I have been awake for nineteen days straight. I counted the pebbles in the Styrofoam cup this morning before coming to the shore and lie down on this smooth slab of limestone and watch the sky with half open eyes.
I feel the warp and weft of my body tearing apart and when the wind rises, I fear they will blow my pieces away like seeds of a dandelion. I have lost the ability to sleep, anyway. I can only lie down on my back and shut my eyes and let that somnolent serenity suck me in like quicksand; from my knees to my chest, to my throat.
But wakefulness in the shape of a white rabbit with red eyes hops around me and the intermittent thuds of its paws on the floor, the squeaking of its chattering teeth and the pulse of its heart echo through the void of my mind. The rabbit grows bigger and bigger as I fall deeper and deeper into this strange comatose state.
The rabbit expands into a gigantic beast with bleeding eyes and the booms of its paws now sound like an avalanche roaring down a mountain. The whiteness, spreading out from the fluffy white wools of the giant rabbit fills my field of vision and covers everything like a thick layer of untouched snow and it is in that sheer whiteness that I hear voices in my head; bits and pieces of conversations I may have heard or imagined or dreamed, children laughter and man and women chattering in strange languages, seagulls screeching, water lapping and sometimes rumbling sound of waves. I dare not go any deeper into this trance. The sense of being untethered frightens me.
I open my eyes and sit up. I am alive, I say to myself, and my senses are still sharp. My memory seems to work fine. I know who I am and why I am here and where I want to go. Only I can’t sleep; I must not fall asleep anyway, because I fear I may never wake up again.
I did briefly sleep the night Igor brought me to this place, only to wake up and see myself hung upside down. I was dead tired, after God knows how many hours drifting at sea. I recall seeing the mattress in the corner of the room as Igor shone his torchlight. I lay on it and immediately went to sleep.
An hour or perhaps two must have passed before I began to feel my head throb. I was hearing sounds in my skull similar to the rumbling of waves one hears from a seashell held to the ear. I opened my eyes and realised that I was hanging from the ceiling and the first thought that naturally crossed my mind was that I had to be dreaming; even though I could see the tips of my fingers almost touching the floor and, as my body oscillated from side to side, I could hear a screeching similar to the sound a rope makes when rubbing against a pole.
I shifted a little, causing my swaying body to spin a half circle. The rope must have been knotted around my anklebones, I suspected from the unbearable pain I felt there. My shirt, still damp from the seawater, had fallen over my face and the suffocating reek of rotten fish trapped in the fabric burnt my eyes and my throat. I shook my head in an attempt to push my shirt away from my face so I could breathe, and then I sensed a presence in the room; a ghostly figure standing to my right, about two paces away from my dangling body.
To my eyes, as they became accustomed to the predawn darkness, the apparition appeared the size of a boy wearing a dark cloak over his shoulders. Pain accumulated behind my eyes as I stared at the cloaked creature and he at me. A nightmare, I told myself as I turned my head to look to my left, where I hoped to see myself asleep. The whitish mattress stood out in the dark. Empty. A nightmare, I thought again; that, or I truly was suspending in the air. Upside down.
As the being moved a cautious step forward, stretching out his bony hands in my direction, my dreamy sense of dislocation suddenly turned into sharp terror. I started thrashing and flailing with all my might, struggling to pull my torso away from the touch of those wilted fingers reaching out for me. The rope suddenly unknotted and I fell to the ground head first. The creature startled. He took a step back and then leaped out of the door and, before faintness stole over me, I saw his cloak fluttering behind him like enormous wings of an ancient bird.
When I came to my senses, I found myself sprawled on the floor away from the mattress and with excruciating pain in my neck and back. My head thumped like a balloon filled with water. I sat in the middle of a square of sunlight on the ground, feeling dizzy and disoriented. I looked around me and saw the inside of the place for the first time in daylight.
It was a cave in the shape of a cube about four paces on each edge, dug into what seemed to be a limestone rock. The surfaces of the walls were covered with marks of a chisel or perhaps a pickaxe, I couldn’t tell. But they reminded me of a face covered in pockmarks. A shaft of sunlight flowed in from an opening in the wall in front of me and to my left was a doorway covered with a curtain fashioned of gunnysacks stitched together. In one corner of the room was a cardboard box – an ordinary brown one with no marks or labels on the sides – and in it were two dented metal plates, an old pan, dozens of white plastic forks and spoons and a small knife, a stack of Styrofoam cups and a blackened kettle. A small pile of ash in between two limestone rocks, placed a hand span away from each other, suggested that the setup had been a hearth.
