In the course of my countless journeys through the archipelago, I once encountered an island surrounded by green waters, hexagons of light dancing in the sun. The land was pale in comparison with the litharge of those seas, and with the wings of giant albatrosses sliding across the immaculate sky, the scene would have enchanted any human eye. You could only wonder whether that craggy place was not home to the untouched palace that the diminutive locals, with their fezzes of brick-red felt and stilettos in their cummerbunds, spoke of during the hour of siesta, while you squatted beside a wall and dragged on a shisha. There were, they said, many chambers in the palace, full of unknown wonders, but it was not these that merited risking your life, not these that were worth the trouble, to write a story with a needle in the corner of your eye. Rather, in the center of the palace was the Exit, blocked by a ferocious guardian, whom none could pass. No one had ever vanquished him, and the defeated warriors returned wizened and raw. What was beyond the Exit no one knew, but the angels who occasionally descended to the islands, be it to bless a procession of tear-stained icons, or to rebuke a fool who slept with his wife while she was unclean, or to run various other errands, told of a depth as endless as the ocean floor littered with shattered wooden boats, their holds filled with treasure, and surrounded by fish with pointed beaks, and octopi, and ancient statues of marble flesh.

Any sailor, it was said, might reach that island once in his life, guided by the zodiac charts consulted at his birth. I was thus not surprised that, at the age of fifty – when a man whose skin has been thickened by salt and storms is drawn toward home – it was given to me to place my foot on the burning sands of that storied island. I was not afraid, nor was I pleased: thus it had to be, as I always told myself when facing a new day, a new woman, a new stranger with my knife in his chest. One cannot do anything but what heaven compels. In a man’s last moment, he regards his life and understands: thus it had to be.

I made land on a dinghy, leaving the barque a hundred cubits’ distance from the rocks. The sun was high, I saw no shadow. Fig trees grew wild, full of violet fruits. In the middle of the island was a ring of cliffs, as slim and irregular as a giant’s teeth. With much effort, I found the narrow through which I could penetrate. And there, rising between the rocks, with yellow walls bracing an arched cupola in the shape of a skull, was the palace built by inhuman hands. I entered it as much in search of shade as of adventure, the sun having become blistering, and my clothes and hair were soaked with sweat as though I had swum there. In the vast halls I found shadow, much shadow, thick shadow, of the highest quality.

The palace was immense and deserted, its walls covered with arabesques. In the interior courtyards, fountains lay still, their waters long since evaporated. In their spiral basins, spiders wove dusty cobwebs. The halls were lined with doors; I opened as many as I could. Each led into a chamber with a window facing the sea. Each had a stone cube in its center, where a baffling machinery churned, a golden fish flapped, suspended in a crystal sphere, or a girl sat with her feet hanging, her face sulking at me, like a strange fruit of the sea, wearing a breastplate of rose ivory. Another chamber held a lobster the size of a large dog; it pinched beads of water between its claws and regarded me with blind eyes.

There were more and more halls, but soon I stopped investigating the closed doors, abandoning the surprises that might have been waiting in the chambers behind them, because I was impatient to stand before the Exit. I advanced for hours over the gentle tiles of polished stone. Here and there I passed large, symmetrical openings in the exterior walls, where I saw the sky and sea on every side. Pelicans rested on long ledges, peering inside with one red eye, but not daring to violate the shadow with their flight. Just when I began to lose faith in the stories of the island and to ruminate a return to my ship, I passed through a high arch of porphyry that led into the chamber of the great portal. The chamber was perfectly round, and in its perimeter I counted eleven entrances like this one, buried in the same scarlet stone. The opposite doors could barely be seen across the room’s immensity. I reckoned I was in the palace center, under the skull-like dome visible from the shore, and which, now I marveled, had its hemispheric ceiling painted with the volutes of a brain – the living and mortal throne of the human soul.

In the precise center of the room something flashed like lightning. A perpendicular column of pure light descended from the large round hole at the apex of the cupola, a sign that the sun stood constantly above the island. Flickering in the distance was the portal; its flames blinded me as I approached the central depth of the chamber with my arm across my eyes. In this same posture, once in the days of my youth, had I thrown myself from the ship’s prow into the flashing ocean, in the center of its roundness, and swam toward the sun on its path of fire and water, the rays and wetness quivering in ever-changing proportions.

When I reached the Exit I was so stunned my heart stopped, because at the same moment, as though waiting for me since the beginnings of the world, from the depths of the Exit appeared the guardian. Now we stared at each other fiercely, determined to stand our ground. He had sworn an oath to the gods to repel intruders, even at the price of his life, and I was constant in my desire to know what lay beyond, and my will was equal to any oath, and any god. We stood face-to-face, with the portal between us, our eyes glaring at the other ferociously.

The guardian was a hearty man about fifty. A scar, similar to the one that furrowed my left temple, also furrowed his, but on the right side. His clothes matched mine, but he was evidently left-handed, because he wore his hilt on his right hip. His boots had perhaps been made by the same bootmaker as worked mine, but then he had mistaken the two initials of his name, printed near the top of the leather: the guardian’s were strangely reversed.

