Masquerade

I found myself in a cramped closet filled with costumes and disguises. It was dark in the closet but there was a small skylight which cast down a narrow ray of sunshine, dimly hinting at the fake mustaches and spectacles on the shelves as well as the epaulets on the coat of a fake uniform hung on the clothes rack beside me. Another man came forward out of the darkness into the ray of sunlight. He was small and extremely frail. He looked as though no amount of food or nourishment could ever provide enough strength for his weak body. The light fell across his brow but left his eyes obscured in the shadows as he spoke. He told me that it was his job to follow people, to collect information about them, and he said that being small and hard to spot gave him an advantage. He pointed at the clothes hanging all around us and explained that he had to wear different disguises from the closet here to do his job.

At that moment, yet another man appeared. This one had a tailor's tape measure and he immediately hoisted the frail man up onto a tall bar stool that he pulled out from the corner of the closet, and he began to take the frail man's measurements, pulling his face into a long, sour expression as he read the tape. It began to feel close and crowded in the small closet, and I pressed back against the hanging coats and shirts to give the new man room to work. The frail man paid no attention to the man taking his measurements. He just went on talking to me and explaining how he needed to dress as a child for his present assignment. The man with the tape measure nodded to confirm this as he held the tape measure along the length of the frail man's thin arm.

We all emerged from the closet once the frail man had been dressed in his disguise. He wore a small blue dress and a blonde wig with pigtails. In the bright hallway outside the closet, I had a better look at the man, and I could see that he was just a little over two feet tall, and I could see now that his right leg was missing from the knee down and that he supported himself on a short black cane with a gold handle. The man with the tape measure hurried over and attached a prosthetic leg to the frail man's knee. It was a perfect match for the other leg, already dressed in the same white socks and patent leather shoes. The frail man hobbled forward a few steps on his new leg and then he handed over his cane to the man with the tape measure. As he started away down the hall, I watched him from behind, and I could tell the man by his walk, like picking someone out of a crowd, their face turned away, their back to you, nothing but their posture to know them by. And I could see it then. It was clearly an adult man with all the struggles and gravity and pain of an adult life. He would never pass for a child.

Sketch of a Hanging Man

In the stiff brown pages of an old textbook I found an illustration of a man hanging from a gibbet.  A pair of small creatures were drawn clinging to the man's body.  They were dressed in the rough robes of monks, but they had insect heads and long claw-like fingers protruding from their sleeves.  One of the creatures clung to the man's back, and it seemed to be whispering in the man's ear, but looking closer, I could see that it was actually gnawing at the rope around the man's neck.  The other creature clung to the man's legs, and it rested its head against the man's knees as it grinned lasciviously.  There were more hands and claws breaking through the ground beneath the man, grasping for his swinging feet.  A few inches away a single antenna with sharp spikes was drawn breaking through the soil like an infernal weed.

The caption below the picture explained that back before people knew anything about gravity, it was believed that it was a hanging man's sins that weighed his body down, that it was the demons trying to pull his soul down into the earth that put the fatal strain on his neck.  The counter force of the gibbet and the rope, being applied from above, pulled back and cinched the noose with the authority of divine justice.  The condemned man was caught between them, literally made to choke on his own guilt.

Walking Home

There was a terrible accident, and I was rushed to the hospital.  Just as the doctor glanced up at the clock on the wall to call the time of death, I began to see things from his perspective.  Just a quick drop of the eyelids and a sudden snap of the second hand, and then I was seeing things through his eyes.  I had no memory of my own life and I had no tangible connection to the body lying on the bed, but yet somehow I knew that this migration had taken place.  I was the doctor now.  I went on about the doctor's afternoon rounds, moving from room to room to see the patients as though nothing at all had happened.  Faces smiled up at me from their beds.  People sat up and propped their pillows against the headboards.  The white curtains rippled softly in the cross breeze.  It was turning out to be a pleasant afternoon.  I listened to all of the usual questions.  I nodded to all of the usual answers.

When the doctor's shift was done for the day, I walked home.  It was a quiet, small town road with no sidewalk, just a soft dirt shoulder.  I knew every step of the way.  I knew the mulberry tree where the doctor would sometimes stop and rest in the shade and finish whatever food that he had brought for his lunch in his black tin lunchbox.  I knew the names on all the mailboxes that were posted along the side of the road, all the names that the doctor read every day without thinking as he passed them by.  This was feeling more and more like my life now.  I was settling into the old habits, the comfortable routines.  I turned down a couple of side streets and I arrived in front of the doctor's house.  It was a modest bungalow with a short white fence around the front yard.  The doctor lived there with his mother and his grandmother, and I could hear them in the kitchen fixing dinner as I came in.
 
That night, I read a few passages from the book that the doctor kept on the table beside the bed, and as I was setting aside the book and the doctor's reading glasses, I had a moment to reflect.  It was a nice quiet life, but it was a lonely life, too.  Still I knew that I had chosen this somehow.  I had passed on to this after the turbulent storm of my own life had subsided like a whisper.  This was the calm place that I had reached out for in that last moment.  And as I rolled over and settled in bed and listened to the late summer sounds of the bugs outside in the yard, I wondered where the doctor would go when the time came, where I would choose to move on to when this life was over, what other place would look brighter through the looking glass of mortality.  There would always be a little something missing from every life.  I drifted off, dreaming of it.

The Monster

I went over to my mother's house, and my father was there, staying in the back bedroom.  He had come to town for a brief visit.  I heard his voice coming from the back as I came down the hall.  There was a home hospital bed set up in the middle of the bedroom with an IV and a heart monitor beside it, and my father was laying there talking to my brother on the phone.  He kept telling my brother how stupid and worthless he was.  He spoke so calmly.  He said every horrible, hurtful thing he could think of and he held nothing back.  I took a seat in a chair at the foot of the bed and listened to every awful word.

From bits and pieces of my father's tirade, I gathered the fact that my brother had stolen some money out of my mother's purse.  I waited a while for my father to get off the phone.  I wanted to ask him about all of this.  It began to get dark out, and my mother came in to turn on a lamp in the corner of the room.  I wanted to ask her what was going on, but she just held a finger to her lips and hurried out the door.  We had to be quiet while my father was on the phone.  I sat back and waited, and when he finally let the phone fall weakly from his hand, I tried to talk to him, but my mother came in and ushered me out of the room.  She said that he needed to rest and that I couldn't get him too worked up before he went to sleep.

This incident ruined my father's entire visit.  As a conciliatory gesture, my brother offered to let my father use his car while he was in town.  He said that he would leave the keys at my mother's house and he told my father that he understood if he didn't want to see him otherwise.  But even this sad gesture didn't quite come off somehow, and my father left town still upset, and everyone felt horrible about the whole thing.  Worst of all, I knew that this would probably be my father's last visit.  I knew that he didn't have the strength to make the trip again.  And this was how we had left everything.

After he had gone, I dropped by my mother's house again.  I still didn't completely understand what had happened and I wanted to ask her about it.  Summer had passed as the weeks had gone by and there were fallen leaves in the front yard.  I found my mother alone in her living room, sittting in a chair over by the window.  The curtains were drawn, and I could hardly see her across the dim room.  I talked for a long time and I asked her all sorts of question and all the while she just sat there.  Finally, she spoke up in a low voice, almost under her breath, and she said, "You know that I never should have gotten involved with that monster."

I knew that she was talking about my father and I resented her saying that.  I looked at her and said, "A monster!?  A monster could just as easily be someone that does something petty like stealing money from their mother's purse when they have a perfectly good job and they make a decent living and they have absolutely no reason to be doing things like that." But then it occurred to me that I still didn't know the whole story.  So I asked, "Did he even tell you why he did it?  Did he give you any kind of explanation?"

She hesitated, like she wasn't sure how much she should say.  Finally, she told me that my brother had taken the money because someone was threatening to kill him.  I didn't understand.  "Why would someone want to kill him?  What does that have to do with taking money from your purse?" She sighed, and then she muttered something about some football team losing a game.  I started to put it all together, and I began to realize just how big of a problem my brother really had.  I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I said, "He didn't just take a little bit of money from your purse, did he?"

