Chapter 21
“Look in my eyes and see what I see, the collector is you, the collector is me” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“Where did you hear that?” asked Safrine turning the coloured cube in her hands.
“It could have been sung by something or someone, twas something I picked up and thought might be fun. Something to canter from time until time, a necklace of words; a harmless old rhyme” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“Why do you do that? Why is everything a rhyme?” asked Safrine.
“Why does the sky have to sit up so high, so far from my reach yet so near to my eye? It is what it is; I accept that it be, the want I can’t have is the want I can see” rhymed The Creepy Old Man.
The two sat in on the dusted earth with their legs crossed, the coloured cubes sitting comfortably in their hands, their fingers twisting and turning while their eyes locked onto one another. The sound of shuffling plastic hummed through the afternoon air as the sun blazed down on them from high above. Neither seemed affected as they held their glance and shifted their fingers in delicate delight.
As numbers were to math so too puzzles were to Safrine as if the presence of them alone would prove of her existence. Her mind had always felt like the colours on this cube, with each twist of the cruel fate of life taking her a hundred more turns away from becoming a complete person.
The first time she attempted this puzzle box she had only recently grasped the concept of opposable thumbs and when she garnered the trait of reach and grab, the coloured cube was one of the first things that had worked its way into her little hands.
Left alone to her devices, Safrine twisted and turned the little cube and enjoyed; more than the riddle of probability, the simple shifting of colours and then the seemingly chance like groupings of colours as if they danced around the edges of the squares, one minute alone and then walking in two, three, four and five; but never more than that, at least, not at first.
Her brother; from the day he was born, was like a ball of fire attached to kicking limbs. He loved to fight. While Safrine pondered over the cube; running in and out of impossible combinations, her brother; Donal, would pass through time with his body shifting and turning on the head of a pin; his body just like the coloured cube, spinning on its centre, jabbing and kicking and sweeping and blocking and parrying and striking and choking and locking and then just like the cube; with a shift at his core and with a turn of his eye, unleashing a combination of explosive colour, definition and power.
Her father though was not a fighting man and took no time with his son to develop his skills. In fact, her father could barely wrestle his own depression.
Her father too was not a man of logic. Math in his eye was merely a tool to illustrate his sadness; the addition of another day without his wife; she having died birthing her children into this cruel fated world, the subtraction of meaning and hope, the division of his heart unto zero and the multiplication of his fears which upon the rasping of rapture in his children’s eyes only served to compound his immense loneliness.
Still; for many years, Safrine developed her art of the puzzle box understanding the puzzle of her dear twin, watching him craft his art; twisting and turning his own body into deniable shapes to appease the love of his father whose sadness; an irrevocable puzzle, he could not understand. Yet focus he did, on the crying man who sat slumped in his chair and focus, did Safrine, on her brother’s unwavering stare.
The girl sat vying for the attention of the boy whose gaze was only on his father whose eyes hanged lowly and of whom saw; in the spirit and zest of his children, only the death of his wife. Thus, a man, a boy and a girl each quenched their spiritual thirst from a well of grief and each became an artist of their own device.
And just as mankind played the instrument for the intricate mathematics of nature, the coloured cube played the extension of the young girl’s being and while her brother fought to unhinge his father’s sadness, Safrine became somewhat of an expert with this coloured cube as with each turn, she tried to will her brother’s stare in her direction.
“My sweet little girl, what memories hide, out of the lens of the eye in your mind? Have you a secret; a wish you could say; a terrible truth to make go away? Tell me your whispers and I’ll whisper you mine” said The Creepy Old Man in his creepy old rhyme.
“I don’t have any secrets,” she said trying hard to keep her focus; her brother’s eyes burning stronger, but she feared they may be burning out and she worried for The Creepy Old Man would continue his round of distraction.
