Belief

We had just returned from a shapeless journey. We were back from a place that had no distinct barriers, no easily accessible gateways, no signs or guideposts by which to navigate. It was a place as far away as it was possible to conceive of distance, and yet as close as being right where we were, a place as close as never having left at all.
Mother sat in front of me, her legs crossed, her eyes still wide open and full of a kind of thick ancient wisdom that made my bones shiver. I looked into her eyes patiently, knowing that the gaps of silence were simply there to allow for the formation of new messages. I would wait for these new messages to come, as they had come to me so many times already. The air was thick with twilight shadows and the walls seemed to blur into clouds of vapor that danced at the edges of my sight. I could, every now and then, make out the long windows to my left, the slanted wooden roof above me, the dark blue door to my right, all of it in the midst of the vapor that never stopped moving. Most of all, I could only look into Mother’s eyes. They never wavered, never looked away, never blinked, never hesitated in their permanent, solid attention.
“You will have to travel again,” she said, in a voice that was low and rumbling, a voice that slipped sideways in a drunken way and yet seemed full of ancient certainty. “You will have to travel far. You will go through seven different levels. Each level will have its own distinct challenge and you will have to face each challenge. You will move through each of them and you will make your way through all the many obstacles. When you are done, you will come back here and I will be waiting.”
I left right away. As soon as the blue door closed behind me, all my memories had been set aside, all thoughts of the past were left back there, in that room, waiting for my return. I traveled for so long that many times I forgot where it was that I was going or why I was going there. I could only sense a vague notion of direction that still clung to me underneath layers of complex and interconnected stories. I made my way through each obstacle as it stood before me and, finally, I traveled all the way to the end of that invisible path. As I moved past each obstacle, each one vanished before my eyes. The levels, the chambers, the doorways, the other travelers, they all disappeared from my thoughts. By the time I arrived at the end, I could not remember a single place, a single event, a single moment. I simply knew I had traveled and I knew that I had come back.
When I stepped into the old room I had left so long ago, the elements were there just as I had left them. The long windows were now filled with light and they were distinct and clear under the thin cover of an old brown curtain. The slanted wooden roof was also clear and solid, there were no shadows to hide the black shapes that were scattered over the dark brown surface. The blue door was there as well, thick and heavy and old.
Mother was still there as well. She was no longer sitting up cross-legged as she had been when I had left. Instead, she was laying down on her side, breathing deeply and slowly, peacefully asleep.
There was a recurrent noise in the room that seemed unfamiliar to me. It was a tiny voice full of treble and fury that tickled at my ears like the sound of buzzing mosquitoes. I turned to see a small black radio sitting on the wooden bed frame that reached towards the windows. The tiny voice spoke of a Savior and of the Judgement that was soon to come. It threatened the listeners with endless damnation and terrible gut wrenching punishments. It pushed them towards fear and subjugation.
I sat by the side of the bed and listened to the tiny voice repeating itself over and over while Mother continued to sleep, oblivious to the sound of the radio or the repeated words of unavoidable doom. I sat there and waited, watching breathing slowly, watching her chest move up and down with each deep breath.
After some time had passed, she opened her eyes and smiled at me. Her eyes were no longer as wide as they once had been. Fear had crept into them while I had been gone in my travels.
“Why were you listening to that?” I asked, with an eager curiosity that couldn’t understand her purposes.
She looked at me with a face full of gravity and seriousness. The slippery drunkenness was gone and it had now been replaced by a fearful rigidity.
“It’s all true. The Book is true. The Judgement is true and it is soon coming. The Savior is true as well. It is all true. It was always true but we didn’t know it. We will have to study the Book. There is much to learn, much to understand. And we have very little time.”
I smiled and nodded, trying to make sure that I didn’t show any sign of surprise. But behind my own eyes I was asking myself what had happened, what events had brought her to this place of fear, what had transpired while I was gone and far away. I worried that my absence itself could have frightened her, even if she herself had made me go. We can never know what we truly want, until it’s too late to change our minds.
“We traveled far together. We went right to the place where our stories end and other stories begin, we went to the place of bright light where all paths come to fruition, we went to the place that is itself the end and the source for all stories. It is a beautiful place. It is a frightening place. I understand why you would now need a thick blanket. It is very cold when one is alone, and when the light is bright but the stories are gone, then it’s even colder. I was gone for a long time. I am sorry to have been gone so long. I did my best to come back as soon as I could. But the blanket is now unnecessary. I am back. The stories end. The stories begin. The stories will always continue.”
The tiny voice kept on speaking under me, a counterpoint of quickly moving staccato threats and thick rumbling choruses to my single tenor line.
Mother nodded and spoke once again.
“The Book is true. It was always true. We just didn’t know it.”
I reached towards the radio and turned it off with one click. The wave of silence expanded through the room like an explosion, shaking the walls all around us in a subtle way that only barely registered at the edges of my vision.
“The Book is true. All Books are true. All words are true. True in their own existence. True in their own shape. True in their own sound. It has always been so. It could never be otherwise. But as true as all words are, all their meanings are false.”
Mother looked at me then, and her eyes didn’t waver with fear as much as they had when she first opened them. Her attention once again fell on me like a great metal weight from a great height.
“This is only a return. The stories go in circles and you now go in a great circle as well. Soon you will be young and innocent, soon you will be in a place that is green and hot and violent, soon you will believe that circles are no more and you will struggle for a vision that others hold above you, soon you will listen to men that speak in measured tones, soon you will find someone to protect you, soon it will all be gone and it will be just you and me, here in this room, travelling forever, together, once again. Then the circle will be complete. No matter what the hopes, no matter what the intentions may be, you and I will travel once again, together. Just like we always have.”
She nodded slowly and her eyes were now wide open as they had been when I left on my solitary journey.
“It’s true… what you say is true… but it’s terrible, just terrible.” She said it so slowly that the words bounced off the bed frame and onto the white brick floor like the shadows of forgotten nightmares. “It is terrible and true, and I am afraid to give myself to it completely. Maybe if I only slept a little longer.”
I just looked at her and the twilight clouds began to form around us. The journey had started once again and there was no turning back.
“You will have to believe in me, believe in me with all your power. That is all that we have left, that is all that I have left to offer. Believe in me and maybe that will hold me from the abyss.” She spoke and thick bright tears streamed down her cheeks. As I looked at her tears, I noticed I had tears of my own and they were spilling over my face and down onto my chest.
“Believe in me and maybe we will find a way out.”
I told her many times that I did believe but she just kept on pleading. Soon the walls had vanished behind the twilight, and the windows were gone and the roof and the door. And then we had crossed the invisible gateway and there was only her voice asking for my belief and my own voice telling her that she had it, telling her that it had always been hers. But as much as I said it, she couldn’t bring herself to believe me.

