I woke up to the sound of someone slapping my cheeks hard. I was lying on the sand, the sunlight making my eyes water. The sound of the surf was roaring; the wind carried salt spray and the happy laughter of children heard to my ears. “Hey you, new guy!”
I turned my stiff neck and focused my gaze on the bearded man in the Panama hat. “Hi! My name’s Randy,” he waved at me. “Where am I?” “Welcome to Thailand, Samchang Island. It’s not ideal, but it could be worse, believe me, dude. Come on get up; stop chilling, time waits for no man.”
I lifted myself up on my elbow to get a better look at my new acquaintance. “Who are you?” “I told you, I’m Randy, your companion in misfortune. Why did ‘they’ take you for?“ “Who is ‘they’? Take me where?“ “Oh, dude, come on!” the bearded man laughed. “Listen, I don’t have time for this right now. Go to the cafe over there, sit at the table with the gray-haired dude with sunglasses, and tell him you a newbie. He’ll explain everything to you, and I’ll run – time is money. Bye-bye! See you later.” I got up, shook the sand off my clothes, and walked to seaside cafe.
The man with the sunglasses was named Austin. Despite his gray hair, he did not look old – about fifty, maybe a little more. Strong, tanned, and in no hurry to engage in conversation, he sipped tangerine juice and occasionally glanced at the kids, frolicking at the sea’s edge. Maybe he was keeping an eye on his grandchildren, or maybe his own children, who knows.
“Are you here with your family?” I asked the first thing that came to mind.He lifted his glasses and looked at me in surprise: “No. Alone.”
“How long have you been here?” Holding a glass of juice in his hand, the man stared at me with undisguised curiosity: “Quite a long time... And you, if I understand correctly, are…a newcomer? May I ask how you ended up on this beach?”
I thought for a second. How indeed? And then I realized that neither the bearded man no the gray-haired man were the usual tourists. Or rather, they weren’t tourists at all, but, as Randy put it, my companions in misfortune. As it was, I didn’t have to worry about Austin thinking I was a ‘nut’. So I told him everything. I told him about my last reportage, about the crazy beekeeper who shot at me; and even about the time I’d been in the White Room and how I’d been tricked by The Shadow.
“I fell for the bait too,” Austin drank his juice, pushed his glass aside, took off his sunglasses and covered his eyes with the palm of his hand: “Almost everyone gets caught. You’re lucky you’re not addicted to visions of the illusory world like a junky to needle. Although I don’t know if you were lucky that “they” got you off the needle before you got sick of this world.” “Should I have?”
“It’s hard to say. Anyway, it was just your imagination.” “It couldn’t be true!” I couldn’t believe it. “It was all so real and vivid...” “The visions of drug addicts are also vivid, but that didn’t stop them from being hallucinations.” I didn’t know what to say, so I asked:“Was it different for you?” “It was.” “What about the details?” “Are you really interested?” “Very much!”
He motioned for the waiter to bring the check and said:“The waking dreams amused me at first. Then I began to get tired of them. I was fed up with all the pleasures of the world, and nothing else pleased me. I had no desire to fly or to build castles in the air; I felt that all this had already happened to me. What comes next – the endless repetition of the same? Sooner or later, I think, these thoughts crossed everyone’s mind.”
I understood very well what Austin meant.I read too many adventure novels as a boy, dreamt of traveling, but feared I would die before I saw the world. My parents never went on vacation, because they thought it was a waste of money. It was better to buy a TV or a new kitchen set. They spent their summers in the country house and were quite happy about it, while they sent me to pioneer camp, which I didn’t like very much.
Once, when I was eleven years old, I woke up in the middle of the night to music playing somewhere outside. I recognized the melody; it was a lambada. Frames of the popular video from early ‘90s immediately flashed before my eyes: a black boy dancing under palm trees with a young beautiful blond girl. “What a happy couple!” I thought with envy. “It’s sad that I’ll never see these places”. My self-pity made me cry. I really wanted to go to the mysterious world called “abroad”. But in those years, a trip to another country was like a trip to the Looking-Glass, where only the chosen ones could go. I was not one of them, but I believed that the day would come when my dream would come true.
And as soon as I had the opportunity, I rushed to catch up on what I had missed. I couldn’t sit still for a minute on vacation. I had to go everywhere, visit all the museums and monasteries, swim in a waterfall, ride an elephant, and raft down a mountain river. In search of excitement, I walked deserted beaches, climbed mountains; scuba dived, and even explored abandoned caves alone.
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But gradually, my interest in adventure began to wane. Maybe I’m tired, but all the resorts I’ve seen began to seem the same. If before the unknown attracted me to travel, I enjoyed every moment, not thinking about time and money, but now I did not want to go anywhere. “Maybe it would be better to buy a new laptop?” I thought lazily. But I couldn’t help traveling. One thought frightened me: what if I miss something important? Where else could I be happy, if not there – in a Far-Away Kingdom across the seas and oceans?