It took me a few minutes to recall the events of the previous night and roll up my trouser legs to look at the bruises around my ankles and then up at a metal ring which hang from the end of a large nail driven into the ceiling. And there, near the doorway, I found the last piece of the puzzle; rope. Why would anyone wish to hang me upside down, I wondered. I picked it up, examining it up close. It was a kenaf rope used by fishermen on their boats. I’d seen similar ropes in Samos.
A shadow passed outside and I caught a glimpse of it from the crack between the doorway and the curtain. Someone was standing on the roof of the hovel and I could see part of a shadow trailing on the ground. I pulled the curtain away and stepped outside. The sunlight blinded me momentarily as I raised my head to look up. Shading my eyes with my hand I stood back and stared again. The person standing above the doorway was not Igor. He was an old man with enormous wings that resembled a dark cloak hanging from his shoulders.
My mother used to say she’d see my brother with wings spread from his shoulders; splendid wings with white plumes, she’d tell me with brightened eyes. “The world is full of things we don’t understand,” she’d scold me, when I listened to her words without expressing an opinion. Until four months before she died, I would see my mother in the evenings looking up at the roofline, whispering, smiling and sometimes giggling.
But the winged man I was looking at had no resemblance to my brother; though his mere existence perhaps proved that my mother’s stories weren’t mere figments of the imagination of a grieving old woman who’d lost her favourite son to a suicide bomber.
The man I was looking at was small, like a boy suffering from progeria, and scrawny like a poorly-fed stray cat. He had scruffy hair, a thinning beard and eyes that sparkled like two glass beads in the sun. The only clothes that he wore was a pair of dark trousers, whose legs were cut unevenly at the knee and his bare feet poked out of them like two dried sticks. His ribs, pressing hard against his skin, reminded me of a cage – or rather the bony fingers of a witch trapped inside that cage. We stared at one another for long moments. He looked on wearily, incuriously and somewhat sorrowfully. But not malicious to suppose that he’d been the one who’d hung me upside down, nor such a small creature I presumed was capable of doing so.
I stepped back into the room and lay down on the mattress, dazed by what I had seen. Chaotic thoughts were stubborn gadflies whizzing in my mind in every direction. The winged man had been too piteous to evoke fear in me. It was just that I couldn’t get my head round the absurdity of it.
The first time my mother told me that she’d seen my brother, her voice faltered. “He looked taller,” she muttered. “He looked me in the eyes, but didn’t speak. Just opened his wings as if he meant to show them to me. I think he was your brother. He definitely was. I don’t know…” She couldn’t believe her own eyes. She’d recited her prayers and returned to her room. She’d been scared, she told me. I nodded and sipped my tea and resisted imagining my brother with wings.
A few days later, I heard my mother’s voice again. I looked out of the window and watched her in the yard as she’d squinted up, looking at the roofline. She spoke softly, the way she’d normally speak to my brother and me. I couldn’t make out her words but saw no reasons to step outside and intrude on her fantasies. When she returned to the room, her visage was bright with the biggest smile I had seen on her face since the day my brother was killed, two and a half years ago. She had the face of a little girl who couldn’t wait to talk about her new doll. But every time she parted her lips, they froze in the shape of a grin. She must have suspected that I didn’t believe her eyes either. And I asked nothing. I preferred not to hear, though the thought crossed my mind that grief burry those with no fantasies sooner.
Before she died, my mother saw her dead son many more times and she finally spoke to me about his wings; white wings of an angel that she insisted looked good on him. She’d given birth to another son for herself, a winged son who probably wouldn’t die in a suicide attack again, and if this winged son was so real to her that she could see him and smile at him and speak to him, who was I to take him away from her. After all, no creature is born into existence without first being conceived in its creator’s imagination.
The wind sighed through the window, bringing with it the mellow song of waves from faraway. I shook my head to clear it. I was being carried away by illusions, I snapped at myself. Just like her, my mother. It had to be hallucination caused by the effects of seasickness. That vast expanse of blueness was getting into me, playing tricks on my mind. The sea was beautiful from afar but step into it and it wakes into a frightening monster seeking to swallow everything.
