Chapter VIII

He approached, and saw that there were five people – three were men, and two women. They were all intently focused on one another’s conversation, and paid him no attention until he was very near. He saw that they were not sitting around the fire, but instead, they were concentrated around something else, which he could not yet see.

When he was standing right behind them, and at the very edge of their circle, they all fell silent and looked at him. Then, they looked at one another, and began to laugh again. One of the women made some space for him, and gestured for him to sit beside her.

“Come” she said, as everyone else resumed their laughter and conversation.

“Hello, I’m…”

“We don’t have names here” she interrupted.

Now that he was part of their circle, he could see what it was that they were gathered around. In the center, was a spectacularly odd, white flower.

It seemed entirely out of place in the desert. It had four long, thin, pearl-white petals that pointed outwards, each perpendicular to the one before. Further adding to its strangeness, the flower was growing out of a perfectly circular, small pool of water. The water was still, and shallow, causing it to behave like a mirror; reflecting perfectly the stars above it. It had the effect of making the flower seem like it was suspended in space, among the stars.

He turned to ask the woman who had invited him to sit beside her, about this rather curious object, but she had already joined the others in collectively ignoring him, and was laughing and talking along with everyone else.

Rather abruptly, one of them, in the middle of their conversation, approached the flower while maintaining his attention on the others.

“I’m next!” called the woman who was closest to him, enthusiastically.

What the man did next, he found particularly curious. The man brought his face close to the flower and inhaled deeply, and with rather a lot of force. Then, he held this breath for a few moments and released it – slowly at first, then all at once. Seeming unusually relaxed by this action, he returned to join the laughter and conversation of his peers, while the woman who had earlier called out, repeated the same, strange ritual.

He found this to be fascinating, and watched as the others, soon after, and one after the other, did exactly the same. Every time the laughter died down, they would put their faces to the flower and take a deep breath, and the loud conversation and heavy laughter would once again, resume.

He could no longer contain his curiosity.

“What happens with the flower?” he asked the woman who was closest to him.

This question had, for some reason unknown to him, caused the group to fall silent, and the entirety of their attention now belonged to him. At first, no one spoke, and then, they smiled to each other, as if they had all communicated and come to some secret agreement about how best to answer him. The woman he had asked, broke silence, and said, “Try it”.

He thought about it for a moment, and concluded that he was too curious to uncover the purpose of the strange routine he had seen them perform. He approached the flower, and they all watched, eagerly.

He was now directly above it, and the reflection of his face began to replace the stars in the water surrounding it. The flower was beautiful, and enticing, but there was some hidden cruelness to it, some invisible, treacherous quality that he had failed to locate, but it made him uneasy nonetheless.

“Don’t take too much, not on your first time” one of his audience warned.

He nodded, and drew his first breath, as he had seen them do. There was something uniquely violent about its effect. It washed over him in a giant wave of euphoric numbness. He felt it do to him, everything it had promised. Beginning in his head, it trickled down his spine, into his arms and legs, and found its way to the very edges of his fingertips and toes. He forgot completely, about the nomad, Esma, Thalam, and the village.

The flower had relieved him of all of his suffering; he was no longer troubled by any of the thoughts that, only a moment ago, were the source of a great deal of pain and longing in him. He no longer heard the nomad’s words in his mind, or Esma’s voice when she spoke his name, or Thalam, or the village. The flower made it all disappear; he thought he had discovered some divine gift that was meant for him. He fell back, looked at the others and smiled, who smiled in return, at him, then at each other. They congratulated him on his inauguration into their company. He re-joined their circle, and made loud conversation, and laughed with them, and felt overjoyed.

Without suffering, there is no joy, wanderer.

He had suddenly remembered the nomad.

“What is this?” he asked, shocked, clutching his chest, where an anxiety had formed much stronger than any he had felt before. “I feel… The flower… Something is wrong…”

“Don’t worry”, replied the woman beside him. “You only need to breathe from it again. The effect is temporary. Just go to it again, and it’ll all be alright.”

The joy the flower had brought him, came at the price of its brief existence. When it left him, it was always replaced by a suffering much heavier than that which he had started with.

He thought about how the nomad had told him that he needed to endure suffering in order to find joy. What the flower did, was reverse the equation – it provided immediate joy, the end result of which was always, suffering.

Overwhelmed by the pain of the memories of the people and the place that he loved, what he did next, is not to be judged. It is what people sometimes do when they’re heartbroken – he convinced himself that none of it mattered to him. The nomad was just an old man, Esma was only a girl that he had briefly known, and Thalam, was just an animal. He moved his face to the flower and, just as his fellow wanderers had done, breathed from its pearl-white heart, a fleeting happiness that was as shallow as the water from which it grew.

He repeated this many times again after that – how many exactly, he did not know. For the people of the flower, nothing ever changed, not for the better, or for worse. Time didn’t move here - it was always night-time. Every time he would go to the flower, he would see the reflection of his face in the mirror of its water. It always showed him his own, desperate eyes, just before he breathed from it, and he would always feel a little bit more of his courage abandon him. He felt he no longer possessed enough of it to remember those whom he loved.

He learned that the anxiety the flower caused him could always be extinguished by another, more powerful breath than the one before. There was also the dull ache in his heart that had since appeared – it felt as if something had been stolen from it. Something, which had always existed yet, had been invisible, unnoticed, until it was no longer there. What was now missing from him was the love we reserve for ourselves. He no longer loved his life in all its chaos, hardship and surprise. He no longer loved himself.

This feeling, he discovered, no matter how many times he put his face to the flower, would not go away.

“So, how do you like our Place?” asked the woman beside him.

He simply stared at her for a while, unable to answer. He thought about the question seriously, and realized that in this place, what he felt, more than anything, was, alone. Although there were five others, whom he had been laughing and making conversation with for quite some time now, he still felt profoundly lonely. He knew that each of them would always love the flower and its effect, more than they would ever care for each other. To them, it didn’t matter if they were five, or six, or twenty, or even a single person - as long as the flower was there, and it continued to provide, that was all that mattered.

“I feel alone”, he finally responded.

The woman stared at him, her smile now faded, and her eyes widened slightly. She seemed to understand what he had meant, but looked at him as if he had spoken some great truth that she too, felt, but had chosen to ignore in exchange for laughter. She put her face to the flower and drew a breath, and returned smiling once again.

“Life is a lonely place, my friend”, she said.

He thought about this too. It is true, that he found life to be mostly a cruel, vicious and difficult thing, but he did not feel that way when he was with the nomad. He did not feel that way, when the little girl from the village offered him a date from her small, tender palms; or with Esma, or even Thalam. Although at one point it did not bother him, he felt that he no longer wanted to tolerate solitude. Life, he thought, is a solitary journey not meant to be suffered alone.

It was then that he decided that this Place was not for him, and he made the exhaustingly difficult decision, to abandon the flower and its people. He would endure the ache of remembering what had once belonged in his life. He would face the darkness in his thoughts, in exchange for even the faintest hope, that another soul may be willing to share with him, in all the burdens and the glory of life.

He stood up, and almost immediately, the woman beside him asked, “where are you going?”

“To find the one who gave me a name”, he replied.

“No!” she cried. “You are one of us now. There is nothing out there for us. Stay!”

Alnilam turned around and made an attempt at walking away, but the heavy breathing had already started in his chest, and he was beginning to feel light-headed. He had taken too much from the flower. His head began to swirl, his eyes closed, and he collapsed onto the sand.

He heard a distant voice.

“Wake up. Tea is ready”, it said.

He opened his eyes; he was a young boy again, in his bed, in the small room where the doorman lived, at the Windsor hotel, in Cairo.