Yup

It struck him that the understanding of our place within the universe was either radically important or deeply uninteresting. On the one hand it seemed fundamentally important whether a person believed that the universe was created and sustained by an all powerful being who’s true aim, problems aside was the redemption of some portion of humanity. Or whether you thought that the world was a mere accident in a myriad of accidents, or some sort of cosmic inevitability that was ultimately meaningless, just a collection of matter that had a tendency to form organisms, who in turn, formed more complex organisms. In short, whether human history was directed towards some goal, or whether human existence was just a monumental accident. This, it seemed to him, should be the essential sort of question that every human being should come to terms with before deciding how to live their life, whether things like ethics and morals etc. were even relevant, seemed somewhat contingent on this conclusion. And yet, people, himself included, tended to give more sustained thought to whether they’d prefer Chinese food or pizza for dinner than on the nature or direction of their existence. Why was this? Did everybody secretly already know in their gut whether they believed in anything beyond themselves as cosmic jokes or not? Or were these questions so difficult to answer that they just functioned in the background of everyone’s mind, like a computer running some endless processing function.

The real problem was that, from a societal standpoint, at least in the technocratic western world where he’d been weaned, the answer to the question was a non-sequiter. What does the creation of the universe or your place in it have to do with rent, with a spreadsheet, with staying in shape? You’d hear, and heard a couple in his church going days, a sermon or two that said that it made all the difference, but he often wondered if that was true. People who professed to believe in the direction of God in the world always seemed hopelessly naïve, or so like their non-believing cohorts that the belief didn’t seem to matter. It was too hard to walk a reasonable middle ground. And either way, it didn’t seem, with the way society was made, to matter at all. We were no longer sacrificing cows or other human beings to deities for rain. It had become a thing that a person could consider in the privacy of their own home, like whether to have cable or not. In short, religion was on the fringe. He wasn’t even sure that that was a problem, or whether it was just a natural result of being a citizen in any developed nation.

He spent one summer as a tour guide of the world’s smallest mountain along the coast of CA. It wasn’t technically a mountain, but the company determined that the phrase, world’s smallest mountain, was catchier than, not technically a mountain, but still pretty small. He’d run a gondola, a very short gondola up to the top of the mountain for young couples looking for romance or older couples not wiling to climb stairs. At the top of the world’s smallest mountain was a tiny village composed of a gift shop, an ice cream shop, and two restaurants. It was his first introduction into the adult world of work and he found the work world deeply mystifying and stultifyingly boring all at once.

Is this really what people did all day? Pushed a button to start a gondola? Smiled at strangers? Did it not occur to anyone else that having seventy percent of the population working in the service industry was deeply bizarre? That each of us serving each other, with a, if the company was good, fake plastered on smile was vaguely orgiastic as though we were rewarding ourselves for doing the very things that we’d been saving up to be doing. It would be like working at Disneyland all summer to afford spending a day at Disneyland. He meant something, else, but it almost seemed analogous. Everyone was actually in this deep symbiotic relationship where they all worked for each other, but the real underlying problem of this beautiful system is that most people hate the customers they work with, or at least dislike them, find them annoying. And yet, if seventy percent of people are working in the service industry, what’s being communicated is the fact that seventy percent of people don’t actually like themselves, or don’t respect the job that they do. When not working they find themselves deeply annoying. How could this not create a nation of people alienated from themselves? 

Draconian

They were lying down in a parking lot staring up at the stars. He couldn’t identify any of the constellations, literally none. He couldn’t even pick out Polaris, though he’d heard, and didn’t know if it was true, that in a thousand years the North Star would have changed. That someone like him or whatever approximation of human beings were around, would actually be staring up at a different North Star. Life, it seemed, was formed like a straight line, and the idea of discontinuity in that line, an end, a person looking at one’s gravestone, or some secondary North Star troubled him. Death, as he’d learned from reading Sophocles, was the one thing that man could not escape no matter how much he busied himself on earth. And therefore, though some escape artists now made it to one hundred twenty before succumbing, he imagined that death, unlike the North Start had always been a troubling thing for a human being. Did it make any difference if the average age at death was 34 as opposed to 74. Didn’t Neanderthals make burial caves, and Vikings cairns in which they buried ships? No. Death meant nothing more and nothing less than it had ever meant. It was an end.

It was strange though, he said to Thomas, that he could go through life not knowing anything about the stars and still be a reasonable and competent member of society, when, for thousands of years, societies who were now perceived as archaic or draconian, had not only catalogued but developed vast mythologies around the stars, built whole life’s around them. And now that we had the capability to travel to other planets it was no longer necessary for the common man to even be able to identify them. It’s like a love the one you’re with kind of thing.

“You know that isn’t true, Thomas answered. The truth is that it’s so fundamentally weird, the whole idea of going into space, of moving about in a vacuum or a space suit. We’ve become so acculturated to movies that we don’t even think of it as an actual thing. And why should we? We’re aware that some of the stars are so far away that the light reaching us, pase though the thought may be, is actually from a dead star. This is a bizarre concept. We have nothing in our physical worlds that tells us that this is true, that we are that ephemeral in the grand scope of the cosmos. You are very much alive until you are dead at which point we have a lot harder time hearing from people.

Ouija boards aside.

Of course.

They mused on the stars for a while in silence, but it did not bring them any closer, nor even the idea of them. They were still just conceptions, familiar things that could go unnoticed, like a good heating system. “I’ve been thinking,” he started. 

Pale things

When he walked in the evening he was often overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, of not being known by anyone. He thought of himself as a little boy standing before an ocean wave, and being enveloped, all alone, covered completely by the water, bathed in the sound, alone, forever. And so when he took these walks at night he took them as a puppy or a very friendly dog would, in search of someone to unburden his soul to, if soul’s existed, or whether they were just constructions of the mind. He deemed the answer unimportant, because he felt that he had something that needed to be shared.

It was commonplace, he knew, to live in the depths of a city and feel completely anonymous. The street was lined by empty cars and old blue gum trees that had been planted some forty years before. 

He had had a dream for what seemed like weeks. It took place out west somewhere, near or in a desert. The sun was always low on the horizon and alternatively bright red or black depending on the day. In the dream he was sitting around a campfire at either breakfast or late at night, drinking a cup of coffee from a silver mug, and sitting around in a circle with a group of men who were vague replicas of old friends and family. Not one of them was particularly distinct. If it was the morning dream an eagle or a falcon flew overhead, creating a dark silhouette against the red of the sky, and he tended to look up at it in the dream without attaching any symbolism, just admiring the majesty of flight. 

The men in the circle were all wearing blankets of the sort that you purchased in road side stands in the southwest, grey mostly, with designs in red beads of old Indian rituals or buffalos shaped like smoke running nowhere. Most of the men had hats and a few of them were chewing bits of tobacco and spitting it into their cups. The fire was mostly embers, and, either way, day or night, the wind was chilled.

