Once I am told by you that it’s for the first time when you’ve heard of such a geographical name as Barsaraka, I’ll agree with you and say that, most probably, this island with a thousand beaches lying in an intratropical sea just appeared in my dreams. At the beginning of summer, I’ve got wits about this paradise from a booklet caught by my sight at the local hostelry, while I was pretty drunk. After a plentiful effusion of beer, I minded purely accidental that in a couple of bloody weeks I was going to have my next birthday, and it would be nice to spend it with a hearty company, at a green place, in an affectionate embrace, and having even warm drinks. I plopped down the waitress’s ass when she was passing by and asked for more beer. She even did not look behind but in a few minutes brought me a weeping glass and put it onto the table together with the circular tray. The moment I got closer to the cool beverage with my lips, my eyes fixed the glance on a bright spot under the bottom. Without breaking away from my beer I captured something that was incumbent out there and did my best to distinguish the content in glimmer light of the cocktail lounge lantern.
Over there, atop flexible binding of the thrice folded leaflet tinted as a bright-blue ocean bay, a palm tree showed off, few foamy surf crinkled along white sandy ribbon of a beach, the glary sun disc hung up frozen over the crown of the tropical plant, and the inscription «Barsaraka – the island of a thousand beaches» shone diagonally in a large scarlet type of Freestyle Script. My clouded consciousness flew inside of the advertisement and began sliding on a sailboard over marine wave as a surfer, swarming up the palm tree for a coconut as a crab, running around the beach after a volleyball as a player, and helpfully depicting me astride the bike within the company of the same motorized friends, tracking on sand with a girl in the costume of Eve behind my back.
That's how the plan for my birthday staging arose. I, one of the «Berserker MC» gang, gathered a team out of thirteen bones (together with me). We, bikers, are superstitious people. But that time I had an extremely strong desire to jerk the fate’s tail, so I spat upon any conventionalities. Especially as together with gals, whom we’d definitely come across over there, we’d become twenty six in number, and it was my real age to meet. The cost of flight tickets for the whole boiling plus motor-cycles was not bijou at all. But, can it really stop young dicks wishing to put a bold face on the matter? We had done homework on travel: all saddle bags were stuffed with sunbathing and further requisite, all wallets were swollen with credit cards, and the Harleys were maintained and glassed. Everybody had gathered in front of my shelter in three hours prior to the flight, and we set off to the airport in a convoy formation led by me as the birthday person.
There’s nothing like free hovering along the main body of the road in the saddle of your true iron horse except for the night trekking to music by favourite groups. We tore the dark apart with headlight beams, engine roar and hard rock thunder. It takes around thirty minutes to the airdrome along the highway at an authorized speed. My pack managed to cover approximately half-way. Everything that happened further still appears in my consciousness as pieces of a patchwork quilt. The headlight of an off-roadster made me blind while emerging on the oncoming traffic lane right in front of me. Time failed me to apply the brake, even to think of it. In a matter of free flight seconds I had an opportunity to distinguish a face fast drawing nearer, smooth-shaven, shrieking, distorted with fear and having saucer-sized eyes. There was darkness afterwards.
The first awakening was a tormenting torch. I unstuck my blinkers scarcely, one by one, in succession, and stared a glance into the snow-white area of ceiling. The attempt of motion fulgurated both chest and head with the spear of infernal pain. Then I decided to confine myself to pure visual contact with the outside world and fumbled the gaze on the corners and circle-wise with the same result – I was surrounded by white silence of the intensive cure-unit space. Tired from the applied force, I slumped in the dark again under the rhythmical pulsation of hospital tones, among which I could catch somebody else's remote murmuring from the other reality: «He’s been out of coma».
My next uprising from nihility took place in the presence of some strange audience. The bed-head was slowly raised up to the angle of forty five degrees, and when I succeeded in opening lead screens of my eyelids, two cheesecake babes were sitting on my left, while on the right there was an elderly married couple. Those people strove to constrain their tears with hammer and tongs, but nevertheless they were looking at me with compassion poorly wrapped up in slumber. As for me, I was half-sitting with an air of abstraction and carefully taking view of the overall mise en scene without paying particular attention to the characters of the performance. Right in front of me, at the foot of the bed, there stood a man, a physician, whom I noticed and classified as a doctor even before, at the moments of enlightenment. He was the one who forwarded the conversation of the strangers’ assemble into the essential mainstream:
- Your relative had vastly larger luck than that poor fellow who flew into his windscreen panel. However the bunt coming in the head was so hard that he sank into a coma. Coma, just so you know, is a state between life and death characterized by loss of consciousness, acute decrease of reaction or nonreactive for external excitation, which becomes life threatening if a person remains in it much too long. On the contrary, it is the klendusity effective against pain and stress, which helped our boy indeed to steer himself out of the crisis. The amnesia is a different story. It is a disease with the symptoms of memory loss, especially as of recent dramatic events, or showing fragmentary memories about emanated occasions. So, arm yourself with patience, don’t force the process, and be utterly cautious in application that you strain for regeneration of the «information on the hard disk».
