excerpt

Inside the building, which seemed to be made entirely of
corridors without destinations, yet with no Minoan puzzle or labyrinth
in mind at its construction, there was a small cell, number

  1. In the room, so without character, there was one small, barred
    window to describe a man. In the man were a blue Mediterranean of
    memory and his imaginary port through which he summoned his
    island: sailing, skewering the centuries at the speed of a wild dove,
    jagged face sunward, savaging back the battle of glaucous breakers,
    waking behind a spoor of black blood.
    Darkness in the cell, the image of which intensifies in resolution;
    a sword-blade geography, an oblique holiness fuelled by ferocity.
    Darkness in hallways, long and painful, in corners undeciphered by
    the eyes of passing guards or prisoners; darkness where light was
    once. Light that has left this forsaken place, light trying to find solace
    in faraway lands and minds.
    It was the slopping of the beasts, or as it is known more formally,
    the distribution of the evening meal to the prisoners; to
    Hermes Dragakis’ surprise and pleasure, Loukopoulos’ son was on
    duty, standing there in the doorway of his cell with his tray. The son
    whispered that things outside the prison were going very well, and
    his father, Colonel Stathis Loukopoulos, would come and visit as
    soon as he could devise an un-suspicious excuse. With that modicum
    of lift, Hermes began the adventure to the evening meal with
    as much appetite as he could muster. Then he went to sit on his bed
    and write in his diary, which has become a diary of his phases and
    pneumatic conjunctions since the beginning. Each deep midnight
    and each high noon of his mood was logged there: a small dynamism
    within the large arrest, a faint stirring in the service of sustaining
    sanity, an unfounded and dangerously nude hope that the words
    would never die in this placenta of paper.
    He stood. He faced the wall. He spoke. It must be understood
    that he did not consider himself isolated. As he stared with such
    sincerity at a single stone in the wall, surely it was as if he were
    endorsing with his eyes all he was saying, as if he were attempting to…