Travel Journal, Day Four:
I blog now via satellite, from a remote location in the Atlantic Ocean, some one hundred miles north of the coast of Suriname in South America. The cruise ship continues to plunge ahead through the deep toward our next port of call,
Devil's Island, French Guiana.
I never thought I would see the penal colony again — though it was eighty years ago, I remember my last glimpse of the "green hell" like it was yesterday — the island's margin fading into a darkening sky as my raft swirled around it in a loosening orbit. My stock of marinated steak tips and bloodied veal, swiped from the prison foreman's personal pantries, running thin; the slack in my homemade slingshot stretched beyond its elastic limit, and with it my ability to draw away the sharks from the raft with catapulted meats severely compromised. The guards on Penitentiary Island took several shots at me when I pushed off. They hit both shoulders — and worse, my canteen of fresh water.
But somehow I persevered, squirreled away some of the raw meat for the expected week-long period of drift, resisted the urge to salt it in the water, for fear of drawing back those sharks, empty-eyed with the terrified faces. The sight of them gave me hope:
I was not the one who was damned. It was they whom some cruel divinity had cursed to haunt these waters, insatiable in their hunger: vampires without opposable thumbs or charming accents. Somehow, through wind and rain, after a pitched moonlight battle with that manta ray — oh how I cursed the gods when that hellish skate, porcupined with driftwood harpoons, renewed its runs at my raft! — I made the Guatemalan coast. Free at last, one might say.
Now it is my privilege to revisit the penal colony, now disused, on a luxury cruise ship. Once again I will peer inside the Isolation Cells, this time under the supervision of a tour guide, lazily intoning the horrors that once lay within these sweltering, airless honeycombs, with no prison guard to shove me inside with the butt end of his bayonet. And I wonder, when I stand at the gates of Cell 14, where I lost sixteen months of my life to blackouts and madness, will the same wild, self-destructive thoughts find their way out of the crabby corners of my mind? Will the old voices that sounded in that cramped cubicle speak to me again? Will they sound eighty years older?
I write all this tonight because I cannot sleep. I know what awaits me tomorrow morning. Well, I know and I don't know. They say there is a gift shop on the Island. Postcards for sale reading "GREETINGS FROM BEAUTIFUL FRENCH GUIANA." Might the kind lady at the cash register consider selling me back ten years of my life? What would that cost me in euros?
My psychiatrist tells me that this visit — seeing the old penal colony of my nightmares, out of order and overgrown with weeds — will finally afford me a sense of "closure." But in my one hundred fifteen years of life I have had my fill of closures; it is openendedness that I am after now: the horizon after the horizon, the release from freedom. Perhaps your Phutatorius will not take the boat ashore with the other guests. Maybe, just maybe, he will stay on the ship instead; there is a Water Aerobics class slated for three in the afternoon.
