The Visit
Sena Magazine
December, 1990
Part of the prep for publishing White Man Dancing - Grief, God, and a Unified Theory is to prepare such things as cover art, copy, graphics, acknowledgements, and a page of "Additional Works by..."
Along with Remembered Gifts and New Directions, this Blog, and the 72 episodes of the Sena Foundation T.V. Series "Sharing the Seasons", the “Additional Works” page will include a link to the twenty Sena Magazine articles that were published way back before the advent of personal "instapublishing" (1987 - 1992). We've found the information on grief and Loss as relevant today as the day each article was published.
As I was going through the articles I found The Visit. Part 1 was published in the December, 1990 issue, and the conclusion in the March, 1991 issue.
I had forgotten it. Took me a bit to remember.
I read it, beginning to end.
It's relevant to the direction and tone this Blog has taken the last couple months.
I hope you find value in it...
THE VISIT
Part 1
by Bill Schaefer
Giving and receiving is a pattern not unlike the birth/death pattern. The following story relates to both. It is appropriate that Part I is offered during the Christmas season as we celebrate birth, and Part 2 will be offered in spring, during the Easter season, when we celebrate death and resurrection.
He put his hand into the bowl up to his wrist. The feeling was not what he
expected. What had he expected? He didn't know.
Certainly there was sensation. He could feel his fingers and palm, cold he wanted to say-but it wasn't lack of warmth. Viscous he wanted to say-but his movement was unhampered. The pressure of twelve gravities he wanted to say - but movement seemed outward, not inward.
For the first time he looked down into the bowl. It was as if his hand were cut off at the precise plane where it entered the bowl. His hand existed, if his sensations could be trusted, if his hand did not demand a new description of existence, in an impenetrable darkness.
Yet he took no time to analyze the experience, only a moment to turn quickly from the fear scratching, like keen-edged talons seeking purchase, on the edge of his consciousness. His fingers, flexed and grasping, reached deeper....
* * * * *
He had been fat as long as he could remember. Pictures from his infancy reflected arcs and circles drawn taut and shiny from baby fat. Eyes, nose, tiny puckered mouth surfaced from a subterranean reality.
Everywhere, always, fat.
His childhood patterned his life as an adult. Periods of dieting, shedding layer after layer of fat, alternated with long luxurious months of feeding. His entire existence seemed filtered through - omnipresent, omniscient fat.
The fat was his enemy, causing distorted responses from a world repulsed by his presence. The fat was his lover protecting him, insulating him from a cruel and uncaring world.
He designed his life using the same pattern that had made him fat. He collected
He gathered things to him. Although he saw purpose to his collecting, if someone had looked in from the outside - which, of course, no one ever did they would have seen only random, indiscriminate consumption.
His parents, before they forced him out of their house, accused him of being selfish and self-centered. He had no reason not to believe them. It was just before Christmas when it began. Laboriously he had raised himself from a night of semi-sleep, groggy and hungry. As he slowly navigated his bulk across a bedroom cluttered with world-things so that there was barely room to move, he passed his solitary window. Unshaded and uncurtained, it framed one bare, lonely tree-branch that cut a jagged horizontal path across the otherwise unbroken line of the rectangle. Sitting on the branch, facing his window was a small brown bird. He barely noticed.
Slowly, ponderously he worked through his morning ablutions, then returned to his bedroom. Carefully he balanced a tray, heavy with food, as he negotiated a tenuous route to his bed. As he passed the window, the bird was still there. He thought its head turned from right to left, watching him as he passed. Back in bed he gathered his food about him and began the solitary, engrossing ritual of feeding. When he was finished and had taken long, satisfying moments to relish the fullness, he noticed that the bird was still on the branch. It almost looked as if it was watching him.
He looked away.
It was time for him to prepare for shopping. As he struggled with his clothes, his body, and the bedroom, he could feel the bird's attention follow him. Furtively, in various stages of dress, he glanced toward the window from various edges of the room. Except for its eyes and the minimalist movements of its head as it followed his progress, the bird seemed to be an overgrown knot bulging stark and somehow aggressive from the branch. At last he was ready. Taking his coat from a waist-high pile of clothes in a far comer of the room, he made his way towards the door. As he passed the window, he looked directly at the bird. It pierced him with its eyes, seemed to stop the world for just a moment, although motion and time clicked on relentlessly. Then as if it knew he was leaving, the bird flew awav.
