Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
The Man with the Ladder Stories Vol 1
There was a man who was called by everyone who knew him, and some of those who didn't, the Man with the Ladder. From time to time, he was called other things but he paid no attention to them. I did hear someone call him Rong Chiu Shi once, to his face, and someone else called him Nicholas Strayte, behind his back, but if he had a name besides the Man with the Ladder he never acknowledged it.
He said of someone else—by way of excusing some idiosyncrasy—"which of us who first reaches for the world with the top of our heads and our shoulders, is not sour faced and mean spirited." He was not sour faced and mean spirited. But like many people who were born in strange places, like cabs, or the waiting rooms of rail road stations, or the backs of envelops, he felt deprived by the circumstances of his birth, and, like many of us, he also felt misunderstood. In fact, he was not widely misunderstood. His ex-wife understood him very well, and the man who sold him cigars understood him perfectly. There was only one person who really misunderstood him, misunderstood him through and through, thoroughly and completely, and that was himself.
Slander was anathema to him, but gossip always rang true, no matter how bizarre. He tried to be economical about his egoism and unless he burned his finger, or had a toothache, or was cut off at a stoplight, or was buying a shirt, he did not place undo importance on himself. He could not fathom how the people of other countries tolerated their government's inhuman oppression and casual persecution of innocents, and he thanked God that his country did such things only when they were necessary to preserve freedom in the world. He was moved to tears by cruelty to animals and children, but he believed that cruelty, when it was applied to adults, was probably, in some measure, always deserved.
He was not particularly witty, nor was he especially clever. Like most of us, he was moved by contradictory impulses: conflicting winds blew him in opposite directions. He craved justice, but found himself perpetuating injustice, because those who required justice did not seem to deserve it. He championed charity, but found himself being uncharitable, because, at the moment it was required, it was inconvenient or embarrassing. He compromised, because he could not imagine how he could preserve his integrity without compromising, but he compromised unwillingly. He found himself wishing things were different, so that he could be different, but he acquiesced in the way things were, because he felt that nothing could be done given the way things were.
He longed for romance, but suspected passion. He had faith in science, but distrusted scientists, whom he felt were charlatans, foisting elaborate fantasies on an unsuspecting public, in order to keep their nests well feathered. Wealth and success filled him with awe and envy, but he was convinced that all that was required to achieve them was a narrowness of purpose and bad manners.
He sought wisdom much as we do, in the columns of newspapers and in articles in magazines. When he found it, he circled the relevant section and clipped it out, and pinned it to a bulletin board, or stuck it under a magnet on the door of the refrigerator. But he found, as we do, that most of the wisdom of the world is inconvenient, contradicts common sense, and is hard to make serve some useful purpose; so he made a special place in his mind for wisdom, separate from the ideas by which he regulated his life.
He felt that television was the only mirror that showed him and his life as it really was, yet he deplored the silliness and baseness that he saw on the tube. He felt that privacy was the only valuable collective good. But he also believed that public scrutiny was the only guarantee of virtue and honesty. He felt the need for more discipline and control over himself; yet he was convinced that he depended in some way upon incontinence and the exploitation of his own impulses. He believed that his strength derived from his virtues. He was certain that he was reasonable because of his strength. But he was sure that others were strong because of their vices, and were reasonable out of weakness. He lamented what he took to be the only indisputable truth about the world; that his security depended on the insecurity of others, whose tenuous position made them vicious.
He was a very ordinary looking man, 5 feet 11, medium build, brown hair and eyes. He wore shoes when shoes were required, but liked to go barefoot when he could. He kept his fly zipped and his shirt buttoned. He wore an overcoat in the winter, and a bathing suit when he went swimming. All in all you would recognize him anywhere, although you would probably no more notice him than you would notice the woman who sells you newspapers, or the man who sells you fruit in the Korean grocery, or the cop on the corner.
He was born and grew up in the
In any conflict he usually knew which side the truth was on, but he always hesitated a moment before he chose which side to support, until it was clearer which side was likely to win. He struggled against his limitations and lost. He was defeated in his fight with his baser impulses. He tried to nurture his unique virtues, but failed. His only victory was against the desire to give up and surrender, to stop losing so consistently.
He was a working man, that is a man who worked. He carried a ladder around during the day, because he needed it for his work. He did whatever a man with a ladder can do that is useful, and people will pay for. He cleaned and painted ceilings. He rescued animals from trees. He installed fixtures. But mostly he changed light bulbs.
Except for one or two unessential details, he was very much like you or me. One thing that set him apart from us is that he was a good listener. He listened to the world around him, not only with his ears but with all of his body. Because he was an accomplished listener, he heard things between the words that people spoke, between the sounds that animals made, and between the noises that came out of mechanisms and devices that most of us miss. Someone said of him that he insisted on keeping his door open, even in the winter, even when the snow blew in, and in the summer, even when the air was filled with dust.
He was different from us also, because odd and strange things happened to him. I am not sure that these two characteristics were not two aspects of the same thing. I believe that unusual things might as frequently happen to any of us, if we did not keep our eyes closed, and our head turned, until the unfamiliar and uninvited got bored, and went away.
People called him the Man with the Ladder, not because he carried his Ladder around when he was working, but because he carried it around almost all of the time. When he wasn't working, he carried it around to sit on and listen to the world from. On it, he thought about the world, and made up stories. If making up fairy tales and fables qualifies anyone after Aesop as a writer, you could call him a writer. They were quaint little pieces full of misshapen humor, and somewhat incomprehensible characters; he baited them with morals.
At some point he started to write down the things that happened to him and tell them to his friends. But as usual, a strange thing happened to him. People began to tell stories about him. He would hear these stories second or third hand, and he would write them down too; pretty soon what happened to him, and what happened to the Man with the Ladder in stories that people told became confused. For a while he became convinced that he had a double in the world to whom more interesting things happened than happened to him. His writings became laced with jealousy and envy. As time went on, the characters became confused and, in his own mind, he started to become a character in a story that people told about him, or about the other Man with the Ladder. He finally decided that, while he would continue to tell his friends stories about things that happened to him, he would stop writing Man with the Ladder stories down, and let his memory sift, and sort, and forget, so that he could keep his life in order.
I never read any of the stories he wrote before he abandoned pencil and paper, but I have collected some of the stories people told about him. These tales are not about him, or, they are about him only as they are about each of us, who is a point at which many lines intersect, all of them wavy and crooked. I hope you read them with pleasure and remember.
The Man with the Ladder was sitting in the park, with his ladder, passing his time watching the people around him passing their time, watching him. Because he was sitting on a ladder, people expected that at any moment he might do something interesting, like juggle fish or roll hot stones around in his mouth and, for that minute, they seemed ready to allot him some portion of their attention all day.
Everybody watched him with the slow, detached, idling curiosity reserved for jugglers and street performers, everybody that is, except one oddly dressed man whose attention was much more active and personal, not of the waiting to be entertained sort, but of the struggling and straining to remember kind. After alternatively peering and craning his neck for a while, he let his curiosity move his feet slowly and steadily until he stood quietly in front and off to the side of the ladder.
"Do we know one another?" asked the Man with the Ladder.
"I'm Hungarian," the man replied enthusiastically.
The Man with the Ladder recognized something familiar about him, not the indistinct familiarity of the not-utterly-foreign, but the definite, tangible familiarity that puts a person in the category of the husband of one's mistress, or an ex-wife, or one's first grade teacher, or one-couldn't-remember-which-person exactly, but someone who at one point in one's life, in some not exactly straight forward way, one was very, very close to.
The Man with the Ladder prided himself in home grown linguistic skills and he marveled at the fact that the man standing before him absolutely lacked an accent. "It's odd," he thought to himself, "that the way this man pronounces his words sounds exactly like the way I pronounce my words."
"I visited
"Oh, I wasn't born in
The Man with the Ladder reasoned that the man's parents who were born in Hungary and that they must have taken him back there as a young child so that, in growing up in Hungary, the man naturally enough thought of himself as a Hungarian.
"Where in
The man appeared sad for a moment but responded cheerfully.
"I didn't grow up in
They had gone to the same public school. Memories scuffled and jousted with one another to get to the front of the line and be the first to leap to the freedom of awareness. The one that succeeded was the most painful. This forty five year old man with a gray toupee, cowboy boots, and pince nez glasses was the boy who had made his school life miserable, the arrogant bully who had selected him as his private target and over eight years, practiced every form of cruelty on him that his constricted imagination could devise.
The present and the past clashed in his head. He wanted to voice forty year old complaints, but the confused present won over the cumulated and definite but half decayed particulars of the past.
"How can you say you are Hungarian," the Man with the Ladder heard himself say angrily, as if his old nemesis had shifted tactics and was practicing mental cruelty exclusively in his middle years, "when you were born and grew up in the Bronx," (and, although he didn't say it out loud, are Italian to boot.)
"I didn't say I was from
"It's the same thing," the Man with the Ladder said although he wasn't exactly sure.
"No, it's not," said the man, his voice conveying a robust and comfortable, but hard won, certainty. "Sometimes you live in a place with people and they're not your people, and it's not your place. Even if one of them gave birth to you, and the other fathered you, and the others crept out of the same crevice you did, and you eat the same food as they do, and speak the same language as they do, they're not your people, and it's not your place, and it's not your food or your language. Other people know you're different," he added, "but they don't know how, and they decide your queer or crazy. Even your parents have a gnawing feeling about you as if their real son was stolen by the gypsies and they got you just to mark the place from which their own child had been taken. I'm sorry I picked on you," he said apropos nothing. "I know it was wrong. I knew it then but…. I would be grateful if you forgave me, I mean here, to my face."
The Man with the Ladder said "I forgive you," quickly, and not entirely convincingly, but enough to satisfy the man.
"That was the way I felt," the man said. "I walked around feeling queer, odd, out of place," implying that that was the explanation for his reprehensible behavior. "I had certain unshakable prejudices and odd unnameable longings. I had impulses that came from nowhere and went nowhere because there was nothing to do them to, or with, or for. Certain times of the year I felt like celebrating but there was no holiday in sight, and other times I mourned unknown dead."
"I saw the world differently from anyone I knew, and I was frightened continuously for the first 15 years of my life. I'm afraid I acted badly." He moved his feet in a funny little shuffle. The Man with the Ladder tried to remember back to see if this information corresponded to anything he remembered and inquire of the boy he was then, whether it would have made any difference if he had known it; but in his head the memories said 'stop', and while he was waiting there for the light to change, his curiosity got the better of him. He shifted his attention to the present and the man in front of him. "What happened?" he asked.
"When I started seeing things I dropped out of school and
worked for a while. Then I began traveling. I dragged myself over half the
world until I got to
"They treated me as a native son who was slow. I traveled
around
For a moment the man looked infinitely far away, and a little homesick. "I rented a room and met my people. They treated me as one treats a relative whose exact genealogy was known only by an old aunt who had died. I met all of my relatives. It was a small town. I knew who I was finally."
"What happened," the Man with the Ladder asked after a little while. "Why did you come back?"
"I couldn't get a job. I tried to get work, but it was impossible. The bureaucracy, the papers, the language, you know. They took care of me for a while, but I could see that they really couldn't afford it. I met this girl, actually a second cousin I think. We got married and I emigrated back here.
"Do you get homesick?" asked the Man with the Ladder.
"Not too often, and not too bad," the man replied. "Now and then. I've done fairly well here. Now and then," he repeated. "The important thing is that I know who I am. I'm sorry," he said again, "for public school."
"It's over and done with and I can see that it wasn't entirely your fault," said the Man with the Ladder, meaning it, but not entirely convinced it was enough of the truth to excuse his companion's bad behavior as a youth. He opened a door in his mind for the particular memories of public school to leave at their leisure.
"I was wondering," the man said quietly. "You're not Hungarian?" he asked.
"No," said the Man with the Ladder, "I'm not Hungarian."
"You looked Hungarian sometimes. It's the only reason I asked," the man said. He readjusted his glasses. "I have to leave now," he said and walked off and disappeared down the walk.
After he was gone the Man with the Ladder heard a little voice in his head. "Are you sure you're not Hungarian?" it asked, which another voice in his mind answered with a silence that lasted long enough for the first voice to inquire, "if you're not Hungarian, what are you?"
The Man with the Ladder found himself with the gift of a day off from an anonymous employer. Without thinking about it, he set off for the park. But by the time he arrived there and climbed up on his perch, the feeling had grown and matured in him that this day was going to be different in a not entirely pleasant way. He took an inventory of the kinds of days he knew. 'There are days and there are days,' he said to himself.
There are days that submerge at the first light of dawn and only resurface at the instant one falls asleep in the evening. There are days that seem to be a message left by a dream the night before, for another dream waiting to be dreamt the night after. There are days that seem to be laced together by the anticipation of some impending disaster which never occurs, and never not occurs, but merely withdraws, receding infinitely slowly at a tangent towards evening.
There are days that fracture in the morning and break apart in the afternoon and reach evening in a hundred small pieces that burn up like a meteor shower when they hit sleep. There are days that begin with a warning shot fired into your stomach and a whispered threat that if you don't shape up, a second shot will do major damage. There are days that seem just a collection of randomly selected minutes thrown haphazardly together into hours of varying lengths. There are days that never appear anywhere but on calendars, and then only after the fact, and there are other days that appear and reappear on privy doors and subway posters and the backs of animals and children's drawings and on beer advertisements on T.V., so that they feel like they have been lived in again and again, like an old house that has been occupied for centuries. 'There are days and there are days,' he said to himself and spent the first few hours of this day trying to figure out which kind it would turn out to be when it was over.
At the end of the examination, he decided that no matter how saturated with reality this particular day appeared, at its conclusion it would turn out to have been a dream. He knew for a certainty that, at the end of the day, as he lay on his bed in his jockey shorts and socks, exhausted and vulnerable, some bright faced little girl in a tutu would prance out of the shadows and shove a sign in his face which said, "Today was completely a dream," and all the figments of his imagination that he had met that day would leap up from behind bookcases and sofas and shriek "SURPRISE, WE KNEW IT ALL THE TIME," and he would be mortified and embarrassed and feel that he had been royally had.
He had seen a number of movies whose plot consisted of resolving an intractable reality by transforming it into a dream. The only trouble was that none of these films had given a hint of what you could do to get out of such a situation if you discovered that you were in the middle of it. At least he had not picked up any such hint if it were there.
He felt abandoned by both common sense and
He was drawn back into the park rudely by a voice saying," I know just how you feel." When he looked down he found himself staring into the faces of a Mutt and Jeff pair staring up at him. The words had come out of Jeff's mouth.
Now the Man with the Ladder was sure that he had only been thinking to himself and that he had said nothing out loud that a stranger could so easily empathize with. But he was in an extraordinarily cautious mood so he nodded noncommittally.
"I've had the same dream every night for the last 50 years," the little man in front of him said.
"This is Harry." The big man offered the introduction indifferently. "And I am Willie. We are strangers."
Aliens would be more like it, thought the Man with the Ladder. The bigger man was absolutely big in every direction and he had protruding ears and a pasty sharp face covered with stubble. The little man seemed to have skin that consisted of pocks interspersed with pimples, no nose to speak of and glasses without lenses in them.