They were always waiting in these dreams, not talking, just creating a rhythm of spits into tin cans or small glottal stops brought on by coffee. In the distance, with only a dark silhouette appearing first coming up over a rise, backlit by the sun, as if her were riding it, was the shape of a man. Nobody said anything when the shape appeared thought there was a general shifting of bodies and of blankets, so that all of them were eventually watching the approach of the silhouette. This then is what they had gathered for. It was the man for whom they’d been waiting. His horse, pale white, approached at a slow walk, heaving this way and that like a drunken sailor. 

The real point of the story

This girl finished her story, her fork poised over a half of a Belgian waffle she’d bought mid-way through, and devoured very slowly, between sentences, gazing in the interim at her fork as if it were a piece of some distant star landed on earth, worth consideration, which is to say, she barely noticed it at all. It had started raining outside while she’d been talking, a loose, uncommitted rain, that seemed to fall in sheets and downpours in odd places, a copse of trees was near dry while a fire hydrant and a rack of bikes was drenched nearby.

She slowly chewed the last bit of waffle and he listened with a vague sort of disgust to her mastication. “So, the body was you, and that’s what convinced you?”

                “Well, that and the presence of the unwatched city.”

                “I see,” he answered, sipping his coffee.

                “What does it mean to see yourself dead in your own dream?”

                “Well, I imagine it’s a sort of anxiety dream, some indication that something is deeply wrong in your life.”

                The problem arose months later at a party on the upper west side of town. A group of his friends was meeting to talk about literature and drink wine, and she tagged along as they were kind of dating by this point, though he wasn’t willing to commit to it as an actual thing. Anyhow, they were all sitting around the house talking about literature, McCarthy specifically, and the subject of dreams came up, and he, stupidly, started telling a much abbreviated story of his new girlfriend’s dream, not noticing the embarrassing flush that rose to her cheeks because he’d had at least three very full glasses of wine.

                And anyhow, he moved through the story at a brisk pace because he couldn’t be entirely sure of the details as he was searching through a dream third hand now. But, he felt, he gave a pretty good accounting of what had happened that particular night and how it had played a central role in this girl becoming a very committed Christian. And everyone politely nodded at the end, and asked the girl questions about her dream, which she answered despite her obvious reticence, because she was, after all, a nice girl.

But anyhow, on the ride home, she burst into tears, and he thought it was because she thought that his friends didn’t like her, that they’d been cruel to her or something. An old girlfriend had been there and perhaps she’d said or done something that had left this very kind young woman distraught, and he pulled the car over, very slowly, onto the shoulder and asked her what was wrong, taking his left hand and kneading the back of her neck, very gently and looking out the window at the stars, which were bright and clean.

And she shook her head, as if to tell him that she couldn’t talk about it, but he told her that he’d like to talk about it, that she was a central part of his life now, and that her happiness was becoming correlated with his own in a very particular way. And she looked up just then, meeting his eyes very fiercely, and asked him how he could have gotten the dream story wrong then. If he regarded her so highly how could he trivialize the very event that she considered to have been the most central thing in her small and meager life up to this point. The point at which she’d accepted her Lord and Savior on the beach.

And, he leaned back and started to apologize for botching some of the finer details, trying to remember if he’d gotten any of the particulars wrong in such a way that would bring forth this much emotion, but really just trying to soothe her by brushing her hair, which she wasn’t having at all, her nose running like a faucet that she occasionally wiped with her left hand. “Why would you lie about Him just to impress your friends?”

“Who,” he asked, not having any idea what she was talking about by this point.

“About Him being on the beach. His presence. Opening his eyes and me just knowing from that light that he’d been watching all along, just like he was watching those tiny people on the brink of destruction. It fails as a metaphor and just become one more involuted and self-referential trick if it’s me on the beach. No. It had to be Him.”

He’d dated his fair share of women that he’d characterize as crazy, but this particular manifestation astounded him. She’d changed essential details about her story, for what, for God knows what reason, and now she was actively blaming him for it. As though he could or should have known that

“What?” she said.

“Like, if it’s just a normal type day and you’re relating this particular dream to say, a group of really interested school girls who are all going to grow up to be marine biologists, is the body on the shore, is it a seal?”

“What?” she said again, wiping a tear from her eye, and forming a nasty scowl by drawing the skin on her forehead in a particular manner.

“I’m wondering what parts of the story are contingent, malleable, audience dependent?”

The story, she insisted was not audience dependent but manifest just as she had related it tonight, with all the people working obliviously in the city and the body of Christ washed up on the shore, seemingly dead, but really, quite alive, and that it had never been or could be anything else, and how could he possibly think that she’d confuse or intentionally muddle the details of what she regarded as her raison de etre for existence. 

Was he insane?

He had drawn that conclusion about her by this point, and he drove her home in relative silence, though for weeks afterward it was if he was in a haze. What could possibly make a person suddenly decide to shift gears, jump off a bridge, change something essential about their character. He acknowledged that perhaps the mistake was his, in assuming that anything was stable, the malleability of the world, of religion, of science, of ideas had been proven time and time again. Why did he assume that people would ever be any different? From that point forward he resolved to try and never be surprised by anything that a person said or did based on previous assumptions, which were really nothing more than guesses, approximations, thick clouds overhead that suggested but could not promise rain. Afterwards, he’d sometimes wander down third and Liberty in hopes of running into her. Why? He didn’t precisely know. He’d have nothing to say to her. 

Apologetically American

He had the sense that he still had to do some clarifying in his own mind in relation to what he thought of people. Growing up, becoming an adult, was perhaps about holding two opposing ideas in one’s head without letting it explode. Someone had said something along those lines, though they’d left out the part about the head exploding, which was obviously just a figure of speech. He should have worn a scarf, though he’d always thought they looked effeminate. It was his idea about everyone, about America that was problematic. And he understood that a person had to have a certain kind of background, educated, at least middle class, or at least that he was not unique in thinking this way, in thinking of America as an abstraction, as a thing which a young person could consider in its entirety. This vast space of land, filled with hundreds of millions of people and make pronouncements. That it was hubris, of the vast sort that always had Greek heroes ripping out their eyes or making love to their mothers, and yet he did it; everyone he knew did it, made vast pronunciations about the state of American discourse, of American literature, about American art, the American psyche, the American conservative, as if such a thing were that easy to define. He heard, in the distance a cat in heat, or perhaps a cat being hurt, or giving birth. He suspected that the cat was in heat, but didn’t really know.

