by Daniel Quinn
“Okay. I’ll be there in a while.”
Tim’s glove, molded around a ball, was wedged at the back of the closet in his room. He took it to the bed, sat down, worked his hand into it, tossed the ball into the pocket a couple of times: plok, plok. Then he walked over to the window. Drawing aside the curtain with his gloved hand, he stared out at the backyard, the houses, the featureless horizon under a gray sky.
You saw the fire of life, Tim.
He let the curtain fall back into place.
Tim, your father left to find something he wanted but wasn’t strong enough to have. He became lost. Your mother followed him and she too became lost.
Lost. Became lost. Nothing to do with us. He wondered why he hadn’t asked Pablo what lost meant. Probably because he had a pretty good idea what it meant—or was afraid to hear the truth.
Of course: There is a lie to be told about everything.
What would he have felt if Pablo had told the truth?
It was arranged that a dog would get your mother out of the way, Tim, but at the last minute we decided to give it another target.
No, the truth couldn’t have been trusted to do the job: They would have lost him forever.
Wouldn’t they?
What is it you most deeply want, Tim? Do you want to go back home and school with the other boys?
Why hadn’t he said yes?
Suppose Pablo had said, “Do you want to go back home to your mother?”
He would have said yes to that.
Wouldn’t he?
It seems you are to be someone of great importance in the scheme of things, Tim, Samson had said. They mean to break humanity’s hold on the world, and the instrument they mean to use is you.
Tim shook his head. That had to be a lie. All of it. But they’d hidden it from him—as if it were the truth. As if it were a truth to be revealed only when he was ready to accept it.
He threw the ball into the pocket of his glove with all his might, stinging his palm. Then he went down to the kitchen and left a note for his mother on the refrigerator: “Going to play ball with some of the guys. Back in time for lunch.”
One voice had spoken the truth, he was sure. He’d heard it as he left Andrea’s house with Howard: Pablo’s voice, firm, calm. True, he’d heard it only in his head, but that didn’t matter. It was unmistakable; he hadn’t imagined it. If he had, it would all be easier. So much easier.
At least one voice had spoken the truth.
Outside he reared back and threw the ball as far up into the air as he could and chased it across the yard. He caught it on the run and, feeling the sap rise in his body, just kept on running.
We’ll wait for you, Tim. Not forever. But we’ll wait.
Also by Daniel Quinn
Tales of Adam
Adam, a hunter-gatherer standing at the threshold of human history, passes the gift of wisdom to his son Abel through seven profound but delightfully simple tales that illuminate the world in which humans became humans. This is the world seen through animist eyes: as friendly to human life as it was to the life of gazelles, lions, lizards, mosquitos, jellyfish, and seals — not a world in which humans lived like trespassers who must conquer and subdue an alien territory.
After Dachau
Imagine that the Allies surrendered. The Nazis continued to press their campaign to rid the world of “mongrel races” until the world was populated only by white faces. Two thousand years in the future people don’t remember, or much care, about this distant past. The reality is that to be human is to be caucasian, and what came before is ancient history, until a crack appears in the cosmos, and a traumatic accident causes memories from a life lived centuries before to pour into the present.