He was stunned. After a long moment looking at the empty window, he shook himself, as a wild animal might after plunging into an icy stream, and pretended it had never happened. "Just an illusion," he told himself, "brought on by the high sugar content of the breakfast I've just finished."
It was several hours after he had returned from shopping that he reentered the bedroom. Groceries had been put away, household items stored, and, of course, he was very, very hungry. A lunch of mammoth proportions needed to be prepared.
When he entered the bedroom, he was balancing a very large circular tray covered to the edges and heaped high with food. Swinging from his an% was-a plastic bag filled with videocassettes which he would watch on the TVJVCR in the corner to the left of the window. Watching movies was the other major occupation ofhis life.
As soon as he managed to make it through the door, closing it with his left foot while balancing on his right-no mean trick for a body of his size, burdened with food and entertainment - he looked at the window. It was empty.
Crossing the room, he passed close enough to touch the pane if he had had an arm not needed for more important tasks. His eye caught the movement. He looked at the window as the little brown bird flew back to the branch. It perched, silent, with eyes of fire, in the same spot it had abandoned when he had left to go shopping. The tray bobbed, rattled, and shook. His attention returned to his endangered food. All thought vanished.
With zen-like single-mindedness he saved the food. He did not look at the window until he sat propped in bed, his food like sentinels surrounding him.
Then he looked at the window.
The bird was watching him.
The meal was without satisfaction. Even momentary. His attention broke. He chewed and swallowed. He reached, gathered, and encircled, but there was no
satisfaction.
At last the food gone, the clattering dishes, silverware, and trays a cacophony ricocheting off hard, bare walls, he raised himself from the bed. He waddled towards the window where the bird sat, unmoving, waiting for him. He placed one hand on each edge of the sill and supported his weight on stiff arms and locked elbows. He lowered his head until it was parallel to the branch. The bird never moved.
The eyes. He was drawn into those eyes; tiny sparks of fire struck from some cosmic furnace. He was falling into those fiery eyes, and he was not afraid. He was falling into them; yet he was again pierced. The sharp, cold needle of the bird's attention slid without resistance through his insulating, isolating layers and touched him in a place he had forgotten. He felt an almost physical pain.
Again the world stopped while motion and time kept rhythm. He existed within those eyes-connected. He experienced relationship and saw it as a road map.
When the world began again, he became aware of his own body and that of the bird.
Shaken, weak, and confused, wanting only to be finished, protected somehow from what he had just experienced, he looked at the bird's body. Up close he could see its feathers. Row upon row of dingy, deteriorating feathers. Splotches here and there appeared as whorls of damaged feathers, so thin in places he thought he might see the bird's skin. Its feet grasping the narrow branch seemed skeletal. Indeed, except for the eyes, it could have been a corpse. Yet his attention was drawn to one particular point high on its breast. There, if he focused
and was very still, he could see the rapid beating of the bird's heart.
He pushed himself from the window, the sudden violence of the motion staggering him. "I do not have to be a part of this," he told himself. He turned clumsily toward his bed, his mind inventorying his body, reminding him of its solidity, of its terrible comfort. Reaffirming, reestablishing himself, he dropped into his bed. He switched on a movie that he had left in the VCR. The remote control became his entry into reality.
It was as it had been with the food. His attention was broken. Again and again his eyes, then his mind drifted toward the bird. Always it was there, patiently offering its aggressive, unwanted attention.
He would look at the eyes, then look away. He could see the bird's body clearly now, even from the bed across the room. He looked at its body because it lacked the power of the eyes. Poor broken body. Such a paradox.
The afternoon slipped away silently, as if unwilling to interrupt the motion by measuring time. He became aware of rumblings deep within the caverns of his body. Hunger. Perhaps the bird was hungry.