A Moment of Difference

The apartment’s living room was a wide rectangle. Across one of the wide sides was an equally long single pane window which looked into the shabby courtyard one floor below. In the courtyard, the circular fountain had stopped flowing many years before, the grass had turned yellow and just the hearty oaks continued to thrive. Daylight was beginning to break into an electric spectacle of brilliant blue. It came in through the unobstructed window and added a tint of dim light to the room.
He sat on the tall wooden backed chair stolen from the kitchen. It was the only bit of furniture in the room. He sat nearly straight, but for the small hunch in his upper back. An unfiltered cigarette hung from his lip, just as they had hung from the bristly upper lip of his father. He took a long drag, holding the cigarette with his thumb and index finger, his eyes rolled across his loot, they rolled across it like a pilot surveying the curvy hillsides far below.
It had been a good night, a productive night. There were a few TVs, one old VCR and three nearly new DVD players. In addition, there were a handful of CDs and a few necklaces. One of them had some pearls on it and he made a mental note to check their worth.
This was what he liked about his job, the tangibility of it all. The rock solid possession. There was no abstraction, no maybes, just good solid atoms that came together to form recognizable shapes. He would sit on the same chair every morning, when the light was just cracking through the horizon, he would sit back with a swirl of smoke and ash about him and survey the bounty.
He likened it to being a hunter and having something tangible at the end of the day, having something to show for the effort, something earthly and real and solid, something he could pound his fist on or throw across the room. It was real and he liked it.
He avoided numbers on a check and their abstractions. He didn’t play around with banks that promised money on little slips of paper. They were all promises, and above all, he hated promises. Promises depended on someone to fulfill them, they implied vulnerability and trust and patience. He dealt only in the real as much as he could help it.
The TVs were real. He could plug them in and watch them or sell them or, as he sometimes did, throw them from the window in a fit of madness. He would watch them splinter and send their screams through the courtyard and he would know they were real.
He had no time for the objectless, for the illusion of accumulation and wealth. The world would not provide for him, the world would not keep its promises, so he made sure to take what he needed. He never asked, he just took.
When he found he needed something, he went out and got it. He took it. He made it happen. The night shadowed his intent and he moved through it like an animal, sniffing out what he needed, finding a way to shift past the obstacles unnoticed and then, as the light changed to blue, he would slink back into his cave, bringing with him the prey he had killed.
He needed… he took. He wanted… he took. There was no need for patience, no need to slave away as a salesman or beneath the hood of a car. If he needed it, he would get it. It was simple. There just wasn’t time for patience, a gentle finesse, or even a polite “please.” It was now or never and he never waited an extra day.
The light came through the window in a brilliant mess of blue, it caught the smooth glass of the TV set and he saw his reflection. There he was, in his chair, in his white T-shirt and rumpled blue jeans and short brown hair.
He saw himself and remembered another. The man he had seen walking past the bookstore two nights before. It was so dark that night, but the man’s white hair was shining in the darkness like a gleaming orb of promise and knowledge. He himself was hidden behind a car on the other side of the street, hidden in the dark shadows of the city, waiting for the perfect moment to take what was about to be his.
But for a moment, he forgot his intent. He watched as the old man walked slowly past the dim illumination of the store’s window. Walking as though there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, nothing more important than the one step he was taking at that exact moment. The long white hair fluttered slightly with each step and each one was taken with a deliberate slowness. It was a slower gait than any he had ever seen, almost like a dance of liquid.
For a moment that seemed to continue forever, the man walked, trailed by little specks of white light and a blue trail of dust. The man took the world like a drop of water smoothing a stone. It took more than a moment for him, more than a lifetime perhaps, but the man could ultimately bend the world into the shape he envisioned. It was not now or never, but just a matter of time.

