Thanks to the Helpful Man

Old men never know what they're talking about. But at least they stop. Old women just keep going on and on about the same things. He slouches. He doesn't eat enough vegetables (and he never did). When he was a kid an old man told him that adults eat vegetables all the time so he had better learn to do it now, and an old woman repeated it to him over and over for a while until everyone realized that vegetables don't taste especially good, and they left the matter alone.

He wanted to stop slouching, but he was forced—a hand appeared at each shoulder (like the good angel and the bad devil except these both stemmed from evil soil out to either side of the back of his neck), and they pressured him forward and his back curved like a crescent moon. The hands appeared every time he breathed in a vengeful thought of the old woman telling him to straighten his posture. Every time he saw an old woman walking down the street. But he really ought to straighten it, he knew that.

Slouching was what made camels and computer programmers, and he was neither of these things. He liked to write, sometimes about castles or detectives or children, but usually about old men and women. The age in their bodies and in their words, memories replaying in their eyes and ears and noses and spouting from their mouths when asked about their pasts. But people didn’t usually ask.

During the day he worked at a desk, where his hands did one thing and his feet tap tapped and his mind was in another world entire. Even he could not explain what he did to make money. His feet tapped to the beat he heard while he thought about his past—music playing so loudly that his ears had rung in happy memory for hours afterward, other smiling faces, all human but all so amazingly different, like a new cloud in the sky on a new day (slowly changing and molding and expanding, never staying long).

They were all gone somewhere, dispersed like a tipped jar of marbles on an old carpet filled with dust and crumbs and millions of footprints echoing almost silently. The marbles had all held vivid colored shapes, encased in glass and rounded, smooth and ready to roll if they felt the slightest tilt. The two boys had played with those marbles (with their knees digging into the floor, making four little impressions into time with explosive ease) until their finger prints had covered the entire surface of every marble ten times over, until they had lost them to the house, slowly and one by one, until they had gotten older and fallen with a gentle crash, landing apart and alone and far away from home.

(He lived in a giant castle and he was a detective and) he worked silently, not listening much if people spoke around him. As he grew older the castle grew only more elaborate, and the hedges around it grew higher. There was always something to do as a detective, studying fingerprints (the fingerprints grew too, as they had begun small as a child's, fitting onto little marbles) and dusting for clues.

Sometimes after work he would volunteer to sit with the older people in the big house across the street from his office, and when they weren't sleeping or repeating themselves he'd ask them about their lives. They spoke slowly and he took in every word, every breath, and the images formed in his mind like vines spreading around an ancient house. But when he went home everyone was alone once more, left with nothing but the strange itch of a new memory.

He grew old. His back hunched hopelessly despite the (fairly minimal) efforts he had made throughout his life to straighten it. He never found a love for vegetables. On some days he was visited by a younger woman who would ask about his life, and he would describe his castle and giant hedges (that eventually grew tall enough to become a maze) and most interesting murder cases. Her eyes would widen, trying to picture the stories in her mind, and when she left they both felt the itch. She began to come less often, or maybe it just seemed like less often to him, and then one day he realized she would never be back. He was left to talk to no one but the nurses and the other old people.

Have you seen my cane?

It's by the television

Have you seen my cane?

It's by the television.

Have you seen my cane? Have you seen....

The days passed in their slowness, their beige, their fluorescent light. The sky outside continued to house the clouds and stars, and sometimes he would sit outside and watch the universe spin around him. One night the crescent moon shone in unreachable distance. By the time morning came, it had lost the light to which it had been feebly clinging, and it could be seen no more.

On that night his breath had been slow and rasped, inhaling a bit of the world, exhaling a tangle of footprints into the gentle darkness.