Storybook Illustration

I opened this children's book to a random page and there was a colorful drawing of a girl climbing over the fence of an amusement park that sat beside a small lake.  The wooden fence meandered along the shore to the spot where she climbed in the foreground; the Ferris wheel there, spinning off the edge of the page.  In the background, amongst all of the other rides, there was a huge animatronic dinosaur tethered with ropes or wires.  The text in the bottom corner explained the scene.  It said that the girl was fighting some monster and she recalled seeing the same creature in that theme park many years ago.

I was more fascinated by the picture, however.  I felt like I could stare at it for hours, like a childhood memory, the endless details of the park and the rides, the games and concessions, the people gaping at the towering toy dinosaur, holding cotton candy and pointing up with their free hands, the watercolor lake tapering off into yellow paper nothingness, the pastel boats floating aimlessly.  I felt like I was poised at the edge of an adventure or closing the book at the end of a long rainy day. 

From Childhood Playmates

I grew up next door to a young girl named Alisa Rosenbaum, who would later write under the name "Ayn Rand" as a adult.  She lived in a grand old house on a shady piece of property.  From my window I could often see her playing in the yard with this little blond-haired boy.  He had a beaming smile, sublime and bright under the sun.  They were best friends, always conspiring and scheming, scratching at the dirt under the bush, dodging between the sheets hung out on the clothes line.  The boy's name was John Galt, and some day Ayn would base a character on him.

But the real boy's life was cut short by a pointless accident involving a rotted porch railing.  The railing had given way beneath John's weight as he leaned against it, and he had fallen and hit his head in a rather unfortunate way on a rock in the garden below.  Young Alissa blamed her parents for neglecting to fix the railing.  And she blamed everyone for not grasping the magnitude of the light that had gone out of her life.  She became dark, sullen, brooding.  Autumn swept the leaves from the shade trees and she spent long hours sitting alone on a plank swing that hung from a bare branch.  I woke so many mornings to that slow, awful, creaking of the rope.

She kept a journal.  She made up her mind.  She would tell the world about John.  She would tell them what she had lost, what the world had lost, when he died.  She would keep him alive in some small way.  She would find the words and the ideas, the principles and premises, that made him what he was.  She would refashion him from the clay!  But it never quite came off.  She would never quite capture that spark, that essence, that boy smiling confidently against the railing in the August haze.  She would never quite get it right.          

Dramatis Personae

I had discovered a glitch in the working of things.  It all started with an accident.  Someone slipped up.  I had been lost in the forest.  I came to the base of this large mountain that had a vast network of tunnels and caves hollowed out in the inside of it.  One of these tunnels terminated in an opening several feet above the ground, high above where I was standing.  As I stood there, staring up at the granite face of the mountain, I saw a man in a marching band uniform fall from the opening.  He stood up, dusted the burrs and dried leaves of the forest floor from his sleeves, cast a wary glance back at me, and then he took off through the trees and he was gone.

I didn't think anything of the incident until I happened to stumble upon a parade the next day.  There were floats and baton twirlers, and of course, a marching band.  As the band passed, someone stepped on someone else's shoe or something, and one of the band members tripped and fell.  I watched as he got back to his feet and dusted the dirt from the street from his sleeves.  And then he spotted me looking at him.  He shot me that same wary glance, and then he pushed the other band members out of the way and took off through the crowd before I could pursue him.

I returned to the mountain in the woods.  In one of the tunnels, I found a stage that was set up to look like a restaurant in my neighborhood.  I had stumbled across some sort of rehearsal space.  I took up a hiding place and I watched as these two women had the same lunch over and over again, reading all the same lines, trying to get it right.  Like the marching band member tripping and falling, it was an event that wouldn't happen until the next day.  This was where they rehearsed life before it happened, making sure it all came off normal and natural.

After about their fifth or six run-through, I began to notice something.  I saw that one of the women kept reproducing a twenty dollar bill from her wallet every time the bill came.  There was no resetting of the props between each scene.  It was a fresh bill every time.  An idea came to me.  I stood up and revealed my position.  They were startled to see me, but I launched right in, asking about the money.  I wanted to know where it all came from.  Was a new twenty created from thin air every time?  Had I found an unlimited source of funds?  A loophole in the economics of existence?

Unfortunately, once we started piecing it all together, we discovered that these funds were being generated from tiny changes out in the world, changes that normally no one would notice, things no one would miss.  But when we traced where the money that had paid for these lunches had come from, it all led back to this young bride-to-be.  Her wedding dress, which she had dreamed of since childhood, had been traded for a cheaper one to pay for the meals.  This would lead to a grave misunderstanding between her and her fiance', as the dress was the same one which an old girlfriend of his had worn for her wedding the previous spring.  And this suspicion, in turn, would break the engagement and derail this poor bride's entire life. 

We couldn't let that happen.  I sat down to figure it all out.  I took account of all of the different scenes being rehearsed in those caves.  We had to juggle the money around from one scene to the other.  We had to set things right and get this bride her dress back.  It was a vast undertaking, pennies from one life, dimes from another, but at last I managed to do it.  The world was back on course, and no one would miss a thing.           

The Night Eyes

I was asleep in a twin bed with a wooden frame and headboard, and the bed was outside in the night air.  It was down at the end of a long residential street, down past the last house, past the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, down where the sidewalk abruptly ends with a few trees and some tangled underbrush.

In a bush tucked away on the unlit side of the neighbor's house, I thought I saw something.  I could just make out the curving shape of the eye, and then the pupil and the iris, as though it had been sketched by pencil.  Then, having seen one, I began to see others, more and more, until the night seemed filled with eyes watching me from every corner.

I felt oddly untroubled by these eyes.  I just counted each new one that I noticed from my bed, as my own eye adjusted to all the nocturnal corners and crevices.  And having counted and cataloged all these eyes, as numerous as dew drops on every surface in the dark morning hours, I gathered up my blankets and rolled back over.