Dale carefully carried his food tray to avoid hitting the obese sole waitress in the pub, that he figured out to the pub owner’s wife, as he walked to his seat. He found an empty table at the corner of the local restaurant where he hoped people wouldn’t find him, and where he could have a good view of the television. He took one peer at the TV, relieved not to see or hear anything that would make him lose his appetite, the way he had done yesterday and refused to eat ever since.
He opened the free Guilder that he had refused to collect yesterday and took two full gulps, rendering the bottle half-empty. It made him remember the days of The Humour Sect back at Crawdown, they had spent the midnight together at a table, very much unawake. Their table would be filled with tens of alcoholic bottles; a benefit that they enjoyed from the sellers for free. Dale had learnt to drink including how to finish a Green Bear bottle in just four gulps. They took approximately ten bottles every night but they never got so stoned to the point of embarrassing themselves, they always found the way home and never broke any road rules, not to talk of causing a road accident. Maybe that was a credit reserved specifically for Pierson, who was the only man that Dale knew that the Don’t-drink-and-drive warning didn’t work for. If not for Pierson, Dale would most likely have been crushed the night they found him laying unconscious on the road.
Dale, on the other hand, never took more than one bottle every night because he had the superior notion programmed in his mind that drinking was never a good thing. As blurry as the memory formed now, he was sure that his father never drunk and always warned them against doing such. He had taken his father’s instructions so much in high esteem that it registered in his mind like a seaweed on the sea shore, even when the waves of amnesia had come flowing over. Nonetheless, he knew his father smoked too. He did it in the private with the blinds closed. This was one practice that, on the other hand, The Humour Sect especially Barry disagreed to. Barry would say: ‘Smoking would burn up your liver’, like drinking would do any good.
Either way, Dale had picked one of the two bad habits and although he did it with careful moderation, he didn’t see himself taking any other liquid apart from water and Guilder. As he sat alone rinsing his mouth with the beer, he couldn’t help reliving the moments or craving that somehow, they would all sit down together again and continue their convivial brotherhood. It was a bonding moment that Dale wished they had more enjoyed more because in reality, such moments would never suffice again. There would always be two empty chairs.
Astor would be the first person to spot him and take him out of his thoughts. ‘Hey Del, I have been looking for you probably you didn’t come to the pub today’, he said and fell into the seat beside Dale, digging into his own meal.
Dale emptied the bottle and dropped it noiselessly on the planked table. He didn’t know what to say and just stared up at the TV.
‘Del? You are not going to perform magic for us today, will you?’, Dale looked at Astor. He was looking at him too, food suspended in the mouth with a strand of spaghetti hanging at its corner, eager for Dale to respond. Dale just faced back at the television and sighed.
‘Hey’, Astor called. ‘What’s wrong? I heard you telling the manager that this is your last day of being around’, he said and paused, thinking Dale would at least say a word or move his lips. ‘I’m sorry’, he said and focused on his food. They didn’t get to talk until the closing hour.
Dale was sitting at the lake shore mute and not moving, he had his hands crossed over his bent knees, feeling the evening breeze and watching the sun go down, when Astor came to join him, assuming the same posture.
‘I feel the same way too, sometimes you know’, he said, annoyingly ruining the alone moment that Dale to ponder on the giant task ahead of him. ‘Things get bad and I don’t like the job. I just want to quit and get a good job. I just want to go home sometimes, to my sister and my brother and my father and my mother. But how do I go with no money with me, with no little presents for my siblings and good news. That’s why I came here for railway job. Everyone here is not happy with the job. But we would be done soon anyway and I would have no choice but to return home to Ohio, to my family. By next month, I will be having my twenty-eighth-year birthday and they are going to celebrate it with me’, he said with a smile hanging on his face. ‘Where’d you come from?’, he asked Dale.
Now, that was the question that summarised everything, the root of all the problems. ‘Dexter. I am from Dexter Islands’, he said and turned his face away, not wanting to see the expected expression of astonishment on his face.
‘How did you…how did you leave?’, he asked.
‘I didn’t leave. I was exiled. From prison’
‘How did you get to prison?’
Dale stared at the lake, staying silent again. ‘If you mean what I did to get in jail, nothing. You don’t have to do anything wrong to go to jail in Dexter. Things don’t follow the regular pattern in Dexter. It’s a crazy place to be’
Astor sighed and rubbed his forehead with the back of his palm, trying difficult to imagine how life went on there. All the while that he had been hearing about Dexter and its extinction in the hand of a destructive terrorist group, it was now that he was realising that people were actually there that had lives too and had futures and here, he was sitting with a defector. ‘Do you have a family there?’
‘Yes. The rest of my family members are there. Living or dead, it’s hard to know. One second, they are alive and the next they are dead’
Astor’s face turned blue, not knowing what that would feel like. ‘It is a terrible place. How did you fare in prison, knowing you’re completely innocent?’
