Love and the Dark Night

TWELVE

Anais’ POV

I stared at the newspaper, I read and reread it a thousand times. Rudi! How come he met with the train accident?

He had got down from the car and left with an indifferent air. And I saw him heading homewards. Where’s my cell phone. Here.

“Hi. Sorry it’s early morning but had you seen Rudi last night? I mean had you met him?”

The voice on the other side coughed slightly.

“No, I didn’t. In fact after my work at the embassy I went for a meeting. Why do you ask? I mean we are not supposed to let anything be known now, but…”

I explained our whereabouts of the last evening.

“And then he walked out and I saw him heading towards his house. In fact he was about a hundred metres or so away from his house. You know the café? He got down there. Anyway, go through today’s The Newslight. It’s on the front page. We have to bring him back.”

*

Rudi’s POV

Waking up in Tessa’s room in the Southern neighbourhood, the first thing my mind felt was a pale white light, and the first thing that I felt stabbing my body was an ice-cold draft against my body. The hair on my chest rose up as every pore woke up with the cold shiver, shaming the hair of my arm. I must have slept for over five hours, more like adrift on sea of icy waters, but here on waves of pain beginning from between my eyes, growing as they travelled back to my feet and then up, over my knees, my waist, chest, neck before crashing against my eyes again. A dreamy shot of an action of wizards and their disciples skateboarding on cliffs of icy waves as effortlessly as mice on split boards of a wrecked ship appeared and vanished from my mind.

I found myself wrapped in a medical haze of ointments, gels drenched in cotton gauze tied firmly around my head. When I opened my eyes, t took me a moment to realize that the pale white light was not light from a special bulb, covered with a special filter. This was light from the sky, the first light of day. It flooded the room, filling every space available. It softened the edges of the brown dining table with garden benches, even lighted my nails and my hands, and like the approaching headlight of a train through a tunnel, it got brighter before my eyes.

In this light I looked around, moved my head just a little bit, and the pain making me wince. Where was the light coming from?

Oh yes, from between the edge of the curtain and the bottom window frame where the curtain was pulled up slightly by the hanging bead-chain on its side. It was a flood pouring forth from the walls as if the wall itself had turned luminescent. By this time my eyes had adjusted and I could see that the window frame had a dark grey colour and the curtain was dark off white. The cool draft against my face, was it a fan? There was no fan on the ceiling, only an ancient chandelier with countless light bulbs hanging upside down.

When the hurt on my head came, it did so with a hammer coming down on little red and flat circular caps of fireworks children play during Diwali. Each bang of those little fire-caps came in succession splitting my head into countless pieces and throwing my head all over in space.

Where was I? Who am I? What is happening? Why all this pain?

There was no stand-fan on the floor anywhere but the draft was strong and made the ends of my sheet shiver in quick succession. Was a door open somewhere, some door I could not see and the wind rushing through it? Thinking of other options, I heard it, the hum, so indistinct that I would have missed it had it not been for the silence in the room. It was an air conditioner, I could make out. But where had I seen one? In someone’s room? Someone called… Rumi…? No. Rumirez? No no. Romey. Ru…di…? Yes. I think so. I’m not sure. Or was it in a terminus where the parallel metal lines of tram cars went snaking in and out from, and in one of those cars I had gone on a joy-ride down the vast greenery of the city, and the strong draft of the early morning fog brought shivers all over me?

Or was it like the wind carrying the first drops of rain, when the monsoon broke, when the city heat suddenly vanished as if a giant switch had been flicked off in the sky, drawing thick black clouds over the sun and covering the copper sky?

The light and the draft clearly explained, my mind took care to where I lay with the light-grey sheet covering me, and smells of liquid soap, conditioner and shampoo and fresh water, and the plop-plop of water dripping after every one second from the butt-washing faucet which I could hear and equally see through the fissure between the washroom door and its frame.        

I could roll over three times and still not fall but I couldn’t move now, my back was stiff. I felt a weight on my chest so heavy that even the slightest shift felt a knife stab in my back and instantly the gnarled fingers of the voice was twisting the blade, bit by bit. A laugh, croaking and hollow rang in my every vein, a burning and sharp pain, and coupled with this the hammering of the little powerful fireworks by the children of spirits.

I was dressed in a white loose-fitting robe-like cloth, loosely tied around my neck and waist somewhat like a priest’s. The garment snuggled against my body, warm and light grey under which I was naked.

I turned slowly to one side and with as much little pain and saw a light grey carpet covering the floor like a grey dead stagnant water surface of a pool. There was a mixture of mud and earth, that’s what it felt like. The carpet ran underneath the dining table and the two benches, right up to the wall, almost touching the curtains, under the door, which was slightly ajar and through which I could see only a strip of a charcoal-black wall that perhaps lead to the other rooms.        

Perhaps Tessa lay in one of the rooms. Maybe asleep. Fast asleep. But Tessa had a different flat, slightly vintage with high ceiling and thick walls and the walls with butter yellow colour, and windows with vertical bars. This was a different house, high up in space, as if.

Should I allow my hand to fall, but it might hurt. But fortunately I didn’t have to bend or stretch, the bed’s height seemed to be perfect since my fingers touched the carpet. I ran them through the fine fibres, moved them left and right and back again right and left. A game it was for me. A painless game before the pains of the entire body, from the nerves, and reaching my head would begin.  

My eyes closed. The room became brighter in gradual steps, the light seeped through my closed eyes, and it tinted the darkness with a dusk-coloured grey, a heavy grey, before the second wave of sleep came crashing down the endless shore of his eyes, and scraps of the previous night’s activities floated by: chilling out at the Roxy with familiar people, vague picture of a tourist with Ranee, a lady thrown out of a vehicle, leaving someone, walking down a road next to a café.

The images appeared in an orderly fashion, as if I was standing at the balcony of the universe, far up in space, surrounded by clouds and these activities came one after the other, like the children in the movie The Wall walking down the aisle as We don’t need no education played in the background. But soon they get mixed up, break and join only to break again. I saw I was dancing on the road with the familiar faces, the lady in the car inside the Roxy pub being thrown out on the cold marble floor, the tourist crucified pinned to the wooden door of the café with a Red Indian spear and a tomahawk stuck deep on the right side of his head.  

I’m better now, the voice said. So this voice message. Good morning.

I didn’t know what was happening but I said: Good morning. I’m so glad to know you are better, my heart almost leaps in joy. But I didn’t know why I was saying all this, and to whom. Whatever I do, I involve you into it. I mean, well, I think of what I will do today, and I imagine you are there standing next to me and I’m saying this to you. I’ll have a cold cut sandwich, what do you think? And you nod your head, saying ‘Hmm…”

Why am I saying all this?

And then I was trying to buffet the sleep with my strong arms but their waves came crashing before sleep sucked me in deeper into its folds.