WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HÉCTOR CASTELLS NOWHERE, NOW HERE. PART II 024 I. Nowhere. You Are Alive and They are all Dead. Marrakech, April 2019. I wake up under a vaulted skylight. I can’t move but I can make the shape of a minaret at an angle, its golden spire pierced by an imperative sunshine. The room is dark, filled with marbled columns and glittering tiles. I blink slowly and the pain feels as otherworldly as the roof and its patterns. I see a vibrant fresco above me: it looks like a massacre of flowers and centurions, all of them symmetrically beheaded by a constellation of semi circular arches. Feels like architecture as a fine, murderous art, a proper annihilator of time and memory, until the loudspeaker starts calling out the prayer and my system revives in some excruciating fashion. The muezzin channels the deadly echoes of my immediate past. They are shouting out loud: YOU ARE ALIVE AND WE ARE DEAD! I’m tied to a stretcher. Blinking is painful enough to not consider moving, thus I breathe slowly. Feels like swallowing cracked glass. My upper body is bandaged, my legs bruised and my head pounding like drum’n’bass infused with Stormzy’s grime beats. There’s a bloody handkerchief stuffed in my left hand. I can’t open its palm: it feels like there is a hole right in its centre. My heart and mind are galloping while the flashbacks line up like Detroit techno stuck on the blades of a Blackhawk. BOOOOM! Flashbacks, here we go! Oh my days! All of a sudden, I remember it: a balaclava militia shot down the Blackhawk and the four escorts that helped me fleeing Ireland, right before landing on North African soil. It was pitch dark until the sky started glowing so hard that you could read a book under the burst of the artillery. It is the last thing I remember. My ears are ringing like Jeff Mills’ eviscerating dark matter. Was I shot? Someone must have rescued me and nursed my wounds, but who? Darkness adjusts to me and I adjust to nothing but to a big, massive IF. If I, If I, If I… It takes a fake passport and four vanished escorts to remember my murdered pupil. My dear, sweet Nora! If I, If I, If I… I’M NOT DEAD AND THEY ALL ARE … Nora and Selby’s men would be still breathing and Murder would have never come to life if it were not for Alex, the damned witch doctor at Nowhere. I try to clench my fists. I cry instead: the pain is unbearable. I scan every angle of the room that my battered neck can cover until realising that there is someone hanging on the ceiling. He looks like the overweight, bald version of the singer of the first band that I ever interviewed. I scrutinise the silhouette, see his gold teeth smile and hear the words: “You are lucky to be alive.” “I wish I wasn’t and they were. Where are they?” “Breath in. Death never comes at the wrong time, somehow it spared you.” “I bet you know how.” “I know many things.” “No doubt. Are you FLOATING? “Yes.” “Who are you?” “I could be THE END of your struggling.”
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