                He had this idea, strongly held, that America was a pretty damn fine place, that a place that had its roots in ideas like democracy and freedom of religion and speech was the sort of place that he should be proud of, that the ideals should be emulated, and, if he was feeling especially brazen, what would be so bad about exporting these very same ideals to other nations? Not under the banner of war, but in peace, in home building. He knew that the financial situation was much more complicated and that organizations like the IMF really dicked people over, but couldn’t it be simpler? And yet, like most of his friends, he simultaneously held the idea that America was a deeply troubled place, full of ignorant bastards who couldn’t find their asses with two hands, people who called in to radio talk shows yelling about gun rights, people who hadn’t read a book in over a year, people who thought that the government was out to get them, people who considered education to be for the “elite,” people who considered mass transit and inconvenient tax burden, people who would argue with him vociferously about things that were in their own self-interest like nationalized health care or exporting peace rather than some fake democracy contingent upon repaying loans to multinational corporations. How could these people argue against their own self interest? Why did they?

And therein lay the problem. He saw two girls on a small culvert, or thin skein of cement that slid out into the water, passing a bottle of what he guessed was wine back and forth between them, their shoes off, toes stretching and dipping down into the inky water. He thought of calling out to them, inviting them somewhere. He couldn’t even see their faces. It was his strong wish, often, to not be alone. And yet, often when he was with people, he found that he wished he were alone that the idea of spending time with people was somehow better than the thing itself. He didn’t know if it had always been that way or whether there was something more complex like the relationship between actual sex and that of pornography, if the one came to resemble or replace the other, carved out a new space in a person, or filled a space improperly, but changed its shape in a way that was irrevocable. Some sort of animal probably existed that did just such a thing. 

More sand

I watched as a man left his house ten minutes after his wife, and then walked next door where he was greeted by someone who could only have been his mistress, and the two of them disappeared into the house, which was solid sand beyond the windows, and so I could only guess at what went on there. But I began to see, just by watching them, that these tiny creatures weren’t really so different from  you and I. One of them rammed his car into another’s along the street, and after getting out, and making sure no one was watching, he drove away without leaving a note or anything, driving faster now into the honey combed streets of sand. The afternoon sun was now high in the sky, and I was beginning to sweat, peering over that city, casting a shadow they surely must have noticed over what appeared to be the financial district. No one seemed to care. Not one of them looked up into the sky, all too intent on the hustle and bustle below.

I could see after a while why the artist might have left, why he might have wandered to some other part of the beach, maybe to peer at some shells, or toss a star fish back in the water. Put his gaze on something different then these curious creatures so like people you meet on the street every day, only miniature, and living at the edge of a disaster they didn’t see coming. I can tell you straight out that I still hadn’t gotten the metaphor by that point, she said.

She was sexy, long legged and bony, with small dark circles under her eyes that gave her a movie star’s bedraggled look.

I’m sorry this is taking so long, she said. But really, it was this night that changed my life. Anyhow, the day wore on, and I decided to go in search of the artist, to trust that no harm would come to that small town of industrious people, and I walked down towards the beach where that pile of kelp lay that the sea gulls had been pecking away at all day. And I as I got closer the monstrous stench of the thing nearly overwhelmed me, and I held my nose as I approached, sending a pack of three gulls scurrying away, not quite committing to flight. It was at that point that I saw the gulls hadn’t been pecking away at a pile of kelp all day but at a body, a black and bloated body, turned over on its side, facing away from me.

I’d forgotten by this point, all about the people in the city, and being in the middle of this place I looked around again for someone, only then remembering the artist, the artist who had perhaps done this and then made the people and the castle and run perhaps as a sort of penance. One could imagine such a thing. And I can tell you that though I didn’t want to walk around and see the bodies face, for I was sure that it would be bloated beyond belief and perhaps eyeless, so long had the gulls been at work on it, but a nagging feeling told me that I should. And I stepped around, sending a few squawkers off into the distance, winging towards the now distant sun, beyond dark cliffs holding black trees hostage or perhaps the other way around, and I saw my own eyeless face starting back at me. And I screamed.

It was at this point that I woke up from whatever had happened to me and discovered that the guy I’d arrived with had left, that the whole house was empty, everyone gone. And I knew what I had to do. I went and picked up my clothes from wherever they’d been thrown. I didn’t go searching for any of the lost right away. I understood in a flash, what my dream or vision was trying to tell me, and I accepted Jesus into my heart that very night, and I haven’t doubted Him ever since. 

Stories

We were upstairs, this guy and I, Steve after a few minutes, and he pulled out a thin line of something white, that I’d never done but easily recognized.

And I had this vision, like the ancient Mayan witch doctors used to have, or maybe would still have of what my life was going to be like. I walked down the pathway, which was full of what seemed to be cracked sea shells along a beach, the tide was way out, and someone had built a sandcastle somewhere in between, because the front portion of it had washed away, but the main castle, and the outer wall, which guarded a town of sorts, a real life like town with a butcher and a blacksmith’s shop, you could tell because these tiny sand mounds had the drawing of a knife or two swords crossed over fire that signified what each shop stood for, really it was the finest example of a sand castle that I’d ever seen.

Two sea gulls landed on the ground and pecked wildly at something on the beach, but I was too entranced in the minutia of the sand castle to bother and see what they were up to. It was so far away. I could not understand how a person would have had time to make such a castle, or what the purpose could have been. What possible purpose, beyond anything, artistic I suppose, would drive a person to construct something so unbearably minute and detail filled and yet put it on the edge of constant disaster, because it was clear from the general make up of the beach that at the very least, on a particularly high night the tide came all the way up the beach and would slowly wear away at the castle and the town’s outer walls, and that if we had a hurricane somewhere that the whole thing would be gone, the project ruined.

And suddenly I realized, or maybe just thought I realized that there were infinitesimally small people moving about the town that were only visible if I closed my left eye and squinted, that the streets of the town were bustling, that the blacksmith and the butcher shop’s had actual doors through which people, or what appeared to be people as they seemed to be constructed of parts of the beach, kelp, sand flies, bits of shell, but definitely made to fit into the shape and construction of what you or I would call a person all bustling about. And I became even more concerned, as anyone would, that all of these people were living on the brink of a disaster that they seemed dimly unaware of, for I could see that no one was working on the retaining wall, that the water was damaging it each night, and though I couldn’t be entirely sure, no one was fixing it, they were all dimly going on about their day, waving to one another, picking up groceries, stopping at what were now clearly tiny traffic lights.

I can tell you that my first thought was that I must move them. Must get them all to safety or warn them, but I could tell that we’d have no way of communicating with one another. It was just out of the question. And, it struck me, just who in the world, what artist could have possibly constructed something so fantastical that my eyes and ears could not believe what they saw, the small wheels of a stroller turning on a street. But moreso, how could a person create something like this and then disappear? Who would possibly leave all of these people, or whatever, on the brink of disaster where the smallest misstep of a foot could bring an end to all that hustle and bustle? Who knew how long they’d existed like that, maybe a day, perhaps years. I couldn’t be sure never having been to the beach before, which by this time, I scanned again, trying to see if the artist was anywhere to be found, certain that he, or maker or whatever you want to call him, would certainly be within shouting distance. And I noticed again the sea gulls down by grey green water pecking at something, probably a bed of kelp. And I turned my attention back to the town, watching them go about their days, oblivious of my presence of interest. 