"I've had the same dream every night for the last 50 years," the small man repeated.
The Man with the Ladder recognized that he was obligated to ask about the dream.
"What do you dream," he responded, knowing he would be told whether he asked or not.
"The first thing that happens in this dream is that I wake up."
That's an odd beginning thought the Man with the Ladder, but not wanting to provoke the small man any more than he knew he was going to, he said nothing.
"I wake up in a large bed."
"Is it a wooden bed or a brass bed?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
The little man seemed annoyed. "I never noticed. Sometimes details aren't important," he chided.
'After 50 years you'd think you would have noticed,' the Man with the Ladder thought to himself.
"I wake up in this bed," the little man continued, "and I realize I have forgotten everything. Everything, I don't remember anything at all."
"A tabula rasa," chimed in the Man with the Ladder, feeling he had to say something.
"Exactly," the little man echoed, "a completely blank slate. Empty. Null. I have this gnawing feeling that I was supposed to do something very important on this day, like pay my taxes, or get married, or declare war, something significant, and I will not do it because I can't remember what it is."
He rested while he caught his breath. "Then this woman comes in. She is tall and blond and beautiful. Even in the dream I know that she's a spirit, not a real person."
"Is it always a woman," the Man with the Ladder inquired cautiously, indulging a speculation.
"Well," said the little man, "when I first started having this dream she was a girl, but she's been a woman for at least thirty years." He seemed to begrudge the Man with the Ladder his insight and returned quickly to telling his dream.
"'Don't worry,' she says softly. She seems to understand my dilemma. 'I will help you remember.'"
"What?" the little man reports he responds.
"'Everything,'" the lady replies.
"But I don`t remember anything," the little man reports himself saying, as if she might have second thoughts if she recognized the magnitude of the task.
"'Not to worry,' she says."
"And then," said the little man, "she starts at the very beginning. 'Remember, it was very, very dark,' she reminds me, 'and you'" the little man illustrated his story by vigorously pointing to himself "'you decided that now was the time.' I didn't remember anything of the sort," the little man whispers in an off stage voice, behind his hand, as if the lady were standing with them in the park, and he wanted to keep the secret from her.
"'You thought the very little thought of 'getting out', she reminded me. 'Up, down, sideways, anyway, but loose. That was exactly what you thought,' she insisted. Vaguely, I remembered something like that," the little man confessed.
"And she would go on from there and remember me everything that had happened to me, and how things felt, and smelled, and tasted, and what I was thinking. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, she remembered me the pieces of my life."
"That's very inspirational," the Man with the Ladder said, hoping he could suggest that the little man quit while he was ahead.
"And when she had covered almost everything, she would say, 'and then there was yesterday,' and she would add yesterday to the line of days she had walked me though."
"And when she was done," the little man continued, "I remembered everything. I remembered what I was thinking the time I cut my finger on a piece of broken glass when I was six, and I remembered listening in the closet to my mother and father making love, and I remembered the pattern on the sheets on the bed on which I made love the first time and I remembered the appointments I had next week."
"When I was intact, when I had remembered everything, I would lay down on the bed and go to sleep in my dream and wake up at the beginning of a new day. My wife would be next to me snoring, and the kids would be playing the phonograph too loud. And if it was a regular day I would have breakfast and go to work, and if it were a Saturday…."
The Man with the Ladder felt that the essential point of the story had been told and he resented the little man embellishing the tale with minor details. He felt no obligation to pay carefully attention to ornamental and irrelevant points.
The Man with the Ladder regarded at the little man cautiously. He half remembered having a dream a while ago something like the one he had just heard, but he could not be sure. The little man's story made him apprehensive and sad.
"Every night for 50 years I dreamed the same dream," the man repeated.
"Until?" the Man with the Ladder added.
"How did you know there was an 'until'?" the little man asked suspiciously.
"Any five year old knows there is always an 'until'," said the Man with the Ladder rather pompously. "There is, isn't there?"
"Well, there just happens to be," said the little man sourly. "This particular night, not so long ago, I fell asleep as usual, and I had my dream and the lady came and she remembered me my past, the way she had every night before, but…," the little man hesitated, "but then a strange thing happened. I don't know why, perhaps it was something I ate, perhaps something I should have eaten, but when my dream ended I found myself still in the bed in the room."
The Man with the Ladder looked confused.
"Don't you see," the little man complained, "every time my dream ended before, I woke up in my own bed with my wife next to me and the kids playing."
"I remember," said the Man with the Ladder quickly.
"Well this time," the little man continued, "I was still in the room in the dream. I had forgotten everything. I was a tabula rasa again."
The Man with the Ladder waited for the little man to continue, but he seemed to need a push.
"Well, didn't the lady come?" he asked.
"I waited and I waited," wailed the little man, "but she didn't come. I panicked. I jumped out of the bed and ran around the room moaning and whimpering." The little man looked even smaller than he was and began to whimper and moan. "It was the only thing I could remember to do and then even the panic faded because I forgot the basics of panicking."
The Man with the Ladder thought about it for a minute. He had never thought that a person had to remember the basics of panicking. In spite of himself and the little man's discomfort, he felt the story was getting interesting.
"Well?" he asked.
"I looked around and I felt the world tilting, and it seemed I was sliding towards the edge of a void. I realized that the only thing that would stop that motion was if I remembered something, only I didn't know how to begin. I couldn't remember how to begin to remember things."
The little man was sweating and making funny little noises between words. "I still don't know how I did it, but I started remembering. I guess for people the fundamental reflex is not breathing but remembering. I remembered myself. I started at the beginning as the lady did with the very first things. Only…. "
"Only what," the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Without the lady I remembered an entirely different life. By the time it was done I had remembered an entirely different me than I had remembered all the times before."
A little quiet invaded the park where they stood.
"And then," the Man with the Ladder asked.
"And then I woke up," the little man said decisively.
"That's an interesting story," the Man with the Ladder said. He was uncomfortable and ready to change the subject, though he did have a few questions about the ending.
"You don't understand," the little man repeated. "I woke up."
"I hope so," the Man with the Ladder said quietly. "You woke up the other times too," he gently reminded the little man.
"You don't understand," the little man insisted. "I woke up in the bed in the room of the dream. The room was light, and I realized it was morning. But there was no wife snoring next to me, and there were no kids playing."
"You woke up a different person that you remembered going to sleep as," the Man with the Ladder summarized bluntly.
"Yes," answered the little man, distraught.
"Which person," the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Me, who I am now," the little man said. "For all intents and purposes, the man you see in front of you."
"Well," said the Man with the Ladder, "then it's OK."
"It's not OK," the little man shrieked. "It's not OK. I stopped dreaming the dream," he whined bitterly. "I miss that other person I was. I worry about his wife, his children. I miss the lady too. But that's not the worst thing," he added ominously, "not the worst thing."
"What's the worst thing?" the Man with the Ladder asked, not really sure he wanted to know.
"The worst thing," the little man said in a trembling, uncertain voice, "the worst thing is that when I think about it, I remember going to sleep three times and waking up twice." His voice sunk to the floor of his despair. "I woke up from some dream I was dreaming in a dream, but I'm not sure which one."
The Man with the Ladder felt he had been kicked, but he could not identify exactly where on his body the blow had fallen, nor could he tell exactly where the kick had come from; and something else generated an attack of anxiety that punished the spot that had been kicked.
"That reminds me of a dream," the big man said, without letting the Man with the Ladder dwell on his condition.
"Is it as long as Harry's?" the Man with the Ladder asked. He felt confused and disoriented. "If it is I may have to leave in the middle…I…" His discomfort went fishing for an excuse.
"No, it's quite short," said the big man.
"There's this other person," he began abruptly. "He's exactly like me only a little taller, a little handsomer and a little quicker on his feet. He always has the proper comeback to a wisecrack immediately, whereas it comes to me two hours after I need it. He's a bit wittier than I am with a little bit more style."
The Man with the Ladder sat bolt upright and stock still. Just a few weeks ago, he thought to himself, I had exactly the same idea about a person who was almost exactly me only a little bit smarter and….
"Are you listening?" the big man asked pointedly. Without waiting for an answer, he continued.
"When he has to make a decision he makes it quickly, and he always seems to make the right choice, whereas I agonize over the pettiest of decisions, and always select the wrong alternative.
"You meet this pretty girl in the park," he continued, lost in his bill of indictment against his other self, "and you know if you could only say the right thing she would give herself to you, but you learn to stutter on the spot, instantly, and while she passes you by, you can see him making the turn down the path—he pointed to where the path turned behind the trees—and she is giggling and he has his hand on her behind."
His voice was filled with venom, and the Man with the Ladder knew exactly what he felt. Now you understand," the big man explained, "I never met this other me, not in real life, but I've envied him as long as I can remember."
Fifty years probably, thought the Man with the Ladder to himself although he couldn't tell exactly why this thought came to him.
"I've never met this other me in real life, but last week we met in this dream."
"Whose dream?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
The big man paid no attention to the question. "He was dreaming and I was dreaming and suddenly we were together in a dream."
"I remember saying to him when we bumped into one another, 'so it's you. ' He was pleasant enough and made some joke about two pods and one pea. And we talked for a while about experiences we nearly had in common.
"Suddenly I had this idea. I said, 'Since I can never be as clever or sharp as you in real life I will envy you to the day I die. Envy will poison the relationship between us. I tried to play on his sympathy and sense of superiority. I can never be like you in real life. But in a dream… Why don't we exchange dreams I suggested, I'll dream your dream and you dream mine.'"
"A brilliant maneuver," the little man suddenly yelled out, prancing and applauding.
The big man acknowledged the applause with a nod, and looked at the Man with the Ladder's silence disapprovingly.
"The other me was generous. His sense of superiority blinded him. 'I don't see any harm in it,' he said. 'It's only a dream.' We exchanged dreams. He began slowly to dream my dream and I began dreaming his."
He waited for the Man with the Ladder to draw the implications from what he had just said, but the Man with the Ladder misinterpreted the silence to mean that the story was over.
"That's an interesting dream," the Man with the Ladder said. "Did you ever meet him," he asked, "I mean after you woke up?"
"Woke up," the big man said, exploding like a bell attached to a trap springing closed. "Woke up," he bellowed. "I didn't say anything about waking up. Did I say anything about waking up?" He poked the little man in the ribs and repeated the question. "Did I say anything about waking up?"
"No," said the little man, jumping up and down. "I don't recall you saying anything at all about waking up." He dangled the joke in the Man with the Ladder's face.
"But," the Man with the Ladder started to say.
The big man interrupted him before he could get anything but the 'but' out. "Tell us one of your dreams," the big man demanded, effectively cutting off the Man with the Ladder's line of inquiry into dream he had just heard. Somehow the Man with the Ladder felt the request was a demand pushing him into a place where he already was.
"That's a problem," the Man with the Ladder said. "I mean my dreams aren't memorable. I mean, I don't remember them. But I can tell you something that was like a dream more or less."
"What kind of a thing is like a dream more or less," the little man inquired.
The Man with the Ladder ignored him. "This happened on a day a few weeks ago," he began, "a wonderful day, more or less like this one. The sun was out and there was only one cloud in the sky just like that one," he pointed over the big man's shoulder, "and it seemed to move to just the right spot to block the sun from your eyes. I had no job that day, so I went to the park. I was sitting where I usually sit, about here, when two men whom I had never seen came up and stood in front of me and started a conversation."
"What did they talk about?" asked the little man suspiciously.
"Not important," said the Man with the Ladder, holding very tightly to the story he was telling. "Not important at all. We talked about dreams. But what was said exactly wasn't important," he told the little man pedantically. "What is important is that they convinced me that I was really at home dreaming that I was in the park."
"Just how did they do that?" the little man asked pointedly.
"They confused me with their talk and stories."
"I don't understand," interrupted the big man, but the Man with the Ladder knew that he did.
"They played to a weakness I have," the Man with the Ladder continued. "They made me believe that I was capable of reproducing the world so exactly that my reproduction would fool me because it was indistinguishable from the real thing. It was the worst form of flattery."
"Was it sincere?" the big man asked.
"Sincere or not, they succeeded pretty well. After talking to them for a while I was confused. I really couldn't tell whether I was at home dreaming I was in the park, or actually in the park wondering whether I was at home dreaming I was in the park."
"Does it matter?" the big man inquired quietly.
"I thought it did," said the Man with the Ladder. "I felt it was necessary, absolutely necessary, for me to be certain whether I was awake or asleep, dreaming I was awake."
"Did you decide?" the little man asked.
The Man with the Ladder disregarded the question and mused out loud to himself. "The demand to be absolutely sure was what did me in," he said, reviewing the events he was recounting. "I think if I could have gone through the day uncertain about which reality I was in, things would have turned out differently. I could have gradually sorted it out. But in my mind I had to make a decision." He excused himself. "I was shrewd. I was logical. I was careful." He sighed a genuine sigh. "I decided I was in a dream."
The little man looked disappointed.
"What happened" he asked, "after you decided you were in a dream?"
"Nothing changed much as far as I could see. We finished our conversation and they drifted off."
"Where did they go?" the little man asked earnestly.
"How should I know?" the Man with the Ladder shot back annoyed but he found it hard to ignore the question. "But they had done their work." He looked at the two men standing innocently in front of him. "I convinced myself I was really dreaming." The little man seemed satisfied.
"After they left I sat here. I mean I sat there on the ladder, thinking. Since I had decided I was in a dream I knew that none of what I was feeling, touching and seeing was real. But that only left me with the sense that the trees I saw, and the wind I felt, were even more real, but in a dream like way. I decided that if I was in a dream I might as well enjoy it."
"And use it," the big man added.
"And use it," the Man with the Ladder echoed, not quite clear how the big man had sniffed out what was in his mind but unstated.
"What did I do?" the Man with the Ladder ladder asked rhetorically, trying to prolong the suspense. "Well, I figured that since I was in a dream, the limitations of the real everyday world didn't hold and I no longer had to be constrained by them."
The big man looked at the small man who tried to make himself appear even smaller than he was.
"When I was a child, I wanted to fly. I mean not in a plane but the way Superman or Batman or Captain Marvel flew." The Man with the Ladder looked down, and for an instant the little man appeared to be Billy Bateson resting on crutches, his leg pulled up, and the big man wore the face of Captain Marvel, and he thought to himself, "you both shouldn't be here at the same time." When he squinted at them, the illusion went away.
"I decided that since I wasn't held down by the million of little strings that tie us to our every day limitations, I would fly. And I did. I had to practice for a few hours until I got the hang of it. Flying turns out to be a lot like roller skating on one wheel, only a little trickier. But I managed to get me and the ladder off of the ground about a foot. And once I did this I, scooted up and down the grass, on the paths between the trees and over sand boxes. Most people think you have to go high in the sky to be flying, but it's not true. You fly just as much three inches off of the ground. I never went higher than a foot."
"It was a little hard for people in the park to take. I don't think they really saw me flying, only moving quite fast on the ladder; the blur, and the fact that they were characters in my dream, saved reality for them. They continued to behave as if the normal laws of the world held."
