In my emptiness I walked. Without a single word to anyone, even myself, I rose from my bed and slipped into a pair of familiar, unwashed jeans that were marred by the doodles of past days. I pulled on a tee-shirt which was lying on the floor near my bed. I then covered it with a beige wool sweater, which I had owned for years. It was comfortable and warm. At once time it was fine enough to wear to parties and important outings, but now it was worn and deformed by time and use, only worn while lying around the condo, or with casual weekend attire. Stepping into a pair of old sneakers, I exited the condo, descending the marble steps that led to the main door, burst out onto the sidewalk, and walked in no particular direction. The cool of the autumn morning pierced my clothing, pricking at my skin. The chill of the October morning brushed against my exposed face as I trust myself forward. The streets of Boston were still mostly quiet and I found myself focusing on the sound of my sneakers scraping and slapping the cold concrete sidewalk. The air was filled with distant rumblings of activity that were occasionally submerged in the sounds of sparrows and finches which resented the closeness of my approach. Pigeons frequently wobbled around me, looking for a handout, and I found myself eavesdropping on a one-sided conversation a crow barking a message to something or someone that did not appear to be listening. After a while, I noticed I was heading toward the river. At its bank, I turned and walked parallel to it, tracing its edge with my path, my back turned to the heart of the city. I had yet to utter a single word, syllable, or grunt to myself. If I were asked what I was thinking as I walked, I would not be able to answer. I was without thought, without expectation, without destination. There was nothing within me at that moment but a profound sense of nothingness. I was filled with emptiness. Yet, the vacuum-filled vessel that was me was propelled forward by some unknown and nameless force. I was like a balloon without a knot released by a mischievous child, and I walked. The cool October morning gradually became a hot October afternoon. I tore off my sweater without missing a beat in the sound of my footfalls. It spent the afternoon migrating under one arm, then the other, then over one shoulder, then the other, never finding a comfortable place to rest. As the sun began its descent in the west, I found myself burrowing into the sweater once more as a chill began to return. I continued to walk all that evening and night. I never stopped once that day to eat, or to rest. I did not sleep that night. I just walked. By morning, the city has receded far behind me. I had been walking for a whole day. The river had tired of our acquaintance long ago. It had turned off in another direction sometime during the night. The concrete sidewalks had transformed into soft, damp ground. I had moments when I realized how tired and hungry I should be, but I was neither. So I walked. I did not know why I was walking or to where I was going – I just kept walking. I was so far from home, so lost, so directionless, but I could not stop. I did not try to stop. I walked. I walked all that second day. My body was beginning to resist. It began to stream that I should stop. I ignored it and pushed forward. I lost my balance frequently; yet, I stumbled forward and managed to stay on my feet, and I walked. I awoke in a field. A cold drizzle was tapping my face. I deduced that I had passed out. My clothes were soaked and I was lying in mud. I inspected my body with my fingertips. I attempted to push my body up from the mud, my hands sinking into the mire until they found a firmness that could be used to push myself upward. I positioned my right food under my waist and ascended toward something like an erect stature, but my legs were rubbery and unsteady and I fell back into the muck. I made a second attempt, and caught myself as I fell forward, my feet eventually catching up with the force of gravity and I resumed my walking. Something dark was hovering in the wind above me. “Probably a vulture,” I scoffed to myself. It was the first thing I had said since I set out on my trek to nowhere, and the sound of my own voice was startling. The dark shape hovered in the sky behind me like an ominous shadow. Once my footsteps found a steady pattern, I forgot the shape that seemed to be following me. The morning spilled into the afternoon and the wet ground dried quickly. The shape, seemingly tired of being ignored, made its presence known once more. The shape drew closer and began quacking. I knew from its voice that it was crow and it sounded as if it were laughing at me. The crow continued to haunt the sky above me, circling, quacking, barking, cawing. At times I thought it was saying words, though I knew that was impossible and I consoled myself by explaining to myself that I was beginning to hallucinate from the physical exertion and lack of food and water, as well as a lack of any