1001 Nights Cast

[…] because you were always warned to take the back roads.

You find yourself in near or absolute darkness overlooking the plain. You feel the ground underfoot, registering your point of departure in terms of incline and decline. A downward gradient would inevitably take you west towards the sea. The breeze follows the currents along the coast and confirms an axis from south to north. You construct your path from these scant details.

Most nights. But there are some nights when there is no breeze at all and you cannot tell where precisely along the coast you will end up. Your instinct is to take the long routes around, following the well-trodden paths, always touching upon the coast to gather your bearings. But you do not have that luxury these days, and there are passages along the way that trouble you. It has something to do with not being observed. Were you to encounter someone along the way you would not know what to say and in what or whose terms.

For the most part you aim northwards, homewards. Or towards some sense of what you call home. Why you call it this you are unsure, because you are certainly out of sorts and out of place. And how you have ended up by nightfall, night after night, so far south you can never recall. But come night you are found at this outer limit, with no recollection of why or whence you came. And still this homeward urge.

[…]

You are not always alone. But if she who accompanies you is more than imagined she makes her way with you in silence. (You remember your namesake whose habit it was to accompany his guests along more than half of their journey, before bidding them farewell.) Do you accompany her on these journeys or she you? Does she hold your hand to steady her step or you hers? Were you her guest or she yours? You assume the former, as you sense the direction of home is away from this site overlooking the plain. But you cannot be sure.

You begin, as always, on the steep, at the top of the hill. Utter darkness, but from time to time a brief glimmer in the plain that you imagine might enable you to gather your bearings in the manner of the sailors. But the lights come in fits and starts, with neither rhyme nor reason.

You dread the lights in the plain, even as you scour the dark for them. Brief lights, like sparks when flint strikes its other. You never see them directly, but only as an afterimage, a fraction after the reflex of your pupil has caught it in the corner of itself. Thereafter, occasionally, a thin white plume emerging from the dark to mark the site. But this is elusive and you cannot rely upon this to get your bearings.

[…]

Again, you have no recall as to how you came to be so far away from what you call home. The journey southwards you cannot recall, but you nevertheless retain images and memories of the place, despite a sense of feeling somewhat thrown.

Nostalgia might almost work here. A fractional nostalgia for a moment ago. Not the existential moment of a present tense, but a belatedness or resonance, a displacement through time so slight that none but yourself would begin to notice it. As if you would be conducting a conversation with the echo of her voice, for example, rather than bearing immediate witness to her articulation. Would she speak, you would not be able to see the words from her mouth.

You head north holding in your right hand a map folded upon itself three times to create eight squares on the sheet. Not that you might ever consult it, such is the depth of this dark, but you carry it for comfort, or in the hope that your reflexes anticipate one of those brief flashes in the distance and you might be able to read at a glance an interim location.

You believe you take the same route night after night, but suspect that there may be slight variants that you have come to adopt along the way, feeling for the decline underfoot, rather than following the convention of the established path. You have no evidence for this, as you tend to forget whence you have come with each new turn. You could never retrace your steps.

But nightly you begin your journey somewhere south of the outer limits of the district, where it has sprawled over the years, over the dust, into the next. You begin in what is the grey area at the very foot of your map, were you able to consult it, and head north, or more precisely north-west. You might indeed choose to head directly west and this would always lead you to the sea, but have adopted a route that takes a shallower decline and traverses the hill in a more northerly direction. A very slight discrepancy in the manner of magnetic declination. Otherwise as straight as the crow.

[…]

She may or may not accompany you or you her. Sometimes you travel alone and sometimes it is as if she has been sent as your guide or host, in the manner of your namesake. But she does not speak. Your hands join, or you imagine they do, your left in her right, or vice versa, to steady your step.