the darkness had begun to lift, the sun stretching awake. The cold was a loud obnoxious drunk. The slatted bench violated physics pushing upward into the slow bones of the sleeping.
He’d once been at a New Year’s Eve party filled with the most beautiful women. Late into the evening, early into the next year, a lovely blonde would offer him sage wisdom. She said, “I will only buy food for homeless people. I never give them cash; our privilege should be used responsibly, you know? Like, it’s really shameful to enable addiction.”
He looked her in the eyes and said, “I usually make them promise to use it for drugs or alcohol.” He’d been looking in her eyes for the shock – the transition from Principled Privilege to shocked Innocence. Once he saw it, the dilation of her pupils, the slackening of her cheeks and jaw, he enjoyed it, briefly, before asking, “have you ever tried sleeping on a sidewalk in front of the bank without some kind of anesthetic?”
He’d been thinking of that evening, not more than a decade since, just that evening, as he laid down on the slatted bench and searched for a comfortable position. And here he was, without wine or smoke, and tired. At least he wasn’t in front of a bank, he thought. Besides, he was warm enough with his heavy coat and enough layers to be happy for, when it’s cold, but frustrated when it’s time to urinate.
How he’d gone from a New Year’s Eve party in Washington, D.C., filled with beautiful people to sleeping on a bench on a forest-path along the Limat river in Zurich was a mystery to him. Butterfly effect, chaos – who knew? He could hardly hold, in his mind, all the events between then and this moment. Synthesizing an analysis of cause and effect was out of the question. He was savant in so far as life – he called it the Universe – happened to him, and without effort, without training or learning, but by pure random accident, he survived.
If the reader were to stumble down this forest path and find our protagonist sleeping on the bench, being curious, wake him and ask, “What have you ever done to deserve your life? What suffering have you endured that you should be so rewarded?” He would only reply, “Nothing. I’ve done nothing to warrant my comfort. I’ve suffered no more than others, no less than some. There is no accounting, with our current understanding, of the causes for my existence. I can make no more a claim for myself as I can for my own skin. I am the Universe’s will.”
The reader might find the idea of being the will belonging to the Universe, depending upon the reader’s conception of the term, “Universe”, a bit uncomfortable. The discomfort would be cheaply lost on him, firmly set in the belief that a single bacteria living on his skin could never conceive of his dreams, and so it was that he would never glimpse the ideas of the Universe. He had often said, “I’m just along for the ride.”
It was a comfortable belief system. Elegant in its simplicity. Veritably unassailable. One could not, after all, truly understand what it would be to actually be another person, let alone a single celled organism living upon that other person. Physical processing limits, he would say. Not enough registers to map a close enough model. In the end, he would say, “ya can’t get there from here.”
It was, he knew, the remnants of his strict Christian upbringing. The need for a singular, encompassing concept had been easily satisfied with a reasonable scientific definition of the Universe. Being a student of math, he’d found parallels in Set Theory, Transcendental Numbers. Biology was a recent obsession of his, even if it was only philosophical in nature. The mysticism of the monotheistic religions had found a home somewhere within him.
It was the mysticism that had encouraged such a ridiculous statement intended for shock value on that brisk New Year’s Eve in D.C. He couldn’t say if that beautiful young blonde had recanted her repulsive, privileged-white-liberal mask and donned the regalia of a nun dedicated to the plight of the poor. But such was the nature of processing limitations: predictions were generally given a short lifespan and long-term models diverged wildly, quickly.
After all, who might have predicted that he would rest his tired head on this particular bench, on this particular cold, wet and unwelcoming night? And more to the point, who could have predicted what was to happen to him after the sun had risen and the sky cleared to reveal its deep blues?
As it turned out, he woke confused. The flickering lights overhead hurt; it hurt his eyes, it hurt his ears, but more than anything, the glare hurt his lips. His tongue was unmanageable; a failed appendage evolution was in the process of repurposing. His throat fared no better. Was he in the desert? Was this Jordan? His mind was reeling in slow-motion. A piercing ‘meow’ came from behind him. It finally occurred to him that he should probably determine where he stood with respect to the rest of existence. Everything seemed to hurt simultaneously. He rolled his head to his right. Then back to his left. He rolled back to his right with the idea that he would open his eyes. En route, he realized he was laying down; a revelation, it seemed, to verify life. His cheeks lifted with this new knowledge.
