3k: heh

...
I once met a very convincing fraud. I was at a party in the City of Fog, by chance, as it happened. Bored, one night, I decided to board the train and see if I could find anything elsewhere. Movement in life was not my way — for to move rationally, one must have a sense of direction. To move with no purpose served no purpose, and purpose had always seemed a good thing to have. From this, then, my life had been a great stillness, a pondering of choices and momentums, a consideration of potential directions, and a movement toward none of them.

But the night of the party had been an experiment. If direction could not be inspired internally, perhaps I could find, outside my own territory, outside my own self, some authority, some walker of paths that could show me a way that I had not considered. Perhaps, I could force an encounter with someone whose rut of thought intersected enough with mine for communication, but not so much that it would bore me.

I had once met a man like this, as near as I had ever found to an authority on matters of living. His words fell upon my ears like comforting rain, and hearing him, I was soothed. He spoke at length on many topics, and truly, it did not matter the topic he chose, because what he really said shone through the spaces between words, emanated from his eyes and the corners of his mouth as he chattered about mathematics and other topics of no interest to me.

What he said to me was this: I am just as lost as you, even though I have traveled through this life far and wide. What he told me in the subtle movements of his body, as he spoke, what he said through the yearning sadness in his eyes as he laughed, was this: my path has not been yours, but I have also not found what we both are looking for.

He had lived a life quite different from mine, but righteous and good, as he told it. He had risen far from his beginnings, and learned much. And he was a natural teacher, though perhaps he did not realize it. When he closed the chapter of his life which included me, when he wrote me out of the story of his life, I was sad for myself, but sadness is no better motivator than any other. I was changed by his time with me, but not by his departure.

My departure from the station was delayed. The trains ran on time, but I did not. The terminal was brightly lit and inhospitable, a place designed by people who would not use it for people who had no choice but to. The benches were cold and hard and not remotely inviting, the artwork was rubbish foisted upon the station by untalented hacks, no doubt overjoyed to find receptive, uncaring municipal employees willing to purchase in order to complete a section of a budgeting form. The whole place seemed designed to encourage not staying, yet this design was emergent, and not intentional. To assume thought had gone into the design at all was too great a stretch.

My erstwhile almost-guru had not been a fraud. He was the real thing. He spoke of one thing but said quite another. He made no claims other than those that were factually true. He told stories of his past but drew no conclusions. He left it up to me to pick the meanings from his tales as a crow picks eyeballs from roadkill. And this, I did. Before and since, I met many people who had lived Important Lives, and wanted desperately to tell me of their Great Stories. Not me, specifically, of course. I happened only to be a convenient ear. Anyone would have done just as well, for their tales and recounting of adventures were not intended to share, only to self-aggrandize and perhaps entertain. Their Great Stories contained no lessons, no learnings, no patterns of refinement. They had a great many words to share, a multitude of laughs, and smiles, and dramatic pauses. But they had no learning.

And so I had no time for them. Amidst the screeching of rails, the flashing, dimming light patterns of the train, I studied my temporary compatriots. We all had business in the City, though what their business may have been, I had no idea. We had little in common, except a look. I had taken very few trips on the train to the City, but each time I had, I had noticed immediately the look. Most often it was accompanied by a pallor, a paleness, a grimness bereft of life. It was a stare, round eyed, unblinking, unfocused. The head moved in unison with the train to maintain a fixed stare at an invisible object. It was a trance, a suspension of life, a suppression of living to be lifted upon arrival.

There were some who did not have the look. Their boisterous conversations, filled with laughter and irreverence, marked them as casual visitors to the train. The ones who had ridden before and would ride again, they all had the look.

Even the man with the crooked face. He sat facing me, three rows closer to the back of the train. A woman sat between us, also facing me. She stared right through me, immersed in her trance, and did not see me. The man with the crooked face did not see me either. At every stop, he would stand up, listen for the stop announcement, and retake his seat. If he had not done this, I would not have noticed his crooked face. He would have remained anonymous, and his crooked face, which told such interesting tales, would have remained hidden from me. The man with the crooked face was no fraud. His crooked face told of lessons learned, patterns discovered, if not consciously recognized. The man with the crooked face taught me everything I needed to know about the train, that night. He had the look, too. It was not his first time on the train. With a face like his, he had been on this train many, many times before.

