The man was woken by a loud noise outside. It was an infernal nuisance, he grumbled, to be bothered by the street dogs at night, when all one wanted was some quiet time to forget the world outside. He lowered his quilt and put on his spectacles. The mattress squeaked as he shifted in his single-bed to draw the curtains from the bedside window. This is odd, he thought. He had never seen a moon so plump and shiny in the sky. It was immaculate. The moonlight dusted its way across the street and into his room. It felt like chalk powder, only unreal. He could not fathom why the dogs were baying at it. Perhaps it seemed strange to them, too, very strange.

He wondered what time it was. He checked his watch. It was 2 a.m. He pulled his woollen stockings above his knees and got up from the bed to pour himself a small glass of bourbon. The old devil whispered to him from a distance. He rubbed his dry eyes and looked at the bottle with bemused regret. Like everything else in life, it reminded him of age, slowing down, a slackening feeling in his limbs, looseness of mouth.

So much time has passed for me, he thought, as he swirled the glass in his hand. Life is still the same. He looked around his room, trying to make out the objects in the pewter light that streamed from the window. His mirror had fogged. I was a beloved professor once, and now I am cleaning old vinyl records at a radio station. Everyone asks the same question—aren’t you too old? I am a lucky dog, I guess. I have done everything to destroy myself. Two nights ago, I crossed the international border twice, drank gallons of cheap whiskey while listening to poetry, doing other activities which people at the age of fifty wouldn’t even think, and now it is past midnight and I am here. But life is not leaving me yet. Why? What more do I have to see?

He took a long sigh and stationed himself in the cheap padded chair near his cramped desk. Dog-eared files, stacks of yellowing crisp sheets, soggy, empty packets of cigarettes, a dusting cloth, scratched LP records, and piles of books that had been read too many times lay huddled on a large rusty metal trunk against the wall, from where they spilled on to his desk. Both my parents are dead, he thought, gulping down a large sip, looking into the glass. There are times I wonder what I am doing in a world that has ceased to exist for me. I think about it while shaving my face every morning, trying to look young to compete with people one-third my age. I think about my father. I find it peculiar to remember him, lying in a bed, his face turned away from me, muttering, groaning, always away, always distant. The world is a cruel place, he said once, in half-sleep, his lips buttered with thin saliva that frothed near the seam of his mouth. No one lives for anyone, he moaned. You have to make it on your own, on your own two goddamn feet! Remember me, if you must. But forgive me, he sighed and fell into a stupor, in a sleep where he fought with his demons alone. I recall the sight of his face with surprising clarity. He had deep lines with puffed up cheeks and heavy bags under his eyes, a sign of excessive drinking and lack of sleep—or bad sleep—who could tell? He wrestled too much.

But father I must leave, I remember saying to him, through my sad eyes. We never exchanged words. You don’t understand me, I said. I am not like other boys. I have secrets that embarrass me. My future is in America. People like me can live their lives there, do you understand? I think he does. I think he always did, he always knew. It occurred to me one night, as I lay quartered in bed under the weight of a stranger in a foreign land, who, like most, could never love me, that how much I missed my father. How I longed for love, his precious, difficult love. I feel a stab of sharp pain in a hollow pit under my stomach every time I remember him. I wish he had more time.

The mother always prayed for her child. She knew he was different. She could tell. All mothers can. It fills me with a wonder too deep to express that how, with passing time, as I struggle to form a vision of my life ahead, the distant, the bygone, seems so near and the near seems so far away, like an impossible dream. She comes to me in perfect visions, at times only sights and whispers. I feared losing her. As a child I followed the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she slept soundly, lest her heart stopped beating. Her flatulence was reassuring, along with all the scents she guarded under her nightgown. She and father made love every weekend. I would pause at the doorstep, listening to their every sound, as they heaved and sighed. It was love, I believed. It filled me with intense j0y. Love.

The early days were rough. The man poured himself another glass of drink. I took to drinking too often, he remembered. Lovelorn. Lovesick. Too disappointed, too disillusioned. Like everyone else I drank to drown my sorrows. Soon it became a habit, and then a chronic need. Urban middle-aged men, swollen eyes and tired expressions, angry, belligerent, like phantoms hanging in darkness, populated the bars in those days. Their shadows greeted each other on the grimy discoloured walls, always talking, deliriously busy, lamenting the inability to fulfil the promise of their youth, ordinary men in their ordinary grief. The sympathetic aged barman watched me with his weary eyes. He too was young once. Look at me now, he said. The poison gurgled near the back of my tongue, spreading like fire inside. He left me, I cried, wriggling my wrist and throwing my head on the counter, the boy with the brown eyes left me. I will take you, the jinn in the bottle whispered. And so it did. One by one, they all did.