The big man seemed a little bored. "Is there any sex in this dream?" he asked bluntly, as if he was deciding whether to listen any more. The Man with the Ladder was amused at the question but he looked at the big man sternly, forcing him back into his the role of listener.
"After flying, I decided I would like to be rich for a while. I took the easy was out. The quickest way I knew of getting a lot of money was to find it. It was easy. My flight had carried me to a part of the park that was infrequently used because someone had been murdered there. I looked down and there was this bag, a bank bag, I think."
"Was there money in it?" the little man inquired.
"A lot of money," the Man with the Ladder replied.
"I picked it up, took out as much as I wanted, and threw the bag down again where I found it. It was like a dream."
"How much did you take?" the little man asked, hungry for details.
"Oh, ten thousand or so," said the Man with the Ladder. "I gave it away. I stopped Mary, one of the bag ladies and gave her $500. 'Shop wisely,' I told her. I gave Pete, who plays chess in the corner there, three hundred. 'Buy a new chess set', I told him. I was wildly generous. It didn't last too long but it was great fun."
"And then?"
"I went home. I went home and there was my wife, but since I knew this was a dream mimicking reality, I expected her to be there. For the first time in a long time I looked at her not the real her but her image in the dream and I was overwhelmed by love, a love that in real life somehow was always half enslaved and enshrouded by the reality of married life. I loved her, and it seemed to me she was beautiful. I told her so."
"You told her so." The big man echoed the statement as a question.
"I just said to her 'you are beautiful and I love you,'" the Man with the Ladder related. "I would never have done that except in a dream because…" He stopped in front of the explanation and looked at it. "I just don't know exactly why, I just wouldn't have. Never that way.
"She looked at me oddly. 'Thank you,' she said softly, 'I love you too, but you don't seem yourself.' Then she added as an afterthought, 'when I look at you sometimes I get excited.'
"'The right eye never marries,'" I said back to her. "'You're right though, I'm not quite myself.'"
'"You're telling me,' she said.
"I had this feeling she would wink or give me some sign that she knew we were in a dream, but she didn't. She behaved as if it was just the tail end of a tilted, normal day.
"I could see she wanted me to stay and explore our new found loving, and to tell the truth I wanted to see how far we could take it, but I was just to bushed. Dreaming was almost as hard work as real life living."
"'Time to get up,' I said to myself and I went into the bedroom and lay down in my bed where I was convinced I belonged. I tried hard to fall awake. I lay there and tossed and turned just like a cartoon figure in the movies. I got up and got a book and read for a while. I put the book down and reviewed the commotion of the day, the flying and the money."
"And the conversation," the little man added.
"Yes, that too. I wanted desperately to wake up. I waited patiently and I waited impatiently but I didn't. I fell asleep."
"What do you mean by that?" the little man asked, searching for some hidden meaning.
"Just that, I fell asleep. I didn't wake up, I fell asleep."
"You weren't dreaming," the big man concluded.
"No, it was a real day. My wife woke me up after an hour and asked me whether I wanted dinner or if she should call a doctor. I remembered everything about the day."
"Bizarro," said the big man, bizarro himself.
The Man with the Ladder ignored him. "When I realized it had been a real day my first thought was what kind of damage have I done to my marriage, but my wife treated me as if it was just a pleasantly quirky episode. I knew that although she remembered, she understood enough not to let it worry our life together."
"Well," said the little man, "you did learn to fly."
"I thought so," said the Man with the Ladder. "The next day I got the ladder out and went to the park. It was early and there was almost no one around."
"You flew again," the little man said genuinely excited.
"No. I couldn`t make even the littlest motion in the air."
"You lost it."
"I'm not sure now I ever had it. I tried for hours but I just couldn't fly. No way, no how.
"As the park filled up people came up to me and thanked me for my generosity the day before, some of which I remembered, some of which I didn't.
"I actually found a hundred dollar bill stuck in the ladder which I tucked away as a bribe for my wife just in case she decided to hold me responsible for what I said in the dream, but that was all. I wandered around to where I had found the bag of money but there was nothing there."
"That's an interesting dream," said the big man.
"Not a dream," repeated the Man with the Ladder.
"OK," said the big man agreeably, "it's an interesting story." He turned to the little man who was clearly thinking about the story the Man with the Ladder had told. "We have to be going," he said to him. And they walked off.
The Man with the Ladder watched them go and felt a little tug on the ladder but he sat very still until it went away, and he pressed himself very tightly against the rung he sat on.
"This is going to be a long day," he said out loud, bracing himself for the intrusion of the little girl in the tutu with the sign.
Although the Man with the Ladder loved parks he was bothered now and then, by the fact that he couldn't adequately explain to himself the source of this affection. And, because he was not clear in his head what a park really was, he was uncertain whether his affection was justified. He tried to decipher the meaning parks held for him. After thinking about it for a while he realized—although he was disappointed that the discovery was so ordinary and trite-—that a park was a place where privacy was both ferociously and incontestably grasped, and at the same time casually and completely surrendered. It dawned on him that a park was any spot in the city in which people behaved in the midst of strangers as they did when they were alone. A park, he concluded finally, was a place where people held private parties in public, with themselves as the only guest.
He realized in some way he couldn't quite make clear to himself that in a park any park there was always some tattooed mystery slinking around disguised as a non event, wearing glasses and a wig, smoking a pipe and humming. He came to this conclusion sitting on his ladder in the park watching two men he had never seen before, playing a game that was unfamiliar to him, on a cement table that he could have sworn was not there the day before. He watched politely and cautiously from a distance, moving closer gradually until he took a kibitzer's position to the side of the two men who were entirely absorbed by the play.
Up close, he could see what he had felt from a distance; it was a very strange game. Each player took a turn arranging objects on the table in some pattern that was pleasing to him. Any object, it appeared, could be put down on the table, scraps of paper, a leaf, a cigarette butt, match covers, pebbles, spit, anything at all. And these did not seem to stand for a collection of abstract definite powers, like a Queen or a Knight in chess. The retained their individuality and represented what they were and the pattern they made up.
When the player whose turn it was had completed his move and everything was laid out to his satisfaction, the other player had a chance to make a counter move, which consisted of shifting or removing or adding any thing he wanted to the display. When this play and response was done they would talk for a while and the cycle would begin again.
The game was being played by two men who looked familiar to him but who he could not quite place. One was balding with a thin mouth. He wore a plaid jacket. The other was slight with a bent nose, crooked sunglasses and a mop of stringy blond hair.
"I've never seen this particular game played," the Man with the Ladder said, when he felt he had been a bystander long enough to claim the role of kibitzer. "What is its name?" A hand articulated an obscene gesture. When no other reply was forthcoming he asked, "what are the rules?"
"No rules," said the balding man who was watching his opponent slide and shift objects around furiously.
"That's right, no rules at all," said bent nose, whose hair had fallen over his sunglasses from the exertion of the move.
"Every game has rules," said the Man with the Ladder, "that's what makes a game a game. How can you play the game if there are no rules."
"It's not an easy game," the balding man acknowledged, not without some pride. "It's not for everyone."
"There must be rules," the Man with the Ladder said decisively, "otherwise it would mean that you could do anything."
"Yes," said Mop head. "Your move," he said to his companion who was still intently examining the position he had been left, as if the ring of a beer can were harboring a trap of cosmic proportions.
"You could do this," the Man with the Ladder said, reaching down and cautiously moving half of a lottery ticket across the top of the table.
"You could, but it would be very foolish and not very tasteful," the balding man said looking up at him.
"Very foolish," his companion echoed.
A breeze came up an blew the piece back to its original position.
"If there are no rules how can you learn to play?" asked the Man with the Ladder, "in case," he added, "you wanted to learn to play."
"You watch other people play or you just remember," bent nose said.
"And take advice," his companion added.
"If there are no rules how do you know which moves are legal," inquired the Man with the Ladder.
"That's easy," said the man with the full head of hair, looking at his partner. They put the game aside for a moment in order to answer the Man with the Ladder's questions. "If a player makes it, it's a move, and if it's a move then it's a legal move. You can't miss it," he suggested.
"But how do you win," asked the Man with the Ladder.
"Can't win," said bent nose, appearing surprised that the issue of winning had come up.
"Can't lose either," said his companion, turning his attention back to the game and quickly coming to a decision about his next move.
"You become an expert fast," said the smaller of the two men. "Figuring out which move to make is easy. Actually making a move once you decide on it is the hard part."
The balding man was using his turn to construct a delicate but intricate pattern of odd shaped pieces of paper on the board. He reached into his pocket for a collection of cut up pieces of rice paper that looked as if they had been covered with a translucent spray paint and set them out.
He was using for his move those pieces that were entirely covered with black paint. They made the top of the table look as if it was covered with deep, bottomless holes. The Man with the Ladder thought he saw the bald man drop a pebble into one of these pits.
"Actually there are rules," the bald man confessed, as if he had rethought an issue the Man with the Ladder had raised previously. "There are rules, but only the rules you make up. Making up the rules is a move in the game. It's the way the game is played by experts. It's one of the hardest moves to make."
"If you need rules," the player with the sun glasses affirmed, "you make them up, and then you discover that they are the rules you were playing with all of the time."
"If you're lucky," said his companion.
"Sometimes," said the first man.
"Sometimes, and sometimes not. And sometimes someone changes the rules. People forget the rules conveniently."
"They certainly do," repeated his partner.
"You mean they conveniently forget the rules," asserted the Man with the Ladder. Plaid jacket moved over to make a place for the Man with the Ladder who sat down.
"That too," said the bald man. "That too."
The Man with the Ladder watched the pattern emerge under the bald man's fingers. When he put the last piece in place the three of them sat watching the pieces carefully. They sat so still a squirrel climbed up on the table and took a peanut, which had been used as a piece, off of the table and scampered away with it.
"That comes very close to cheating," the blond player said quietly, "very close. But it was a very clever move for a squirrel," he added.
"Can squirrels play? " asked the Man with the Ladder.
"That one can," baldy replied.
The Man with the Ladder watched them playing for a while. Although he couldn't say why, the game was exciting to look at and it began making sense to him, although he couldn't tell which particular sense. In fact, it seemed to him that he was familiar with the game in some way he was not aware of. The sense of the game became clear enough, so that when the balding man took his next turn and had nearly finished constructing a set of figures on the board, the Man with the Ladder leaned over and whispered, "that's a very poor move I think," pointing to the butt of a cigar resting on a matchbook. The balding man looked up at him and then down on the board. "You know, he said, "you're absolutely correct."
"First the squirrel then him," said mop-of-hair. "Who is playing? If you going to get advice and help, I'm entitled too," he whined and looked around for an ally. Not finding anyone he got up. "I'm going to get some more pieces. I'll be back," he said and left quickly.
"Why did he have to go get more pieces," asked the Man with the Ladder, "there are plenty of pieces here," he said, pointing to mounds of rocks and twigs and pieces of paper.
"Change of strategy," he was told. "He's looking for a piece of a comic book cover I expect," confided the balding gentleman. He leaned over and looked up right into the Man with the Ladder's face. "Sometimes his moves are so predictable. It may take him a while," he added. "He will only buy it if he's convinced he can't find it free anywhere. He's probably gone to Brooklyn. He's very stubborn. You know there's a solitaire version," he said after a while. "It takes a little longer to play and it's not as much fun," he added, "but it's easier to learn."
"Teach me," asked the Man with the Ladder.
"You know it already, I think. We've been playing the solitaire version."
"How can it be a solitaire version if two people are playing it?"
"It's easier," confessed the balding man, examining his missing companion's incomplete position. "It's the attitude, your feeling about the game. You can play it alone if you want. You want to play for a while just to kill the time until my friend comes back."
"OK" said the Man with the Ladder.
"You start," the balding man said to the Man with the Ladder, you can use his position to begin."
"Are you sure he" indicating the absent head of hair "won't mind."
"Of course not. I don't think so anyway. Besides," he said, "it's not a position worth saving."
"Well," the Man with the Ladder said, clearing most of the scraps of flotsam and jetsam off of the table carefully, "I'm not sure I really know how to play but I did see something interesting there." He pointed to half of a flower.
"That was an extremely clever move you just made," replied his companion. "You're sure you've never played this game before, without thinking you were playing a game, perhaps. You're not a hustler, are you?" And then, thinking a little, he squared off to the Man with the Ladder's face. "I don't play for time under any conditions. No how, no way. Money, now and then, but time, never." He was adamant.
The Man with the Ladder ignored him and was getting ready to make his move when Sally, the bag lady, came by. She was pulling 3 carts loaded to overflowing with shopping bags from Dean and Delucca's and Bloomingdales. The carts, which were from Grand Union, were strung together into a wagon train by pieces of chain and cord. The load was oppressive. She rested as she went by and relaxed by yelling at them.
"That's all you guys got to do all day is lay around and play games. I don't understand you people. You got no initiative, that's your problem. What are you kids or something. Lazy bums," she cried, heaving the cords attached to the wagon to her shoulder and pulling off. "Take my advice," she yelled, turning her face towards them, "find something useful to do with your time," and she set out on her rounds.
"Never play with her," the balding man commented when she was well out of sight. "She's treacherous. I think she learned from her mother," he said.
After they played three rounds, the balding man threw a bottle top onto the table. "I'm bushed," he said. "I guess my friend isn't coming back. Expect he couldn't find his comic book."
The Man with the Ladder was disappointed. The game was fun. "Maybe we can play again tomorrow or next week," he suggested.
"Probably not," said his companion. "My friend and I are traveling men. There's always another park," he added, "although this one has the look of a place a person could settle into." He pulled a hat out of his pocket. "You're welcome to the game, if you like it. Teach it to anyone."
"I'll forget it," said the Man with the Ladder.
The balding man reached over and picked up a piece of spray painted paper from the table. "Here," he said, handing it to the Man with the Ladder. "All of the rules are here. It's been fun playing with you," he said, and he walked off.
The Man with the Ladder was working his regular, irregular job changing lightbulbs in the exposed kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. He clung to his ladder with his toes through his shoes, and to the light bulb he was changing with the tips of his fingers, and hung suspended, motionless except for the miniature circles his hand made unscrewing the lightbulb. Below him, cooks and waiters rushed around, plates balanced on trays above their shoulders and pans held at odd angles, kept from colliding with the ladder, he thought, by the sheer force of his will.
Balanced precariously, he was focused intently on remaining suspended when a instantly familiar woman walked into the restaurant. He struggled to resolve the familiarity into recognition while he maintained his equilibrium. He twisted the light bulb free of the socket and glanced at her furtively, not wanting her to recognize him before he could place who she was. From where he stood he couldn't see her face so he wasn't sure if it was her confident walk that was familiar, or the way the light cast gleaming streaks through her dark black hair. For an instant he thought perhaps it was only the Moo Shu Pork he had for lunch playing tricks on him as meals in the restaurant often did.
The woman turned far enough his way for her face to brush his eyes. His first reaction was to let the bulb drop and leap down and hide behind the ladder but he considered the consequences. He palmed the burnt out light bulb and scrambled down the ladder.