When I arrived at the station, I disembarked from the train and emerged onto the streets. I wandered, for a while, and let the City guide me to my destination. The City’s vision, directed inwards, could penetrate the thick fog that obscured from me my direction that night. I walked, and walked, and walked until the City had me turn. Up hill, I walked, and down, and up again. Left and right, I turned, as the City directed, until I arrived at a door. Around the door stood a house, and the house extended for two more stories above the street. I knocked on the door and was welcomed inside. “Come in,” the hostess said. She did not ask for my name. I was welcome without one. I did not ask her name. She was fine without one.

There were people inside, lots of people. Some of them, like me, had taken the train, though I had seen none of them on it. By now, the look had worn off. The City had resumed the consciousness of those who hibernated on the train. Its fog had entered their lungs and caused breath to once more course through their bodies. They were awake.

They were loud, also. I could hear nothing, or worse, I could hear everything, and discern nothing. Words, short phrases, bits of conversation. Everyone wanted to tell their story. Nobody wanted to listen. It was cacophony to me. But to them, it was not. To them, it was entertainment. My ears useless, I focused my sight around me. The City had brought me here, and surely, it was a kind and gentle teacher. It would not mislead me, it would not bring me here, so distant from my own place, to be immersed in cold sound without meaning.

My former near-mentor had not misled me, nor had he taken me anywhere. I had come to him, always, and when I arrived, we had gone nowhere. His words and my imagination had been our sailing ship, and it was a swift ship, and it took us to fantastic places. I discovered many incidental things, as he wove his tales in front of me, but wherever our ship came to port, we found, at first with sadness, and later, with resigned non-surprise, that our ship was the only one moored. The ports were empty. We were alone wherever we went, and, even together, we were alone: the words that he spoke, the consciousness of mine that heard them, these things were real, and we knew them, but they did not connect us. Even with his stories raining down upon my ears like healing waters, we were apart, awkward, and unsure. It was only deep within the silences of his thoughts that I found him. It was only after we had parted that I heard what he had to say. It was only after he left, with finality, that I understood what he had been telling me.

Now, I had become more adept at listening. It was easy to not speak. This was not listening. It was easy to receive words upon my ears. This was not listening. It was easy to regurgitate bits and pieces of another’s story as they went on about some part of their Great Story that they found fascinating. This was not listening.

The more often I listened, the more I felt alienated from those around me. The more I listened, the more I despaired of finding someone who had something to tell me. This was the problem with learning to listen: there were so few people to listen to.

As I searched with my eyes, wandering around my thoughts, wondering whom it was the City had brought me here to meet, my scan was delayed, my sight ensnared, by a man across the sea of stories and people. I made my way through, cutting the waters, parting the seas to arrive, hopeful, hungry, at a new port.

The man was tall, though not taller than me. His head was bald, entirely, and he wore glasses. His clothes were unassuming, nondescript. He was not speaking to anyone, or listening to anyone, or doing anything. He stood in the middle of a circle of backs, smiling patiently, waiting, I hoped, for me.

He told me his name, and as he did so, his smile widened. Names were unimportant, and I think he knew this. I think his smile told me so. We would not meet again, after tonight, even if he were in fact whom the City had brought me to meet. I did not tell him my name, as we shook hands, and he nodded. He knew, also, that we would not meet again.

I told him that I knew nobody at the party, that I was invited not by the hosts, but my the greater host, the City itself had invited me tonight, to this place, amongst these people. He said that the party was his, the house was his, and the City was his also. He said that since all these things were his, and since they had invited me, I was a welcomed and important guest.