“Each and then all have a story to tell, a pardon to beg, a pretext to sell. Then what is of yours and what hath you laid, what reason deceives you; what toll have you paid?” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“It’s nothing. I don’t feel funny, well maybe a little funny but it’s nothing” she said, watching the image of her brother’s eyes lighten in her mind and the strength that he gave her weaken from her being and as this happened, she felt her fingers sliding off of the cube and she felt the game slipping from her.
The Creepy Old Man continued to shift his fingers with gentle rhythm, sliding each side over and around, never breaking his stare from that of the young girl sitting at his front.
His breath was low but it was heaving as he was an old man and one could just guess as to how old he truly was and whether or not there really was a young buy cursed in an old man’s skin. But his breath heaved and it sounded like thousands of grains of sand falling into an open grate and when he breathed in, his bottom lip lowered somewhat; just enough to let the air pass his teeth and then sediment in his lungs.
Safrine tried not to concentrate on his breath, but it was hard. She felt her own being, being taken away by that of the old man and soon her breath mimicked his; low, heavy and dragging and as she inhaled, her mind started to lighten while the images that had burned bright and kept her strong began to darken until they faded entirely to black.
And she was vulnerable.
And now, she was his.
“I lied,” she said.
“Oh dear, my sweet dear, a simple lie is nothing to fear; nothing to run from, no reason to cry, surely a lie’s not the reason you sigh?” he sang.
“It’s not simple. I lied to my brother” she said.
“A brother you speak, a brother of you? From Eros born Philos, not one but now two? For that to be true then one could assume the love of Agape it sings to you too?” he sang.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said, her hands now fumbling on the cube as her concentration was truly slated and with every twist of her wrist, she added another series of impossible combinations to the solution, getting further from completion with each flick of her fingers.
The Creepy Old Man had undone her focus and had doused the fire in her heart and now he was drenching her with rhyme and questionable doubt.
“What keeps you safe and what keeps you sound, what keeps the spectres from spooking around?” he sang.
“Donal does He’s my brother and he’s the bravest person in the whole world,” she said; remembering her brother’s face and feeling her spine warm and tingle when the fire in his eyes once again shimmered in her conscious eye.
“Well I trust what you say, believe that it’s right, I won’t be beseeching this boy for a fight but tell me the fib that has you so down, that saddles your eyes and heavies your frown?” he sang.
“I can’t say,” she said.
“Pretend he is me and give it a try, sister, tell me what happened and why did you lie?” he sang.
“This is so stupid. You’re not Donal. You’re just a creepy old man who tricks little girls into playing games so that you can keep them like some toy” she said.
“Tell me the fucking lie you little cunt” screamed The Creepy Old Man before falling deadly silent and smiling placatingly again.
Safrine jumped backwards in fright but kept her fingers moving the coloured cube as the rules had been set for if she was to stop, even to wipe a bead of
sweat from her brow, she would concede to her rival and accept her defeat and as such, she would be his for an eternity or until death saved her from his despicable clammy grasp.
“I wasn’t taken by those men, not really anyway. Not the way Donal thinks. I walked away from him at the rally, just like he would do to dad and I knew like always, if I was in trouble, he would come and rescue me. He always did. So I met these people and they asked if I wanted to come with them. They put me in their arms and carried me through the crowd because it was getting very dangerous and loud. When Donal turned and saw me, I pretended I was being stolen so he would come and rescue me. I just wanted him to be my hero again and to see me and to love me. To love me like he loves dad but I didn’t think all of this would happen” she said, lightening the load that she carried in her heart.
“And what did you think he would beckon to say if it was that your hero had come to your aide?” he sang.
“I think he’d be real angry. He probably wouldn’t talk to me that’s for sure. That’s usually what he does” she said.
“The man of your prize with slumbering eyes, was he one your captors, the lie you disguised?” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“Yeah, he was. They were nice people; at first anyway, before they put lots of needles in me. Then they were mean” she said.
“Apart from your father and that of your brother, had ever you known the love of a mother?” he said.
“She died when I was born,” she said.
“She died when you were born, oh what a burden to adorn. So sad be it true to be born oh so blue, was she as to pretty as pretty to you?” he sang.
