The Ruins

I was wandering around an abandoned neighborhood. There were whole streets lined with empty houses, the rotten boards cracked and splintered and caved in on sagging porches, the glass broken out in front windows that showed nothing but blackness inside. There was a gas station with weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement around the broken pumps and a little grocery store with cleared out shelves and cobwebs around the cash registers. In the streets, there were random items scattered around, rusted pieces of silverware and a jack in the box that had been smashed under the wheel of a fleeing car, the deflated clown laying on its back with its arms outstretched and its frowning rubber face baking into the asphalt.

As the afternoon wore on, I got turned around trying to find my way back out of the neighborhood. I kept finding myself turning down the same streets over and over, going in circles. I got it into my head that it was like this everywhere, that all of civilization had fallen. I started to think about the supplies I would need to gather to stay alive, and I started to think about the things I would need to get to defend those supplies from the other desperate people who might be out there wandering the ruined landscape. I wondered where I could go to be safe from them all, where I could live in peace. And then, having lost track of the world, I started to lose track of myself. I completely forgot my name and who I was. I just stood there in the middle of the street devoid of any past or memories, my mind empty of everything except for the humming of the cicadas in the summer heat.

The hours rolled by as I stood there in a stupor, rooted to the spot, lacking any motivation to move and unable to gather enough of my wits together to head off to somewhere else. I just stood there broiling in the sun until I heard the sound of voices coming from somewhere far off. I looked up and saw a few people in white scrubs appear from around the side of a house down on the corner of the street. They shouted and pointed me out to one another and they hustled down the street in my direction. I decided that these were some of the desperate people I had been worried about, and I turned and tried to casually saunter off in the other direction, breaking into a full sprint after only taking a few short steps.

But another group of people in white scrubs emerged from around a brick building down at the corner at the other end of the street, and then even more of them poured out from behind the houses all around me, and they all converged on me and gathered around me until they had me tightly surrounded and there was nowhere for me to run. One of them grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and they herded me across town to where a white van was sitting in the back of a deserted parking lot under the shade of a tree. They loaded me into the back of the van and piled in after me and slid the door closed behind them.

They took me to a home for other strays like me who had been out wandering around and had forgotten who they were. We passed through a common area where a few of the residents sat staring out the windows, flies landing on their hanging lips and heavy eyelids, while others held puzzle pieces poised in their trembling hands, having no idea of where to put them and having lost all track of why they were even holding them. They just kept furrowing their brows and flipping the little jagged pieces of cardboard round and round between their fingers.

I was taken to the office of some head administrator where she asked me a long series of questions which I could only answer with slow, bewildered shakes of my head. Then they took me to the office of the entertainment director, a small little white-haired old man who worked out of what appeared to be a dim supply closet filled with endless racks of film cannisters. The old man explained that he was in charge of picking movies for the residents to watch on movie nights, and he warned me that he refused to show any movies with anything bad in them. "Movies about space really seem to be the best for our residents," he explained. "Good wholesome movies about space." I just nodded and continued to let them process me. I was really in no position to complain.

I was sitting in my room when a nurse came in, saying that I had visitors. A handful of people piled in behind her and she explained that these people were my family. They had a photo album with them, hoping that it would help me regain my memories. I flipped through the pages. I saw my daughter when she was a toddler, smiling big into the camera. I saw my aunt blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. But the pictures were all ugly, the faces grotesque, menacing. I began to regret that I hadn't been more careful documenting my life, that I hadn't taken better photographs, used better cameras, or at least put better film in the cameras. These grainy pictures with their drab colors and their glaring flashbulbs popping in dark windowless places were hard to look at, things long gone, grey and neglected, fragments of the past in their loneliest and most dismal manifestations.

But just as I was about to shove the photo album off of my lap and throw a fit and yell at everyone to leave the room and let me be, a set of photos on the last few pages of the album caught my eye. They were pictures of a snowy night, sparkling and clear. Looking closer, I saw that these pictures had been taken in the abandoned neighborhood. They were pictures of a garage with a bunch of junked cars piled up in the lot in front of it. Each picture seemed to advance closer to the cars and the garage, and in each picture the snow had gathered deeper on the hoods and windows of the cars. It started to make me uneasy, the way these pictures kept getting closer, like something was being stalked by the camera.

