Rhumb Lines
His face was a story, deep lines written in delicate calligraphy. He saw it reflected in a fragment of an hourglass. He could see that much had come to pass. He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and fingered a compass that was no bigger than a silver dollar, and turned in no particular direction. He had carried it throughout his life as one carries a familiar story, or a childhood scar. During difficult times he would search its face for solace, but the spinning needle gave him little recourse.
As the years settled on his shoulders he came to believe that the compass directed his destiny. This conviction pushed him beyond the pale of the known world. He left his maps behind, and walked alone until the words of his native tongue became foreign to him. The compass was his consort.
His travels became a self-flagellation. The marks of his tribulations he bore on his body. His skin blistered crossing a desert near the equator. He sat, feverish with dengue, as a monsoon storm battered his frail frame, along the Asiatic shores. He was set upon by cannibals in the jungles of some forgotten land, and escaped with nothing but a coin from a dead nation, his decrepit body, and the uncompromising compass. He sailed across seas filled with the sadness of one’s lone thoughts and fears. Sea serpents plagued his dreams as he fitfully slept at the rudder of his open boat.
Along a riverbank he found a coin he had once discarded in a dream. It matched the coin in his pocket. He feared that he was living in the wake of a single memory; an infinite regression towards something lost. He dreamed of death.
He began to record his headings in a ledger. He mapped his journey. He paced his progression. He painstakingly described the landmarks that surrounded him. He charted the constellations above him. He feared that he would, once again, find his own footprints in a land he had never been before. His notes grew to enormity. He wrapped the velum in a leather case and pulled it by a cord behind his dragging feet.
His parched mouth held no words as he came upon a broken hourglass scattered around a forgotten fire. He fingered the filigreed compass within his breast pocket and noticed the same scorings on the base of the discarded glass. Nauseated he searched for some memory of the hourglass. He sat down to read the book that was his burden. It spoke of rivers, and canyons, and wind that carried the musky smells of peat and rotting foliage. He became lost within its pages.
He felt the misery of eternity and mourned the secrecy of its passage. He envisioned an organ that measures time, which grows continuously and causes pain. He wondered if his conception of time was so different. He lay down on the ground and slept beside a pair of his footprints from long ago. The compass turned within his pocket.
