighter to the needs that shape them. From the brutal slime of drives and needs, of headlong births, all the beauty and variety of our manufactured zoo.

Her finger traces a futuristic rune and the page flashes into blue life. A welcome message appears against the blue background. She whisks it away with two light taps. The blue is beautiful, many shaded, rich and deep but still bright and charged with joy. It leaks from her lap all over her vest and onto her hands and up her arms. It lights the undershadows of her face. I think of a girl with a buttercup under her chin, and I almost laugh, I have drifted so far from the quick androgynous skiffle of our age, lost in some fogeyish song of peasant love, a lover and his lass, a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no.

She drags her finger smoothly upwards. The screen scales out and the blue is revealed as a patch of ocean near a shore. Ripples on the water's skin where the sun falls and smashes. A faint line between the cold dark water and the warmer water. I am almost as fascinated by the screen as I am by the lap that holds it. Her finger moves again, streamlined hieroglyphs I cannot read. Her bony fingers with the smooth tan skin on them and the clean blue light below and the raw electric light above, caught like god's Adam reaching finger between the spheres of two technologies. The scene shifts, dizzy fast, lifting up from the shore and the grass roofed huts and the wooden fishing boats keel up on the white beach and the brown shirtless bodies strolling along the beach.

Now the place becoming a pattern, a universal, losing its flag in space and time. The light complex band of the sand under the water and the darker bands beyond of deeper water, and the contours simplifying further out, forgetting the fronded fractal line at their core, like the nebulous edge-smoothing forms of dust in a wind-tunnel.

Bugs leave their suicidal cloud beneath the bulb and land on the screen. She flicks one away with the side of her hand. Her hand skiffs the screen and throws us leagues out to sea. Oops, she says and smiles at me. I smile back, I want her blue eyes with the blue sea in them but I have no words and cannot hold her face for long. The screen is shipwrecked above some empty square of ocean, floating slowing backwards, adrift from all laws of friction or fluid, stuck on the last tack given by the unsticking of her hand, and it is not hard to see the real world disrupted by this same bug, this glitch in some miraculous but never quite perfect machine. Her finger whips us back to the tropical beach.

I will never get used to this inversion. We are in the real tropics now, strange birds sing in the trees outside, strange humidity freights the air, strange insects whirr through the night. And yet the virtual tropics are richer and stranger.

Backpackers begin to drift in from the kitchen. Word has got out. They crowd around us, sitting on her bed, drawing up chairs like the one I sit on, tube legged, backed and seated with flat glossed and chipped plywood, chairs for a secondary school or a student cinema. We shuffle, reorder, laugh, sit, kneel, stand; our movements as arbitrary yet circumscribed as the bugs' angular zipping on the screen. Are we sitting comfortably? Good, then she'll begin. We fly over the furred green roof of a jungle, the grey spine of a mountain ridge. Someone is rolling a joint. A tall guy with dreadlocks bends with her over the screen. She zooms in closer and closer until one little stone in the heap of stones on top of a peak fills the screen. That closing isolating feeling, the feeble spotlight coming down on me and me alone, and the blur of everyone moving around it, flitting bat-happy through the shadow light. I have to swim strong and stay with the current, not get trapped in some stagnant pool of self-absorption. My eyes, make my eyes move around. Everyone is white, everyone is tanned. Thin tanned bodies under the light, gleams of sweat, smears of dirt, men in shorts with bare chests, women in vests, dirty tanned young, why are these scruffy people you meet on the road are so much more beautiful than those at home? Because beautiful people travel? Because people are more beautiful when they travel? Because travel makes everything seem more beautiful? But now my eyes are back on me, swivelled inward like Swift's academics, seeing nothing, aching with inversion, and it's as if I can see myself from outside, as if I can see my own face, my own damn face, my week old stubble, itchy and rank, the bulblight bright and sickly on my forehead and the bridge of my nose, my tight white tee-shirt, tight around my arms, with the dirty freckled tan beneath it, a tee-shirt still on when I take it off. I must let go. I must join the stream where the others laugh and talk and splash and are not themselves, there is no line around themselves.