And as I got down to the last few photographs, a memory came back to me of a leather satchel that I had stashed in the back corner of this garage. I remembered the grip of the handle and the way the leather had always given off a strong scent of oil and stale soap. The satchel was filled with important papers and old mementos, bank statements, birth certificates, awards I'd won in school, letters from old friends, all sorts of irreplaceable things. My hand shook as I held it over the page. I was terrified that someone would find the satchel and take it, but at the same time I couldn't bear the thought of ever going back to that dark place again to retrieve it. I just slammed the photo album shut and pressed my hand against the cover to steady it.

A Tree Out Back

There was a massive tree in my back yard. The trunk was a good ten feet around, and the nobby knuckles of its roots filled almost the entire yard. The bark was smooth and white, hard like sinews of muscle and bleached bone, nicked here and there with deep black cuts and dark red notches. And most notable of all, the tree had made a strange twist as it had sprouted, as though tightening its grip on the soil, and the contours of this twist could be followed round and round the trunk and high up into the branches, determining the shape of its whole long tortured growth.

A rumor had spread that there was some sort of special enchantment about this tree, and people came from all around to see it and to reach out hesitating hands to touch its cool surface. In the early days, whole crowds had come to see the tree, coming day and night, and there had been a constant carnival of noise and excitement in the backyard. But over time, the rumors had subsided, and people just came every now and then, alone or in small groups. Touching the tree seemed to calm them, make them think, and they would leave quieted, stepping carefully over the roots in bare feet and treading off lightly across the lawn, taking the quiet away with them as they left.

One day I was having breakfast with my neighbor, and we were watching from the kitchen window as a family came to visit the tree. The shade was deep under the tree, and there was a glow of morning light in the grass beyond the shade. The mother had brought her three sons to the foot of the tree, pulling the smallest one up the driveway in a red wagon. We could see her explaining to them that it was okay to touch the tree and showing them by reaching her hand out and touching the tree herself, but we couldn't hear the words that she was saying.

I took a sip of my coffee and I leaned towards the window and looked up at where the higher branches of the tree got tangled in the sun. I turned to my neighbor and I told her that the real miracle in all of this was that while I knew that the tree was here for everyone's sake, disseminating its peace and its peculiar wisdom on Earth, I also somehow knew that it had grown here only for me, that it was the capstone of my life, the thing that would lull me quietly to sleep in the end. I couldn't reconcile these things, but I felt it, I knew it, every time I looked out the window at the tree, and it was almost more than my heart could take. I asked her if she understood. She shook her head no, but she smiled and reached out her hand.

Grace Note

I was working on a large memoir, trying to recount every little significant detail that I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and there was one moment in particular that I wanted to capture as vividly as I could. It was a morning many years ago when I was returning home for the funeral of an old friend. It was just before dawn, and I was taking a ferry across a large open lake. The passengers were all standing there in silence lined up in a row along the railing, looking down into the water. I could just make out the shapes of mountains on the far shore against the dark blue backdrop of the stars. As we headed towards a narrow channel between two rocky cliff faces that separated this section of the lake from another broader portion of it, I saw the glow of the sunrise behind the rocks, and I knew that the sun was waiting there on the other side of the lake.

And it was that moment of passing through the channel that I wanted to capture, that anticipation of the sun on the other side and how it suddenly hit me with the full devestating impact of the loss of my friend, leaving me to feel completely alone on the Earth, even the way home navigated through strange dark waters. So I added an improvised flute player to the scene. As we passed into the channel, another passenger standing towards the back of the ferry took out a flute from his brown duffel bag and began to play a single soft note, high and mournful. And I thought that I could grab this note out of the air and use it. If I could establish the key that the note was in and the precise intervals at which it reverberated between one rock face and the other, I could place the exact dimensions of this narrow channel directly into the reader's mind through the use of a single onamonapoetic phrase. I could put them right there in the scene with the light and the loss and that lingering sound of the note fading on the air as we emerged on the other side of lake to the low mist, the huge sky, the land in the unobtainable distance, and someone standing far off on a dock across the water waving a lantern to guide our way.

