Council of the Vision
Cries crashed into Aisha's ears, tangled together, as if she were being pulled from every side at once:
"Hurry up!! No time!!"
"We've got him, hold him tight!!"
"My God, he's resisting, he's slipping out!! Pull harder!!"
The darkness in front of her split into sharp blue flashes; lights hanging in the air, multiplying until the blue covered everything. Below her, waves struck without mercy, rising and falling, swallowing huge things she could not fully see; the edges of structures, the ends of pillars, shadows of masses disappearing into the mouth of the water and dissolving. She tried to plant one foot on something solid and found nothing. She felt herself moving without weight, as if the ground refused to acknowledge her, as if her existence were a ghostly passage sliding between the layers of the scene.
"What exactly is happening here? Who are these people shouting? Where is the wall, where is the room?"
The features of a familiar face shone through the shifting mist. A trimmed beard, a broad shoulder, and two stern eyes she had known for years.
"Sheikh Fathi… is that you?"
The stream of questions was cut by a nearby voice, sharper than the other cries:
"Watch out, Aisha!"
She felt a rough hand push her from her shoulder, a heavy body shifting her to the side before she crashed into some strange rock. A stone jutting out of nowhere in the middle of water and light. Fathi disappeared from her field of vision in the next moment; a wave or a patch of fog swallowed him, and only the trace of his touch on her shoulder remained.
She lifted her eyes beyond the fog and saw something that could not be explained with a single word; a tall giant rising above the fog itself, a massive shape whose only visible details were intersecting dark lines, as if the sea carried a walking shadow on its back. At its feet, or where its feet were supposed to be, other lights and small bodies moved in front of its enormity, but would not settle in her mind.
"What is that thing there?"
Next to the giant, a clearer figure took shape: a man in a long coat flaring around his legs, standing on some edge, his head tilted, his mouth open in a broken laugh whose sound did not reach her, but whose shape was clear. A bit higher above him, another body floated in the air, with no wings and no ropes, rising with no support, his hair tied back in a single knot that left his neck exposed. To the right of both stood a person in a loose robe, half the face in shadow, and in the other half a pure golden eye sat; no black pupil, no white, just a piece of living metal watching the scene from above the water.
She tried to connect those scattered images, between the giant, and the laugh of the man in the coat, and the flying man with the tied hair, and the shine of the golden eye, but the vision refused to give her more. A new wave rose, the fog spread like a heavy curtain, and the shapes began to melt away one by one.
"Nooooo…!"
The sound came out of my throat before I noticed it, as if someone had torn it from my chest in one pull. My chest was rising and falling, and the air came to me in broken pieces, not enough. I pulled my body off the bed, rushed toward the window, and ignored the darkness in my room. I crashed into the edge of that damned table near the wall and almost fell to the floor, but I caught the corner and then kept going.
My fingers trembled on the window latch before I managed to open it. The night air rushed onto my face, and the moon's spectral blue light entered, giving my bedroom a shape that was beautiful but pale. At the same time, I gathered my breath and watched the sky with my eyes, while my hands shook from something I did not understand. Was it fear from what I had just seen? Or from what I felt was happening now with nothing to point to it? But I kept checking over and over, afraid some surprise might happen, until this terror was cut by my grandmother's voice, her broken tone and surprised look as she walked toward the bed to fetch the blanket and cover me, saying:
"My dear, what happened!? I heard you screaming. Is there a thief? Or just a nightmare… is there someone outside the house you saw from the window?"
I told her I had not seen anything, but she did not look convinced. Her eyebrows were tight, close to fear and worry. She wrapped me in the blanket while trying to lift herself up to reach my height with her fingertips and tapped my shoulder slowly, brushing over it, and said in a low voice to me:
"Whatever you saw, don't be afraid, my love. I am here with you and I won't let anyone hurt you. And anyone who even thinks of coming close, I'll hit him with my big iron spoon and hide you in the wardrobe, heh… Come to the sitting room, I'll make you a warm cup of milk and we'll talk together. What do you think, my soul?"