Justice

She sat alone at the wrought iron table, the wind blowing her blond tresses into soft billows around her face. Watching the steam rise from a white ceramic mug, she kept her hands knotted together under the table. Now and then she glanced at the people who passed her by, a woman with a baby budgie, a couple carrying parcels. She waited and waited for the man who had said he would come, but he never came and the steam disappeared and the mug grew cold.
While she waited for him, another man sat in a parked car across the street watching her wait. He knew that Giovanni would not come, knew that the little blonde would sit at the table and wait to no avail. He knew these things because they had been agreed upon.
“She sounded very upset.” Giovanni had said. “She wants to meet me at The Star, you know that place?”
“No, I don’t,” he had said, gripping the receiver as though it would wriggle away.
“It’s a new place in North Beach, I don’t have the address.” Giovanni told him
“It’s okay, I can look it up.” He had answered.
“So now we are even, right?” Giovanni had asked “I am giving you this meeting with the girl and our old grievances will be forgotten?”
“If she’s there, yes.”
“She says she’ll be there. She sounded upset. I made her beg. I told her I couldn’t at first, I admit I was going to let her slip through my fingers and never tell you. But she begged. It sounded like she had been crying. This new man… he probably hurt her. Serves her right. And she comes crawling to me after she had said she wouldn’t see me…” Giovanni’s voice rose wrathfully and he broke off abruptly. After a moment he continued, “She deserves this.”
And after another beat he asked, “ I’ll have no trouble renewing my permits now?”
“If she is there, then you will have no trouble.” He had answered icily, because right then he had been awash with conflicting emotions; the thrill that there was a chance he would see her again, jealousy because she had called Giovanni and not him, rage because it meant that she had never loved him. She had only used him, and with a wretched pang he realized that she must actually care for Giovanni, that he was not one of the men she could use, because like her, he was a rag tag street artist with nothing, but she continued to seek his company.
“She will. I know she will. At three o clock.” Giovanni had said and then he had hung up.
Now with both pain and relish he watched the contortions of her face. Rejection and loneliness swam over her eyes and mouth and made her knot her hands even tighter under the table.
He felt for the pistol in his jacket pocket and thought that maybe this was enough. He looked himself in the eye in the rearview mirror. A man with hard set eyes and a pencil line moustache regarded him immovably. It reminded him of the bills he was still paying so that she could look so lovely sitting there at that table, in the clothing and jewelry he had purchased for her. In fact, he said to himself, she had bled him dry just to make herself more appealing for the next dupe, so she could upgrade and snag someone with even more money than he had. He stepped out of the borrowed car and crossed the street and sat down at her table. He watched the incredible shock spread out over her face. He watched it freeze for a moment like a mask. Then she said,
“Lindsay!”
“Hello. Alice.”
But they both noticed that his voice was not as soft as it used to be, it nearly sounded like the voice of another man, a colder harsher man
She glanced around herself, perhaps to see if her Giovanni was anywhere near, but he was not.
“I,” she said “don’t want to see you anymore. I have to go.” She started to stand, but he drew the pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at her discreetly from across the table.
“Yes.” He said, “You do. But first we’ll go for a drive.”
He stood up and, with the gun still trained on her, he used his free hand to grab her arm and direct her out of the chair. Then he buried the gun’s muzzle in her soft side and with the other arm around her shoulders, he led her across the street and to the parked rental car. For just a moment, he felt his heart stinging again and all he wanted to do was to embrace her and beg her to come back. Then he remembered the windy streets and the weeks of searching and lying awake at night, chest aching. He knew if he gave her a chance she would run away again and this time he might not be able to find her. The little sting was overcome by the numbness and new found hardness within him. He shoved her into the driver’s seat and closed the door before sliding into the back seat behind her.