- Doctor, how do you appraise the condition of my son at the moment? – the grey-headed but rather strong man with military poise sitting on the right side from the bed, who didn’t let the hand of the lady from his palm even for a second because she really needed his support, distantly inquired.
- Almost during two weeks he’s been at the edge, but today, I’m adamant, we may speak about stabilization of his state. I believe that in a couple of weeks you will be able to take him back home, so that he could continue his post-hospital rehabilitation outpatiently and in the bosom of his provident family.
A girl sitting at my left hand gave a sob and snuggled closer to her escort, and the neighboring beauty, in her turn, braced that poor martyr stiffer and contracted her pretty eyebrows over her nice but red eyes. They both were blinking gorgeous, even in mourning. My head began to swim, pictures got hazy, and I zonked out. At that period I was downright incapable of administrating the march of time and a bird of my brain. I resided extremely comfortable in a special orthopedic bed, I didn’t remonstrate against hand feeding with spoon, shift of clothes and bed-pan, pains in thoracic cage and brainpan gradually retreated as affected by duly prescribed medication and resistance of strong constitution. The same man and women came to see me every day, and little by little I got accustomed to see their frightened, sad or spiritual faces, having absolutely no idea, who they were in general, and who they were to me in particular.
The youngest of two girls, according to oral information provided by my attending physician, has been my true wife during the latest one and half years; the older beauty (although I guess not much older) appears to be my uncle’s widow, who has lost recently in Afghanistan in the course of mission; whereas the silver gent and the sweet madam, whom I accurately detected as a married couple, well, provided to be my parents. But approximately three days before the discharge from the hospital, I made the most mind-bending discovery for myself, while taking a shower. On the eve, I was allowed getting up and slightly moving by my own. So, sticking with one hand to the wall I smoothly, shockless, in an unhurried manner and without distinct cheer shuffled off in the direction of the shower room located inside of my cubicle. Touching my face covered with the three day’s hair I thought that those were the hospital staff persons who shaved my physiognomy medicinally at my admission in the emergency room and later on, because since my eighteen I had both moustache and beard, as seemly a brutal berserker should have.
The walk-in shower occurred to be directly across from the entry to the bath-room, and I like a blind man, on the touch, instantly stretched my vacant arm, turned on the tap, put my hand under it and satisfied myself with the comfort temperature of flowing water. And only after such manipulations I let the wall stay free and turned my sight to the sink with mirror. A mug of unknown peasant looked at me from the looking-glass awakening an indistinct and highly nasty association. Feeling a leg weakness, I based myself upon the sink tulip with my both hands. Some sedative drugs compose the medicaments, which I had to be stuffed in the hospital three times a day. All chances are that particularly this fact has saved me from apoplexy or any other stroke. The amnesia gave its place to a fragmentary film festival of images buzzing through my conscious at a speed of twenty five frames per second. Very carefully, I pried myself away from contemplation of mixer taps and looked at the mirror once again. Instead of customary set of eyes, ears, mouth and nose framed with hair I saw a suburban driver’s face pale from horror…
Nevertheless, I stepped in and stood up under the flow of water in the shower and faded for a while in perplexity. The brain declined presenting any optional versions of happened transformation and analyzing further ensuing consequences. I, as the saying goes, blankly stayed in the cabin, naked, wet and doomed like the crucified Nazarean. A tap on the door recalled me from the transfixion state. A nurse was interested about my well-being with warm considerate voice. And, though I didn’t feel myself to be myself at all, I put the girl at ease as vigorous as possible out loud and asked through the door, whether I can get newspapers and magazines to recover the informational gap of the last month. She twitted: «I will bring it right now!» and melted in the noise of murmuring water.