Sooner or later, I solaced myself, Igor will return, he must return, if not for me, for his money. The deal was that Naseer, my cousin, would pay him in full once he met me safe and sound in Athens. I looked at myself. What was left of my clothes were the cheap cargo pants and the white cotton shirt I’d bought in Samos. I didn’t remember where I’d lost my shoes. I didn’t even recall if I had them on the previous night when I trudged behind Igor to this place. I touched my feet; they were cold, bruised, blistered.
A flutter of wings snapped the threat of my thoughts. A dark shadow passed before the window-like opening in the wall and a loud thud, followed. I stood up involuntarily, my heart beating fast. The fleeting shadow I had seen was that of a human bird. Overcoming my hesitation, I went outside again. The winged man had fallen on the ground. He saw me and started flapping his wings wildly to stand up and then scurried away, and I noticed a limp in his gait, and the plumage on the tip of his half-open wing, brushed the ground behind him. He must be injured, I thought to myself. And he did seem to be more afraid of me than I was of him. The world, as my mother said, was full of incomprehensible things.
I looked around me. The hovel from outside was nothing more than a cave in a massive rock, partly protruding from the slope of a hill, or perhaps the whole hill was a massive rock covered with hardened earth. The entrance was almost a rectangular shape and the window more or less a square. It was situated along a path that began at the top of the mount and disappeared along the slope on its way towards the sea, which lay flat, like a sheet of blue glass at the bottom of the hill. The shoreline couldn’t be more than half an hour walk from where I stood, I estimated. No other man-made structure was in my sight, but that, I thought – and also wished – was perhaps because I couldn’t see beyond the hill. I turned my gaze to where the well-trodden track started at the top. It made sense that I walk upward, I decided.
The winged man stood watching me from a safe distance, as I began plodding upward. Only rocks and thorns seemed to grow on the land on either side of the track. The sun was high in the sky, dyeing everything in a familiar gold colour and making the salty air heavy to breathe. I heard the chirping of a sparrow amidst the whisper of a mild breeze and perpetual sigh of the sea. The tweeting coursed through me, filling me with a sweet and sad feeling. I stopped to turn towards the direction whence I thought I had heard the sparrow. It must have been hidden in the bushes or camouflaged with the brownish surroundings. The chirping reminded me of my hometown, the place I had abandoned after my mother died.
I realised the winged man had been following me, holding on to that piece of rope, which disturbed me greatly. He must have picked it up from the cell after I had left. Something about him angered me, offended me.
“What do you want from me?” I shouted.
The old man stopped, shifted his weight from foot to foot, and looked on warily. I grabbed a rock the size of my fist and hurled it as I ran towards him.
“What do you want from my life?” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The creature flapped his black wings which carried him up in the air and the rock landed where he’d been standing. For a fleeting moment that the creature’s awesome wings were fully unfurled against the backdrop of the blue sky, it seemed that his ancient glory and grace had returned to him in full. His descent was not as elegant; his lame leg twisted as it touched the earth and he sprawled on the ground.
I stopped a few steps short of him, holding a second rock ready in my raised hand. The winged man began fluttering his wings in a frenzy causing a wild storm of dust, as if a majestic phoenix was rising from its ashes. He failed to get to his feet and thus, wriggled on the ground and spread his broken wing over his emaciated body, making a continuous groaning noise, whilst his shining beads of eyes watched fearfully for the rock in my hand.
I stepped back slowly and lowered my hand and let go of the rock. It made a thud, which startled the winged man. He snatched the piece of rope as he crawled backward, flapping his wings, and this time managed to stand up. He limped away hastily, the tip of his right wing, sweeping dust and pebbles behind him.
I continued my way to the top of the hill and when I reached the highest point, I stood and surveyed around me. The islet looked like a small clump of earth thrown in the middle of a perfectly circled pond. on the horizon the sky merged with the blue sea in a haze of greyness and shallow waters around the coast formed a magnificent turquoise-coloured ring that surrounded the islet. The track continued in the opposite direction, receding from view as it went down the slope of the hill, before reappearing on a second small mount on its way to the coast. It seemed as if the track had slit the island into two halves. It was greener on this side, but no houses, no dike, no boats, nothing that suggested people lived there, could be seen. Igor had told me there were quite a few inhabited islands around Greece and this probably was one that smugglers brought the refugees before moving them over the borders into Europe. I just knew this wasn’t the place I was supposed to be.
