When I’d arrived at Puerto Plata airport, a year and a day ago, I’d taken a taxi. Now I only had a few pesos in my pocket, so I waited in line for the guagua1 with the locals and their chickens. They eyed the dishevelled gringo and his enormous bag with suspicion. My board-bag took the space of at least another passenger, but there was no way I was abandoning my trusty wave-board as Nicole had abandoned me.
The guagua’s arrival was the cue for a mini-riot. It was dog eat dog as passengers battled to get on, but this perro negro was desperate. I fought my way through the scrum and squeezed myself and my coffin-shaped bag onto the sweaty little bus, accompanied by angry shouts and complaints about dead bodies.
I was drained—physically and emotionally. Before my Día de Muertos, I could handle the stress of living in the Dominican Republic. I used to enjoy the craziness, thrive on the adrenaline. Now everything was torture: the heat, the stink, the noise …
Merengue music blasted from the speakers. Funny how I used to love merengue. ‘Salsa on speed’ I called it. It animated life in the DR. Everyone and everything moved to its manic pulse. Now I couldn’t stand it. The music tortured me like nails scratching on a blackboard, tearing at my skin, ripping up my soul.
That guagua journey was hell, but eventually we arrived at the airport. The porters descended on us like a pack of vultures. One of them grabbed my wrist before I could extract my board-bag from the bus and join the queue at the check-in.
“No tengo dinero, ni pesos—I have no money!” I shouted, but it didn’t deter him.
“OK. I take the watch, señor!” he yelled, grabbing my much loved Casio G-shock and spitting in my face. Luckily he was a scrawny little weasel—no match for me in my current mood, and I fought him off before his compañeros came to his rescue.
I dragged my board-bag up to the desk and produced my passport. The check-in girl’s reaction was encouraging:
“Ah yes, mister Fraser, we have a ticket reserved for you on the London flight ... oh, and your surfboard” she added, staring at the computer screen.
I nodded, grateful for these small mercies.
“I see that it was booked just over a year ago” she announced, with some surprise.
I nodded again. This didn’t surprise me, given what I knew of the Master’s meticulous planning.
“And it’s a first class reservation!” A mix of shock and respect in her voice now, as she studied this scruffy passenger with the designer dreadlocks.
I could imagine her wondering if I was some kind of celebrity—a famous musician or perhaps a top professional surfer.
“So you don’t need to queue up here, sir.”
I noted the elevation of my status to “sir”.
“Just leave your board with us and you can proceed straight through to our VIP lounge.”
I smiled—for the first time in twenty-four hours. I might hate the Master but I appreciated his efficiency and attention to detail. It made a dreadful day marginally more bearable.
I made my way to the VIP lounge and proceeded to take advantage of the hospitality there. It dulled my despair a smidgeon, but not for long.
As soon as we took off I wondered what the hell I was doing. I tried to gather my thoughts, but the voices in my head were doing their best to scatter them. They reminded me how Cabarete had felt like home. I’d been a member of Nicole’s little community and my tribe of locals. Teaching the kids to windsurf, to speak English, helping to rebuild the pueblo ... all this had given me an identity—even if there was a false ID on my passport. The past year had been a steep learning curve. I was a different person, no longer an outsider … and now I was throwing it all away …
“For what?” a voice demanded.
I shrugged. To be honest, I didn’t have an answer. All I had were the Master’s instructions—a paper trail of packages and notes, like clichéd clues in a contrived crime thriller.
“What about this ‘Group’?” another voice whispered. “He said Nicole was one of them, so are you now a member?”
“I’ve got no fucking idea” I muttered to myself, shrugging again.
Now I was getting hostile stares from my fellow first-class passengers in their designer suits. It was bad enough when the dreadlocks and tattoos had invaded their space, but with all the muttering and shrugging I was in danger of being reported as a dangerous lunatic.
I sank a few beers and tried to silence the voices. But paranoia is another black dog, like depression—it chases you and alcohol won’t make it go away. I hated this Master bloke with a vengeance, but I feared him. He knew all about me—everything he needed to control me, and he had no qualms about threatening Nicole.
“He told you to ‘let go of your ego’ ... but then who will you be?”
Good question, I replied to myself, keeping the dialogue inside my head now. This voice had a point. Perhaps, given time, I’d get over Nicole, but my ego was who I was—my identity, whether false or real—as Malcolm Fraser or Nick Kelly.
When I was onboard the Abyss we’d discussed the notion of free will—was it an illusion? Were we all just characters in somebody else’s dream? At the time I thought it was just a game of philosophical chess, clever conversation to entertain him. Now these questions seemed to be the crux of the biscuit. Was I free to choose my own identity, or must I ‘let go of my ego’ to be in his Group?
I sat there, thirty-thousand feet above the Atlantic, wrestling with philosophical questions that had occupied some of mankind’s greatest minds. It seemed unlikely that I, a screwed-up Ozzie surf-punk, would get very far with them. So I reclined the seat, sipped my beer, smiled benignly at the suits, and tried to empty my mind.