The man chugged the last sip down and looked at his watch. Have I drunk too much? He stared at the watch foolishly. The time was still 2 a.m. Has it stopped working? He got up from the chair scratching his forehead, and then gently put the watch down on the table desk.

Dreams, thoughts, and the stark reality all hit very close. Flashbacks, whispers, not too far from where I am living, he thought. ‘Do you see it, Mahen?’ He knocked his head on the hard upper shelf of the cave, while crouching on the soggy ground beneath. I don’t see it yet, Mahen replied. The boy leading Mahen stepped out of the cave and onto the edge of the cliff. The sky had acquired a deep rustic sheen, with rifts of white clouds popping in sporadic bursts. Dusting the dry mud off his trousers, Mahen came panting behind the boy and stood near the cliff. In the ground beneath him, raised by a dome shaped rocky mountain, he saw a giant crater like opening, steadily spouting streams of vast silver smoke. ‘It is a volcano. You know what that is?’ the boy asked Mahen, outlining the edge of the crater with his sturdy but slightly crooked wooden stick. ‘This is what we came here for,’ his dove shaped eyes gleamed with excitement. ‘That crater you are looking at over there,’ he tapped his stick in thin air, ‘is one of the three mouths of the volcano. It gushes at the periodicity of once in every five or ten years.’ How do you know all this stuff? Mahen asked, confounded. The air around him was dense with the odor of burnt wood and something akin to rotten eggs. ‘Unlike you, I always do my research,’ the boy replied, with a sharp conceit. He crouched on his knees and started circling the air in loops with his stick. ‘Do you see that smoke?’ he asked. Of course I do, that’s the only thing I can see, Mahen replied. The smoke grew rapidly from the crater and covered the nearby rocks and trees in a thick coat of fog. ‘Well, that swirling column of smoke you see is not actually smoke,’ the boy explained. ‘It is actually a mass of water vapor and sulfur-rich gases, something called as fumarole activity.’ Mahen felt his lungs tighten. Can we go back now? I am feeling choked! he groaned. ‘That’s because these gases are highly poisonous. I got to know from the locals that the volcano erupted just a few months ago. I am not surprised it’s still simmering,’ the boy put his stick on the ground and got up, angling his body towards Mahen, with a mischievous smile on his face. Mahen drew a step back, realizing that the time had come, the time to make it happen, the reason why they sailed across the sea to the island. Balancing carefully on his heels, he quickly bent and uprooted some dry vegetation from the ground and flung it across the boy’s face, laughing uproariously.

The man paused to check his watch again, it was still 2 a.m. The moonlight shone brightly and filtered in fine stalks of silver from the window, suspending the room in a grey watery mist. It has definitely stopped working, he reasoned. Mahen, it had been years since anyone called him by that name. He imagined his mother’s thin lips parting, first stretching gently across her face and then coming together in a small oval, to expel a short burst of air, calling him lovingly and fondly, by his name. Mahen. Was it before the war? My memory is failing me; he carefully glanced at the empty glass on the small table, studying his cracked reflection in the diamond shaped crystals of the glass, gazing silently. How many years have passed?

He slumped his back into the chair, closing his eyes, as the spirit finally started to numb his nerves. I have plenty to drink and enough pills to pop, his upper lip twitched, as the room came to be flooded in a pool of white light. Everyone can just dream, I am living through this life. Alone. Luck dog. He bounced his head back, as the light started crawling up his legs. He shook his leg, bemused, trying to dust off the light. Am I dreaming? He noticed his hand turn silver as it touched the light. What is happening? In half-drunkenness, he squinted his eyes around the room and found its corners and spaces dissolving into a thick gleam of white liquid. The moon slowly turned and stretched its way into the room, its bright surface peeling and drooping on the floor, as it squeezed through the tiny window. But I don’t understand. And before Mahen could stare in disbelief at his body, which had just turned silver, he saw the moon dwarf into a small bright ball that had successfully shaped its way through the window. His whole body tensed as the ball started nearing him. But only if I could end this nightmare… Jerking his body forward, he lunged at the ball, trying to clasp it between his hands. As his hands touched the ball, he lost his balance and landed with a splashing thud on the floor. Suddenly, he felt a tight pull from under the floor and then quickly held his breath as his whole body got sucked down into a whirlpool of shimmering liquid.