I asked him about the house. I did not really care, I was not interested in the house, or the City, or the guests. I was not interested in any of the words that my host could speak. I was interested in listening to what he had to say, to see what I had found. He told me of the history of the house. In the City, most houses had a history. This was no exception. The history of the house was long, and interesting, and full of changes of ownership, bizarre and unexpected. Between the words that he spoke, in the pauses between sentences, in the twists of the corners of his mouth, in the movement of his hands, his neck, his hips, in the crinkles of his crow’s feet, my host told me another story. In the language of his body, my host wove a tale much more interesting.

He told me of his own history, longer and more interesting even than that of the house, with as many bizarre and unexpected twists. He told me of his own journeys, far and wide, as he searched for things to find, and in his manner, I saw refinement. I saw that his journeys, far and wide, had not been in vain, that he had found, many times, what he had set out to find, and he had brought back treasures and riches. He offered to share those riches with me.

All of time and all of space had been his, and he had blazed a path across them. He was an explorer, in a way that I was not. Where I sought a leader to follow, he boldly fashioned trails through the unknown, clearing away the detritus of the universe as it blocked his direction. He trod where none had been before, always seeking pristine places to explore.

I was different. I was not an explorer, by choice. Which is to say, I was an explorer, but not by choice. Movement was not my nature. Movement without direction served no purpose, and purpose seemed and important thing to me. In searching for purpose, I suspended movement. Purpose, when I found it, would supply its own movement and direction, as it drew me toward. In the meantime, I searched.

But that was not enough. My search was lonely, I had found no leader. Even my departed un-guru was not my leader. He showed me many paths, but none led out of the place where I found myself. His paths were all loops, they spanned great distances and passed many fine sights, but ended up just where they’d started. I could walk his paths, but following him would have served no purpose. Following him would have been as following myself.

In searching, then, I had to be my own leader. I had none else to direct my gaze. So by necessity, I had become what I sought. I led myself.

So did my host. In his journeys, as I listened, I realized he had been alone, as had I and my friend. He had explored amazing vistas of time, space, and imagination. He had seen places I had sought but never found, he had visited fortresses to which I did not have the keys, he had played music on instruments that I had not built. But he had done it all alone, he had never encountered anyone else, never found another searcher who had made it to the territories he wandered.

I realized, after a while, that I was staring at my host, and he was not talking. He was smiling mildly, and sipping from a cup, studying me. My attention had wandered far, too far, and I had not noticed that his history of the house had ended. I nodded, and thanked him for sharing his story with me, and for inviting me to his party, his house, his City. He thanked me for coming, and asked when we would meet again. He was polite, I think, for the sake of ritual. He knew as well as I that we would not meet again. I told him, though, that I hoped it would be soon. We smiled, and shared a cold embrace. And then, I left.

I wandered the streets some more, listening to the City breathe. It guided me, once more. It had to: the City had led me to the house, I did not know how to get back to the train. The City is kind, and it honored its responsibility to help me back to my own home. As I descended the stairwell into the body of the City, I patted the railing, and thanked It for guiding me safely. It was not the fault of the City that my host had been a fraud.

My departed near-mentor had told me many tales. He had painted stories of his travels and his searching, but the stories had all had no ending, no victorious discovery of obscured treasures, no celebrated homecoming, dragging riches. He had not claimed to have found anything, and in his honesty, I believed him. I did not know how my host that night had managed to weave such a convincing picture in between the words of his house’s history. I did not know how he had been able to reconstruct so convincingly the tales of travels to places I wished to go. But I know that he was a fraud, that the tales he told were contrived and constructed, not experienced, because throughout them, he was alone.

The paths of my erstwhile almost-guru led back to their starting place. The paths of my host led also back to their starting place, no matter how convoluted and torturous their route, no matter how perilous the cliffs they skirted, no matter how wondrous the vistas they encountered. In ending, they began again. The treasures they revealed were not shared, and unshared, had no value. What worth has a thing that can be hoarded only, and not given?

On the train, heading south, heading home, heading back on the return-leg of my loop through the night, I assumed the look. My fellows on the train all had the look, and so did I. We stared into the invisible, impenetrable fog on the train, unsatisfied by wherever we had been, our treasures still hidden from us. We stared, still determined, despite our repeated disappointments, to someday find them.