Short Story: The Change

When he was coming down the stairs and onto the city street, Bill had actually felt quite fine. So strange of the doctor to ask about his walk down the stairs, which was brisk and composed, as always, as it had to be, he felt,  during office hours. Maybe the doctor was thinking of exertion, but Bill never felt tired in a draining sort of way. He had greeted his co-worker with a casual wave, and paused to look at the new issue of Golf Digest which a man had just brought in on his squeaking trolley, and then he had proceeded to go outside. The brisk, no-nonsense-cold city air had hit him straight on the face, and, as he was caught in the middle of an inhale, right after a sigh, he inhaled some of it in too. Ice cold, that day, gray, no sign of the sun.

It all came in a rush, in fact. A dizziness, more like. The doctor’s eyebrows furrowed again, looking confused on their own, and he pursed his lips. The doctor’s assistant wrote something on the clipboard, something, he really felt for some reason, which would turn out to be insignificant, like a tentative pencil scribble at the edge of something important. The doctor looked back at his assistant but words were not exchanged, and only blank stares were shared across the white, clean room. Then he turned to Bill again, and asked, after shaking his head a little, almost imperceptibly: “A—a dizziness, you say? But no pain when walking down the stairs, right?”

Yes, a dizziness. But that didn’t quite capture it. That was just coincidental, it felt like, something on the order of a dry taste in the mouth during a fever. It was more the case that he had had some kind of access to the underbelly of dizziness in a way that even doctors do not, as if it was a plain object with its qualities out in the open, some kind of lodestone looking thing which did not move, though all the things around it had suddenly and smoothly shifted place. Now, the changes that came, they had nothing to do with his visual field—to his eyes, everything appeared just fine. It was just the sounds that were out of the ordinary. At first, it was the usual, traffic, and the sounds of the cool rush, probably some water gushing through a hydrant in another street, or the sewer pipes or something—that sound that big cities make at all times of the day and night. Up until then, he had felt comfortably in place, a part of the world, with a sense of security in belonging there. But within a few minutes of noticing those sounds, as if for the first time in his life, he felt he was no longer listening to the sounds of an ordinary city street, but rather, that he was in some kind of zone of representation, but, and this was strange, while still being in a zone that managed to stay true to the reality that was there before it.

“Would you describe it,” asked the Priest, to whom he had turned next, in his characteristic low voice, a look of stone serenity disturbed upon his face, shaking his veiny hand over the length of the bench, and then a fingerprint executed upon the sill, checking for some cosmic stardust that had found a way of settling down, outside his ever-present watch, coming back to Bill’s look, “as the Ultimate Truth? Did you have an experience of the Ultimate Truth?”

No, not quite. Although, yes, in the fact that the representation did not seem to lose touch with reality, and neither shift him to a different plane, there really was the hint of something Ultimate, as the Priest said, being revealed. Coming to think of it now, nothing of reality was lost, in the representation, not a single thing, the car’s horn, the person whistling, the noise from the guys in office halls across the street, all of those sounds were still there, and he was confident that those were all the sounds in the street then. It was as if he was really experiencing the real thing, except that he wasn’t. What had been retained, in that moment, then, was not a distillation of the important stuff, like the silhouette of that mysterious lady looking at him from across the street, nor some metaphoric condensation, like the all important cathedral lights shining through the traffic lights’ general region. Coming to think of it, he should not have said “dizziness” to the doctor in reference to what he had gone through, for that implied that he had missed something, when in truth he had not missed a single thing. 

He sat before the Priest, swimming in his own head, in search first of a better word, not “dizziness,” to do this right, this time, and then he drifted to the images of his life. This experience had taken place just this morning, but it already set old and in need of restoration, it seemed. He closed his eyes and rubbed them well over the lids, thinking hard, concentrating. His mind found itself in childhood now, in those magical afternoons in school-year summers, at home with his mother downstairs baking something or the other, when there was not a care in the world, and he had the full freedom in his hands to think, something that he hadn’t really felt since then at any moment in his life. Then he recalled painting the trees outside his window as a teenager, then the whirlwind of friendships that were bittersweet, and, when all this came, and seemed important, it also came with its faded bits intact, frays around the edges going yellow were there too, showing him that it was not the same remains that it had been the last time it had been accessed with this form of a headlong dive. And it was not until he began to reckon with the first few years of his old job, as a young man in the big city, that he found the picture got clearer, and that more references could be made to the experience that he had had this morning, and words could be thought through without seeming even a bit childish, or aged, to explain, to convey. And finally, he settled on something, a definite word.

“It was a compression,” he said. Not the word which the Priest was expecting, he believed. But it was a compression, that was almost exactly what it was. The ordinary sounds of the city street got compressed, and the whole effect got noisier and noisier, yet not a single sound was lost, as if this was ensured somehow by whatever forces seemed to be in control. There had come through the sense of burden to his ears as the noise increased. A compression, and yes, in some odd way, a truer reflection of the Ultimate, in that how nothing was overlooked, and nothing was lost, nothing reduced. 