Stories

Once, he’d had a long conversation with a girl who was an Evangelical. Evangelicals are the sorts of people who give religious folk a bad name was his general opinion. And yet, this girl had been smart, genuine, funny, even self-deprecating. “When you accept Jesus into your heart you see that the life you’ve been living, have lived, has been empty.” And he sipped his coffee and told her point blank that he, if he really believed her, was now jealous of her for finding some meaning in her life, that as he conceived it, life was empty for everyone, and that we were all trying to find ways to fill up that empty glass. She wasn’t really listening though, and he could tell.

                “I’m going to tell you something,” she said, leaning confidentially over her cup and revealing a pronounced bit of clavicle rising from beneath her skin like a dorsal fin. “I was twenty at the time,” she said, looking off into the distance, out the window, but not really looking out the window, but looking inward, he could tell, as people sometimes do in these sort of revelatory moments. Looking outward to look inward. That was at least the start of something quasi-religious, he thought.

                Some friends and I had gone to a party on the upper east side of my small college town. Everyone in this town partied on Friday and Saturday nights, because there was virtually nothing else to do. It had one movie theater, but it was the sort of movie theater that only showed popular films a two screener that specialized in high budget films that your average film student could probably deconstruct in about ten minutes time. The college was small enough, six hundred students or so, that it had little impact on the community. It wasn’t, as many people think of it, a college town, but rather, a college that happened to be in a town.

                This house had a long copse of cypress trees that lined the driveway that I remember watching out the window as we pulled into the driveway. I remember being struck by how beautiful the trees were, wet and stripped by a light evening rain. I tried to tell my friends who were sitting in the back seat with me to look out their windows at how beautiful the trees were, but I couldn’t get the words out to describe it. They fell short, or so I thought.

                This all happened a short enough time ago that I can remember nearly every detail. The house had an in ground swimming pool, which people were jumping into from off the roof. The pool was lit by one of those underground lights that suffuses it in such a way that it looks like the shape of an unformed dream. The girl was getting comfortable now, he could tell, warming to her story, she had her hands wrapped around her coffee mug and was staring at the center of the table, but he could tell that she wasn’t there at all, that she’d gone back, time traveled back to this night, what, two three years ago by the look of her when something had happened, and this intrigued him a great deal, this type of time travel, to a moment in someone’s life that they could point to as seminal. He had no seminal moments in his life, just a collection of remembrances that when pieced together formed a sort of meaningless collage, not a life, not a structured thing with points along a line, no vertex or right angles, just points on a graph that signified nothing.

                We’d had a long conversation that night about who each of us would like to sleep with. You’ll forgive me for saying this. I was a completely different person, wholly unrelated to the person who sits before you now. She made eye contact as she said this, assuring him that it was true. She took a sip of her tea before continuing. “Anyhow, the girls and I had had this conversation ahead of time, and we’d kind of staked out our own particular leanings, made sure they didn’t overlap and set about to find them, these guys. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that we found them, found these guys and told them a couple of stories and that each one of us was on her way to being successful in her own way, because it isn’t all that hard to be successful in that sort of endeavor. It’s one of the rubs, one of the clues that it was meaningless, that it wasn’t challenging, that in and of itself it was just another thing to do, like waking up in the morning, or showering, or washing our hair. 

It was important not to think so

As a child he developed a strange obsession with submarines, and he’d spend hours in the bathtub submerging the tiny red plastic toys that is mother purchased from the 99 cent store. The problem with the submarines was that they had a tendency to float. Of course, if they’d just sunk perhaps it wouldn’t have been a good kid’s toy either. It was only possible to submerge the submarine by holding it tightly in the fist of his right hand.

She was lonely on Tuesdays. To be fair, she was lonely on pretty much all of the week days. It had seemed like a grand adventure, living alone after being in the company of her family for eighteen years, her college roommates for four, and then her post-collegiate girls for four years. She had decided that hit was time to live alone. She was twenty five years old. She came home from work in the early evening, kicked off her shoes and ate ice cream on the couch while watching a sitcom that rarely if ever made her laugh.

The primary thing about living alone was the profound silence that reigned throughout the house. It had an unearthly quality, to her mind. She had been the middle child of three rambunctious girls and had never really known or lived in a house that was silent for more than an hour or two. In college someone would always appear to have a conversation with or study. It was strange how quiet a house was when no one lived in it. The floor, some old hardwood, covered by a bevy of rugs would sometimes creak without notice, causing her to suspect that someone was breaking into her house to steal her money and probably murder her as well, or worse. And even though she knew that the floor creaked, every time the floor creaked she had it in her mind that someone had arrived and intended her harm, and she wouldn’t be quit of the idea until she’d walked the small perimeter of the apartment, making sure that nothing was amiss. Sub-consciosuly she must have known that no one was in the house or else why would she walk the perimeter looking for them? Perhaps she should always jump out the window and on to the fire escape when the floor creaked.

When she’d been young her mother, a single parent, had allowed her to walk home from school starting in the fourth grade. Her younger sister had to stay at after care, and her older sister was busy with gymnastics, and so she was allowed to trudge the six blocks home, on white washed sidewalks, and quiet shady streets. And she’d arrive home, she now remembered, to the same silence that greeted her now. Her sister or mother always came home within an hour, but she would always wait for them, tensely, hearing in the slightest change in the wind that same person come to bring her harm. And so, through some fault in childish logic, she’d sit in a large leather chair in the living room watching cartoons with a bat cradled between her knees and the front door wide open in case she needed to run from an intruder. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t even really swing the bat properly, and keeping the door open would have served as an inducement to anyone passing by to enter the home, rather than pass it by. 

Something had been fundamentally wrong with her, even then. She just wasn’t cut out for living alone. Her mind did not operate rationally. She would spend hours thinking about old loves, considering her failures, their mistakes, turning them over in her mind as if it would change anything, as if she even cared. The only respite she found from herself was mindless television, a nightly inoculation from the day’s woes. She’d go online some nights and do light facebook stalking of old college friends, scroll through a month’s worth of baby pictures, or honeymoon pictures in Rome. She’d see all of their smiling faces, looking back at her, and rather than remember the good times they’d had, she’d think of how far apart they were now, how distant. How little the person having a pizza with some man named Steve on the banks of the river was from the girl who’d always asked to borrow her curling iron. In short, she found that by scanning the lives of other people that she did not feel a more intrinsic kinship to them, a united sort of front. Rather, she felt the distant instead.  She found that seeing them happy actually made her unhappy because it disproved one of the great functional fallacies of the natural mind, that we are the most important person in the world. And to see all these people, all the people she’d once known, who’s hair she’d held as they vomited, who’s tears she’d watched shed over old boyfriends, didn’t, probably hadn’t ever needed her to be happy. She’d just been a convenience, a vector, a sign without a signified. It was deeply depressing, so she tried to limit herself to a couple of hours only three nights a week. Those nights she’d usually drink wine, and eventually wind up scanning through pictures of old boyfriends, comparing herself to their new loves, alternatively giddy and disgusted with herself for being so excited when she still looked better than the new girl. Had she always been so shallow? It was important not to think so. 

