“The aeon is a child at play with colored balls.” -Heraclitus
The younger man’s talk was cast, from the first word, to its expiration; it moved along an enclosed path of quickness to the end. It was a vulgar death, the way it stole, unchagrinned and unaware, life from the living: long before the first movements of physical Death, there with his rakish hat, a whirligig youth, back on the desert land dancing to a vague, if not forgotten, melody someplace far removed in one’s fragile creation. He stomped at the sand; and there was the scent of the tamarack that must have surrounded him somewhere in the distance. That gummy scent of pine needles and sap which stings the nose, which, like the enduring trees, survives the winter and lives one waking day. But the younger man kept his nose plugged and his eyes averted.
The boy and the older man’s talk had no ends, and rather no paths per se, but moved in nonlinear ways. They might spend a whole day in rocking chairs (which is used more with the sense of metaphor for the rambunctious, quick youth) in dumb wandering of words, all easy had, to come out with very little or nothing at all. The time would go by unnoticed, as for the blind if time were light and picture.
There were all three of them in a room;
but it was the partially mutual sounds from two
mouths upon the bodies at the table which
urged on at an undying Thought,
that their spinning rhythms would miss the end,
these strange fellows making
according expressions of limitlessness,
like forming leaves.
The trees from their silent meditations
are culled by the other, middle-aged man,
with a fading thought.
The trialogue (with the aforementioned Thought interspersed) was this:
“Say, what time is it, old man?”
“Half until nine makes two quarters of eight,” the boy called loud.
“These are hard times, are they not?” the old man then said.
“Hard times, my friend, yes,” the boy replied; “that is a time of hardship, two quarters of eight. When all the terrible things place take.”
The old man spoke in timely. “But we are not yet marked for the finish?” slowing at last emphatically.
He was an infinite boy, we are sure, but at this point he seemed altogether to stop and think. At last he uttered, “I will struggle with you then.”
The middle-aged man was lost at it all, which, as dense as it was, took but a few seconds. He was quick, and spoke in reference. “I asked, ‘What time is it?’ But what do you two mean? What were you referring to a moment ago?”
The boy only said, “Two quarters after eight,” with fundamentals in watchery.
“I thank you; but…well, thank you.”
There was indeed cooped up energy in the boy; he smiled a ready complexion, and the old man leapt at it. “My boy, say what you pass the days to do.”
But the boy squawked and nothing more.
A meeting at the latter’s and old man’s eyes brought about a conversation of facemaking, rare dialect. Their graven gradually relaxed. At night they were like fire logs burning away at the sides of their bodies (the boy given sometimes to crackling). The third fellow watched them, and, only after a time, in earnest. “What is their feeling?” he thought. And, “What is the meaning?” His first reaction was discomfited disbelief, in the curve his lowered head made of his sweat-pondering neck unseen.
The younger man soon amassed again the conversation, remarking, on a different note, “What dues do you think you have paid?”
The hues of face pale red and doom.
“One quick dodge at the Frothel,” replied the old man. It wasn’t for me, anyway, I was to learn. He was making out for one of his compatriots, but mistook me for him.
“The thing, the thing!” the boy demanded.
The old man tapped the table with the ring on his mid-finger and resumed. “It – a most unsparing, I should think! even not knowing the fellow of intent, a most unthinkable practical joke. Long after, I was young then, far greater even than you, boy: yet younger! It now might seem like nothing to you,” he said, acknowledging the other man as well. “Must have been colorful outfits for me still. Dressed still by the Mother-dresser. Four or five years age.”
“Compatriots of whom?” the younger man demanded. “You were such a youth! What are you talking about?”
“Yes, I know what you think. I - however you may disbelieve - ran in prodigious circles of exceptional children. Anyway, it was a case of blame, I suppose, more than practical joking - at a family herding. So many of them there willed the thing, made it possible, you see. …Some fellow had refused to eat his vegetables; and this lad was known to put up unsought silences, in plainest disposition, to protest. I fall.”
“I tumble!” the boy hailed. “‘Here is the way to the alleys of London!’” I tell Mom, but she will never come. Old is never tumbling.”
The old man, it could be sensed, then used some melody of a song that was familiar to him for the continuance of his story, which he made, almost, as if in reply to the boy. “Kid couldn’t take it! When she didn’t look, he hid it away! Under the tablecloth. I was blamed, so young! I was still volatile; he told on “him” by a colored shirt! Which was the same color as that which I wore. It wasn’t practical at all. I was charged with invasion of another’s dinner-plate privacy and the ills of other wrong conduct. You would’ve to had known the rites of food of the family people to understand the severity. I was scoured.”
“Yes! but what dues, you dog!?” the tired looking younger man finally said in a busting.
The boy spun his shiny coin.
Then, for the first time, the old man seemed to look at the question. That for all his skin’s dryness and wrinkles he seemed yet untouched, undamaged, he said, as if in solitude, “I have never known sadness singularly. It has always been accompanied by some fortune perforce – however distant, though have you ever looked a while at the clouds…?”
The conversation grew stranger and less coherent into the night. Pushed by undetectable winds, this thing so delicate and fructifying seemed, after the hour, like nothing. Its vestiges too vague to recall. The vanished particulars left no remnants. The infinite was gone with those moments, leaving no more than a sense of nonsense.
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