He would have to live several lifetimes before he would ever forget that face. He was at a complete loss as to what to do next, he felt giddy, nervous, instantly tongue tied—and he felt young. Then he realized it could not possibly be the woman that he had known because she looked exactly like his memory of her and his memory was twenty years old.
The giddiness, the nervousness disappeared as quickly as it had come but he refused to let the memory slip back into its comfortable, dark sleep. He did not bother to hide as he glanced at her, now that he knew she must be a stranger, modern coinage, only a counterfeit of someone he had known twenty year ago.
He savored the freshness of the memories the sight brought to his mind. They were happy times. He wished he had been smart enough to hold on to her. If he had had the foresight, every nuance of his life would have been completely different. He would have settled down into a very domestic existence. He would not have been able to travel as he did or have had the adventures he had.
On the other hand he'd have had children, young bouncy bursts of energy as beautiful as their mother. To this day he'd be changing diapers and wiping food off the walls. He'd have more bills to pay then he wanted to imagine. He'd be wearing a suit right now working for some corporate tyrant with at least another twenty years of mortgage keeping him in bondage.
But he'd have her. The thought of waking up next to her drove the images of the other unpleasant consequences from his mind.
No one had ever touched him as she had, no one had ever seen through him and pushed him as she did. She had encouraged him to make something out of his nothing job. She had struggled to bring him alive up when he came home and sank before the T.V. as his father always had. She was the only woman he had ever met who could lure him into a life of domestic insanity.
Of course, unlike this woman, she'd look twenty years older. She would probably have gray hair and wrinkles but still be beautiful he was sure.
The woman looked up from the menu she was reading and caught him glancing at her and a look of recognition flashed on her face. She jumped up.
"It's me," she said, smiling that devastating smile, "don't you recognize me?"
It was her. In twenty years she had hardly changed at all. He was stunned, tongue tied; the room seemed to be spinning. As she approached it was clear she was even more beautiful then he remembered. His heart was pounding. He was trapped. If he talked to her he knew he would do anything she asked. He did not have the youthful vigor and craving for freedom to resist her a second time. He could already feel the tie tightening around his neck.
"Don't you recognize me?" she repeated.
"No, no," he stammered, dragging his eyes away "You've got the wrong guy I'm not who you think I am."
Her face fell.
He hurriedly picked up the ladder and started to turn. Just when it was clear that his deception had worked his heart turned him around to look at her one last time. "No, I'm not who you think I am," he repeated, but added in an infinitely sorrowful but apologetic tone, "though I wish I were.''
From time to time the Man with the Ladder baby sat for the daughter of one of the working women in the neighborhood while she plied her trade. Although he did not entirely approve of what she did for a living, he heard that she did it very skillfully, and with much enthusiasm, and he was certain that she did it with considerable dignity. Besides, the little girl was sparkling, sharp and intelligent.
What he liked best about the child was that, although she knew precisely what kind of woman she would ultimately become, she kept that person out of sight and hidden, even from herself, so that she was completely a little girl, and completely opaque; but she dropped hints, and the hints intrigued him.
When the mother had a job and the Man with the Ladder was in the park, she would bring the little girl as close to the ladder as was possible without making what she was doing obvious, and say as loudly as was necessary to catch anyone's attention who needed telling "now just stay here." And pointing vaguely in the direction of nowhere in particular, and edging the little girl slightly closer to the ladder, she would tell her again to stay put, until finally the little girl was firmly planted against the back of the ladder, and everyone had been adequately communicated to. "I will pick you up in an hour, two hours at the most. Do you understand?" she would ask, and look at the Man with the Ladder, and the little girl would say "yes" quietly, and the Man with the Ladder would look away and nod as inconspicuously as possible and wonder who baby sat for the little girl when he himself was working.
Since it was not a real babysitting job he did not receive real wages, but when the mother returned to pick up the child, whose name was Tatyana Schwartz, she always had a bag with fruit or pastries in it, and she would say, to everyone who needed telling, something like, "I brought us a treat," and then, feigning surprise, as if the grocer had put an extra apple or pastry in the bag, offer it to the Man with the Ladder, as if it was him or throwing it away. Once, when she worked overtime, she found a five dollar bill underneath the ladder that she insisted he must have dropped and forced him to accept it as his own.
There were times when he wondered why she did not just come out and ask him to watch the child, but he decided she must have an especially good reason for this elaborate charade, and he just accepted it as the way he was permitted to baby sit for Tatyana.
They did a variety of things together when he baby sat. Sometimes he would point out the different animals, seen and unseen, that made their home on the ground underneath the ladder. Other times he would identify different kinds of birds, real and imaginary, that flitted from tree to tree above them. Most of the time though, she would ask him to tell her a story. He would usually resist, saying he knew few stories, and these were not suitable for children, but she would insist, and he would finally give in and make up a story for her. The stories he told her were interesting.
"Well," he began one day, "in this government office there were three men."
"That's no way to begin a story," the little girl corrected him.
"Have you heard this story before?" he asked, querulously.
"I don't think I ever heard a story about three men in an office before," the little girl answered. "But I know for a fact that that is no way to begin a story."
"Well, it's the way this story begins," the Man with the Ladder answered a little petulantly. Then having second thoughts he asked, "How should it begin?"
"It should begin," the little girl responded, "once upon a time. "
The Man with the Ladder thought for a moment. "I know for a fact that that's an entirely different story," he said, "but OK." Once upon a time, in this government office, there were three men."
"What did they do," asked the little girl.
"I was just going to tell you that," said the Man with the Ladder.
"Well," said the little girl, "I just wanted to be sure."
"It happens that these men collectively were responsible for ideas, and each one was responsible for a different kind of idea."
"Like what kind of idea," the little girl asked suspiciously.
"Are you going to let me tell this story or…"
"OK," the little girl responded defensively. "I just thought it would help if I knew from the start what kind of ideas we were talking about."
"Well the first man was responsible for the idea of how to begin things, and the second was responsible for ideas about how to take a beginning and end it."
"And the third man," the little girl demanded to know, "what kind of idea was the third man responsible for?"
"Well, no one really thought about what kind of idea he was responsible for. He was just part of the way the office worked. In fact," the Man with the Ladder added, "that's the nub of the story. This third man didn't ever seem to be working. What this office did, you see was, well, someone somewhere would come up with an idea for an idea…"
"You mean an intuition," commented Tatanya Schwartz.
"…and they would send it to this office in the bowels of the government," said the Man with the Ladder completing his thought. "Where did you learn that word?" he asked.
"What does bowels mean?" the little girl asked in return, without answering his question.
"It was in Washington," the Man with the Ladder said.
"You mean," the little girl said, "that it was like a place for making insights into ideas."
"That's it, exactly," said the Man with the Ladder.
"Suggestions for ideas would come into this office from all over the world and when an underdeveloped, immature idea came in the office manager would look it over and give it to the man who it seemed to belong to."
"To whom it seemed to belong," the little girl corrected.
"Exactly. That was what I meant to say," said the Man with the Ladder, "When it looked like it was an idea that needed a new beginning, he would give it to the first man, and when it was an idea that was well begun but needed an ending, he would give it to the second man."
"Well, when the manager gave an idea to the first man, he would take it into his office and work on it. When he was done with it, the first man would give it to the second man."
"You still haven't told me what the third man did."
"You are impatient," the Man with the Ladder said to her. "A funny thing happened all the time. I don't know whether you are going to believe this," the Man with the Ladder added, looking down to the ground.
"If I try hard, I can believe anything—if it helps make a story more interesting," said Tatyana.
"Well, whenever the office manager got an idea that he thought was somehow between the two of them, requiring something that was neither a beginning nor an ending, he would give it to the third man and say, 'Work on this,' but no sooner had he done this than the third man would say something like, 'You remember that idea that came in yesterday that you gave to the first man? Well,' he would say innocently enough, holding the idea up in the managers face, 'if you just think about this the right way, like such and such,' and he would describe a very strange way of looking at the idea the office manager had just brought in, 'if you look at it this way, it's just like that idea. So,' he would say, 'I think you had better give it to the first man.' The third man was very nosy and because he was never very busy he was always looking over the office manager's shoulders when the mail came in.
"And the office manager would take it back and go into the first man's office and say 'you know, if you looked at this idea in this way,' and he would repeat more or less what the third man had just said. 'If you looked at it in this way, its very much like the idea that came in yesterday.' And the first man would say, 'you know, if you did look at it that way, all these ideas,' and he would grab this handful of ideas that were littering his desk and that he couldn't figure out how to give a good beginning to, 'all these ideas are just the same idea,' and he would gather them together with a happy look on his face and he would move them around and make some rough calculations and come up with this other idea and throw the old ones into the waste paper basket and hand this new idea to the office manager. 'Give this to the second man,' he would say, 'he'll know what to do with it.'"
"Sometimes when he handed the third man an idea the third man would say, 'you remember that idea you gave the second man a few weeks ago. Well,' he would say, 'if you looked at this idea in this way,' and then he would describe a very peculiar way of looking at the idea he had in his hand, 'it's just like it.'"
"And the office manager would take the idea back and go into the second man's office and say, 'you remember that odd ball idea I gave you a few weeks ago? If you look at this idea,' he held out the idea to the second man, 'if you look at this idea like this,' and he would repeat just what the third man had said a moment before, 'if you look at it this way, then it's very much like that idea.'
"And the second man would say, 'that's interesting, I would have never thought of that' and add, 'you know if you looked at it that way then, you could also look at it this way' and he would spell out an another entirely different way of looking at the idea. Then he would go over to his desk and lift up the rock keeping the pile of ideas that had stumped him in a neat pile, and look through the pile and pull out a few. 'Give these ideas to the first man,' he would say,' they need new beginnings ' and then he would rifle through the ideas that were left on his desk, and furiously scribble something down on a piece of paper. And when he was done writing he would hand the piece of paper to the office manager and with a flourish, sweep everything on his desk off into the waste paper basket."
"That's interesting," the little girl said. "So work did get done after all."
"A great deal of work," said the Man with the Ladder. "The office had a world wide reputation for putting out the best ideas in the nation."
"So what's the story," the little girl asked.
"It's coming, it's coming," the Man with the Ladder protested.
"Well, one day, there was a move in government to save money and an inspector general came around. He watched the office at work looking for a way to save the government some money. He was an expert in the efficient workings of offices and knew just what to look for. He saw the first man and the second man working, their desks piled high with papers, but the third man sat with his feet up on a clean desk smoking a cigar."
"'That third man,' the inspector said to the office manager, 'doesn't seem to be very busy. What does he do?'"
"'Well I give him the ideas that are neither badly begun, nor ready yet for an ending,' said the office manager, but he really had no good answer to the question. The truth is he did not understand how the office really worked even though he managed it, and actually managed it fairly well. What the third man did was a mystery to him, but as long as ideas came in, and ideas went out, he just accepted the arrangements as they had always been."
"The inspector watched for a few days and when he saw the third man take whatever ideas the office manager gave him and quickly redirect them to one of the other two men in the office he decided that the third man did nothing useful at all. 'Fire that man,' he ordered the office manager and the office manager did as he was told."
"'You're fired,' he said to the third man, even though he was quite fond of him.
"'I need a vacation,' the third man replied, and went off happily."
"And then," asked the little girl.
"How do you know there is a then?" asked the Man with the Ladder.
The little girl smiled. "Even a three year old knows that in every story there is an 'and then,'" she replied seriously, "and I am five."
"And then," said the Man with the Ladder. The little girl smiled. "Well this time there happens to be an 'and then,'" he said brusquely.
"Well, what was it?" asked Tatyana.
"The 'and then' is that somehow the ideas stopped coming out of the office. They kept coming in," the Man with the Ladder said. "People kept sending the best intuitions they had to this office, seeds of ideas brimming over with promise, to be given beginnings and endings and sent into action, but try as they could, somehow the first man and the second man and the office manager could not seem to give the ideas that were coming in, rich beginnings and fruitful endings.
"After a while the first man and the second man were swamped with work and their desks were piled so high with paper they couldn't find anything at all. 'We could use another person in the office,' the office manager said to himself. Because he liked the third man who he had fired, he thought he would hire him again to help out temporarily, until things settled back to normal. He called the third man.
"'You're lucky,' the third man said cheerfully when the office manager called, 'I just got back from my vacation,' and he came back to work immediately.
"The office manger took the very next idea that he received to the third man who was sitting with his feet up on the top of his desk, smoking his cigar. But before the manager could get out of the door, the third man had his feet on the floor and said 'you know I haven't been here for a while, but before I left I remember you giving the first man an idea very much like this one. If you didn't think about this one like this, but as if it were,' and he sketched out a way of thinking about the idea he had in his hand. 'I think this ought to go to the first man' and handed it back to the office manager."
"I bet I know what happened," said the little girl.
"I'll bet you do. The first man cleaned off his desk."
"And I'll bet that when the next idea came in and the office manager brought it in, he gave it back and said if you look at it this funny way it really belonged to the second man."
The Man with the Ladder laughed. "You are a smart little girl."
"It comes from hearing a very lot of fairy tales," the little girl replied.
"It turns out you're right. The third man showed the office manager that the very next idea that he brought in for him to work on really belonged to the second man if you just saw it in a slightly different way than the office manager did.'"
"And I bet the second man cleaned his desk off too."
"Exactly," said the Man with the Ladder.
"And what happened the next time the government ran out of money and the next inspector came around looking to economize and make the office efficient?"
"There wasn't a next time, honey," the Man with the Ladder said." They left the office alone after that and the third man sat around smoking with his feet on the desk and the office manager never complained again."
"Did you ever work in an office?" Tatyana asked, not so innocently.
"A long time ago," answered the Man with the Ladder, "a very long time ago."
"What did the third man really do?" the little girl asked after a thinking a long while.
"No one really knows or at least they didn't say, that I heard of," replied the Man with the Ladder. "Only whatever it was it was very very important. If I had to guess though…," he said, dropping his voice. The girl wrinkled up her brow and prepared to listen very carefully. But, just then, her mother appeared from behind the ladder saying, "I brought us a treat," and the Man with the Ladder whispered, "next time."
The Man with the Ladder was perched on his ladder on a cloudy afternoon when he heard the familiar voice of his sometime employer giving the familiar instructions to everyone who needed instructing. "You stay here. I'll be back for you in a little while, understand." He nodded to the voice in the direction he was facing and he heard Tatanya Schwarz acquiesce with a murmured, "yes."
After her mother had gone, Tatanya Schwarz balanced lightly on the bottom rung of the ladder. "Could I sit on the top today and you sit on the bottom?"
"I don't see why not," the Man with the Ladder said, and they exchanged places.
"Have things changed much since you were like me?" Tatanya Schwarz asked.
"No," the Man with the Ladder replied, "they look from down here much like they looked from up there, only a little lower."
"That's not what I meant," said Tatanya. "You know. Are things different now than they were when you were my age?"
The Man with the Ladder thought about the question for a while. "Yes and no," he said, "yes and no." He tried to think of himself as he was at five, but the memories stung and harassed him and he brushed them away.
"What things have changed, and why have they changed?" Tatyana asked, doubling up the question without giving him a chance to start to answer it.