Byzantium

The story was, in that time such stories were considered far more normative than they are now, and one wonders, now and again, whether just exactly why such stories were bandied about then as though they were truth. But, to be fair, one need only sit up a few nights by themselves and listen closely to the creaks of a tree outside a window, or a car door shutting in the distance, and then see which roads down which the mind meanders to know that enough darkness, enough silence would find us all believing in a sort of magic

.

The king was reputedly a handsome man. It’s hard to tell with kings. He may have had a tongue that he couldn’t put back in his mouth like that fellow from France, but not a person would have spoken of it in his sort of kingdom, where the king was more god than king. 

The king would depart from his ornate throne room to speak with the Lord during the most taxing of times. He crossed over into the Holy of Holies via a brief walkway, illuminated with the six winged and eyed angels keeping watch from the floor below. No one ever knew what the king talked about with the Lord, whether it was the Rule of Law, dividing up what had been learned with the prophets from what had been learned from Christ. Did Christ ever come to these meetings? Was the sort of question that everyone asked themselves in the quiet of their room without being brave enough to inquire.

In the first year of his reign the king approached the Holy of Holies with trepidation, going to speak to the Lord in fear and trembling, nearly wetting his robes that first time as he crossed the threshold.

By that point it was fair to say that the two, or rather four, though we were never clear on that had become friends. And the king would disappear into the Holy of Holies with a backgammon board and fresh mutton. We were always careful to offer him the best before he entered, for we all knew the story of Cain and Abel, and wanted to assure that the last of our kings, the Holy one, would not be found wanting in the sight of the Lord.

He needed to take a wife, this was well known and talked about.

The year 989 was the last that we saw our beloved king, and the last we were to  hold onto the city, the jewel of the ancient world. After his disappearance it was no wonder that the council lost its nerve, and the military men decided to abandon us for easier fare.

Had any of us known what would have befallen our king we’d not have allowed him to ever step foot inside the Holy of Holies. It was said that our God was a jealous God, but I fear we did not know how jealous. The king had been carrying his backgammon board, dressed in a shoddy white robe when last the servants saw him.

We learned to doubt more after that year when it became clear that we weren’t all to be saved, that it was only the king, only the chosen one who would walk away on his own two feet. 

It was said that when the Emperor finally achieved the status of Godhood, that rather than ascend into heaven, he descended into the depths of hell, and brought back the men who had been the scourge of the city on his final days because he did not want their punishment to be as light as it had been had it only gone on for eternity.

The three men called back from hell were initially thankful, and agreed that the emperor had done them a considerable favor in bringing them from eternal torment back to the land of the living. 

The emperor now made God grew strange after the first week, asking that all the serpents in the land be brought to him, and when we complied, he set them all free after a brief talk. We’d expected something more dramatic than that, a hellfire and brimstone speech, a meteor called down from the heavens to imprint his name upon the earth. He explained to us that the Spirit only came forth from the Father, and that Justinian had proved it himself in heaven seventeen years after his death after winning a very heated round of poker with Saint Peter. Most of the stories he told us were implausible, though we all lived in fear of him and accepted his stories as true. He told us that the rains would not come this season, but that they’d come the year after, but that it was but a waste anyhow, as it would be best if folks like us would store up our treasures in heaven. He took a wife, or someone else’s wife and called her his own. In short, he behaved a lot like the emperor had before he’d been killed, and all of us in the quarters began to suspect that we might want to get around to finishing him off before we did anything too drastic. We watched the storm from the window in our night gowns.

Scattered things

He stood just beyond the wrought iron gate at her house, admiring the geometric shape of the small garden out front, the pansies gathered in a row, blue star and zinnias gathered round a small hedge shaped like a rectangle. The sun was high overhead, passing idly by in the sky, pretending to mind it’s own goddamn business, nearly whistling as he stood outside the front gate and thought about what the future could possibly hold.

The third roommate, the man who’d been their third in college had disappeared in a South American jungle under strange circumstances. He’d been sent down there by Wycliffe to translate Bibles into local tribal dialects. He’d gotten malaria straight away, and been bed ridden for the first two months when he was supposed to have been building trust with the villagers.

He wondered about the effect that other people had on him. Like most men, he was concerned about his reception in any room, whether the women found him likeable and charming, good looking and intelligent, the normal sorts of things, he acknowledged, that were likely to come out in any sort of group dynamic, he understood it as biological. And yet, he wondered about the own ghost like aura of self that permeated every conversation he had. It seemed to him that at one moment he could be speaking with a friend about the need for aid to Afghanistan, carrying on a conversation for fifteen minutes about the arable land, the corruption, the natural resources, and then just as easily spend the next twenty minutes talking with a new person about the need to leave the country immediately, to cut all losses and just go. This was not an uncommon sort of phenomenon for him. He feared that if he spent time with fish he’d be breathing underwater in no time. It seemed to him that the possession of a real and defined self was something that was denied him. That the real essence of who he was happened to be triggered by the person who he was with. He was a contingent being. The only way for him to ever figure out who he truly was would be to go away for years in a monastery and think, high in the Andes mountains. And yet, he knew himself, knew that he’d spend those years thinking about all the people he’d left behind, wondering how many thought of him, how many would write. In short, the trip would be wasted. He was entirely given over to the people he surrounded himself with and this was widely regarded as both strength and weakness.

The dog wagged its tail, and he reached down to idly pet it. Her mother came out first, long white hair braided down her back and a pair of glasses resting with equananimity upon her nose.

 “Welcome, welcome. We’ve heard so much about you,” she said, gathering him into her bony arms for an embrace.

“All good things, I hope,” he said with a slight laugh, as people always do.

Passing was more akin to poetry than sport. It was looking at a moving canvas, impressionist painting is perhaps what it was, being able to see the court, the jumble of bodies as something that could be constructed to give meaning. He had found very few things in life that gave him the same aesthetic pleasure as a perfectly timed bounce pass. He took off up the right sideline, scanning the court, looking for his guys to fill the lanes, dipping his left shoulder slightly to fake that way before bursting past the defender and skirting the sideline. He saw Joe setting up in the corner, so he dribbled straight at his defender, pivoting quickly as he reached him, and shoveling the ball backwards as he landed squarely in his chest, freeing Joe for a jumper, which, if it fell, was really unimportant. What was important was the beauty of the movement. The next time down, he pushed past his man with a burst and headed down the lane, drawing two defenders, and, as he jumped, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Hal open at five feet, and he adjusted immediately, flipping the ball behind his head and straight to Hal as the three bodies careened back towards the floor and Hal knocked down an easy lay in. This, this was art.

