DESERT MOVING, INC.

The situation in town was not great. The town, once a jewel of the region, had slowly declined: the formerly verdant parks now dry and slender, the public amenities insular and self-serving, the waste collection service a seething bucket of crabs. Even the Rotary club members, who in times past had stood for the fortification and betterment of the community, had retreated to their fiefs. And while visitors to the town would still stop in and buy a salad sandwich at the bakery on the main street and sit under the weeping willow by the town hall and say to each other "This is so nice - isn't it? We should holiday here," the residents had become disillusioned by the town's problems, and by the sense that it was sliding inexorably towards collapse.

This was the atmosphere in which the new shop opened up in town. One day it was not there and the next it was holding a grand opening, with a motorcade up the main street and a fabulous neon sign in the window that read "Desert Moving, Inc." On the street outside the shop a swarm of marketing directors set up a lectern covered in lavish blue rosettes and the shopkeeper, wearing a cowboy hat and futuristic sunglasses, snatched the microphone and announced: "We are going to move to the desert!"

The word spread around town. A fresh start in the desert: not easy, but maybe necessary - maybe the perspective offered by a hypothetical desert colony, one far from quotidian demands of life in the existing town, would put things in focus - maybe the town had outgrown its strictures. This is what people were saying as they discussed the news. For the first time in too long optimism took hold. Those who were bold and foresighted enough would pick up only what was needed, only what was most highly prized and take it to the desert, where they would start a new town, wiser and more prosperous than the old. The rotten pieces, the frivolous excesses, the misfires of the past; all these would be left behind. Such was the promise of the new plan.

The townspeople had no reason to be sceptical of the plan, but if some strain of naysaying had emerged to articulate why a move to the desert may be an imperfect solution to the town’s problems, it would have been quickly smothered by the owner of Desert Moving, Inc.’s next announcement: the first exploratory journey to the desert would soon depart. Wowed by efficiency and intrigued by the chance of a spectacle, the townspeople gathered on the main street to see the expedition off. As the hour struck a fleet of identical vans rolled out of Desert Moving, Inc's garage and convoyed slowly and grandly up the main street, the scientists and military contractors and a small number of citizen volunteers staring solemnly at the townspeople from the windows of the vans; once their peers, now something more significant. Eventually they disappeared over the ridge, and those left behind had to content themselves with looking around at the dusty streets of the town, the tumbledown street signs, the cracked concrete, the peeling paint on the brick veneers of the shopfronts which read "Est. 1884" and the like. And many thought to themselves - all of this had its place, of course, we have no regrets as such, but already it feels like the past to us - not just the past but, like, if the course of history was a river, then the old town was a small tributary off the principal torrent that ended in stagnant water, mud and mangroves, and we, having battled back upstream against the current, were now so nearly reunited with the main flow. And while the river had borne just some of our contemporaries to the grand new tomorrow and we remained on the banks, soon enough it would be our turn to hop in the canoe and set off downstream. And then some boys on bikes raced back into town and said they'd been following the convoy and when it was just around the corner all the vans had broken down and fallen apart, the engines had caught fire, and the heavy-duty tires had exploded and smashed in the windows and everyone on the mission had died. The doc and the registered nurse and even the receptionist from the medical centre were dispatched out to see if anyone needed help but it was too late. When the fires had gone out, the remains of the dead that could be identified were bagged up and laid to rest in the cemetery.

The next day the shop owner held another press conference. "Bummer about yesterday," he said. "We will rebuild. But, uh, we'll need a little help. We'll be opening up a chemical refinery in town to help cover costs. Back soon," he said, and disappeared inside. The townspeople stood around the square chewing it over. "Not sure we need to move out to the desert," someone said. "It's just the desert, after all. It's dry and inhospitable. Even though the town has its problems, the desert is worse." Someone else said, "Yeah, but it's the desert. Haven't you always wanted to see what it's like out there?" A third person said, "The desert may be inconvenient and inhospitable, but on the other hand, so is the town, at times. And moving out to the desert feels like real progress." A fourth spoke up. "Those who wanted to stay in town would be able to, of course. No one would be forced to move to the desert." As that person - the fourth person - finished speaking, there was a rumble and a gushing sound and the gutters near where they stood started to run with a disgusting ooze that made everyone's nose burn. And everyone said, "What the hell is that?" And then one of the shop owner's marketing directors popped up and said "Chemical run off. From the refinery. That's progress!" One of the townspeople wanted to know, "Is that part of the plan to move us out to the desert?" and the marketing director said "Sure. Abstractly," and the townsperson said, "What do you mean, 'abstractly'?" And the marketing director said "Kind of. In a way."

