The first time I visited Anacletus island was a dream within a dream.

That day I finished an early supper around three-thirty in the afternoon and had a small glass of wine afterward. Although I was accustomed to drinking, the wine put me in a state of drowsy torpor for some odd reason. Barely able to keep my eyes open, I lay down to rest and quickly fell into a deep sleep.

I awoke feeling disoriented with the memory of a strange dream. Looking out the rear window of my apartment, I saw what I thought was the first light of morning and couldn't believe I still felt tired after sleeping through the night. I decided to catch a few more winks before I started the day and I rolled over on the sofa.

I was soon asleep again and the strange dream continued where it had left off. When I awoke, I felt slightly feverish. I was quite astonished to notice that it was pitch black outside and this made me feel even more disoriented than the first time. I turned on a light and looked at the clock on the living room wall. It read eight-thirty and I suddenly realized it was not the following morning, but the night of the same day. I had slept five hours in total.

It was only then that the disjointed memory of the dream filtered into my groggy mind. In one part of the dream I was telling a friend about an island I had once visited in the days when I was a world traveler. It was called Anacletus and I had specific memories of the place. Rich Americans lived on the north shore where the tropical climate was cooler. The south shore was dry and extremely hot. Budget travelers rented primitive beach huts there for fifty dollars per month. The toilets were open pits dug into the ground.

When my friend asked me where Anacletus was located, I took out an atlas and began looking first in the Gulf of Mexico off the south Texas coast. Then I remembered the island was somewhere south of Cuba and I turned to the page containing a map of the Caribbean. I searched for the island without any luck and began to look at the names of shoals. I found nothing listed, which mystified me because I was certain I had gone to the Caribbean when I visited Anacletus.

Thinking about the dream later, I wondered where my unconscious mind had picked up the name. Anacletus sounded much more Greek than Caribbean and I had never been to Greece. Perhaps I had read about it in a magazine. After two decades of wandering half the world, I had given up travel due to lack of money. Even traveling first class, I had grown weary of the logistics of waiting in airports, catching flights, checking into and out of hotels and so forth. It all became a sort of blur after twenty years and I finally decided to call it quits. In any event I never found the perfect place I was looking for, my Shangri-La. I came to the conclusion that such places only existed in fiction, like the Himalayan kingdom in James Hilton's novel.

But the dream had been so vivid I couldn't put it out of my mind. In the dream I remembered details of Anacletus so clearly it seemed like a real place I had actually visited. In my feverish condition I began to wonder if Anacletus might exist after all. Had I gone there and simply forgot the experience on a conscious level, only to be reminded by my unconscious mind? I had visited literally scores of islands in my extensive travels and I could not be absolutely certain I hadn't misplaced the conscious memory of one. Or had I repressed the memory for some reason?

The following day I researched the name Anacletus on the internet, but all I found was a reference to an obscure early Christian Pope who was martyred by the Romans. His name meant "the blameless one" in Greek and this translation had a curious effect on me. I recalled my childhood training in Catholicism, a faith I had long ago abandoned. Perhaps I had heard Anacletus mentioned in one of my lessons. But why would I transpose this name to an island in my dream? Did I want to consider myself blameless for something that happened on one of the islands I had visited?

I wracked my brain for clues, but I couldn't remember any incident in my travels that would qualify as traumatic. The effort kept me awake late a few nights as I went over memories of each island where I had spent even a single day. For some reason my thoughts returned to Singapore more than once. It was an island-nation, not simply an island, and I had stopped there for a few days on a tour of Asia eight years earlier. It happened to be the last trip I ever took, a fact that suddenly struck me as significant.

I went so far as to write down notes of my Singapore visit to see if I could jog my memory. The first two days I spent touring the city in a rental car. I recalled visiting a crocodile farm and a zoo where orangutans roamed free among the onlookers. I went to see a film on the second night. Details of the third day and night were hazy, but I remembered leaving on the fourth day to fly to Thailand.

I struggled to recall events of the third day without any luck. Then one night I woke up feeling ill. I went to the bathroom and vomited. At first I thought it was a case of stomach flu or something I had eaten, but later I had a vague sense that my nausea was caused by something I had dreamed but couldn't recall.

The next few days I found myself in a nervous state, as if I were on the verge of remembering the dream. I jumped at loud noises, lost my appetite and had trouble sleeping. Gradually it dawned on me that my life had gone downhill since the Asian trip. That journey had been an important turning point without my realizing it until now. A few months after I returned home, I was fired from my lucrative job as a magazine editor when my work habits became sloppy. I fell back on freelance writing and moved into a cheaper apartment. I also began drinking more than usual. This caused a rift with Charlene, the woman I thought I loved, and she eventually broke off our relationship. How strange that I had never connected all of this to my last trip to Asia.

