"You see," he says to me casually, "the moth is way up there by the white wall of the doorway, and it is visible only because it moves. From here it almost looks like a bird high up in the sky, if you think of the wall as the sky. That's probably how the moth sees the wall, and only we know it is wrong. But it doesn't know that we know. It doesn't know we exist. You try to communicate with it, if you can. Can you tell it anything in a way it understands; can you be sure it has understood you completely?"

"I don't know," I replied, "Can you?"

"Yes," the old man said quietly, and with a clap of his hands he killed the moth, then proffered its crushed body on the palm of his hand.

"Do you think it didn't understand what I told it?"...

..."Now, imagine" he went on, "that there is somebody who knows about us what we know about this moth. Somebody who knows how, with what, and why this space that we call the sky and assume to be boundless, is bounded - somebody who cannot approach us to let us know he exists except in one way - by killing us."

"Somebody on whose garments we are nourished, somebody who carries our death in his hand like a tongue, as a means of communicating with us. By killing us, this anonymous being informs us about himself. And we, through our deaths, which may be no more than a warning to some wayfarer sitting alongside the assassin, we, i say, can at the last moment perceive, as through an opened door, new fields and other boundaries. The sixth and highest degree of fear (where there is no memory) is what holds and links us anonymous participants in the game. The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes."

Milorad Pavic The Khazar Dictionary

The fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night.
Gregory David Roberts

*

1.

Arrive in the flatlands with a flat tyre. Roll slowly off the ferry, lopsided, but full of determination.

2.

Make the repair and get to Amsterdam in good time.

Meet her and walk, surrounded by the usual scenery: cafes, shops, markets, parks, bored looking people.

Feel out of it for the rendezvous, lopsided, lost for words.

3.

Evening. Blue Tea House, Vondelpark. You sit, she lies, her head in your lap, looking up into the trees, in the fading light. She reaches her arms up around you, pressing her head into your chest and embracing you.

After all the bullshit she finally says something that makes sense to you.

Let me go, it’s the only way for me to find out how I really feel.

4.

Drive. Drive on, through Holland, Belgium, France, stopping only for coffee, petrol. Drive for 15 hours or more, without blinking, for 500, 900, 1200 kilometres, with no spare tyre. Pause, blink, fill up, drink, but do not think, drive on.

5.

1300 kilometres. Southwest France. Heat… the sun rolling over everything, the roaring engine beneath you, your dry burning eyes, and a smell, like something is melting. The floor of the van is getting hotter under your bare feet, the gears are not shifting as they should.

You are approaching Spain, and something is coming loose. No garage is in sight, only the road, only the Pyrenees looming in the near distance, The Iberian Peninsula. Drive. Drive on.

Approaching the toll gate, trying to shift down a gear, something snaps. It is the gear stick. It has broken off completely and is loose in your hand. The engine is still in fifth gear, with no way to change.

Roll into the toll, pressing the clutch down, stationary in fifth gear, holding a metal stick in one hand and counting out money for the cashier with the other.

6.

You are walking, in a desolate industrial area of Hayenne, a weird little ghost town in the far south west corner of France, just off the motorway, 5 kilometres away from the Spanish border. You see huge grey corrugated buildings, clean wide streets completely devoid of humans, a prefabricated world deadly still under the fierce sun. You need to piss.

Walk into a post office, see seats in lines, a counter with a glass window, a stopped clock, no people, just a low hum. Find the toilet, and later, elsewhere, a mechanic.

7.

The knife bears down into the last piece of the bread you brought with you from England. You are sitting, consuming the last remnants of a life you are leaving behind, under a tree, on a sharp, thick, dense little scrap of grass, overlooking an empty playground, in front of a huge grey building whose ground floor shop-unit is occupied by a funeral parlour. Everything has stopped. The insects have stopped, the birds have stopped, time has stopped, the prefabricated buildings have stopped, the people have stopped, the future has stopped.

You did not want to stop yet. Terrible thoughts escape when you stop. You did not want it to end. Now, the fatigue - of a 20 hour journey, of this incessant silence now widening between us, of this broken feeling you are left with – grips your body.

The sweetness, the safe haven you shared, has gone. The passion lived through her, has now to find a new place to live, here, in this body, where it does not yet fit.

You have driven your vehicle too far without stopping, until parts of it have bent and snapped. It seems you must now break down, and you must find yourself to be here, at the border between countries, alone, in this empty place.

And the universe says

Stop here. Stop here and be alone. Do not be afraid. Feel this, it is yours. You are not ready to pass in to Spain yet.

You are trying to listen.

8.

In the workshop a miserable French man with hard black oily hands is ripping out broken pieces of your vehicle and welding them back together, and under this tree you are sobbing, pulling out broken bits from your own blocked up innards and laying them on the grass in front of you. Your fear, your arrogance, your weak, impulsive, destructive behaviours, your half-finished thoughts, your dependence, your reluctance and your denial, your mis-spent energies, which, so shamefully, you laid out before her.

Your soul, cut open, exposed, which does not want to be alone, which, above all, clings doggedly to the idea of two, asks you

what is freedom without love?

and you still don't know. You only know that now you are going to find out, and it shouldn't be so terrifying, but it is. So you sob. There is pain in your chest, in your throat, in your eyes, in you guts, as you weep for these broken parts of yourself.

Lay them out in front of you now, then say goodbye.

Leave it all here, on the grass, under this tree. Pull out the broken car parts and make some space for this passion to fit inside you again.

Call her back, and say goodbye, and mean it this time.

9.

Spain has opened its mouth and swallowed you. You enter a mountainous region, the van labouring up hills and coasting down them, passing through weaving roads and tunnels. You think of the tunnels as a part of your own body, a Spanish part of you.

At the border, you felt light and empty. Loneliness is a prayer, a deep longing to know and feel. There is great strength in wanting. There is dignity, not shame, in loneliness, sorrow isn’t the enemy.

Your body knows this, it needs you now.

By dawn you are in an arid, rocky landscape punctuated by small villages. The sun rises in a pink haze and you start to wonder who it is you want to be. Singularly, and whole heartedly, after what seems like your whole life, you ask yourself, at last, now that it’s all yours:

Who is it that I want to be?

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