I smiled at her while looking down, tiredness on my face, and although what she said was simple, it could still make me feel more warmth than this blanket wrapped around me.
⛧⛧⛧
We sat at the kitchen table, and I kept thinking about what I had seen, lost in my thoughts, my eyes fixed on the table, and my fingers tapping on it as I thought. My thinking was cut off by the sound of my grandmother's sandals as she walked in, carrying two cups of milk. She sat on the other side, the noise of the TV in the next room filling the silence.
My grandmother said to me:
"Tell me, my dear, what happened?"
I answered her while looking at my reflection in the milk cup:
"It was a dream, like the earlier dreams I've had in the past weeks… But this dream was strange, it felt more real than it should."
My grandmother kept listening carefully, leaning forward on the table, trying to understand what I was saying, but I did not want to pull her into details that would worry her for no reason, so I found myself saying to calm her:
"I think I should ease up on food before sleeping, Grandma… your sandwiches, I saw them in my nightmares as monsters, heh."
She laughed a short laugh, and the tension fell a little from her face.
I lifted my eyes to the watch on my hand and saw the hands at four-thirty, close to Fajr. I let out a slow sigh because Fajr was near. My grandmother cut my gaze at the watch, looking at me with a tight and sharp face, and said:
"My dear Aisha… the sandwiches have nothing to do with your nightmares. I'm sure you didn't read your supplications. Before you sleep, open the Qur'an and read the two surahs of protection and Ayat al-Kursi… so you don't let the devil play with your mind again and scare you, my soul."
I smiled at her, trying to reassure her, and said as I reached out and touched her palm and held it in my hand:
"Of course, my dear… I'll keep up with my supplications before sleep, God willing… and I'm sorry I made you wake up at this hour."
My grandmother put her hand on her chest, her eyes open in surprise, saying to me in a rising voice that cut off my thought that I bothered her:
"Bothered me? My dear, I didn't sleep at all… I was watching a film all night."
She said that while turning her thin body to point toward the TV, looking at it once and at me once. She leaned her left hand on the table and the other on the chair, trying to stand, then took the cup of milk and drank a light sip with her eyes closed, full of the night's fatigue, and left, saying to me:
"I'll go finish the film on the couch, my dear, and I'll stay awake. Do you want to watch the film?"
I said to her, smiling, as I put my hand on my head and scratched my hair, my eyes on her, trying to keep them steady and not drift:
"No… after a little while I'll pray Fajr, and I'll wait for the morning to come and the sun to rise a bit, then I'll go."
⛧⛧⛧
"Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest… I bear witness that there is no god but Allah… I bear witness that there is no god but Allah."
Worshippers of different ages could be seen from far away like ants, from the balcony window of the building. The sound of the call to prayer could barely be heard from that far distance. The colors of their clothes shone in that darkness about to fade under the light of dawn. Grass crept into the stones of the old mosque, the place that kept the marks of tradition and heritage among the modern buildings, and the place that gathers people of different ages under one roof and one goal… prayer.
His black hand touched the white leaves of the woolly flower, and his eyes looked at the ring on his hand and at the flower. Then he stared at the sky from the balcony of the building.
⛧⛧⛧
I nodded to him with a small gesture, meaning I wished his family well and that I would see him soon, standing beside the building's door. I went inside and showed my card to the building's guard. He allowed me in, pointing with his hand.
Alright… now the twenty-fifth floor… hmm? No one at the building's door, it seems so. But what I felt was different from what my eyes saw. The elevator door opened. It doesn't matter in any case.
The elevator felt longer every time… haaaah. Yet I knew for sure that something was there. I reached out my hand to touch the elevator's mirror, to see what was in this place.
In the moment my fingers touched the mirror's glass, the elevator changed and I was back at the entrance, looking around. Hmm… the place was the same, but the building's guard was lying on the floor on his stomach.
