A Light in the Window

I was trudging along through a cold marsh. It was almost night, and I was straining my eyes and sweeping my hands out in front of me to find my way. I came to a clearing where there was a small cabin. There was a kerosene lamp in the window. As I approached, I almost stumbled over a huddled figure sitting on a tree stump a few yards away from the cabin. I caught the figure by the shoulder to break my fall and I felt the trembling under my hand. I came in close. It was a man with the hood of his filthy brown coat pulled up over his head. I couldn't make out the man's face, but I could see the mud and debris matted in his beard. I could see the mud on his hands and the dirt crusted around his fingernails as he balled one hand into a fist and crushed it with the other and then switched and crushed the other fist in his other hand, both of the hands shaking wildly until he brought them to his face and bit down on the knuckle of his thumb, the teeth showing in the dark.

The man didn't even seem to notice my hand resting on his shoulder. He didn't seem to notice me huddled in close to him, my breath steaming in the cold after the long slog through the marsh. I could hear him whimpering and gnashing and gnawing, and then his jaw would clench and he would go quiet and I could feel the tremors in his shoulder under my hand. Finally, he took a deep breath and sat up straighter, like he had resolved something and cleared his mind. He got up from the stump and started towards the door of the cabin. I slipped in behind him as he entered, still unnoticed. It was darker inside and the kerosene lamp provided the only light. The man's wife sat in a rocking chair across the room. The man grabbed the lamp off the window sill and brought it to the middle of the room and held it high. His wife didn't like the glare from the light and she turned away her head. There was an old shoebox lying on the floor under the shadow cast by the man's arm holding the lamp.

Then, from some unseen corner of the room, a doctor wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope came over and knelt there on the floor in front of the shoebox. He pulled back the lid, and I could see that there was a baby lying inside the shoebox on a blue quilt that had been folded and laid down beneath it. The baby's eyes were open and it didn't move, and I could see that it was dead, but the doctor proceeded to examine it and he placed the stethoscope against its chest to be sure. Everyone was quiet as the doctor worked, but the wife kept rocking her chair with a maddening regularity and she kept her head turned away and her face hard and her jaw set, as though she refused to see the truth of what was laid out in front of her.

The man explained to the doctor that the baby had been making this constant whining noise, like a whistling in the back of its throat. He said that his wife couldn't stand the noise. She couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. Her hair was prematurely turning grey, and she was pulling at the knots, and clumps of it were coming loose in her hands. They didn't know what was wrong with the baby. They couldn't get it to stop making this noise. Every breath the baby took, there was that noise, like a hard wind driving through the cracks in the walls. Finally, the man had made the bed for the baby in the shoebox, and he had laid the baby in the box, and then he had held his hand over the baby's mouth and nose and he had kept it there until the noise was gone.

The doctor lifted his head and he stared off at a nail in the wall that was level with his line of sight. He let out a long breath. He looked back down at the baby, and he opened the baby's mouth and reached two fingers down the baby's throat. He did all this as gently as he could, even though the baby was gone. He felt around carefully, turning his head slightly, like he was listening for something. He pulled back his hand and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. He explained to the couple that the baby had only had a small defect, a deviation at the back of the throat that had caused the whistling noise that they had heard. It could have been easily fixed with surgery. The doctor wiped the handkerchief across his forehead and slipped it back into his pocket. 

The Pillowcase

I was climbing up to the sixth floor of this decrepit old apartment building in the city. I had to trudge up the stairs that spiraled around the large open stairwell in the center of the building. I had received some sort of mysterious summons to meet someone, and when I reached the landing on the sixth floor, I saw that the door to the first apartment at the top of the stairs was wide open. I crept into the apartment, and I saw that the place was empty. There was no furniture, just a few boxes and other discarded items left behind on the hardwood floors. Across the room, the double doors to the balcony were standing open, and out on the balcony I saw a woman with black hair standing at the railing. She stood with her back to me, and I could see the view beyond her as she stood looking out at the bay that the city had been build around, watching all the little boats with their white sails as they drifted into the harbor or sailed back out to the open water on the horizon.

I raised a finger, and I was just about to call out to her, but then I heard the sound of a car alarm going off down in the parking lot below. I knew it was my car. I knew someone was messing with it. This was a bad neighborhood, and I had taken a risk coming here. I wanted to get down there quickly and catch the person in the act of breaking into my car, but I knew I'd never get back down all those flights of stairs in time. But then I noticed a pillowcase sitting on a stack of boxes just beside the door to the apartment. The pillowcase was decorated with cartoon cows and sheep and other farm animals grazing in the rainbows and the clouds. I grabbed the pillowcase, and before giving the idea any real thought, I ran back out into the stairwell and jumped over the railing, holding the pillowcase over my head and hoping to use it as a makeshift parachute.

Luckily, the pillowcase popped open with a snap and it eased my descent as I dropped down the shaft in the middle of the spiraling flights of stairs. But I looked up and I saw that there was a small rip in the stitching along the seam of the pillowcase, just big enough to poke a finger through. The pillowcase deflated a little as some of the air escaped though this hole, and I felt myself dropping a little faster, but the pillowcase was still doing a pretty good job of catching the air. And I figured this would be even better. The landing might be kind of rough, but I would be alright, and I would get down to the parking lot even sooner, with even better hopes of catching the person breaking into my car.