The boat trip was going to take a few hours, Igor told me. We were headed for Crete and from there another boat would take us to Athens. Naseer, my cousin, had told me he’d taken the same route to travel to Europe. The day before our departure, he called me from Hamburg to say that he was flying to Athens to meet me there. He told me not to worry, because Igor was a professional. He’d smuggled thousands to Europe, my cousin himself included, and knew every sea and land route like the palm of his hand. But I had a bad feeling as I embarked the old fishing boat, which was painted in stripes of blue, yellow and red, and found a place next to a sturdy man, on whose lap sat a little boy with a beatific face.
Most children and women huddled tightly together on the main deck and men sat on the long benches on both sides of the deck. The boat seemed a wooden bowl filled to the brim with wallowing worms, bobbing on menacing dark waters. The waterline had risen to just a foot below the edge of the boat. I lowered my hand and brushed the surface of the waters. The boy, watching me, grinned and tried to bend down so he too could touch the water. His father snapped at him in a language that sounded Arabic to me. The little boy started screaming, thrashing about, until his father helped him lower his hand into the water. The boy laughed and his father threw a hard look at me. When waves taller than houses crashed the boat like a toy in the fist of a ghoul and as the force of water gushed into my mouth and eyes and ears, I saw the little boy, with thrilled eyes looking in wonder at millions of bubbles that burst around him.
* * *
Waves gurgle and roll in, playfully crawling up the craggy rocks on the shoreline before crumbling back into the sea, sounding like children giggling, never getting tired of playing the same game. I see the sky through the crack of my eyes and I’m shaking like a leaf, despite the morning sun beating down on my bare skin. I feel the weight of the air, the way a drowned corpse, lying deep in the ocean feels the squeezing of water. When I hold an object, no matter how small, how light, it slips off my fingers. I can’t keep my jaw fully closed or eyes fully open. My vision is blurred, as if I’m seeing the world from behind a fogged sheet of glass. Worse, I have noticed I don’t recognise objects, and sounds, and smells immediately. It takes me some time before I can make sense of things I see and hear and attach meaning or names to them. I hear sparrows chirping and minutes later I smile, because it takes that long before my brain acknowledges the tweeting, sticks the sense of longing to it and lets me miss my hometown.
Today is my nineteenth day without sleep. I dropped one more pebble into the Styrofoam cup this morning and then counted them, before coming here to lie down on this smooth slab of limestone near the sea. On the second night, I lay on the mattress, wondering if I should sleep. I was afraid the winged man might try to hang me again or even kill me, I had seen him follow me the entire day as I walked around the island. I had tried to speak to him.
“What do you want?” I had asked him, keeping my tone friendly to encourage him to speak. “Who are you?”
But he gaped at me, showing no signs that he’d understood me. I walked slowly towards him, holding out my palms so he could see I carried no rocks in them. He hesitated but as I went closer, he stepped back, maintaining his distance. He’s been acting as though he had no interest in my person. He was more interested in whatever he was supposed to do, which one way or another, involved me as a mere subject. And he seemed to be in no hurry to accomplish this.
On that second night, the winged man, as I had feared, pulled the curtain away while I was lying on the mattress. I could distinguish his figure in the dark as he tiptoed in. He suddenly stopped as if he’d sensed something and by the time I grabbed the rock I had brought with me that evening, he dashed out. I followed him anyway, and threw the rock in the direction I thought he had vanished into the dark.
After that, he gave up peeping in, but I haven’t been able to fall asleep. The fear of being hanged, upside down, perhaps was the trigger of my sleeplessness, but as days passed, I noticed I couldn’t fall asleep, even if I want to. I feel like I’m being unstuck from my old self, slowly, without knowing what it is that I am transforming into.
