On the beach, there were drunks, yoga enthusiasts and dog people. They were scattered around the sand and the pier evenly, motionlessly. To an outsider, it looked as if they had wandered here by chance, or else they had woken up by the sea - with their claws, yoga mats and perpetual hangovers. Outsiders, however, they were not. They were local and dull. The two outsiders were standing by the coffee shop at a substantial distance from the beach. They had arrived at the train station at two a.m., at the time when the silent hum of the city night was just starting to settle in. And now they were near the embankment, thirsty and breathing heavily as they had been running to get here on time. According to the application on their mobile phones, the sunrise began at 6:12, and something had delayed them. Either a hitch or a bad miscalculation.
In the end, and this was something they had encountered quite often over the years, they arrived at the destination with time to spare. They got their seaside coffees, disgusting but efficient, and they hurried to the railing separating the sea and the ramshackle embankment. They had a little time to walk, to shake off the unfortunate delay and to gather up their excitement. The wooden boards felt shaky and offered little sense of protection. They liked that. Life, in their experience, was fleeting.
"Have I ever told you, Karl?"
"What".
"Don't laugh".
Karl was not going to laugh. He had just noticed a bloody scratch on the edge of his palm, and it stung like hell. He thought it was odd that it only hurt when you paid attention.
"This will be my first time".
Karl raised his eyebrow and uttered a deep growling sound denoting surprise. He chose not to say anything. After all, this was going to be his first time, too.
And then they almost missed it. What happened was that they noticed a boy walking by a group of drunks and their empty bottles of plastic water and cheap wine. The drunks were lying by the sea like a bunch of comatose seals and displayed no visible signs of life. You had to wonder if they were actually breathing and had not, in fact, relegated that task to the sea waves that were rising and falling hungrily beside their feet. The boy was hunched over, and he approached them with a question. It was too far away, and it was a language they would not have understood, but they were transfixed by the scene. A cold shiver ran through the bodies of the drunks as they mumbled a reply. It was too far away, and it was a language they did not understood, but they could see it was a 'no'.
At which point Karl's hand acted up again, he dropped the coffee cup onto his feet and then they saw it, a red dot climbing up and exploding over the edge of the sea.
"This looks like a nuclear blast".
Karl did not reply, but it did look that way. First a red boil on the smooth skin of the sea and then a full-blown atom bomb going off and then flying up into the air like a child's balloon. It was incredible. It looked foreign, too, as they could not recongise the shades of red on the sphere that would normally look smaller and a lot more pale. But now it seemed crimson and wild (pinprick it and it would bleed), and everyone on the beach, from drunks to yoga enthusiasts, was watching it flying off into the distance.
Now the blood was beginning to drip onto the washed-out wood, and it was time to leave the city.
"No, Karl, please, no. A little more time. Five minutes, please".
"Two. Two minutes tops".
And so they stood, for two more minutes, until there was little time and they had to run to the train station. They had scheduled their night train earlier to catch the sunrise, but now they had to go. Their job was done, the hitch dealt with, and they still needed to go to the drugstore to buy some bandage for the wound. Reluctantly, with one hand, Karl pulled his partner away from the railing.
"The sun. Fucking hell, right?"
"Yeah".
"What was he saying, Karl?"
"Who?"
"That boy, to the drunks. I think he was sick. He was begging for help, he was hunched over".
Even under the bandage, the scratch stung and he growled in pain.
"He was not begging for help. He was a junkie and he was looking for a fix".
"Yeah, maybe, but I kept hearing a different voice. From earlier".
"Oh knock it off, for god's sake".
Outside the train window, the sun was yellow and dull and it was climbing slowly into the distance like a kite on god's remote control. Suddenly, they no longer felt like two outsiders. They felt like they belonged, to the train and to the foreign countryside loitering outside. Karl liked that. What he did not like was the new sensitivity that threatened to derail their future. "Just a junkie", he whispered to himself as the train kept swishing through another tunnel on the way to the airport. "Nothing new".