Some of the townspeople pointed out that the disgusting ooze running through the middle of town only made the need to relocate to the desert more urgent. “The desert,” they argued, “say what you want - it’s dry. None of this kind of thing.” The townspeople pounded on the front door of the shop and the owner popped his head out. "Is there ooze in the desert?" they demanded. "No ooze," he confirmed. "We're only eight hundred billion dollars short of our next funding target, and then we can mount another mission, which, once we have implemented the learnings from the last mission and accounted for the necessary miscalculations etc is basically a lock-in." The mayor convened an emergency council session, emerging after fourteen minutes with an authorisation for an emergency loan of eight hundred billion dollars to the shop owner, with generous repayment terms, and the next morning another fleet of vans rolled out of Desert Moving, Inc.'s garage. The vans were newer, shinier, with glass tops and trailers, and inside them we could see scientists in lab coats tinkering with test tubes and various items of scientific paraphernalia, while in the trailers some said they caught a glimpse through the tiny, tinted windows of rows of mathematicians in front of banks of monitors, calculating dryness levels, sand viscosity and other crucial environmental factors of the desert. The convoy got as far as Jefferson's Hardware, which is to say two blocks short of the town limits, before the vans broke down and began to leak white smoke. The scientists and mathematicians scurried out. They gathered just inside the doorway of Jefferson's. A labrador belonging to the Montells, name of Ginger, jumped their front fence and regrettably sniffed the wheel of one of the vans just as the entire convoy detonated in a fireball so intense it burnt the outline of Ginger’s shadow into the wall of Jefferson’s. "Think of all the scientists we didn't lose this time," the shop owner said at Ginger's funeral, which he generously paid for. His marketing team supplied a headstone for Ginger's grave, made of white marble and with a carving of Ginger as a desert dog, smiling near a cactus.

The next day the town's water and power supplies were turned off. The public toilets in the park were locked, the tourism desk shuttered and the garbage collectors retrenched. The townspeople marched up the main street and hammered on the mayor's door. He came out wearing a dirty suit with food stains on the front. "We can't pay for anything," he told them. "We bet on moving to the desert and we lost. That's the way of life," he ended philosophically, staring down at his filthy blazer with an interest that suggested that it also was the way of life, that the way of life was to blunder through, with a jar on your head, and to hope you did not tumble into the death pit, and to accept the jar - the jar had been placed on your head for a reason, and you knew yourself that things only ever happened if there was a very good reason, and so while the jar may be dark, and hot, and prevent you from seeing, it was where it needed to be and the rest was up to you. The townspeople turned away in disappointment. Some went home. Some went to the river to bathe and fill up buckets of water, but down by the water their noses burned with fumes and they returned in distress and confusion to Desert Moving, Inc., where the shop owner cheerfully sold them a bulk consignment of water, because he got a good deal on water for the chemical plant and he was happy to pass the savings on to them. He built a coin-operated pump just off Main Street. The townspeople devised a roster to reduce queues, and at home with their buckets and bowls of water for just $10 per litre they sat in the dark and imagined what their lives would be like in the desert, in new, purpose-built homes, in a community built intelligently and with functionality in mind. And outside the fumes rose up from the river and the gutters and scarred the lungs of the old people, who died. And when the old people were dead it was, for many of the townspeople, like a major emotional link to the town had been severed and nothing at all was keeping them from building their new lives in the desert. Nothing except the fact that there was no town in the desert yet.

So the townspeople went back to the shop, which had grown huge without them really noticing, having bought out the bakery and the School of Arts and the feed co-op and Jeffersons and lovingly preserved their historical facades but replaced the signs with new ones that read “DMI INDUSTRIAL CHEMICALS” and “DMI MOTORWORKS” and “DMI INFINITY POOLS” and so on. They wandered up the main street, peering into front windows in awe and trepidation until they arrived at the original shop. The old cedar front door had been replaced by a heavy metal slab with a porthole in the centre. They rang the doorbell and a smiling junior professional appeared on a video screen. “We can’t live here anymore,” the townspeople demanded hoarsely. “Is the desert ready yet?”

The smiling junior professional hit a buzzer and the door swung open. The shop owner was there. “Of course, of course,” he told them. “We’re just about ready to leave now. Are you ready to go?”

With flooding tears of relief they climbed into the Desert Moving, Inc. vans and trundled down the main street, holding their breath in case the vans detonated or broke down or caught fire and burnt them all alive, but the convoy proceeded smoothly past the shops, to the outskirts of town where their houses had once been - so recently, actually, they’d just come from their houses - but now where the houses had been was a crater with an army of earthmoving vehicles burrowing deeper into the hole. They continued along the aging tarmac into the desert for hours until, just before sunset, the vans turned abruptly, leaving the road and driving slowly across red sand. At a cleared patch the convoy stopped. There was no town there. There was nothing, actually, just sand and a couple of cactuses, and the smiling junior professional who had joined them smilingly handed them all a shovel and said, “You’ll need to dig.”

“For what?” the townspeople demanded. “For shelter,” the junior professional said. “You’ll freeze without shelter.”

The townspeople said - “this is insane, it isn’t a town, it isn’t anything at all, we WILL freeze, look - the sun is setting now - it’s already cold, and what about our town, what about our homes, you have to take us back.”

“You can have a ride back,” the junior professional told them, “If you can pay. It’s seventy-five million dollars per person. Who’s coming?” But none of the townspeople had even one million dollars, or one hundred dollars, or even more than around thirty-five dollars if they pooled their funds. So the smiling junior professional climbed back into the van and drove back to the town, which was now empty of people but still so full of promise, with so much to gain; so much history, so many wonderful resources to call upon, to be used and enjoyed by those who could value them for what they were truly worth, who could make them work, to build and create, freed at last from the crude requirements of life.