Third Person

I was the second of us to see the clearing. I walked in step behind Henry, bracing myself on a rock formation to my right that he navigated more effortlessly. It seemed natural from our exertions that one of us would huff while the other would puff, but I hogged both duties rather gracelessly. While Henry was breathless from the beauty before him, I was breathless from the walk and from the knowledge that Henry was not breathless at all. Comparison is the thief of breath. 

Maybe I did not fully enjoy the beauty of the clearing, framed by magnanimous rock structures and illuminated by the initial ignition of the sun’s descent, because I spent a mental beat finding fault with myself just as I first laid eyes on it. And then I could not enjoy it fully, because I found fault in my ability to fully enjoy it. My brain traveled recursively in this way in front of this beauty until it sucked.

“Shit’s dope,” said Henry

“Yeah, I’m enjoying it too, maybe even more than you,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. The curt, effective way in which he spoke drowned the unpleasantness festering in the air from my swirling thoughts. This was beyond any social ability I could have dreamed of.

The clearing was surrounded like a bowl with overbearing and dramatic walls lining the outer ring. The only imperfection was a small opening in their easternmost side where we had entered. Within this coliseum of sorts, the surface was flat and lined with pebbles. The sun was a quarter of the way eclipsed by the wall of rock on its way to the horizon. 

“This hike was a good idea,” said Henry. The curvature reflected off his pupils, and I could see that this end point of our journey led him gently into an introspective moment. “We haven’t gotten to hang out just the two of us since you moved away.”

“I know, right?” said Sally as a few rocks dropped from her hand back to the ground. She dropped her rucksack and sat looking up at the sun. My face distorted briefly as the words ‘just the two of us’ lingered in the air, but I quickly lost grasp of them when I looked at Sally. 

“Yeah,” I said. Sally was once a friend of a friend in college, but once people move and proximity reigns, friends of friends become friends, and friends become close friends. Is this out of necessity and the inability to form adult friendships without a prior connection? I felt it was unfair and a bit depressing to stand there and analyze what caused friendships. To dissect a frog, it has to already be dead, or something like that. Henry reached down to feel the rocks..

I sat next to Sally. “Gosh, this is beautiful.” I didn’t think she was religious, but ‘Gosh’ was the safe thing to say. Was it weird that we were out here just the two of us? Or wait, weren’t there more of us? A deep breath cleared my mind of what felt like long-forgotten confusion. My focus turned back to Sally as she looked up at me with emerald green eyes. I didn’t know her that well, but we got along. I wasn’t interested in her romantically, and I wanted her to be comfortable on this hike, but also if something were to escalate, I would certainly do nothing to stop it. Did she know that I thought that way? And if she did, would that make her uncomfortable? Did I sit too close to her? Too far from her? How difficult it must be to be a girl, knowing that every guy who sits next to you is plotting something. I wanted to be different—a safe space—but I wasn’t sure how not to be off-putting. Maybe I was singular in this line of thinking, and other, more well-adjusted men were able to interact with girls who are friends without being weird. She was out on this hike with me, just the two of us, so that was a testament to something, but she was perhaps seconds away from finding out I was a bona fide blue ribbon creep.

“I'm not a big ol’ blue ribbon creeper,” I almost said, but she spoke first.

“What a cool find. This clearing is so neat,” she said. “Let’s set up here!” Just me and her in this beautiful desert. It was magic, romantic or not. Henry tossed a rock to the tune of a satisfying clank. I wondered if he had eyes for Sally. I would certainly be jealous, even though I had no real romantic aspirations with her. I wondered if Henry perceived me as a sweaty creep just moments away from making this girl uncomfortable. Or if Sally viewed me as an awkward intrusion on a hike with Henry, a friend she knew and liked better. Just be normal, I thought to myself, a drop in a sea of ‘just be normals’ I had told myself over the years, unsuccessfully and otherwise. Henry sat across from us and took a bite of jerky. While I was sure there were three of us, a waft of mental malaise sewed doubt into me. 

“Yeah, we’ll definitely set up here,” said Henry. “Sally, you and Dingus can set up the fire, and I’ll, uh, assemble the chairs.”

He wasn’t bullying me, Dingus was my last name. “Assemble the chairs?” asked Sally with an accusatory laugh. “You mean unfold them, the ones Elroy carried up here?”

Elroy is my first name. Henry chuckled and pushed himself up. “We got a perceptive one in our midst. Fine, I’ll help with the fire.” I pushed myself up to move towards the center of our campsite. As I did, I grabbed a handful of pebbles from the ground. Silence hit my mind.