I did a tumble and a roll to break my fall as I hit the ground, and then I flipped back onto my feet and I ran for the back door that led out to the parking lot. But I was too late. The thieves had already disassembled my car and they were scattering in all directions, carrying off different pieces of it, tires and fenders and rims and taillights. One of them hooted and hollered as he ran off waving the radio in the air, the wires hanging from it, music from the classic rock station still playing from the speakers that someone else was carrying off in the other direction. Another one was giggling hysterically as he made off with my steering wheel, holding it out in front of him and weaving in a zigzag pattern across the parking lot as he pretended to steer himself one way and then the other. There was nothing but a dented bumper and a few greasy nuts and bolts left sitting in the space where my car had been.

My shoulders slumped and my arms dropped to my sides, the deflated pillowcase still gripped in my fist. There was a little boy standing there next to me on the sidewalk. He had been watching the whole thing and just shaking his head. He turned to me and pointed at something on my shirt, and I looked down and noticed that there was a silver badge pinned there. I touched the badge with my finger and he nodded and looked away back out at the parking lot. He asked me why I never did anything about the crime in his neighborhood, why I just stood there and let things like this happen right in front of me. I started to say something, but I stopped and my shoulders slumped again. I had no idea what to tell him. 

On a Train

In a passage of an old book, I read about an encounter between a monk and Dostoevsky on a train. The two men had been seated together in the same section of the train on seats facing each other. In the book, the monk described Dostoevsky’s distracted demeanor and the preoccupied way that he nodded to the porter, never looking up from the papers that he was leafing through in his lap. He made a note of the way Dostoevsky's hand shook when the train unexpectedly lurched into motion and the way that the writer reached for a steady grip on the armrest of his seat. He said that once the train was clear of the city and rumbling along the open tracks, Dostoevsky finally looked up from his papers and glanced at the countryside passing out the window and blinked and squinted his eyes like someone who had just spent hours upon hours in a dark room, and it was only then that he heard him mutter a clipped sigh of relief.

As the miles and the hours went by, the two men engaged in a few halting moments of conversation that never went beyond a few awkward words or sentences, that never gained the momentum of the train carrying them along, conversations that died as quickly and as lifelessly as they began. The monk was eager to tell Dostoevsky that he recognized him. He wanted to tell him that he had read his books and he wanted to share his thoughts on them. But there never seemed to be a good place to inject this into the conversation, and every time they spoke and fell back into silence, it became harder and harder to bring it up. And the monk thought of all the reasons not to bring it up. He considered that Dostoevsky had no great reason to be impressed by the recognition; he was with himself everywhere that he went on Earth, and moreover, he was probably used to being recognized and being told that he was recognized and pestered with people's thoughts about his writing.

So the monk never brought it up. When the train reached the station, the two men traded a perfunctory handshake and grabbed their bags and went their ways. They got tangled up in the crowd out on the platform and separated from one another. But the monk spotted Dostoevsky a short while later. He saw him walking alone down a narrow passageway between the buildings. It was quiet there, away from the crowds, and there were puddles on the stones, and from some lonely place high above, the afternoon light shone down on the writer as he stopped and set down his trunk on the pavement and gathered the papers he had been working on into a neat sheaf and popped the latches on the trunk and set the stack of papers gently on top of the folded clothes inside and continued on his way. The monk knew that he would never see the man again, and he wished with all his heart that he would have told him that he knew who he was, that he would have pushed past the awkwardness and told him all the things he would never have the chance to say again. He decided then to pray for Dostoevsky, to fervently hope that he would find peace from the preoccupations and obsessions that seemed to be consuming him.

After I had finished reading this anecdote, I noticed a that there was a footnote at the bottom of the page that provided a date for this encounter, and I realized that it was only two days before Dostoevsky finished work on his novel The Possessed. I went to my bookshelf to grab one of my copies of the book. As I opened it up, I saw that the type on the pages had faded to the point that it was completely unreadable. There were a few places where the ink had been stamped heavy and I could still make out the letters, but the rest of the text looked like it was in the process of fading back into the page itself, receding into the weathered depths of the paper. It was as though the book had been left out in the sunlight and all the words had been bleached away in its sublime bliss. I had other copies of the book, but I was afraid to check them to see if they were in the same condition. 

The Golden Age

I was out on the west coast, wandering around the streets of the city, and I came across a beach where a famous scene from a historical epic had been filmed. I passed under a bridge where the echoes of the cars zipping by on the freeway overhead reverberated off the concrete walls, and on the other side there was the vast white beach, and further on was the ocean with the waves rolling in from the horizon, their swells tossing around blinding glints of light from the afternoon sun. In the scene, this empty beach had been filled with extras dressed in bright period costumes in striking shades of lavender and blue and orange. There had been giraffes and elephants and lions, golden trumpets and soldiers in bronze armor, statesman in robes unrolling parchments bearing official decrees.