He walked through the old country grave yard, kicking through red and yellow autumn leaves scattered on the grounds. The wind raked them wildly across the green hills, throwing them up against the trunks of the last few remaining elms in the area.

In honor of shark week

He did not awake immediately from his dream, but stayed asleep in both, finding a double sort of restfulness in sleeping in his real life and sleeping in his dream. So deep was his sleep that it took him a few minutes to feel the gentle swaying of the boat beginning to subtly change. He awoke, not with a start, but slowly, pushing up through the veils before arriving in his dream back in the small boat, admiring the silver fish who bathed in the light.

The shark came quickly, barreling through a school of fish and leaving only faint traces of them in the water behind, a small veil of blood made its way out of the light and towards the ocean floor. Within moments the creature, a shark, he thought, had scattered all of the fish that had gathered beneath the moonlight to feed. And when it had finished, he could feel it out there, the shark began bumping up against the boat, slightly at first, as if were a small dog come to rest its head at the foot of its master. And as the night wore on, the bumping became more insistent, and he looked around for a piece of the ship that he’d be able to use to fend it off. He had forgotten by now, that he was dreaming. He really thought that he was probably going to die, and in his haste he tore off a piece of the boat, fashioning a crude weapon and slapping helplessly at the water as the shark passed through the waves in that awful silence before hitting the side of the boat with increasing frequency. He took off his shoe and threw it at the approaching shape. He swung the bit of board. He prayed that the silver fish might return, so that the shark might dine on more of them and forget that he existed. He prayed to every God that he knew in every language that he knew to no avail. The shark kept knocking at the side of the boat.

In some ancient cultures they thought that a person who died in their dream would die in real life as well. And if any documented cases are true it would probably be, as I think we all know, that the person passed away from cardiac arrest, from the fear that their death was actually happening rather than subconsciously happening. Or perhaps death was real, and the ancients were right. 

It was true that the shark was a metaphor for desire, and the fish a metaphor for opportunity. And he understood that the metaphor had become a necessity, like Jonan’s trip into the bowels of the whale. He understood that it was his own desire that would wind up eating through thousands of opportunities without ever stopping to savor one of them. This was how he interpreted the dream in which he was eaten alive by a shark. He was often wrong about these sorts of things. 

Time's a wastin'

The street was dark and covered in wet patches from a rain that had passed sometime during the night. As he walked he reflected on the slightness of her body held against his, the ghostly insubstantiality of her, hard pressed against him. Things would be no different between them. He complexly regretted the evening already, as a cross street approached, and he took a right turn and walked back towards the waiting arms of the city that he did not love.

 The regret was made complex by its relationship to his former self in time. Had he known earlier in the day how this afternoon and evening would turn out, he would have experienced every moment with increased joy and trepidation, like a hummingbird’s heart thumping frantically above a flower. He regretted not being able to travel back in time to let the prior version of himself know what was to come. How he would have liked to have known all day that he would see her all night. As in most infatuations, the sky would have been bluer, the music more perfect, the curve of her leg beneath the skirt more perfect. And now, reflecting back, he saw that all of these things had been true and that even though he had not noticed them at the time, he was noticing them now, in retrospect, the way the evening took shape around the two of them as if it were the nicest and warmest fitting coat on a cold winter’s day, and not what it was, a collection of missteps and accidents, made glorious through the symmetry of the evening they’d shared. In this way the evening had been like the rise of the whole human race, or like catching a snow flake on one’s tongue in a mild April storm, a matter of chance, meant to be savored, never repeated. 

The failure of his life hung over him as it were a distant yet unattainable dream. He felt, as he walked, as if his life were somehow akin to the ruins of the Roman empire, and he was aware the metaphorically it was grandiose. But he’d stood on the hill of Palatine, hid under an olive tree to block out the blistering Italian sun, and listened to stories of the emperors of old, how they’d probably flooded the Hippodrome and conducted naval battles, how the emperor probably sat on the hill opposite them, which was now just a grassy knoll beneath a busy looking street. And the emperor, or any of the senators who had sat on that particular knoll that day and watched a staged naval battle, a testament to their ingenuity and magnificence, would never have imagined that people would stand there two thousand years later, and have to try and reconstruct the whole scene from the dregs that had been left. That was how he felt. That if he, now, were to try and reconstruct his life from what he’d imagined as a child, or even a very young adult, that it would be hard to see, hard to imagine what dreams he’d once held.

He generally avoided thinking about such things because he knew that the failure lurked just beneath the surface of his thoughts, waiting patiently, for him to spend too long in thought, in reverie, some afternoon, and it was then that he’d pull him down, rip him to shreds. There was good reason to stay busy, to avoid too much thinking. He thought instead about a basketball game he’d been watching, wondered if they’d just pushed the pace a bit more if they’d have been able to win the game. He saw again, the brief flash of a person to pass the ball to, felt the shift of the ball smoothly from right to left hand, and the sudden and pinpoint delivery of the ball through the three pairs of arms outstretched when they saw him passing the ball across court, leading the person he was passing to away from the defenders and towards the basket, hitting him perfectly, with that left-handed bounce pass, and guiding him straight into a layup. It didn’t bother him that he remembered such a thing. It was a thing of beauty. The pleasure was aesthetic, passing a basketball would always be much closer to art than scoring it, more perfect. If Augustine or Aquinas were thinking of what position God would play in a game of pick up, it would no doubt be as pass first point guard. 

Off the coast of somewhere

The woman was gone now, and his cigarette had been smoked. He threw it down on the deck and ground it under his foot.

“I’d prefer,” a voice said, “that you set the ship on fire after the rest of us had had the chance to depart.”

The voice was attached to a peculiarly pretty woman, with blond curly hair and a heart shaped face. She looked to be no more than twenty, and in her eyes, he could see, not horizons or vistas or oceans, or whatever the writers of the past will tell you, but a playfulness, a sense of adventure, a sparkle or twinkle, he could tell immediately that she laughed frequently, and he liked her.

“Dumbstruck?” she asked, “I’m not that pretty. Or am I?” she laughed, good naturedly and hard.

“We seem to have skipped over some of the preliminaries,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s rare that a person accuses me of planned mass murder without actually knowing my name.”

“Only rare? My God maybe I should have just kept walking,” she shook his hand warmly and smiled up at him.

“I’m tempted to make a  joke about chumming for sharks with bits of other passengers, but I fear that I’d have taken the joke too far.”

“I have somewhere to be…” she said, trailing off, and pretending to walk away.

An older couple stood at the side of the ferry next to them, and they looked off embarrassingly. “You know, the older gentleman, said to, what they presumed was his wife, “once, years ago, a whale swam all the way up the channel and stayed for two weeks in this bay.” His wife nodded sagely, seeming used to gathering in bits of errata, as if they were pieces of glass strewn upon her shore. The couple moved on, and they were silent, aware now of the distance between them that had been bridged so quickly at first, and yet, that couple, that older couple staring out into the water maybe not even listening to one another made it clear how far they would still have to go to reach the farther shore. Or something like that. It was not a D.H. Lawrence novel.