Time and erosive forces had shaped the rocks into a bowl, like a single strike of lightning. The only reality that existed was the present, and thus time could be treated as one unit, one event that caused the rocks to be exactly as they were, which they were. In another story, another single unit of time might have melded the rocks into a different shape, but other stories, hypotheticals, or assumptive happenings in the periphery of the mind are frivolous. There is one present, one setting, one reality. 

In the clearing, under long, oppressive shadows sat Henry Dalleney who pulled flint and firewood from his bag as his friend Sally Lovelace dug out a pit for the fire. “You ever make a fire out in the desert like this?” asked Sally.

“It’s like making a fire on the beach,” said Henry casually. Sally appreciated having a friend with acumen there to make her feel safe traversing these unfamiliar lands. She was trying to get into nature now that she had moved out west, and Henry’s offer of a hike was perfect. They had known each other in college, but now they were the only two of their extended friend group out here, so he was an appreciated built-in friend to help her get accustomed to the new area. 

Henry coaxed a few sparks out of the flint, and the still atmosphere allowed them to spread to the firewood free from any hindrances. He glanced at Sally to see if she was impressed by his fire making abilities, but he couldn’t get a read from her face. 

“I’m gonna grab some rocks to line the fire pit,” he said. He took a few paces to a spot where the rocks were most plentiful and reached down to pick some up. 

Sally nodded. She looked up and watched the clouds move swiftly through the sky. She felt as though she could perceive the velocity of the sun. She was alone out in the desert to take a meditative beat, but all she could see was time continuing to move at the same alarming pace as it did back in the city. She took a deep breath and laid her head on the ground. “Let it pass,” she said aloud for no one to hear.

Rocks fell to the ground. I looked at my hands and analyzed the dust they left behind. It was chalky. Henry finished making a ring of rocks around the fire pit, and Sally arose from lying on the ground to sit around the fire with us. Thoughts of looming deadlines at work, uneasiness from trying to make new friends, contradictions and second guesses within me replaced a prior narration that ran through my head. Narration, I thought, where did that come from?

The three of us stared into the newly started fire in silence. There was food and music and drinks and either games or water to be had, but for a moment, that all seemed like activities of the future—a flash in my brain that felt like a memory of what’s to come. But the present was wrought with confusion.

“Have you guys noticed anything… peculiar?” asked Sally. Henry let out a relieved sigh, and I nodded tentatively in her direction. “My mind has been wavering since we got here between my thoughts and just, like, general thoughts.”

“Like narration,” I said.

“And sometimes it feels like I’m alone,” she continued. “Like I know you’re there, but simultaneously I don’t.”

“I noticed it when I grabbed some pebbles to line the firepit,” said Henry. He was looking down and poking at the ground with a stick. “I think it’s the rocks, like when you pick them up.” We each reached to grab the rock nearest to us.

A fire, its flames aspiring for the sky, assimilated into the cooling desert heat, one final offering of warmth before the cold night took over. Then it went out. With no one there to rage against the passing of time, many millennia occurred, the rock structures shifted, weather eroded everything that once was, and everything that would become had its day and its death simultaneously. And it all happened again infinitely, and it all happened at once against that purring whistle of ad nauseum. 

Then the familiar clank of a rock on the ground, and even louder, the electricity of anxiety blasting away the infinite narration took hold of everything. I looked at Henry. It was just the two of us chilling in the gorgeous desert. Somehow that didn’t feel right, though. “Sup Dingus,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

“We came here together,” I said. 

“Oh right,” he said. He furrowed his brow and looked down at the ground. “Sorry I called you Dingus.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s my name.” 

“Oh right,” he said. He was confused. 

“That is crazy,” said Sally, as she emerged into my perception. One moment there was no Sally, and the next there was, as I had always known her. I could do nothing but nod. The fire was still going. The rocks were still shaped exactly as before. I had seen what they would become, but it was pleasantly meaningless to me. As thoughts of comparisons of myself to Henry and nervousness towards Sally began to swell back up and inform every lackluster decision I made from how to posture myself around the fire to what to say, I began to crave holding the rocks again. I considered gently the possibility of diving back into peaceful narration, but before I could take action, a rock slide began behind Henry.

I suppose what happened next warranted a small yelp or at least a quick catlike shuffle to my feet, but to the mind that had wavered so drastically, I did nothing but watch in stunned silence. A man in bellbottom jeans and a paisley blazer covered in dust emerged from the wall of rock behind Henry as the sun finally fell wholly behind the bowl but not yet behind the horizon. 