And I stopped living in the present. All year long, like a robot, I went to work, automatically writing articles, answering the phone and counting the days until my vacation. While flipping through colorful brochures, I imagined renting a house by the sea, waking up with the first rays of the sun, enjoying the dawn on the beach and diving into rising waves.
I literally lived these thoughts, I was so fascinated by them that I took the dreams as something already accomplished. How else to explain that in real life everything repeated itself according to the same scenario: from the first minutes on the sea I had the feeling that I had never left here. Getting up before sunrise, when sleep is especially sweet, no longer seemed so tempting. So I always said to myself: “No, not today, long flight, jet lag, I need to rest. As for the sea, it’s not going anywhere. I will see it tomorrow...”
But the next day I have many reasons to sleep longer. I called myself a wimp and felt remorse. It’s funny to say, I was even angry at the sun, thinking it was responsible for my troubles. Finally, cursing, I dragged my sleepy body to the beach, where, I sat on a rock, cold and irritated, waiting for the sunrise. But the morning was overcast and it began to rain. “I shouldn’t have gotten up so early!” I felt sorry for myself and I went back to bed.
The thought of having to do it all over again tomorrow was getting on my nerves. So in the morning, when I pulled back the curtain and saw the clouds, which meant I didn’t have to go anywhere, I fell asleep like a baby and felt fine. Until an old lady caught me in the middle of the day and casually asked me: “Why did you not go to the beach today?” My heart sank: “The clouds...” “Oh, young man, you have lost much!” she exclaimed reproachfully. “The clouds parted, and the dawn was full of beauty. The sky was azure, in the scarlet rays of the sun. It was magnificent!” She blissfully closed her eyelids as if the sun’s disk were still shining before her.
I was furious – the old hag! She had ruined my mood. And the next morning I went to the beach with determined. The sky was clear, the dawn was yellow. “Well, yes, it is beautiful”, I thought, listening to myself, trying to arouse joy, or at least a note of tenderness. But those feelings must have slumbered somewhere very deep. I shrugged: the sun is like the sun – dawns are no worse in my homeland. So I went to sleep.
The day I left, I had to get up early to catch my plane. A huge crimson ball swelled over the sea, framed by a plume of golden cloud. I admired the bizarre play of light and shadow, and my angry boiled over. “It’s always like this!” I was angry. “As soon as you start to feel something, the game is over – time to go home. No, two weeks is not enough! A month off, that’s what I need!”
Soon I did it. I imagined an ideal vacation, bought a ticket and flew to a tropical paradise, expecting to be in complete nirvana this time. But on the very first day, while swimming in the sea during a storm, I scratched my leg on a board that was floating in the rough surf. I had no health insurance (as usual, I hoped for the best). But I wouldn’t have used it anyway. The scratch was nothing…
A week passed, but the wound did not heal; on the contrary, it deepened and festered. I felt no pain and continued to swim and sunbathe as if nothing had happened. It was only when the infection had spread to my entire leg that I rushed to the drugstore to buy iodine and bandages.
In the evenings, after lotions, everything seemed fine, but in the mornings, like the biblical Job, I woke up with bubbling foam on ulcers, that now numbered in the dozens.
The doctor (I had to see him for help) prescribed an ointment and advised me to fly to Russia as soon as possible, suggesting that the cold and rest would kill the infection, otherwise my case was rubbish. “What a great vacation!” I grumbled to myself. “Why the hell did I go swimming in a storm!”
Cursing everything in the world – the tropical humidity, the heat, and the mosquitoes, I moved to another province in kind of semi-delirium. I hoped I would get better there. But the disease did not go away. The ointment didn’t help. I even began to think that it was blood poisoning and that I would die soon. Or maybe that was what I wanted unconsciously. I guess all I had been doing for the past few years was looking for death, and now I seemed to have found it...
I decided that if I was going to die, it did not matter if I died in my homeland or in a foreign country. It might even be better to die near the sea! So I gave up worrying. I had no books, no laptop, no internet, I wasn’t doing anything and I wasn’t in a hurry. I spent my days on the beach in the shade of coconut trees, or lying in a bamboo hut with windows wide open. I had never been so calm and relaxed. In those days I would wake up to the sonorous chirping of birds and listen for long stretches to the rustle of the palm leaves with the monkey trail on the top, which meant the macaques were out on their morning hunt. I didn’t have to go out to see the sunrise – the beach where I lived only had sunsets. The ulcers on my leg finally healed, and I was even able to swim and snorkel for a while. It was probably the best vacation of my life.
To be continued