Eric Basso

 Frustrums

A short, straight line from the collapsed dune to silhouettes on the horizon obliterated almost half of all he could remember. Now the voyager had come full circle, back to where his helmet lay half buried. He would leave it in hopes that the sand might cover it over, for he no longer wished to think of the helmet as his. No longer recognized what it once had been.

    Relief accompanied this loss of memory. Only vaguely aware of having crossed miles of desert waste, he had ceased to fear the fall of night but could not recall when last the sky was dark. Cirrus clouds were breaking up and moving off now. Soon none would be left.

    He approached. The distant silhouettes grew into atolls of weathered rock. Once they must have been pyramids, but centuries of sand and squall had bitten at their mica flanks, leaving only these massive pedestals crushed beneath the phantom weight of the sky. Cantilevered basalt slabs, cragged by erosion, served as flights of steps. Their frustums, transformed into rounded tables, were glazed by a substance that had drained them of all color and opacity save for the amber tinge that comes of aging. They looked like lenses fretted with crystalline webs, patterns his eye followed till the shadows engulfed them.

    Peering through those ambered layers, in the depths of each frustum he could make out a different “flaw.” A snowflake. Magnified starbursts. Minuscule arrowheads flared from what he first took to be a fish but then thought of as a closed eye. Bristles in ice. Beaded necklaces interlaced. The sun’s reflection was black, with the pale aura of eclipse. He could see his face in it, and realized the frustums were angled so no sun would lie within them that was not eclipsed by his mirror image.

    Or had he merely come at the ideal hour? Soon the star that lighted this planet would move a little in its orbit yet still be reflected in the frustums’ lenses. He planned to chart the azimuth in their amber pools.

    He sat with his back to a hollow, waiting. For a time, turning his shoulder to the rock, half his head fell in a shadow bathed by humid warmth. He pressed his face to the ruined monolith. The vaporing heat brought feeling back into his nose and cheek. His beard stubble wilted, moist against the skin, as the numbness slowly passed out of him.

    When he drew back from the heat-shadow, the freezing sunlight hit him with force.  He staggered and fell. Masking his face with his hands, he puffed hard to regain the warmth. Now he thought of going back for the helmet. He gazed through spread fingers across the boundless waves of sand. It wasn’t so far off. From where it lay, he had seen these pyramids as dwarfed silhouettes. Stumbling over slabs of mica, he fixed his gaze on the near-white distance, circled the crest of battered rock, and saw nothing. Not even a glint to point the way. He hadn’t thought to mark his line of approach. The wind had swept the desert clean of his tracks. Too much was forgotten.

    Gradually, his face accustomed itself to the cold again. The numbness prickled as he returned to the frustum lenses. His head still blocked the dark-reflected orb. Either the sun stood transfixed in the blue or the frustums were tracking its imperceptible ellipse from horizon to horizon. If those truncated cones were in motion, swinching slowly round some hidden pivot, their lenses scanned the sky in silence. He peered into the glassy depths of one whose flaw resembled snow crystals caught in mid-descent, encased by the vitreous matter at splayed angles to its surface, some in “profile,” their patterns lost to view. Others recalled old lace or the fretted hatchings in hoarfrost on a window. There were gaudy stars and crucifixes enmeshed in a forest of webs. Some had a cyclops eye at center, or a maw baring concentric tiers of molars. He saw faces of vultures, wolves and jackals. The lower they were, the less the light filtered down to them, the more they seemed serene. He wondered if this frustum of “falling” snow were not a lure for curious heads sectioned into wafers by a microtome. If the sun’s path across the empty sky recalled the progress of a tortoise, maybe the lens was no lens at all but liquid congealed by the sluggish flux of its molecules. Nonsense, and he knew it. Sand shifted, sweeping new whorls and eddies across the desert with every gust of wind. No reason to believe that water, if it could be found, would behave any differently.

    He put his hand to the polished surface, felt nothing through the glove. No idea whether he was touching hot or cold. All of a piece with his crash suit, the glove could not be taken off. He brought his face close to within an inch of its sun-bound reflection and still felt nothing strange. He’d expected a tingle, a feeble current of air at the very least. His breath misted the lens—a blot that dwindled then reappeared only to shrink again. No closer. He would not press his cheek to the glass while those snow faces glared at him from below.

    A myriad of densities. Tides frozen in an ice block. They made the snow crystals undulate whenever he shifted his point of view. Distortions combined at various depths to feather the “dance.” He thought that here the pattern he was searching for had laid itself out. Perhaps the sun had little to do with the frustums that bordered the collapsed pyramids. He realized now these ambered “lenses” were set in their slabs at a distinct angle. They, whoever “they” were, had probably lopped off the tops of the cones only after they had been fixed in their foundations. If the lens faces were to be perfectly level with one another, they had to have been sliced in the form of an ellipse so slight as to be virtually undetectable. But there was no way of proving this. If it were true, the sun might enter into the scheme of things again. No telling how deep the frustums ran. Perhaps they stood so deep their bases touched or were all of one substance. He had long ago cast away the instruments he was carrying. His memory of a heavy belt, hung with pouches, holsters and transmitting devices, remained in limbo, an image he was unable to interpret as having anything to do with his present needs. Even if he had not left the belt behind, useless. He no longer remembered how to use the gear that weighed him down in his desert wanderings.

    He emptied the pouches one by one. Some glittering cubes fell on the slabs without breaking. Their casings were transparent. The smallest of them fit snugly in his palm. He turned it slowly, as on a spit, between thumb and index, holding it up to the light. A maze of fibers appeared, silhouettes half submerged in pink solution. It held a medusa the size of a pebble, bristling with coiled filaments. With a little imagination—he hoped to let his brain make up for what his eyes passed over—the face could be discerned: a kind of shrunken head whose leathered skin made small fires flare in the eight corners of the cube.

    He knelt down and arranged it with the others. The cubes refracted pale sun-streaks on the rock.

    Then, one by one, he chucked them into the sand.

    The sand that stretched for miles in every direction.

    Sand for as long as he could remember.

1977