Sailor’s Story
All the visitors ask the same question. After more than a year become on the not godforsaken place, when we survived just barely on raw fish and stringy albatross, why did we tried to drive away our rescuers? Why did we fly a plague flag over the ship, and, when they boarded anyway, why did we fight them with our knives and our weak fists until they subdued us?
No one has ever believed my answer, that there on the motionless sea we found a life a thousand times more beautiful than the one we’d left behind. Over and over, I tell the story of the bright green lights that came in the fourth month, and thereafter lit each night with a glow that revealed us to each other somehow more than fully, so that we knew each other as we had never known another human being. I tell about the music of the whales, which only a trained ear can hear, and which gives full form to all the half-buried secrets hinted at in dreams. I tell, finally, about the white birds that came to us on the final day before we were rescued, and flew three times around the mast, calling. I do not tell what the birds offered us, because we did not know yet. When the rescuers came, we were still lying on the deck, remembering the sound of wings.
Time had a different meaning there — we were willing to wait years for the message to come clear. Now every day I am more impatient. I cannot wait another minute on this earth. So I will end your visit the same way I end all the others: with a plea. Tell the guards to stop forcefeeding me. Tell them I want to return to the place that has been prepared for me. Tell them there is no rest on this earth for a man who has seen what I have seen, and that if they cannot understand they must trust me, and let me go.