Now the Storyteller
What did it mean to be alive but to see worlds, to embrace them, to live within them and to absorb something of their atmosphere...
Now the Storyteller
The earliest bus was the one he liked to catch when he needed to go to town, and this time of year when greens colored the hills and rain often fell at night and felt cool and fresh and smelled good, especially in the morning, he didn’t mind waiting for the bus, since all those greens and the scent of rain meant more life and he desired more life, so he caught the bus early that morning and climbed up the three steps, careful to keep his hat on his head and his scarf tucked under his collar and against his neck, as the driver waved good morning, and he scanned the bus and found a place where no one else sat and soon settled into a seat next to a window and looked out of the window at the countryside, at the mountains streaked with late snow and at the fields that in less than a month had deepened with green grass and yellow wildflowers, then he settled into his seat again and thought about how long it had been since he had seen town and he tried to remember what he had done there, who he had met, or what he had searched for, when he looked out of the window again and wondered when his life had started to narrow, which caused him to shake his head and maybe to say out loud I don’t know, for there had been starts, certainly there had been starts, starts into worlds and then an accumulation of worlds and then worlds without direction or ends and this despite his knowledge, his actual experience of ends which he had known since childhood, a time when he had seen children, many in conditions like himself, die in their rooms, die in their hospital beds, and he could recall the old people who had died too and who while hardly fixed into their coffins had relatives snap pictures of them that were later developed into 4x6 photographs which in turn were placed into albums and shared with family and friends at picnics, reunions, sometimes ordinary visits, and as a child he had understood something of why the living needed to take pictures of their dead, which was to preserve the dead and those worlds that the dead carried with them, worlds that the living tried not to forget, neither the dead nor their worlds, but what he did not comprehend as a child, what he could not have comprehended was that life narrowed for everyone, narrowed and narrowed and narrowed for years and before most people had the chance to die, given that long before death, long before the final squeeze through the proverbial sack, life collapsed into something so small and narrow that people felt it, felt it like the weight of some strange heavy air upon their person or the heavy sum of real regrets
as a child he had heard speculations regarding his own death, what the doctors said to his parents when they thought he was sleeping, what the chances were of his making it through another night, another we’ll just have to wait and see, yet he could not quite believe, not as a child, that his life might succumb within the diminishing width of a hospital bed, which perhaps was impossible for any child to believe, then later the facts of his childhood became circumstances that he was, on occasion, required to explain though he never understood why, considering that there was an allotment for everyone, a designation of unknown time in which the past could be an excuse for the limitations or failures of a present life, and by the time he needed to explain the facts of his own childhood and illness, he had already answered for his obvious failures, which he had accounted for and had apologized for and apologized again and still again, and he remained comfortable in his seat when the bus wobbled to a stop and a group of reindeer crossed the road and went in the direction of the sea, and he watched them as they went and saw how beautiful they looked against the new grass and he saw how the sky looked blue and close, but what would have been the point to go on explaining, for we are all wounded, he told himself, as he settled back into his seat, and nothing can alter a choice already made and acted upon, least of all how someone is born, then he checked the bus and saw there were two other passengers, one a woman whom he guessed to be in her late forties, sleeping, nodding her chin into her chest, and another, a teenage boy locked into the damnations of his phone, though they had touched him, those failures and mistakes and consequences, of course they had touched him, the reality of wounds, of wounded bodies, of wounded hearts, but it was this same knowledge of wounds and death that had corrupted him from childhood, corrupted him with a ruthless sense of wanting to stay alive and to be alive, and what did it mean to be alive but to see worlds, to embrace them, to live within them and to absorb something of their atmosphere, their light, their darkness, as well as their hopes, pleasures, risks and something like time, time expressed in terms of past, present and future, and later time expressed as seasons and later still time expressed as months and days, and yet with enough time and enough loss, we begin to account for our experiences not in the language of tenses or seasons or months or even days but by what most of us come to call the day-to-day, the lonely tick-tock of the mere day-to-day, and he was no exception, no exception at all
the bus arrived downtown and he got off one stop before the terminal and instantly became aware of his feet, and he took a couple of steps away from the departing bus and stared upwards at the geometries of the city, at the cornices, architraves and façades, and saw how the sky, still deeply blue, conformed to the angles of the buildings and how avenues ended at other avenues or at other buildings though none of them taller than four stories, and he checked his feet again before moving on, and he saw that the shoes he wore, shoes that had belonged to his father, needed polishing, and he wondered if men polished their shoes anymore, maybe shoes didn’t require polish these days, maybe polished shoes were part of some praxis that simply had faded, and wasn’t it curious how many things in a lifetime could simply fade, could simply disappear, and he walked on and thought about stories his father had told him of things passing, about how he, his father, had hit a homerun in Little League but had the homerun called back because his shirt was untucked or how when he had been a child all men wore ties whenever they went outside unless it was to grill meat, cut grass, or fix a car, and his father had insisted that in his day to get into a car and find a radio station with music to match your mood could very well change your life, and it did change his father’s life, when one evening he and a young woman got into a car and found a radio station and heard Andy Williams sing “Try to Remember,” and their lives changed forever, his father’s life and the young woman who would become his mother, her life changed, too, and their lives after love, loss, regrets and hard, sometimes bitter years would indeed become slow and oh, so mellow, and he kept going but without much attention to where he was, rather he wanted to feel the sensation of being lost, as though in a different city, among unfamiliar streets and buildings and possible detours into some new magic, and he walked through an alley where there had been a used bookstore and then he crossed the street and walked up a block and turned left into the town center where no cars were allowed, and he saw people moving along the street, some of whom raised their hands to the sun and others who took pictures of the cathedral, and young women who twirled and smiled when they landed, and old people who fumbled along in tired khaki, with their coats left unbuttoned, and couples who sat at small tables outside of cafes, drinking coffee, talking with each other or sitting in some knowing silence, and he could hear them, could hear their chatter, their calls, their joys in the sunlight, and were not these scenes, these people what he had wanted to see, why he had come to town, to go along streets where people and their dreams had not yet been sacrificed or castigated but thrived under sunlight and stories, maybe one story, then suddenly there was the odor of cigarette smoke and he saw the man a few paces ahead and understood him to be the one who smoked, and when the man stopped in front of a café and turned around and patted down his kitchen apron, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled, and he slowed his pace to see him, to see the man’s gold rimmed glasses, his unshaven, rounded face, his greyish brown hair curled just above his ears, and to see the confidence of a man who appreciated that his shift would end early and afterwards the rest of the day would be his, his to smoke again, to people watch, to see the young women twirl, the old women who held their coffee cups exactly as his mother had held her coffee cup, or to sit in front of the cathedral and recover some memory of wherever he had come from, perhaps Poland or Lithuania, then to ask himself if this was the life he had chosen or planned or even wanted and knowing the answer, he might think again about what he could have amended or confessed but then noticing the time or something else, he would get up to leave, though before all that, before that later might arrive, the two of them glanced at each other and nodded a greeting and he felt an urge to thank the man for smoking and for stopping, but he went on instead, he kept going, and he walked past the cathedral and past the pretty flowerbeds, all the crimsons and purples, and resisting the urge to hurry, he went in the direction of another bus stop, one he believed to be at the end of the street—
This piece is a companion to “How the Sea Became A River,” published in May:
How the Sea Became a River
Was it yesterday afternoon that the snow arrived and dashed the world mere days after we believed it was spring? There had been reports that the hestehov were in bloom and from the house, from the living room, from the large window in the living room, he looked outside and saw where the strait narrowed into a gap between the south sh…
Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.
beautiful, somber