She began to throw her hands about erratically.  She tried to explain that my brother had taken some credit cards that she had had, and he had maxxed them out.  But then, overwhelmed by her efforts to explain, she just burst into tears and buried her head in her hands.  The whole ordeal had left her financially devastated, ruined.  I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.  My hands were shaking.  I didn't know what to do.  I just sank down into a chair, and I sat staring with my eyes wide.

Mountain View

I was part of an expedition that was heading up to an abandoned hotel in the mountains.  I was taken along because I had been to the hotel on vacation years ago when it was still open and I knew the layout of the hotel and I had important information crucial for the expedition.  There were switchback stairs carved into the grey, frozen face of the mountain and we used them to climb up to the hotel high above.  A few of the steps were cracked or broken or missing entirely, and we had to step carefully around the cracks or jump to clear the gaps in some places.  We inched our way up with our backs to the rock face and our breath steaming with each deep exhalation.

The hotel was literally built into the side of the mountain.  The front facade protruded directly from the rock, and there was a long porch that ran the length of the front of the hotel and hung out over the edge of the mountain side.  We all gathered on this porch, a few members of the expedition bracing themselves against the wooden railing and peering down at the grey swirl of mist and snow through which we had just ascended.  It was evening and the light was beginning to fade.  The leader of the expedition consulted with me about where to go next.  I pointed down towards the end of the porch to a set of double doors that led to the old front lobby of the hotel.

It was dark inside the lobby, and although the cold, dry air had preserved everything, there was still a sour, stale smell of abandonment and neglect that hit me as soon as I came though the door.  I remembered the woman that had been there behind the front desk.  I remembered her crooked blonde wig and her sloppy makeup and that awful way that she laughed, and I remembered how strangely uncomfortable I had felt being here then.  I crept along into the dark, wondering if this woman's ghost was still there or if I might encounter some remnant of her shadow on the wall.  I almost turned to go right then, but the leader of the expedition grabbed me by the arm.  He waved his flashlight down a hallway, wanting me to lead them all deeper into this ruin.  He communicated with pantomimes and gestures, somehow reluctant to speak or disturb the vacant silence.  I took a deep breath and nodded and we moved on.

We came to a large dining hall where all the round tables were still covered in white table cloths and the places were all still set with dishes and silverware.  Moonlight streamed down through the skylight, illuminating the long threads of cobwebs strung from the light fixtures.  I remembered having a late dinner here, and I remembered how I had still felt uneasy and how the waiter's strange, sly demeanor had put me on edge.  I remembered lifting the silver lid on my meal and expecting to find something alive and squirming underneath.  I snapped out of this memory and found myself in the dark dining hall holding a silver lid that I had pulled back from one of the trays on the table.  There was nothing but discarded bones left on the tray.  I studied the bones closely, looking to see what sort of animal they had once belonged to, but I couldn't tell anything from the bones.

In the back of the dining hall there was a short flight of stairs that led to a narrow hallway.  The guest rooms were all along this hallway.  I led the expedition down the hall and I showed them the room that was just across from the room that I had stayed in.  This was what they were looking for.  This was why they had brought me.  When I had stayed here, I had been kept awake all night by the screams of a woman giving birth in the room across the hall.  I remembered tossing and turning in my bed.  I remembered clutching my pillow around my ears.  I remembered that nothing, absolutely nothing, had helped at all.

The door was unlocked and it swung inward into the dark room.  I had never actually been in the room.  I had just pictured it in my mind as I had laid there all night listening to the woman scream, and I had just assumed that it was a basic room like the one that I was staying in.  Instead, I saw now that it was a large, open shower room with white tiles.  There was a bare twin matress laid down in the middle of the floor.  There was a large, deep spot of blood down at the foot of it, and there was some blood spattered on the white tiles around the room.  There was a metal pail in the corner filled with blood that had slopped over the sides.  The leader of the expedition made his way over to this pail with his flashlight, and he was just about to start picking through it, when another member of the team called out that she had found what they were looking for.  She held up a signet ring that she had found on the edge of the drain in the middle of the room.  The flashlights all converged on this ring.  It was gold and it had an "X" carved onto the flat surface of it.

As the expedition was packing up their gear to leave the hotel, I decided to have one last look at the room that I had stayed in on that night long ago.  The room faced towards the east, as I had requested, towards the view from the front of the hotel and the face of the mountain.  The clouds had broken and the sun was just beginning to rise, casting the surrounding peaks in cool blues and breaking in hues of red and gold through the pass.  The light shone through the windows and fell on a bookshelf that was built into the wall across from the window.  I reached out to grab one of the books, but then I realized that the bookshelf wasn't real.  It was just a design in the wallpaper.  I shook my head.  I had been fooled by that same illusion when I had been here before.

A Brief Survey

It was late at night, and I decided to go out and do some shopping while the stores were all quiet.  I pulled into the empty parking lot of a department store.  Just inside the entrance there was a display of white, faceless mannequins surrounded by Greek columns and pediments.  A spotlight shone down on this display, and the walls around it were painted black, giving the impression that the display was suspended in empty space.  One of the mannequins had laurel leaves around her head, and she wore a long Grecian gown.  She indicated the way to the sales floor with the languishing pose of her arm, her palm upturned as though she were gathering cool running water.

The way that she indicated lead down a wide, dark corridor, mostly bare except for a few other faux Greek artifacts scattered here and there along the way.  In the dark I stumbled against one of these artifacts, a large free-standing vase carved with glyphs and symbols.  I knocked the thing over and I saw that I had chipped a piece off of the edge of it.  I was standing there holding the broken piece and looking for where it had broken from the vase when I heard a woman's voice further down the corridor call out to me, "Oh, it's fine.  Don't worry about it."

I looked up and saw three women standing around a little area that had been set up in the middle of the corridor.  There was a small rug laid down and on the rug there was an a leather armchair, an old grey TV with silver dials, and a camera set up on a tripod facing the armchair.  One of the women beckoned me with a wave of her hand, and when I came over, all three of them eased me into the chair, gently pushing down on my shoulders and holding me there.  The woman who had beckoned me over went and turned on the camera, and she spoke with her eye to the eyepiece of the camera, communicating with the image in the camera instead of talking directly to me.

The women told me thay they were taking a survey of some sort, and they said that I would get some coupons for the store if I gave them a few minutes of my time.  It sounded like a fine deal to me.  The woman behind the camera asked me a series of random questions as she continued to peer into the eyepiece.  The other two women continued to hold me in place with a hand on each shoulder.  They applied only the slightest hint of pressure, but I knew that they would hold me firm if I tried to resist or get up and get away.  I looked up at one and then the other from time to time.  They both stood with fixed smiles, staring straight ahead.

When she was done, the woman behind the camera looked up from the eyepiece and thanked me warmly.  Then she went over and turned the dial on the TV with a sharp click.  I noted the deep red nail polish on her fingers and the brisk but precise clarity of her movements.  The glow of the TV slowly brightened.  The picture rolled a few times before settling into place.  And then I saw my own face staring back at me, wearing the same wool winter cap.  I noticed on the screen that my eyes were squinting strangely, and as the footage of the survey was played back to me, I watched as my eyes went in all sorts of different, random directions from one another, like two eyes that hadn't been properly paired to work together.

Having never seen footage of myself talking, I had no idea that my eyes had developed this strange wandering habit.  I was alarmed and upset that this had been recorded.  I started to stir from the chair, but just as I had thought, the two hands on my shoulders held me firm.  The footage had already been recorded.  It was too late to take it back.  The woman who had asked the questions picked up the TV from its stand and she carried it over to a wall across the way where there was a bank of dozens of these TVs mounted in a grid.  She slid the TV with my face on it into the last remaining empty space in the grid.  Together these TVs formed a mosaic of faces with a variety of grotesque tics and unconscious idiosyncrasies.  I looked from face to face and took in the whole effect of them until I was lost in this sea of gesticulating heads, gone from the chair completely, just another face on the wall.