Wednesday, 21:00. The plane touched down at Heathrow airport, but I was none the wiser. “The hub of my communications network” the Master had called London, preposterously. He was probably sitting on his yacht somewhere, sticking pins into voodoo effigies—the puppetmaster, pulling the strings.
Paranoia gripped me. Perhaps he was watching me at this very moment via a feed of the airport security cameras. After all, if he was important enough to have an international ‘communication network’ with a ‘hub’ here in London, perhaps was powerful enough to have access to the world’s CCTV systems, or clever enough to hack into them.
I was sweating now, shooting scared looks at the security cameras, the airport staff, my fellow passengers. Then I got a hold of myself. This was all getting a bit too ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. He was surely no ‘Doctor No’, and I was certainly no James Bond.
I followed the signs for ‘Passengers in Transit’ along interminable steel-grey corridors into the bowels of the terminal, lost in a strange limbo—a shadow world existing somewhere between Arrivals and Departures, a purgatory between this world and the next. Something in me had died the morning Nicole had disappeared and now I was just a shell, a dead man walking, a zombie trapped in transit, a ghost again.
Eventually, I arrived at the transit lounge—the waiting room between worlds. I sat down, put the Master’s package on the table, and looked around wondering what to do next.
There were a few of my fellow transit zombies in the room, lost in limbo like me. One bloke, in particular, caught my eye. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. As I unwrapped the package I had the impression he was watching me.
Again I followed the Master’s instructions to the letter—literally, because having removed the usual brown wrapping paper, in the specified location, I again found a letter, along with yet another package, wrapped in the inevitable brown paper. I put it on the table and picked up the letter. It was addressed to: ‘el capitán, Pablo Rodrigues Vasquez, London’.
I looked up and was startled to lock eyes with the man I’d noticed. He nodded politely to me, and beneath the unfamiliar beard and newly cropped hair I recognised him. It was indeed Pablo, the captain of the Master’s yacht. He crossed the lounge and sat down beside me.
I gave him the letter without a word passing be
tween us. He read it, nodded to himself, and unwrapped the package, placing the items that were inside it on the table: some money, an airline ticket, and a handwritten note.
He handed the note to me. I recognised the Master’s handwriting and saw that it was a message to me, but before reading it I needed to have a conversation with the messenger. I stared at Pablo, waiting, until the silence became embarrassing. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting to explain anything, but I wanted some answers.
“Hola Pablo, long time no see” I stuttered, not knowing where to start. “¿Cómo estás? How are you?”
“—” He shrugged.
Perhaps I should have apologised for resorting to such a lame cliché but it had been a long time—a year and a day to be precise. When I’d walked down the gangplank and away from the Abyss I hadn’t expected to see him again, ever. Now here he was, materialising in the transit lounge as if he’d just beamed down from an episode of ‘Star Trek’.
I tried again: “More to the point, Pablo, ¿Que pasa hombre? What’s going on mate?”
He would have shrugged again, I’m sure of it, but I put my hand on his shoulder. He stared at it, surprised and annoyed. I suppose he’d expected to pass the Master’s instructions to me with a minimum of human interaction and then just beam back up to the mothership.
He raised his eyes from the hand on his shoulder to meet my own, and he could see my distress. The despair, confusion, paranoia—all the bleak emotions of the past two days were etched on my face, and it broke the ice …
“OK. Bueno. Is good to see you, Nick. I hope you are having a good journey?” The same smooth, cultured Argentine accent I remembered from the Abyss.
“Please Pablo, I need some answers, por favor, before I go crazy.”
He nodded, reluctantly, and I fired a round of questions at him:
“Look, all these notes and packages in brown paper—what’s going on? Is it some kind of spy thing? You know, like a James Bond movie? Is he a spymaster?”
A wry smile and a shake of the head.
“So who is he? And what is this Group? He said Nicole was a member—what about you?”
He gave me the faintest of nods.
“OK. And am I a member now?”
Again there was a suggestion of a nod.
“So, what is the project, the goal? Some kind of world domination?”
My voice cracked. I was breathless, hysterical. He put his hand on my shoulder to stop me.
“I think you must read las instrucciones from the Master, Nick. He explain everything what happen next ...”
I sighed. Clearly, I wouldn’t get any more answers from Pablo and there was no point in getting frustrated with him. I remembered what I’d said to Nicole when I delivered the Master’s letter to her: “don’t shoot the messenger and maybe he won’t shoot you!” So I picked up the note and read it:
Nick—it is time for you to continue your journey.
Pablo will give you a one-way ticket to Perth, Western Australia, and enough money for the next stage of your mission.
You will travel to the library in your hometown and log on to our website: www.TheGroup.org
(Your username is ‘Close2TheWind’ and the password is below)
You will then receive further instructions.
He’d signed it with his initials again: A.A.L and added today’s date: Wednesday, November 2, 2016. Below it was an ‘I Ching’ hexagram:
I stared at the arrangement of six lines trying to work out how it could be a clue to the password. Eventually, I gave up and decided I’d figure it out when I got to my destination. When I looked up from the page Pablo had gone. I wasn’t surprised.
