Twelve

 The children! He jumped up and listened for sounds coming from the basement. Nothing yet. But they must have at least gotten round the first couple of obstacles…

Rusted doors, dead-end alleyways, false (but decorative) entryways, inoperative lights and doorbells. All of it awaited them, a maze of frustrations to try their little hearts. What pleasure, he thought. Before they arrived, he knew that he had to prepare a series of intricate digressions that followed the imaginative fable of the world within the lock mechanism. Where to begin? Ah! Of course: there were several notebooks dense and laden with elaborate descriptions from his several travels that awaited perusal. They were penned long ago, so long ago for him, and from such a time—one of youthful frivolities to be sure, but which was mostly stupidity waxing wise of the ways of the world (his world and only his)—so long ago it was, that rereading sent spikes of bitter remembrance through his delicate but lonely and souring heart. A page opened from his recollections—of love lost, or never gained. Sometimes he couldn’t recall which was which: whether it was a love that he refused, or abandoned, or ignored, or ran away from; or whether it was one he wanted but could not gain, perhaps unrequited love of the sentimentally romantic sort (an illusion he tried his best to engage in, with decisive seriousness), but more likely love forced through his own tortured sense (or lack) of self. Suddenly, his life felt empty and a certain kind of boredom crept upon him, from nowhere, a thermostat slowly turned up by a hand intent on a quiet, calculated malice. Where had it all gone? What had it all amounted to? Into which direction had the joy gone? It was strange, how now it was all the unhappiness and joylessness and profound sorrow that seemed to come from an infinitely small point somewhere in the distant past, only to now bloom into a wide delta flooding his later years, as if time had the effect, as one ages, of releasing and dispersing the immeasurably contracted and concentrated doses of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow and all the metaphysically arranged elements of opposition that haunt one’s life from its first tragic moment to its inevitably forgotten and lost final breath. The effect was cumulative.

At one time youth knows no desperation; but all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, there breaks like lightning a sharp streak of desperation across the twilight horizon of life, and it shocks the heart into a sadness which remains with the soul until death—or senility. He was burdened now—despairing of a thousand, of countless, things, things he could not find enough notebooks into which to wail and scream and flood tears about it all.

Just yesterday, while lying in his bed, looking up at the monotonous ceiling of a room he didn’t care to redecorate, a face returned to him—was it one of his several dozen lovers? No, it was a random remembrance: a beautiful but seemingly sad countenance of a boy—no, a young man—playfully conversing with someone or other. He was adjacent to his table, seated with hands folded in lap, arms exposed with shoulders and chest, and chest hair wonderfully visible to his sneaking glances (he couldn’t tell if his pectoral muscles were firm or flat—no bother). The light created a glow upon the boy’s face, a pleasant shine, and his face received it well as his eye caught and reflected back some of that light. There then bloomed in him a radiance that imparted a joviality to his movements, his mouth, his nose and ears, the dark hair and eyelashes, the coiled black hairs grasping his muscular legs… He was entranced. But the young man looked only once in his direction. Taking careful note of this refusal, he all the while pretended indifference as he studied each gesture and especially the glances being exchanged between this youth and his dinner companion (were they the lovers, finally?). His heart fell and desperation broke out, quietly, killing something unfathomably subtle that had up to now preserved his levity of spirit. Add to this a thousand such indifferences he had to feign, and in no time upon your face a transparency forms that reflects and then projects another’s itinerary of love and hope and faith, rather than your own—a foreign scripture of the spiritual virtues that runs aground on the lonely island you’ve managed to cultivate for so long. Soon, all of your spirit is consumed out of desperate self-preservation, and you finally have nothing left to give—no radiance, not even a gray streak of personality.

So he hoped for senility, maybe finalized by the barrel of a gun, someday … you can hope, can’t you? But whose hope would it really be, if you’re already partner to despair? If you truly despair, you’ve already lost hope—or it’s painfully and ridiculously redundant. Yes, desperation had taken hold of him quite suddenly. Relentlessly. A stubbornness to match his own. Each notebook page was another strike of a match to ignite the inferno that lay dormant in him—demons returned he thought he’d snuffed out by sheer force of the vacuum of his inner life. Never so simple, of course. Though there be an abyss buried within, even the abyss must breathe, and its inhalations simply keep the embers burning, the demons warm; at its edge, before the depths consume, there is warmth. Abysses radiate… There was some consolation in that, after all. Thus, an infinitesimal space for that one thing never needful in one’s life, but always present, like background radiation that registers just above absolute zero: hope.

He did hope. Serially. Sequentially. Tragedy, farce … but what about the eternal recurrence of the cycle? Neither tragic, nor farcical—somehow a great overcoming of the two. That, that!, was where the metaphysical fury came from, he realized. All of his notes, given from and to himself out of a desperate attempt to stay alive (almost a form of self-cannibalism, the singular point of non-reference that every writer must grapple with, and in the end be consumed by—their personalized abyss), they were not merely for the famished, as if they somehow provided the sustenance they did not otherwise receive from elsewhere. No, they were for the famished—not that they provided substance and sustenance with which they might help you to endure throughout the famine (something that gets them through the famine), but it was that these notes saw you unto the end. They could only be for those whose end was assured. For the doomed. Is hope at its most intense during this, the final episode? If so, his hope was a great conflagration, raging for years upon years for he was doomed, consuming himself in writing never finished but perpetually abandoned.

Another face—dozens threatened now—appeared, one full of both youth and its own solitary and unbreakable pain, a face that shined arrogant innocence and a false knowingness of things only age teaches (but which youth only hears or sees, from afar). He had, ridiculously (it now seemed) gone through the trouble of creating paper prints of the photos this youth (now likely a man entering middle-age) had sent him dozens of years ago. This was the one that hurt the most. This one was the most paradoxical of my loves, he remembered, painfully. This one just would not go. I wanted to be left alone, but I couldn’t—and he couldn’t let me alone, though he wanted me to let him alone. Why? I asked myself why for the days, and weeks, I tried to untangle myself from him. I couldn’t. He couldn’t. I knew what was going on—and this I knew with an understanding that powerfully rejected sentimentality. Yet, that part of my heart that was attracted by his youth, that was awash in sentimentality, in romantic illusions—all of this was stirred up in me by him. I could not, he thought, get him out of my soul. I searched for reasons, and soon the ‘why’ itself was like a demon, an anti-conscience that drew me closer to this enigma of a soul I could not fully fathom but whose heart I somehow understood, unconsciously. Nothing I could say or do would induce separation or loss. I began to think how loss was a gift, and that this gift, like any gift, might never be given.