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.