And at a certain point, as he had been gazing at the cars passing by, and at the well-maintained gaps between any two cars, as these gaps converged and collapsed depending on the whims and moods of anonymous drivers, and he looked also at the crowd milling about, the compression reached a certain limit, and the noise, it sounded like, had literally a million moving parts, and yet there was still no reduction to speak of, for each sound was completely salient, and, finally, it reached a point that he himself lost his breath, and instead of his breath, something else came out of him, some kind of fog, it seemed, a cloud of steam that lingered in the city street, added to the noise, but maintained its own place, before it dissipated and vanished, at first holding its ground, but only ever within its limit, and then simply becoming a part of the rest of the noise there, as if it were a brief symphonic element in a wider song that did not strike the conductor over. Then the whole thing loosened, and things seemed to gain a normalcy all over again. 

The Priest had looked away as he had explained all this, his leg one over the other, his hand moving through the sill, a zap of a frantic energy underneath, right where the fingertip met the sill, which could be sensed, and his slender fingers next upon the stained glass just touching, or refusing to touch—this could not be told. And just when Bill though there was no answer forthcoming, the Priest said:

“Life is chaos, Bill. I have read the science, I trust it, and it tells me that the universe is chaos. And when that chaos, when it gets to a certain range, then, mark my words, each of us, in our own individual time, are called from our static normalcy to make a contribution, and that—“ he looked at Bill straight in the eyes—“that is our day.”

As he was driving home from the church, he witnessed a breeze settle itself among the trees, then get unsettled thrown out to the autumn leaves strewn across the ground beneath. Then it felt offguarded being caught by the housewives who were going home with their kids from school in tow, and it rushed away to an alley and died there. 

The Priest, it seemed, had been thoughtful. His doctor, more friendly. For his doctor had said that he needed a change, and had suggested that he drive to Yosemite National Park and spend a weekend there.    

*

It was surprising how swiftly that moment on the city street, that compression, a suffocation, almost, had been overcome once he arrived at Yosemite. He had dwelt on it for a few hours only, in fact, after he had driven there and got a look, when the wonder of that yellow canyon, and of little trailers dotting a plain hilltop amid a misty rain afall, the ray of a sun managing to come through the thick clouds somehow, but cut off from heavenly and divine forms, and the dutiful fall of night without the interruptions of a single city light, took away the thought to a darkness he did not even feel the inclination to retrieve it from. His plan had been to spend as long as it took to forget about that day, and enjoy the simple beauty of the park. All was going according to plan.

One day he had tried to climb up a rough hill, but the trail was lost from him about halfway through. So he had camped by a little pool that seemed to be an old abandoned reservoir, thinking it had enough of an imprint of humanity that it wouldn’t alert wild animals that he was there. By the pool’s side was this small, unkempt fire-pit, nestled in amid the bushes now, its parts all in disarray, so that it was more of a rusted tin-can with the blackened licks of flames from a thousand fires before. He decided that, tonight, he, too, would build a fire there, and add to that fire-pit’s monotone coloration and drab history. And the fire he built, he thought, would keep him company, and whole the night around them would grow, when he would get to know that thing, shining through his hesitations, which would wilt, and his shyness at facing nature, and, perhaps, a perennial fear, would all go away. In the middle of this nowhere, he would have nothing to share with it, save some can of beans that sizzled and gave it a taste, or the pages of an old book, if he disliked its characters too much. 

He remembered how his grandmother used to say that a mere fifteen minutes before a fire made all manners of men quiet. No more than fifteen minutes, and a man as much attuned to the now as any turns back to his memory, which he seems to ever harbor within him, and becomes immersed in the adventures of his childhood, no matter how embarrassingly faded they may turn out to be. And he found that he was no different from these men in this regard. Ten minutes in and his mind felt quite and peaceful, and his eyes, following the ever shifting flames, seemed to be doing all the work of his mind on their own. 

His eyes followed the line of the flame. Within an hour of staring at that shifting line, at its peaks and troughs, attentive as he could be, for there was really no disturbance here, he had found the graphs the line made told the fortunes of every thing he could see—the life he was to lead, the life of his family and friends, the life of this empire in its heyday today around him, all of them, and, alas, he could not really read any of it, he could not decipher the line, although, he seemed sure, that this line was about his family, and that one, when the fire was angered and arage, was about the empire at some distant war. Every fortune was told, and, with a direct reference to no particular thing in the real world, with no consciousness of what was going on to speak of, without a simulation model to derive equations from, every graph of every event, predicting the fate, the destiny, of all things, in their own individual journeys, it was all made there—from the moment the fire began, and grew to a certain confidence, till the moment it was no more than embers in the shifting, glowing sand…

And he stared at it all the way. Without sense of place or time, distant  from him that call of sleep. He stared, and he took it in, and not just the line, not just its telling of the fortunes of any and all, but the fire’s great, great figure, that body within the lines, that body which does not stop dancing even as it tells the most dire fate, even as it knows, better than all else do, the great rise that gives it rush and stills it, which is followed by the tragic fall, an equal decline. It dances, it revels, and it sings. It hisses, it whistles, at times. It loves fate. It loves fate. Amor Fati. Amor Fati.