TASK 01. — THE PEOPLE / THE TOWN.
“ Could there be a temple of the hearth, of Home, which lurks beneath the paltry mechanisms of sinew and bone, Claude? Cruel mistress and tempest-tossed, the Sea is. To say aloud that I tire of her wraith-like keening is to insult the divine art of piracy itself. She is Home, what ever left of it I have left. But I will not cease my searches, for if any sailor knows well that there need be a day where you crash upon Her rocks, or unearth a final port for your weary soul. ”
p. 221 — “The Pleiades Above, The Captain and His First Mate Discuss.” Raiders on the Seas.
i. ——
let me tell you about the man who lives in the manor at the end of crescent road. coalyard is hardly the type to get new visitors, the static nature of the town almost piling up like corpses in a mass grave, sediment on the crust of the world. eccentrics, such as the man who bought the house on crescent road, would have wanted to go somewhere with arthouses and people as odd as him. but he stood there, another dead man in the dead-end town. another corpse for the pile. on some level, do you think he knows this?
let me tell you about the man who lives in the manor, the ghost living in the skeleton of a once magnificent house. the first day that the strange man buys the old house near the woods, movers come in, and he stands unnaturally still in the daylight, watching as the movers walk into the house and furnish it one by one. the long dining room table, the plates, the armoires. the furniture was old as the sin of our forebears, kept alive by sentiment and elbow grease. when a mover scuffs the chair, he does not flinch. he does not acknowledge it. he barely even breathes.
this is no story, you say, only observations. a painting made with the backdrop of shifting light and painted regret.
let me tell you something else, then.
ii. ——
did you know that paris is built upon the bones of its dead? did you know that saint petersburg is built on the dead that built it? did you know that the bodies of history have overflown and spat out men from heaven and hell alike? did you know that purgatory is a wasteland of souls, wailing outside the gates and running from the flames?
did you know that the man who lives in the manor is alone? in some form or another, we are all alone. measured by the distance between our heartbeats, divided by our differences, our loneliness can be quantified, even known to us, if we only stop to notice. but who wants to know their solitude? the man who lives in the manor walks down the street, people giving him a wide berth. some of them whisper and ask who died, and there is almost something in the man that wants to reply.
did you know that coalyard is the last place anyone will find him? he has no family, of course, only the memories in his diary, long-dead and rotten beneath his touch. this is the finalé to a punchline, the arc of a swing calculated over centuries of questions. there will be no body, but he will be dead, as will all the people he had carried with him. only another thing that coalyard subsumes into itself. at least he is a part of something, he whispers, staring out into the open water. at least there is that.
iii. ——
he wears his existence in town like an ill-fitting coat. the grocery clerk stares at the man and the man, as a kindness, pretends not to notice. he pretends not to notice a lot of things, of course. he’s had practice. death streams down from the light in the afternoon sun. perhaps the man on crescent road will pretend not to notice that as well.
iv. ——
why do you tell me this? what is this for? you ask this, unknowing. i forgive you. sometimes, stories have no purpose but to be what they are.
that’s a shit explanation. so let me end the story. perhaps we can start anew.
v. ——
two years pass and he still walks to the door and feeds a stray. the man that lives on the end of crescent road does not disappear anymore, only lingers. dusk sets and the stars shine, but the town still feels wrong. maybe the problem isn’t the town, or the wine, or the people, just him. but the coat fits better in the end, even if the wrongness never leaves. the corpse is content with being what it is, here in the graveyard where it waits.
the man only waits, but does not live, the idyll of the days outside going by in a haze of months. what is one more in the span of centuries? he’s lived his life thrice-over, and the toll of the bell drones only to let him remember the passage of time. there is no savior coming for the man, so what’s a little more waiting? what’s a little more torment? the corpse becomes lazarus, and the old mythology rears its head through the fog.
a christian god is something anathema to the man, and yet he swallows down every walk to the church through the silence of the mosaic glass. there is a miracle yet to come. agnus dei, agnus dei. he will be content to sit and to live through coalyard yet again. the coat fits his shoulders, not his arms. perhaps four lifetimes is enough, and lazarus will return to the earth.