There was a large flat stone that had been the centerpiece of the scene. The hero had stood in sweaty-faced defiance at the foot of the stone, his wrists shackled, glaring up at the centurion who stood on the top of the stone, huge and regal in the sun, his jaw set, his foot planted on an outcropping of rock, his iron hand resting on his knee. The trumpets and revelry had all abruptly stopped, and there had only been the sounds of the waves and the wind and the birds as the two men squared off entirely with their eyes, the camera flipping back and forth in a montage of menacing squints, the score finally punctuating the tension with a protracted buzz that stung like an insect born out of the sweat and the heat.

That was all gone now. The beach was deserted. The day was getting later. I walked along the sand. I knew that further down the shore there was a beach house that had belonged to the lead actress from the film, the one who had stood by the centurion in her clean white linen, secretly in love with the hero. Years later, the cast had all gotten back together to reshoot the scene for a reenactment that was being included in another film about the glory days of Hollywood. The cast had eagerly agreed to get back together to shoot the scene, because they had all wanted to spend the weekend hanging out at the beach house, reminiscing about old times and reclining by the pool in their light-weight summer shirts and sipping their margaritas to the smooth rippling notes of the piano playing up on the balcony as the cool breeze rolled in off the sea.

But it hadn't quite worked out. Nothing in the scene had really looked the way it was supposed to. All the same props and costumes were there, and everyone hit all their same marks, but all the traces of time were visible just beneath the surface. The lead actress had gotten older and the makeup didn't quite hide the lines around her eyes. The centurion's bearing wasn't quite as firm, and he had gotten fatter and the armor didn't quite fit him anymore. Even the film stock they used was a little different, making all the colors and costumes look like they had been transposed to some other time and place. Worst of all, they hadn't been able to get the lead actor back. There had been a falling out between him and the actor who had played the centurion. There had been some sort of scandal involving a traffic accident that had circulated in the Hollywood gossip columns for years. They had cast a replacement, but with someone else, shackled and trying to glare that same iconic glare in his place, the whole scene just fell apart.

The weekend at the beach house hadn't worked out either. The white-haired old actor who played the centurion had gotten drunk and mad and shoved the replacement lead actor into the pool. There had been an awkward scene between him and the actress who owned the beach house, and it had made everyone uncomfortable, and it ended up with her throwing him out. Afterwards, the piano had resumed its cool ripple, but there was something sad and even a little anxious between the notes. Guests started to slip away, offering a variety of hastily improvised excuses for why they had to go, blushing and smiling their awkward smiles, trying to say how great it had been for everyone to get back together, how it had all been just the same, so incredibly, wonderfully the same, leaving all the tables around the pool littered with half-finished margaritas until the last of them were gone.

But, of course, it hadn't been the same. I finally reached the beach house, and it was boarded up now. No one lived there anymore. The sun was going down out over the ocean and the house was latticed with deep shadows from the grove of untended trees that surrounded it. The waves rolled right up to the edge of the foundation beams of the crumbling wooden deck, provided with all the neglected ages that they needed to pick apart the whole property one piece at a time and pull it all back into the sea. I plucked a hot smoothed stone out of the sand and flipped it around between my fingers. No, things were never the same. 

All Fours

There was a documentary made about my childhood. Someone sent it to me on a film reel, and I projected it onto the wall of my basement and watched it in the dark. The documentary seemed to portray me as some sort of feral wonder child who spent all of his waking hours roaming the woods in misunderstood solitude, even though the only wooded area that I ever really played in was a patchy little spot out behind our garage where a worn out old tree presided over some overgrown brush that used to be a garden, and the only sparks of wonder that I ever remembered showing were purely accidental, sporadic and unremarkable.

There was a voiceover of me talking about how the teacher always liked to have me read the current passage from our reading book in front of the class, because she liked the cadence of my voice. She liked that I paused in all the appropriate ways in all the right places for the right commas and punctuation. Most of all, she liked that my reading showed genuine comprehension. This voiceover was played over footage of me roaming through the overgrown garden on a winter morning when it was still dark out, finding my way along the paths of hard frozen mud by spotting the places where the scattered patches of snow had settled into my previous footprints.

Still, I started getting into it, accepting the documentary’s conceits and embellishments, almost believing that this was a reflection of my actual childhood. But then something happened that ruined the illusion for me. The footage rolled on, later into the morning when the sun was up and the patches of snow were receding and a couple of early spring buds on the tangled weeds were starting to open. There were some railroad tracks that passed along the back of our property, and the footage showed me walking along the path by the tracks and then suddenly stopping when I heard something crunching around in the brush. The footage showed me standing still with my ears perked up, and then it showed me leaping forward with this tremendous bound and tearing along the path on all fours, propelling myself along at a ferocious pace with each stride.

This was just too much. I laughed and shook my head in complete disbelief. I look around in the dark for someone to explain it all to, to explain the logistics of the human spine and the inadequacy of a person trying to run that way, to point out the outright lie of the whole thing, to even got down on my hands and knees if necessary to demonstrate my own incapacity to perform such a feat, to confess all the long degradations of my lazy sedentary life. But there was no one there watching this thing with me. I was just alone in the dark with the steady rattle of the projector.