At nights, I lie down and let my mind drift. I enter a strangely peaceful state and imagine things and feel them as though they were real and it begins with the rabbit hopping around me and soon after its whiteness engulfs everything, my thoughts come to life; I think of swimming and feel the touch of water against my skin, I think of snowy mountains and I shudder from cold. As I fall deeper into this trance, I also hear people speaking in different languages, children laughing, seagulls screaming and strange monotonous sounds like roar of engine and even church bells tolling. The first time I heard these sounds and voices, I gasped and opened my eyes. The voices still rang in my head. I went to the window, listening carefully, as I had almost no doubts, I had heard them for real. But there was no sound other than the pounding of waves from faraway. Would I be able to see things, I have often wondered, if I let myself go deeper into these dreamy states?
When the sun rises, I work my way up the hill towards the shore to lie down on this perfectly smooth slab of limestone a few steps short of the sea, under the sun and stare at the sky with half open eyes and listen to the mesmerising sound of waves. The winged man follows me here and climbs up an outcrop – fifty paces to my right – that stands out like a giant Moai sculpture gazing at the sea. As he nears the mighty boulder, he limps faster and starts flapping his wings, which help him elevate enough to grab onto the edge of the outcrop and clumsily pull himself up. He then crouches there and watches me.
The winged old man can’t still fly. His right wing doesn’t furl and he drags it behind him. He follows me everywhere, always maintaining a distance, always holding on to that piece of kenaf rope, reminding me of a vulture, loitering about a dying beast; stoical, patient, unflinching. He still wears that uninterested expression, which offends me in a strange way, making me feel unworthy of life. I have, on more than one occasion, mulled over killing him. I haven’t seen him asleep or do anything other than observing me. But he is not agile with that broken wing and I have thought about collecting several good rocks and hurling them at him one after another until he falls to the ground, and I tie his wings and hands and feet with the very same rope, drag him to the northern shore and throw him off the precipices. I spend long times with such thoughts and wonder what I’d feel to see terror in his shining eyes as I push him off the cliffs.
I laugh at these bewitching, captivating thoughts when I come to myself; but there must have been a day in the life of every murderer who’s laughed at the thought of murder; trembled with fear at the mere imagination of pulling a trigger or stabbing a knife into a chest.
Yet, as days have passed, I have come to accept his upsetting presence. The way my mother must have eventually come to terms with the unthinkable fact that her son’s body had been torn to pieces in an explosion of another human; the way all people accept their grief and losses. Sorrows become part of us and we become part of them and soon we forget the last time we breathed and it didn’t sound like a sigh.
Apart from the winged man, there isn’t much about this place that strikes me as unordinary. Eerie, yes, but not eerier than any other forsaken place. In the past nineteen days, I have had the time to explore every corner of it. I have walked the circumference of the island in the hope of finding any sign of Igor or traces of human life.
The cave in the rock must be facing east as I see the sunrise every morning from the square hole in the wall. The hill on which the room is, stands in the centre of the Island and its peak is the highest point. One would expect the pathway, laid east to west, should lead to a particular point of the coastline. But it doesn’t. The shores on both ends of the route look, more or less, the same as the rest of the coastline; with rocks, huge outcrops, boulders, gigantic slabs of limestone. The northern periphery, though is formed of high cliffs rising sheer from the sea, defying the great waves that violently strike against them and splash tremendous amounts of foamy water into the air.
Excepted for the thorn bushes that sprout here and there out of the barren land, Indian fig trees are the only trees on the island. There are patches of them on the western side, some along the route as it continues towards the sea. I recognise them because my mother had planted a small type of the same cactus in our garden. She called them “scorpion flower” and believed that scorpions wouldn’t enter a house with the plant.
But that hideous thorny thing reminded me of some incurable disease. The ones on the island grow twice the height of a man and each is densely covered with hundreds of huge, thick green pads, grown right out of the knobby stalks with smaller pads are grown on the edges of the pads, along with some reddish fruits, the Indian fig. With sharp spikes, as long as a human finger, covering the surfaces of the pads and the fruits, the fig trees are no less thorny, nor less ugly than my mother’s scorpion flower. They are even intimidating. Yet I found myself fascinated since I saw them first on the hot afternoon of the third day.
As I stood watching them, the thought popped into my head that I was but a petty relative of these formidable beings. I was the very scorpion flower in our garden, plucked and thrown before the mighty Indian fig trees. And it wasn’t their immensity before which I felt insignificant, but their rootedness and my uprootedness. The trees had an authoritative air about them; they stand firm, confident, proud and looking down at me, the tiny scorpion flower, as an unwelcome intruder, an ashamed stranger from a faraway land, an incurable disease.