The thought came to him so clearly that at first he couldn't claim it as his own. Then, resistance overcome, he lifted himself from the bed with an ease and grace unnoticed by his conscious mind. He gathered a small handful of food crumbs
left from the last feeding and went to the window.
Carefully he put his empty hand on the handle attached to the bottom of the
window frame.
The bird remained still as death.
His eyes fixed on the eyes of the bird; his mind was clear and empty.
Slowly, silently he raised the window. The bird never moved.
He looked down and spread the crumbs in a small circle on the sill belowthe bird. Six or eight tiny pieces - skinny, skinny feast.
Without looking at the bird again he lowered the window and turned away. His body reminded him of the clammy sweat and biological needs that seemed to result from his effort. With a feeling of exhaustion, with his head down, and eyes somehow unable to look up from the floor, he made his way into the bathroom. He was out of the bedroom for only about two minutes, three at the most. He looked at the window as he came through the door. The bird was in its’ place unmoved.
But as he crossed in front ofthe window, he noticed the crumbs were gone.
Almost in passing he remembered he had not eaten and didn't seem to be hungry.
For several days he fell into a new routine. He would eat, though not as often or as much. He would resist the bird's attention. Finally he would come to it, fall into its eyes, and almost welcome the pain the bird's attention uncovered. And he would feed the bird.
The bird never moved, eating only when he was out of the room or when his attention was elsewhere. It remained on its perch always. There was only one exception. When he left his bedroom with the intention of leaving the house, the bird seemed to know. As he passed the window on his way out, their eyes would meet and the bird would fly away, its wings aflutter in an angular, disjointed
dance.
When he came home again and entered the bedroom, his eyes would look to the window. Only then would the bird return, repeating its ungraceful flight. It would perch in exactly the same spot, and its head would slowly turn, its eyes searching for him.
It was that way for three days. That third day he had taken to spending long periods of time at the window, leaning on his arms, head lowered, examining the bird. Surely it was eating, but as he looked closely, it seemed, even after so few days, that the bird's condition had worsened. Its feathers seemed more bedraggled. Occasionally he thought he saw it shudder. Just a momentary tremor, almost imperceptible, he thought of it as an after-shock generated by some cataclysm long since passed.
Long after dark on the third day, he witnessed another tremor. Was it more powerful? He couldn't tell. He stilled his mind and focused on the bird's heartbeat.
Certainly it had changed. In a subtle way the beat had become tenuous. As if broken free of connection to its normal rhythm, the heartbeat hovered close to what was remembered, but there was almost an echo of a new, less stable, less fundamental rhythm to come.
He looked into the bird's eyes.
They too had somehow changed. They looked familiar. Beyond their fire, perhaps
transcendental to it, they triggered a memory. So familiar.
He moved away from the window, lumbering across the trails of the cluttered room. He allowed some unidentified emotion to bubble into his consciousness. He rolled it around in his mind and examined it. He identified it. He called it
fear.
He stood next to his bed, arms hanging at his sides. Again it was a thought so clear he could not at first claim it as his own.
"The bird is dying."
For the first time in memory, he was driven to panic-to unplanned reactive movement.
"I must do something," his mind said as he pushed towards the window, dislodging the stacks of clothes, paper, and collectible debris between him and the bird.
"I must do something."
It never occurred to him to wonder why it was important, why the bird's life had any meaning to him at all. He stood again before the bird with that singular
thought,
"I must do something."
Looking into the bird's eyes, he was sure he could feel it allying itself to
the thought.
Indeed something must be done.
"Pet stores," his mind said.
But it was far into the night and there were no stores
open.
"Then it must wait until morning."
His mind struggling for logical, methodical control knew he must be prepared.
The rest of the night he spent, sleepless, alternating between searching through telephone books and street maps -calculating on how long it would take to reach the nearest pet store - and standing before the bird looking for changes and drinking the fire of its eyes. For the eyes burned as fiercely, with as much
power as they ever had.
At eight-thirty in the morning, he left the bedroom. As he walked past the window, the bird spread its wings - its eyes still on his-and flew into the morning light. It seemed to him that it had been a monumental effort.
