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Emanu

What is left to us of a story once we have pulled it from our soul and etched it in blood?

By Jonathan McAuleyPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Emanu
Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

Write it down, John said, handing me the little black notebook. Write it all down in here.

And you’ll give me all that money?

Every cent.

It is hard to believe that by writing Emanu onto the page he might live again; surely the world doesn’t work like that, does it?

You don’t believe me? John leans back on the stool. Behind him, through the tent flap, the wind whisks the top of the sea into humps, little grey tombs extending all the way to the horizon.

I don’t believe anything anymore. In my pocket, I trace the outline of a heart against my leg.

Once you write it down people will know. Words make it true; they last.

Longer than Emanu did, you mean.

Just think what you could do with this money. John leans in. You could reach the mainland, then... his voice trails off as he lights a cigarette, a practised gesture, but he is not indifferent. How many stories has he collected?

Why will you pay so much for a story about…? I stop, there are some words I won’t give him.

John exhales smoke through his nostrils. That’s my business, he says.

My question seems to be the answer he was waiting for. He takes out a thick bundle of money wrapped in clear plastic, I can see the top note, a large number printed in bold, an old face looking out, a hint of warning in the stern gaze.

John puts the bundle in my hand. Here.

I open the black notebook and write.

Emanu became Emanu in the sea. Formed out of swirling darkness, he reached past death and pulled me back into life. I first saw him in a narrow corridor deep inside the facility; you don’t forget a face like that, but he became real for me in the sea.

The corridor was a foul place, there was barely any air, the world had narrowed to almost nothing and beyond, I couldn’t picture anything but empty space in every direction. Crowded in, there was no room to sit down so we were obliged to stand, to endure. Hour after hour I stared at the small door at the far end of the corridor, praying it would let us through. The smell was awful, it squeezed against us, thickly. My back and legs ached from standing, and the old woman beside me urinated on the floor; she could hold on no longer. A small puddle collected underneath my foot. I wanted to tell her I didn’t mind, that I understood, but she wept for shame and I didn’t want to draw more attention to her, so I pretended not to notice.

Emanu was standing beside a mother and her two children, though I didn’t know who he was at the time; I thought the children were his. He played with the little boy, pretending to take his fingers and throw them away over his shoulder. The child giggled, hid his face in his mother’s dress, then peeped back at Emanu, let him take his fingers once more, they would grow back.

How could anyone play at a time like this, I wondered? How could this handsome man remain so calm when our lives stood in the balance? As though reading my thoughts, Emanu turned and glanced at me over his shoulder. I saw that he was younger than the mother, his eyes told me that he was not her husband. Across the sea of bowed and covered heads, his eyes shone with an understanding that made me feel hopeful, then he turned away, an act of gentle courtesy; he understood that I wasn’t ready to be looked at in such a way.

The boat was a hollowed-out shell with an engine stuck on the back. Emanu sat in the bow, I was in the stern. As in the corridor, a sea of heads separated us from one another, but this time there were no walls pressing in, instead the sea seemed to want to pull us away from everything that was solid, it felt like being on the edge of a great emptiness. Emanu didn’t look back in the boat, though I was sure he knew where I was. He faced forwards, moving ahead in his mind across the water, faster than the boat, heading towards something that only he could see.

When the boat sank under the freezing water many people did not return to the surface, the sea just swallowed them up. It began to swallow me too, freezing currents snatched my breath away, they clamped my arms and legs in numbness. I tried to move but the cold was quicker, it moved inside me, coating me in terror. All around, tentacle shapes clawed in desperation at nothing; unreachable and forgotten, we all floated down through darkness, tiny atoms of fear being pulled by an invisible force that was everywhere. Then it stopped. A different force took hold of me from above and didn’t let go, it pulled me out of the darkness.

My breath came back slowly. The cold was still inside, and I could not see because of the saltwater sting, but I felt something solid under my chest and a hand on my back, calmly holding me in place even as the waves continued to dip over us. When I regained my sight, I recognised the man from the corridor; his eyes, they spoke of hope and possibility, made me believe that rescue would come, so I put my trust in them and the invisible force of the sea loosened its grip on me.

I put the pen down. My hand aches, I have never written this much, I am not used to it. John turns abruptly and stares at me, did he hear me stop? He can’t have.

What’s wrong? He takes a step towards me.

