I do not know a better story than the story of a man with the ironic name of a prophet. My children, and their children, would benefit from hearing his story rather than mine. I’m sure he would get quite angry if he heard me say that, but that is a moot point nowadays. Time has left its mark on me, and left him behind, and no amount fancy words will make the story of my life quite as poetic as his. His name was Elias. He would often talk about how his name was a misnomer, and he should have been called Ahab. There was always a little pride in his smirk when he talked about how he felt like the follower of a beaten god, rather than the prophet of a victorious one. As I grow ever older, my body ever weaker, and my voice ever softer, I begin to understand how he must have felt. Elias had always held a certain elderly weight with him, as if God himself strapped irons to his hands and feet. Elias and I were born in the same town a little under a year apart. It wasn’t a very small town. North Carolina had many clusters of limbo cities stuck between urban and farm country, so Elias didn’t have that small town upbringing he always seemed to find romantic. We met at a young age and never really paid too much mind to the other until we were in our teenage years, but boy did we become very close very quickly. It was if something in the back of our heads suddenly turned on one day and needed to find its magnetic polarity in the other. I’d love to jump right into the first time Elias and I first began our friendship, but there is a lot I need to get to before that. I’d like to first tell you about his death. Dead at the age of 49, he never had much time to feel the weight of age like I did. It is thirty years down the road and I still remember hearing about his death as vividly as I hear myself anytime I speak. By that time, we had not seen each other in ten years, but Elias had still put me down as the first person to contact in an emergency. That was no surprise, really. As I started a family and grew independently from him, we drifted apart as old friends normally do in time. When I got the phone call, I was cleaning up little bits of paper left over from the streamers my wife had brought to celebrate my 50th birthday. It had happened a little over two weeks ago and I procrastinated so long because you hardly noticed the little colored strands on the carpet unless you stare at it for longer than a moment. In my hands there was a wad of multicolored party paper vomit when my cell phone vibrated furiously in my pocket. In an effort not to make the same mess again, I tried to rush to throw away the trash, and as was inevitable with my klutziness, I completely wiped out wearing socks on the clean linoleum floor in my kitchen. I missed the first call. In hindsight, I’d like to think that the massive pain that formed in my knee and in my pride was Elias making another ironic joke before he passed on, but I don’t really believe in such a thing and neither did he. About ten minutes later, the phone rang again and I had recovered from my graceful encounter with the floor enough to answer. Of all the things I remember from this moment; the exact sound and tone of the lady’s voice (it was a mixture of monotony and an effort of sympathy), the sliver of blue paper I had neglected to pick up that I stared at during the entirety of the conversation, and what I said in response to her statements and the one final question (“Oh.” “Yes” “This is him” “When?” “Oh.” “Yes I’ll make arrangements” and finally, “That won’t be necessary”), I actually can’t remember what she said to me. I hung up the phone knowing that Elias had died a few days prior. How he died I found out later when I drove to the hospital where his body was. We hadn’t seen each other in so long, but hearing the news left a big confused child right in the middle of my psyche wondering how the world could ever be the same again. I rushed through two emotions lightning fast; disbelief, and then panic. At the time, how I felt about it and the twinge of pain and denial was the most important part of the story. I can tell you right now that how I felt didn’t really matter. I know that deep down I was just really curious about a lot of things, but I was so used to that feeling when it came to Elias that the only thing worth noticing were the peripherals. The drive to the hospital was about an hour and a half long, and by the time I turned off the highway a few blocks from the hospital I was operating the same way someone operates driving into work every morning. This was our town, and he had come back it seems. It was then I wondered if maybe Elias had finally pulled off that trick he had been talking about for years where he fakes his own death just to be able to start over again, but it soon passed when I arrived at the hospital and saw his body. It was him alright. There seemed to be the tiniest smile on his face, which at the time seemed to me like a smug little smirk as if to mock my reaction to seeing my closest’s friend dead body. In fact, to this day