The Haven Hotel

Requiem for Hope

I sleep for an entire day. My existence wavers between fevered dreams and hallucinatory consciousness. For a full day I barely exist. But I can hear my breathing and the rush of blood in the side of my head and that confirms that I'm still alive. 

I hear voices too. Themba's is the loudest. He's screaming over the roar of a fire and his shouts mingle with the sizzle of his own skin. I try to tune him out but the other voices are no better; Nadia, the base officer, Omar, every hunter I played a part in killing, and some voices I don't even recognize. They all scream while their bodies burn.

I'm in a dark room that smells of rot and waste and fire. By the flame's light I can see Themba's sunken face pointed at my feet. He's not screaming anymore but I can still hear him crying. Water drips from his eyes and mouth and then evaporates on the floor. I want to help him. I put my hand on his arm and his shoulder falls apart in layers of skin, flesh, and bone. 

His head shoots up and he smiles through the tears. "Cassandra." He says. "You can help her."

"Yes."

"Yes!" He stands up and grabs my hand with his remaining arm. "Come with me."

"Where?"

He pulls and I follow. I ask two more times before I receive an answer. By then we've walked through an identical room and into a staircase nearly too narrow for me to climb. The bottom is rendered invisible by distant darkness. Cool air flows upwards and into my face but I don't want to go down. I don't want to find out where Themba is leading me. Yet I ask again.

"Deeper." He yanks me and I fly down and forward between walls that scrape at my shoulders as I pass. I get stuck but he keeps pulling until I've squeezed through and into a world of grey and white light. I land on my face in yellow grass and dry ground. Ants stray onto my nose before I can stand up. Themba has carried me into nowhere. Both horizons carry nothing but dry Savannah. The stairway is gone and so is the sun. Above us, rather than stars, is a city. 

"More beautiful than the stars." Themba stands in the celestial glow of old Johannesburg and stares at the new sky. Lights shift as the city breathes. "This city died a long time ago but the light will live forever." He points to his own head. "I'll never let this light die."

"I'll never let this light die." I imitate him but, at least to myself, those words are sincere. I can't lie here, to him. Everything under these lights must be true. That's why it's so quiet here. There is no wind, no birds chirp, no dogs bark, no fire pollutes the sky. The only sounds are those words and my heartbeat.

"Good." We walk along the empty veld until we reach a crater with no bottom. "This is the blue bomb. This is where your life begins. Where were you when the blue bomb fell?"

"At home. With my mother." Piece by piece the silence breaks and lies bleed into the world. They come from below, that hole is evil.

"Wrong. You didn't exist."

"I did, I was eight..."

"That child was not you." He points into the crater. "When Raqqa died and the worl shuddered you became. Everything before the blue bomb is nothing to you and you are nothing to it. That was the old world and now you have to make a new one for her."

"How?"

He shakes his head. "It's not my place to say." Wind comes from deep in the crater. It's a wind full of life and it makes the veld breathe. Before long I'm hypnotized by malnourished grass swaying in the earth's speech.

"Is that what you tried to do?" I borrowed that question from the whispering wind. "Were you trying to create a world for her?"

He thinks. He thinks for too long. Only liars think for that long. "No. No, I was trying to use her to create a new world for me. That's why I'm here now. I'm no different from her father."