Instinctively, I draw back. The flash in his eyes tells me he is annoyed, he has spent many nights convincing me that he is a friend, that he won’t hurt me; he just wants my story, that’s all.

Why have you stopped? His tone is urgent.

My hand hurts.

Open and close your fingers, that will help. John commands this, so I do as he says. He lights another cigarette. Are you writing down everything?

The notebook is full of small shapes, page after page, some long, some short, a pattern of a story. But I don’t recognise them, the shapes look strange, they won’t settle into anything resembling words.

John reads my confusion. Gesturing vaguely towards the notebook he tells me to carry on. Don’t stop, he says. Write it all down. Everything. It’s better this way, trust me.

This doesn’t feel right. I want to give John back the packet of money, I want to leave this tent, but I am too scared by what he might do if I try.

With this money you can go, and you will never have to come back, John says, still looking at me. He peers through the tent flap at the camp beyond. You can forget all this.

I pick up the pen, no longer an ally, and force myself to write. This is harmful, an act of rebellion against the self. I have been tricked.

I write that after two days drifting in the freezing water Emanu and I were pulled from the sea by hands that were neither kind nor cruel, hands that wrapped us in silver for warmth. I write our arrival in a small port in a grey town, the transfer to a medical facility, the silent prayers that Emanu and I be kept together: let them think we are friends or maybe relations, I just need to be with him. Neither of us ever said out loud what we wanted, we didn’t need to, being together was the rescue we had hoped for.

I describe our move to this camp, the tent they gave us to share, the questions they didn’t ask; enquiry is a luxury no one can afford here anyway. The pen moves on across the page, digging out memory like a blade, I feel the truth leave me with every letter carved.

At first, we were shy with each other, both careful to keep to his side of the tiny tent, no physical contact whatsoever, not even in sleep did we brush up against one another. But as the weeks passed and the winter set in it became impossible to avoid contact and we drew closer to one another, at first for survival, then because we couldn’t stop ourselves.

In Emanu’s arms I was in the place I had been trying to reach my entire life. Outside, snow covered the ground and the thin trees, sat on the tops of the tents, casting a strange new appearance over the world, one that I did not understand or recognise. Inside, we nested in one another, whispering into existence a world of our own, secret, and safe.

I do not want to write anymore.

In a flash, John crouches before me. I raise my arms to shield my face, but he pulls them away like twigs.

Finish it now, he hisses. Hurry up and finish it.

I begin to weep. I don’t want to give Emanu away, the black notebook is too greedy for him, this isn’t right, but I cannot stop, it won’t let me. When John isn’t looking, I rub the page with my thumb, but the words won’t fade, there is no way for me to erase them, they belong to the notebook now. And it continues to take.

It takes the group of men who came to the camp like hunters in the night. Their daily movements between the tents belong to the lines on the page, so do their searching, hate-filled eyes. Emanu and I staying hidden for nearly a week until the day he leaves to collect food rations are the notebooks memories now, it knows that we tricked ourselves into believing that we had not been seen, that it was safe to go out. The hours I waited for Emanu to return are stained in ink, thoughts that collected in the tent with me while I waited, the wail of the wind taunting me to go out and see the dreadful truth for myself, all of it flows out of me like blood onto the cursed pages, flooding the notebook with a truth I can never reclaim.

I try and stop, I do, but my hand forms the strange shapes on its own now, shapes in which lies the body of Emanu at the base of a small cliff, his head swollen and smashed, his eyes grey and lifeless like the rocks they gaze upon, hope and acceptance gone out of them. The sea washing against his feet, blotting his jeans, the tide coming to take him away on its dark currents to a place he will not rise from. I write myself there too, kneeling at the top of the cliff, afraid to linger in case the hunters should return and crush my head too because of what I am, because of who I love.

Words blur into children finding me, into the defiance of mothers as they take me into their tent, into white men in yellow vests climbing down the cliff and dragging Emanu’s body out of the water with ropes.

That’s enough for John, he doesn’t need any more than that, he knows the rest. He takes the black notebook from me and binds it with string. He doesn’t look at me as he leaves, he’s too eager for another story, the notebook wants more.

Has the story really gone? At night, beside the cold sea, I try and summon it in vain. It has left my body; my mouth will not form it and my fingers cannot trace it. Perhaps it was not true enough to last after all.

fantasy
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About the Creator

Jonathan McAuley

Writer / Storyteller / Theatre Maker / Teacher

Establishing deeper connections through stories both established and new.

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