Strength

Lindsay Werner was one of a rare breed of man, the type who dressed impeccably but modestly and showed courtesy to everyone, even those who lacked this quality themselves. He wore crisp white collared shirts and pressed slacks of black or charcoal gray supported by gray suspenders. His ties were shiny, he liked the shiny ones, but of classic hues such as maroon or royal blue embellished with little patterns in gold or gray or black. His glasses had plastic frames to reduce the chance of breakage, and were of a tortoise shell pattern in earthen hues. He wore soft leather wing tipped shoes that were all black so that you would only notice the wing tip quality if you examined them closely, and black nylon socks pulled up over his calves. He had dressed this way in his youth and he dressed this way even now as his years progressed and his neatly trimmed fine hair turned gray at the back of his head but remained black at the crown and his pencil line mustache was all salt and pepper.
He worked for the city arts commission issuing permits to crafters who desired to pedal their wares on the streets of San Francisco. He loved art and music, but lacking the courage, talent, and skill to produce anything himself, he was satisfied with working close to creative people. Although he might only encounter a particular artist once or twice, he enjoyed the momentary proximity. They would come into his office after demonstrating to a panel that they were indeed the artist or crafter who produced the goods they intended to sell, and there, behind the walls of his cubicle, he would accept their check or credit card and write out their permit and laminate their photograph into an official street vender identification badge. It was in this way that he met Alice.
She was a painter with long honey colored hair and blue eyes and skin like milk. She wore long flowing scarves of bright colors and knitted hats and billowing goucho pants. Every gesture, every glance of hers was filled with vitality, and spark. She was too young to sport even crows eye wrinkles or fine lines on the forehead. She showed him an abnormal amount of attention there in his office, standing terribly close to him as he filled out the paperwork on a counter beside the desk. It made him tremble. She touched his suspenders and gazed into his eyes and made him completely dizzy.
“Do you like Dashiell Hammett? The Maltese Falcon?” she asked him and he had been scarcely able to nod and cough out a yes.
“Well you remind me of a character from a book like that, the way you look. But are you the villain or the good guy?” she asked him pulling on the suspender a little and turning her face up to his.
“The good guy I hope.” He said honestly.
“Hmm.” She smiled, “I’m sure you are. But we should find out.” She took a step back from him and began to collect her things.
“I’m not, uh… quite finished with your permit yet.” He told her.
“That’s all right.” She said, “You can bring it to me when you pick me up for dinner.”
“D-Dinner?” he stammered.
She nodded,
“Dinner. Tonight. 7pm. You can pick me up on the corner of Geary and Folsom.”
Then she left him standing there alone, sweating and shaking.
He had picked her up that night, exactly at seven, and soon she was living with him, sharing meals with him, sleeping with him, and making love to him. There had never been a woman like Alice before. He gave her money for clothes and art supplies, he bought her jewelry and flowers. She transformed his living room into a makeshift studio, setting up her easel over a sheet, and soon the room was full of pieces of art. Now he was closer than he had ever been to the creative process. He watched her in awe and even sat for her once.
She had a way of asking him for money that he could not refuse. He gave it to her until his account was overdrawn and he was pulling it from his savings.
Then one evening he came home from the office and found that she was gone, every sign of her had vanished. He sat down in the empty living room, full of shock. The trembling and sweating began as it had on the day that he met her and soon it transformed into tears. In the following weeks he searched for her on the streets, looking for her in the places were she used to sell her art. He asked the other vendors but none of them had seen her, no one knew where she had gone. Then one day a little Italian photographer, a young man with long dark hair stared at him for a long moment after he asked about Alice.
“You’re the one that lives on Lombard right? 326? She had me up there sometimes when you were at work. Forget about her. She’s no good. You seem nice, if I had known you I wouldn’t have gone into your bed with her like that.”
He stared back at the man in shock, in terror in disbelief. For the first time in his life he felt an incredible rage. He wanted to grab the young man by the throat. His skin turned red.
“Do you know where she is?” he asked “Is she with you?”
“With me?” the man laughed bitterly, “No. She took up with some business man living in Nob Hill. She won’t see me anymore either. Forget about her. She is no good. She looks like a lamb, but my friend, we are the lambs. She’s the lion.”
Then he had turned away and busied himself shuffling black and white prints, perhaps to hide his own emotion, and Lindsay wondered away down the windy street huddled under his jacket. Now he felt like a character from a Dashiel Hammet novel, most definitely, the good guy, the one who gets duped, and this new awareness of himself stung him fiercely and unrelentingly in the heart.