‘I…’, Dale didn’t know exactly where to start, he didn’t want to talk at all. ‘It is a wicked place’ was all he could say, albeit he knew that that was far from the right word. The Death Toast was more than wicked. ‘People die there too and only very few get lucky to leave’.
Although Astor didn’t get the meaning of lucky, he just stayed mute, not wanting to dig deeper and call out the demons to lurk over Dale’s mind.
‘And sometimes it’s hard to know if you have left or not. Boorbunk never leaves you, Dexter never leaves you’, Dale continued ‘My best friends are still there and I am going to find them out’
Astor stood up too to face him with impatient eyes. ‘What do you mean by that?’, he said lowly.
‘I am going back to Dexter’, he said with his palms tightened, and saying it out now made him feel more poised in his mind but also rattled him, because he knew the disastrous consequences that came with that.
‘Wow!’, Astor mouthed with the reflexive response of his mind shouting: He is going to die! But when he looked at Dale again, he saw that mask over his face that showed he was going to do it anyway and fear wasn’t in his mind. He placed his hand on the shoulder of Dale. ‘I wish you good luck, and nothing but that. You are braver than I am, Del. You’re braver than any other man I have seen’, he said with sincerity.
‘Dale, let’s go home!’, Frankie yelled in the distance.
‘I am coming’, Dale shouted back.
‘Thank you’, Dale whispered.
‘You can be Harry Potter, Dale. Let your magic save your world’, Astor added with a promising smile on his face.
‘Yeah. Except that I don’t know who Harry Potter is’, Dale said and burst it into laughter, mocking his ignorance, no thanks to being from a place that is isolated from the rest of the world. Astor laughed too but with that question on his face like Really?
‘You’ve been living under a rock, Del’, he remarked. ‘Okay, better put. Go to that dark place of yours and drive light to it’
‘Now, that was much better’, Dale said and laughed again. ‘I have to go now though’
‘Yeah’, Astor replied with a tinge of angst in his voice, knowing that this might be the last time he would see him and the mind-reading might be the last impossible trick he would experience. ‘I would miss your tricks, Del’
‘Goodbye, my man’, Dale said and trotted towards Frankie.
Dale took one last peer at Astor and waved to him before disappearing into the grey dimness of late evening.
As Dale rested in his bed, all that filled his mind was what Astor had called Dexter: the dark side of the world. Someone had mentioned something similar to it and now, he was certain that the person had been referring to the same place.
Sixteen hours from then and Dale was on Alliston Avenue, turning his head in every direction and poking his head into each of the hundred shops he was passing. He had seen fifteen different barbing salons and hadn’t found any old man with a clipper in his hand, dipping into people’s hair. Yet again, he recalled the man’s words: ‘You know something, your attire makes me remember sometime in the past, of someone. Myself actually. It was just like the same cloth, same attire, same pattern. You know what, never mind. That’s not something any person around here should know about. Good stories must be told always. If you don’t tell the bad ones, they will wither away’.
It was just now that he was linking up the story and finding all the words of the old man who had called himself Mark informing him that he had been banished as well, so many years ago. And he needed to find him, possibly what he knew left about Dexter had not withered away completely.
The place was busy with tens of people trying to find their way on the sidewalk, he was likely not to find the man. He was close to the tail end of the line of stalls along Alliston Avenue when he saw the little shop that didn’t look much like a barbershop when checking it through the outside glass but he could see Mark in it with his head on the arm of the single barber’s chair in the room, fast asleep.
Dale pushed open the door and got in. It was such a nice setting. Just him and the man, no customer, no one to hear their jittering and their secrets about being aliens from a dystopian planet; the dark side of the moon.
‘Do you want to cut your hair? One dollar’, Mark announced out from his sleep after Dale patted him.
‘No, I have not come here for hair. It’s me’
‘No! No!! No!!! I am not collecting anything less than one dollar’, the man ranted from his sleep.
They were two more smaller chairs, kindergarten chairs fitting only for his granddaughter to fit in. Dale could also sit on it, only that he had to stoop so low and his legs were so close to the ground that he had to stretch them out. He sat and kept staring all around the room, waiting for Mark to wake up and see him.
Mark stood up with his eyes still very much closed, trying to break out of the sweet afternoon nap that he had resorted to, after hours of waiting for customers. He did open his eyes and gave a loud, wide yawn at the same time that made Dale see his throat through his glottis. Mark appeared very unforgetful because at the first peer at Dale, his yawn lowered into that I-know-you smile which was all the better for their meeting because what they were going to talk about was going to take Mark down memory lane.
Dale smiled back with that nod of Yes, it’s me, ‘Is this how few customers you get every day?’
