David Policar 1996
Arthur awoke to the smell of saltwater, the taste of sand in his mouth, and blistering heat over most of his body. Beach, he thought to himself. How did I get on the beach? Gingerly, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and looked around. Yes, it's a beach, he confirmed, though he hadn't doubted it. A surprisingly clean beach, actually, and much to his surprise, an empty one.
At times like these, ordinary people will stop for a moment and attempt to regain their bearings. Let's see, they will ask themselves, where was I when I went to sleep? An empty beach, perhaps? Thereupon, they ransack their minds, attempting to cudgel a stray memory out of its resting place. Eventually, they hope, something will click into place, leaving them with the comforting realization that they are indeed the same person they were upon going to sleep, in the same place, or some place they might reasonably have been moved to in the interim. And, in ordinary circumstances, that is precisely what occurs -- Ah! , they exclaim, I remember now! I'm on holiday with the wife and kids! We're at the beach! Yes, yes, of course, I must have fallen asleep at the party last night... it was rather late... and so on and so forth.
Since Arthur was in most respects a perfectly ordinary person, it is not surprising that this is precisely what he did. And, since the circumstances in which he found himself were far from ordinary, as will in time be seen, it is perhaps equally unsurprising that he had no such success. Evidently, his mind had developed overnight a considerable number of comfortable burrows which had been promptly occupied, not only by the unsorted memories of the previous night, but also by the accumulated store of facts and fancies by which he had become accustomed to identifying himself each morning. Cudgel and coax though he might, he could not bring them out of their hidey-holes, and after some time he gave up trying. It shall come to me in time, I suppose, he mumbled, though he was beginning to suspect that that might not be the case.
In view of his own disqualification as a material witness, then, as regarded the events of the previous evening -- or, indeed, those of his life up to that evening -- he resolved to inspect his surroundings for clues. He began by muttering "Mm-hmm" several times while squinting his eyes, in what he hoped was both a fierce and learned fashion, hoping in some vague way to intimidate whatever clues might be listening into surrendering themselves at once. When that proved ineffective, he climbed to his feet and brushed the sand off of his knees, arms, and chest, all the while nodding and muttering sagely. He was wearing, he noted, a pair of white shorts and sandals, both perfectly dry and uncomfortably full of sand. The only other item in sight, besides himself, the sand, and the ocean, was a piece of white cloth a yard or so away. "Mm-hmm", he repeated for good measure.
"Well," he said out loud in a cheerful voice, "here I am." Surprisingly, this inanity seemed to improve his mood, which, what with the hot sun and the sand in his swim-trunks, not to mention the business of mysteriously awakening on an empty beach with no recollection of how he had come to be there or, indeed, of anything besides his name and what he imagined to be his native language, had begun to sour. "Yes indeed," he went on, hoping to cheer himself up still further, "here I am, at the beach." (While he did feel somewhat chipper afterwards, the effect seemed to have diminished with repetition and he decided not to try a third dose.)
Feeling unaccountably refreshed, he turned back to the task at hand -- namely, determining what on Earth was going on -- and reviewed his facts. So far, he had succeeded in tentatively establishing a single fact: he was on a beach. This seemed indisputable -- the ocean was blue (as was, to Arthur's relief, the sky), the waves were pounding regularly against the shore, there was a moderately cool breeze coming up from the water bringing with it the smell of brine, the sun was shining and hot, and in short, the environment was behaving in a generally approved beach-like fashion.
Shading his eyes against the sun, he looked up and down the shoreline and established, once again, that it was in fact empty of everything but himself, his clothes, and what on inspection turned out to be a white T-shirt lying on the sand. The sand itself sloped gently towards the sea; uphill there was nothing but sand and more sand. Squinting and peering out over the water, he saw what might have been a plume of smoke, or a sailboat, or any number of things -- in any case, a tall white thing of some sort, quite some distance out. Picking up the T-shirt and shaking the sand out of it, he waved the shirt in the air and yelled for some time, and then, feeling foolish, put the shirt on.
