The path opposite the hotel led down to the beach and the salty tang in the air got stronger. It began to clear my lungs of the smoke I had inhaled. Behind me I could hear the hotel raging as it burned over my shoulder I could see a black cloud rising into the sky. I felt inexplicably detached from the incident already.
So what if the hotel burned down? What good did it serve any more anyway?
There were no people around to stay in it. My mind was focused solely on getting to a bar so I could have a beer or two and think about the phone call. When the voice had spoken it had sent a jolt of electricity down my spine as if it had leapt from the earpiece directly into my body.
My daughter. My little girl. Where was she? How had she known I would be in the Hotel Hesperia at that time? Why had she called me there instead of coming in person? Where were the rest of my family? If they knew I was here why weren’t they coming to get me?
I had only heard the one word spoken yet I was convinced it was her. My little girl. I could picture her beautiful round little face as I always did when I was speaking to her on the phone and not in person, grinning and showing her slightly squiffy teeth which she was so very excited about falling out in a couple of years so her ‘big’ teeth could take their place. She only ever wanted to be a big girl. Why was I thinking about her in the past tense? My mind must have been run ragged by the events of the past few days and I wasn’t thinking straight.
Myriad thoughts flooded my mind as I emerged from a tunnel and into the broad daylight again with the beach stretching out in front of me. Empty. Sun loungers lay pointed at the water in perfect rows, inviting the tide in, then turning it away a few hours later, day after day, month after month. I wondered how long this place had been this way. Had it only been five or six days, or had this beach ever seen human activity? Sure, there were towels scattered on a few of the loungers, beer bottles half drunk on the plastic tables next to them that people had probably paid an extra Euro or two for the privilege of having somewhere to stand their drinks during the day instead of on the roasting sand, countless cigarette butts on the pavements, but were these simply manifestations of my subconscious? Had my mind simply put them there because that is what I would expect to see as part of a beachside environment?
I now doubted the very existence of everything around me. My nihilistic tendencies were causing me to reject what my eyes could see right in front of me. All I wanted was to get off this island and get back to my family.
Anger coursed through me, I could feel my veins widening at the futility of it. I needed a plan. Some plan of action.
I began to run. I think it was out of exasperation. Suddenly I wanted to know instantly what was in every building, every hotel, down every side street in this ridiculous place. I already knew there were no people here, but if I could prove that fact then at least I would then know I could rely on nobody else but myself to get out of this situation. I wanted to find someone, anyone, tear information out of them, make them talk and tell me why this was happening to me.
Emotion got the better of me and I collapsed on the sandy beach, reaching to the sky and screaming in vain. I don’t know what I yelled. ‘You can’t do this to me’ or ‘somebody help for god’s sake!’ or some shit like that. Whatever it was, nobody heard and nobody came. Only the waves answered with their inexorable lapping. I lifted my face towards the horizon, sand clinging to my tears, and gazed at the vast blue expanse of ocean in front of me. I could see another island, it must have been Fuerteventura, rising out of the blue sea maybe two or three miles away. Could I swim for it?
I could just wade into the water now, I told myself. I wasn’t in the best physical shape but hey, at least I was wearing swimming shorts. How long would it take to swim three miles? Was it even three miles though? Distance is hard to judge on the water. It could have been 10 miles for all I knew. What if I cramped up or got attacked by a shark?
I was overanalysing the situation. I should just jump in, what did I have to lose? But a part of me knew that no matter if I made the swim in one piece and got to the island across the sea, I would be in no better a position than I was now.
For there would be nobody there.
Hope had deserted me.
I collapsed on my back in the sand and stared at the bright blue sky. I desperately wanted to be asleep, or unconscious, anything so that I didn’t have to deal with this stunning sense of isolation and solitude. But I had spent a good portion of the last five or six days out like a light, and my body was pumped with the adrenaline of the run. So I sat and regained my breath, with the sun on my bare back and sand in my hair.
One solitary cloud hung above me. It looked a bit like a plane, and a bit like a shotgun. At that moment I would have given all I owned for either.
74%
The hotel burned for three days. There was no way I could stop it. At first it just seemed to smoke and smoke, with plumes of black cascading into the perfect blue sky. I watched it while sitting in a bar on the beach, wondering whether to have beer or sangria or start on something a lot harder.
By my third beer I could feel the heat cascading off it, the air itself seemed to be melting even though I was a good 500 yards away. I drank, losing myself in the roar emanating from it. What the heck was burning? I asked myself. It was just one almighty block of concrete.
At around 4pm an almighty explosion seemed to rock the whole beach. Then the flames assumed their totally unchallenged hold and the Hesperia seemed to audibly sigh as it became engulfed. The boiler unit must have caught, or the heat had reached a store of gas canisters or something. Whatever, nobody was going to want to stay there anymore and it was all down to me. I felt curiously detached from my actions. Was I a criminal? I hadn’t reported the incident after all. Who could I report it to? All the phones were dead. I heard no alarms as fire engines came rushing to extinguish the blaze. No sirens as police came to administer control. Nothing. Just the crack and whoosh of an enormous ball of black flame less than a quarter of a mile away. Once or twice what breeze there was changed direction and the plume threated to engulf the beach, but at the last moment it steadied itself and continued its rise straight up into the azure heavens above the hotel.
I spent those days in a kind of wild daze, alternating between periods of desperate mania and extreme calm depending on how much I drank. Mostly it was until I blacked out, hoping that something would happen to me in my stupor that would either end or clarify my circumstances. Nothing did, and when I awoke each time, whether my mattress was the golden sand of the beach, or the wooden floor of a beer shack, or the hard unyielding boulders that lined the promenade, my mind was no more at rest than when I had gone under, and the pain that filtered through my brain like the march of the fire ants was the only thing that made me aware I was really alive. Even the numbers had disappeared, the flashing percentages that taunted me each time I came round. They had disappeared along with any semblance of hope I had held on to, and so I existed solely on a plain of nihilism, unwilling to either deny or accept this… this Pripyat that smothered me in its arms, uncaring, but also unwilling to let me escape from its grasp. And each time I woke, I yearned for the numbers to return, the only things give me some indication as to when this whole nightmare would end.