“Is that true?” she asked.

“About the whale,” he answered, looking over at her heart shaped face, at the mole on her right cheek, a small blemish, chicken pox? On her forehead, “I think so,” he answered.

“Do you know the end of it? Like, did the whale die horribly due to pollution or what?”

“Strangely, it actually developed a pair of legs, and eventually, after two weeks time, began lifting itself out of the water, very slowly mind you, evolution doesn’t always work as fast as you want it to, and, upon reaching the land, it put on a pair of spectacles and began walking the streets of the city, quoting Shakespeare and talking about the American spirit as personified in Whitman and Emerson. As it turns out everyone loves him. He’s our local mascot.”

“You’re a terrific liar,” she said. “I’m not sure that bodes well for me.”

“Most of life is about lying. We lie to ourselves when we wake up in the morning. If we didn’t, if we acknowledged just how insignificant we were in some grander scope, the world would be a tremendously depressing place. In that way we have more in common with ants than with the gods we aspire to be.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think we are important?”

“Expand.”

“We’re alive, right here and now. We’ve got a leg up on all the generations of the past and all the generations to come. We’re burning brightly and briefly, fireflies in the summer.”

 She looked mischievously at him, her eyes filled with mirth. “Will you take me to dinner?”

“So modern,” he said. “I didn’t know that ladies were asking the beaux’s these days. Strangely, I’m actually promised to that woman,” he said, pointing across the large deck to an elderly balding woman, who was standing at the rail, her hand slightly trembling, an older grandchild in tow.

“Tough break for me.”

“Yeah. I mean, you understand my predicament, right?”

“Entirely,” she said, and started walking away from him.

“Wait.”

“Yes,” she said, looking back at him with pursed lips and a barely suppressed smile.

“I’m willing to give it a shot this evening, but I want you to know what I’m giving up. That elderly woman is very rich, and I was hoping to ingratiate myself with her in an attempt to get written into her will.”

“That’s very noble of you.”

“I was going to try and get written in just below her cat but above her children. I fear that too many people make the mistake of being put above the cat, and then they wind up being sued and looking foolish. I’m thinking if I can get all the attention focused on the cat that I’ll at least have a chance at a million without too much trouble.”

“How do you know she has cats?”

“We go way back.”

“Seven?” she asked.

“Sure. Wear something pretty.”

“I was waiting for you to say something sexist.  You looked like the type.”

“Handsome, charming….”

“Not the words I’d have chosen first, but. Au revoir.”

And with that she walked back below decks, and he stood up in the brisk sea breeze and reflected on the conversation. He smiled inwardly, and it manifested itself as a slight smirk on his face. He didn’t know whether he had her or not, or whether she was worth having. These things could only be known after painful weeks or months of prosecutions and interrogations. Right now was the best time, the beginning, before things had started to go wrong. He tried to remember exactly what she looked like, but couldn’t. He had a habit of not making eye contact when he spoke. He found the gesture too intimate for his purposes. He liked to keep a distance. It was always safer that way. A pod of dolphins breeched along the side of the water and the grandmother and her grandchild ooohed in delight. 

The Olympic wrap up blog

What a spectacular fourteen days! Is the Olympics actually fourteen days? I'm not sure because I didn't catch a single event, but I don't think that disqualifies me from writing an extensive blog post about my favorite events and athletes. Let's dish first:

                                                               "Terrible lizard, indeed. You should have been at Gene's last night"

London-Really London? That's the best you could do? We all knew the Chinese were on the verge of passing the United States as the greatest superpower since Tyrannosaurus Rex, (pre-scientific takedown, where now everyone is like, he probably didn't walk upright and used his tiny arms to scrape for grubs in the dirt or whatever and also based on small chipped pottery probably enjoyed tea parties) walked the earth, but it's amazing to see how far the British have fallen. Come on! You used to control the world! Oh well, at least they're still rich.

It's time to talk about the athletes.

Ryan Lochte-He won some medals and stuff, but who really cares if he's the best in the world at something? What we care about is how he looks with his shirt off. Am I right? Comrades? Com...Oh. Anyhow, besides that what we care about is how he says douchey things like the fact that he winks at women and likes them to be fit. And we, as a society, are like, "hey Ryan Lochte, cut it out." Most guys don't like fit girls and have never winked at them. What a jerk. I'd blame him more, but it might be tough to work on your personality when you're being trained to be some kind of robo-athlete. You have to figure he can spend the first part of his life working on his body and winking, and then, after raking in some dough, he can spend the rest of his life reading Chaucer and Euripedes and stuff. I bet by the time he's fifty or so he's the American version of an English country gentleman, which is a guy who goes down to the YMCA to swim some laps and impress the ladies.

Ryan Lochte's mom also deserves special commendation for saying that he only has time for one night stands. Ryan Lochte's mom is a great example of how parents can support their children no matter what they are doing. Everyone gets a trophy, and if you ever run into a problem it's probably somebody else's fault.

                                                                          "To be fair, if he winked at me, I might wait around and see if he was coming back by as well."


Usain Bolt-Like most people, I love Usain Bolt! I love Usain because he won at a foot race, which is like, the way that you prove yourself in elementary school. It's pretty much how I went from being a quiet and nerdy kid to being a quiet and nerdy kid who could also beat your as- in a sprint. It was a pretty meteoric rise. I jest, but the foot race is definitely where you first learn to compete. I remember the big race in third grade between the fastest kids. What I try to forget is how I finished fourth. I blame the course being too long. I'd have at least won the bronze if it had been a Sprint.

Also, after winning the 100m dash, Usain partied with the Swedish handball team. Like you, I have no idea what handball entails. Nor do I particularly care to find out. The Olympics are strange. I saw some sport that was synchronized air throws or something, with like a person lifting someone up to do poses, and all I kept wondering was how the person underwater wasn't drowning. The point is, I was raised during that era of television where Beer commercials always included references to things like Swedish bikini models. Usain Bolt pretty much one upped it by getting Olympic handball players. Oh, and then he went on to win the 200M as well. He was definitely the most exciting athlete in London. The cheater! No, I only say that because he's not American.

                                                     "Remember when you were a little kid and  you'd wrap a blanket or a towel around your shoulders and parade around the house claiming it was a cape and that you could possibly fly and maybe you were a naked at the time? That's what it's like to be Usain Bolt all the time."

Michael Phelps-Phelps is no longer interesting because he's retired. Anyone who is younger than me but has managed to retire is kind of a dirt bag. Sure he's the most decorated Olympian ever, but who's to say that you need all those decorations. It's like putting all the Christmas ornaments on. That just looks garish Michael Phelps. Plus, aren't we a nation that wants everyone to learn to share. Is it sharing to win that many medals? No. It sets a bad example for our kids. Also, I'm guessing that he swims one event in the next Olympics because what the hell else is this guy going to do? Is he going to sell cars? Work in an office with spread sheets? Start a business? No. He was made to swim. On second thought maybe he should just go off and live with that underwater mermaids in the company of Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. That city looked like it needed more people, and he could then set about winning gold medals against mermen. That's a good goal for Michael Phelps.