"Which do you want to know first," he asked, as if giving a single answer to two questions was much more difficult than giving two answers to a single question which he did all of the time. And then, without giving her a chance to pick, he said, "I don't know why things change."
"You have some idea," she said egging him on, baiting the question with a smile.
"Big things change because people are too smart for their own good," answered the Man with the Ladder.
"And little things?" Tatanya inquired.
"Little things change because people are not smart enough. I just made that up they're not the real reasons," he confessed.
"That's clever," she said.
"Do you know what clever means?" he asked, not sure that she had complete control of her language.
"Clever is what adults are when they think like children," she said, looking down at him.
"I'm not clever, then," he said, "I'm wise."
"They're not the same," Tatyana said decisively. "Being wise means giving very very short answers to very very long questions."
"You are very sophisticated," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Aren't most five year olds," she responded.
He thought about it for a minute, and in the middle of his thought she asked, "What does sophisticated mean?"
"Sophisticated means to be able to do something before you know the name for what you're doing, or why you're doing it."
"Oh," she said, "you mean it's what children do when they are behaving as adults."
"You've been watching late night television again," he commented, adding, "I'm not sure I can take too much more of this kind of conversation, Tatanya," leaving open the question of what kind of conversation it was, and trying to maintain a stern face, and only worry a little about the effect the conversation on his mental equilibrium. "I think before we go any further you had better come down here and sit on the bottom rung and I better move back up to the top."
"I like it here," the little girl said. "I promise not to be too clever or too sophisticated. You never really answered my questions," she reminded him. "Why have things changed?"
"Oh," he said, "I'm not really sure. It's complicated. Maybe things change because people always forget for a while before they remember. I do happen to know why a few things changed." he said. "Not big things but important things."
"You are going to tell me a story," she squealed.
"You promised now, you remember," he reminded her, and she nodded, even though she was not quite sure which promise he had in mind.
"Once a year at the Hilton Plaza in Madrid, the Devil and all the demons of the world hold a convention. Do you know what a convention is?" he asked the little girl who was listening attentively. She shrugged her shoulders. "It's when a lot of people who have spent all year doing the same thing, get together to talk about what they did, and about doing it next year, and have fun to boot," he explained. "Actually it's quite a conventional convention," he continued. "Any plumbing salesman would recognize it right away. It's the regular kind of convention, a lot of fooling around and drinking."
"How come I never heard of it?" asked Tatanya.
"Well, they take over the hotel for a week but they take it over only in demon time which rushes by like an instant for us, and they start about 3:47 in the morning so that no one every notices, although there are rumors and occasionally something is broken. Actually although they hold it once a year our time, it's once a millennium to these dwellers in the underworld and they have a lot of dead time to make up for. Everyday life no pleasure for these types."
"What do they do all day?" Tatanya asked.
The Man with the Ladder looked puzzled for a moment. "They sit around inventing mischief, making up aphorisms and putting cleverness in the mouths of five year olds," he said, recovering quickly.
"That sounds like fun," his charge said.
"It's a punishment," said the Man with the Ladder.
"What kind of aphori…things do they make up?" almond eyed Tatanya asked.
"Things like, 'Death has a slogan: return the empties' and 'Sex talks with forked tongue: don't you wish' and 'Reality stands by its illusions'."
"I don't understand any of them," Tatanya said.
"They belong to another five year old," said the Man with the Ladder. "Can I get on with the story? It was in the midst of a drunken brawl that Beelzebub and some of his minions were having, that one of Old Devil's lesser servants threw out a challenge. You have to understand that in any other circumstance than this, he would have been immediately punished with some ingenious torture on the spot. But this was convention, and Mardi Gras rules prevailed, and the challenge was picked up by a drunken Beelzebub with the relish only a lost soul who dreams mischief can display."
"What is Mardi Gras?" Tatanya asked softly.
"It's a drunken Channuka," the Man with the Ladder answered.
"Actually the demon who made the challenge wasn't drunk at all. He had thought about it for a few centuries, and was convinced it would get Old Sod in very deep trouble. And he reasoned logically, that even though the Devil would see this, his pride and basic evil streak would not let him reject the challenge. If the truth be known this innocent was ambitious and had his eye on moving up in the underworld. The only thing that worried him was the question of whether evil was good when it was done to evil with the intention of having evil punished. But he decided that since it was being done with evil intent he was safe.
"What he said was, 'I bet you can't remake the world, change it all, every piece then put it together again from memory.'
"What you have to understand," the Man with the Ladder pointed out, "is that things like changing the world were usually done with a lot of equipment, including a lot of books, and maps, and charts, even when it was done for pleasure. God, in his wisdom and mercy, did not object to infrequent putterings as long as in the end everything was left as it was in the beginning and he was not required to do any kludge re-patching after the evil was done. In fact, it gave him something to do, checking and rechecking to make sure that everything was as he had left it. There was hell to pay if something as much as gas from a comet or a left over meal was misplaced. So interventions like this were never left to so frail a instrument as memory even if a demon's memory was usually much better than a computer's.
"Now Old Sod rose to the bait as the lesser demon knew he would. He swallowed the challenge to the last overtone. 'From scratch,' he yelled, 'every molecule and from memory,' and he pulled himself up from the floor and began instantaneously to change the world."
"It was an awesome spectacle. It even caught God's attention. He didn't approve of course, but he appreciated a good show as much as anyone.
"And the world was changed completely. You should have been there. No, that's not the way to put it. I didn't mean to imply that you are anything like a demon or evil spirit. I just mean you should have seen the world as it was after that transformation. The sun was fusia. Two and two made seven. Politicians told the truth, out of habit. Doctors cured even the most minor illnesses. Little children behaved like little children. The instant after it was completely changed, the tension became almost unbearable.
"'Rest for a moment' the demon who had thrown out the challenge urged. But Beelzebub wasn't that drunk. He knew if he concentration was broken even for an instant he would forget some little girls wish for a cabbage patch doll, or some drunkards longing for a pint of sweet wine or one of the thirty equations involving quark colors, and he would be in for one hell of a time with the Old Man. So he did no more than suck in his breath and began putting the world back in place. The right wish here, the proper lust just where it had issued from, each and every apple on the right branch and so on and so on, until he slammed his fist on the table and said in a bright loud voice, 'DONE!' And it was.
"Now the whole convention was impressed. Everyone just stopped what they were doing and applauded and applauded, not only because they enjoyed the tipsy topsy shape of the world when it was changed, or even because they felt comfortable they would all have their old jobs back, but also out of respect, because it was a stupendous accomplishment. Even God nodded. Only Beelzebub knew he missed something and God knew he had missed something. But just then the Lord's attention was captured by something happening light years away and he put off checking every out properly and Beelzebub gave his laziness reign, calculating none of his minions who suspected something would say anything."
The Man with the Ladder paused.
"And, " the listener inquired
"And the convention ended and everyone went home, a little sadder, a little older you know what conventions are like. But…," and here his voice dropped a little and he hesitated before the next word. "Have you noticed," he said, looking up at the five year old perched at the top of the ladder, "have you noticed that people's smiles don't last as long as they used to when you were three, and that tears are a little wetter, and goodbyes are a little sadder, and that the colors of the rainbow are faded a bit? And," he added a little scarily, "when the moon is full, the darkness faces forward."
Tatanya Schwarz sat quietly examining the story from different angles. "God will get around to making it right, won't He?" she asked.
"Of course, honey," the Man with the Ladder said. "It might take a little while though," he added. "Until then we'll just have to smile a little more and make do." And at that moment he heard the Tatanya's mother's familiar 'hallo, look what I've brought us.'"
"Do you believe in God?" Tatyana Schwarz asked, initiating the conversation with the Man with the Ladder one afternoon after her mother had deposited her by the ladder to be babysat.
"Yes I do," replied the Man with the Ladder.
"You seem very sure," the little girl said. "You didn't take any time at all to think about it"
"I've thought about it a bit before," the Man with the Ladder replied. "I've heard a number of stories that have convinced me God exists."
"How can stories do that?" Tatyana asked.
"Either you believe stories you hear, or you don't. If you learn to believe, you can believe anything, and believing stories that have the ring of reality to them is an easy thing to do. It's like reading. Do you know how to read?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"A little," said Tatyana.
"A little goes a long way. If you learn to read between the lines," the Man with the Ladder said, "you can read anything in almost any language."
"Could you please tell me a story about God," the child requested.
"Well the story I like best is about the end of the world. I'm not sure that its suitable for a young child."
"I'm not so young," said Tatyana, "I'm five."
Five going on twenty five, thought the Man with the Ladder. "OK," he said, "you're not too young but it may be a little deep for you."
"That's OK too," she said. "I'm learning to listen. When you're learning to listen the deeper the things you hear are, the better." The Man with the Ladder realized why he liked Tatyana Schwartz so much.
"Why do you like this particular story?" she asked, just as he was preparing to tell it.
"Because it shows that God thinks the way I think, which is a sure guarantee that he really exists," said the Man with the Ladder, and he began the story.
"Once upon a time, the Lord, hearing that the earth he had made had been turned into a dung heap and was corrupted entirely, without relief and without exception…"
Tatanya raised her hand as if she were in school. "Can I ask a question, if its a very short one?" and before getting permission she asked, "what's a dung heap?"
"It's a spiral pile of garbage," the Man with the Ladder answered, and continued with the story. "God decided to send someone he trusted to check out the state of his creation. He roused Jonah and shoved him, bitching—complaining, he corrected himself—and moaning, back into the great fish. That's the way Jonah traveled to where he was going, when the Lord sent him scouting. It put him in the proper mood. 'Go to the earth,' God commanded Jonah, 'and see if the wickedness has reached the brim of it yet.'"
" Do you know who Jonah was," asked the Man with the Ladder who decided on the spur of the moment to play the teacher.
"Sure," Tatyana answered confidently, "God sent him to Nineveh to check things out and he got hung up on a gourd." The Man with the Ladder was impressed. "Saw it on television," Tatyana informed him.
"Do you go to Sunday school?" the Man with the Ladder inquired.
"I'm Jewish," Tatyana answered, "we have to figure things out for ourselves or watch television."
The Man with the Ladder yanked on the thread of his story. "Jonah came back yelling and whooping that it was the pits, and that without a doubt it ought to be torched, but that he didn't want to be around when the Lord scourged it because it would probably flare up like a piece of rotten timber that termites had banqueted on continuously since the third day of creation, and its ashes would most likely stink up the universe for ever."
"So the Lord called an angel whose name was Bill and gave him the order to lay waste to the earth, as a punishment for its inequities. The choice of Bill was a poor one. He was only recently dead and he still had an old girl friend alive on earth towards whom he felt some affection. What made things worse, was that the evils for which the earth was being punished were very familiar to him."
"'Spare them Lord,' Bill begged. 'You loved them once, try again. I realize its harder now with computers and Walkmen and television and Cabbage Patch dolls. But you're the Lord,' he pleaded. 'Give it a shot.'"
"And the Lord God made it appear that he was considering the request; but what the infinite mind was really thinking was 'It gives one pause to think that one's fate may be in the hands of an individual whose only virtue is that he remembers the mischief he's done, and can identify with the mischief you are doing now.'"
"Why did God pick the angel Bill?" asked the little girl.
"I don't know," answered the Man with the Ladder. "If you are going to ask me a lot of questions I don't know the answers to, I never will get to the story I do know," he complained.
"How do I know you don't know the answer before I ask you?" Tatyana inquired innocently."
"You know you know I don't know, and I know you know I don't know," answered the Man with the Ladder.
"But you have some idea," she came back. "You always have some idea."
"Well," he said, recognizing the flattery as a ramp up which more questions would be pushed, but accepting it, nevertheless, "Bill may have been nearest his right hand at the moment, or maybe God wanted to be sure. If you are God and make terrible judgments you always like to be sure. Un-flooding a world is a very difficult thing to do even for God, and while he can raise insects from the squished dead, and breathe life back into beached whales, it's a pain in the neck." The Man with the Ladder continued his story.
"'OK, OK,' said the Lord God. 'I can't stand beseeching in the morning. I won't scourge them. Let me think for a movement.' And after a little while he saw a little light and while it would have been better if it were bigger and brighter it did the job of illuminating the situation. 'OK,' he said, making a definitive pronouncement. 'I won't kill them. I will only take away all of their worldly possessions.'
"Like he did with Job," said Tatyana."
"Exactly," replied the Man with the Ladder.
"'That's a warning shot into the belly if I've ever seen one,' thought Bill, 'but its better than locusts and blood and a bolt of lightning up the kazoo.' So he set off for earth carrying the Lord's message. Before he got to far, he heard the Lord yelling at him, 'Appear to the USA!' God instructed him. 'They're the worst of the bunch. If they don't pass muster, cream the lot.'"
"When the angel Bill went down and communicated the Lord's judgment, a general wail went up. The people of America yelled as one voice. 'Give up our possessions,' they cried. 'Our possessions possess us as much as we possess them. We can no more do without our possessions than we can do without….' They hunted around for a comparison, and as they searched, someone in the back reminded them who they were dealing with and they added, 'the Lord God which is greater, but in the ballpark.'"
"Then the angel Bill came back and told the Lord what had happened and the Lord said, 'They sound like a hopeless lot and I better deal with them myself.'" Then he manifested himself before everybody and said 'Woe unto you and your dogs and your cockroaches and cattle and portable radios and Hondas. But I am a just God and a merciful God to boot. So hear my judgment. Of your possessions, those that you have made you may keep, the others go down the tube.'"
"Now as soon as they heard this judgement the people of the U.S. of A. wailed to the last toddler."
"And a spokesman came out from the multitude and said, 'Lord, it's not our fault. We gave up making anything useful, at least anything that we use. None of our possessions have we made, not the television set, nor the Walkmen nor the automobiles nor the camera, nor the…'"
"'Enough,' said the Lord."
"'It's not our fault,' wailed the spokesman for the whole country. 'It's your fault. It's the economy you made, who made everything.'"
"The Lord was miffed but he held his peace. 'OK, I am a just God and a merciful God, although I must say you are treading very close to where my patience ends and my wrath begins.' And he disappeared to think about it some more."
"He seems to be thinking a lot for God," Tatyana commented out loud. The Man with the Ladder took it as an extraneous commentary requiring no response and continued.
"'OK,' the Lord God said, manifesting himself again. 'I have thought it over. If you have made none of your possessions, merciful as I am, I will abandon that condition for your keeping them. So now hear me men of America, and women, and children and Chicanos and Jews and Baptists and Catholics and little inquisitive children' and he enumerated all of the kinds he could recall having made. 'Those of your possessions that you can fix when they break, or those of your possessions you can repair when they wear out, these possessions may you keep as your own. All others will be taken from you and trashed.'"
"A sorrowful lamentation rose up from the multitude. 'Lord,' they wailed, in unison, 'how in the hell are we supposed to be able to fix them. They come from Japan in little boxes. We thought that that was the way you wanted it,' and they gnashed their teeth and banged their Cuisinarts together."
"'OK, OK, STOP!'" he commanded, and silence replaced the lamentations. 'Just wait,' he commanded, and disappeared to give the matter some thought. It was a while before he appeared again and the crowd had grown a bit weary and restless and people were shuffling around waiting for the evening news on T.V. to tell them what the hell was really happening."