He hurried into the cold December morning. Plodding through the streets, through grey-cold slush and patches of treacherous ice, he heard the Christmas lights clinking and the hanging decorations groaning in the wind. On the very edge of his consciousness, he registered the date. December twenty-fourth.
Christmas Eve
The wind blew harsh and bitter, folks on the street leaning into it or resisting its push. He alone was vertical. He moved his ponderous weight like a monolith parting the wind, peeling it aside. People, like the wind, altered their course and slipped around and behind him. But he was not untouched. Beneath his coat his shirt and pants clung to him, sweat polishing his body. His breath came in little gasps, oval-shaped gulps, and blood pounded a rhythm in his ears reminiscent of the bird's heartbeat but so amplified that he was sure the earth must shake hearing it.
He neither slowed down nor altered his course. He was close now. He could see the sign. Nokah Pet Shop. Just a few more feet. Steadying himself, checking his momentum for his imminent change in direction and speed, his attention, for no apparent reason, developed a jagged addendum. Just to the left, in a building attached to the pet store, was another store. A display case in the window held rows of bushel baskets. Each basket was filled with strange-looking roots, or weedy-looking herbs, or bulbs of ominous browns and greens. Behind the display, over near the far wall stood a man of indeterminate age, dressed in a white shirt buttoned to the throat, and black, baggy pants. He stood facing the street, hands folded in front of him, watching.
The rest of the store was filled with a jumble of display cases and other baskets, all filled with strange dried plants and other suspicious organic matter. In the shadows, furthest from the street, there was another figure sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair. All this he perceived in the shortest of moments.
"Herbalist," his mind registered, then wasted another moment wondering why he had bothered to look. The moment was enough to complicate his entrance into the Nokah Pet Shop. His body hit the door a millisecond before his hand managed to fully turn the knob. As his weight pressured the door, threatening an explosion of glass, the door latch released and the door swung open.
He followed, stumbling, arms akimbo, tripping across the floor like a Kentucky
hillock with St. Vitus Dance.
A bespectacled, grey-haired lady behind the counter pressed a hand to herbreast and stuttered,
"Oh, oh, oh!"
He fought for control. He balanced and counter-balanced. At the very last moment, before he reached the counter, he used both arms to brace himself against the counter's leading edge, stopping there - shaky but safe.
The lady pushed her reading glasses far down her nose.
"What!" she asked.
"There's this bird, you see ..."
There was a moment of uncertainty, a transitional moment when the lady's laughter - his entrance certainly was humorous - could have changed the course.
Laughter, healing and friendly was called for. But the lady did not laugh. She stood, cold and superior, with her arms across her breasts, grasping her elbows.
He stuttered, garbled words of apology, was silent for a moment, then
began again.
He tried to explain. He tried to say it in a way that didn't sound crazy. His shoulders hunched forward over the counter; his voice was soft and urgent.
Never before had he felt so vulnerable; never before had he risked so much.
"The bird is surely dying."
His hands clasped and unclasped, worrying fat fingers, palms reaching outward, upward, pleading. He kept speaking long after he knew it was useless. Even after he stopped, his body continued to plead.
"There is nothing I can do," was the store lady’s response.
She turned to the right, showing him a stem and final profile. With a single, pointed finger she pushed up her glasses and returned to her paperwork.
Except for his hands, he stopped pleading. His hands called to her once, twice, then again. Never before had his movements been so graceful.
But the lady did not hear. Her heart was deaf.
He closed the door quietly when he left and stood for a time outside the Nokah Pet Shop. He seemed confused, as if he were not sure where he was or how he had gotten there.
The day remained grey as boredom, cut by the winter wind and a dreadful, arcane aura of Christmas.
His feet began to shuffle towards home almost without conscious direction.
TO BE CONTINUED
Sena Magazine
March, 1991
THE VISIT
by Bill Schaefer
The following story is based on patterns of giving and receiving, life and death. Part I was offered in the Christmas issue during a season which celebrates birth. It is appropriate that Part 2 is offered during the Easter season when we are attentive to death and resurrection.
