Free Maps by Nuruddin Farah

am” addressed to Misra was not, after all, incomplete? And he was Misra? In his mind, he removed the dots denoting the incomplete nature of the statement and spoke it again. He heard himself say “I am”, and the echo returned to him a sound which he found to be meaningful
    Now he looked up to see if “Venus” too had vanished. Here he wasn’t totally disappointed—but in a peculiar way curiously reflective. He felt awkward, like when you cannot name something you know, when the combination of letters in your mouth will not match the sound your lips are willing to make. It was not “Venus”, he decided in his Edenic impression. It was a species, looking rather like a spider, large and colourful—a spider as huge as the dreamscape he had been treading, a spider which had managed to weave from out of that small belly, out of that tiny body, a web so complex, a trap so long, one would be lost in it. The spider ascended the ladder of lengths of its innards.
    Now he moved away, convinced that he had to do just that. And he walked. After half an hour, he came upon a river about to break at the banks. Undisturbed, he sat under a tree and contemplated while waiting. But what was he waiting for? He didn’t know. He sat, waiting; he sat, burdened with a Thomist’s questioning of the self: he told himself he knew what purpose rivers served—to irrigate and help grow food in the form of fruits, vegetables, etc.; but what did man’s existence serve, or whom? To worship God? To study God through nature? Why was
he
born? For some unforeseeable reason related to the thought that had just crossed his mind, Askar remembered the story of a man who challenged everything, a man who contested that “even mirrors didn’t reflect the true identity of things and persons”. The man was bald—but he chose to refuse to see his baldness, although people confirmed what the mirror reflected, or rather what it saw. People said that he was insane, they argued, how could anyone contend that what people saw and mirrors confirmed wasn’t true? Months later, the man went insane. Would Askar in the end go mad questioning things, challenging received opinions?
    Finally, he was standing in front of a huge portal with the letter A boldly printed on it. He remembered that, perhaps in a previous life, he had seen that portal before and he had been turned away from it by a uniformed man. Now he hadn’t the courage to knock on it, nor did he have the curiosity to discover to what secret world the gate would have given him access. He sat on a boulder by the side of the road. To his left, there was a stream whose banks were green with weeds. It appeared as though a fountain had, just at that instant, right in front of him, right in his presence, given birth to an aqueous marvel of a stream in which fishes of all sizes and descriptions chased one another without any sense of inhibition or forbearance.
    And he discovered, looking up, that the sky above him was wearing the seven heavenly garments, whose colours matched that of a rainbow he had never seen before—one was of ruby; one of silvery pearls; one gold; another white silver; one of orange hyacinth; and, lastly, one of shining brightness, the likes of which no human, other than a mystic or a prophet, had ever perceived. To his right, when he turned, there was a tree on one of whose branches perched “talking dolls”. He couldn’t understand what the dolls were saying. However, he later wondered if these might possibly have been the product of an exhausted mind’s aberrant way of expressing itself.
    Then a voice (was it coming from within himself or without—he couldn’t tell), a voice, alive with urgency, called to him. First, he was frightened and wouldn’t stir at all. Then he heard a silky sound, that is, he heard the hissing sound of a snake approaching from his right, and, not in the least frightened,