The Time of the Titans

Chapter 5: Atlantis

The sleep was not like the empty eversleep after my death. I was dreaming, seeing real dreams. My dreams took me to my childhood memories. On the lake, where my grandfather took me to fish at magically still nights, there was an island. The island always attracted me more than the patience required in the boat to lure the fish. Each such lake night's highlight, the point of time I was secretly waiting for, was a visit to the magic island. The island that was bathing in the light of the white night or in moonshine.

Grandfather was a mystery himself. He talked little, except when he forgot I was his grandson and took me for my father who was no longer with us. Grandfather spoke of strange things of the old age, the Cold War, its secrets. I had found in his closet a black cloak, red silken waistcoat, and a top hat, and tried them on, however oversized they were for my slender years. My mother beat me up for that trespassing. That was not an unusual thing to happen for much lesser offences, or for no reason whatsoever, so I would not pay much attention on it until long after my grandfather's death when I would long for clarifications for the stories he had unintendedly shared with my infant ears. Any clarifications, however, had been buried with him.

I stood in front of the class, first day in a new school. They had decided already while I was waiting in the schoolyard for the doors to open, that I was to be the outsider. The outcast. They pointed with finger at the mark my mother had left on my face. Their laughter hurt more than my mother's hits. Still as an adult, I would react with negative instinct whenever I heard random people laughing somewhere behind my back. I had to convince myself that laughter was a happy thing.

I stood naked in front of the class and I wanted to vanish. But I was adult now and it was the first class I was to teach in the Gottfried von Seelen High School. I wasn't physically naked of course, except in the nightmare. The kids weren't laughing at me – rather, they studied me with intense curiosity and vigilance, trying to spot my weaknesses. I saw a pack of jackals eager to pick a bite on me; eager to see if they could take me down and rip apart with the advantage of their numbers. They fed me with silly fake names. I wouldn't fall for such cheap tricks – my own years in school weren't that far behind.

From the objective point of view, I usually coped quite well with the boys. Perhaps because my initial expectations were so low that they managed to impress me positively by being much less scary than the bad boys had been when I was a child myself. The respect I gained earned me more respect in the female-dominated senior common room, where they had been initially confident that I'd fail because I had no children of my own. I wouldn't tell them, but that was perhaps exactly why I succeeded. I still regarded my students without the burden of parenthood.

With the girls I had more headache, though. Teen girls those days – they shook my concepts of humanity and occasionally they made me feel very old, though we had less than a decade between us. To be honest, I was quite insecure even with the young women of my age until I met Helena. Helena made a man out of a boy. By her entry in my life, it didn't seem to matter anymore what others than her thought about me. Helena's enigmatic smile was the last vision I woke up to.

*   *   *

I saw the endless blue for the first time when woken up from the travel sleep where I had been put for the journey through space. I would have liked to see Planet Sini from the space, but by the time I woke up we were in the planet's atmosphere already. I saw clouds like on Earth. I saw the rays of sun glittering on what appeared as a shoreless ocean.

Seeing the ocean evoked in me an oddly deep elation. My chest was filled with an anticipation of a kind nothing in Lemuria had caused. The space city was in fact turning into a dreamlike memory for me. I ignored the titan whale-song that may have prepared us for the impending landing in our destination. Neither did I pay attention on the ship in which I travelled. My cabin there was small and I had no company. All my attention focused on the window revealing a bright view at the sea. I scanned the horizon in the hope of spotting an island somewhere, without success.