"'I have thought it over,' said the Lord, so forcefully that the atmosphere was singed. 'It may have been an oversight on my part not to make it clear that people ought to make what they possess, or at least be able to repair it when it breaks. I will relent this far but no farther.' He cleared his throat to make a new pronouncement and the people all assumed humble postures. "'Of those things you possess that you can tell me what need they serve, those I will say you truly possess and those you may keep. The rest…' He made a destroying fire and pointed to it."
"The whole country stood dumfounded and mute. Then everyone cried out at once. 'But…we don't understand.'"
"'What the hell is so hard to understand, you dense turkeys,' the Lord said. 'Those of your possessions that meet a need I have given you, you keep, the others I burn up.'"
"The people began to whisper to one another and finally a spokesman moved to the front of the multitude and began to speak. 'That seems reasonable enough. I need my car,' he said, as if speaking to a child ignorant of the most fundamental facts of life, 'I need my car in order to get to the racquetball courts, and I have to get to the racquetball courts in order to loose weight and keep in shape because I keep putting on pounds because I eat too many rich foods and work at a desk all day and watch television most of the…, ' and the earth heard the Lord say 'CRAP' and that was the last thing they heard before the earth went up in flames and was utterly consumed.
After the story was finished, Tatanya sat turnings its pages in her mind. "The world's still here," she said soberly, thinking of her favorite doll and the consuming fire.
"Today," said the Man with the Ladder, "today, but I have it on a substantial rumor that…" At this point he heard a voice say, 'Look what I brought for us.' "Next time," he whispered, "next time."
One of the people who the Man with the Ladder knew well was a local banker whose name was Samuel Leumis the third. He was a small, thin, angular black man with a mat of steel grey hair.
Samuel Leumis worked in the neighborhood office of a branch of one of the major banks in the city. He had worked his way up through the hierarchy of assistant tellers and clerk tellers and counting tellers to become assistant manager of the branch. When they were about to promote him to manager, he asked to be moved out of the "cash area" into "personnel and supplies."
His decision puzzled bank officials. He seemed to love to handle money and he was extraordinarily competent. Everything about him had led people to believe that he would end up in a very high position in the industry. "Personnel and supplies" was a career path that dead ended chest high against the back door of the branch office. Because they were short of blacks in this district they accommodated him, but they put a little mark in his record next to a pregnant empty space signifying some sort of a betrayal.
He was part of a circle which met irregularly on Saturdays. In addition to the banker, it included Arthur Davis, who painted, and Willard Smuth, who wrote short things of a variety of sorts, and the Man with the Ladder, who listened better than most people talked.
Arthur Davis lived in a barter economy in which money had the same place as brandy to reformed alcoholics. Necessity, pride and theology had led him to renounce it, but its appeal was enduring and irrationally strong.
Willard Smuth's conception of money had been damaged by a childhood case of poverty and was deformed. He was the kind of writer who sold what he wrote by the word, and this had led him to count and value money according to the number of words it was worth. A dollar was worth ten words, any ten words. He dealt with larger sums in terms of sentences and pages. He ate page meals when he could afford them, and smoked three sentence cigars when he was flush. He confused libraries with banks, and had a very hard time balancing his checkbook which he would read and reread, as if it were a novella.
The Man with the Ladder found money to be emotionally unattractive, like a woman who was beautiful on the outside but empty and repulsive inside, whom one loved because she made other men jealous and envious.
But it was Samuel Leumis the third who terrorized the circle with his cynical attitude towards money and his absolute contempt for banks. The rest of the circle believed that this cynicism was born of information he was privy to because he worked in a bank. He kept that belief alive by periodically denying, without being asked, that the banks were collectively hatching a scheme on everyone's hard earned money.
Actually, part of this contempt came from a secret fear he had. He kept most of his savings on deposit in a different bank than the one he worked for, because this other bank gave better interest, and had free checking for five hundred dollars less than his employer. The bank for which he worked had circulated an ambiguous memo on the matter of "fraternizing and loyalty" which he read as a personal warning. He disregarded it, but he was anxious that his rationality would be discovered and that another mark would be placed next to some other pregnant, open space in his record.
Except for his spontaneous denials, he stayed away from the topic of money. Arthur Davis, however, raised it frequently. Once after Willard reported that his cat had died, Arthur said," Money makes a good pet. It's quiet and it doesn't have to be walked. It doesn't need to be fed often, and it doesn't require a license."
Samuel Leumis dissented. "Money is always in heat," he responded, "besides, the only dollar bill with a pedigree is a counterfeit." He put the lid on the topic, but the Man with the Ladder noticed everyone feeling around for their wallets.
Another time, apropos nothing at all, and merely to get a rise out of the banker, Arthur offered, that "he knew a man who insisted that every bill over five dollars had its own particular personality." Everybody ridiculed him except the Samuel Leumis.
"I wouldn't be to sure," he said. Then, he picked up the gauntlet. "Money is orphaned power," he whispered. "It's the dark phase of love. Money is capable of tender mercies," he added. He said it with such a sense of nostalgia and feeling that everyone sat bolt upright. It was very unlike him.
"Doesn't matter," he added. There was nothing but silence for a moment. He noticed the Man with the Ladder intensify his listening. "The computer," he added by way of explanation.
"I am not sure I understand you," Arthur Davis said argumentatively.
"No more money," the banker stated simply and decisively. The banker looked at the artist straight in the eye. "Before us, people worked. We went to the heart of economics. Before us people were happy to hear money talk. They liked to listen to it tell of the places it had been, the things it had seen, the miracles it had worked. Before us, money only talked. We made it sing."
No one was quite sure of who 'us' or 'we' were, but everyone suspected that ambiguous references were the way that Samuel Leumis referred to banks collectively, without having to take responsibility for that meaning in case someone from a particular bank was listening. Only the Man with the Ladder thought that the 'we' and 'us' meant just that, everyone, all of us, but he kept his mouth shut. Everyone else shuddered.
"We found that it could speak foreign languages, take actions, make decisions. We found that it was a poetry of the past and the future. Before us, money only talked. We made it sing," he repeated "Only the song it sang," he added as an afterthought.
"We discovered money was slow, that it had to be printed, counted, sent, arrive, that it had to be passed from hand to hand, that it could be hoarded, drooled over, that it had to be imprisoned like a thief, protected like a child. We found," he continued, hardly catching his breath, "we found that people liked it for its designs, for the netting that hooked the numbers; that people found something aesthetic in it, taped it to the pages of books, collected it, bought and sold it for the way it looked, for how scarce it was. We went to the heart of economics and found that money's little feet couldn't take it around fast enough, that it tripped and tumbled and fell into some old lady's purse and stayed there forever; that little kids saved more of it than they needed to buy something that they shouldn't want, that it wore out jingling in pockets being passed from hand to hand, that people put it in their mouths waiting to make change."
"You are working up to something," Willard shouted at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Money," Samuel Leumis answered, "Money. We realized that money didn't matter, that it was a nuisance, that we could do better, that human debits and credits could be made to dance and sing at the speed of light on the head of an electronic chip in the synapses of a computer that accounted every transaction, that forgave no debtor, took no risk, made no bad judgments, remembered everything, forgot nothing and was able to take its pound of flesh without a drop of blood. Numbers on cards, money on line. Invest in computers," he said. "No more banks tomorrow. No more money."
Everyone looked at him strangely, as if he had taken leave of his senses. "No more money tomorrow, only dial tones and electronic transactions. No more checks, no more pass books," he announced as if he were bringing news of a cataclysmic change in the order of the universe. "Only, only…," he hesitated, and the Man with the Ladder heard Mr.Kurz in the jungle of the cities, poised on the edge of darkness. "Only the electricity. When the juice goes off," the banker continued, "billions on billions will stop and disappear into wires and if the electrons stay in their holes and the plugs are dead in their sockets we will go bankrupt and freeze to death with billions to our names."
It was a terrifying vision and after it was displayed, the banker relaxed. "Maybe not tomorrow," he said. "Definitely not tomorrow."
"How about some beer while we're waiting?" Willard suggested, a little relieved.
"I'm a little short today," the banker replied. "You don't think they'll take a credit card?" he asked, laughingly.
"I will buy," said the Man with the Ladder remembering the ten dollar bill with the moustache and the sour disposition in his pocket.
The man with the ladder was walking home from work one day.
He had almost reached his house when he encountered the most wondrous creature he had ever seen. It was not only wondrous, it was a creature whose likes he had never seen before, meaning, he told himself, "I have never seen anything like this creature before."
Just to make sure he wasn't fooling himself, he reviewed in his mind the creatures from science fiction movies he had seen recently, and the unusual imaginary beasts and real creatures that he had encountered on his trips to the zoo. This review left him certain that he had never seen anything like this creature before. He told himself this as a reminder to play close attention to it.
He found himself trying to explain his surprise to himself. "If I were in New Jersey I would not be surprised at all," he said. "If I were uptown I am sure my excitement would be have been reduced to a tickle. Even," he heard himself say, "even if I were downtown, which I am much more familiar with than uptown or New Jersey, I would hardly have noticed this thing. But seeing something so strange, so close to home, is very exciting and very unusual."
The Man with the Ladder put down his ladder and stood and stared at the creature as it half cavorted, half trotted, half tangoed by. He stood for a while, stunned by the strangeness of what he had seen, then he lifted his ladder onto his back again and resumed walking home.
But his amazement and wonderment was too much for routine walking and he set the ladder down and talked to himself about this wondrous thing.
There are experiences whose reality can only be preserved by making them public in an intimate way, that is, by talking about them to a friend. The Man with the Ladder happened to be very lucky because, as he set his ladder down for the fifth time, who should turn the corner but his old friend, Reb Dunzel.
"I've seen the most wondrous creature," he blurted out, catching the Rebbe unawares. He set his ladder down and, grabbing his friend by the lapels of his coat, pulled him close. "It was a wonderment. I've never seen anything like it."
"Well, what was it?" the Rebbe inquired.
"It was an animal, I think. It wasn't a poem or a vegetable, that I'm sure of."
The Rebbe waited patiently for a more rational and detailed description.
"It was like a fish but it didn't have fins or scales." And then he thought for a moment; "Like a walrus, only it didn't have flippers or tusks."
Reb Dunzel fidgeted, waiting impatiently while the Man with the Ladder continued to expand the bestiary.
"It was like a bird only it lacked feathers," he continued."It was like an elephant too, only without a trunk and missing a tail," he blurted out after thinking about it for a while.
This was more than the usually quiet, soft-spoken Rebbe could handle. "That's the most absurd description I've ever heard," he yelled at the Man with the Ladder. "I've heard some meaningless descriptions but this one is beyond the book. You might as well say, you might as well say," he repeated, his frustration getting the best of him, "you might as well say that it was like an ostrich with a snout and a horn."
Instead of having the effect the Rebbe intended, which was to stop Man with the Ladder's wild enthusiasm dead in its track by pointing up the absurdity of his description, his statement refueled it and caused his friend's wild joy to flare up. It was Reb Dunzel who was taken aback when he heard the Man with the Ladder say joyously, "Oh, you saw it, too."
There was an instant in which it seemed that their friendship, hurtling down the single track of confusion and impatience, would derail and end up as a mass of tangled, impossibly bent scrap. But, without warning, the wondrous creature passed by again, coming up behind the Man with the Ladder, skirting the ladder and, half cavorting, half break dancing, half skipping, showed Reb Dunzel his front end, his rear end and his other end, in rapid succession, but in no particular order.
And when the creature had passed, the Reb turned to his friend and in a small and subdued voice said quietly, "you know it was like a fish without fins or scales," then, after a pause, "and like a walrus without flippers or tusks." And the two of them walked home, mostly silent, holding reality between them, gently but firmly as only two friends can.
When they had their first – and last – almost-looking-each-other-in-the-face-talk, Tatanya Schwartz's mother asked the Man with the Ladder why he refused to take money for babysitting her six year old daughter, to which he replied that babysitting the little girl in the park was really no more work than babysitting the park itself, which is how he spent most of his mornings and afternoons. He blushed and confessed that babysitting the little girl gave him a great deal of pleasure. He said that he relished the conversations with Tatanya very much, and that he enjoyed the challenge of trying to imagine the changes she would undergo as she grew up to be an adult. He maintained that he had pretty much solved the mystery of what kind of twenty one year old she would turn into and that, after a struggle, he had figured out what kind of adolescent she would become, but what kind of seven year old she would metamorphose into was a complete mystery to him.
After this conversation they went back to their usual way of communicating. The Man with the Ladder's baby sitting jobs were usually not arranged in advance. When Tatanya Schwartz's mother had a job she would bring her daughter to the park and sit her down on the bench next to the Man with the Ladder's ladder and broadcast instructions to everyone close enough by to hear. Because he came to the park almost every day and did nothing but sit on top of his ladder, talking and kibbitzing with whichever of his friends happened to be in the park that day, the Man with the Ladder was available for babysitting jobs whenever he was needed.
Tatanya's Schwartz's mother worked mostly in the afternoon so he was surprised one morning to see the little girl and her mother waiting impatiently for him on the bench next to his favorite spot in the park. As soon he set the ladder up and before he managed to climb up the first step, he heard Tatanya's mother broadcast the usual instructions to him and to her daughter.
"Now you remember, stay here," she said to her daughter. "I will be back in an hour, an hour and a half tops. I have packed two lunches, peanut butter and jelly and liver pate sandwiches and fruit and cake, just in case someone gets hungry."
The little girl nodded. The girls mother waited, looking at the Man with the Ladder obliquely out of the corner of her eyes, until the Man with the Ladder, staring towards the very far end of the park, nodded also.
"Are you hungry ?" the little girl asked the Man with the Ladder after her mother disappeared down the path, looking back once to make sure everything was OK.
"No," the Man with the Ladder said. "Not yet." After a short silence the girl said, "the pate is for you. My mother brought it home from a party," she added. "Unless you want the peanut butter."
"No, the pate will be fine," the Man with the Ladder said. "Of course, unless …."
"No," the little girl said, "I prefer the peanut and jelly."
Before the little girl could say anything else the Man with the Ladder jumped in with request. "Why don't you tell me a story today. I am in a listening mood."
"What kind of a story would you like?" Tatanya Schwartz asked.
"Well of course, you can pick. It's a tradition that the person who tells the story gets to pick the story she tells, but I would love to hear a story about God. I've told you all the God stories I know and now I would like to hear one from you."
"Mostly adults tell God stories to small children and the small children listen," the little girl protested weakly.
"But you are six," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Almost seven, going on 26," she added, winking. "Well I do not know many God stories except the ones you have told me and the one my rabbi tells me over and over in one disguise or another. I've seen a few on television and I've read a couple of traditional stories. You probably know all of those stories… but if you really want . . ."
"I would really like to hear a God story," the Man with the Ladder affirmed. He looked at the little girl and it was immediately clear to him that she was going to take up the challenge, and, lacking a suitable heard story, she was going to make one up as she was telling it. He realized why he liked the little girl so much.
