B.H. SCHAFER
I was a sky-gazer once, though I couldn’t remember why. My father had been one too, when the roads were flattened grass and the only entertainment was a hazy horizon. By my time, however, board houses were replaced with undifferentiated concrete boxes, and the beaten paths survived only in forgotten corners where investment wasn’t worth the return. I lived like my father when I was young, but my final years in that town were spent beneath fluorescent lights and foam ceilings, staring out the window at grand cloud palaces in the golden hour, learning too late there was no place for that in the world I was growing into.
As an adult, I was far from that home, bounced around from town to town, office to office. I didn’t own much that would make traveling a hassle. I spent my days inside a cubicle, tacking digits into a spreadsheet, or sending emails — a bureaucratic ventricle that existed between crisscrossing red tape whose sole job, aside from busywork, was to pass the buck along. It wasn’t bad, especially surrounded by those in the same lot. And there was free water.
“Wayward Son,” Laurence said as he sipped cold water from a paper cone.
I glanced at him as I poured my own, the silence filled by the glug of rising bubbles in the water tank and the stupid sound I made to get him to repeat himself.
“For the bar tonight. I’m thinking Wayward Son, by Kansas. You think I got the pipes for it?” The bags under his eyes had bags, and his voice had a wisping feebleness to match. “You know the one, don’t you? Carry on my wayward son,” he sang. “There’ll be peace —”
“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Well, it’s karaoke. Being too good at it ruins the fun for everyone.”
He nodded, paused, frowned, and flicked his eyes up, no doubt trying to figure if I was saying something good, or bad, about his voice. I quickly patted him on the shoulder and made my escape.
Karaoke was a non-negotiable for this office. When the day came to a close, we’d all saunter off to , a nearby bar and lounge just down the street, chatting about nothing in particular as we made our way to the quaint, basement, hole-in-the-wall establishment. Its ceiling was low and pimpled with incandescent bulbs that filled the space with a golden glow I wasn’t a fan of. We chugged beer, ate salty foods, laughed, and reveled at the horrible performances until Laurence finally shot up and announced his turn, slapping me on the shoulder as he staggered his way to the stage.
It had been an evening like this some time ago that I first noticed the old man. He was there again that evening. Short because of how he hunched. He shuffled, rather than walked, and lumbered his way onto a stool at the bar, ordering a single pint of beer, just the one, that would serve him for the whole night. I disliked him from the first time I saw him. His slowness. The perpetual contentment on his face. It all frustrated me. When I looked at him, I saw every slow-moving, anachronistic sky-gazer I had ever encountered.
He was the person driving five miles below the speed limit I’d get stuck behind in traffic. He was every old executive who spent a minute flipping through sheets before addressing me. He was every slow walker on the sidewalk I had to step around.
Photo credit: Varun Baker
Maybe if I only encountered him at the bar I could have ignored him, but he seemed to live in the neighborhood I had picked for being close to my current office, and I saw him often. I’d see him strolling in the rain with a small umbrella, stopping to examine each puddle. Or, on sunny days, he’d sit at a storefront for hours watching a cat lounge in the sunlight. Worst of all, he often took the same path I took for work, walking slowly by an old wall while I stomped past him.
I’m not sure what got into me, but I rose from our table and marched to the bar, stopping and staring at the old man, through a semi-drunk haze.
He looked at me, smiled, and nodded, the way he often did when our eyes met on one of those encounters.
“Tell me something, old man.”
He straightened, turned towards me, focused, like I was the only person in the world. I hesitated, for a moment.
“I see you take your time with the strangest things, and I wonder, do you have more of it than the rest of us?”
He studied me, or maybe not, maybe he was just taking his time, like always. He smiled. “I’ve certainly had more of it than many.”
I plopped down on the bar stool next to him, alcohol working its way through me. “How many times do you need to see a puddle before it’s familiar, hmmm?”
He frowned for a moment, furrowing his gray, bushy brows, then beamed. “Isn’t each one a bit different?” He turned away from me, looking forward. “Things only seem familiar when you don’t spend time with them. When you do, you realize there’s always something new, and that they’re not quite as familiar as you thought.”
Golden light sparkled on his gray hair, and I frowned at him, frowned at the weight tugging at my chest.
Before I could reply, Laurence fell on me, arms across my shoulder, muttering something about having the pipes after all. “Yeah, you should go on tour,” I grumbled as I tried to shrug him off, but he didn’t seem to notice.
The old man only stared, smiling.
“What are you looking at!” Laurence barked at the old man, and I got up and ushered him back to the others as he mumbled drunkenly.
