The Island

It blots out the foreground in the lagoon, artificial, tapering out of the silt, bulky walls curving to a flat roof, narrow slit windows with salt-crust in the sills. Occasionally, you will see the thin flit of a face behind the cobwebs, passing from some unknown room to some unknown room and the eyes seem to reflect the grey of the water as they stare at you briefly as you bob below, in your tiny vessel, pitched on the shallow waves of an enclosed sea.

It has not a crumble of soil at the base, not a wave of grass, not the trickle of a beetle: its massiveness is almost a monument to sterility, stone piled on stone heaped on wood pilings rammed into the seabed, a rigid home to people designated to need the strength of authoritarian rigour.

They arrive by boat, blinking in the flat breadth of daylight. They offer no struggle; they are not drugged, save for the narcotic shrug of their resignation to their fate. They need to be pushed inside, not through reluctance to enter but rather through the inertia that has clouded over them. They are not silent, but neither do they converse: they form a chorus of monologues. This unanswered jabber suits them: they have no need to listen. Their high-pitched chatter mingles with the screech of gulls as they stagger inside.

You wait, standing foot-spread on the base of your boat, feeling for the fluctuations in the waves, retaining your balance, binoculars screwed into your eyes, searching for a response, a flash of recognition from someone you are sure you know.

They depart the same way: by boat, eyes flat and closed in the swell of the dusk. They do not move; they are drugged by death. They are carried out of the building and pushed inside, under the black tarpaulin. This is the only way they leave. And now they are silent, surrounded by the interlocking dialogue chorus of keening nurses, their screamed song mingling with the screech of gulls as the barge staggers back across the lagoon, flashed to a silhouette across the moon.

You put aside your binoculars in the folds of your jacket, sit back down, pick up the oars, and push off backwards between the sandbars to where you think you now live, gazing at the concave walls as they diminish, shrinking down until the line of the horizon lies higher than the rooftop. Tomorrow, you will return.