First the right eye, a blurry mosaic. Focus. It’s the end of a fight and he’s tired. Focus. He’s not sure it matters. Again, forming like a neon sign in the middle of his mind: Focus. Shadows, light, lines, a box? An arm? A robot? The left eye. Fuck. Focus. Easier this time. His mind is coming back. Machines. Buttons on the machines. Bags suspended in the air. Balloons. No, not balloons – a hospital. ‘oh fuck,’ he thinks, ‘the fucking hospital.’
A boom in the distance makes him flinch, pulling his hands up to cover his face, palms out. After a moment, he looks at his hands. Like the hands of strangers. He says out loud, low and gravely, “These hands are innocent, they have never murdered!” The confusion is complete. There are machines in a field of grass, a small lake on a light incline. Its surface reflects two perfect clouds. There are butterflies sitting on his floating bag, attached to his arm like a vine in the forest.
Sitting up on his elbows, a tree asks how he feels. “Fine,” he says, “never better? How are you?” The tree bows its top to its lower branches and begins a kind of waddle to his opposite side. It strikes him as odd, this waddling tree, but he can’t quite put his finger on what is odd about it. “You’re certainly in good spirits, all things considered,” the tree responded. “It’s good to see you awake.” The tree took his hand, it’s needles poking him. He twitched. “Still a bit nervous, eh? Let’s get you some water.”
“Yes. Indeed, I should have some water. Is it from the lake?”
“No doubt it’s from some lake,” the tree said, “but I couldn’t say which one.”
The tree was taking his pulse. That was what was odd. He asked, “Why are you taking my pulse?”
“It’s part of what I do?” the tree half asked. “Let me get you that water,” and with that, the tree waddled off into the forest.
This was a completely new phenomenon for him. Never before had a tree taken his pulse. It occurred to him that he had no idea what the local social norms were. Worried he’d committed an unforgivable faux pas, he looked to the forest to see if the other trees were doing anything remarkable. The butterflies around his bag seemed a bit put off by the tree as well.
“I don’t think she likes her job very much,” one of the butterflies said offhandedly.
He asked, “You think that’s its job? To go around taking pulses?”, somewhat incredulously.
“What’r’you, stupid?” The blue winged butterfly shot back. “Of course that’s what she does, she’s a fucking nurse.” Somehow, after it’d been said, it seemed somewhat obvious.
He’d drifted off to sleep, a peaceful darkness that enveloped him in silence.
When he woke, there was a glass of water on a rock near his hammock. He reached out, half expected it not to be there, took it and drank deeply, spilling a small stream down his chin, neck and onto his chest. The butterflies were gone and now there sat three crows at the end of his hammock, rocking in time with him.
“Hey,” he said slowly. His voice felt a hundred times better. “How are you guys?”
The crows looked at one another, then back at him. There was no answer.
“Fair enough.” He looked around the meadow at the various flowers. “I like the red ones. And those blue ones have a funny shape.”
The crow in the middle said, “There are no flowers.”
It had come across as a command, and in his own turn said, “Whatever you say dude. Crows ought to know what’s what, right?” The middle crow turned his head left then right looking at his colleagues in turn. “Are there are least cigarettes?” His desire to get out of the hammock was growing at an unreasonable pace. He realized he needed to pee.
The three crows flew off together, twisting uniformly on their take off from the foot-board. A practiced military maneuver.
He looked around for a bush, or a rock outcrop; anything to maintain a bit of privacy. Only the forest in the distance offered some privacy, though he thought about how one of the forest also took his pulse. It would have to wait.
In the mean time, it also seemed important to figure out just what was going on. He acknowledged that a bag of fluid floating in the air, and a bed in the middle of a meadow was not what he would consider an ordinary event. However, upon reflection, he was unable to come up with what an ordinary event might be.