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.