The Map

As the metal gate squeaked open and he stepped into the cool bright air of the morning, he could see his destination. It was just two blocks away from where he now stood, but there were worlds between them. A sea of gray sidewalk that hid within it all the siren calls, all the sunken ship of dreams, all the maps to hidden island nations filled with spice and mushroom and song and music that shattered the mind into a spectacle of colored light.
The worlds were always there, but they took a careful look, more than most could give. That, he knew. You just couldn’t see them from a bus window, or a slowly moving bicycle, or even on a brisk walk. They were micro spaces that required micro attention. It was true attention, and it was what he had developed. And because he had developed it, he looked harder to find them. So everyday he opened the squeaky metal gate and stepped onto the sidewalk.
He looked up two blocks and saw the sign of the liquor store on Lombard and Dominican Dr. It was his eventual destination, but as soon as he saw it, he put it out of his mind. There were worlds to walk. To get there, he followed the cracks in the sidewalk, letting them lead him like a well-made map.
Of course, he knew the way, objectively, it was a short distance. For any other person around him, it was a quick walk. And though he knew it could be like that, simple, fast, blind, he chose to move a different way. He chose to voyage.
He let the lines in the earth lead him. The earth that had long ago been covered up by man and his concrete and his dominance, and his shortsighted plans. But nothing was permanent, and the earth moved like a softly groaning woman. It moved softly and subtly, but just like a woman, its force was known, shown to all that could look and see her sounds.
The cracks were her revolt, her soft laughter and cry. There were cracks everywhere, long straight ones that ended at the asphalt street and the jagged ones that looked like lightning and seemed to move in all directions simultaneously. Everywhere were the signs of the shifting earth and shifting time and he followed them.
Each day was slightly different, each route deviated slightly along the sidewalk, leading him past small remnants he had never seen, like the forgotten penny, the just-blooming daisy that had found the sun. Time was no concern, the weather was no concern, it all brought new gifts. A new shift of light, or a droplet of rain that would splatter between the cracks and bring out a bit of dark brown earth.
He let the cracks lead him, and because he relented to their shape, they showed him things he would have missed. Though he didn’t look up, he could feel the energy around him. The quick movements of the bus, the lone bicycle that sent a gust of air over him.
They passed him in a second. They passed him and the missed worlds and they never saw the treasure. He could hear some questions from outside, or perhaps they came from within him…he heard the echoes…”why?” The questions of those not looking perhaps.
They were questions lost in the wind and he walked past them, drinking them, eating them, letting them roll through him like another breath of air. The why for them could not be explained with the words of a meandering explorer, they were deaf to his words and blind to his actions and his true motive. He walked through the questions, slowly following the path of the day.
When the world was walked, he would claim his treasure. Sweet liquid gold would coat his tongue and throat and he would drink it as though there had never been anything else. Nothing from the twelve years that had come before, nothing that would ever come after.
This is the day that worlds were crossed. The only day in which it could ever happen.