But as days passed, I began feeling fondness, even love, in my heart toward this dry clump of earth in the middle of a blue sea. I have walked barefooted for hours around the island, sometimes so immersed in the serenity of it, that I forget about the winged man following me like a shadow.
Outwardly, the ssland has no resemblance to my hometown; nevertheless, I’m convinced this is a piece of my birthplace magically transported away from all the sadness. It has the same wind, without the smell of the gunpowder, the same blue sky, unpolluted by the acrid smoke of explosions, the same earth with no traces of blood on its surface, the same sparrows, no longer silenced by guns and bombs. This sense of belonging came to me like a forgotten dream and I no longer fret that Igor might never return. I can’t think of any reason why he left me here nor can I figure out how he might have crossed the sea without a boat. I often dig through my memory to recall the events of the night when the boat sank. What I remember is sketchy; I recall the vessel creaking dangerously as waves rose tall above it and I remember people, shouting, screaming, sometimes clearly and vividly, other times stifled as they struggled to keep their heads out of the furious waters. I saw children, men, women, suitcases, shoes, floating around and sinking down as though in slow motion.
The next thing I remember is that someone took my hand and pulled me out of water. I was dragged across slimy surfaces of the rocks at the shoreline for some distance before the hand helped me to stand on my feet. There are quite a few places along the shore, including the very same spot I am lying down on my back, where rocks and stones are covered with green slithery algae and I can’t decide which point waves might have washed me to. I can’t even guess how long I followed Igor before we arrived at the hovel. But as days have passed and the world around me has grown dreamier, I sometimes doubt if the man I followed was truly Igor. Sleeplessness has taken its toll on me.
The day before yesterday, on the seventeenth day, I found myself sitting cross-legged before the fig trees and I had no clue as to how I’d got there and for how long I had been gazing at the trees. When I came to my senses, my ears rang with voices. “What?” I said, almost shouting. The wind hushed through the fig trees. The sun was beating down hard and the winged man was sitting on his heels, watching me from afar. The trees remained wrapped in mysterious silence. I swear they were speaking to me; that, or I was losing my grip on reality.
* * *
The sea too is speaking to me in a secret language and I shut my eyes to the blue of the sky and let my mind drift. I am wary of the winged man atop the outcrops, not taking his eyes off me, lying on my back on the limestone with my hands placed by my sides. Just a few minutes, I whisper to myself, I shut my eyes and will open them if he moves from his place.
I let the white rabbit take form and hop around me and grow bigger and bigger. I let myself sink down the quicksand, taking pleasure in the gritty touch of the grains of sand on my bare skin as it swallows me, slowly. The rabbit keeps hopping, expanding, until I see nothing but sheer whiteness and now, I hear a stifled clamour from faraway, which gradually fades into the sound of waves – not lapping and childlike giggling of water at the shore – but the rumbling roars the waves produce as they form an enormous swirl across the surface. I feel the rise and fall of the waves and float up and down with it.
I hear more sounds; music – harsh and piercing – similar to the kind young people in Samos played on beaches and dance to it. I hear people speaking in different languages, cars honking in the background, hawkers crying out their wares.
This auditory collection reminds me of the long hot days in Samos, where I stayed for three weeks awaiting Igor to arrange for the boat that would take us to Crete. I never mixed with the tourists on the beach. They seemed too confident – almost threateningly confident. I stood aside and watched men and women swim in the sea, dance to their noisy music, shout at one another while playing volleyball or simply walk along the sandy beaches.
For a long time, I listen to these sounds and voices and try to separate them from one another and for each I create an image in my mind, like painters, painting what they see in their mind’s eye. But all of a sudden a deep deafening roar shatters my mental picture. It is a low-pitched thunder, as if the Angel Israfil blows the trumpet right beneath my ear.
It startles me, and I open my eyes, but what I see is not the blue sky to which I have closed my eyes a few minutes earlier as I had been lying down on the limestone. What I am seeing is a ship, painted in dark blue, carrying countless numbers of colourful containers. I press my eyelids together, hard, and open them as wide as I can. The ship is still here, passing slowly right before my eyes and blowing its deafening foghorn once again.