I took a step forward, and he did as well. I attempted to pass him, and he blocked my way, rushing toward the side where I advanced. I shoved him and he shoved me, with his hands braced against my own. Scarlet with fury, I drew my dagger from my waistband and he drew his own at the same moment. I aimed the tip of my blade at his heart and – who will believe me? Who could believe in curses and magic? – our blades met in the middle at their finest tips, as had never before happened and could never happen. I threw my weapon onto the floor, convinced it would be of no use, and he did the same, perhaps relying more on the diabolical power of his spells and charms.

We stood face-to-face, two men huffing with the weight of their years, looking hopelessly at each other. I rose again, reengaged the battle with all my power – but to no end. It was as though he had a thousand hands and a hundred bodies. His bearded head, his broad chest, his large belly, his sculpted thighs filled every corner of the Exit’s shimmering expanse. Hour after hour passed in clenches, huffing, groans and sweat, our bellows cast against and resounding from the chamber’s distant walls.

I faced the guardian, who had exhausted all his previous adversaries, and I searched for a way to prove myself more cunning than he. I studied his movements. I dropped my head and looked at him through my eyebrows, and he did precisely the same. But if I leaned to the right, he leaned to the left, remaining my opposite. I leaned forward, and he did the same. I raised my left arm, he his right. I put my hand over my heart: his heart was on the right! The monster only appeared to be human, under his skin he was inverted, as the left hand is to the right. I stood again before the Exit – the only one in our world, as the all-knowing and tight-lipped women had told me in the fruit market – and I leaned my chest against his, my eyes on his eyes, my mouth on his mouth, my hands and feet on his hands and feet, pressing with all my might against his strong and immobile body. We pressed our foreheads against each other until our browbones were bruised.

I could not pass. My amazement knew no bounds. I had expected a hard battle with the omnipotent guardian, I had thought that in the end I would writhe in my own blood, but such direct and stubborn opposition completely disoriented me. I was about the same stature as he: why couldn’t I send him to one side so I could finally pass beyond him? Was it my fate never to see the treasures of the sunken galleys, the pale statues, the deceitful glints of the depths?

I stayed there for days on end, first looking for a crack in the defense of the terrible guardian, then lying on the floor resigned, and then overwhelmed with fury and kicking and punching against the ever-potent refusals of his feet and hands, then again hopeless, stretched over the floor . . . I sat one evening on the cool tiles, and he did the same. I lay my entire body on the floor, and bracing my chin in my hands, I pondered until I felt my mind would explode. The brave guardian was obviously as strong as I was. Bodily vigor had proven pointless, I would not get rid of him but through some ruse, which I should devise as quickly as possible.

Through the large, azure opening in the peak of the cupola, swarms of angels constantly descended, bathed in light, as irritating as mosquitoes. They gathered around me, they offered asinine advice, they spoke of dogmas and mysteries, they bored me with their ashen faces that knew neither laughter nor tears. Others, identical and evasive, perched on the sills along the chamber’s narrow windows, dangling their legs inside, written like icons in two types of blue, that of the sea below and that of the sky above.

Angels, in that summer, had infested the entire archipelago. In other years there had been harpies, and before that there were soft, transparent rocks that would swallow a man whole, and then spit out his bones only a few moments later. The old people remembered the depraved women of the sea, who in ancient times emerged from the foamy waves to show the fisherman, in an extended palm, their lemon-like eggs, each with a person crouched inside. And each tiny person resembled the fisherman and called him Father, begging him to take them home to his earthen hut. The angels were not the worst infestation the archipelago had periodically experienced, but they were the most insufferable, harping on endlessly: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife . . . The old tars often claimed the man-eating stones were more humane. Now the angels sat like pelicans on the windowsills, twisting their heads to either side, perhaps laying bets on the eventual victor, because I often saw, from the corner of my eye, the flash of coins being flipped in the air and dexterously caught with a smack of the right palm on the back of the left. ‘Heads,’ some shouted, ‘Tails,’ said others, but I could not guess the battle’s denouement until one of them shouted loud enough to echo through the dome, in agony or in triumph. He had driven his coin, which in the air resembled a dandelion tuft, impetuously into the flesh of his left hand, where it had landed on its edge. He could just make out the ridges, like those of a giant fish, on the back of his bloody hand. When I heard the unlucky angel’s cry, like a wounded bird, I received a blessed thought from on high.

Heaven’s stars do not bestow on us, we human beings, merely resilience and courage; they also give wisdom. Often a small and nimble ship, with well-sewn sails, may sink the heavy galleon that vainly blasts its cannons at flies. I remembered one afternoon the story of a muezzin, on one of these islands, who only descended from his minaret to milk his goats. He had heard, and told the same to others, that in the wilds of other lands, a small creature resembling a weasel bested the great hooded snake with a wondrously devious tactic: face-to-face with the giant serpent, overshadowed by its hood, this creature of God called the mongoose began to dance, up and down, side to side, while the evil worm did the same, its head raised and tail twisted into the dust. To and fro, left and right, to and fro, left and right, to and fro . . . always the same and ever faster, until the snake came to believe that it knew, a moment ahead, what its enemy would do. When the speed reached the point you could barely see the two heads moving together, the mongoose suddenly changed its movement: instead of right, it went left, and the reptile, leaning to the opposite side, for a brief moment revealed its neck. In a flash it pounced onto the snake’s back and killed it with a cry of victory.