Temperance

Those who passed by only glanced at the spotted old man seated on the bench in front of the barber shop. It was not his age which caused them to swiftly avert their eyes and pretend utter absorption in their private conversations. It was something about the man, about his hard dark little eyes and erect posture. Even in the throngs of old age, he looked as though he would be a formidable opponent, an old dog you wouldn’t want to scrap with. These were the lingering vestiges of his past and youth; the piercing hawks eyes and tightly drawn mouth. It was not a smile or a frown, but something else; an omission. From behind that face he might be thinking that you were a true friend or he might be thinking that he should bust your knee caps. Now he would never bust anyone’s knee caps, but in his youth he would have, and his adversary would not have known what he was thinking until it was too late. Despite the fact that his only present wish was to sit quietly by the slowly spiraling barber pole and watch the comings and goings of Main Street, his face still wore the harsh mask of his youth. He had grown so accustomed to wearing it that few other options remained.
Most days were sunny. Even in the winter, the air would be cold but clear and the sun would dazzle in the blue sky, refusing to give up its place on the throne. It was rarely so cold that one should do more than wear a jacket and put ones hands in the pockets. The idyllic lampposts were adorned with red ribbons and faux pine wreaths and little banners welcoming tourists to The City of Lake Elsinore. The old man on his bench could watch the people marching up the sidewalk to the popular Mexican restaurant on the corner for lunch or for dinner. Other restaurants had come and gone along this street and other little shops were stocked with antiques and curios. Only the barber shop and the Mexican restaurant had withstood time along with the tanned old man and his crisp bowling shirts. The Mexican restaurant had begun as a tiny hole in the wall and over time had expanded and swallowed up neighboring units thanks to its success, and though they still displayed the old pieces of folk art that first graced their walls, they now included glittering suns of hammered copper and shiny mirrors and a fancy lighted sign outside.
The barber shop had remained as it always had been, and it had been there nearly as long as there had been a town. The old man, watching the life of the Main Street trickle down the black vein, was the owner. His daughter ran the business now, still occasionally coming in and cutting hair, but for the most part she had been swept up in the stream of life that flowed around the barber shop but rarely trickled in. There were a few old men who were regular customers, old men who had learned that behind the stony face of the man on the bench they were regarded as friends. With them he would let that mask go and wear an occasional smile, a face he had only learned as he had aged. A few of them had been there in the days when he would break another man’s knees or drive a car off the Ortega highway and point out to the owner that it was only by his grace that they had not been inside the vehicle during the accident. Like him, all these old men had children that picked them up to come over on Christmas day and gave them photos of grand children and great grandchildren to hang over their television sets. Like him they had once thought of themselves as business men that knew how to get things done. Like him they now watched the world rushing by and wondered what the hurry was. If anyone would have asked, they could have told them that there was no hurry, that everyone was heading the same place. These old men had invoked death on a few occasions, accidentally and not so accidentally, and the taste of it had tempered them.
Sitting on the bench in front of the window with the words BARBER SHOP painted in gold, the old man regarded the old sun blazing in the sky and was glad that it would not rain today. In his youth he had been a rainmaker. Now he was content to let the sun shine on.