Part 2
As his body began to move, stalwart against the wind and the diabetic whisperings of Christmas, his attention was drawn, perhaps as a defense against replaying the pet-shop scene over in his mind, to the store of herbs. It remained exactly as it had before he entered the pet shop. The man still stood motionless, with hands folded before him, close to the street. He had black hair that matched his pants, and it was pulled straight back into a ponytail so tight that the skin of his forehead and eyes stretched toward the back of his head in sympathy with his hair. It gave him a vague but distinctly eastern look.
Back in the shadows the seated figure remained so still it could have been an illusion. "Herbalist," his mind again registered as he moved slowly by.
"Herbalist."
He had not walked a block before he stopped. In the very center of the sidewalk, he was an immovable object around which the movement of Christmas Eve flowed.
"Herbalist," his mind repeated.
"Perhaps. . ."
It was not hope rekindled that finally turned his mammoth body back towards the herb shop. It was more a rebirth of the powerful need to do something, anything, that had driven him out into the cold gray light of Christmastime to begin with.
The door squeaked on its hinges as he opened it. Four bells tolled an ancient minor key. The man by the window turned to face him. It was the only adjustment in demeanor or posture the man made toward his presence in the store.
"You sell herbal remedies?"
The man's head nodded slowly, once, chin almost touching his chest.
He began to tell the man, so very carefully, about the bird. About the small, brown, wild bird that was sick. Not saying too much. Speaking reasonably, quietly, logically. Even as he began to describe the bird, the man's eyes grew round and large. As he began to describe the bird's symptoms, the man's serenity
seemed to crumble. He began to shake his head and shoulders.
"There are patches here and there on its body where…"
The man took a step backward
"Wait, there is something about its heartbeat..."
"No, no, I know nothing," the man's hands made sharp horizontal cuts,
waist-high, in the air between them.
"Wait. I'm not explaining well, I'm
not used to. . . ."
The man's hands reached towards him, palms out, fingers splayed.
"No, no, go from here."
The hands pushed him away, rejecting him from across the room.
"But you must. . . ."
"Wait!"
The word was quiet, whispery, almost dusty. All motion and emotion in the store ceased. For the first time he was aware of the store's smell. All herbal and spicy; there was an underlying earthy smell, pungent, with a subtle essence of decay.
He looked toward the back of the store. The seated figure was still in shadow, features unclear. One hand had reached into the light. The hand was ancient, skin like parchment, translucent over blue veins, gnarled, bony joints. One finger, long and sharp, was pointing at him.
With exquisite slowness the figure rose and came out from the shadows. The old man's body was stooped and frail. His face, worn and wrinkled, was framed by wisps of long white hair. His head sunk low into the trunk of his body as if its weight were too much for his neck to bear. But as he leaned forward, finger
still pointing, his body formed an arc of powerful attention.
"Come with me," the old man beckoned.
The younger man near the window hugged himself and leaned at an odd angle against the wall, his skin pallid and grey.
The old man moved with surprising agility to his right, pulled back a heavy black drapery, and disappeared behind it.
As he watched the old man disappear, a vision of the bird flitted through his mind; then, willing steadiness into his body, he began to negotiate carefully a trail across the room.
He entered the back room, unconsciously holding his breath. One light bulb, hanging from a cord in the ceiling, illuminated a room almost too small for his presence. His bulk filled almost its entire width. Before him, positioned directly under the single light, was a wooden pedestal. Resting on its richly grained surface was a large, blood-red box. Perhaps eighteen inches square, the wooden box had strange, esoteric symbols on each of its visible planes.
Behind the pedestal the old man stood, hands behind his back, watching him.
Again, passing almost too quickly to be seen, he had a vision of the bird. He looked into the old man's eyes. They were keen and dry and pale.
"You can help me?"
For a long moment the old man said nothing. Then,
"The bird is dying?"
"Yes."
"It feeds you fire?"
"Yes."
"It stops the world?"
"Yes."
"It removes you?"
"Yes."
"It gives you pain?"
"Yes."
Again the old man was silent. He reached for the box. He folded back the top. Then, as if the box had magical hinges, he folded each side over upon the next until he held the sides and the top in his hands, flat and separated from the pedestal. His hands and the box returned behind his back.