She looked around for a place to start. There was a small movement in the grass next to them and a frog hopped into the open. It took another short hop and made itself at home on a sandy depression in front of the little girl. Tatanya looked at the frog and the frog looked at her.
"Once upon a time there was this unusual frog," she began. The frog rustled a bit in its sandy bed. "This frog," Tatanya said, looking at the frog, "this frog was ambitious. This frog wanted to be more than just a hopping frog." She looked at the frog to see if he approved of her characterization. The frog settled itself in its sandy depression and stared, bulgy-eyed, at the little girl who looked across the park that seemed to hang above the frog and continued her story. "This frog thought about what he wanted to be and decided he would like to be God. He did not want to be God permanently, because he was very happy being a frog. But he had been a frog for a long time and while it never was boring he knew the way the world looked to a frog . There was no more mystery to the world from the frogs point of view. He knew this was just a frogs picture of the world and not the real picture, not the big picture, an illustration….
"An illusion," the Man with the Ladder corrected.
"An illusion," the little girl continued. "So he thought about the big picture and thought that he would like to see that big picture for a while, not for ever, but for a day so that he could know what it was like." She rested, and looked at the frog who seemed to be listening carefully while he was enjoying his dusty bath.
"So he prayed to God. He prayed that he could become God for a day and if God wanted, he could become him, a frog, or go on a vacation, and after the day was over they would go back to being what they were."
"Can frogs pray?" the Man with the Ladder asked, seriously.
"This one could," Tatanya said, "he certainly could. I mean it was not our kind of praying on his knees. Frogs don't have knees you know, they have…." She stopped and looked at the frog, "legs. at least when they are not tadpoles. Front ones and back ones. This one prayed sort of lying down," she added, looking at the frog, "with its legs spread under it, on its hands." She squinted at the frog again.
"Oh," the Man with the Ladder said.
"God liked the idea the frog presented in its prayer," the little girl continued.
The Man with the Ladder look puzzled. "Why…?"
"If you are going to ask questions every moment," the little girl complained, "it's going to be hard to get to the peanut and jelly part of the story."
"I see," the Man with the Ladder said, chastened. "But this part is confusing me and if I don't get this question answered, I don't think I will be able to concentrate."
The little girl looked at him critically.
"Why would God want to become a frog, even for a day?"
The girl thought for a moment. "It's like being an adult," she said. "After you have been an adult for a while its very hard to see what the world looks like to a child, even if the child is very close to you, part of you, so to speak, your child. If you are God," she said thoughtfully, "it's very difficult to get some real sense of your creation, what it's really like. From where you sit," she said, looking at the Man with the Ladder on his ladder, "if you are God, everything looks OK because you are very, very high up and far away from things. The details blur. God realized that if he and the frog exchanged places he could see how things looked from close up"
The Man with the Ladder moved down a step on the ladder. "Did God grant the frogs prayer?" he asked.
"Yes," the little girl said. "He did. They changed places."
"And how did it go?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Well, God became the frog and the frog became God in an instant."
The Man with the Ladder held his breath.
"God found it very educational. As soon as he became the frog he started worrying about eating and being eaten and other things frogs worry about. He tried to take his usual God like attitude toward things, but it was very hard for him. In fact, he couldn't see anything around him because there were bushes and ant hills and rocks that blocked his view. He decided he jump up on the highest tree near him and look around. It took him a while but he managed to get up a very high tree."
"How did he get up a tree?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"He was an exceptional frog, remember," the little girl said. She stared at the frog to see if the story was making sense to him, but, while he seemed to be listening, she could not tell whether he understood or not.
"He realized what a struggle it was for creatures to see even most of the little picture around them let alone the God like picture which includes the reason things are the way they are, and droughts and poison Ivy and volcanoes and evolution. Branches and other things were always getting in the way. But he did manage to look around for a long time. Some of what he saw made him sad. He looked for a long time until he got hungry. Then there was trouble."
"Getting down," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Yes, have you heard this story before?" the little girl asked.
"No, not exactly. I just thought about it," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Well getting up was a matter of jumping and holding on. Getting down was another matter entirely," Tatanya said gravely.
"So what did he do?"
"He prayed. And God—the former frog—heard his prayer and came down. 'What's the trouble?' he asked."
"'Getting down,' God who was the frog said."
"'I see,' God, who used to be a frog, said. And he lifted the frog up and set him down very gently. 'Now you better be careful,' God said, 'Hawks,' he whispered 'I'm not always so available.'"
"And when he got back to heaven the frog who was temporarily God, realized right away how difficult a job it is being a God responsible for everything, not only ponds and bugs and insects, but fish and storks and foxes and everything the frog had no particular use for as a frog. After a while he got into a real frazzle making decisions about galaxies one second and deserts and flows of rivers the next, and all the things God worries about. There were a couple of decisions he wasn't quite sure about."
"God got into a frazzle?"
"Well he used to be a frog remember," the girl explained. "The pace of things was quite different."
"What did he do?"
"He went down to earth in the form of a burning bush."
"And…"
"… and asked the frogs advice. And the frog talked to the burning bush and gave it very helpful advice. All of the animals in the swamp were very impressed. He whispered to the burning bush not to make to many really big changes and some other advice about quantum things."
"So it worked out well."
"Yes, except, unfortunately, the burning bush caused a fire. Not a forest fire exactly but the frog had to hop for its life."
"So things went well for everyone, the frog who was God and God who was temporarily a frog," the Man with the Ladder observed.
"I think it did. of course the world changed too, a little," Tatanya said, in her most serious voice.
The Man with the Ladder was not sure he wanted to hear but he asked weakly, "how?"
"Since a frog was God everything changed. We were made in Gods image you know," she said. "so when the frog became God, everything became a little frog like. Everyone thought like a frog, spoke like a frog, saw the world like a frog, had frog like desires."
"What are frog like desires?" the Man with the Ladder asked, genuinely curious.
"Well, mostly," the little girl thought for a minute, "about juicy flies and other things frogs like to eat. Everything changed a little so that they were a little tastier to frogs. But of course we didn't notice it because …"
"We were like frogs a little," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Exactly,"the little girl agreed.
"Then God, who formerly was a frog, went about making things better for frogs, mostly, but also for other creatures. even for humans."
"How did he do that?"
"Well frogs never thought about killing other frogs. so for a day people stopped killing one another. And the water in ponds and rivers where frogs live got a little cleaner. He made flies grow a little bigger and fatter and slower and easier to catch and a lot of other things, and then…," she said.
"And then?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"When the day was over the frog thanked God and went back to being a frog and God went back to being God."
"And everything went back to the way it was before," the Man with the Ladder added.
The frog by Tatanya's feet roused itself. It stretched and shook off the dust it had accumulated. After waiting a minute of two to make sure there was no more story to come, it cocked its head and scoured the park for danger. Then it hopped off.
"So the world didn't change much from having a frog God for a day," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Hardly at all," the little girl said with a smile that made the Man with the Ladder smile, "except now and then…"
"Now and then," the Man with the Ladder repeated. "That was a good story, a really wonderful story. It made me hungry. Pass me my lunch," he requested. And as they sat eating a fly buzzed around them and the Man with the Ladder involuntarily shot out his tongue to chase it away. "Oh, I see, now and then," he repeated and they ate quietly until they heard the familiar greeting of the little girls mother.
The Man with the Ladder was arguing with his friend Wipper about change. It was a topic they argued about frequently. In fact, their argument about change was the one unchanging thing about their relationship.
What bothered Wipper was the Man with the Ladder's insistence that change was an illusion. "Change is real," Wipper would assert vehemently, inviting his friend to an equally forceful reply.
"Change is collective pretend," the Man with the Ladder would answer quietly, "it's an illusion."
"Change is real," Wipper would respond, barely retaining control, "change is forever."
"You mean it's unchanging," the Man with the Ladder would assert.
"Change stands behind its illusions," Wipper would yell angrily.
"Change is reality making believe it's making up its mind. It's a matter of what you choose to believe, that's all," the Man with the Ladder would state perversely.
Actually the Man with the Ladder had abandoned Plato about the time he gave up American cheese, but he did not know how he could keep his friendship with Wipper going unless they had something to argue about. For a long time, he had tried to find another topic for them to fight over, but Wipper clung tenaciously to change as a basis for the difference between them. Since the difference kept them together, the Man with the Ladder decided not to change in a little way, for the sake of not changing in a big way.
As Wipper searched for a response to the Man with the Ladder's last assault, Klinger, the neighborhood transsexual turned the corner into their argument. Klinger was the 'neighborhood transsexual' not because he was the only transsexual who lived in the neighborhood, but because he was the only one whose transexuality belonged as much to the people who lived around him as it did to him personally.
Of course Klinger wasn't his real name. His real name was Bill or Beatrice depending on which set of clothing he was wearing.
As long as it was definite, which was most of the time, whether she was a he, or he was a she, was a matter of indifference to the neighborhood. This indifference to inessential things was one of the neighborhood's better qualities. It was only between sexes, when it was impossible to tell whether he was Bill or Beatrice, that people got angry at him or her. One of the ways people in the neighborhood coped with this problem was to give him a third name, a nickname that they could use when his sex was indeterminate. Hence 'Klinger', out of respect for 'Mash'.
"Well, Klinger," the Man with the Ladder said cheerfully, grateful for the interruption, "how are you?"
"Fine, better than fine," Klinger replied. "I'm going to have an operation." He seemed to call attention to the skirt he was wearing, deemphasizing the man's jacket and tie.
"Well, Bill," Wipper said, incorrectly solving the mystery of what identity Klinger was claiming, "that's wonderful."
"What are you doing with Bill's clothing?" asked the Man with the Ladder innocently.
"I'm giving them to my roommate," Beatrice replied. "Why?"
"Nothing," said the Man with the Ladder, thinking of the plaid jacket he had admired for a long time.
"When are you having the operation?" Wipper inquired.
"Two weeks, overseas, in Sweden. There's clinic. They do it very cheaply. It's something I wanted to do for a long time. I have to run," she said.
"Well, good luck," Wipper said, and they watched Beatrice hugging the curb, move down the street, rather daintily, the Man with the Ladder thought.
As a matter of indifference to the neighborhood, Klinger usually appeared in conversations as an example, to make some point, which is exactly how Wipper used him.
"Take Bill's operation," Wipper said.
"Or Beatrice's operation," the Man with the Ladder corrected him.
"Take Klinger's operation," Wipper continued unfazed, homing in on his point. "Now there's a change. The worst kind of change too, the permanent kind."
"Change is an illusion," the Man with the Ladder repeated intransigently.
"You tell that to him," Wipper demanded. "Tell Bill change is an illusion. He is going to part with a piece of him that he's carted around for a long time. Tell him the operation is an illusion. Tell him that male to female is no change."
The Man with the Ladder thought for a moment. Wipper watched him pick his way among the debris of ideas that Kilinger had left in his wake.
"Why should I tell him?" the Man with the Ladder said quietly, dragging out his words, "she'll find out soon enough."
Wipper caved in, not to the logic of the argument he told himself, but to the precision of its statement."I give up. How about coffee and a croissant?" And they went off.
"I knew a woman writer," the Man with the Ladder said, "who, when she was working on a story or a novel, even a long poem sometimes, would strangely enough exhibit all of the signs of pregnancy. She would run up to me in the street and say, 'Hey love, touch my belly. You can feel the art moving underneath the reality.' And she was right. I would put my hand on her bulging stomach and I could feel little kicks and turns."
"What happened after she finished whatever she was writing?" asked Tranny.
"She would have a party," the Man with the Ladder replied.
"I mean," interrupted Tranny, "I mean with the…, with whatever was turning and kicking."
"At the party she was always sleek and thin," the Man with the Ladder commented. "I don't know exactly," he said, trying to avoid confronting his friend's question directly. "She would get very drunk at the party and she would pay all her debts…even some you didn't remember her incurring."
"'It's the adoption money,' she would say, sadly. 'I gave it up for adoption. The next one I will keep for myself,' she would add. But she never did, not as far as I know."
The Man with the Ladder was in the park playing hide-and-seek with spring. He was sitting on the top step of his ladder trying to tag each bit of sunlight and each tenuous whisper of a breeze that wanted to play. It was innocent enough, but he got such an indecent pleasure from it that it felt more like he was exposing himself, not simply to all the people in the park, but to half a century, or the border of a nation or Nature herself.
The lightness of the day knitted itself through and around him and he became part of its fabric. It happened to be the first real day of spring even though, according to the calendar, spring had come four weeks before. But, until this particular day, spring had played a different game, dressing in a pair of pants and a wig, and slouching around and passing itself off as winter.
And then in the darkness of the morning of that day, before one could get any inkling of what the day was going to bring, spring called to all who could hear it, 'ole ole homefree' or something of the sort, and people, like the Man with the Ladder, who played those sort of games, got up knowing that spring, real spring, had come. And as he closed his eyes and compressed the warmth and forced it into the cracks that the freeze of winter had opened in him, he heard a voice call his name.
He looked down to see his friend, Reb Dunzel, stooped in sadness, staring at some tragedy he had put down near the bottom rung of the ladder.
"What's wrong?" the Man with the Ladder asked as he reluctantly pushed himself down the ladder toward the tragedy, slowly, step by step.
"Oh,"said the Rebbe quietly, "a friend of mine, a close friend, closer, one of my best friends," his voice rising to touch the height of their friendship, "died."
"I'm sorry," the Man with the Ladder said, "I really am." He pulled a cloak of unhappiness tightly around himself mostly to keep the sunlight out, but also to keep some of the warmth and joy of spring which had nested near him, close in.
"How did it happen?" he asked, hoping talking about it would lighten his friends heavy load.
"I don't know exactly,"said the Reb. "He died in California a year ago," he added.
The Man with the Ladder rearranged the cloak of sadness that he had drawn around him so that it let in a little of the sunlight and spring laden air. "Well, a year ago," he said."That's a long time ago."
"But I just found out about it today," explained his friend, clinging to his sadness, "so for me he died today."
The Man with the Ladder knew exactly what his friend meant. Inside of you a person always dies again and again, and the death is always slow, and painful and fresh.
"Just last week I was thinking about him. It's been a while since I've seen him. (At least a year thought the Man with the Ladder.) I thought," continued his friend, "he'll probably drop in one of these days to visit, or maybe he'll call. We used to call one another from time to time. (Dial direct or call collect, a real long distance call now, the Man with the Ladder thought to himself.) "He traveled a lot," his friend concluded, as if it were an explanation.
"You didn't read about it. I mean his obituary," said the Man with the Ladder.
"I never buy the newspaper," Reb Dunzel said. "Sometimes, when one of the boxes on the corner is open I read The Times, but even when they are free I never read the obituaries."
"Neither do I," the Man with the Ladder offered, which wasn't true. He read the paper religiously, from the edition number on the top of the first page, to the advertisement on the last page. But he found himself trying to be agreeable this morning because of spring and because of his friend's loss.
