Novella (ii/?)

209

Room two-zero-nine has a bed, a desk, a window, a shower, and a ceiling. Its four walls are full of nothing. Nothing, like sleep without dreams, like being dead.

Mebhratu once told us that there are English people who pay to float in tanks until they lose their senses. He said that these tanks are full of water with the exact same temperature and mineral content as a human body, and they keep out light and sound. He said that all the rich businessmen in England have these tanks in their townhouse basements between the sauna and the home gym, and when they get home from the office, they go down to the basement and crawl into the flotation tank still wearing their suit and tie. Then they lie there in the dark. Sometimes they cry, but mostly they just pretend that they’re disembodied spirits that don’t know what an office is.

We were in our usual booth at the internet café on Segdo intersection. The two of them always sat opposite me, sharing the screen, so I couldn’t see if he was getting this from a real website. Instead, I stared into the back of the monitor and imagined the little men who tuck themselves into watery tanks each night. I did not feel sorry for the Englishmen. Like most of the stories Mebrahtu told with an overly serious face, it was probably a bit made up. I asked him what the tank experience was called to try to catch him out. “Sensory deprivation”, he replied, not a beat missed as his eyes met mine over the top of the screen.

The nothing of room two-zero-nine is how I’d imagined English deprivation would be. A vast, warm nothingness where my edges dissolve. Spine sinking through the mattress, eyes free to roam beyond my face. I could be in a womb here, waiting to be born, or in a cell that floats through my own arteries and has a desk, window, and shower instead of organelles. There are plaster swirls in the ceiling, and when I look at them through defocused eyes, shapes begin to drift in and out of the pattern. It’s like the game kids play when they point out stories in the clouds. Clouds far above this ceiling and all the floors on top of it. In the corner, a camera blinks red.

At first, I ignored the pills I’ve been told to take each morning. Then realised I that if I do take them, I can spend all day forgetting where I am, lying still and watching the stories on the ceiling. This is the best activity available. It sustains the nothingness. Sometimes, like now, another memory approaches. I can feel it swelling in the distance, getting ready to carry my reluctant body up its crest. I know it cannot take me back there. I may be barely here, somewhere between a bed and a ceiling, but I am far less there. Still, the swell breaks. In the memory, which is now starting to unfold in the ceiling shapes, or in my mind’s eye (it gets harder to tell them apart), the twins are younger than I am now, watching them from the future.

“What was it like?”
“It was red, obviously.”
“No!”
It’s evening and I’m waiting for them at the front door, as I have done since the first day they went to the high school where I can’t yet follow.
Kidane looks down at me like I’m incredibly stupid, but his eyes are laughing.
“Course it is, why else would they call it that?”
He picks his satchel off his shoulder and drops it around my neck, but before its weight can pull me to my knees, they take an arm each and lift me into the house. One of their feet kicks the door closed behind us. A practised manoeuvre. Every evening, in fact.
“The sea can’t be red, it’s water.”
“The Red Sea can.”
We’re in the kitchen now, where they’ve set me on my feet. Still in the memory, but in the kitchen in there.
“No!”
“Yep. I hardly believed it either”, Kidane says, as he pours a glass of juice. He always puts his whole mouth around the rim of the glass and tips it down in one. Being able to open his gullet like that used to be his party trick, except the grownups don’t like it, and we see it every day, so it’s just become something he does.
Then he slams the empty glass down in the sink. “It’s almost unbelievable”, he gasps, “But we got out of the coach and there it was.”
“The weirdest thing about the sea,” Mebrahtu starts to say. Then he looks at Kidane. “Aside from it being red, obviously, is that it goes up to the horizon, rather than out.”
I wait, and when he’s kicked his shoes off under the table, he turns to tell me properly.
“You know how the picture bible has a blue stripe for the sea? I always thought that was just how they drew it in pictures, like how you put the sun in the corner when you do your drawings for mum. I guess it would have been obvious if I’d thought about it, it's just perspective, but the water does stretch up into the distance like that. So the far away bit looks higher towards the sky.”

When I was eleven and they were fifteen, it was my turn for the class trip to the coast. They were sitting in the doorway waiting for me.
“Well?”
“It wasn’t red.”
“No!”
Kidane’s hands are at his mouth in mock disbelief, an imitation of me three years before. Maybe that’s why they’ve chosen to sit and squint up at me.
The water had been blue, like it is in the picture bible, and like I’d half expected. It did look like you had to go up rather than out to get over the horizon, though. That much was true. When Mrs Gezhemene had counted us back onto the coach, she’d asked why I looked so disappointed.
“I always knew you were lying. I knew even before you wouldn’t show me the sea on the computer screen because you said it would ruin the surprise.”
I try to get past into the hallway, but Mebrahtu stays in the way, grinning. “We never lie.” Then he crosses himself, adding, “We’d never lie to you about the important stuff.”
Kidane nods and gets up to take my backpack. 
“It must have changed colour since we went.”
And the memory crashes away.

First there was nothing. Just God and an immobile, heavenly ceiling waiting to tell stories. Then God sent the waters down from the firmament. The salt of the earth was split from the salt of the ocean. Two boys came back from the end of the land and told their younger brother that the Red Sea is red. It isn’t, but the sea is a red memory that goes on forever. The blood of everyone lost at sea still flows through its sodium guts, haunting, beckoning, and a lost brother’s grin flashes in the white water.

My name is Tekle Ashford. That is what the people here call me, but I know that I am just a number to them, and a number far worse and greater than two-zero-nine. I was once Tekle with a different name, but I crossed the sea too far. It did not part for me.

Out of the nothingness, Kidane Ashford starts knocking on the door.