I crane at the screen again. Her fingertip travels light as light itself up the side of the screen and we scorch behind it, her weightless movements amplified a million times by the humming dread magic in the screen. We are racing down the track of a river. Broad and bold, ripped with foam. I thought of a stream and here's a river. Water must have leaked into my unthinking mind, dripped into the corner of my eye, like so much does, so much of the substance I consist of, unprocessed and undigested, heaped up raw inside my brain, shaping the words and thoughts I think are my own, the clay of my tenderest feelings. This must be this reason. It cannot be that the river flowed from my thoughts to the screen. That is impossible. That is obscene. A dam screams up from the water. Everyone gasps, everyone laughs. The mountains curve up steep from the valley and the bloated flat corpse of the river fills the valley with the dam bisecting the narrow gorge between the mountains, huge and desolate and black with the sun behind it, the star of the sun burned white out of the screen with pink and yellow fringes and the lens flare of psychedelic moons strung across the screen. Someone nudges me, passes a joint. The dam's vast inorganic curve the grace of a comma to our ragged delight. The girl whose name I now realise I never asked looks up from her magical map, asks if anyone wants a shot. She smiles, anticipating the melee. The scroll is passed from eager hand to hand and she only smiles, does not fret for her costly toy. The hug of sharing stronger than the rictus grip of having. Sometimes I feel like an amorous vampire, stalking the globe for love and generosity and kindness to drink. And none to give, heart dry and shrunk as a raisin. I suck on the joint and grass pops inside it and my face creases up around the bitter heat of grass with no tobacco to balm it.

"So what's your name?" asks the guy with dreadlocks.

"Lena."

His chest sinewed and brown above his pale linen trousers. I am half between them and I do not want to be half between them. Insects land on my face and my tee-shirt and my arms and take off again. The air coming in the empty window is finally cool. The colonial streets of dirty pavements and planted trees, dark, mysterious, breezy, cool. I pass the joint and stand and walk to the screen that has migrated to another bed. I snuggle in beside the others, sadly savouring the touch of their bodies. We're over a desert now. We zip down some rutted road sugared with sand until it stops dead in the desert with an empty vehicle parked at the end of it. The boy with the scroll tries to swoop low for a closer look, but gets stuck pointing down at a patch of sand. He strokes and pats the screen, frowns a lot, but the screen stays jammed, caught above the unfranked stamp of sand.

"I love deserts," says dreadlocks.

"So do I! They're so blank"

Her voice uptilting.

The sand is hollowed by some depression that is not a ripple or a footstep or a hole, just a nameless, shapeless lack of sand. Flakes of dark rock in there too. I've never seen a desert but I get the feeling that places like this are the truth of living in one. Like those things you see in every city — a piece of pavement with a circle of grey chewing gum stamped into it and old rainwater seeped into the concrete, a flyer peeling off the perspex wall of a bus shelter, a streetlight ticking on at dusk — those things that are more like the city than any photo foregrounded by a beaming tourist, or sold by the dozen from a flimsy white stand in front of a shop, and even the bars that hold the postcards, rust peeping through the thin white paint, even those are more like the city than the saccharine views inside them. The virtual sun is close to setting. You can tell by the warm orange tint to the sand and the pastel softness of the shaded contours and the cool blue shadow that picks out the clumps and clusters of sand. The map is still stuck. The kid is getting frustrated now. His hands flap around the screen. Males itch to take control, you can hear it inside them, the cold hiss of masculine command, assured of its superiority, its ability to muscle the situation to a clean sharp place where action follows decision follows desire in a gleaming three link chain.

I glance at Lena. She saw me looking and so did he. The lines etched deep in his halfstarved stomach, the waterfall of sinew under his arms. I focus on the unchanging scene with the hard square concentration of every man who ever proved a theorem, or wrote a novel, or found a star, or did any of the other things men do when they can't get laid. And maybe the weed is taking effect, because the metal cage around my face and neck feels like it could persist for hours. The anonymous divot of sand with the boys slender fingers flapping across it, leaving tracers on the lambent screen. The more he moves the more certain I am that the picture will not change. I sit and wait and enjoy the immobility in a lockjawed way, waiting for the blue black shadows to stretch further across the depression until the night swallows it and the whole desert with it and the screen so dark with only the faint dust of moonlight and starlight you would think it was switched off unless you sat in the dark and waited for the grain and speckle of the night to show. The boy is losing interest, frustration rotting into boredom. A hand is already reaching for the screen. Just before the magic map is passed over a boot steps down inside it, a hiking boot foreshortened from the heel, and sand sinks around it and trickles down into the hollow, and the boot lifts up again, beautified by the rich evening light, leaving the stamp of its sole behind it.