The Changing Of Matter

It was a place very different and distant from any place I had ever known. The buildings were all gray and dark blue and a very faint green hue that almost looked like gray. They were all drawn in sharp narrow angles that made them seem both stretched and squashed down at the same time, like reflections in a fun house mirror. All the curtains were closed and the few lights that I could see were all a very pallid shade of yellow. The walls were all thick and heavy and old, structures meant to outlive their inhabitants by centuries, burdened by the years, laden with unspoken stories. The streets were quiet and made of little white stones, and there were long tall barriers that delineated where the city ended and the green country began.
I sat behind a tall window in a nearly empty room. My own curtains were only half open. Inside the room, there was only a narrow bed and an old desk marked by years of usage. I sat on a little chair staring at the strange world outside. It all smelled of cold moisture and crackling cold air. I could feel some of the cold air that made it through the slim gaps in the windowsill. A few people came and went, moving slowly with their eyes always fixed upon the ground. I wondered what they were hiding, but I didn’t know enough about them to even begin to ask what they would want to hide.
I looked up at the empty gray sky and I saw the vast green and blue mountains in the distance, crowned by solemn peaks of white ice. I took a deep breath when I gazed upon their magnificence, and soon I had to look towards the street again, where a man slowly pulled on a cart that made a recurring wooden rhythm on the clear white stones.
I knew I had something here, somewhere else within this place that was now our home, something that I valued intensely even if I couldn’t remember what it was. I felt that I was in great risk of losing it, I felt that it could disappear just like our old home had disappeared, just like the street I remembered and the people I had known, it had all vanished like the morning mist fading under the hot sun. We were in a strange land where we didn’t know the rules and we didn’t know the dangers. Whatever we had could be taken away and we would never know why it had happened, we would never even have a chance to ask.
“Back where we came from, there was much more danger than there could ever be here, there was violence and war and hatred…and yet I wasn’t afraid… I never spent a single afternoon, maybe not even a single hour, full of fear…why am I afraid now?”
I turned away from the window and I saw my two possessions on the surface of the dark brown desk: a bluish palm sized river stone and an old thick book that explained what to do with the stone that was laying next to it. As I looked at them, I remembered what the book said and I remembered why I felt that these things could be taken and I remembered why, once taken, they would never again be found.
The book explained what to do to the stone, it spoke in a language that I somehow found legible and yet utterly foreign at the same time. It spoke of strange purposes that made no sense to my everyday mind and yet they pulled at something deep within my chest that was eager to come out, eager to emerge into the daylight. The book explained that there were certain actions to be taken, certain things to be done to the stone. These things were strange and forbidden, they came from beyond the thick barriers of the known quiet world. Once these actions were taken, once these things were done, then the matter inside of the stone would change in some very intrinsic manner. That was all I knew at the moment. That was enough.
I looked at the stone which rested quietly on the brown surface of the old desk, and I looked at the thick book which was closed and locked and covered in ancient heaviness. I then lifted my head and looked at Mother who was sitting in the middle of the room looking back at me. She was silent and her face had a kind of gravity that I recognized as delicate but guarded. Still I felt an urge to speak and I did.
I pointed to the book that sat on the desk and I spoke of the things that were written within its pages. I tried to let her know what we had and what it was meant for, even if the purposes were hidden in a murky fog that my words could not penetrate. I spoke for a long time, making long circles of interlocking sentences. When I was finished, Mother shook her head. All my efforts had been useless. I couldn’t make her understand.
I reached under my bed and pulled out another rock from a hiding place I had not known about just a few moments before.
“Look Mother, this one has already been open, this will make it all clear, this will let you understand all that I have been trying to say.”
The new rock was like an open box with a tunnel inside, a tunnel that led into complete darkness deep within the tiny walls of stone. There were two small wheels on either side of the opening, keeping the jagged wound from healing and closing up. With my index finger, I pointed straight into the darkness, feeling the icy cold on my skin.
“Look Mother, that is where the matter is, that is where it has always been hiding…”
But Mother just shook her head and looked straight at me. She was as quiet as the streets outside, as the thick heavy walls, as the closed curtains, as the distant mountains crowned with white.