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.