Paying My Respects

My mother called me and asked me to come to a funeral.  This man that she knew had died, some friend of hers from church.  I remembered seeing him there when I was young, and I remembered noticing how much older he had gotten every time that I had seen him again and how he had served as a benchmark of the years, and that was all.  I reluctantly agreed to go.  I stood in my upstairs hallway and hands appeared to tie the black tie around my neck and to slip the black suit jacket over my shoulders, and finally someone led me down to the car waiting out in the driveway.  The streets were empty and the raindrops tapped against the wet pavement.

I slipped in through some back door of the funeral home, and I walked down a long dim corridor where someone was lighting tapers along the wall every few feet.  I heard organ music.  I found the room with the flowers around the casket and the mourners standing around in small groups, talking.  My mother was there with a few of my aunts.  I passed them with a nod and I went to look down at the man in the casket.  We both had on the same black suit and tie.  I looked at the man's bald head and his little white scruff of a beard, and I recognized him once again.  I wanted to tell my mother and my aunts that I had seen the man just the day before.  We had passed in the woods at a spot where the path turned.  He had waved a hand at me and I had waved a hand at him, and that was it.  We had both went on without a word.  But now it turned out that he had died three days ago, and there had been two days preparing the service.  All the things that I could have asked him, if only I'd known him.  

Last Words

My wife and I were browsing around a warehouse filled with old junked typewriters. There were windows high on the walls with grimy, yellowed panes of glass that softened the light that shone through. There was a strong smell of stale oil in the air. The typewriters were piled up everywhere, old manual typewriters, electric typewriters, big office typewriters, all sorts of types and brands. Some were piled in heaps of gears and hammers. Over on a shelf by the wall there was a bin filled with loose keys that had fallen off the different machines. I slid the bin out a little ways with my finger and I gave the box a good shake. There was every letter of the alphabet in there, in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.

Any of the typewriters were free to take, if I could find one that worked and was worth taking. I came across a few typewriters that were sitting by themselves on tables and desktops scattered around the shop, as though someone had set them up there ready to be used. Seeing if these typewriters still worked seemed more promising than trying to extract any of the broken machines from one of the piles. They were at least still left at their posts, still maintaining the semblance of service. A few even had working desk lamps shining down on their carriages and chairs placed before them, ready to be occupied.

My wife started to get impatient as she followed me through the warehouse. She saw nothing but heaps of old junk. She said that I'd never find a typewriter that worked, and she couldn't see the point in trying to find one, anyway. They were all old and outdated and obsolete. I came across one that had a stack of blank paper laid out beside it. It was a little blue typewriter, and it looked just like the one I used to own, except that it had an actual return key, rather than that long metal lever on the carriage. I told my wife to just give me a second, and I fed the paper in with that soft satisfying click of the wheel. It jumped to life with a hiccup when I flipped the power switch. The loose desktop rattled slightly from the warm hum of the machine as it waited for me to tap the first key.

I slid into the chair. I sat for a moment, looking at the broken parts that had been crammed onto a shelf behind the desk beyond the glow of the desk lamp. I looked at the ashtray beside the typewriter and the burned out stub of a cigarette left still poised and forgotten on its edge. I felt like I had to choose the first words I typed carefully. I felt like the health and fate of this machine depended on what I typed. It would be a summons from the outside world, a message recalling it to life. This was a negotiation. I had to convince the typewriter that it still had work to do, that there were still words out there worth shedding ink for.

I don't remember exactly what I typed. I remember the click of the keys and the sharp snap of the hammers against the paper. But I hadn't gotten more than five words out before I looked up and noticed that they had all run together on the page, a long smudge of consonants and vowels all hitched to one another in a single incomprehensible word, saying nothing. I jiggled the space bar. It felt loose under my fingers, and nothing happened when I pressed it. I felt the hum of the machine begin to fade away. The bulb in the desk lamp flickered. I tapped randomly at the keys, but the typewriter was gone. My wife just shrugged and shook her head.

An Empty Gallery

I met an old man who could draw. He was tall and cadaverous, and he always wore the same shabby brown suit and hat. He looked as though he slept in the suit and it had worn to the contours of his frame to the point that it no longer wrinkled. His hand was long and frail and it would tend to shake until he made a fist to steady it, and his eyes were milky and dim. But he could still weave together a picture in minutes like he was conjuring the image out of the air. It was amazing to watch him work, and I got the idea for the two of us to open a shop together. We rented out a space for the store, and I displayed some of his work in the front window on a couple of small easels with spotlights shining down on them.

I tried to find some angle, some specific type of drawing or merchandise that would become our stock and trade. I wanted to have some part in this. If the old man's gift was lightning in a bottle, I wanted to at least be the one that designed the bottle. I thought, for instance, of having the walls on either side of the store lined with racks of hand crafted greeting cards. I would concoct the sentiments and the old man would draw the illustrations, and we would be in the greeting card business. But it never worked out that way. We never settled on anything definite. I never knew what kind of store we had. The two of us would just stand there in the middle of the empty shop, the stone walls and the floor all completely bare, and we would wait for people to come in out of the rain.

And people would come. The pictures out front would catch their eye and they would wander in, looking all around. They all wanted something different. They put forward their requests uncertainly, not sure if such a thing could be done, or if it could be done right, or if it could be done by us. One woman wanted a simple family portrait of herself and her children, her hands resting on their shoulders. Another man wanted the face of his late wife drawn from memory. That is, he wanted his memory somehow conveyed to the old man's hand. People wanted landscapes that they had seen in their mind, or moments they had long since lost. The old man's supplies would materialize upon request, his pens and his pencils, and with broad curving strokes he would indelibly etch their vision onto the paper. I stood by with the customers and watched him work, and I never got tired of it. Afterwards, when the old man was packing his tools away in a small wooden case, the customers would always dab their eyes with a tissue and they would press the tissue into my hands as a token of gratitude and as payment for our services. I took the tissues and locked them away in the cash box in the back room of the shop, but I knew they weren't for me or for anything I'd done.

Penumbra

We found a shadow hiding in the corner of our back yard. It had come there weak and injured. My daughter and I first noticed it because it didn't belong to any of the other objects there in the yard, and we could see that it was out of place. The shape of it flinched as we approached, and we could tell that it was scared. I tried to coax it out. I spoke gently and beckoned it with my palm turned up and my fingers trying to draw it forward. But it just rattled about in the tall weeds and it refused to come out.

Late in the evening, we brought it out some food. Being a shadow, we had to bring it the shadows of food, and this was no easy thing to arrange. I laid the meal out on the dining room table in the dark. Then I placed a flashbulb at one end of the table. I popped the flash, and the tableaux of the bottle of wine and the block of cheese and the plate of fish were all briefly illuminated, the memory of the sight lingering far longer than the sight itself. The shadows of the wine, the fish, and the cheese had all been cast onto a tray that had been placed behind them, and I lifted the tray up in the dark and carried it carefully from the room.

We had to wait till evening to feed the shadow, because the other shadows were longer and deeper then, and it could blend in with them and creep out a little from its hiding place. It was a starlit night, and I crossed the yard shading the tray with my hand, trying not to let any of the starlight disturb the shadows of the food on the tray. My daughter tagged along beside me. She wanted to see the shadow come out to feed. I think she wanted to pet it or tickle it behind the ears. But I told her that she had to stay back. The shadow was wild and scared. We didn't know where it had come from or what it would do.

As we approached the corner of the yard, I realized that I had no idea if the shadow was still there. The shadow made no noises of it own, and there would be no sounds if it bumped against the other shadows and the other things in the dark. I had a flashlight with me, but that would do nothing but chase the shadow away, and I didn't want to hurt it or scare it. So, I just placed the tray on the ground and backed away. I whispered to my daughter and told her that we would come back in the morning and see if the shadows were gone.

The Silent Years

I came into Galilee on foot, feeling my way through the rocks and crevices with my staff. On the outskirts of a town, I came to a small shack sitting alone in a clearing, the ground parched and cracked all around it. There was a young man up on the top of this house, working on the peak of the roof, hammering long nails into the boards there. I stopped before the door and looked up at him and waited. He looked down from his work and saw me standing there. He wiped the sweat from his brow and shaded his eyes with his arm. I called up to him, asking for lodging, and he nodded, and the arrangements were made as simply as that.