Ha? His body was fine from the back, so the wound must be… from the front.
Damn it… the body was torn, the insides emptied and gone, and the face and mouth split in two, and the eyes seemed plucked out, not lost in a simple injury. Claws that didn't look like any creature I knew.
Alright… I have to go back now. A monster behind me? How does it move? Does it see me? Things weren't supposed to move here—
"Ahhhhh!"
"Damn you, son of a bitch! How did you stab those horns into the middle of my sensory field?! I was the one who was supposed to…
Come back!! Come back now!! To the state of reality."
⛧⛧⛧
He leaned his back on the elevator's wall, staring at his face in the mirror. Not much time had passed, only minutes, and the rest of the minutes passed while he was thinking: "How was I attacked in my own sensory field?" His hand was raised, close to his face, and despite the daze he felt, his face was empty, like a blank painting waiting for the first stroke of the brush.
The elevator opened and the man saw the yellow office light cutting into the blue cold of the elevator's light, and he could see a man standing outside the elevator at a distance of two hand spans, wearing a crimson Libyan cap and a white robe falling to his ankles, with a white cloak leaning toward yellow and a hood.
The man looked at him and stretched his hand out, palm open downward, and said to him with a smile:
"Do you want to feel how children feel when they crawl, heh heh heh?"
The man answered him with a hand gesture that there was no need to reach out. He stood and placed his hand between the elevator doors so they would not close on him, then stepped out. As he walked out he said, asking him:
"Did Aisha call you, is that why you came so late?"
Amjad nodded with his hand that Aisha was not the reason he came, and made a sign with his hand to ask why and to ask if something had happened to Aisha.
The man smiled and put his hand on his waist and raised the other, and said to him:
"Isn't it better that you explain why you were crawling in the elevator like a baby a few months old? Anyway, come here to the table while I wash the fruit. As long as there is no monster coming out of the window, let's eat some apples and drink juice."
Both men walked toward the apartment's room door, the man with the cap walking ahead, looking beside his eye at his friend and smiling a small smile without turning his head, as if he knew his friend had seen something unusual, but did not ask him anything and they kept walking in the corridor. And the corridor felt like it didn't end, and every sound got louder with every second, even the sounds of the devices and the internal channels of the building faded and dropped, and nothing was heard except the sound of the dark-skinned man's shoes and the breathing of the man from the elevator.
The door handle felt colder than usual; it was not like that when the dark-skinned man left his apartment, but he didn't care about that and didn't delay the moment with more thinking. He opened the apartment door and they both entered the room.
⛧⛧⛧
"So like this… a monster with horns, full of hair and crystals on its ends, attacked you and stabbed you while you were inside your sensory field? Really strange… things weren't supposed to happen there, since it is your sensory field."
The dark-skinned man said that as he held out the red apple he had washed with his towel to his friend sitting on the couch across from the sink, after he had put the basket of apples on the table in front of the bookshelf.
Their talk was cut off by knocking on the door, four slow knocks, three seconds for each one. The dark-skinned man went and opened the door and found Aisha in front of him. He smiled at her smile, and she greeted him and said with a long happy sigh:
"Peace be upon you, Sheikh Fathi, how are you? How are you, Amjad? I'm happy to see you at last."
She stepped in after Fathi stood beside the door and gestured with his hand for her to come in, welcoming her, closing his eyes and smiling a warm smile.
She sat on one of the chairs after putting her bag on the table next to the couch on the other side.
Fathi said to her in a calm voice as he closed the door and made sure it was locked:
"The same dreams, Aisha? Or something new…?"
She looked up, turning her head while her hands were busy opening the bag and taking things out.
"I don't think, Sheikh Fathi, that things are coming with good news…"
Fathi answered her while scratching his short gray beard and looking down:
"Alright… I can say this is the last time I look down on the worshippers from the balcony, eating apples and watching the sunrise, heh heh."