“Oi oi,” said the man as he sat casually in a gap in our circle. “Starvin’. You got any beans?” In stunned compliance, Henry reached into his rucksack and searched around while his eyes, like the rest of us, stayed glued to the man. 

“Yeah, actually,” said Henry. He rolled a can of beans from his bag past the fire.

The man grabbed them and inspected the can with a pained expression. “Cool, cool, yeah, beans. Mind if I shotgun?” he asked. No one said anything. We turned over the hundreds of pertinent and pressing questions in our minds and landed on a few before it seemed that each of us pleaded for the other to ask. Sally finally gathered the courage while the man started trying to open the can of beans.

“Where did you come from?” she asked.

“Me?” he asked. He looked quickly at Henry, then me, as if the question was somehow more likely meant for us. He opened the can of beans from the pull-tab at the top.

“Yes, of course,” I said. 

“I been in the rocks,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a slurp of beans. “What year is it?”

“2025," said Sally.

The man nodded briefly. “Yeah, I been in the rocks 60 years. You were there too.” He nodded his head at each of us. “Henry, Sally… Elroy Dingus.”

There seemed to be two courses of action: one in which we treat this stranger as an intruder on our hike and one in which we engage with him as something of a guide to whatever oddity it was here that we had encountered. I noticed Henry stiffening up with clenched fists and saw Sally lean forward inquisitively ready to engage with the man. I was the deciding vote. This man was a link to the rocks, and the rocks had, if only for a moment, an infinite moment, released me from the constant purr of my thoughts, so I chose how I knew I would always choose.  

“What does that mean, in the rocks?” I asked.

“Well yeah, that’s a good question,” said the man. He smiled softly at all three of us. “It’s not really you in there. You become the rocks. See in this place when you touch the rocks, you join them. But more importantly, you stop being you. You no longer have an identity. When there is no one here and you’re touching the rocks, you experience all of time as it passes over this here desert all at once. When there’s people here, you see them as how a narrator might, you are on the outside, you are the setting in which they walk. But there’s no more you.”

“So when I held the rocks,” started Henry, loosening up and trying to conceptualize what was happening. “There was no me? Elroy and Sally felt as if they were alone, just the two of them? That’s… horrifying.”

“But Henry, it wasn’t scary when you were in there, was it? When you have no identity, you are agnostic to whether Henry Dalleney exists or is liked or is successful. You feel a kinship to Henry Dalleney as much as you do to any other person who has ever lived and whose identity has then subsequently been forgotten. It’s scary to you now, but you now are a speck of dust on eternity. You’re already a faint memory as far as the rocks are concerned. And everyone comes back to the rocks eventually.”

I felt less intimidated by the insignificance the rock man detailed for us and rather a pleasant feeling for the oneness and peace the rocks promised. 

“So, where is this place?” asked Sally.

“That’s the peculiar part,” said the rock man. “You got any more beans?”

“No,” said Henry quickly and assertively. 

“When we were in the rocks, you would have shared your beans with me,” he said, then he turned back to Sally. “That’s the peculiar part, Sally, I think you took a wrong turn somewhere. I’d love for you to grab onto these rocks with me, come be nobody as I am.” He chuckled. “‘I’ and ‘me,’ these words sting off the tongue.” 

I started to have a sinking feeling in my stomach, an understanding that, while gentle on my mind, still brought me dread. “But we’re not supposed to be here yet, are we?”

“Bingo, Dingus,” said the man from the rocks. “You three will be in the rocks soon enough. One at a time, you’ll go from being a first-person narrator out doing your little adventures to being a third-person narrator here with me, back in the earth from where you came. For now, though, I reckon you should pack up and head back through that crack you got here through.” 

Before any of us could say anything, the man returned to the wall behind him and resumed his position. We began to mechanically pack our things. Henry looked around.

“Didn’t there used to be four of us?” he asked. I squinted towards the setting sun. I, too, had a faint memory of this. 

“Maybe once upon a time,” I said. 

When we hiked back through the opening, the search party found us immediately. “All three accounted for, no items missing except one can of beans,” said a ranger into a walkie talkie. They put a foil blanket over me.

A year later, I was working on a Maximum Carnage Attack Pain Women and Children First Destroyer that we could use to defend our nation. I was known around the office as Dingus, the guy who got lost on that hike and had to be rescued. From time to time, I felt the familiar swell of anxious thoughts wear me down, but it soothed me to think back to my time holding the rocks. I used to fear what it would be like to return to the earth, to be forgotten, but after that hike, I associated a serenity with becoming part of the collective. 

For now, I narrate my own story, but it brings me great peace to know that one day, when the time is right, I’ll be in those rocks ready to narrate yours.