In the evening, when the young man was done with his work on the roof, he made a fire in the yard in front of the house and he cooked some stew over the fire. We sat in the yard eating the stew as the sun went down behind the house and a breeze blew in, cooling the sweat of the day. Two men approached out of the gathering darkness. They were friends of the young man. They introduced themselves to me as Peter and John. The one named Peter asked the young man if he was ready to go to Jerusalem, but the young man shook his head as he scraped the last of his stew from the bottom of his bowl. He told Peter that he had to stay to finish the house. He told both of the men to go on to Jerusalem without him. He told them that he would meet them there when he was done.

The two men walked off, grumbling to themselves. Peter glanced back a few times with a scowl on his face. But eventually they receded back into the darkness and we were alone again before the fire. The young man said nothing for a long time. He just stared thoughtfully into the flames. When the sun was almost completely set, I began to notice some lights far across the plains. I tapped the young man on the shoulder and I nodded in the direction of the lights and asked, "Jerusalem?" He looked that way and nodded slowly. I could see that it was something that he didn't want to talk about. I could see the lights reflected in his eyes and I knew that it was some dream that he had. He sat gazing at it out there, just beyond his reach.

But he stayed there, working on the house, making a little more progress with each passing day. Other men came, other friends, one named Andrew, others named James and Bartholomew. They came in the mornings and the evenings and at midday. They found the young man pounding the nails into the boards on the roof or mixing tar over a fire in the yard. The conversation was always the same. The men would tell him that they were headed on to Jerusalem. They would ask him if he was coming with them. He would tell them that he had to stay and finish the house and that he would meet them there when he was done. And they would stomp away, grumbling and leaving dust in their wake.

Time went by, and eventually the friends stopped coming. The last of them had moved on to Jerusalem years ago. They had settled into their lives there, and they had probably long since forgotten about the young man, and they had probably taken jobs and gotten married and given up waiting for him. The young man explained the situation to me many times, many evenings beside the fire, as though he had read my thoughts, as though he was answering some persistent question that I had never asked out loud. The house had been left to him by his father. It was the only thing of value that he had in the world. He had to make sure that it was fixed up properly, and he had to find new owners to sell it to. He couldn't leave until this was taken care of. I never said anything in response to this explanation, but I grew more frustrated every time I heard it.

As the young man grew older, his beard grew fuller and his brown hair grew longer. One morning I woke up and I saw him washing his face in the clay basin across the room. The water dripped from his beard as he lifted his head and wiped his face with a towel, and then, with that sudden fresh clarity that sometimes occurs upon waking, I realized for the first time exactly who he was. I understood the whole thing. These were the silent years, the ones the Gospels had never mentioned. I knew the whole story. I knew what was ahead. And yet, at the same time, this future seemed so precious and unset. There was no certainty that things would happen as they were supposed to. My frustration got the better of me, and I started yelling at the young man, "How can you just stay here working on this house!? You know who you are! You know what's going to happen, what needs to happen! How can you waste all this time!?" But he said nothing. He just followed his eyes to a support beam across the room, feeling its unsteadiness with his hand. Another thing he'd have to fix.

I stopped talking to him for a long time after that. I would stare sullenly at the fire in the evenings and I would snatch the bowl of stew from his hand when he offered it. I knew I wasn't being fair. I knew I wasn't being a thankful and respectful guest in his home. I didn't care. I couldn't stand to sit there while history was put on hold, maybe even jeopardized, just for the sake of some ramshackle house. I felt like my skin was crawling with aggravation. I thought of a thousand angry words to say, but I swallowed each one. I shuddered at every pounding of the hammer. I clenched my fist whenever I caught a whiff of tar in the air.

By the time the house was done, we were strangers. We never even said goodbye to one another. I just woke up in my bed one morning and the house was quiet, and I knew he was gone. There was a headstone set in the ground beside the front door with a simple epitaph which read, "Gone to Jerusalem", and there were a couple of bright desert flowers planted around the stone. I understood that he had left the house with me and he trusted me to take care of it. I stood over the stone for a long time. I felt the flower petals with the tips of my fingers. I walked around the house, inside and out, feeling the solid craftsmanship of the joints and the boards. I sat on the edge of my bed, smoothing the blankets and situating the pillow. I waited for the tears, but they never came.

That night I had a dream that rolled down through the ages. I dreamt that I sat by the fire in the yard and watched as the lights of Jerusalem went out one by one. Wars and nations came and went. Travellers passed by, asking the way, their clothes and modes of transportation changing with every generation. Soldiers passed, wearing different uniforms, belonging to different armies, pushing ever more sophisticated machines of war among their ranks. And all the while the house stood, weathering every storm that swirled around it, rooted firm against every tide of time and fortune, until finally I woke up, and I knew that I was somewhere else now, adrift in human history. I went to the door and looked out on this new world. It still looked like the same desert, but I knew everything was different out there beyond what I could see.

A Season Ticket

I went down to the baseball stadium to see the game.  It was a fine day, and from my seat high in the upper deck I could see the city surrounding the park.  I could see the traffic moving through the streets.  I could see the tall buildings all around.  I thought about how my father would have loved this.  I thought about him living in an apartment in one of these buildings and coming down here every day in the summer heat to see the game.  He would have been in heaven.  And when I thought the words "in heaven", I took a moment to consider them literally.  Maybe he really was somewhere just like this, someplace beyond this life, making his way through the city streets with his ticket and a mitt for catching foul balls.  And if that were so, if there was even a possibility that that were so, then in a way, this really was heaven already, this was a little parcel of heaven, a few city blocks colliding with eternity.  This was what heaven meant to someone and it was here in this life, on Earth.  I sat there high above the field and I smiled at the thought.

Home Movie

It seemed like a fragment of a childhood memory.  I was sitting in the front seat of a pickup truck beside my grandfather.  The truck was parked in the doorway of a collapsing old barn that my grandfather used as a garage.  Only the bed of the truck was tucked inside the barn.  The cab was out in the open in the muddy driveway that wound its way up to the barn, and the driveway was lined with rusty mufflers and discarded fenders and other debris on either side.  There were empty cans of oil and old food wrappers scattered about the seat of the truck.  My grandfather just stared out the windshield, saying nothing, as he drank black coffee from his heavy brown thermos.  He held the thermos in one hand and he held the lid in the other and he drank the coffee from the lid.  He took his time drinking the coffee, dipping his chin forward with each sip but keeping his eyes fixed and watchful on something out there beyond the windshield.  It was an overcast day, but through the grime on the windshield I could see that there was soft light breaking through a stand of bare trees across the field.

I wasn't sure what the significance of this memory was, or why it had lingered with me.  But as I sat there watching my grandfather and watching him watch the light through the stand of trees as though he expected something to emerge from that spot, I heard a voice somewhere in the darkness of the barn behind me.  It sounded distant, like it was rattling around inside a rusty metal drum.  The voice was talking about how they could clean up old footage like this, make it something crisp and usable.  As the voice spoke, it seemed like the scene before me was drawing focus.  The colors and shapes softened and blurred for a moment, as though seen through a tear drop, and then the whole scene pulled into an incredible sharpness.  I could see every detail.  All of it became meaningful.  There was a movie of this.  The boy and the grandfather sitting in the truck.  The light beyond the trees.  There were long, unspoken shots that you lived with, dwelt in, contemplated for their own sake.

I opened the door and climbed down from the truck.  I wanted to have a look around, see everything with this new clarity.  I saw it all in a succession of long takes.  There was a long shot of a row of pines, the wind cascading through their branches.  I could see every needle.  I could feel winter coming in on the wind.  The shot lingered just as long as it needed to, saying everything it needed to say.  I turned and saw the farmhouse with the long clothesline strung from the corner of the house to a telephone pole out by the road.  There were sheets and blankets hung on the line and they rippled in the wind.  There was no one around, but the shot rolled on and on, as if to say that it would stay here, long after everything else was gone, after the wind had carried off the world, and there just this place, just this memory.

