12.4 Wall of Doom

I grabbed a flash and pulled on a windbreaker. On the way, I was wondering how young she could be. Sophie Nadz said she was fifty-one in my last dream. Now she looked twenty-eight with a six-year-old kid. If I did my math right, she’d be twenty when she was my class teacher in Grade Three. Two years later she taught us Science in Grade Five. She wore silky long hair. And that dark brown skirt was quite fresh in my memory. Certainly, she was not married then and did not have a child. She probably cut her hair short only yesterday. She did not even mention my motorbike parked outside her garage doors. Oh! She won’t be having that big building at Sunrise Villa in Salt Waters with sixty rooms and a Jacuzzi if she was this young. I shall go and see that place. Would she believe if I told her that I fucked her?

Hang on a second! This must be another dream. Obviously. Asmr once told me not to try things against a vision while I am experiencing it. “Let it flow!” Alright, I’ll let it flow without disruption. I made up my mind not to go to Salt Waters. This is just another dream and I want to go through it.

Soon, I was on top of the dunes once again. With light in the sky, that beach appeared golden than redden. A black thing lay on the coast half a mile away. Washed aground. I detected some movement of flashes, perhaps folks scrambling to its reach. I should have brought a pair of binoculars. Three guys hammered a pole into earth few spaces below downhill.

It looked like a submarine with a gun house on its top. From this distance, I couldn’t really tell. In second thought, it could be a destroyer or a gunboat. I could tell no difference between a frigate ship and a trawler.

I raced downhill.

“Ahoy!” he called, “Don’t try to get down here!”

“What is it?” I enquired.

“It’s a stealth ship,” the second guy replied.

“Oh crap!” cried the third guy, “It’s the Argentine submarine that vanished into the depths of the Atlantic with forty-four crew members gone missing.”

“You know too much,” articulated the first mate pulling the tail end of a rope three inches in diameter. He said, “Hunt for the submarine is called off because it will not surface or materialise.”

“This ship is quarantined,” cried the second guy.

“Some kind of smallpox or what?” I demanded.

“No,” said the first guy, “Mayor’s Office sent out a notice. This whole beach is cautioned not to enter.”

“It’s San Juan, no doubt, made its last contact on 15^th November,” maintained the third guy, “message read, crew well and alive.”

“Armada, hardly!” uttered the first mate, “Arena Roja is now contaminated. They are calling them off. See that ship! It’s a nuclear stealth. You can’t go near because its radiation heat is felt in fifty-yard distance.”

“Mi falda!” I exclaimed.

“Split up! You are tossing a nerve in those little panties!”

Now it looked to me like a stealth ship as he said. “So, it’s leaking!”

“Yeah, it is leaking like your pene.”

“What happened to the deckhands?”

“Dickheads! They’re trying to communicate with them. No soul likely alive.”

“It’s a ghost ship then!” I uttered.

“Aye, aye,” they echoed.

As I paused to watch, those three guys erected a ‘BEACH CLOSED’ signboard warning pedestrians not to cross this line, that rope, and to stay clear of the beaches with a symbol of the Trefoil – three leaves in yellow background indicating radioactive hazard in this area.

I grunted, “Nobody comes down this beach.”

“Now they will,” returned the third mate.

“Say! Are you going to tug that man-of-war!”

First mate replied, “This rope is for conjuring in order to keep demons out of the way.”

“Now you call it a demon!”

“Precisely. That thing is a sea monster!”

“They don’t cross and we don’t cross!”

“Exactly,” he grinned to display a missing tooth, “No man nor jinn crosses this line.”

“Huh! I see it is thick enough,” I was convinced.

I got shivers figuring those grey clouds behind a magenta sky. As the sun rose and blue light took over the sky, I noticed a lingering cloud in orange colour on the western horizon. It gradually faded away in about thirty minutes.

I will give a hint here. When they mentioned ARA San Juan, that fateful incident hasn’t occurred. But I was aware of it. And that was the baffling mystery.

I came home and I didn’t have to explain all that to Sophie because she shoved a leaflet into my hand.

“They dropped one on every doorstep,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Take a look!”

Unbelievable! On this threefold leaflet, they have drawn some illustrations of gasmasks and overalls just in case of exposure to radiation.

“I can tell there are several kinds of garbs in the shops but where would you find this!”

“They are bringing in a stock,” she replied.

“What else?”

“Iodine.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“I’ll show you…” Sophie Nadz stepped to a side and tossed her body to handstand with her feet up on the wall. That long falda rapidly fell off her legs down to the midriff. “Can you see it?”

“I can see.” I noticed the wide gap between her smooth long dainty legs. Dainty too when I met her at her place when she was fifty-three.

“That is iodine,” she dropped back on her feet and corrected her skirt hung over the buttocks.