"Well," he mumbled, "here I am, on an empty beach." In retrospect, he decided he should have left off at two repetitions, and decided not to indulge again, at least that day. "Might as well look around for a bit, then," he added, to reassure his nonexistent audience that his repertory of dialogue -- or, in this case, monologue -- was not fatally impoverished and that he was not, on the whole, as much of an idiot as might have at first appeared. He looked thoughtful for a moment, nodded for good measure, and walked briskly up the beachfront.
As he walked, the slope seemed to grow steeper, and after fifteen or twenty minutes it became clear that he was approaching a hilltop of some sort, from which he would be able to see more of the world. It became equally clear that he would soon have to remove the sand from his shorts before he developed a quite unpleasant rash.
A moment's contemplation served to point out that he would need to remove his clothes from his body before he could remove the sand from his clothes. A cursory glance around confirmed the complete lack of any structure or outcropping behind which he could stand while so doing. These were not remarkable observations. What struck Arthur as remarkable was that this lack of structure made him altogether too embarassed to remove his clothing, despite the evident fact that the same stark featurelessness of the landscape also rendered it highly unlikely that there was anyone observing him, dressed or undressed.
After a puzzled moment, he concluded that now knew something about this Arthur fellow: he was evidently quite unreasonably, one might say irrationally, modest about his anatomy. While this revelation was not in and of itself enough to justify continuing to abrade sensitive parts of said anatomy, he knew so little about himself that it seemed an uconscionable waste to disregard what little he did know. Besides, who knows? Perhaps someone on that sailboat or whatever-it-is is watching me with binoculars, or somesuch thing. He looked out over the ocean again, to verify that the white whatever-it-was was still there, which indeed it was. This was oddly reassuring.
Other than the slow climb and fall of the sun in the sky (which served to establish several things which Arthur gratefully added to his store of known facts: that it had been late morning when he woke, that the ocean was to the south, and that he had missed both breakfast and lunch while slogging across the sand), and the increasing discomfort of his clothing (which he had several times determined he was not going to think about), there was little to draw Arthur's attention or make one moment different from any other. He grew hungrier, and thirstier, and hotter, and more tired, but tried to avoid thinking about that, as well. When I reach the top of this slope, he said to himself, I can sleep.
He repeated this many times over the course of the day.
Whenever any phrase is repeated over and over like that, of course, it becomes nearly meaningless. In Arthur's case, it had become a sort of chant, with which he had distracted himself from an awareness of the tedium of his day's journey. Thus, it came as rather a shock to him when he found himself suddenly at the top of a sandy hill, from which nothing could be seen in the dim light. That he had reached the top of the slope, however, was indisputable.
Eventually, as he contemplated the meaning of this, it came to him that he ought to sleep. Which he did, ignoring handily the nagging feeling that he really hadn't learned anything at all.
Insofar as he awoke, again, face-down on a sandy shore with sun on his back, Arthur's second day began much like his first.
After some reflection, however, he recalled having gone to sleep in the same spot the previous night, and this was enormously reassuring in its own way. A past was an important thing to have -- even if it consisted solely of one rather tedious day. Perhaps it was even better that way, since the situation, having begun in such a perfectly wretched fashion, was thus more likely to improve.
He remembered, also, snatches of a dream. In the dream, there were many men and women, dressed in white T-shirts and shorts and sandals, walking up from the ocean to the end of the beach, as he had done the day before. Behind them were armored knights, readying their mounts and their weapons for the holy war against the Enemy beyond the mountains. And a single phrase ran through his mind: The frontal attack can never succeed.
Try though he did to keep hold of it (representing, as it did, a sizable percentage of his personal history), the dream slipped away. After a time, he decided to get up and take a look around.
To say that the view was not what Arthur was expecting would be to imply that he had been expecting something concrete, something which could be said to either be or not be, which is not even remotely the case. However, it is very unlikely that, had he in fact been sufficiently foresighted to develop some expectations about what would be visible from the hilltop, that he would have expected the view he saw. Perhaps, if he were an unimaginative sort (which he had no reason to believe he wasn't, excepting possibly the entire business of awakening amnesiac on a deserted beach, which, were it a delusion, would be evidence of rather an unimaginative mind indeed), he would simply have expected more beach, a vast expanse of sand stretching out to the horizon.