… join th e adventure …

The Captain strides through the tightly amassed bodies and reaches toward you, squeezing your right forearm with five iron grips. His eyes are blazing—with disease of the body, the mind. Bits of old leaves strand his gnarled hair, you see the aged criss-cross of their flesh. As the Captain holds you fast, you two together now form a diorama, even as the sailors surge menacingly closer, even as the sea storm continues to pound, as lightning fires and thunder applauds, waves plash violently, the ship creaks and heaves, the frame shudders like a child’s toy boat being tossed about by an angry older brother.

(If at this moment you’re like, Eh, fuck this noise, go on, just jump off the ship.)

But even in this tremulous moment, you realize that it’s an interesting question, what the Captain has asked, a question with many doors behind it:

Indeed, how have you arrived here?

Yes, the train, the town, etc. But before that? You hazily recall poor sleep of late—the landlady from whom you were renting a room as you waited for your mission parameters kept you up all hours, her incessant cough, her thudding pacing as she was trying to relieve sciatica pain, and the cough was worrisome—a cragginess like the first rattle of death. Still, it was maddening: what man cannot sleep in his own bed? And too the bedding was infested, husked little insect legs prickling your skin as you’d lie there, seethingly awake in the tepid night darkness, your legs itching with the rubbings of insects to the soundtrack of dying landlady.

Under such wearying conditions, confusion on your part is certainly warranted. How did you get from there to here? How were you assigned this mission? Did you see a corkboard flier, rip off a tab, call a number? Phone call come in middle night? Discreet knock adoor? A stranger sidling at the local watering hole—Hey have I got a job for you, kid.

It gets confusing, a sensitive errand such as this one. Presenting a false self even as you hide your true is like carrying a strand through a sea of strands, a grand of sand through a dune beside the sea. You have often seen sand on the seashore. How fine, its tiny little grains. And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. (You remember a time, once, playing on the beach—don’t you? There was another with you. Who? You can make out form but not face, words but no voice. Who was it with you then?)

Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness: imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird comes to that mountain and carries away in its beak one tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before the bird has carried away even a square foot of that mountain? How many eons upon eons of ages before it has carried all away?

You are the bird.

In your beak, a single sand grain.

You are flying above the endless ocean, and you are so, so thirsty.

Don’t lose the grain—the grain is you.    

You shake off the captain’s iron grasp, reach into your pocket, produce a folded bit of paper. The captain reaches after it greedily, holds it close to his eyes. His beard ruffles with ocean breeze. Droplets scatter down from his matted dark hair, blotting the ink.

“What are these markings? Tell me! I’m no Feejee!”

You look at the bleary writing. He’s right: it’s a form you’ve never seen. Cyrillic? Some familiar symbols—a heart-shape here, eyes there. Maybe a love letter? But from whom?

Try to remember: where were you that you can’t remember where you were?

Luckily, a bright shining lie comes to your lips: speak it here.

If you toss all concern over your existence, over who you are and where you come from, over the edge of the boat – like really jumping this time, literally letting your self wash away, as it were – turn to page 29.

If you need to know who you were before all this began—if you can’t let go of the past and must linger here in ruminative thought for it is in this state and this state alone that you will calm and will come to yourself—fine, whatever, remain: it is in this state that you will perish.