All The Violence of All The World

I walked into the Arizona desert as the sun was setting. The cliffs to my right were stained blood red in the waning light. The cacti were smaller than I thought they might be. I left the car engine running back there on the side of the road, a Neil Young tape hopping from Side B to Side A and back again. Three empty bottles of Jack under the passenger seat. Empty, the passenger seat, for the last 1,000 miles.

I heard a rattlesnake, or the wind in the brush, and it reminded me of the story my grandmother told me of the highest mountain in Africa that disappeared into the clouds. Only one man ever climbed all the way to the top, and he was so stunned by what he saw that he never came down.

"What did he see?" I asked.

"All the bloodshed across all the world," my grandmother said. "He saw beyond the seas to the other side of the world where women killed their babies, and men killed the women for killing the babies. He saw where the white man came from and how he used the guns he brought to Africa to kill his own brothers and sisters. He saw hatred to the west and to the east, and he feared the end of humanity."

"What shall we do?" I asked.

"There is nothing we can do," she said.

"Surely," I begged, "there is something!"

"Be good to those around you," she said, "take care of them, and when the violence of the world closes in around you, they will take care of you too." She kissed my cheek.

A bee landed on my cheek in the Arizona desert that night as the first stars came out. It did not sting me, but I felt the violence of the world closing in and I vomited on a dry sage bush.