1001 Nights Cast

‘Come on, we can’t be here forever. Let’s face it, we need to get ourselves out, sometime soon. Almost everyone is going. The prevailing wind will set our course for us if we don’t take things into our own hands. It could be quite hairy.’

‘We can’t just leave him there, counting, walking, leaking words and spinning.’

We both looked over to the stooped older man in an outsized flak jacket billowing from his shoulders as he walked, head down, watching each step he took as he strode across the only tarmac road for miles. We had nicknamed him ‘The General’, just because when he did talk it was in orders and lists. We had picked him up at the last petrol-filling station and this was the ‘comfort break’. The General had asked us for a ride to the next town, the one at the end of this two lane road that ribbons into the distance. We didn’t want to let him down now, it would be a breakdown of the covenant we’d built between us over the drive, but time was up. We had done our duty to the best of our ability. We were experiencing difficulties, local difficulties which we could not say were caused by our presence, but, as we weren’t actually invited here at all, we could be seen as aggravating. We acted like we were the special guests but we had crashed into this landscape and into its peoples like meteorites from outer space. We all acted like no-one saw it, the meteor, like it was natural to be here.

‘One hundred and sixty.’ He paced forth taking six long strides from one side of the road to the other, changing back, then;
‘Fifty five,
One thousand one hundred and fifty,
Twenty eight,
Two thousand two hundred and forty,
Six,
Four,
One,
Twelve…’

Jake and I had been here in this sandy, dusty, spiky country for four months out of our six month mission. In some places we were able to help and in others our mere presence exacerbated the local sense of powerlessness, of occupation, and so released the opposite energy. Repelling forces, insurgents, freedom fighters, liberators, they acted in forceful and terminal ways. It made the air tense, like the invisible muscular feeling of magnets forcing against each other, destabilising one another, fundamentally.

‘…Eighteen,
Twenty four,
Two thousand and three,
Two,
Three,
One thousand,
Twenty…’

We had kicked our way in. The original intention was to bring a ‘beneficial effect’. That was the hope, we were told. We are bringing democracy, in a tank, with added balancing agents. Whether a sensible, or naïve hope…? We aren’t going to judge. We are told history will judge, but we are not told whose story it will be. It won’t be the story about unwelcome visitors. Or of the desiccated lives we see about us as we drive through. It will probably be the same old, same old…heroes and villains.

We are on the run, running hot from one town to another carrying blood supplies in a refrigerated four wheel drive truck. On bad days being part of life-saving doesn’t make you feel safe, or less of a target, just more like a nice neat target. And the bad days? They are the ones when we pass more burnt-out, bombed-out vehicles than the day before. Today was a good day because we had found The General, looking lost, out of place. Where is his team?

‘…Fourteen,
Five thousand two hundred,
Five…’

Our status and presence in this world has put us in a vacuum. We suffered a kind of rejection from our surroundings and so we are detached, distant, semi-conscious. We are connected to each other and to familiars through our daze. We are stuck here on the roadside with The General for logistical as well as moral reasons, as the planning for our journey was poor, probably based more on optimism than local knowledge. Now hostile elements have got a hold of our minds. If we are to move on we will need to wake up, to recover consciousness, to regroup and make a plan before more malign forces fill the vacuum we are holding.

‘…Ten,
One hundred and nineteen,
Two thousand seven hundred and forty one…’
(Others can take a view on whether he is right or deceptively impartial.)

The wind blows up a spiral of dust. The General stops counting and walking and makes his way back to the vehicle. ‘Six hundred and fifty five thousand’ he speaks more quietly and his shoulders sink further down, ‘six, five, five, zero, zero, zero.’ He opens the door, reaching for the handle to guide and pull himself onto the seat. He shuts the door then winds down the window to hail us to join him out of the gathering wind. He is coming into a different consciousness, to join us now with our radio crackling and banter as we leave this pit stop.

We climb aboard and turn to face him as he asks, ‘You know the population of Bahrain? ‘, apropos of nothing in particular, except it’s a continuation of his numbers theme. It’s not a question he expects us to answer.

‘Six hundred and ninety thousand, five hundred and eighty five. That’s a whole country. Bahrain.’

‘Uh huh’ we nod.

‘That’s thirty five thousand, five hundred and eighty five more people than have been killed here since we came.‘

Jake looked at me and motioned with his furrowed brow and pursed lips, ‘What did he say?’

‘He’s talking about how many people have been killed, you know, since we got here…six hundred and fifty five thousand people. Killed. The population of a country, like most of Bahrain or all of Montenegro or more than the entire population of the Bahamas.’

‘A lot of hoo–ha’ laughed The General leaning out of the window, ‘yeah, a lot of hoo-ha!’