The Sound of Water

My wife and I were woken up at three in the morning by the sound of rushing water coming from the bathroom of our apartment.  We opened the door and found that the floor was flooded a few inches deep.  The water was flowing from a hole in the ceiling in the far corner of the room.  It appeared to be coming from the apartment above ours.  As we stood there in the doorway of the bathroom, several neighbors from the other apartments came in to see what was going on.  Apparently the sound of the flowing water had woken them up as well.  A few of them squeezed into the doorway beside us and surveyed the disaster with curiousity.  One of them noticed that there were streams of red in the water pouring from the ceiling and clouds of red spreading here and there in the water on the floor.  Someone else said that it looked like it might be blood.

That kind of caught everyone off guard.  We all looked at each other, not quite sure what to make of that statement.  Then one of the neighbors pushed through the crowd and we stood aside and let him through the doorway of the bathroom.  He crept in carefully.  His feet were bare and the water was cold.  He curled his toes and stepped lightly across the tile.  When he got over to the other side of the room, he braced himself against the wall and turned to look up at the hole in the ceiling where the water was coming through.  His eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.  His head started shaking back and forth.  He looked down, biting his lip and thinking, and then he rushed out of the room, gesturing with his hands for us to part and clear a path for him.

We all followed him as he ran down the hall to the stairwell and pounded up the stairs to the floor above.  He slammed his shoulder against the door of the apartment directly above ours, cracking the wood until the lock gave way.  The door burst open and slammed violently against the wall as he stumbled into the dark apartment.  Inside, I could hear the running water, louder that it had been below.  We all made our way through the rooms, and we stopped cold at the doorway of the bathroom.

The faucets on the sink and the tub were all turned on full blast, and the sink and the tub were filled to overflowing.  The water ran over the sides of the porcelain and streamed across the floor to the far corner of the room where an old woman stood doubled over with her face pressed to the floor in a pool of blood diluted by the water flowing around her head.  One of her hands lay limp in the water, and there was a silver gun lying next to it.  The man who had rushed up there hooked the gun with his big toe and drew it away from the woman's body.  Someone turned off the faucets and opened the drains on the tub and the sink, and we all stood there, trying to make some sense of what we were seeing.

It seemed that this woman had lived above us, harboring some grudge against my wife and I.  We had no idea who she was, but apparently she had taken some offense to us or something we had done to the point that it had consumed her entirely.  She had concocted this bizarre revenge.  She had made a hole in the floor and then turned on all of her faucets in order to flood our apartment from above.  Then she had placed her eye to the hole that she had made while putting the muzzle of the gun to her head.  She wanted to leave her body there to watch, beyond death, with the water and the blood flowing around her cold eye and a cackling rictus of rotting teeth hardening on her face once the rigor mortis had set in.

Morning Classes

I was taking a class that was held in the very early hours of the morning. I arrived at the school when it was still dark out, and even then, I was hustling, walking fast, afraid of being late. The school building was just a large brick house. There were three storeys to the house, and as I approached, I saw that it was lit from top to bottom. Inside, the rooms of the house had all been converted into normal classrooms. The number of the classroom that I was looking for was printed on the red stub of a carnival ticket that I pulled from my pocket. I went from room to room, floor to floor, trying to find the right room, trying to match the number of the ticket in my hand. I rode up in a newly installed elevator with heavy silver doors and blue illuminated buttons. I made my way back downstairs by a grand staircase which had a thick white banister capped with posts on each floor that were mounted with the busts of different Greek philosophers, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle.

But there seemed to be no system to how the classrooms were numbered. They weren't numbered consecutively, or in any other sort of discernible order. They weren't numbered by floor or subject. I held up my carnival ticket and worked my way up and down the halls, thinking I had picked up the trail that would lead me to my class, thinking that I had deciphered a pattern in the numbers. But then I would find myself confronted by a seemingly random number posted on the copper plaque beside the door of the next classroom I came across, and it would completely blow the pattern that I had thought I had established. I would hold up the ticket next to the copper plaque and stare at them both in a stupor, as though holding them side by side would somehow bring one number into miraculous alignment with the other.

Finally, I thought I had found the right room. I started to settle in at one of the desks in the back. I dumped my books on the desktop, and I started to hang my coat on the back of the chair. The class hadn't begun yet, and there was hardly anyone there. The teacher was at his desk up at the head of the classroom, and a couple of his students were there talking to him. I had slipped in unnoticed, but when I set my books down, the noise had caught their attention. I looked up from arranging my coat on the back of the chair and saw that they were all staring at me. The teacher held his white coffee cup poised under his scowling face. They said nothing, but they stared at me so insistently that I became certain that I had mistaken the room number. Everything about their demeanor conveyed the idea that I was in the wrong place. I looked at my red ticket again. I went back out to the hall and looked at the room number again. I blushed and laughed and gathered up my books and coat and slipped back out of the classroom.

I started to think that I would never find the right room; I would never make it to class on time. The class was probably already in session, somewhere, in one of these rooms, the lecture already proceeding in muffled tones behind the closed door, vital information for the course already dispensed, all of it already lost to me, frustrated, roaming the empty halls with my useless red ticket. The books weighed heavy on my arms. My coat was hot and uncomfortable slung over my shoulder. I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. I turned this way and that, stepping in one direction and then another with a purpose, only to find that purpose dissolving in uncertainty. I had no idea where to go.

Down at the end of one of the halls there was a set of French doors with long lace curtains hung over their windows. I went out through these doors and I found myself on the front porch of the old house. There was a young lady there, wearing a white nightgown and swinging ever so softly on the porch swing. She was turned away, gazing off at the morning glow on the horizon. She turned back briefly to look at me, scanning me from head to toe with a quick nod of her head, and then she turned to look back out at the sky. I thought of the red ticket still in my hand, still clutched in my fist. Maybe she would know where my classroom was at. She seemed like she was a fixture here, perhaps a daughter of someone on the faculty or on the board of administration, passing her time out here on the porch swing while all the daily business of the school carried on inside.

I turned my hand up and opened my fist, but instead of the red carnival ticket, I found a frail baby bird sitting in the palm of my hand. It looked like I might have injured it a bit from the pressure of my fist. Its feathers were disheveled and matted, and it struggled to its feet on broken bones and flexed its crooked wings. It looked up at me, hoping that I could help it, but all I could do was hold my hand out and let it take its time there on my palm and gather whatever strength that it had left. Then, suddenly, it sprang from my palm and took flight. It circled around the porch there, its wings flapping against the posts and the corners of the roof. The young lady and I both followed the bird with our eyes, smiling, our heads twisting as the bird bounced here and there above us in the dark.

But finally the bird found its way. It ducked down low and slipped out under the roof of the porch and flew free out into the morning air. It settled on the branch of a nearby tree and took up the song that it was born knowing by heart, hesitantly cracking out the first notes. I took a seat beside the young lady, settling down slowly and taking care not to interrupt the steady, gentle rocking of the porch swing, swinging just enough to compensate for my own added weight, letting the swing drift back and forth in the same rhythm as before. And so we sat, swinging quietly, adding no words to the situation, listening to the bird on the branch, and watching for the sun to rise.

Foot Work

Some friends of mine were sitting around over coffee, talking about what they would do in a dystopian scenario where everything was controlled and censored and no one had any privacy.  They proposed all of the usual measures, underground manifestos, clandestine groups of rebels, and so forth.  I let them talk it all out, getting all the details in order, and then I explained to them why it wouldn't work.  In these scenarios, the governments always kept a tight reign on information and ideas, and they actively discouraged the meeting of two or more minds, keeping people as isolated as possible.  Their manifestos would be found and burned.  Their subversive groups would be infiltrated and broken up the moment they formed.