“I don’t like it when you speak like that. Please stop” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong, don’t speak of me mad, I wish only you smile and then never be sad” he sang.
“I don’t wanna smile for you,” she said sternly.
“The smiles not for me girl; cannot you see, for if you don’t let it out you might soon go without, for you might get confused and forget that it’s there and think that you’re happy but in truth you don’t care, cause love you must practice it day after day or then love will extinguish and vanish away” he sang.
“Mum died because of me and that’s why everyone is so sad. It’s why dad doesn’t speak; except when he’s disappointed with us and it’s why Donal is always so grumpy when he comes to rescue me. It wasn’t my fault, though” she said.
“It’s not of your fault for it is that of life, a child lost her mother, a husband his wife. But you can’t be blamed; you should not take the fall for what is explained with no reason at all. Death has no motive outside of its own, an end to a start; to reap of what’s sown” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“My Grandad used to tell me that a life could be measured in seconds and hours and minutes and years but to every living thing; regardless of measure, it always felt like a lifetime. As long as there was a start and an end, every life was measured the same. He said that a young boy and an old man were identical. Neither could remember their birth nor envision their death, both from beginning to end felt like an eternity” she said.
“Of that which you speak; a day or a week, are concepts of man; a marginal feat. Nature’s intention in what is of time is to be or be not is to live or to die. A second for one, it can seem like a year while a time for another it can just disappear. For what we can measure is how much that we give into every breath of the life that we live” sang The Creepy Old Man.
“What about you? Why do you do the things you do? What’s wrong with you?” asked Safrine.
“I am the effect of the life that I live and I am the extent of all that I give. My skin it hangs loose and my bones they are sore, but the old man you see is a boy at his core” he said.
“So you just get really old? How old are you? I mean really, how old are you?” she asked genuinely.
“I’m hardly a child and scarcely a man. I am the age that you think that I am. Answer me this as for myself it defines; would an adult engage you in game and in rhyme? Would he know how you feel by what hasn’t been said, would he bother to listen to what’s in your head? How many times in all of our life has ever an adult provoked you to cry? An adult is not of the skin that he wears but the things that he thinks and the soul that he bears, for the skin of a child can be that of man if he thinks that his thoughts are the world in his hands” he sang.
“So what am I?” asked Safrine.
“All that I see is a sweet little girl who is all alone in a venomous world. It’s sad to be seen and much worse to be true; the sweet little girl that I see here is you. But now that I’m here you will never be blue for a friend of like me is a friend through and through,” he said.
“Will you be my friend?” she asked, letting go of the coloured cube and dropping it to the dusted earth, “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Look to my hand and what do you see? The winner is you or the winner is me?” he sang.
Safrine looked down at The Creepy Old Man’s hands and saw that they too were empty. She looked around him; on the dusted earth by his rickety old rump and couldn’t see the coloured cube anywhere.
“Where is it? I don’t get it. Did I win?” she asked.
“A friend you have made and a life you have saved by claiming the victor in a game you have played for look to the earth where you coloured box lays and look at where all of the coloured dots stay, each colour together on every side; are you the winner? I’ll let you decide” he sang.
Safrine squealed with excitement and jumped up from where she sat bouncing around on her feet and swinging her arms in the air. She had never in her life felt this way.
She had solved this puzzle a million times before but never had it accounted for anything, never had she felt this electric as if she had turned the key for its millionth time and finally a door had opened; one that unleashed a flood of pent exhilaration. She took the coloured cube from the dusted earth and kept it on herself; a reminder of this moment.
“That was so much fun,” she said, throwing her arms around The Creepy Old Man.
She was no longer pestered by his blotchy loose skin, his long grimy fingers or his stench of an old boot. Instead, she saw the same spirit she had seen in her brother, except this time she felt cared for and that made her feel special.
The Creepy Old Man hugged Safrine tight, squeezing the joy from her pores like juice from an orange and grinned to himself in a dark manner of which she could not see, for her face was smirking against his chest.
Utopian Circus Page 22