                                                     "Oh, Daryl Hannah you've got it all. You could save me if I fell in the ocean. You've got long blond hair and you're bat shi- crazy eating that raw food. Childhood Andrew is daydreaming about living forever with you in your underwater city."


Oscar Pistorius-I actually watched a replay of his heat. Besides the 100M dash final, this was the only thing I tuned in for. I wasn't crazy about the fact that he had to go through a bunch of crap to run in the Olympics. People saying he had an advantage what with the being born w/o legs and stuff. What an advantage for a runner.  I can see why they troubled him. Also, runners who were jealous of the attention he got. Guess what? Nobody would have cared about your race otherwise? Do you see what you've done to me world? All I wanted was a legitimately happy and feel good story about the Olympics and you've gone and ruined it by being yourself. His story is still awesome.

                                                     "Awesome!"


Last and most importantly: we won the medal count! Whatever you thought of America you can just shove it world or liberals who hate America. Because it doesn't matter if you invent sports like tandem cannon balling or women's skeet shooting, we will find a way to beat you! Why? Not because of our athletes training and dedication, or our largely affluent population who can afford the time and money to train. No. We won because we are America. And if you challenged us to a game of bocce ball or Swedish handball we'd find a way to win that too. Now, be gone, we're off to feast. Tonight, we eat gold. In the morning, sickness.

                                                     "Eagle=America."

Concluding things

They found the shoe maker’s body in the river the next morning. He was floating face down, caught up in some thrushes. A pair of boys had gone out fishing and seen first, his coal black shoes, floating in the water and then realized that they were attached to a body, they’d gone to contact the police. It took a while to identify the shoe maker as most of the town he’d grown up had forgotten that he existed, forgotten about the comfortable and well made shoes of their youth, the shoes that cupped their feet so gently that it reminded them of being in their mother’s womb without them ever knowing. 

Eventually the butcher was told that an unidentified body had been found at the morgue, and he knew right away who it was. He walked the sixteen blocks across streets dusted by pollen, waving away two or three sneezes as he traversed back alleys, past old church buildings made of stone, and large glass obelisks that had arisen after the war, where it was said that men counted money all day, profits from all of the projects that had taken place during the war. Occasionally, he had to dodge a car, too much in a hurry to get somewhere to notice the lonely butcher walking, and for a moment he envied the shoe maker, even in death. He could see how he’d become obsessed with traveling back to the past. The pace of things was going to move so rapidly now, he was not sure that he’d be able to keep up. By the time he reached the morgue he hoped to have come to a conclusion about the shoe maker, but he hadn’t. The body he identified was his, he had the same round nose and thick mustache that had characterized him throughout his life. 

And yet, the butcher wondered if this version of the shoe maker did not appear younger, perhaps his crow’s feet were reduced from the man he’d seen only a couple of days ago. And he knew that he was letting fancy take hold. Certainly the shoe maker had wandered down into the river and killed himself to get away from the voices, or to join them. But what if he’d been right? What if he’d traveled into the past? What was he planning to do there? Perhaps, and now he remembered the day of the shelling quite well, perhaps the shoe maker had traveled back in time for a different reason than he’d first thought. 

And he could see the shoe maker now, stepping back into the past, walking down the street in his shoes, the buildings being demolished or reconstructing themselves as he walked, light posts falling and erecting themselves, their light pooling in the street or totally absent depending on the time of year, until he reached his shop, but rather than entering his shop, and warning himself, the old self working furiously on a perfect pair of shoes that this would be the last day to see his family, what if, instead, he walked right by. What if he went up to the crossroads and hailed a cab, had it take him out to the country, and paid the man handsomely for the trouble, and urged him to get back to the city. And then, the shoe maker walked up the old muddy road towards his house, towards his wife, beaming at him from the kitchen window. What if he walked into the house and kissed her, and called up to his two little girls to run and hide, let them know that he was coming for them, that he’d be counting to one hundred, and so they’d best find good spots. What if he’d walked up the stairs into that old house, his bare feet muddy from the road, and chased after his daughters, found them, held them very closely to himself, and kissed the top of their perfect heads. 

What if he’d understood at the last, that you can’t change the past, but realized instead, that at least he could be a part of it. That he could kiss his wife on the lips, and tell his two little girls that he loved them. Perhaps that’s what he’d used the shoes for after all. But then again the butcher was a fanciful man, and he suspected that he was probably wrong, that it was a mere suicide, but he mused all afternoon on the thought of his old friend kissing the tops of those little girl’s heads and greeting his death with a strange sort of smile. 

This all happened later

And so he redoubled his efforts, making one hundred and three more pairs of shoes before he finally had created the pair that he knew would do the trick correctly this time. But he also knew that if he was to disappear, he’d have to let someone know why. And so he went into the public house and tracked down a man who had once been his friend, a butcher who used to share the same portion of the block for his store before the war separated them. He told the butcher that he had made a pair of shoes that allowed him to travel back in time. And the butcher laughed, clapping him on the back, and asked him where he’d been storing all of his liquor. And the shoe maker, a quiet and pensive man, reassured the butcher that in no way was he lying. He’d made shoes that would allow him to travel back to before the war had started. And the butcher could now see that the man was deadly serious, and, if troubled, at least an old friend. So he started to ask him about the particulars of the shoes, and just what he planned to do with them. Two particulars that the shoe maker told him he was reluctant to share, one, because he didn’t want anyone coming after him, and the second because he didn’t really know. The butcher, a kind man really, with a red jowls and a great big beard that made him always appear jolly, offered to buy him a beer, but the shoe maker said no, that he’d have to get back to work now, but that he wanted someone to know where he’d gone. “When will you be back,” the butcher asked, fingering the glass of amber liquid, peering into its depths as if it had something to reveal.

“I don’t know,” said the shoe maker, and with that, he pushed back his stool and walked back towards his shop feeling light in his heart now that he had made up his mind. Of course, he knew exactly what he’d have to do. He was going to have to go back in time and kill himself, for it just wouldn’t do to have two shoe maker’s and only one wife. He didn’t know if he’d have the courage to do it, to kill his unsuspecting self. And yet, he knew that that version of himself had worked late on that fateful afternoon, had left his family out in the country house, his children no doubt playing in attic, a game of hide and seek, had left them to their deaths, his wife, his precious Helen, probably knitting and looking out the bay window waiting for him to return. And he saw that he hated that man, and didn’t just have to kill him, but really and truly wanted to, wanted to take his life for being so selfish, so characteristically wrapped up in his own world that he forgot that other world’s existed.