I had a different idea.  The only way to hide the truth in these circumstances would be to leave it in plain sight.  I would affect a limp, possibly as the result of a manufactured accident.  I would walk with my right foot turning outwards from time to time in a way the would seem involuntary, like a spasm or a response to chronic pain.  But I would build a code into this limp.  The left foot would pace the spaces off evenly and the right foot would shift at different angles to indicate different letters.  And wherever there was an occasion to leave lasting footprints on the ground, I would write my message step by step.  I would teach no one this code.  I would just leave it there on the muddy ground to be deciphered by someone in the future.  There would be no meetings, no manifestos, no counter-revolutionary cells.  There would just one man, walking, leaving the truth behind me everywhere I went.

Smiling Back at Me

Tucked away in a box of odds and ends, I found a lost photograph of me as a baby.  It was just a picture of me in a blue jumper, half smiling with my head resting on a pillow.  My name and age were scrawled on the back in smudged pencil.  I showed the picture to my wife.  She could hardly believe that it was me, although there was something that she recognized about the eyes.  She was so taken with this photograph, she commissioned a full-sized portrait of it painted.  She hung the portrait over the fireplace.  For the rest of my life, I had to see it hanging there, smiling back at me, every time I walked into the room.  I got so tired of it.

The Book Store

I was waking down the street in an abandoned quarter of the city.  It was late at night.  I huddled against the rain in my brown coat, dodging the puddles scattered along the pavement.  I walked with my head down, emersed in a sense of despondency engendered by the coldness of the rain, the shabbiness of my coat, the murkiness of the puddles, and the forsaken emptiness of the buildings around me.  I came to a spot where one of the streetlamps was burned out, leaving a pool of darkness along the front of one the buildings.  I was curious about what was there.  I had a flashlight in the pocket of my coat, and I pulled it out and tapped it against the palm of my hand a few times to get it to work.

As the beam played off the walls in that dark space, I saw that it was an old book store.  The windows were broken, and the shelves and the displays had all been cleaned out and overturned.  There was no front door, just a cracked doorframe.  So I crept into the store, feeling my way with the flashlight beam.  Glass and splintered wood crunched under my feet.  I could hear soft, lonely drips of rain falling from the weak spots in the roof.  I traced the flashlight beam along the wall, and I found a single shelf, hanging crooked and nearly collapsing, that still held a few paperback books.  The covers were tattered and the spines were broken in white bands from long use.  But I saw a few books that I had been looking for for years.  I pulled one with a brown cover down off the shelf.  I flipped through the pages, illuminating the text with my flashlight.

As I stood there, getting lost in random passages and nearly forgetting where I was, there was a sudden snap and a low, groaning hum, as though someone had just powered up a generator.  Dim lights faded on around me from the corners of the store.  People, in coats even shabbier than my own, began to crawl out from different nooks and recesses in the walls, some of them knocking over shelves that were blocking their way.  I swept the beam of my flashlight across their faces.  They all squinted in the harsh glare, unaccustomed to the brightness.  They were curious about the book in my hand and the other books still on the shelves.  It was as if they hadn't known the books were still there until I had come along and shed some light on them.

I handed out the remaining volumes at random, trying to explain what the books were about, what stories and ideas they contained, offering reviews and recommendations of a few spare sentences.  The people just held the books in their hands like they were life-giving portions of bread, feeling their weight and substance, staring at the illustrations on the covers, not really heeding anything I was telling them.  But they had the books.  That was something.  They clutched them fiercely and they nodded vigorously as they receded back into their holes.  The lights went out as the last of them pulled a bookshelf back over the entrance to their lair, as though tucking themselves under a blanket.  I was left there in the darkness to find my way out with the beam of my flashlight, still holding the two books that I had kept for myself.

Picture Perfect

I woke up in a dark hotel room.  I grumbled my way out of bed, and I pulled back the curtains to let in some light.  Rising before me, I saw two towering buildings randomly lit by various windows.  It was just a pair of high-rise office buildings, straight-edged and squared at the top, but they looked so clean and clear against the deep blue backdrop of the sky.  I wanted to take a picture of it.  I grabbed my camera off the table, and I took a few steps back to get everything into frame.  But then I realized that there would be a glare off the window, and that it would ruin the photo.  I had to go outside and take the picture out in the open air.

The lobby doors of the hotel opened onto a narrow street with walls rising on either side.  Down at the far end of the street, in the distance to the East, I saw a conglomeration of buildings that looked like a city made of white crystal set against stratus clouds and pastel skies.  This was an even more incredible sight than the pair of office buildings.  I needed to get a picture of this too.  I ran down to the end of the street, so that I could get a nice, unobstructed view of it in the open.  But as I came to the corner, I was met by the glaring sun rising over the edge of the land.  I knew this would wash out my picture entirely, completely outshining the soft colors.

So I tried to find my original subject again.  I made my way through the streets, looking over the pedestrians' heads and keeping my camera poised for the right moment.  But I couldn't find those same buildings.  I saw plenty of other buildings.  I saw all the morning bustle of the city, the congested traffic and the crowded sidewalks.  I elbowed my way through, turning corners at random.  But something had changed.  The light had shifted.  The magic had passed.

Queen's Gambit

I was wandering through a dense forest where shafts of morning light occasionally broke through the trees, and as I came to an open clearing I saw a white castle high up on the hill.  There was a procession of knights and horses and banners coming down the hill from the castle, and there was a princess with blonde hair and a long purple gown at the head of the procession.  From the other direction, a crowd of common men were approaching, an unruly mass of burlap and black leather.  They met in the middle of the field, as though for a duel, and they stood waiting as an old white-haired man, the personal attendant to the princess, scuttled out from the procession and set up a table and a chessboard in the space between them.  As the attendant laid out the board and the pieces, the princess stared with a cold and haughty expression, as though holding eye contact with every man in the crowd.

The princess was an extremely skilled chess player, and it had been ordained that a man would have to beat her in a game of chess before he could ask for her hand in marriage.  No one had decided on this stipulation; it was simply the way that it had to be.  Certainly neither her mother nor her father had wanted it this way.  They wouldn't have wanted any unnecessary obstacles in the way of their daughter's happiness or their kingdom's stability.  And the princess herself hadn't asked for this stipulation either.  In fact, it was quite clear from the way that she took her seat at her side of the chessboard, pouting and petulantly shooing away the attendant that kept fussing over her, that she resented the whole arrangement.

 However, despite her resentment, she could not throw a match out of disinterest or from an inclination to let one of her suitors win.  They had to beat her fairly and honestly.  This was either part of the stipulation or it was simply due to the fact that the princess was such a naturally skilled player that she was incapable of not seeing through the game to unravel the most brilliant strategies and calculate the most complex moves with the meer flick of a piece.  In either event, it was clear, as the day wore on and one opponent after another was dismissed from the table in defeat, that she was growing impatient with the whole ordeal.  She lounged sideways in her chair, not even facing the board and barely bothering to look at it, making her moves with the thought of a moment and rolling her eyes.  And yet, she won match after match.  If she could have thrown a game, she would have, just to be done with it.

A variety of men came to take their place on the opposite side of the board.  They came with a variety of attitudes and demeanors. Some scratched their heads, bewildered by the game, and they stared at the board with their mouths open, shocked and crestfallen when the princess eliminated them with four or five easy moves.  Others came smirking, sly and cocky.  They would make their moves and then sit back with arms folded, holding their gaze steady on the princess.  They tried to sneak their pieces around her.  They would lay subtle traps.  She flicked aside their pawns and rooks and bishops like they were clothes pins.  They blinked at the board in disbelief before the attendant ushered them away.  Then there were the older men in the crowd, the ones who had studied with the greatest grand masters in the realm.  They pushed their way to the front, eager to display their skills before their peers.  The princess laughed out loud at every one of them and she sighed impatiently as she countered all of their obvious textbook maneuvers.

The crowd thinned as more and more men left in defeat until, finally, there was just one man left.  He had blonde hair, much the same shade as the princess herself.  He took his place at the board with with a simple, openhearted expression on his face.  He gave the princess a bright, warm smile and then he bent to scrutinize the pieces laid out before him.  The princess cast a knowing look at her attendant and shook her head.  But after the man survived the opening exchanges and matched her ploys move for move, she began to sit up straighter.  She turned to face the board.  She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing in on her pieces, plotting her moves.  And from time to time, she looked up at the man across from her, studying him as well.