quality sleep for more than a day. Yet, even though I was rational enough to know this, I found it impossible to dismiss the crow, which was circling above me, cawing over and over in a way that to my exhausted ears sounded like, “Woe! Woe! Woe!” I lifted my eyes heavenward to inspect the bird, and as I did so, the toe of my sneaker caught a piece of earth and I flew forward, crashing onto the unyielding ground, landing with a dull thud. I issued a series of expletives as I once more tried to lift myself off of the ground. I was too exhausted and my body was too heavy. I lay in field inhaling topsoil, choking on the thick earthworm air. The sweat on my brow made the dirt cake on my forehead. My walk was finished. I may have passed out again, but I was soon stirred by the flapping sound of powerful wings. I strained to raise my face from the ground and looked out in front of me. The crow strutted back and forth about a yard away from me. Its glossy black wings reflected the sunlight, allowing its feathers to take on an aura of a rainbow. Its eyes constantly on me as it paced, wielding its sharp beak like a threat. It waddled back and forth, fixing me in its relentless gaze. “I hate to break it to you, little fellow, but I’m not dead yet.” felt in the dirt for something to throw at it. I was gripped with a fear that it would try to eat me while I was passed out or sleeping. The crow, for its part, never broke its stride, never unfixed its gaze. “Fool!” I thought I heard the crow speak. It is hard to explain because it sounded like a crow. It was not speaking in any conventional sense. It was barking and cawing and making normal crow noises; yet, somehow, those noises were understandable. I was hearing the crow as it made its crow sounds, but it was also as if I were hearing it speak, not with my ears as audible words, but with my chest – with my heart – as if I were sensing its words. But make no mistake, somehow, the crow was communicating with me, and it seemed less than impressed with me. My natural reaction was to ask it if it had just spoken to me, but then I realized the absurdity, not only of thinking that a crow had said something coherent, but also that it was more absurd to ask it afterward if it had said something cogent. Asking a crow about what I had clearly imagined is crazier than imagining it in the first place. “Fool!” it repeated. “Ah,” I suddenly had a flash of insight, “you’re one of those pet birds. I’ve heard about that. Some farmer catches a crow, slices its tongue or something and teaches to parrot certain words. Phew. For a second I thought I had lost it. “Fool!” “Didn’t they teach you any other words?” I found the strength to push up my upper body and moved to a sitting position. “Well, I’m alive, so shoo! Shoo!” I began to wave my arms and fling them in its direction. The crow stopped pacing. I thought it was because it was going to fly away, but it just stopped, looking at me with an expression that could only be described as disdain. “Disappointment!” it barked. “Disappointment? That’s a big word to teach a bird,” I mused. “Fool!” the crow replied sharply. “Nobody has taught me a thing. I am not mimicking word! I am creating them! And you, mortal, are a fool and a disappointment.” “What the…?” Nothing could have prepared me for this. “What are you?” “You and I are acquainted.” “Acquainted?” I parroted the crow. “I don’t think so,” I concluded with a sarcastic laugh. “I think I would remember a talking crow.” “We met many years ago. You were on a swing with an old woman. She was very wise and such high hopes for you.” My mind instantly found itself thirty years before. I felt myself on the swing. I saw my great-grandmother. I smelled the smells and felt the breeze. I heard the rattling rustle of the wind in the trees, and I saw the crow. “That was you!” I said in a way that was partly and exclamation and partly a question. “You were a fool then, and you are a fool now. The only difference is that then you still had promise, but now you are just a disappointment.” “Look, where do you get off telling me I’m a disappointment?” “I have watched you your whole life. I have watched you all your lives.” “All my lives? Lives? What does that mean?” “I am crow. I am wisdom. I fly between worlds. I fly back and forth between life and death. Death is wiser than life, and I am made alive by eating death.” I was completely out of my depth. I did not understand anything that was happening. I did not understand how any of this was possible. I was not even sure it was happening at all. And lives? What was that supposed to mean? “You mean like reincarnation?” I asked. “Fool!” “What do you mean lives if not reincarnation?” “There is not only one world. Your lives are not one after another, but all at once. You do not reincarnate. You are incarnate in many places at once. You are living in many places at once.” “That’s impossible!” “Fool! Where do you go when you dream?” “I don’t go anywhere.” “Where does your mind go?” “My mind does not go