A Message from the Heart

A Message from the Heart

Alan Hancock

Prologue

Just after midnight he checks the phone for the last time and sits on the kitchen stool. He stares out through the window, through his reflection and into the darkness, as if he might find there some clue to a problem he’s trying to solve. He doesn’t see anything. No reply, no message: just him and the phone, as pointless as everything else in this house. He picks up his keys from the granite work top and walks quickly down the hallway to the front door. Outside the air is restless and hot. An easterly is sending a swirl of dead leaves and paper wrappers chasing themselves round a corner in the yard. The palms in the neighbour’s garden rattle and shiver in the wind. Everything is restless. Everything is on edge, and he jumps as the front door is caught in a gust and slammed shut behind him. He did not punch the four digits into the security key pad. What the hell. What does it matter? What does anything matter now?And he sets off at a brisk walk as if he has somewhere to go.

He walks, because he cannot be still. He walks the empty wind raked streets of this empty suburb. He walks past the neat gardens and the hissing lawns, past the blank eyes of windows shut against the night.He haunts crescents, groves and dead end drives, each named after a poet that nobody here has ever read. He walks past the shopping centre where coke cans go rattling along in the wind. He walks and walks because anything is better than sitting at home and facing the truth of what has happened. And his entire being is consumed with one yearning, one ache, one longing for what he knows he cannot have.

As darkness thins to grey and the street lights blink off, block by block, as the first bus goes growling down the highway at the end of the street, he comes home. He comes back to a place where he cannot sleep, where he cannot be still. He stares at the computer screen as if it holds a secret to turn back time and give him back what he has lost. He thinks the same thought, over and over again, as if the thinking itself could change what has happened. In his mind he runs the movie of all his fears and he cannot look away: two bodies, one he knows all too well, and this aching for it not to be so. He thinks, if only. And if he closes his eyes he wakes with a start. He wakes with a question that he knows he cannot answer. Is she with him tonight? Then, at last, he sleeps.

A message received from heartland HQ in the middle of the night and under mysterious circumstances, a message on the screen and in the air when no-one's there and without return address, fading fast, a trace soon gone.

You are now entering the heartland. And since according to our records you have not been here before, or else it has been some time since your last visit, there are certain things you should be aware of, which might make your time here more pleasant, or just more. Especially more.

Firstly and most important, don't look down, or back. There are many places in the heartland where the path follows steep cliffs and seemingly bottomless precipices, where visitors have complained about the lack of a guardrail, so that some have lost their nerve and decided to give up, turn back for home, fearing the drop and no sign of angels to catch them. Listen, take note please. Resist the temptation to look down, or back. Then notice how light your feet, and how they seem to know the way.

You'll find that a lot of the things you bring into the heartland from outside won't work here. It's the altitude. It's the thin air.It's something to do with the effects of gravity on the spirit. There's less of a drag. The light gets inside more easily. It seeps into everything and everyone in every corner and every dark place so that nothing can stay hidden and you may feel transparent, naked to yourself. You may feel as if everything you'd like to hide is being shown quite clearly. It can be a shock. It can feel like it's too much and you're not ready. Nobody ever is, whatever they may say. It's worth getting used to it, this light, this shock of light.

Even though at first you might feel nervous or afraid, just remember where you are, always. Remember that this is sacred ground with powers of all the blood and bones and sweat and stories that came before you. Now you are here you are becoming part of it. You are in this story. You have no choice.

Be very clear about that and you may find it reassuring, or even more fearful. It's up to you. But whatever it is you feel you might as well give in to it, sooner rather than later.

Throw away the guidebook. It's out of date. Sooner rather than later: you'll see.

If your last visit to the heartland was some time ago, you'll find a lot of things have changed. Your memories will deceive you, as ever. It's just that here the deception will be clearer to you than before.That little cafe in the hills where they serve that drink you love, where the old men still sit and talk while someone plays a mandolin, like in a story or a painting, is gone. There was a landslide, or an avalanche. There was a lightning strike. It went. You'll never find it again.

This is what often happens when visitors look forward to finding some remembered place only to find it's gone, or changed, or maybe was never like that anyway. The village church is now an art-gallery, or a shop.The hotel, where you stayed all those summers ago and sat around the courtyard late into the night drinking the local beer while the insects sang, is now in ruins and so overgrown with lantana and frangipani that you wouldn't recognise it any more. People sleep out in hammocks there now, in what used to be the garden. No-one seems to mind.

All the places you read about and heard stories of, all the things you expected to do and made plans for may well not be here, not the way you thought. It may not always be easy to accept this, but you have to. Something new may be required of you. Listen - you are not alone.

Forget the rules. There aren't any. Things change. The mountains and the hot springs, the stone temple and the desert oasis all remain, but are so poorly marked on the maps that you may never find them. The roads can be blocked for years on end, then mysteriously opened without notice, on a whim.The hand of fate is strong here.

You'll get lost. People won't understand when you ask for directions, or will send you the wrong way. But if you don't get lost how will you ever get found, they will say to you in a dialect so thick you won't understand a word. You’ll get used to it. Throw away your phrasebook, and learn to sing.

Then one day you may find yourself saying things like, I didn't ask for this, it isn’t what I came here for. You may find yourself suddenly in tears, a cold dawn in the mountains in a place where no-one speaks your language, where the air itself aches in you and there is no end to breathing it, yet still you have to breathe. Waking one day on a thin mat, in a bare room in a tiny village, the days ticked off in scratches on the walls, you may find yourself in tears. The wind comes from the mountains, and on it comes a call to prayer, with you praying for something quite different. If you listen, the voice in the prayer is saying, it's okay.

And the voice says, even though the mountains notice your tears not one bit and the sky is beautiful, but cold, still, you are here. These things are happening. There is nothing else, just now. All this sadness and joy you will find yourself asking, where does it go?

And the answer is, This is it. It's okay. You'll find out, in time. You'll know.

Knowing you, you'll try to turn it into some kind of joke. So you'll say something like, I might as well have booked into a bloody monastery. Then you’ll laugh and a moment later find yourself in tears, in the thin cold morning, alone and saying, I didn't ask for this. Someone has scratched into the wall a message. The heartland, it's a big place. You are not alone.

So, enjoy your stay and stay as long as you like. Your visa is valid for a lifetime, if that's what you want, though we find some people seem not to. Remember, even though it's all real, you're making it up. You're seeing what you want to see. Even though you can't control events here and things shift and slide at times, you're still responsible. You'll get used to it. The land here has powers you can't imagine, not just yet. Oh, and finally, in case you didn't hear the first time: don't look down, don't look back. And even though there are no angels here, at least none that you can see, let go.

Let go and fly.

Epilogue

He sleeps in the empty house and each time he wakes his hurt and his loss are with him, irrefutable and huge. He feels naked and insubstantial in a world of great peril and sudden change, a world where his suffering goes unnoticed and unmarked. Each time he sleeps he wakes with his broken heart. He wakes in the airless room as the sun fills it with heat, as cicadas sing of the heat to come. He wakes in the hot room, from a dream that he forgets, in an instant. And everything is lost and pointless. There are only dreams, and what is the point of dreaming? He wakes from a dream that reassembles itself around the ringing of the phone, as the phone rings to wake him. He wakes from a dream that is gone, in an instant. And as he picks up the receiver and hears the voice, he remembers. Everything.

The end.