The nurse came back together with substantive pile of paper when I was in a bathrobe sitting on the edge of the bed so far fresh and shiny. I coughed up the easiest possible smile and passionately thanked my angel of mercy for her concern and immense kindness. The girl just reminded me that she would come to feed me in half an hour, but no longer from spoon, broke into a broad smile and fluttered out of the chamber. So I grabbed the newspapers from the bedside chest immediately and spilled them all over the berth, trying to find something important. Finally, my eyes caught up the heading «Murder on Highway», under which there was a developed report on the lurid road fatality. I seized the journal with trembling hands and turned to the light because characters began to feather and jump on the books:
«Yesterday, a road traffic incident took place in South Highway. One person died, the RTI culprit resides in the intensive care squad on the gate. As it is ascertained by our reporter, the driver of a range roving vehicle lost control, and his car drove out to the oncoming traffic lane knocking down the head moving motor-cyclist in these circumstances. The police agency conceives that the automobile technical failure became the accident cause. The relatives adhere to the same opinion and take up the position that their injured member of the family interrupted his business trip because of suddenly incurred malfunction. The pre-investigation check of all incidental facts is carried out. The catastasis of the off-road vehicle driver is assumed as steady severe one. Upon the given testimony there is no necessity of his reclusion under arrest, as it is considered by the representatives of justice. At the scene of the accident, our reporter had a chat to the delegate of bikers’ club, who protests against the qualification of the case as an accident and demands to recognize it as a reckless homicide. Motorheads have informed about the place and timing of civil funeral for their perished fellow».
In spite of summer weather, my hands and feet became icy and cold sweat appeared on my forehead. I fumbled through the remaining prints and fished out the needed issue. Half of the gazette page was occupied with photographs from commemoration and funeral. There I recognized all my motor-brothers, beheld the silhouette of my own beard in the coffin and my name on the grave-stone. Aside from the condolence words under each picture, I read marginal news that the relatives of the crash culprit remunerated most of the expenses incidental to funeral, and grieve together with all folks of the deceased rider. I was lame under the hat at that moment, but I decided that it would be better if I neither move hand or foot nor give myself away meanwhile. First of all, it should be properly digested - present I killed former me. I gathered newspapers with disobedient hands, hammered them together into a stack and arranged onto the night table in anticipation of my fosterer.
As long as I was taking my meal, my little friend retold the latest news here and abroad, quoted my hospital physician concerning my diagnosis, and submitted practical suggestions picked up in the ward of the long-term resident at the neurology unit. As for me, I was managing the diastrophic blocks of thinking in the head all along, trying to build a road to explanation of an unexplainable phenomenon. At the dessert part of the meal my memory helpfully hung out for the universal viewing the illustration of the face, which presently was on me, with large eyes and mouth opening behind the auto windscreen, and it took a lot of my effort to swallow the jelly of vanilla pudding without choking. Suddenly it seemed to me very important that I gave orders on my property in proper time, and now the Motor Club will receive my workshop and trailer where I have been living since the eighteen years old age.
No matter how the exchange happened, it’s already impossible to change something. I have to live inside the body of the thirty years old farmer under the same roof with his wife and parents, as well as his uncle’s widow due to the fatal casualty during the mission in Afghanistan. These people are not guilty at all. It arose for no special reason, just the stars settled on the interstellar blanket, the fate gave a response with the lunge against my challenge, and I have nothing to do but only to accept the things as is and continue breathing. By the way, who of two is alive? This question will currently torture me for life. Don’t you think that it is an unusual chain of cogitation for a man, who has just seen himself lying in the coffin simultaneously sitting on the hospital bed? The nurse left with the tray of empty plates and I began to make some preparations for the relatives’ arrival for the first time since the moment of my exposure to them. I decided to deploy the remaining days before my discharge to coaptation with another family.
Finally, I was taken away from the hospital and brought back home. The procedure of discharging examination lasted all day long, so we reached the farmstead before daylight. The dog days of summer mantled the neighbourhood of household and penetrated the house with stuffy tentacles. Never before the dwelling was so active at night in hot summer period because all its inhabitants were leaving to resorts in search of freshness and vacation from sincere labour; and an old keeper never stepped inside the huge barrack during the hours of darkness. He visited every living-room and non-living premises before the sunset and after the dawn, and preferred to spend night hours in his small, cosy, and luminous gatehouse situated by the garden path leading to the gate. Why should the elderly guardsman fuss about the watched master’s property? But today is a different story. The watchman has walked around the house for ten times already, peeping at all windows and eyeholes where from any shine is streaming, trying to see what is going on, but hesitating to enter the house because of extremely strange circumstances involved in the return of the landlord. (2017)