anywhere.” “Fool! Your mind goes everywhere. When you dream, your mind ventures to another world. Why do you have memories in your dreams that you have never experienced? Why do you know people in dreams you have never met? It is because those memories and those people exist, right now, with you, somewhere else.” “I guess that makes a kind of sense,” I concluded. “But everyone knows that dreams are just the subconscious working out issues while we sleep.” “I am standing in hundreds of worlds at once at this very moment. Are you going to tell me what is real when you only know one tiny part of one tiny world?” It was then I realized I was insane. I must be. Nothing else made sense. Whether it was an insanity brought on by extreme conditions and malnutrition, or something more permanent, the one thing that was clear was my insanity. “I’m not buying any of this!” I yelled in the crow’s direction. “I’ve been walking for days. That alone is crazy, right? And whatever mental breakdown I had when I started, it has clearly been exacerbated by the long walk with no food or water or sleep. I’m hallucinating. My brain and body are shutting down and I’m seeing and hearing things. That’s all this is.” “Tell me, mortal, do you believe in God?” “Sometimes,” I confessed after some thought. “This God in which you sometimes believe, is it all-powerful? Can it do anything?” “That’s what I have been led to believe.” “This God, where is it? Is it everywhere?” “That’s what my mother told me when I was a child.” “If this God is everywhere, then it must be in all things. If it is not in all things, then it is not everywhere, yes? “I guess so.” “Am I not a thing?” “What?” I was suddenly confused. “Am I not a thing?” “Well, that’s kind of the issue, isn’t it? If you are real then you’re a thing, but if you are just a product of my mental breakdown, then you are not a thing.” “Wrong, fool. I am a thing either way. It is simply a question of what kind of thing I am. A hallucination is a thing, just as a crow is a thing. So the question is still before you: Am I a thing?” “Well, I guess if you put it like that, then you are a thing, yeah.” “So, mortal, this God in which you sometimes believe is in everything, everywhere and all things are possible for this God, yes?” “Yeah, that sounds right.” “Then if all things are possible for this God of yours, how can you dismiss me as impossibility? If this God of yours is in all things, and I am a thing, then how can you decide that God is not in me, speaking to you through me?” “You are a hallucination. You’re a mental breakdown. You are the product of overexertion and malnutrition.” “Would a miracle be any less miraculous because you can explain it away? Does a vision cease to be a vision simply because you know what conditions that may cause or contribute to the vision?” “Well, yeah,” I concluded more as a reaction rather than as a product of reflection. “Doesn’t it?” “This is what the old woman wanted to avoid. You are white.” “What’s wrong being white?” I demanded to know, offended by the judgment. “Things are dead to the whites. There is so much they miss because they refuse to see it. They decide things are dead, and so they are to them.” “Come on, that’s just unfair. Dead things are dead. Things that are not real are not real. It’s stupid to think otherwise.” “Was the old woman stupid?” “No. She was not stupid. She was just misguided in her beliefs.” “And when she visited you the night she died, did she not transform into wisdom?” “No she didn’t. I dreamed she visited me. I dreamed she changed into a crow. It was a child’s dream. Nothing more!” “I think it is you who are misguided in your beliefs if you can convince yourself that what is real never happened. You are so certain about things you know nothing about! You are so arrogant! But you are dust!” “Hallucination or not, this is stupid,” I eventually concluded after much reflection. I forced myself up and staggered forward. I would have stomped on the crow on my way, but at the last minute, it jumped out of the way with a shriek and pecking hard at my leg with its beak. “FOOL!” I heard behind me followed by the sound of flapping wings. “Mortal! Mortal!” I heard as I awakened. My walking had led me into a forest. My body could no longer endure and I collapsed. I have no idea how long I was out. “Mortal! Mortal!” I looked up and found the crow perched on a branch above me. “Mortal! Mortal!” Stand and look!” I obstinately rose, stretching as I did so in an attempt to ease away the aches that plagued my body. I looked around. “What?” I asked, seeing nothing. “Look!” I scanned the forest again but still saw nothing. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked impatiently. “Look!” I slowly and deliberately rotated three-hundred-sixty degrees, intensely scrutinizing the wood as I turned. There was nothing except what looked like an endless array of trees in every direction. “What exactly and I supposed to be looking at?” “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these?” Suddenly two figures emerged from behind some trees. I recognized them at once. “It’s . . . they’re my parents,” I said, my voice moving from impatience to surprise. “Mortal! Mortal!” the crow spoke again after a moment, “Who are these?” Four more individuals came out from behind trees. “Those people are my grandparents.” “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these?” The crow’s tone seemed to have a mocking quality. Another group of people advanced from behind trees, eight of them this time. I scrutinized each one of them, immediately recognizing a face that I had not even pictured in my mind for years. “That’s my great-grandmother! I’m not sure who the other people are, but that is my great-grandmother!” “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these?” Now there were sixteen more. “I don’t know them,” I confessed. “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these?” I now saw a diverse crowd of people emerging out into the open. Some of the people were white, some were not. Some were wearing clothing and a manner of dress that I have only seen in old photographs of European immigrants. Others were clearly Lenape from long ago – the younger men with shaved heads or Mohawks; the older men wearing long-haired wigs; the women wrapped in deerskin wraps. “I don’t know any of those people. I’ve never seen any of them before.” The entire assembly of thousands of people stood silently. All of them, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, the host of strangers, white, tan, and red, all looked at me disapprovingly. Then the crow repeated again, “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these?” I cringed when I heard the question once more. I wanted it to stop. I wanted the crow to leave me alone. I wanted all these people to go away. I felt shamed and exposed and I did not know why. But the crow kept repeating over and over, “Mortal! Mortal! Who are these? And who are these? And who are these?” Every time the crow asked the question, a new gathering of people were added to the assembly that had been slowly congregating before me. “I don’t know,” is all I could honestly reply. “I don’t know,” I said over and over as the crow paraded more and more people in front of me, all of whom looked at me with an expression of condemnation and menace. The entire forest seemed to be swollen with people and I was beginning to feel smothered by this synagogue of scorn that had assembled in response to the crow’s unrelenting questioning. “I don’t know! I don’t know! Why are you doing this? Who are these people?” I demanded in desperation. “These are all the people it took to make you,” the crow said bluntly. “These are your ancestors. These people are who you are. They have labored hard through harsh lives for generation after generation, just so you could be – and they are all disappointed with you.” “Disappointed in me?” I asked, wrestling with the words, “Why would they possibly be disappointed with me?” “How could they be otherwise?” the crow replied in a way that pained me. “But why?” I implored, “Why is everyone so disappointed in me?” “Because you seek to go where you have not been invited.” “What does that mean? Where have I gone? Not invited for what?” My mind was desperately trying to unravel this riddle, but the more I failed to make sense of it, the more distressed I became. “It is not polite to go where you have not been invited.” “I don’t know what that means! Tell me what you want from me! What do they expect of me? How have I failed them?” “Mortal, what is on your hands?” The crow’s question was cold and unfeeling. I looked down at my hands and saw that they were covered and dripping with blood. I suddenly felt frightened and nauseous. “What the...?” I exclaimed. “Where is that blood coming from?” I noticed that the sleeves of my sweater were stained. I rolled back the sleeves hastily, and I saw deep gashes on both my wrists and the underside of my forearms. I pulled off my sweater and tried to apply pressure to the wounds. It was impossible. I dropped to my knees as I attempted to rip the sweater apart and wrap strips around the lacerations. I rocked nervously and felt as if I were about to vomit. The blood flowed out of the cuts so forcefully that whenever I attempted to inspect the wounds, I was baptized in blood. “What is happening?” I shouted at no one The crow, apparently unmoved by my horror, calmly stated, “You should not seek to go where you are not invited.” Then it hopped from its branch and flew away. I lay on the forest floor, hemorrhaging. The silent chorus of thousands broke their silence and began repeating my name, first as whispers, but it grew in volume until they were all shouting my name. Some of them were banging against trees with clubs and other objects. I lost consciousness to the sound of pounding and the repeated shouting of my name.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 05:06:36 +0000
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