So, I’d been given my instructions—the ‘next stage of my mission’ as he put it. I remembered the first time he’d used that word. He’d tried to humour me: “This is your mission, Nick, ‘should you choose to accept it’ as they say in the movies.” Should I accept it again now?
I gazed at the Quantas ticket and the money. Several thousand Australian dollars were sitting there on the table doing their best to tempt me, but it was the destination on the ticket that persuaded me.
Perth. I stared at the name and something shifted in me. The confusion and paranoia were still there, but I’d changed in the past year. I could embrace change now, live with the confusion, feed off the fear—just as I’d done when I confronted the life-threatening waves from the hurricane.
The despair that gripped me when my soulmate walked out wasn’t just going to vanish as she did, but now I had a reason to move on. My destination was far more than a city—it was the eye of my hurricane. The waves generated by my past mistakes had been swamping me for too long. It was time to stop running and confront them head-on. The black cloud began to lift, the despair became a dull ache, and I could breathe again. Perhaps the glass was half-full and half-empty.
I was going home!
Part III
AUSTRALIA
“We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.”
(Timothy Leary)
11
The Fremantle Doctor
Perth Airport. Friday, November 4, 2016, 07:00. “Welcome back, Mr Fraser …” the immigration officer said, as he scanned my fake passport. He was trying hard not to grin, but I could tell he was amused. As he compared my likeness to the photo, he couldn’t resist commenting: “... back from the grave, I see?”
Aha, it was refreshing to hear some good old Ozzie sarcasm again. He was, of course, referring to the other Malcolm Fraser—the prime minister who’d died in 2015, but little did he know how close to the mark his attempt at a joke had been. Yes indeed, the ghost was back home!
I collected my board-bag, rented a car, and drove the two hours north to my hometown. It had been eighteen months since I was last in Australia and considerably longer since I’d been back to the town, but nothing had changed. I drove down the main street, past familiar landmarks: the school, the tavern, the crayfish plant, until I reached the library.
As I walked in it was as if I’d come full circle. The books on those shelves were old friends. Memories came wafting back like a heap of cray left to rot in the sun—the smell of the place was enough to trigger them.
I sat down at a row of computer screens. They were new, or at least they hadn’t been around when I was doing my growing-up in there. They must be a welcome window on the wider world for the closed little fishing community.
I logged onto the internet and accessed a Wikipedia page of I Ching hexagrams. The one in the Master’s note was number five, referred to as: ‘Attending’, ‘Waiting’, or ‘Arriving’.
I typed the name of his website: www.TheGroup.org and was presented with a secure log-in window. I entered the username he’d given me: Close2TheWind and typed ‘attending’ in the password field.
The computer gave a bleep of disapproval and an error message shot onto the screen: INCORRECT LOGIN—ACCESS DENIED!
I tried again, this time typing: ‘waiting’ as the password. I got the angry bleep and the same message, but now it also included a threat: ONE FURTHER LOGIN ATTEMPT PERMITTED BEFORE ACCESS IS PERMANENTLY DISABLED!
I was sweating now. I’d forgotten how hot it could be in WA when there was no wind. It was forty in the shade and breathless—hell without the cooling afternoon sea breeze. That’s why the locals call the wind the Fremantle Doctor—his twenty-five knot daily prescription makes life more bearable. Mister BigFish may have installed the internet in his library but his improvements hadn’t stretched to aircon.
Adrenaline coursed through my body as I gave it my one last shot, typing ‘arriving’ as the password this time. After an agonising few seconds, a message appeared on the screen. I was relieved to see it was addressed to me, personally:
Welcome to The Group, Nick. Our goal is to realise my father’s visio
n for humanity, and we communicate via this website. The password I have given you will allow you to read some extracts from his journal.
Below this message there were some links labelled: ‘Title Page’, ‘Extract 1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ etc. I clicked on the first and it took me to a page of handwritten German. The handwriting was not the Master’s, but a similarly formal, elegant italic hand. There was a title in the middle of the page:
Das Journal von Dr Ludwig Langer, Psychotherapeut.
Ein Bericht über sein Leben, seine Experimente in der Ethik und die Erforschung der ‘Conditio Humana’.
I stared at the screen, nonplussed. Surely he didn’t expect me to read his father’s journal in German? Then I realised there was an obvious solution. I typed the handwritten text into Google Translate and an English version appeared on the screen:
The Journal of Dr Ludwig Langer, Psychotherapist.
An Account of his Life, Experiments in Morality, and Research into the Human Condition.
Ambitious, to say the least—and that was just the title! I clicked on ‘Extract 1’, typed Dr Langer’s words into Google, and read the translation of his introductory paragraph:
In this journal I chronicle my life, my studies, and my work as a psychotherapist; my expeditions to the remote regions of India, China, and Australia ...
Aha! So, he had visited my homeland. Now I was intrigued. I continued typing as fast as I could, and read on:
... my experiments with mind-altering substances; my research into exotic ideas, philosophy, religion, and mysticism; my thinking about metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics.
Quite a list, I thought. The Master had clearly inherited his father’s all-embracing intellectual ambitions along with his wealth.
Too Close to the Wind Page 13