Chapter 31:: What will you bring me when you’re back?

The afternoon landscape that the train trudged through was dry and tiring to the eye. Dust rose in yellow-white clouds outside the window, blowing incessantly into his face as he sat on the windward side of the cubicle. Mark’s face was caked with a layer of dust. His long salt-and-pepper hair, tied away carelessly to keep off his eyes and mouth, was filled with minute particles that mixed with his sweat and turned it into a sticky, saline mass of muddiness. His eyes were heavy and his head ached. Sometimes, he would steal jealous glances at the young boy sleeping in the bunk bed across the cubicle. Moses had spent a large portion of the journey sleeping, and the rest plugging on his i-pod, absentminded and quiet. Mark figured he still required a lot of rest and introspection before coming in terms with their present condition.

So did he. Mark couldn’t remember the last time he had a calming, dreamless sleep. Not in the last couple of days, for sure. He didn’t know if it was because of the proximity to the youngster and that strange, almost threateningly mysterious power he carried in his brain, but every time Mark tried to shut his eyes since he boarded the train, he would be seized by strange and unsettling dreams that would leave him shocked and frightened. He tried to avoid them, he could not. It was as if the dreams would suck him in by force and push him inside the heads and consciousnesses of people he did not know, and could definitely never have been. Yet the dreams were so vivid and so involving that for a while after waking up he could not remember who he was and what he was doing in that train compartment, and he loathed those moments of terrified, shivering indecision. And each time in his dreams he was a different person – an arrogant rockstar in New York who shared his name; a luscious young adventuress biding time as a nun in a Mexican monastery; a cautious, world-weary pensioner in Istanbul muttering curses at his reckless daughter; a gruff, unlettered village youth excited at the prospects of joining the Crusades and travelling east; a sombre woman in a long overcoat kneeling in front of her mother’s grave in the freezing Norwegian winter, her heart dark with remorse. Mark despised the dreams, he despised the fact that even the slightest drowsiness could not escape snatches of those dreams. Instead, he had to keep his eyelids pulled open every moment, giving him a splitting headache, a bloodshot stare, and an uncomfortable numbness all over the body that he could not shake off. He would not afford to doze off, he would not. No, he was Mark Middleton, a man without a past or a definite memory, and he was travelling to Bombay, on a train, in the company of a youth called Moses Putatunda. That was his reality. He wasn't going to let anything make him forget that.

Perhaps he was going mad. The doctors at the hospital had considered it possible, on examining the severe wounds he had received on his head. If he had incurred a mysterious long-term memory loss like what he did, why not madness, perhaps, as a later repercussion? I know I’m really going mad this time, Mark’s tired brain informed him, as a sudden, alarming consciousness made him turn his watering eyes from the cubicle window and behold a most unexpected stranger standing in the corridor, inspecting him attentively. The man might have been Mark’s age, but in that train on that tiring Indian summer afternoon, his blatantly foreign features and attire stood out so tremendously as to be almost ridiculous. He seemed right out of a television programme – a well-built, tanned cowboy in a heavy trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat overshadowing his eyes.

The initial shock of the encounter threw Mark off for a few seconds. Another section of his brain had woken up in the meantime and was trying to convince him that he had dozed off again and this was just a dream, he only had to wake up. Yet another, foolishly hopeful portion was attempting to believe that the man in front of him was perhaps but one more dressed-up performer Mark had come across during the journey, dressed up as a cowboy – he could be given some money and made to go away. But Mark’s central consciousness, the one that had helped him survive all these days in an alien life, was back to work by now and it was assuring him of the unpleasant truth – that the man who has just appeared in front of his cubicle and was squinting intently at him was neither dream nor illusion nor some mere street actor dressed up as something he was not. This man existed, paradoxical as his existence might be if judged by time and space; and the vibrations of unknown, unprecedented danger that were being given off his heavy, muscular frame were very, very real and imminent.

As the stranger took a step towards him the first thought inside Mark’s panicked mind was to reach out and wake up the slumbering Moses. But the other man, unexpectedly agile, was already upon him before that thought could be fully formed, gripping him by his shoulders and staring up at his face. Up close, Mark was surprised to notice the stranger’s strong, big-jawed face screwed up in an expression of confusion, almost horror, at it gazed into his. His face was familiar, very familiar, Mark could hear himself thinking, to his own surprise. So very familiar. So many memories… pleasant… playful… he couldn’t remember them to their exactness, but he knew, he could feel them flitting through his brain. A brother… a child… an adversary… a lover? Mark did not know if the expression of his face changed, because the stranger shuddered and let go of his shoulders, taking a step back.

“Celestina Savonarola?” he finally uttered, in a hoarse, shaken whisper, his voice dripping with a heavy foreign accent. His eyes widened in horror. “Celestina?”

“Adan,” Mark whispered back, almost from a trance. Then he pressed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand hard against his forehead and moaned, “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck. Why?”