A Sharpened Blade

It all started with an explosion. I was making my way through the middle of town, and there was a single engine plane droning overhead in the placid blue sky, and suddenly everyone on the street was looking up at the spreading burst of black smoke where the plane had been shot down. There was a long interval of silence where everything seemed to hold quiet and still, and then the silence broke with everyone screaming and scattering and trying to run from the falling pieces of wreckage and debris. No one could afford the risk of stopping to look to see what had shot the plane down, but as we all scrambled for safety, there was an overwhelming sense that something was coming, like the unheard sound of a thousand boots approaching in perfect lockstep.

The attack went on into the next day with random percussions heard throughout the night on the outskirts of town. The invaders started rounding people up as they marched through the streets. I was taken prisoner and brought to a bombed out Spanish church where they were holding several people. The ceiling had been broken open, exposing it to the sky, and there were large chunks of stone and tile scattered around. I was sitting on the floor against a wall with the other prisoners, all of us with our heads hung and the sweat and dirt and soot covering our faces. There was a metal grate just beneath my feet, and I could hear the sounds of people screaming out in pain coming from somewhere below, along with pleas for mercy that were abruptly cut short by the sharp pop of a pistol.

And yet, there was a strange benevolence about our conquerors, as though all of this were being done for our benefit, trimming the weak from our population and honing us like a sharpened blade. A rosy blonde secretary smiled as she handed out blankets to the prisoners that were herded past her in a line, and the officer overseeing the distribution of the blankets patted each prisoner warmly on the back and leaned close to whisper smooth words of comfort to them as they took their blankets and nodded their feeble and terrified thanks before being ushered away to whatever awaited them off somewhere in the dark.

When the moment came for me to step up and take my blanket and this coarse lump of folded brown fabric was laid across my hands and I felt that tender thump against my shoulder, I was determined not to play the part of the pathetic supplicant that the situation seemed deliberately engineered to compel me to accept. I stopped and raised my head and held my glare on the officer, my teeth grit and my jaw quivering. The smile slowly faded from the officer's face as he stared past the sweat and the dirt and saw the anger in my eyes. And then his eyes shifted away from mine as he made a gesture to someone behind me, and I felt the sharp crack of the butt of a rifle against my back, shoving me forward with my blanket to join the other prisoners who'd gone on ahead.

Little Blue Suit

I was at a backyard picnic, and a toddler in a dark blue suit and striped tie came toddling over to me with a smile beaming on his chubby round face, exclaiming that I was his "best friend" and reaching his arms out wide for me to catch him. I knew that this was my son, a son that I had never had, as though he had toddled his way out of some other life that I had never lived. Everyone turned in surprise as he called out to me, and they chuckled over what he had said. I scooped him up as he came to me, and I hoisted him up by my shoulder so that he could see over everyone's heads to a spot in the shade of the house where the hosts of the party were releasing dozens of red and yellow balloons into the air. As the balloons sailed up into the clear blue sky, the boy tapped me on the back of the head with his little hand to get my attention, and he pointed towards the balloons with his stubby finger, and he nudged my chin trying to get me to look, and I turned and squinted as the balloons sailed past the glaring afternoon sun.

There was something in these gestures, this tapping on the back of the head, this nudging of my chin, that gave me a glimpse of the man he would become. I knew that over time, he'd get bigger and older and come to match me in height and stature, and there would be those grudges between us, as there tends to be with fathers and sons, something distant and awkward. But I also knew that this moment would stay with me, that open-hearted declaration of friendship, that gentle nudging of the chin, and despite anything else, it would always be between us. So we both beamed and grinned with the sunlight in our eyes, and we watched as the balloons sailed off over the tops of the trees and the roofs of the houses.