“I don’t like that old fart,” he said. “Always moving like he’s going to live forever.”
I continued running into the old man after that, though we shared no words, just more of the same. Staring at that cat, that damn wall, and the clouds. The last two annoyed me the most. I tried to put him out of my mind, but his words intruded on my thoughts, in the quiet evenings, as the light of that golden hour spilled into my apartment.
One morning, I paused to study the cat lying in the sunlight that came beaming between a wall and a lamppost. It only took thirty seconds for me to feel like an idiot and move on with my day. Another time, I stopped by the wall, but I could tolerate that even less. I tried again with puddles as it rained. All I got from that was a cold. And this kept happening until I could declare to myself that it was all nonsense, and I declared it to him as well.
I stumbled up to him by the bar, far drunker than last time. “You’ve lost your mind,” I slurred at him. “I thought you should know that.”
“Have I?”
I nodded, nearly falling over. “I’ve been looking at that cat, y’know. Guess what? Just a cat.”
“The orange one with a red collar?”
I had no idea what color the collar was. “Yes… that one.”
“Did you see its scars? How do you suppose it got them? I wonder what that fight must’ve been like.”
Even if I hadn’t been drowning in beer, I’d be flabbergasted. What was this man saying?
“And how about that wall?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to hear about that damn wall.” And I paused, surprised at my reaction. I took a breath and shook my head. I didn’t want to hear any more of this, and yet, that weight on my chest lingered. I rose to leave, but he touched my arm.
“You remember your first love, son?”
“What?”
“Your first love. How about this. The next time, or whenever it suits you, think about them as you pass by that wall. Maybe then you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
I pulled my arm away, though my gaze lingered on him a moment longer, before heading over to my co-workers to find the only thing I was looking for in that moment: the bottom of a bottle.
I stopped going to karaoke after that, much to the chagrin of the others. The old man lingered in my mind, absurdly, and I did everything I could to bury him. Deeper and deeper the thoughts went, until, weeks later, all notions of him vanished from my mind. What didn’t vanish though, was the weight I felt every evening as I stood in my apartment, staring out my window as that golden glow gave way to night. And yet, even then, the glow lingered in my mind, the clouds lingered in my mind, that wall lingered in my mind.
One evening, as I was walking home — passing by that wall — the evening light caught in my eyes and I paused. Finally, the last conversation I had with the man returned to me. Think of my first love? I gazed at the structure, then up at the sky.
My memory was like vapor, but all at once I was there again, in my hometown, before the old world had lost to the new. I was crying because I had fallen and scratched my knee. I was plodding my way home in the evening, feeling sorry for myself as I passed by a cobblestone wall. That’s when I first saw her. An older girl, dark skin glowing in that golden light as she leaned against the wall, dress flowing in the gentle wind. She saw me and smiled, calling me over. When I explained to her what happened, she petted my head and asked, “Do you want to know what I do when I’m feeling hurt?”
I nodded quietly.
“I come here and look at the clouds.”
She pulled me closer and pointed up, but I shook my head.
“I’ve seen clouds before.”
“Not these clouds. When you really look, you realize that they’re not as familiar as you thought. They’re always something new, from one moment to the next.” She knelt down. “Look, see.”
And I did look. And I’d return to that wall again to look with her. Even when she left the town I’d return and look. Even when board houses gave way to undifferentiated concrete buildings, I’d stare out the window and look. Even after I’d forgotten all about her, all about that wall, that knee, I’d look. Even without remembering why.
Then, I returned to the present, to the wall before me, and I saw it. It was an old thing. Cobblestones, moss growing in the grooves, a relic relegated to a forgotten stretch of road, untouched because changing it wasn’t worth the cost.
I made my way to hoping to see the old man, but he wasn’t there, and that’s when I finally realized that in all the weeks I had spent trying to forget him, I hadn’t encountered him once.
I asked the bartender about him.
“You didn’t know?” he said softly. “He passed away some weeks ago.”
I was hollow on the journey home. And the night was long. I couldn’t sleep, tortured by two questions. What had I been so focused on as to not see that the man had passed? Where had I been?
Still, the next day, I peeled myself out of bed for work earlier than usual so I’d have time to stroll by that wall, slowly.
I never had the chance.
Down the road, some men in orange vests had created a detour. “Not this way, sir,” one of them said politely. “We’re clearing some things for construction.” In the distance, machines beeped, hummed, and clanked — and stones were shattered.
I simply nodded and did as I was told.
Walking, I gazed up at the sky, and noticed the clouds were distant, small, pathetic wisps. My eyes burned as I thought to myself, didn’t the clouds used to be grand?
