I felt the urge to wake her, to finally learn what was going on and why she was here, but she looked so incredibly peaceful I couldn’t bring myself to do so.
I was suffering a sort of delayed shock, I realised. The toll of the last three weeks had finally caught up on me, like a man who has been in debt for years who finally comes into a massive inheritance. Here she was, potentially the answer to all the questions I had been asking myself. Specifically, why was I here? Where was here? And what could be done about it?
The girl stirred slightly on the bed and I jumped in shock. How on earth could I go about interrogating her if she spoke no English? Could she be dangerous, like Hans? She certainly didn’t seem like she could be a risk. She looked totally harmless, even vulnerable in her youth and the wide-eyed innocence that she had displayed in the street yesterday. But like everything else here, I had to be wary. I had to expect the unexpected…
Explanations for her presence whirred through my mind. She could be a spy for instance. She could have been planted here by The Powers to assess my mental state or even sabotage it. She could yet turn out to be a figment of my imagination, although she seemed as real to the touch as my own body. But then how to explain Hans? He was a ghost. A manifestation of my own consciousness gone to seed. But the bastard was still able to inflict physical harm upon me. Had I done that to myself? I reached up and fingered the cut above my eye, wincing at the touch. Dried blood had caked over it. I inspected the cut in the mirror and without much medical knowledge even I could see it was the sort of wound that would usually require a stitch or two. Luckily it had clotted, and while not life threatening would probably result in quite a scar.
It occurred to me that it was the first time that physical damage had manifested itself upon me since my arrival. Up until that point the fall off the roof, the shoulder injury in the restaurant, the fall from the balcony outside the station, being propelled by smoke tendrils through plate glass doors… none of these had left any lasting damage on my body. But Hans had caused me significant pain. My ribs still ached, I was bloodied and I looked a wreck.
The poor girl. What she must have thought upon seeing me! I had put off the inevitable long enough, I decided. It was time to wake her up and get some answers…
Two hours later, and after a great deal of gesticulating and international charades, we had established the very basics of our existence to each other.
Her name was Akari, and she was 19. I was amazed at this as she looked a lot younger, around 14 or 15 max. She had been on the island for as long as she could remember, but that part was still not entirely clear as she couldn’t actually remember anything before being on the island, except her name, age, and the fact that she had three older sisters. She reckoned she’d been here for about a month.
She had that incredible deference so characteristic of the Japanese, but with a degree of sassiness thrown in that made her a very appealing character.
Of course, my Japanese was non-existent, but I found that after a while I could understand a few of the more common words that she kept using. Island seemed to be ‘shima’, radio was ‘rajio’ and she used the word ‘sora’ a lot, which coupled with her gesticulations I took to mean something like alone or empty.
But by far the most incredible thing I discovered about her was that she had been experiencing the same flashing numbers in front of her eyes each time she awoke.
The percentages!
She illustrated this by making a butterfly motion with one hand in front of her eyes and saying ‘Sūji’ over and over, until I presumed that was the word for numbers or a percentage. She became more and more animated as I explained my experiences to her and it seemed that although she had been here longer than I, she had had a fairly easy time of it compared to me.
Her story, from what I could tell, went thusly.
She had awoken, naked and weak and disoriented, in a room in a hotel somewhere in Costa Teguise, another popular tourist resort a few miles on the other side of the capital Arrecife. At first she had been too afraid and sick to leave the room, and like me stayed inside the compound’s grounds for at least four or five days, building up her strength with food until she was able to move around more freely. She didn’t have any visible injuries, but said her head hurt terribly for the first few days.
I sat amazed as she relayed this information to me by way of hand gestures and drawings of crude maps and outlines on pieces of the hotel’s complimentary stationary. She knew very little English, but was able to communicate very basic words and even sentence structure by squeezing her eyes shut as if pulling the words from the very darkest recesses of her mind. I assumed she had learned some English at school and, much like my French which I gave up aged 16, could summon odd words to the forefront of her brain with visible effort.
Apart from obvious injury she revealed her total lack of memory at anything other than her own identity, that of her sisters, and the fact that she was from Japan. I had to admit that my own memories were scarcer than they should have been, as I explained to her that I had been through almost exactly the same set of tribulations when I awoke in Playa Blanca.
She wasn’t aware of anyone else on the island, and I managed to deduce that she hadn’t seen Hans at all and that I was the first person she had seen in her time on Lanzarote.
She had spent some considerable time wandering the streets of Costa Teguise, grabbing different clothes from tourist shops and disposing of them daily for new ones, searching for clues or other people, but had become depressed upon finding nothing and had holed up in her hotel for a long time, unsure of what to do.
For around half an hour she seemed to be going off on a tangent, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying at all. I couldn’t be sure but I think she was describing having some kind of strange hallucination whilst hibernating at her hotel. I wanted to believe it was the same thing I had been experiencing during my blackouts, but I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.
Damn this language barrier!
She then seemed to have walked inland for a period of days rather than sticking to the coastline as I had, and from what I could tell her experiences had been just as fruitless as mine in uncovering clues to explain our presence here.
Ultimately, she could throw no further light on the reason for our desertion on the island and I groaned with frustration as this became clear. This must have upset her, or maybe she thought she had upset me, as she visibly shrank back in on herself almost halving her already diminutive stature in her perceived shame. I had to work hard to reassure her everything was OK, and that it was just my own frustrations rising to the surface and I would try and keep them in check. She seemed to be confused at the idea that someone would so readily show their emotions, without first considering what effect it could have on those around them.
What we lose in translation!
I vowed several times during our dialogue that if I ever did get off this island I would devote myself to anthropology, to the learning of other languages and cultures, as my woeful ignorance had exposed my complete lack of international relations. Although we did have reason to be proud of what we had gleaned from each other thus far without virtually any knowledge of the other’s language.
Every now and again she would pause to take a sip of water from a bottle she had extracted from the minibar, and each time she did she would very deliberately screw the top back on to its full tightness, as if trying to minimise any loss from evaporation. I took her to be a fastidious, very precise person. It was almost mesmerising to watch her movements, so deliberate and in tune with her surroundings. She was so young and healthy!