The first chink in my amnesia appeared one night while I was watching an old film on cable television. One of the stars was Heddy Lamar made up to look like a native girl. Although I had seen Lamar in several other films, her face looked strangely reminiscent of someone else with all the makeup she wore. I went to bed after the film was over and fell asleep at once.

I woke up trembling at three in the morning and the missing memories of Singapore came rushing back to me in a storm of emotion. It had been a night of drunken passion in the Little India section of the city. I had been drinking heavily all day -- the sort of compulsive drinking that some travelers do to forget a disappointing trip -- when I wandered into a nightclub and noticed a beautiful dancer on stage.

A young Tamil woman, her name was Seji and she was so mesmerizing I couldn't take my eyes off of her. She reminded me of an Indian goddess. I could see her bare flesh behind the rippling veils she used in her dance and her exotic dark eyes smoldered like smoky embers. I was captivated and my imagination ran wild. After she finished her second dance, I gave the waiter an outrageous tip to have her come to my table for a drink. I was delightfully surprised when she accepted my offer. Like most Singaporeans, Seji spoke English fluently. She asked where I was from and told me all about herself. I listened raptly, staring into her eyes and watching her full lips jiggle across bright white teeth. She seemed flattered by the attention I gave her, laughing from time to time and touching my hand on the table.

I promised to wait until her last dance of the night. By the time we left the club I was drunk enough to stagger on the street. Seji led me down a dark alley to the decrepit building where she lived alone in a tiny apartment. She poured me a glass of coconut liquor and undressed while I drank it sitting on the bed. My head was spinning as she kneeled and unbuckled my pants, staring up at me with those smoky eyes.

I passed out after we made love. When I awoke, the room was dark and for a moment I couldn't remember where I was. Then I saw Seji's silhouette against the street light pouring through the window. She held something in her hand. I fumbled with the table lamp and turned it on. She froze in the glare and I saw that she had removed my wallet from my pants. I leaped off the bed and seized her as she ran to the door. She screamed and clawed at my face, drawing blood on my cheek. Enraged, I slapped her hard with the back of my hand. She fell back against the wall and then sprang on me like a wild animal, pummeling my head with her fists and kicking me in the groin. I doubled over in pain and grabbed her around the legs, pulling her to the floor. As we wrestled, she continued punching me in the face and I reached for her throat.

Seji gasped as my fingers tightened around her neck. Her eyes flashed with anger and she kicked in the air. I climbed on top of her to pin her legs to the floor. My head throbbed with pain from her blows and I crushed her throat in a frenzy. After she stopped moving, I rolled off to catch my breath. She lay beside me with her eyes staring vacantly and her mouth agape. I felt strangely calm as I checked her wrist for a pulse and detected nothing. Events of the night suddenly seemed as unreal to me as a dream.

I got dressed and found my wallet on the floor. I turned off the light, left the apartment and walked to my hotel in a sort of trance. The next morning I woke up with a bad hangover and no memory of the previous
night. I checked out of the hotel and caught the first flight to Bangkok as if nothing had happened.

This was no ordinary blackout from drinking too much alcohol. I looked it up in a psychiatric dictionary. The condition was called anterograde amnesia: loss of memory for events immediately following a trauma, sometimes in effect for a long time following the trauma. Eight years in my case. I needed to believe I was blameless for what happened, hence the name of the island in my original dream. My Catholic upbringing had returned to save me in a time of psychological turmoil. The real island was nowhere near the Caribbean, another subterfuge of my unconscious mind to keep the memory buried.

And yet I had remembered. In the end my bad conscience won out against all the defenses my unconscious mind erected.

Questions remained, however. Why didn't I stop choking Seji before it was too late? Was I temporarily insane? I once knew a police captain who was contemptuous of the insanity defense, as most policemen are. "Is he mad or is he bad?" the captain used to ask, laughing derisively. In his jaded heart he was convinced that anyone who took a life was pure evil and beyond redemption.

Should I return to Singapore and confess my crime after eight years? Singapore was known for its harsh laws and I might face the death penalty. Spending the rest of my life in prison was the best I could hope for under the circumstances. What would be the point of subjecting myself to such treatment? It wouldn't bring Seji back to life and the streets of Singapore
wouldn't be one bit safer. Unwittingly, I had already punished myself by turning my life into a shambles. Wasn't that punishment enough?

Was I evil because I accidentally killed Seji in a fit of anger? I didn't feel evil. In fact, I had always considered myself a good person, more compassionate than the majority of people I had known in my lifetime. I dreaded the prospect that a single act of drunken rage would redefine me as a monster in the eyes of most people.

In killing Seji I had crossed an invisible boundary and I could never be the same person again. My soul was stained with sin and now with the knowledge of the sin. It was impossible to forget what I had done, but perhaps one day I might learn how to forgive myself and rebuild my life. If I didn't try, I would sink into the kind of despair that had only one outcome.