Pure white and luminous on the pedestal stood a ball. Flattened on the bottom, creating a secure resting place on the flat surface, it radiated a pristine beauty, a heart-catching simplicity, and a light too lovely to be mere reflection from the incandescent bulb. The top, too, was cut away, a straight horizontal cut, creating an opening. It was not, he realized, a ball at all. It was a ball-shaped bowl.
If the bowl's radiance, purity, and circular unity were a marvel, then looking down into its interior was terror made visible. It was not dark. Black became a word without description in the lexicon between darkness and light. Within the bowl there was an utter absence of light. So complete was the dark victory that the surface of the bowl's opening, that plane so sharp and mathematical, was solid beyond the physical, still beyond the memory of movement.
Seeing it, he was sure he was at the edge of the universe, within arms
length of reality's death.
He looked up at the old man's face.
"You can get what you need," spoke the ancient voice. He looked away, back into
the bowl. A moment passed.
"You can get what you need," the old man repeated
quietly.
He felt his arm raise, his hand begin to reach.
"No."
His hand stopped halfway to the bowl. He looked up into almost colorless
eyes.
"You must pay," the old man said.
He knew it would come to this.
Somehow he knew.
"How much?"
Without hesitation the answer
came.
"Eight thousand, six hundred, and forty-three dollars."
He heard a ringing in his ears; he felt lightheaded. He was fastidious about little in his life except his money. He knew that if he totaled his checking and savings accounts, added to it his three bonds, the amount would be exactly eight thousand, six hundred, and forty-three dollars.
"No, oh no! Not ever!"
His body was already turning, retreating towards the drapery. The old
man spoke quietly to his back.
"Bring the money at midnight."
He was on the street with no memory of having passed through the store. He moved in a panic through a crazy quilt of reds and greens, of people bumping and
pushing him, of horns screeching warnings, and the wind whistling icy laughter
in his ears.
How could the old man have known any of it. It was madness. The bowl, the old man, especially the bird - why should any of it matter. No, no, no. Then he was in the bedroom, dropping his coat on the floor, hurrying towards the window. Before he was halfway there, the bird, fluttering its wings out from its body and above its head like a broken fan, settled on the branch in its special place.
Leaning on his arms, head separated from the bird by inches and a pane of glass, he spoke to it,
"This is madness."
The eyes were fire and they pierced him. He fell into them without resistance, welcoming the union and even the pain. The world stopped and waited, as if there had never been movement. When the world began again, he was still at the window. Exhausted, his body hung like a sack, supported only by his arms. He raised his eyes to the bird.
His whisper barely fogged the window
"No, I cannot do this."
The bird watched him without
reproach or pity.
In his mind, so tired and vulnerable, images revolved slowly; voices began to speak. His life was there, accessible to him and he did not want to look; he did not want to hear. He saw the gluttony and the consumption and was repulsed. Yet he knew it was protection. He heard the ugly words spoken at him, saw the rejection, but hungered for connection.
From far in the past, he heard his mother and
father,
"You are so selfish; you are so self-centered," and he knew they understood only the parts, never the whole.
Then for a long time he thought of nothing. The bird watched, and for a long time it was his guardian.
When he could, he lumbered to the bed, lay where he fell, and slept.
His first coherent thought as he swam back to consciousness was of time.
It was five minutes to one, the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
He sighed. With the expulsion of breath, he purged the last resistance. For the first time in his life he felt light. He gathered together his bank books and bonds. He walked towards the door, and, as he passed the window, placed his hand, fingers spread, against the freezing pane. For a moment the hand left a frosty imprint, a temporary companion for the bird in his absence.
For this time, the bird did not leave with him. Rather its head turned and watched him go. Its eyes were bright, but the fire was gone.
He had not noticed.
* * * * *
He reached deeper into the bowl, his hand flexing, reaching, beginning its search. He looked at the old man, who stood before him as before, his hands hidden behind his back, his face a wrinkled mask, without expression.
He looked down again at the bowl.
"Now," he thought, "I will have it."
