Free Notorious by Roberta Lowing Page B

I taste is salt. When it rains in the desert, the sand must smell like the sea.
    I re-focus the binoculars. White clouds billow behind the Massif. I find the dark bird – a falcon – tearing at the wispy gauze of sky. The bird plummets to the ground, turning as it goes. A hand’s length from the ground, it swoops up again.
    The robed man raises his arm. The bird drops out of the white air, extending its clawed feet. It slows and sits on the man’s forearm. I see the tracking bracelet around its left ankle. Pain – as sharp as it ever was in Sicily – stabs me.
    The man with the briefcase takes out a small black box, extends an antenna and sweeps the horizon. I adjust the binoculars. He has a solid gold watch on his right wrist, a heavy signet ring with a large ruby on his finger.
    The falcon is thrown up again. It soars into the skies, a dark rose thrown off a snowy bough.
    To touch the very face of God, I whisper to myself.
    Sweat runs like an animal down my cheek. The lines of the helicopter are distorting.
    The bird returns. The man with the scanner commences another sweep. He finishes, lowers the box and the falconer eases a leather hood over the bird’s eyes and they walk back to the helicopter.
    The Asylum is far away. On the road, the black metal blades are turning. I could leave now: hitch a lift to Casablanca, bribe my way out, disappear. Back to Borneo.
    At the thought of Borneo I drop to my knees. Stones dig into my shins. I open my briefcase, take out my tie, put it on, search for my spare watch, slide that on, set the alarm for three o’clock. Interrogation hour.
    Closer to the ground, the plain doesn’t look so much like rubble. I see distinct hills and valleys, a landscape in miniature. A small pale cactus, the length of my forefinger, pokes out from a rock in a strange deep groove. When I sit back on my heels I realise I am in the remnants of a water track.
    Now I see there are myriad variations of colour in the earth. A million versions of brown.
    I raise my face to the sun. I don’t feel thirsty anymore. My mouth tastes metallic. The light presses against my closed eyes. I could imagine that in the desert you only dream in light. Even your nightmares would be in light.
    I look at the watch. Noon. The seconds seem to slow on the panel. Fifty-seven seconds. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. The small numbers flicker. Finally they stop – 12.01. Minutes go by. The panel does not change.
    The helicopter lifts, its blades bending in the hot air. It hovers and turns west, following the road to Casablanca. Soon it is a speck in my eye.
    I stay on my knees in the desert, staring at the shadow my body makes on the ground. This seems like the only shade so after a while I try to crawl inside it. Lying on my back, I see a large black bird. It has a hooked neck and long narrow beak. Another bird appears. They circle lazily. I want to recall the helicopter. I open my briefcase to write a message: Here are your birds . But it seems easier to lie still, grit in my eyelashes.
    After a while, I feel myself moving into shadow, into black water. Back to the black lake in Sicily.
    ‘Water is a kiss.’ Who said that? I knew; I just didn’t know her identity. ‘We dive into rock pools like lives we never thought we could enter. We shed our old skins in water, we take on a new skin. Water passes into us. We want new masks, new identities, but all we can do is take in water. Like tears, like pulses.’
    The light is blotted out. Sister Antony kneels, tugs me upright. Her hood is drawn over her head and her palms are cool. As though night is somehow trapped in her body, like the pockets of darkness trapped in the ground at the end of night.
    ‘When I . . . interrogation, what . . . say?’ My voice disappears into some words.
    Sister Antony raises my head, puts a metal flask to my lips. I choke on the sugary water, feel a sharp aftertaste, like thorns in honey. I twist my head so the sourness runs down my chin but she says,