The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

86

Reanimator

I didn’t follow Sal back to the camp because I didn’t want to see everyone yet. In fact, I didn’t want to do anything much. Except maybe sleep. It was the idea of oblivion that appealed; nothing to do with tiredness. I wanted to get away from the brain that was still making me want to yell. The problem was, of the various benefits sleep might provide, oblivion wasn’t on the cards. If I slept I’d dream, and I knew dreams were not the place to avoid these things.

I ended up talking to myself. Walking around the pool, treating my mind as if it were a separate but reasonable entity, I asked it to leave me alone for a while. Or at least turn down the volume.

This wasn’t the deranged caricature if might sound, full of expressive gestures and wild looks. It was an earnest attempt for some peace and quiet that happened not to work. My mind deflected reason like Superman deflecting bullets, chest puffed out, completely unfazed. So I tried a few different tacks, like attempting to get interested in a pretty flower or the bark patterns on the carved tree. But all these techniques failed equally. If they achieved anything, it was that my failure compounded my frustration and made me feel worse.

My last attempt was to dive back into the pool. Underwater had always had the qualities of a refuge for me. Calming, blinding, deafening; a perfect escape. It worked too, enveloping me in anonymous coolness, but in an unavoidably temporary way. Without gills I had to keep surfacing, and as soon as I surfaced my mind resumed its circular debates.

No place to avoid these things. I realized this eventually, hammered into breathless submission. I climbed out of the pool and headed straight into the jungle. I didn’t follow the gardeners’ path. I followed the network of carpentry paths, which I could use to reach the beach without crossing the clearing.

♦

I’ll keep this brief. Absolutely limited to what I remember, with no filling in the blanks. Not that I’ve been filling in the blanks up until now; it just so happens that my memory of the next few minutes is patchy. No doubt a result of the traumatic morning, and the previously described frame of mind.

♦

‘The rafters are dead,’ I said. ‘Christo will be dead within forty-eight hours. All our problems are over except one. It’s time you got sane.’ Karl looked at me through his waxy eyes. Or he looked through me, or he wasn’t looking at anything at all. Whatever. I didn’t really care. I took a step towards him, and as I did so he lashed out viciously at my legs. Maybe revenge for having kicked down his shelter. The blow hurt, so I hit him back.

♦

I sat on his chest, my knees against his upper arms, trying to push a handful of rice into his mouth. His skin reminded me a lot of the dead Freak on Ko Pha-Ngan, slack to the touch, moving loosely over the muscle. Touching it wasn’t a pleasant sensation at all. Especially when he began to writhe.

♦

He made sounds, probably words. ‘That’s the boy!’ I shouted. ‘Guess I’m curing you now!’ His fingers clawed at my neck. I pushed them away. I think I may have lost the rice in the struggle. I think I may have been holding sand.

♦

I assume I closed my eyes. Instead of Karl’s face with bugging eyes, I have a mental picture of a reddy-brown blanket. Nothingness, so closed eyes seem like a logical explanation. They would also explain the next image I have in my memory slide-show – a blue blanket, re-opening my eyes for a split second as I fell backwards and glimpsed a cloudless sky. And the next image, returning to the reddy-brown blanket again.

♦

I sat up. Karl was twenty or more metres down the beach, running like crazy. Amazed that he could still have so much strength after days of virtual starvation, I leapt to my feet and sprinted after him.