The Prescription
Luke sent the message from Brisbane, where the sun was doing something complicated with the clouds. He was heading to see Dr Predrag about the tinnitus—the third hearing test in as many years. "So far the hearing is fine," he wrote. "The ringing in my ears is a sign."
I read it twice, three times. The words seemed to shimmer.
"It's the call of the sirens," I wrote back. "It ain't curable. Ain't preventable."
Luke's reply was immediate: "This is not first time. It may subside but it's a warning to be careful."
A warning. Yes. But a warning about what?
The old captain had told me that the echoes of the Lucia were trapped, frozen, repeating the same terror forever. But Luke was talking about something different—something that came in threes, that pulsed like a heartbeat, that might be tuned rather than silenced.
I remembered the night at the Tivoli, the 30-year anniversary of Ivy and the Big Apples, the way the music had pounded through my earplugs and still left that high-pitched whine. The festival at Mansfield had been worse—no protection, just pure sound, and afterwards the ringing that wouldn't stop.
They don't say what they know, I'd told him. But what they know they can't know directly, so they sing.
The sirens sing. They always have.
The Island of Moyo
There's a book, I'd told Luke, that's popular on the island of Moyo. Placenta: The Forgotten Chakra. He'd laughed at the title—who wouldn't?—but I'd meant it. Even our dear friend Julia, a known international researcher for assisted birth, hasn't heard about the book nor the author of the book, how could Luke.
The placenta is the first memory of sound, the first rhythm, the first pulse. In the womb, we hear the mother's heartbeat as a constant drum, the rush of blood as a river, the voice from outside as something muffled and godlike.
The sirens remember this. They remember a time before words, before meaning, when sound was just being.
The old captain had said the Lucia's crew died screaming, and their screams became echoes. But what if that was only half the story? What if the screams were also something else—a song, a call, a tuning fork that found the wrong frequency?
The fishermen of the Kornati have stories about sirens, though they don't use that word. They speak of vile—feminine spirits of the water, creatures of the deep who sing to sailors and drag them down. But the songs aren't always deadly. Sometimes, the stories go, the songs are a gift. A memory unlocked. A past life remembered. A sense restored.
Luke had mentioned a red-haired siren named Jess. "I got the sun lasered first session," he wrote. "She's the one."
I didn't ask what that meant. I didn't need to. I knew the feeling—the way a certain voice, a certain touch, a certain presence can recalibrate something inside you. The way a woman who knows what she wants can teach you what you want, even if you didn't know it before.
She has a good sense for determined women and can judge them by the width of their hips for how much sex they had and how deeply they enjoyed it.
The words came back to me from the dalmatian nights, the late conversations with Helena and Julia, the way the whole family seemed to move to a rhythm that was older than the islands themselves. Julia's mother had been the one to say it, her eyes half-closed, a glass of something strong in her hand: "The hips don't lie. Neither do the ears."
Sex and Lucia
Someone mentioned the movie. Sex and Lucia. A Spanish film, he said, with a woman who loses herself in the Mediterranean, who finds a man and loses him and finds him again, who writes stories that become real and real stories that become fiction.
The character Lucia is a writer, or maybe a waitress, or maybe both. She moves to an island and discovers that life is just a story you haven't finished telling yourself.
I watched it in Zadar, years ago, in a small cinema that smelled of salt and old wood. There was a scene—I remember it vividly—where Lucia is swimming in a cove, her body pale against the dark water, and the camera holds on her for a long, impossible moment. She's not looking at anything. She's listening. The water is moving, the rocks are warm, the sun is doing something complicated with the light. And she's listening.
The sound comes from inside her own head.
The tinnitus, I thought. The sirens.
"It should of course not be an invitation to make another story," Luke had said, with that wink that's not a wink, that smile that's not a smile.
But stories don't need invitations. They come in threes.
The Tuning
Dr Predrag had a reputation, and the reputation was this: he listened. Not in the way most doctors listen—nodding, taking notes, glancing at the clock—but in a way that felt like being held. Like the sound of your own voice was being witnessed by someone who actually heard it.
Luke was going to ask him for a prescription. Not for medicine—for music.
The question I'd suggested was framed carefully, the kind of thing that sounds technical but carries a deeper meaning: "Doctor, I've been reading about personalized music therapy for tinnitus—specifically, using filtered or notch-filtered music to reduce cortical overactivity. Would you be willing to prescribe your own curated playlist as part of my treatment plan?"
On the surface, it was science. But underneath, it was something else entirely—a request for the doctor to reveal his own inner song, his own relationship with sound, his own way of hearing the world. To prescribe not a drug, but a vibration.
"Maybe train this question a few times before seeing the doc," I'd written. "Be ready for a surprise and for a reward you may gain."
Because the reward wasn't just the music. It was the listening. It was the moment when the doctor paused, looked at Luke, and realized that this wasn't just another patient with another symptom. This was a man who was trying to tune his ringing into something that could be heard as music, not noise.
The sirens don't just sing to drown sailors. They sing to awaken something in them—a memory, a desire, a sense that the world is more than what we see. The tinnitus is the echo of that song, the part that got stuck in the ear canal, the part that can't find its way out.
Tune it, the sirens whisper. Don't silence it. Tune it.
The Watery Foam
Julia's mother had said something else that night, something I'd never forgotten. She was talking about kissing—"The best kisses are as watery as Mediterranean foam"—and the way she said it made everyone at the table go quiet. Even Helena, who usually had something to say about everything, just sat there, her glass halfway to her lips.