He reached deeper, searched wider, but touched nothing. He moved his hand in
wider arcs, not noticing that the motion of his hand far exceeded the exterior limits of the bowl. He reached deeper, past his elbow, fighting for control, insisting on control. He moved his hand and arm left to right, right to left, fingers stretching, searching.
His eyes flicked to the old man, then back to the bowl. His forehead was furrowed; his face sweaty and cold. New fear crowded out the old. It scratched more insistently on the edges of his consciousness.
He rejected it and plunged into the bowl as deeply as his massive arm would allow. His arm was lost close to his shoulder.
There was no order now. His arm flailed in the non-place, his hand's frantic grasping like a desperate sign language, spelling out his need.
The old man's pale eyes held no comfort.
His arms began to move even more quickly.
"Where?" he asked the old man.
The old man was silent.
"Where?" he cried out.
The old man was still.
His hand closed into a fist finally.
He swung his arm from side to side, seeking the edge of the victorious darkness,
needing to deliver hammer-blows, needing destruction, needing oblivion.
At last he stopped.
He withdrew his arm without wondering where it had been. His body was so weak; he could accuse only with his voice.
"You lied."
The old man's voice sounded like
the shattering of glass.
"I did not say you should reach for something."
The arm that had so recently risked the ultimate unknown twitched, but the fingers did not close. He raised both arms then and let them fall-a gesture of capitulation and futility. He did not think about his loss, only about his failure. In
the swirl of uncontrolled movement that characterized his retreat, he heard a noise coming from the old man. It might have been a cough or a dry, humorless cackle.
He was back on the street.
It was sometime after midnight. It was Christmas.
He was alone on the street, and he was defeated. Except for the wind and the clinking, rattling of the decorations, the city was still. Frozen in the moment, he thought perhaps the world had truly stopped and all he saw was chiseled out of a place as totally without warmth - as the dark place had been without light.
He could not hold onto the thought. He moved stolidly down the center of a narrow street between high buildings.
From eyes drawn tight and angular from cold and defeat, in a body all arcs and circles, tears formed graceful spheres, slipping down the soft curve of his cheek like embryonic diamonds.
He entered his house. As he passed through the kitchen, a meaningless thought noted that he had not eaten in over twenty-four hours. Hunger was a
lost word.
Dropping his coat, he slowly climbed the stairs to his bedroom. With effort he opened the door, and the bird's eyes were waiting. They were still bright, but there was no fire. He thought the fire had been smothered by his failure.
He came to the window, a supplicant too feeble to stand, and sunk to his knees before it. His head was now below the branch where the bird still managed its tenacious grip. He looked into the bird's eyes.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
The bird watched but neither accused nor forgave.
He rested his head on the sill, wanting somehow to let go, yet knowing he had nothing more to release. The moment was without hope and terrible.
At last he lifted his head, and with his right hand lifted the window. It was as heavy as the accumulated pain of his life-moments. The task, even as it was being accomplished, seemed impossible. Then the window was open, and he did not feel the icy air suck the warmth from the room.
He lifted his right hand-the hand that had known the intimate terror of the darkness-palm up in some kind of gesture, perhaps. His hand was open, fingers curved gently so that there was formed a kind of tiny bowl or nest.
The bird quit its perch and hopped into his hand. Warmth reborn. His hand, arm, then body radiant, receiving. Warmth paradoxical in direction.
The bird settled softly into his palm, forming itself to his hand's welcoming shape, plumping its feathers to compliment and complete the curve. He looked again into its eyes, still bright, but now filled with a soft light. He did not fall into them; he was not pierced. The world did not stop but rather joined the harmonious rhythm. The soft light caressed him, and he knew that the light, too, was in his eyes, familiar.
Then as he watched, the light in the bird's eyes began to dim. He had known it must be so all along. He had forgotten, but now he remembered.
Gently he covered the bird with his left hand, except for its head. The light was so faint now, so tender, he thought it might be only an echo. In the most intimate part of his mind, he thought he heard the bird's voice.
"Oh, Thomas," he heard it say.
Then the light, which had been limited by the restriction of the bird's
body was free.
With the tiniest of shudders, the bird died.
Thomas knew, for the moment, the peace which passes all understanding.
