When First I Saw The Edge Of The World

The girls, S and M, fascinated me. They were so incredibly cute in their matching white short-shorts and tight lacey tops with matching white lace wrist bands at the ends of long bare arms; so incredibly sexy as they twined around the stripper pole, ran their hands along one another’s limbs, touched red lips lightly with eyes half closed. I was a married man accustomed to looking through sideways glances at the women of the office and the street -– and here I found myself at Burning Man in the middle of the night, house music thumping, exotic twins humping almost within reach. They fascinated me, as did the world I found myself in at this barest beginning of an unpredictable journey.

The Exploratorium sped bumping and grinding across the flat desert floor, headlights extending the dark, wind-borne dust swirling into and out of vision. The girls played and the dance floor swayed and I looked out to see people in long coats stand out of the way and bicyclists wobble in our periphery and strange flames erupt in the distance like gas jets at the opening sequence to Blade Runner, a strange and foreign city far, far away and getting further with every lurch. The truck with its floor and its pole and its arches sped forward, sped into spaces to me unknown, into the dark that surrounded our bubble of sound and light as normal space surrounds the warp field of a starship.

And then, in this penetrable night, far out under the stars, I saw the edge of the world. It was orange, three feet high, and stretched from dark to dark, upheld by poles, floating forward as the dance of the Exploratorium and the desert slowed and calmed and came, with billows of white dust, to a complete halt. We parked with the art car’s nose touching the trash fence, headlights illuminating that place no one can go, out beyond the edge.

Silence reigned. I felt an odd absurd wonder at the sight. I heard girls giggle and the Captain’s voice boom over the PA system, and with yells of defiance they leapt off the floor and over the fence and ran screaming away into the night. Others followed to dance to the idling motor and the whistling of the wind.

And then the wind shifted. Memory shifts with it ... shifts to the alarming impression of black-clad watchers patrolling just beyond view, the momentary blink of a light, the click of a radio call button, the Exploratorium siren, the reemergence of our passengers from dusty limbo, skipping and partially stripping as they ran back to an art car already reversing; and, unaccountably, the taste of dust in the rum concoction I still gripped in one numb hand as I looked disbelieving over the edge of the world.

How it looks at morning