With the crowd gone and only the players and the procession remaining, it was quiet on the field.  Bees buzzed among the scattered wildflowers that had sprouted up here and there in the grass.  The knights in their armor had dismounted and they stretched lazily on the ground, while their horses occasionally knickered and swung their heads.  The banners stirred in the breeze.  The attendant tapped the princess on the shoulder and hesitantly broached the subject of taking a break for tea.  The princess just glared at him until he finally nodded and slunk away.

The game went on with long pauses between moves, as pieces both white and black fell from the board one by one.  It was the princess plying her strategies now, probing for weaknesses, trying to get an angle on her opponent.  The blonde-haired man matched each of her moves easily, as though he had anticipated them, as though he knew her heart and her mind.  Something like hope, maybe even love, stirred in her eyes as she gazed across the table at him.  She placed her knight and he slid his rook out of harm.  She maneuvered her bishop and he blocked her play with a pawn.  She made a fatal mistake with her queen and she gasped as he plucked it from the board.  She looked at her remaining pieces, struggling to formulate a defense.  Her pulse quickened.  He had the advantage.  There was an actual chance that he might win.

But then he made the wrong move at the wrong moment and he left his king vulnerable.  She saw it immediately.  She didn't want to see it, but she couldn't help but see it.  Tears formed in her eyes as she moved her piece into position and whispered under her breath, "Checkmate."  He shook his head in denial.  His fingers flexed over the board.  There had to be a move!  There had to be something!  It couldn't be over just like that!  But it was.  She was right.  The tear rolled down her cheek as the attendant came and took her from the table.  I saw her look back one last time as the procession started away, and then the horses and banners streamed back up the hill to the castle and out of sight.  And the blonde-haired man was left alone on the field, sitting before the chessboard, wondering how he'd lost it all.

For Some Amusement

I went down to the amusement park with a group of friends.  We walked there on foot.  As we rounded a corner, the park loomed before us like some grand metropolis of whimsy.  There were bells and lights and freshly painted airplanes, ice cream towers and huge spinning pinwheels.  The most prominent sight was a ride called "The Zeus", a roller coaster that wound around a bronze statue of the Greek god that was a few hundred feet tall.  He stood at the center of the coaster, scowling and gripping a lightening bolt in his fist.  I pointed at the statue and told my friends, "A thousand years ago, it would have taken them centuries to build something like that.  The project would span generations.  They would have ended up beating half the workers to death for stealing morsels of bread before the thing was done.  Now, they probably just flew a few helicopters over the site and squeezed the whole thing out of a giant tube."

Inside the park, we somehow all got separated from one another.  I explored the place on my own.  To my surprise, there weren't really separate rides with people standing in long lines.  It was more like a playground of interconnected oddities.  I climbed a ladder down a blue metal tube, feeling like I was descending into the bowels of a submarine, and I found myself among a choir rehearsing in the stands of a baseball game.  I navigated a hall of mirrors and ended up behind a circus tent where I peaked under the canvas and saw an acrobat doing tricks and handstands on the head of an elephant before a breathless audience.  There were truly amusements at every turn.

At one point, I came to a dead end.  The path that I had followed led me to a round courtyard that was closed on all sides, except for the way that I had came.  I turned and followed the path back to a library of dusty storybooks that I had just passed through.  There was a man in a black top hat behind the desk, and he lifted his head as I approached.  He pulled his face into a long, exaggerated frown and said, "Excuse me, young man!  You simply cannot come through this way!" From the exaggerated expression and the way that he was drawing out his words, I could tell that he was trying to do a very crude impression of a stuffy librarian.  Still, he was serious and steadfast in his refusal to let me pass.  I would have to find another way.

So I took another path.  This one took me through a sort of grotesque parody of a hair salon with warped, distorting mirrors and hairdressers with giant scissors.  As I got to the back of the shop where a bunch of women were sitting under the hair dryers reading magazines, one of the women, wearing what was clearly a very fake curly blonde wig, lifted her head and started shrieking at me.  I recognized the face of the man in the top hat.  In fact, he pulled away the wig and replaced it with the hat as stomped his way towards me, shaking his finger and saying, "No!  No!  No!  Not this way." I stumbled backwards and ran back out of the shop.

Down every path, I eventually met with the man in the top hat.  He was wearing a monocle as he conducted an orchestra.  He twisted the ends of a fake mustache into sharp points as he baked a cake for a cooking show.  He blew a whistle dressed as a referee, kicking dirt at me and driving me back.  I had no other way to go.  I kept ending up back at the round courtyard.  I had only one more way I could try.  It seemed normal enough.  It was an abandoned office building, filled with dismantled cubicles and wires hanging down in places where the ceiling tiles had been removed, like someone had been working on the electrical system.  The prosaic nature of the place gave me hope.  I thought that maybe this was some neglected part of the park's administration, rather than part of the park itself.  Maybe this could be my way out.

But already I was on guard when I saw a maintenance man in blue coveralls standing on a ladder, working on one of the light fixtures with a screwdriver.  I tried to creep by him, but just as I was about to slip by, he yelled, "Hey!" My heart caught in my throat.  But then he just said, "Can you hand me that five sixteenth wrench?" Slowly, carefully, I handed it up to him, my fingers trembling.  He took it without looking back at me.  He just said, "Thanks" and started loosing a bolt on the light fixture.  I took a long breath.  But as I started to walk away, I could hear him laughing softly under his breath.  I stopped in mid-step when he said, "Not a chance buddy," and I knew it was him.  I knew it was the man in the top hat.

I backed away and the man's laughter got louder and louder.  I shook my head.  There was no way out.  The top hat appeared from no where and the man slipped it onto his head as he climbed down from the ladder, turning back to me and literally grinning from ear to ear, his teeth gleaming and his mouth opened to cartoonish proportions.  He stomped towards me, pounding each foot down for exaggerated and menacing effect.  I back away, still shaking my head, until I butted against a wall.  There was a window beside me.  It was open to air the room.  It was the only path I had left to take.

I closed my eyes and hurled myself from the window.  I felt myself falling free out into the air, my stomach gripping with nausea as I dropped.  I saw the concrete ground rushing up at me.  But just as I braced myself, a giant umbrella suddenly popped open below me.  It spread wide, spinning with blue and yellow stripes, and it caught me as I fell.  I landed with a bounce, and then I slid off the side of the umbrella and landed feet first on the ground.  I found that I was near the entrance to the park.  There was a gift shop there, and I saw my friends inside, browsing the racks of souvenirs.  I wanted to go in there and see them, find out what had happened to them and how we had all gotten lost.  But I just stood there shaking, the light glinting off of every surface, the crowds flowing past, everything, everything spinning around me.

Out to Sea

I had a job in an office and I couldn't stand my boss.  There was a woman that I worked with who hated the boss even more than I did, and she had managed to steal the boss' briefcase containing all of his important papers.  She wanted to dump the briefcase in Lake Erie where he would never find it.  We drove out to the lake, and I pulled the front of the car right out into the edge of the water.  It was a cold winter day.  The beach was deserted and the sky was overcast and a rough wind swept in across the lake.  We climbed out onto the hood.  We had put a few bricks into the briefcase to weigh it down, and I held it out past the front of the car, dangling it from the tips of my fingers. 

I was just about to drop it when the woman stopped me and said, "Wait!  It will probably just wash right back up onto the beach if we dump it here.  You should take it farther out." I suggested taking it out just past the point where the bottom dropped off sharply, where the water was much deeper.  The woman agreed, so I swam out into the frigid water, dragging the briefcase behind me.  I could see the woman on the edge of the hood, waiting for me to swim back, waiting with her heels perched on the bumper and her chin resting on her hand.  I waved to her when I got out to the right spot, and she waved back.  The buoys that usually marked where the bottom dropped off had been taken down for the season, and I had to feel the way to the edge with my toes.  I didn't want to stray too far over the line.  I inched my way as close as I could, and then I held the briefcase out into the water as far as I could stretch my arm and I let it go.  I could feel it's weight drop away as it drifted down into the cold depths.