"You taste the sea in a good kiss," the mother continued. "Not salt, exactly. Something else. Something that reminds you of where you came from. The same water that was in the womb, that was in the placenta, that was in the first cry you ever made. The kiss takes you back to that. To before you learned to speak."
Julia had looked at me then, and I'd felt something shift in my chest. She was younger than me—much younger—but there was something ancient in her eyes, something that had seen the islands rise and fall, had heard the sirens sing, had touched the echoes and not been afraid.
Later that night, we'd walked down to the water, and she'd kissed me. Not a casual kiss—a kiss that had weight, that had taste. It was salty, yes, but also sweet, and there was a rhythm to it that I couldn't quite name. A pulse.
The tinnitus in my left ear—I'd had it since I was sixteen—went quiet.
Not gone. Just… tuned.
The Charter
Luke was asking about the boat charter in Croatia. "I would be happy with a boat ride," he wrote. "No extras lol."
But we both knew that was a lie. There are always extras on the Adriatic. The islands don't just offer you water and rocks—they offer you memories, secrets, the echoes of everyone who came before. You can't sail through the Kornati without hearing something you weren't meant to hear, without becoming part of the story.
"They, the sirens, of unforgettable past, come with a package," I'd written. "Well suited for the promises one makes."
The promise I'd made was to Helena, years ago, when we were young and stupid and thought the world could be conquered with a boat and a bottle of wine. She'd asked me to take her to the caves—the secret caves, the ones no one talks about—and I'd said yes, because how could I say no to a woman who looked at me like I was the only star in the sky?
We'd found the caves. We'd found something else, too—something that made her change, that made her listen in a way she'd never listened before. She'd started hearing things. Voices. Songs. The sound of a woman singing under the water.
I told myself it was the wine. I told myself it was the stress. I told myself a lot of things.
But the truth was simpler: Helena had heard the sirens, and the sirens had called her, and she'd answered.
The Echoes and the Ecstasy
The Lucia's echoes are screams—fear, terror, the pain of drowning and not drowning, of being trapped in sound forever. But the sirens' songs are different. They're not fear—they're desire. They're the thing you want so badly that you forget to be afraid.
I told Luke about the sirens, and he understood immediately. "They come in 3s," he wrote.
Yes. Three is the number of the song. The pulse, the rhythm, the beat that moves through the body and remembers. Three is the number of the trimurti, the triple goddess, the mother-maiden-crone. Three is the placenta, the cord, the child. Three is the ear, the sound, the silence that follows.
The tinnitus isn't a warning—it's an invitation. A chance to hear what you've been blocking out. A chance to tune.
"When they say it's permanent, I challenge it," Luke had written.
I smiled when I read it. Of course he would. He's the son of the sun, the one who sees the rays disappearing only to appear again. He knows that nothing is permanent—not sound, not silence, not the ringing in your ears.
The sirens sing, and the tinnitus is just their echo, just the part of the song that got stuck in your head. If you listen closely, you can hear the melody. You can hear the desire. You can hear the thing you've been missing.
"Ask the doctor," I'd written. "Prescribe you his best music. Take it to a pharmacy."
But the real prescription—the one Dr Predrag would give if he knew—is the music of the sirens themselves. The song that comes from the water, that rises through the hull, that vibrates in the wood and the flesh and the bone.
The Return
Luke is coming to the Kornati. Not in August—the timing isn't right for that—but soon. He'll bring his tinnitus, his hearing test results, his questions about the sirens and the echoes and the islands that rise from the Adriatic like the backs of sleeping gods.
He'll meet Julia's brother Berislav, the captain who knows the channels that aren't on any map. He'll sail past the caves where the Lucia's screams are trapped, and he'll listen. Really listen.
The tinnitus won't stop. It can't.
But it will tune.
And when it does, he'll hear what the sirens have been trying to tell him all along: that sound is just sensation, and sensation is just memory, and memory is just desire, and desire is the only thing that's real.
I think of Helena, years ago, in the water. The way she looked at me, her eyes dark as the sea, her lips parted, her ears open. The sound of her own voice, amplified by the caves, echoing back at her from a place that had no name.
She'd heard the sirens, and she'd answered, and she'd never been the same.
None of us are.
"A very popular read on the island of Moyo is: Placenta: The Forgotten Chakra."
I'd told Luke that as a joke, but it wasn't really a joke. The placenta is a chakra—the first one, the one that connects us to the sound of our mother's voice, to the pulse of her blood, to the rhythm that keeps us alive. The sirens sing to that chakra, to that memory, to that place in us that never learned to speak but always knew how to hear.
The tinnitus is the placenta's call, echoing through time. The sirens want us to tune it, not silence it. To transform it into music.
I'm writing this on a boat—not the Lucia, not the one from the story, but a boat that floats just as easily and sings just as sweetly. The sun is setting, the sea is calm, and in the distance, I can hear something that sounds like a woman's voice, rising and falling, coming closer.
The sirens are real.
The echoes are true.
The tinnitus can be tuned.
And if you listen closely—if you really, really listen—you'll hear it too. The song that the Lucia's crew couldn't hear, the one that drove them to jump from the mast and scream into the void. It's not a song of death. It's a song of transformation. A song that says: You can become the sound. You can become the echo. You can become the thing that was always waiting in the water.
Sirens sing
Tune the ringing
Hear the world
The tune is beginning
The octave shifts
The frequency changes
The body remembers
And the ear arranges.