‘No’, he said and his sandals slithered loudly against the tiles as he dragged his feet sluggishly towards Dale. ‘Friday is a cursed day in the week for barbers’, he said and got hold of the second small plastic chair and sat calmly facing Dale.
‘I see’, Dale replied.
‘What did you come here for?’, Mark asked, his eyes were strained staring directly into Dale’s eyes and his voice got a little more serious.
‘I am from Dexter Islands’, such a sentence, for Dale, was like unsheathing a poisonous sword. For a moment, Mark didn’t move. He kept his eyes staring straight into Dale’s like he hadn’t heard what he said. He was startled to the point of getting frozen and the mention of Dexter didn’t sound too good.
‘Oh dear Lord’, the old man’s voice had turned dense and his face staid. He placed both of his shrivelled palms over his face and shut his eyes. When he pulled off his hands, his face was awash with disbelief. ‘What…what is your name?’
‘Dale. My name is Dale Eagan from Gollogher’
‘Dale? I didn’t expect to see you’, he said and halted for a chuckle to escape his nostrils. ‘I mean, I didn’t think I would see any other Dexterran in my life again. The last few days have been harsh’
‘When you did you get here?’
‘I try not to remember. It’s been twenty-one years’, Mark responded with a lowly voice. Dexter, which was talked about popularly every day on the radio, was now talked about with discreet voices like it was a sacred entity because it wasn’t as abstract to them like everyone else. Except that Dexter was anything but sacred.
‘Do you miss the people you left?’
‘I have new people around me, I don’t need to miss anyone, they are all dead now I believe’
‘Do you miss the wife you left back there in Dexter?’, Dale asked and it was the equivalent of piercing the poisonous sword down Mark’s throat.
Mark sniffled and reached for his back pocket. ‘I am not going to punish myself for being from that place. Our best bet is to leave that place and here we are. We are very lucky. Very, very lucky. I am not going to make myself suffer’, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and a lighter from his shirt pocket.
‘That’s what I thought too. Until I finally learnt that that was far from our best bet’
‘Then maybe we’re just completely doomed and we do not have any control over our fate anymore’, heavy wafts of dark smoke floated towards Dale.
‘Our best bet is the only one that makes us snap out of that wreck of a train forever’
Mark shook his head imperceptibly, not quite getting where the young man was driving at.
‘By reforming the train itself’, Dale looked outside the glass walls, at the people strolling across the sidewalks with baggy jeans and light blouses and sunglasses, their only worry was the heat. ‘I am going back to Dexter Islands’, he kept his face outside and only looked back at Mark when he heard him laugh.
The man didn’t stop laughing, he laughed hard that he started coughing and had to hold his stomach. Mark, who had been thinking that Dexterrans would be more the smartest and most realistic people on the planet and was expecting some very mature discussion about their destroying nation which he had been craving, realised he had just found some foolish lad who didn’t exactly know what he was saying. ‘What do you want to do there?’, he stopped laughing at once.
‘I want to be with my friends again, my future here would leave me tied up and I had never be myself again to walk around sure that the people with which I’d spent the best days of my life were officially wiped out’
‘If you go back to Dexter, there will be no future at all, Dale. Only one thing is going to happen, you are going to die. You will die if you go back there, young man and your family would never know you returned’
‘And if I don’t go back…I will leave the usual country life like you do, pretending all is well. Pretending you still have two hands, when in fact the other hand had grown limp from nursing the griefs. And I will be like you, obsessed with your cigarette’, he said, pointing his finger at the way the man kept puffing out the smoke vehemently.
’My two children, my only two sons! Their dead bodies still appear in my dream almost every night!’, Mark screamed and his throat was about to go up in flames. ‘And you sit here telling me about grief or about love. This’, he raised the cigarette in his hands. ‘Is the only way that I can pretend to myself that I am stable, that life is still worth living’
Dale itched his nose, knowing how miserable their lives had become.
‘And my wife, I don’t even know if she is still alive’, his voice was about to weaken into tears but he held it in. ‘And you think I don’t want her back, of course I do. But if I try to do the same stupid thing that you are about to do, two things would happen to me: I will never get to see all my loved ones anymore or save them or whatever ridiculous thing your mission is, and I will lose my life’
‘It’s clear now that you hold up your life more than any other thing. But someone has got to be willing to do something, to change something and hide the consequences behind the shadows of will’
‘Dale, how long did you stay in Boorbunk?’