I’m fully awake, even frightened. I hear my heart pounding with incredible clarity. I keep blinking, desperately. I’m not asleep. I am not dreaming. It is as though my eyes are drifting across the surface of the sea, travelling with the waves, to where my thoughts go.
This is not mere imagination. This colossal ship, passing right before my eyes, is real. The roar of its engines vibrates through me and I see the waves escaping from the sides of it long hull, travelling towards me, moving me up and down as they come and pass by me. All those random voices I have been hearing, they have been no product of my deranged mind. These must be the people I used to hear their voices all along – and now I am able to see them too. It seems to me as though I am – not lying down on this slab of limestone that I feel its cool surface against my back – but floating across the water in some place I have no memory of. Perhaps I’m in both places at the same time.
I turn away from the ship and I do that instinctively, by rolling my own eyes – the eyes of the person at the shore – and that changes my field of view. I marvel at breath-taking views of billowing clouds in the horizon and the blue sea that reflect the sunlight right back at me. I see fishermen on their boats heaving their fishing nets, seagulls screeching about them. I cast my eyes down and see wondrous swarms of colourful fish and creatures I could never have imagined existed, swimming in between coral rocks that in the great prisms of the deep waters, look like splendid castles of some ancient underwater kingdom.
As the freight ship sails away, the voices come back. I see a woman in bathing suit, moving her elegant hands every which way as she speaks in a foreign language. She has red hair, gathered behind her head in the shape of a small ball. She is walking along the beach with a man whose hands are locked across his bare chest and his head hanging down. The sweet laughter belongs to a little girl whose golden hair is blown by the wind as she runs back and forth toward the sea as if challenging the waves to catch her. A group of young girls and boys are shouting, screaming, dancing to their loud music.
A soothing sense of freedom fills me. I am untethered from the world and its sorrows like a soul unsticking from a body.
I take a deep breath and think of the Island I am stranded on. I imagine myself lying down under the sun with the winged man still crouched on the outcrops. This thought changes the scenes before my eyes and I no longer hear voices. Instead, it is the lapping of water and the hush of a mild breeze that I hear and a small rocky beach appears before me. It takes me just a few moments to recognise the Island. My Island, I gasp. I see through… water? I say to myself. I see through the eyes of the ocean.
I look closer through the floating eyes and I can spot the winged man on the boulder, sitting on his heels and there, on the smooth limestone slab, I see myself lying on my back. What an outlandish feeling to look at yourself though a pair of eyes outside your body. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen myself since I came to this place; not in a mirror, as there are none in the room, but I could have looked at my reflection in the water. I never felt I needed to.
From out at sea, I see my profile, covered with a thick bushy beard, reaching almost to my bare chest. I have torn my shirt into strips on the second day to wrap my blistered feet in them. My skin is darker than I remember and my ribs pushing against my skin reminds me of the first time I had seen the winged man. I shudder.
Now I hear the winged man’s moving. I can feel him standing up. I try to open my eyes – my real eyes, but I fail. I blink again and again, but I can see the winged man only through the floating eyes. He is not looking at me on the limestone, but has his gaze fixed at some distant point in the sea. His narrowed eyes have added more wrinkles to his forehead. He’s found something, I say to myself. The winged man stands up and stares longer.
I blink ferociously but in vain. My real eyes don’t open. I roll them so the floating eyes turn to focus on the point where I guess the winged man is looking. I see nothing but flat surface of the sea. But the winged man is clearly excited. He makes strange sounds I had never heard before; something between cries of a monkey sensing imminent danger and a wolf howling at night. He opens his wings and jumps off the outcrop and flaps them several times until he manages to reach the ground without falling and then begins running towards the sea, fluttering his wings to go faster.
I raise my body and sit on the limestone and blink again and again but I realise these are the floating eyes out in the sea that are blinking. I see my own self, an upright torso and stretched out legs, hands fallen by sides and eyes shut. I see the winged man step into the shallow water and plods forward, his right wing, half spread, brushing across the surface of the sea. The water rises to his chest as he comes closer, his eyes shinier than ever. He extends his bony hands and grabs something off the sea.
Far away, on the limestone, I feel the cold touch of his hand on my hand and then a chill goes through my body. The winged man pulls what he’s found and through the eyes floating in the water, I recognise my hand. The winged man pulls the hand towards the shore and I feel the slimy touch of the algae-covered rock on my bare skin.