They said I was mad, hiking boots in the Sahara. Who said that? Most likely it was me. End up wearing sandals, they said, with big leather boots tied to your rucksack like tin cans banging off a truck. But it's fucking cold here at night. Even now with the sun about to set I'm glad I got my feet in some leather boots. I love leather! So solid and supple, a cows hide around my feet. Plant my feet on the loose dry sand, tic-toc steady, one foot click-clack to another, and I love the machine that swings my legs, I love the sameness of my per-perambulation and the boots snug around my feet and the desert kicked up around me. I love that my pendulum legs are not my own. Did you know that your walk is not your own? It belongs to every biped who ever marched or strode, from the first lazy monkeys to drop from trees to the hordes leaving the Tokyo subway. Did you know that?

And thank fuck I'm off that bus! Thank fuck for the big metal minibus door thunking out and sliding back and the moment of the desert so still framed by the big open door in the side of the bus. Thank fuck for people stirring, awakening from their rattled minibus stupor, unpacking themselves from the claustrophobic spaces, and that half ecstatic fumbling for a way out, worming my rucksack between three people's heads. But didn't I say the same when I got on? Thank fuck I'm on the bus! All the thin brown Arabic men in their loose white shirts taking seats, more seats than there could possibly be, and their white smiles in the half dark of the bus when I got on — that's right guys, I'm a girl!

I love change, that's all there is. I love the interface of things and the point where one substance becomes another, and the blend between them, droplets of oil suspended in water, paint swooshing out in the drab clean water, bleeding from the paintbrush you bat off the sides of the dull plastic cup they gave you at school, and the billionfold zoom of one emotion becoming another, that epileptic tenderness, and the sand thinning on the dirt of the path that leads from the beach, and the green grass shading to white in a million fernlike crystals of ice, and the forest floor glowing with moss, and the door clicking shut behind you, all the drab life behind it, the washed out gloaming of the heart indoors, and the new song swelling in your marching heart, all brass and drums and a bright big band, and the heart that beats beats with new feeling and the calm inside it, the big blissful same in the middle of all that change. That's who I am. I was always there. Did I mention walking? I'm the wanderer, I roamed away from the tribe. I jumped the fence and climbed the wall. And I did it just to do it, and I'm still doing it, and I'm still here, and I'm still free, still chained to my excitement. We live, die, recombine, but we're the same again and again the same and we still burn and sing for change.

Four of us whiteys in the group. Me and a Dutch couple and an Australian guy. Think Aussie thought symmetry gave him a claim, get together and form a square. Fat chance! I'd rather fuck the Arab boy who gave me shy looks, lie down on his hard village bed with his mother cooking in the other room and the light coming through the glassless window in the thick clay wall and the smell of his strange oil, the oil and spice of his lithe brown body and his slick black hair against me and our bodies rolling and writhing on the bed while his mother cooks in the other room. Sorry Steve. You belong to my past, and I burn my past and I don't even turn to watch the black scorched ribs crack and collapse because I move forever forwards into the stream and the green new light. People think I'm peaceful! I must be Buddhist to leave so much behind. I leave behind bones and shells sucked dry and grass scorched in my smoking footprints. I chew up the world and spit out its pith, and I always want more, I can never have enough.

So our cockeyed little caravan heads off from the van, four of us with squinting white skin and backpacks rising above our heads, and two guides in loose desert clothes and thousand mile strides. Our shoes puff sand like the puniest convoy in the wild west. We chat in hollow English while the guides joke in Arabic and smile sharp and inscrutable above their clipped back beards. We round a sluggish dune and turn into a kind of bay, a harbour of sand in sand.