I think that is exactly what the face meant. I was told that he had committed suicide by hanging himself in an old warehouse with old parts from some abandoned farming equipment. The cop present and informing me of this seemed to be impressed by the ingenuity of the pulley he had fashioned, and I’m sure it was in fact quite impressive. The police officer pulled out the tiniest little notepad I had ever seen and began to tell me the two day saga of how Elias ended his life. His name was Officer Dargo. The only reason I actually remember his name is because I kept making fun of his stupid name while he seemed to gleefully recite a rather well thought out guess at what happened. Elias hired an industrial cleaning crew two days beforehand to empty the warehouse of “dead machinery”. Officer Dargo commented that this same industrial cleaning crew had a similar side company that would clean after crime scenes operated by the same group and they were called “Wiped Away”. Elias had previously purchased the property from the state claiming to use it for “urban beautification” which usually means some rich suburban mogul wants a tax break, so the cleaning crew never questioned Elias, because nobody in their right mind would have. Which was rather strange. The body I saw was a clean cut corpse with fair and smooth skin, free from any extremely visible blemish. The clothes I later picked up from Elias’s home were moderately expensive and well put together. Last time I had seen Elias, he had long floppy hair and a full beard, both just dirty enough to change the color of his hair from red to brown. His clothes were functional, not professional, and his nails had dirt caked beneath them. Elias was known for changing looks as often as he possibly could, but I found it incredulous anyone could take such a man as Elias seriously and without question. Officer Dargo pulled a small evidence bag from his coat pocket and told me it was Elias’ suicide note. I had been waiting for that part since I heard it was a suicide because Elias always wrote everything down. It was endearing when we were young but incredibly annoying as we got older. He just never had an audience to hear all his thoughts, so paper was a good victim that couldn’t escape. If Elias killed himself as they said, he would most certainly have left a long and dramatic eulogy. I was then told that I wouldn’t receive the actual note until a few weeks passed, but they had read it and copied it down if I wanted to hear it. Of course I wanted to hear it, so to Officer Dargo’s apparent delight, I told him to go ahead. "No man in my family lived past the age of 50. The women have all lived to be over a hundred, except one, my mother. Up until this moment, I never understood why that trend existed. Now, neither will you until you are here with me. There is a path for all things, a purpose for all places, and life in the quietest of trees. I’ve done what I needed. I am a living man who needs or wants no more. Elias." I found it strange at the time that he didn’t bother to say some sort of farewell and instead signed his first name as if he were just writing to a friend. I still have that note to this day. Maybe he was writing it to me. If he did then I still don’t really understand what it means. He likely had completely lost his grip on reality by that point. I think I once thought about having the note framed but found that to be in bad taste, and I don’t want Elias to chuckle too hard in hell lest he lose preaching privileges. This dead jackass went out and bought an entire ream of high quality gloss photo paper to remove one sheet and write his suicide note with a dollar store disposable pen in his almost exaggerated bad handwriting. The cleaning crew came exactly on time, paid upfront, to find Elias hanging from a steel girder in the exact middle of the largest room in the warehouse. They called an ambulance, and he was declared dead by the first on scene. A few days following this I was informed that according to his wishes, I was to inherit all his worldly possessions. This didn’t consist of much, but it was endlessly more than I expected. I retained ownership of the warehouse, his house that was cluttered with an incredibly large amount of loose pieces of paper (and one rather new looking mattress), and a really busted up bicycle. I kept most of all the paper I found that he has written on, and most of it is dated, but some of it isn’t. Some sheets of paper had just a single word, or a just a sentence. Some where paper clipped clumps of a hundred pages. He also had a few thousand dollars tucked away in assorted areas of his home that one would normally find emergency cash, like a jar, inside a book, and even between the mattress. This was not a house I had never been inside of, it was home of a lot of stories I will get to later. For now, since I have covered his death, I am going to tell you how Elias was born. My name is Jeremiah, and I am dying of old age. Please hear me out, for a I won’t remember much longer. This is the great story of Elias.
