Damascus

“Jenny, stay in the truck. It’s naked.” Jenny got out of the truck.
Bill had one hand on his hip, and the other had unearthed his head from beneath his baseball cap. He scratched his head.
Jenny took a quick look then discreetly began calling into the labyrinthine corn fields for some sort of help.
“Where did he come from?” Bill said aloud, pacing around like there was engine trouble. “He isn’t dead, at least. Well, not dead. But I really don’t know what we can do.”
There was a baseball field nearby, and the lights created a thick carpeted bask across the fields, spilling onto the road so that when Bill finally made a decision, though it was only to turn off the car, the shaft of light wetted the limp figure on the ground with its glow.
“Let’s see if there’s someone there who can help us,” she said, unnerved.
Bill twiddled with his dead cell phone a bit more, and scornful of his lack of strength and unwillingness to part from any buoy in this new bizarre ocean, he tossed it onto the driver’s seat.
First, they had to decide what to do with the unconscious man. For safety’s sake, Bill decided Jenny would stay with the truck. He was reaching down to sling the anatomical specimen over his shoulder when Jenny shuddered and pleaded that if he had a concussion they shouldn’t move him. Bill gave up his jacket for proprieties sake, and went towards the light.
The field was deserted except for a gaggle of old men – professors at the university thirty miles away. They ate popcorn and laughed in their slacks and coat jackets like boys, and wholly lacked resonance with their location. The crickets and the breeze and the sky melted into the grim aspect of desperate, echoless, gossiping chalk.
In the darkness, they squinted against the lights, and its glaring reception in their glasses.
Bill slowed as he reached the congregation and pointed back towards the road with a guilty stride. One of the gentlemen addressed him as “son,” as in: “what can I do for you, son?”
Jenny was sitting in the passenger seat when the tribe arrived, she sat still, watching the naked being which had begun to stir, to rub his rusted palms gingerly, to inch his back up from the ground with groaning hesitancy.
The men laughed and slapped Bill on the back and said things like “you sure were telling the truth!”
Then the debate began. Do we take him to the hospital? One hand on the ground. Consider this might be a mental case. Head supported by neck, staring up at the windowless sky. Well, what’s our first priority here? Knees raised, shoulders slumped. I’ve got a nephew in Kansas who can give us some advice, works as a psychiatrist. Bill gave Jenny a hand out of the truck. Don’t forget, there’s no service in these doldrums. They lifted his elbows. Is our duty ethical, or medical?
Bill and Jenny and the man sat together on the side of the dusty road, under the hum of the artificial light, watching the professors talk into the night.

By Maria Lawson, '13