Alchemisland

Whenever coffee is imminent Byron is struck by nostalgia’s slow-moving truck. Something about beans falling inside a clear tube atop a coffee machine helps him dive in, make an Aquarius of his Venus in furtive Virgo. Brown, flaky beans packed close like a vial of diminutive worlds in the hex-stained hands of a mad alchemist. As they are sifted, Byron can sift memories in time with them, gently handling each for an equal duration as if decading the rosary. One by one, revisited yesterdays disappear from view.

A bulbous cow’s lick undulated across his brow like a warp in badly-laid wallpaper and as he dragged it back out of his eyes, he saw his darkened hand palm like the underside of a star destroyer looks to a lowly merchant frigate. He fancied a caramel latte. He loathed how fastidious islanders were about coffee pairing; if you ordered the wrong coffee with a meal or ordered cappuccino later than your barista would deign to drink one, they tried to warn you that sleep does not await the midnight alert. If Cobalt Byron wanted a caramel latte after six there wasn’t a thing a barista could do to change it, not if he donned another’s armour and called himself Achilles. 

He crossed the empty beach, traversing lonely sands like a thing summoned up in Endor. Sun-scourged sand rippled and the farthest-reaching waves nearing his toes coruscated like a gem rotating before a house fire. He imagined denizens of flowery Samos emerging from the treeline to greet and garland him, bare-breasted goddess worshippers in search of prey to pleasure themselves upon. He threaded a wave-tattooed coast road where, due to the fertilising action of drift seeds, exotic flora abounded. Seeds, which had fallen from foreign coastal or riverine trees, with specialised shapes allowing them to float rather than sink in the ocean, were carried withershins by wave action and deposited on foreign shores. Some scientists posit space drift seeds as a possible catalyst for life on earth, seeded into oceans or plunged into soil by ancient meteor impacts. Coastal floral diversity is a signifier of oceanic health. African Baobabs with bulky bodies and rounded tops from which skinnier branches sprouted resembled post-apocalyptic grain silos reclaimed by nature, and shade-casting mopane trees like open parachutes, stood alongside grey-leaved hippophae and lanky stone pines. 

A coconut fell to earth, presumably from a palm and not hoighed by some malefic casting engine, dully plopped then sank partially. From the angle at which Byron saw it, half embedded in sand, only its straw-maned upper hemisphere visible, it resembled a scene of grave robbery abandoned halfway, the exposed skull’s shoddy physiognomy belying slight rewards further graft would free. He realised that his hands had acted independently upon hearing the thud of the landing coconut and had slowly reached for and gripped the handle of his concealed firearm, which presently he released and left cosy on the seat of his belt.

Cobalt cocked his head to one side, returned to centre, donned the aviators which someone had once told him made him look like a horse fly in a flight suit, to which he had retorted that the horse fly had existed a million years before the horse, and that the speaker might himself learn such room-quieting facts if he spent more time reading and less time telling people their favourite pair of glasses made them look like a fly, then cocked it back to the side. The entire world felt so malleable. He imagined pulling open the sky like a child unwrapping a gift. He imagined squinting, pinching a beach corner and pulling it back; the landscape stretching at his insistence; remade by the slightest inclination of one’s head.

This time of year Lemnos was empty save for spies on the lam, adulterers and tax evaders, who migrated here around bonus time like pecuniary geese, but he didn’t meet another soul on the trail. Twenty minutes walking at a brisk pace brought him not only to utter breathlessness but also the trail’s end, where the beach wound itself up to a neat point that funnelled back into the cloying, shifting shade of the jungle canopy. Anyone lost need only follow the trail of human traffic. Either side of the trampled pathway stood ditches of foot-thrown sand studded with battered limpets and slick-backed cowry shells. Once beneath canopy, the coffee shack was only short shrift therefrom; across an impossibly-cool copse whose tight-knitted top was the woven branches of many different species of trees, where often one found beach-tired tourists sending dry tongues out to hunt moisture from the air.

After Cairo, he had come to question the ultimate aims of his recent assignments. In fact if his suspicions proved correct, its implications called his entire career into question. He began picking apart the logic of orders, something he had never done before then, something which he was trained not to do. His ambiguous orders delivered as suggestions were designed to provoke subjective interpretation. Five weeks into island isolation the penny dropped like the Sacred Heart painting upon the death of a family patriarch.

Byron didn’t know who or what could be trusted. He never used his cell anymore. Recently he approached a payphone and had reached the point where his germ-free suit shoulder fixed the germ-ridden receiver to his moderately germ-busy ear, but stopped himself, positive the booth was bugged even though he swept his hand twice around the frame and console and up inside the boltgun canal of the coin slot, very like when he bugged Havana, when he was their man there. Before leaving the booth, he tugged the suspicious phone free of its console and left a snapped cable swinging spike headed. Later on that same night swigging brandy-laced Jameson at Pól’s Ól Hole Irish bar and patriot’s lounge, he remembered how his handlers had no idea where he was; they relied on his updates and hung on his every word like acolytes of a cult before their ascended master. Without his express say so, his masters were cut off like unwanted children from the first marriage are from the final will. Therefore it was unlikely words spoken into Greek telephones would spill out of leather donut headphone bits in M16 HQ. Byron felt such a paranoia growing upon him as he discerned the coffee shack forming itself at the far end of the shaded walk.