I turned to swim back to the beach, my feet teetering on the edge of the drop off.  I regained my balance, and I was just about to lunge forward into the water, when a big wave came and pulled me back hard.  I knew I had been washed out past the drop off, and I was flailing about wildly now, trying to get a foothold, trying to swim back to where I could still touch bottom.  But every time I gained a few feet, another wave would come and pull me farther out.  The woman was standing on the bumper now, straining to see me out there in the water.  I gripped the surface, trying to swim back to her, but she just receded smaller into the distance as I got washed away.  Finally, I gave up the struggle and the water seemed to grow calm around me.  The land was completely out of sight now.  I rolled over on my back and floated and drifted with nothing but the expansive water around me and the grey sky above.

The Caravan

I was lying on a bed under the shade of a canopy tent that had been set up on the desert plain.  I was recuperating after a traveling caravan had found me wandering in the desert, lost and nearly dead from thirst.  Every time I woke up there was a fresh glass of cool water perspiring on the table beside the bed next to a paperback book someone had left for me to occupy my mind with.  I took slow, drowsy sips of the water, and then I usually drifted back off before I was able to take much interest in the book.  Little by little, I took stock of my accommodations.  The bed had a thick frame with gold spires for posts.  It seemed a bit too permanent and cumbersome for the makeshift shelter of the canopy tent.  There was a large area rug spread out on the ground beneath the bed.  There was a long oval dressing mirror nearby, and a number of steamer trunks had been stacked up behind the bed to form a barricade against the sand and the southern wind.

Beyond the foot of the bed, there was an old weathered piano that was only partially under the cover of the canopy.  Once, I woke up to find three young men at the piano, one of them seated on the bench and the other two hovering over his shoulders.  They all wore white shirts and brown suspenders.  The young man at the piano played a short lullaby.  The keys fell with a dull thump as dry and dusty as the desert itself, but the sweet and soothing melody was still faintly discernible.  The young man to left of the piano player remarked, as a matter of passing trivia, that the song was famous for having no meaning.  The young man on the right said that the song had meaning just by virtue of being a song, and he insisted that all songs had meaning.  The piano player thunked a few random keys, and then he settled the debate by saying that the song had no need for meaning.  It had a feeling, and that was enough.  I was content to leave the argument to them.  I just lay there listening to their chatter and the flapping of the canopy in the wind.  I was weak and tired and down to simple things.

When the time came for the caravan to move on, I was deep into the paperback novel that I had been given.  My strength and energy were coming back to me.  Everything was being packed up all around me, but I hardly paid any attention.  I only noticed that the canopy had been taken down due to the new light that fell across the pages of the book, simmering gold against the black ink.  The bed was disassembled, the frame stacked in three separate pieces and the mattresses loaded onto a truck bed along with all of the steamer trunks, expect for the one I'd taken for a seat as I huddled over reading. When everything else was packed and ready to go, they took that last trunk out from under me, and I climbed into the back seat of one of the cars and we pulled away leaving no traces in the barren plain behind us, and I turned another page. The book was a classic comedy of manners, playing out in drawing rooms and on verandas over endless rounds of tea.  I was engrossed in the subtlety of it, the sly hints, the covert gestures, the spare glances.  I felt like I was going to meet these very people somewhere on the road ahead, and I had a sense that I had been given the book to prepare me for this meeting.  I had to study.  I had to get all the moves down, all the right words.  I had to be ready.

Grandmother's House

My wife and I were driving through the old neighborhood and we passed my Grandmother's old house.  It sat empty and abandoned amid the bustling community of stores and shops and offices that had sprang up around it.  It was an isolated spot of desolation, a lingering smudge of the past.  The rotted boards were falling off the house and the paint had nearly chipped and peeled off completely.  Even the leaves in the trees were dark and wet with decay, and the yard was a mire of mud and debris.  I was amazed that the place was still standing, that it hadn't been swept aside by the progress surrounding it.  It was like a piece of death with deep, tenacious roots, something fixed and stubborn that they had been forced to build around.

I pulled up into the dirt driveway and insisted on going inside.  My wife was reluctant to go in.  She leaned forward and stared up through the windshield at the forbidding facade of the house and the cracked boards near the peak of the roof where bats were probably making their home.  I told her that we'd just be a minute or two, and I was already climbing out of the car.  The front door was unlocked.  The knob was rusted and it nearly came off in my hand.  We passed through empty rooms pervaded with dampness and mold.  We could hear voices coming from somewhere in the back.  I heard my grandmother's voice, saying something about the inevitability of death and despair.  We came into the room and found her sitting around a table with some friends, playing cards, like some afternoon gathering of the dead.  She looked younger, younger than I'd ever seen her, younger than I remembered her being even when I was a child.  There was color in her hair.  Her face was bright and clear, bearing none of the lines of age.  She looked up and smiled warmly as we walked over, and everyone else at the table turned and looked at us.

I felt like I was put on the spot.  For lack of anything else to say, I remarked that even though I'd heard her saying something about death and despair being inevitable, her being so young, her being here at all, would seem to prove otherwise.  All the ladies at the table rolled their eyes and made a bunch of sighs and dismissive gestures, as though I were putting them on, and they all turned back to their cards, waving me away with their hands.  Only my grandmother got up from the table.  She said she had something to show us.  She led us out the back door and off the back porch of the house.  She led us out into the back yard, and we stopped a few paces from the porch and turned around.  It appeared that the house had been resurrected, as well.  There was a fresh coat of yellow paint.  All the boards were straight and even.  Everything had been repaired.  The weathervane had been replaced.  It stood like a masthead on the peak of the roof, the rooster and the arrows mounted against the clear blue sky.  I stood gaping at it, baffled.  Were we seeing it all from some new angle?

But we went back inside and found new life there as well, new carpet, new furniture.  My whole family was there, preparing for a party in the dining room, hanging up streamers and lighting candles at the center of the table and laying out plates and silverware on the white table cloth.  They were all younger versions of themselves, years stripped from their faces, ages of disappointments cleared from their minds.  The house was the way that I remembered it now, and I showed my wife around.  I showed her the place where I would always hop the bannister rather than walking all the way to the end.  I showed her the hidden back stairway, the one that we all thought was some kind of secret passage.  I showed her all the best spots upstairs where we would hide whenever we played hide and go seek.  I showed her my favorite spot in the guest bedroom with its slanted roof and gabled window.  I showed her the high view of the town from the window, told her about watching the distant lights out there in the dark.  I showed her how I would hide under the bed, feeling the heat blowing up through the vent.  I could feel it even still.

As we came back down the main stairs, I saw a young blonde-haired boy sitting in a huge plush chair that had been placed in the hallway in front of a small black and white TV.  I knew this boy was me.  He sat there watching cartoons, totally absorbed.  He didn't even notice us there on the stairs.  I could hear voices coming from the living room across the hall.  My mother and brother were in there, sitting at a table by the window.  They were arguing about something.  I could hear it in their voices.  I could hear the stress and frazzled nerves along the frayed edges of their sentences.  But the boy just sat there watching his cartoons.  I could remember that.  I could remember sitting there on a Saturday morning, catching snatches of adult conversation.  I could remember people at the window just like that, like a snapshot of strangers from another life, never knowing what it was all about.  I remembered this being the shape and shade of my earliest impressions, everything a whisper along the peripheral edges of a world of cartoon honks and rattles and whistles.  I remembered being that boy.

It was time to go.  Our minute or two had long since passed.  I went to the window, and I could see that one of the new stores that had grown up around the area had a flea market with stands and shops set up along a thoroughfare paved with red bricks.  One of the stands was selling sunglasses on a revolving rack.  My wife and I went over to check it out, and we stood at the counter, goofing around with the sunglasses, holding them up to see the evening sky through their tinted lenses.  I looked over and the house was still there, still freshly painted and new.  The sun had dipped behind the house now, and the weathervane stood sharply black against the rich medley of clouds and colors.  I felt like we had stepped out someplace else.  I felt like it would all be different now.  It would all connect back to this, leading on to endless fascinations, embarking from some exotic bazaar somewhere on the surface of the Earth in the darkening shadows of the day.