1001 Nights Cast

Last night you delivered your message to me in person. I was in a house belonging to a friend I had not seen in a while. She was not home and instead, in her house, were lots of other people, some I had seen lately, others I had not seen for some time but there were no new faces there. You arrived and sat at the long wooden table. You had been travelling a long way, your hair smelled of high altitudes, your clothes were dark and heavy and your face held the pale composure of a traveller, one who must keep themselves contained, who will share stories on late night train journeys, in cafes, or at bus stops, but keep enough of themselves aside for others to know that they are not from here, and are on their way to somewhere else.

It was summer in the house of my friend, and early afternoon. The table was cluttered with books and papers, and cups and plates from previous meals. People lounged around the table in the casual easy way of a warm Australian afternoon. You passed me my message. I held it in my hand. It was cold and gritty and about the size of a mouse. I held it up to my face and could smell its strangeness. It smelt like a plot of land disconnected from the hands that work it, and the feet that walk on it. It had a metallic ring when I tapped it. I touched it with my tongue and it tasted like money that has changed hands.

I pulled out my laptop and, as I had agreed to do, started to write. The message sat on the table beside me. Everyone in the room was talking and laughing and I tried to write but it seemed impossible with such distractions going on. I picked up my laptop and attempted to go to another room, but discovered that there were no walls in this house. In one room a mother played with her son, in another, people argued about the coming election, in another people were preparing a meal, but we might as well all have been in the same room. One woman kept following me and looking over my shoulder as I wrote. ‘Please stop’ I pleaded. ‘I can’t write while you are looking at the words.’ I needed to go home. I picked up my things and slipped the message into my pocket. It was cold and rough against my leg. Without saying goodbye I walked out of the house.

Outside everything had changed. Where familiar houses and parks had been there were high wire fences. Roads ran through what had been a sports ground, and the path where I usually walked home along the river was blocked off with a padlocked gate. All the street names and signposts were written in a language that I couldn’t understand. Disoriented, I stood in the road and turned 360 degrees. Looking back I could no longer see the house where I had been sitting only minutes earlier. The road I had just walked along ended in a concrete wall.

I looked up at the sky and that, at least seemed familiar. It was still a deep blue without clouds and still smelled clean and slightly salty from the off-shore westerly breeze. But beneath the sky everything else was utterly unrecognisable. Feeling totally alone and beginning to panic, I started walking towards what I imagined would be west.

Passing through what had been my neighbourhood, buildings that I did not recognise were boarded up. Barbed wire curled around doorways and the tops of fences, and there seemed to be no one else around. Suddenly the road ended and I was standing outside a heavily padlocked gate. I yelled out. ‘Hey is anyone there? Hello, hello.’

A door opened and closed inside the compound. I heard the sound of footsteps hurrying, and two men in uniforms armed with automatic rifles approached the gate. ‘Excuse me’ I croaked, ‘I’ve lost my way.’

The two men started unlocking the gate and yelling at me in a language I could not recognise. My heart was beating loudly and my strongest instinct was to run but I couldn’t get my feet to move. I was paralysed by my own directionlessness. I didn’t know where I was so how could I run to somewhere else? I was grabbed by both arms and slammed up against the gate, a gun pointed at my head while the two men screamed into my face, words of which I had no idea of the meaning. They ripped my laptop from my hands and handcuffed me to the fence. One of the men took my bag and poured the contents onto the ground. Three pens, a notebook, a bottle of water, a small bottle of peppermint oil, a bus timetable, and wallet with twenty dollars in it, tumbled into the dust.

I was crying now and begging them to let me go. I thought I would die in a place I did not know, at the hands of people I could not understand.

While one of the men held the gun against my head, the other roughly searched my jacket. He found my house keys and my travel card and put them in his own pocket. He slapped my legs and ripped at my pants and thrust his hands in to my pocket. He found the message you had given me. I’m sorry. I don’t know why. It seemed important to try to hold onto it. It was something with gravity, with bearings. But he took the message from me, and all my words, my entire language, was rendered meaningless.