Remember the Invisibles

Part I

   
 After the accident


<VISIBLE>



The village was small, mere 30 huts huddled together inside a small valley.  They must have found me in the charred ruins of my plane.  I was anxious and the pain was intolerable. The little I saw of my body were all burns, bruises and wounds. 

Brown burn marks were splattered all over my body.  My left thigh was reduced to a purplish, lifeless lump that looked like it belonged to a rotting corpse.

I was immobilized for the last few months in that little, red bed. The last few months flushed out so slowly that I awoke at what was like an end of a century.

The last few months: I don’t really remember much about them and I don’t want to.  But my memory keeps throwing unwanted pictures at me. So, I decided to gush it all out.  After all, nobody will ever read it, least of all, me.

*



Those days, the sunrays broke in through the windows to remind me that I was still alive. Light.
It was an incoherent haze of nonsensical colors that confused me.
Shadows.
They pranced around the room as death circled around my bed, preparing a prognosis.





Those nights, the gentle fingers of the wind rattled on my body.  The candlelight danced with it.  I saw the shadow of the candle crawling like a snake.  It looked hungry.
Life.
It was an incomprehensible mass of nothingness.

Death.
A dream.  One that would not come true.
 

Awakening:
I should have died but I didn’t.  So, at the end, I once again began seeing things as they were again.  And at that time, I didn’t see imminent happiness.  Instead, I saw a rude awakening.  Life suddenly became alive; alive with pain.

I felt like a corpse that was alive.



<INVISIBLE>


Food. I don’t have much to say.  I feel so hungry, I feel so cold. The full moon offers no warmth and its pale light reveals only the dark, cold, dirty street in which I am trying to light a fire. The matches refuse to light wet branches I’d found. This might sound pathetic but one can do anything to escape from the cold winter numbness.
These physical conditions leave me no room to take care of my mental condition.  I’m not sure, but I must have already gone insane by now.  I can feel the entire world conspiring to drive me mad.  After all, isn’t insanity the price of life?   I’m starting to doubt whether I can bear that type of price tag for too long.

<VISIBLE>





I never did find out what the name of my nurse was.  I identified her with her face, not with her name.  I might have the choice to describe her, but I as the writer will give the reader complete freedom to conjure an imaginary face of my caretaker during those months. I sparsely remember anything about the village or the room I was in. All I remember about my room was that there was a balcony in which I often went out to get some fresh air.  Up there, I often saw a small girl in tattered clothes meandering down below in the streets, holding on to some loaves of bread.  Fate would make sure that I was haunted by the memory of that Girl for the rest of my life.  It makes my eyes wet every time my memory creates a apparition of that Girl walking aimlessly in the dark streets below, as if looking for somebody to find her.

 <INVISIBLE>



 

Who is that room over there? It’s usually empty.  Nobody wants that room where the walls crumble. Who is that immobile guest in the decrepit room?  I haven’t seen that man before. He isn’t from this village and why is -

Oh! She’s coming!  I’d better take the food before she takes it away from my growling stomach.

<VISIBLE>


I understood little of my nurse’s language.  Yet, I could feel the pangs of pain across her complaint.  The food had disappeared again. It had been regularly happening without any rational justification. As my nurse yelled and complained, I looked down at the Girl down below on the street.  She was the same Girl with the tattered clothes, holding on to the loaves of bread. Stolen loaves of bread.

<UNIDENTIFIED OBSERVER>


The man, who was so immensely burnt, was looking at a tired sun ducking below the mountains. It was the phenomenon of the sunset, where the sun would dive below the horizon, only to shoot out into sky again elsewhere. The incandescence of the setting sun was blinding for the man yet he enjoyed the soothing warmth.  

The door was wide open.  And so was the freedom of movement between the balcony and the rest of the world.


He sat on a chair, covered by a blue blanket with white stripes. Nearby the chair was a very small table with his loaves of bread, the only thing that the villagers fed him. 


Soon, he is sleeping.

Grasping the opportunity, the Girl in the tattered clothes entered the balcony, and slowly held her hand out and touched the loaves of bread, her heart glowing with irrepressible happiness.

He snorted and coughed.
The sudden snorting and coughing upsets the Girl and made her jump.


The sudden jumping of the Girl upsets the man in his slumber and he is awoken.  He turns his head and sees the Girl.  A smile escapes from his stitched lips.
 

He spoke in what little he knows about the language of the village. Bad grammar doesn’t always work as a retardant of expression; individual words will have more weight than the ambiguous sentences that they are parts of.  That is the beauty of bad grammar, perhaps the only case in the entire world where individual parts are greater than the whole.





<VISIBLE>


The Girl’s face was frail and thin.  She looked as though she’d fall with the lightest push and break with the hardest punch.
 

“So you’re the onw who’s been stealing the bread?” I asked, smiling.


The Girl didn’t smiling. The muscles in her thin little face worked together to express intense shock. Shock so intense that tears started glistening in her beautiful black eyes. A teardrop slippd through her hollow cheeks to settle in her skeletal lips.

 

I ignored her shocked look. The little thief deserved it.

 

I spoke again, more harshly, washing away my smile in the process, “Speak! What is your name?”

 

She spoke. No, she croaked, “I …don’t…know! My… fa-father… never… gave me… a name.”