0bject permanence: a disconnection parable - part I

“Fuck me”, he croaked painfully through his disused larynx, as the sun’s white-hot tongue wormed its way between his eyelids. This was the part he hated the most. Becoming, once again, a part of the world which had spat him away so unceremoniously  as trade to an unknown recipient, only to be shat back in the same manner, upon some random locale, with nothing but soiled clothing and a mind-splitting headache as is only belongings.

His right shoulder hurt in several places due to his position, and the fact that he was laying on broken glass. His unchosen bed appeared to be the pumping lane of a gas station in the middle of nowhere. And by nowhere, specifically a desert. Oil and dust and saliva stained his left cheek like some apocalyptic cosmetic. 

Curses climbed down the rope of spit that extended from his lip as he hunched himself upright. Glass shards cutting into his palms & knees. More curses. He was thirsty, very much so, but he felt a more southern need at present. No-one around, apparently, so he pissed a steaming stream into the desert heat in no particular direction.

He was not afraid of repetition, apparently, because he repeated himself once he got a good fucking look at the landscape which he, now, seemed to own. It was definitely a Nevada kind of desert, with nothing on one side of the road, and distant mountains on the other. His nose began to bleed. 

Yet more curses, as he staggered toward the building in order to procure supplies. In fact, he was not hoping that there was an attendant waiting within, but instead, hoped that it was both abandoned & somehow stocked with supplies. Amazingly, both criteria were met. Thus, he began the task of gathering bottled water, jerky, cigarettes, a couple dozen lighters and, of course, Ibuprofen. In the back, he found an abandoned backpack and, once he’d emptied the un-needed miscellany, save the porno, he packed away his found bounty. 

Toward the mountains was the obvious choice, so he slung his pack shoulderly and, stopping only to check the reception on the cellphone he’d had in his pocket, which was non-existent, he trudged westward.