1001 Nights Cast

The plane landed just after midnight at the tiny airport, a single-storey clapboard building in an over-lit field. He was one of a handful of passengers and was the last one to make it through to arrivals. Up ahead the silhouetted forms of his fellow passengers were disappearing into the night on foot.

He’d been told to take the airport bus into the town. A journey of about ninety kilometres. He found the stop easily. It was next to a taxi rank. There was no bus. There were no taxis. There were no cars. There was no transport of any kind. He thought about running after the guys from the plane but they were no longer visible. He couldn’t imagine what had brought them to this backwater. Did they live near by? Were they on holiday or in transit? Was the nearest place walkable to?

He turned back to the terminal. It was deserted. The sliding doors at the entrance were shut. He thought he could see the vague outline of a small animal slinking close to the ground. A cat or fox maybe. It seemed unlikely. He instinctively waited for the sliding doors to whoosh open but they remained closed and silent. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly all the lights inside the building went out, followed, almost instantaneously, by all the lights outside.

He was standing alone in the dark. He felt a need to hide or protect himself somehow. He crouched down. His beige trousers and white trainers were fluorescent. He could make out the lines of the building, the traffic control tower, even the dark tarmac of the road. He knew the night didn’t really hide things anymore. Too much light pollution, even in a remote place like this. The only way to achieve total darkness, to get blackness deeper than the deepest black of outer space was if the blackout was artificial. Like in a concrete bunker. Or like in a room where the windows had been sealed with aluminium foil.

Staying crouched down against the cold, he waited it out.

He was here to prove the existence of love. That was the only way he could explain it. He fished out the letter, even though he knew it backwards, and scanned the instructions. The experiment was taking place at nine. The researcher would fit eleven sensor electrodes to specific locations on the head and would also fit sensors on two fingers of one hand. This would take about thirty minutes. Once the sensors were in place it was important to move carefully to stop them shifting or falling off. The researcher in one lab would then contact the researcher in the other and both participants were to speak for five minutes on the telephone to increase the rapport between them before the commencement of the experiment.

She would probably be asleep by now. He could see her very clearly. He couldn’t see the room she was in. Maybe it was a windowless room. Maybe she was lying there in deep and absolute dark on a narrow metal bed with a thin mattress. Maybe she was terrified. But he wasn’t sensing anything like that, like fear.

His eyes had become accustomed to his surroundings and he was picking out details in the amorphous dark. He began sending her snapshots of what he could discern around him, thinking he might interrupt her sleep. He played with scale, alternating minutiae with general information. When they met again he hoped she would be able to tell him about a series of dreams she’d had: a dream about a single-storey building of indeterminate colour, a flat road flanked by white grass, a frozen puddle, an empty bus stop, a tin foil Christmas tree the size of a thumbnail, inexplicably bright on a kerbstone.

He was pleased with that detail. The other stuff she could probably make an educated guess about, but if she mentioned a tiny Christmas tree decoration, then that would be something more than a coincidence. It would prove he’d communicated with her somehow.

It was quiet and still. The air was frosty. Hints of his silvery breath caught in his beard. He saw the Moon, full and round, in the sky, before noticing, with some surprise, that a pale line crossed vertically below it like a fuzzy scar. The vapour trail of the plane from which he’d recently disembarked perhaps. But that should have disappeared by now.

He shifted his concentration from sending to receiving. Maybe she was still awake and trying to talk to him across the distance. He closed his eyes. Two white dots, retina memories of the moon, were scored on the inside of his eyelids. He waited for the dots to disappear. It’s not a place you’ve come to, he found himself thinking, it is a time.

He was shivering. Was that her talking to him? The dots behind his eyes seemed to solidify into an ice cube, a pure sparkling ice cube measuring exactly one inch by one inch by one inch. The ice cube was on a table in a garden in Summer. She was telling him it would take forty minutes to melt in the sun, it was something to do with a scientific explanation of sunshine. Was she trying to keep him warm on this freezing December night? He had never been so convinced of her closeness as he was now in her absence.

He wanted the scientists to know what he knew. He was still hoping the airport bus would turn up, or, even better, a taxi. He had no choice but to wait.