‘One year’
‘Dale, you stayed one year in Boorbunk which means you survived twelve Death Toasts and you were the lucky person in a one in ten thousand chance making it out of there hale and hearty. Now, you want to go back to the same debris that swallows souls? You remind me of myself, just as you did the first time I saw you. I was bitter and I was confused of what I was going to do with life without my wife and my friends and my sweet Tifftam fermented malt. And I felt suddenly very angry as you are now and thought maybe I could go back and plot a revenge but then I looked at the window and I saw people laughing and chuckling, some two youngsters having their first kiss under the rain, living life in a placid way’, he itched his nose and threw his now-exhausted cigarette to a dustbin in a corner of the room. It didn’t get into the dust bin, it just touched the wall and fell to the ground with ash falling off it and faint smoke disappearing from its butt. He took his eyes off the cigarette and continued.
‘I decided to make the most out of life and I have been trying to make it that since then. And as for you, you were younger than I was then. Still rich with energy and bursting at the seams with adrenaline. You might think what you are about to do is ingenuous and possible. But you don’t know what The Order of Quppis is, do you?’, his voice had gotten more lowly and Dale could feel the desperation in his every word. ‘This is not a superhero movie where people run past bullets. They will see you and kill you’
‘How’d you know?, Dale asked.
‘Because I was once part of them’, he said without retreating for one second.
Dale’s eyes opened wide. ‘You were once one of them?’
‘I was twenty-seven and I was broke, like everyone else in Tifftam. I had two sons already. We only had money for rum and Lotar beer. I and my three best friends were at the bar that late night when a man had come to us, telling us that he could get us money. We were drunk and we were badly broke, two situations that made us accept immediately without even thinking to ask what the details of the deal was. We were recruited and we were given guns and after going for four bloody sprees, we decided to leave, to escape. We left during the night, running around with soldiers chasing us. We knew we were never going to completely get away because we knew a computer somewhere was tracking. Somehow, we managed to hide ourselves somewhere that I didn’t think was in the reach of their satellite, deep in the forest’
‘Singalort’, Dale added.
‘How did you know that?’
‘What were the names of your three friends?’, Dale just did what his father had called maiuetics which was on top of the list of the very few things that got Dale’s mother angry. She would flare up real bad and then his father would just laugh and say, ‘C’mon sweetie, it’s just maiuetics’
‘They were Barry, Melvin and Oriel, Oriel being the only one I am sure that is dead now. The other three of us made it to prison and I got redeemed’
‘I met Barry Yates in the prison’, Dale said. ‘He was the man who died on the third Death Toast and I was taken to his room. He left a letter to anyone who got in the room and it told me about a lot of things’
‘Did it tell you about the part where there are satellites everywhere? And they view every single human movement in the nation from their base’
‘And I do know that they would come to kill me if I step in there again!’, Dale thundered. ‘We are all going to die someday and until then, I would rather struggle to save those people back there, than be a goddamn coward and smoke till my lungs are rotten and struggle with a different kind of storm. I will rather die in this storm’
Mark was outraged but managed not to raise his voice. ‘What did you come here for?’
It was the most important question, so far, for Dale and he knew that he should not have come. He stood up at once and started to leave when Mark stood up, as well. Dale knew Mark had good intentions and knew that they both shared a collective anguish.
‘What are you going to do?’, Mark asked.
‘I have a plan’, Dale said and headed for the door.
‘You will regret this, boy and come to realise how foolish you are’, Dale heard Mark say.
He held the doorknob and waited for a second. He had nothing to say and just walked out.
As he took each step, everything he was seeing came to him in slow-motion. He turned his head as he walked, checking how the whole place was perfect. The roads were smooth and shiny under the afternoon sun, the buildings were painted in beautiful colours and on one of the walls, he could see a poster that read Call 911 in case of any emergency. Police is your friend. Everyone he had seen around had a pleasant reflection on their faces; the one that showed clear consciences, soft demeanours and a free mind. No poverty or fear of a bomb blast somewhere near, no need for 24-hour curfews, seven days a week, four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year. All the more so, they had 911 to call on. In case of an emergency, meaning that the emergencies came rarely.
Dale, he heard his father’s powerful voice call within him. YOU HAVE TO DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO! The voice was so daunting in Dale’s head that he staggered for a minute.
Coming to the ethereal United States of America had shown Dale that there weren’t only two crayons in the pack; it wasn’t just grey and black, that there were pastel colours to pick from to illuminate the state of the canvas. Instead of Dale to keep admiring the bright picture, he wore a different cloak on, about to return to the previous canvas and turn it from its ashen frame and embed it with radiance.
Two trains and two cabs after, Dale was thirty-two miles deep into New Mexico, on a desolate street knocking calmly at a door. Dale stood back after he heard someone opening the door.
The man who came out was tall, so tall that he had to bend his head below the door, he had an unfriendly face and had the stature of a body builder. To Dale, he had all the conformities of a bad brazen criminal but when he looked at the killer expression on Dale’s face, he budged.
‘I heard you sell guns’, Dale whispered.
He hesitated for a second. ‘Come on in’, the man replied with a grin.