This idea reinvigorated me. I leapt in that moment to my feet and once again moved toward the great Exit, the only one in our world. As I fully expected, the guardian appeared, determined and also reinvigorated, from his hellish hole. I stood a few moments without moving, pondering my tactic, assembling my plan from forty steps, in the six directions in which the human mind can think: forward, back, left, right, leap, crouch. Difficult to learn, but easy to remember (because the steps repeated in a delicate order whose import slowly came clear), my dance was as symmetrical and subtle as a spider’s web. When I lifted my eyes, I met his gaze and thought I saw a chill flash through his body. Taking one step to the left, I began, as slowly as in a dream, the deadly dance, the final dance, the dance of all dances.

I laid, ten times in a row, the trap of steps, each time slightly faster than before. Then another ten times. And another. The monster came forward, moved back, leaned his body to the right and to the left without mistake, he leapt and crouched at the same moment I did, with the precision of an astrolabe. I started the series of movements again, with re-energized speed, until I thought my shoulders would pop from their sockets and my knees would split apart. After the fortieth identical repetition, heated as though enveloped by flames, I made the first foreign movement. Sudden and bewildering, as though I had grown an extra hand, or my body had grown an extra body. But the monster made no mistake. At the same time, in the same split second, he also turned from the beaten path, following the unknown. We found ourselves again chest-to-chest, we saw our eyes again full of hate, we broke our fists on the other’s fists, our screams echoing the other’s screams.

I began again, with the strength of ten men. I laid the trap hundreds and thousands of times. I suddenly changed my movement in so many ways and at so many different moments that the change itself became part of the dance, just as easy to predict as the trap’s forty steps. For that reason, perhaps, the guardian never made a mistake, however deft my movements. One thousand times, one million times, more times than grains of sand and more than all the tears the world has ever shed, I started the dance over again, without understanding that I had been caught in my own trap and that I danced a petty, fruitless dance that would lead to no victory.

When I suddenly understood what the angels had shouted, that battle is not battle but a dance without beginning, without end, and without limit, I gave up on the trap and the mongoose stratagem. I forgot about the guardian and did nothing other than live in the eternal fire of the dance, with no goal, with no desire, with no memory. I danced with all my might, I danced with twenty hearts and eight arms, I danced with thousands of feet, I danced with the six dimensions that grew from my kidneys and time’s lance emerging from below my left breast. I didn’t dance, rather I was danced, I merely placed my hands and feet inside the hands and feet of the dance. With my body, my strings of guts, my veins, my blood and my bile, with my spine I filled the entire chamber of the great portal, leaving not even the point of a needle unfilled with blood, sperm, teeth and nails, with thousands of eyes and thousands of ears and thousands of fingers and thousands of lips. I danced the Archimedian spiral, I danced the golden ratio, I danced the Fibonacci sequence, I danced the Lie groups, I danced the sacred dance of quaternions and octonions. I danced the genesis of space on the Planck scale and the birth of time in causation, and the hideous screams of Bekenstein scales and the 10, 500 possible, impossible, probable, improbable universes, and the dust of galaxies from Laniakea, the dust of dust of dust of galaxies, the dust of dust of dust of worlds . . . I danced the eternal flame, its eternal return of spark and snuff, furiously consuming the logical space of the mind. I danced the melted gold icon of the Godhead.

As I danced to one side and the other of the Exit, I was the portal, I was the guardian, I was the wheel of angels, I was the palace, I was the sea. The brain, heart and sex, so often pitted against each other, were now a single organ, whose thought flowed into sensation, sensation into pleasure, and pleasure back into thought, and everything broke through my skin and poured into the skin of the world, and broke through and poured, wastelaying and torrential and unstoppable, into the icon of the All, which it also broke through to pour itself into the eternal and ineffable Nothing.

When the dance finished, I found myself again on the threshold of the great portal. Beyond it now was no one. But I could not find within me any reason left to enter. I turned back and crossed the chamber again, under the eyes of angels in the windows, I left through the porphyry archway, I retread the long corridors, without the desire to open a single door. I came into the steady sunlight of the afternoon, crossing the ring of cliffs, passing beside the fig trees with violet fruits to reach my dinghy perched on the shore. The archipelago with its glassy sea, blazing against my sight, with its forested coastlands, seemed to me beauties beyond our power to express. I reached my ship ready to pull the sea air into my chest, my skin wizened by salt and storms. And this is what I have done until today, because this is man’s fate on earth. At some moment I will turn homeward, but not as long as I feel a trace of life left within me. And with my last breath, I hope I will be able to say to myself, in peace, with my hand on my right breast, over my heart, unafraid: thus it had to be.

Artwork by Sybren Vanoverberghe, Red Facade, 2019
Courtesy of Keteleer Gallery