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.