Free My Other Life by Paul Theroux

beating its skinny wings, and I got a whiff of its stink. The bat bothered me less than the intimation that I was dying, yet it seemed part of the paraphernalia of my death, like a funeral prop, a candle or an owl.
    I implored the darkness for one of the priests to look up from his hand of cards and think of me and show concern and break the door down. Then I would have a chance. But I was alone and I was trapped in this room. I was lost. They would not miss me until tomorrow, noon at the earliest, and by then I would be dead.
    This terrified me and made me so sad I began to cry again, like a child, not sobbing but whimpering and squeaking as I cowered.
    Then I was dreaming of enormous women, Birdie and others, with green skin and stupendous breasts and hot, scorching mouths, laughing at me and biting me, wrestling joyously with each other and casting me aside. Quite near me a leper woman with stumps where her limbs should have been turned away, and I realized that I was even uglier than she. Laughing at me, she twisted her nose off—it was like the damp prune of a dog's nose—and she reached for me.
    That woke me, but moments later I was in another dream.
    Every dream was a dream of enemies—of my weakness. I was overwhelmed and mocked and intimidated. Occasionally a giantess would throttle me while I tried to summon the strength to plead for my life.
    I was washed ashore onto a beach of broken bones, a foreshore crisscrossed by bird prints, spirals of their tracks which were neat and simple, like new letters of the alphabet. It was stony, with broken shells and pockmarked rocks and fragments of white wave-smoothed stones that gave the beach its look of doom, a place of dry bones and skull fragments. There were human footprints but no one was in sight. All I saw was an expanse of white sand. At first I felt the heat on my face, and hurrying across the sand I burned my feet. In the distance the sea was a deep blue, but brown against the shore, under a pale sky. The sun was directly overhead and blazing down upon me. I struggled on scorched feet to the edge of the sea and then tipped myself into the water and was scalded by the heat of a wave. The sea was simmering, and close up it was a foul stew of bubbles and weeds.
    I was jerked from this awful dream by the sound of drumming. Like the voices that had jarred me earlier, I had a hallucinatory sense of pain, my eyeballs aching, my ears ringing, not knowing whether I was asleep or awake. The priests were asleep—must have been. But the absence of their voices seemed only to make the drumming louder. It tumbled in a cascade of thumping, and it shivered and stopped before starting again, faster and louder.
    And I imagined I could see the dancers—toothy, grinning villagers, lepers and their families, ugly and stubborn, showing aggression, snatching at each other. Other shadows rutted under the dusty trees. The priests stood by saying nothing, their arms folded, while over the drumbeats I tried to call out, "
Save me!
"
    There was drumming in my dreams and when I woke the drumming continued outside the window, and I hated them—the dancers, the drummers, the priests especially, because they did nothing to stop it or help me.
    So the night went on. Was it one night? But the bat was real, and so was the laughter and the drumming. I was not imagining these things. I could have endured the dream, though. What was real frightened me: the pain in my head and the knowledge that I was small and sweaty and weak and sick, and that I would die before dawn. Knowing that was an agony.
    Without making a sound, I wept. Tears streamed down mv cheeks. I was afraid of death but after all those dark hours I wanted to die, to be rid of this pain.
    That was before dawn. Then I slept and dreamed in sunlight, which gave my dreams the bright colors of a crackling fire. The cockcrows reassured me, and when I woke at last to knocking on the door, I struggled out of bed and slid the