"I knew a woman who always read the obituaries. In fact that's almost the only thing she read in the paper," the Man with the Ladder added. "She would get up early in the morning, maybe five o'clock, sometimes on weekends, six, and she would jog to a newspaper stand which was open all night and buy The Times and jog home again. Then she would make herself breakfast, an egg and some crustless toast and juice in a little china glass. Then she would set a cloth napkin down, and lay a three tined fork she had stolen from a Swedish restaurant on the napkin. And then she would put The Times on top of it…"
"Get to the point," his friend interrupted, not seeing any sense in the details even of a truthful description.
"Well then she would pick up The Times and open it to the obituary page and…"
"And if hers wasn't there, she would have breakfast," the Rebbe interjected.
"Close enough," said the Man with the Ladder.
"She was waiting for death to fire a warning shot into her eggs," Reb Dunzel announced triumphantly as if he had solved a difficult puzzle.
The Man with the Ladder shrugged. "Who knows,"he added. "She would say 'the news changes as soon as the type is set, but obituaries are stories that never change.'"
"She always knew who was dead," he continued. "Being dead makes a person more approachable," she would say. "Nothing they could do would surprise you."
"A strange woman," the Rebbe commented.
"She had an odd belief that a person's death could tell you something about them that their life couldn't. She would say, 'In the face of death some of us grow sick and other give up all diseases but one, in the face of death some of us shit in our pants and others develop constipation, in the face of death some of us hear voices and other begin to listen to silence, in the face of death some of us whistle and others sing.' "But she said 'death has no preferences at all, no matter how you stand, you fall.'"
"She sounds morbid,"the Rebbe commented.
"No, she wasn't really. She was very clever and smart. But she avoided saying clever or profound things. 'Saying clever things kills your sex life,' she said once."
"That was clever," the Rebbe observed.
"Well, she wasn't really a happy person," the Man with the Ladder replied.
"I met death once," the Man with the Ladder said matter of factly. "It was in a Chinese restaurant. I was trying to decide what to order and he tapped me on the left shoulder. 'I'd skip the Moo Shoo Pork if I were you,' he said quietly. "It was what I was thinking of ordering," I said to him. 'I know, I know, 'he said to me. I looked at the menu again. He gave no such advice to a group of tourists a few tables away, who, while he was slurping his Sesame Noodles, gaily ordered Moo Shoo Pork all around. After we had all gotten our orders he called the waiter over and said something to him in Chinese and there was a commotion and he paid his check and left and 12 people who were sitting at the table in front of me grabbed their throats and keeled over.
"The Moo Shoo Pork I expect," Reb Dunzel commented.
"I believe so."
"It happens in Chinese restaurants sometimes," Rebbe Dunzel said matter of factly, "the Moo Shoo Pork isn't what it's cracked up to be."
The Man with the Ladder saw that his friend Reb Dunzel was recovering from his depression. He noticed also that his friend's grief had attracted a shadow which lounged around them. Strangely enough, at the exact moment that he made the observation, his friend spoke up. "Let's move over there," he suggested, pointing to a bench down the path from where they stood which was soaking in light.
The Man with the Ladder agreed readily, letting the cloak of sadness he had pulled around him fall to the ground. "Sometimes," he thought to himself, "you can't see the shadow you only you miss the light."
"Have you noticed," he said when they had settled down at their new location, he on the bottom rung of the ladder, his friend on the bench, "that the best part of us always dies in some childhood tragedy while the worst part of us grows up with two sets of parents?"
"No," his friend replied, "that particular fact escaped me. But," he added, with only a flickering concern with his sex life, "I have heard that sometimes winter comes in childhood and the ice doesn't melt until old age. Senility is the last stage of adolescence."
"That is a very sophisticated observation," the Man with the Ladder commented. Both of them gave themselves over to the lightness of the day and thoughts of death had evaporated.
"Sophistication has the life span of a television season," Rebbe Dunzel commented.
"And wisdom," the Man with the Ladder responded, "never lives longer than a generation."
They sat for a while in silence letting the day carouse around them "Our conversation has left me hungry," the Rebbe said suddenly. "Would you care for a croissant and coffee?"
"A great idea," the Man with the Ladder replied.
The Man with the Ladder spent a lot of time in parks. He had a broad and catholic idea of what a park was. In this respect, he was like a person who loves holy places so much, that he is indifferent to their denomination or appearance, and would count a pile of rock, a half converted tavern or a moving vehicle among the sacred spots of the world, if they reeked of the divine.
One of his favorite parks consisted of little more than an eruption of a few trees and benches in a long, narrow plain of tarmac and pavement. It qualified as a park under the definition that a park was a place where benches and trees grew people. It qualified, but barely.
When he was growing up, people used to say that if you waited long enough on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, you would meet anyone you wanted to meet. It seemed to him that the same was true of this park. People showed up there who had no business showing up there. It was as if it were an unmarked stop on some strange underground railroad. But who was conveyed where, by whom, was a mystery.
The Man with the Ladder was not in the least surprised when, arriving at the park one vibrant and sunny day, he found there, on a bench, in front of a cement table, a spiritual giant, a Seer, Mystic, a Master, whose name was Strayte. He was dressed in a leisure suit, and was preparing to lunch on a duck.
The Man with the Ladder hesitated only a fraction of a minute before he walked over to the master.
"I heard you speak once," he said. I wonder could you…?" He wanted to ask something, but suddenly his courage fled, and he mumbled instead, "it's unusual."
"What," asked the master, "to see a man getting ready to eat lunch."
"No, not the eating exactly, except that it's Peking Duck, isn't it?" the Man with the Ladder asked, pointing to the complete animal laid out on the table. "You have to order them a day in advance, don't you?"
"You do," replied the master, jovially, "but I have a disciple who works in a Chinese restaurant." His look turned suspicious. "You don't want any," he asked, "that's not what you had in mind, was it?"
"No," replied the Man with the Ladder.
"Good," said the master, "because I'm not good at sharing."
"It's just that I heard you preach once," the Man with the Ladder repeated, working his way up the incline to the request he wanted to make.
"I remember, I remember," said the master, "in front of Bloomingdales. It was raining. I remember you."
"But how could you?" the Man with the Ladder blurted out, astounded by the master's assertion. "I was just one of the crowd and I wasn't even near the front. I was on my way to my aunts, and I wasn't even paying much attention," he added guiltily.
"Nonetheless," said the master,"I remember you. You were wearing an apricot colored work shirt," he said. "I hope you got rid of it," adding parenthetically, "it was an atrocity."
The Man with the Ladder was convinced that distinguishing him in that flowing anonymous throng of passersby was impossible. He was stunned by the accuracy of the master's recollection even though he himself liked the shirt. "But, but…," he stuttered.
"I remember, I remember. Why make a federal case of it." The Man with the Ladder retreated from his disbelief and the master shifted his attention to the duck which he had grasped by the thighs, preparing to start his lunch, wing first. "And I remember the story I was telling when you passed. It was that story about a man who meets a Zen master. "
The Man with the Ladder interrupted him, giving the spiritual giant a chance to sink his teeth firmly around one of the large wings of the duck. "Excuse me," the Man with the Ladder said, "that's what I wanted to ask you about. Even though I have forgotten crucial points, the story you told that day has haunted me. But it was not a story about a man who meets a Zen master. I remember distinctly that it was a story of a man who hunted…"
The spiritual master managed to get out a firm, "No" between chomps. "It was the story of a man who meets a Japanese Zen master."
"I hate to be argumentative," said the Man with the Ladder, "but I remember distinctly that it was the story of a man who hunts…" The master let loose grunting sounds which resolved themselves into a very distinct sentence. "Listen, if I can remember you and your apricot shirt in a passing crowd," he said, "give me credit for remembering what story I told. That story then," he explained," is not that story now. On a rainy day that story I told is about a man who hunts, but on a sunny day that story is a story of a man who meets a Zen master. Is it raining now?" The Man with the Ladder looked up quickly as if it might have started to pour without his noticing, but the sun was shining, and he had to admit it wasn't raining. The master treated the issue as closed.
"Besides," he said, I've learned a thing or two since then." He finished stripping the wing clean, and started down the side of the duck, as if his teeth were following a map drawn on the duck's back. He continued talking as he chewed, leaving it up to the Man with the Ladder to separate meaningful sounds from alimentary noises.
"Since then I've learned some spiritual economics," the master seemed to say. "Every truth worth knowing can be said in no more than 15 words." He had finished side of the breast adjacent to the wing and was starting on the leg which had already half disappeared into his mouth. "And every truth that can be said in no more than 15 words, can be said in 6 or less."
Out popped the leg bone from his mouth clean as a silver spoon. He disgorged the gristle on a napkin that had conveniently been discarded by someone earlier.
"It's also true," he said, just before he passed the curve of the neck of the duck on his way to the other leg, "that any truth that can be said in six words is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said at all."
The Man with the Ladder wasn't sure of the integrity of this last sentence because it coincided with the plunge of the other drumstick into the masters maw.
It was a while before the master, whose appetite was unflagging, disgorged the now spotless leg bones and made his way, biting and tearing, towards the last wing and no-moreness.
"You know, of course," he said, using his tongue to scoop the remaining pieces of breast into his mouth, "you know that those truths that are so obvious that they needn't be said at all, require no fewer than three volumes if you write them down. So much for libraries," he added. "It doesn't make a difference any way," he mumbled, whipping the last wing into the darkness waiting between his jaw; he talked around it. "No difference, because the heart of every spoken truth is a feeling that can not be put into words." And the duck was finished, although some chewing and swallowing needed to be done.
The master set the clean carcass down on the cement table in front of him, standing it up and balancing it so that it faced south, toward the World Trade Center, which could just be seen in the opaque southern sky.
"Thank you," he said to the carcass, "thank you." A little breeze awoke from somewhere and started the carcass rocking, and the master gave it a turn and started it spinning.
"Do you see?" he asked the Man with the Ladder,"Do you see?" The Man with the Ladder confessed he didn't see anything other than the unexpectedly animated carcass of a duck and, when he looked up, the uncertain outlines of the World Trade Center. The next thing that the master said seemed to come from the still spinning frame of the picked clean fowl. "Truth is just the most convenient metaphor available at any moment," it seemed to whisper.
With these words, the master turned and headed in the opposite direction from the buildings whose tops were beginning to be obscured by glowing clouds. "I enjoyed our conversation," he said over his shoulder in a good humored way, but the Man with the Ladder's attention was caught by the carcass which at that moment spun off the table and landed by his feet. It rested there, looking up at him, as if it were some sort of a test that he was not quite ready yet to pass. And although he wasn't quite sure what to do next, he guessed that as the price of the lesson, he was expected to clean up. With a good feeling about himself and the world, he tossed the carcass into the wire trash bin on the corner and hoisted his ladder onto his back and set off home.
The Man with the Ladder had two homes and the second of them was a park some distance from the first. One of the people who shared this second home with him was a parkie, one of the park workers whose job was to keep the park clean and in repair. This parkie was a small middle aged Japanese man who was also a Zen master.
The first time they met, the Japanese man, whose name was Utei, irrationally insisted that the Man with the Ladder was really Japanese. He adduced the ladder as evidence and argued that the Man with the Ladder was just too stubborn to recognize the fact. For a whole morning he persisted in speaking only Japanese to him, and it was out of frustration and wanting to say something very delicate that he gave up and shifted into English, remarking that the Man with the Ladder must be from Tanka because they were the most stubborn people on the islands. The Man with the Ladder was sorry the master stopped talking to him in Japanese because, towards the end, he felt he was beginning to understand, if only perhaps in a primitive way, what the little Japanese man was saying.
The Man with the Ladder asked the Zen Master once, how and why he came to New York. Utei said that he discovered that he was a Zen master in a Honshu jail and that in a Kyoto monastery he discovered that his Zen had a New York accent. Another time when the Man with the Ladder repeated the inquiry, the master said that he merely followed a Sony, because it was not right for the spirit to hang to far back from the flesh, and it had led him here. None of this added up to an explanation to the Man with the Ladder so after a while he just accepted the fact that here in the park, where he sat on his ladder watching New York collect, mingle and dissolve, was a Zen master from Kyoto.
The section of the park that this Japanese man was responsible for always seemed to stay cleaner than the rest of the park. The grass was always healthy no matter how many people had trampled it, and the bark of the trees always had a deeper and richer brown color than the trees in the rest of the park. Even though it was an out of the way part of the park, it attracted the most interesting people because it felt good. People who were sensitive to the ground and the air always concluded that this was the part of the park they belonged to, and that belonged to them.
Utei, the Zen master, was married and his wife would often come and sit in near him as he worked on the trees or the grass. When she was in the park she sold things she made. The policeman, Dareth Heirath, whose beat was the park, let her do this even though it was against the park rules.
She would bring a little low table to the park on which she shaped and displayed little statues out of a stuff that appeared to be papier mache. On the table also was a little tank of water. When she dropped one of the little statues into the liquid it was as if someone had squirted fireworks into the tank. Jets of red and yellow exploded into stars which spun and twisted and moved in miniature arcs, bursting just below the water line. After the motion was finished the display would freeze in the water and stay that way for a long time.
On his day off, Utei, the Zen master, would come to the park alone with the little table. On the table he would put some sheets of paper and a little sign that said "Paintings" in Japanese. And he would sit and wait.
It was a mystery to the Man with the Ladder how the people who came up to the table knew the sign said 'Paintings,' because it was obvious from who they were, and how they looked, that they did not know Japanese. But somehow the meaning of the sign was clear to them.
"What kind of paintings do you do?" they would inquire. And, receiving no answer from the little Japanese man behind the table, they would extend the question.
"Landscapes?" they would ask.
They would hear him say no, though he said nothing at all.
"Portraits!" they would conclude.
"No."
"Still lifes?" they would guess.
"No."
"Abstract paintings?"
"No."
At this point the impoverished dialogue would annoy many of them and they would walk away. But a few would ask again softly, "What kind of paintings do you do?"
He would look at them and he would say, "I paint on air."
When he announced what kind of painting he did, most of the people who had stayed through the line of half silent questioning would separate themselves from him and the table and turn away. But a few would say something like, "I need one," or "I want one," or "can I buy one?"
"To take home they are three dollars American," he would say. And the buyer would nod and Utei would open a satchel that he kept under the table and take out a number of cans of spray paint.
Utei always spent some time preparing for the painting. He would survey the space around the person who wanted the painting for what seemed a long time, as if he were examining a large expanse of canvas looking for the part of the surface that felt just right. When he found what seemed like the right spot he would spend some time tamping and smoothing the air down or mending a piece which appeared to have torn. While he was doing this he would talk to the person for whom he was doing this painting.
"You may sit on the grass," he would inform his patron. And after they sat, as they always did, they would begin to talk. They often recounted some episode in their lives that for some reason seemed important to them just then. And Utei would remind them of some detail that they had left out, and they would discuss it like two old friends reminiscing about some experience they had shared. No one ever found it surprising that Utei knew this detail that they had forgotten and all of this time the Zen master was preparing the air to be painted on.
When he was finished with the preparations, he would choose one of the cans and in deft little motions, begin to spray the air. Then he would pick up another and jab the can into the air, releasing the paint in long sweeps or gentle pushes, and then select another can and repeat the pushing and dabbing, until the air in front of the person was drenched with a palette of glorious, misty colors, a glistening brilliant curtain of vapors which hung before them for what seemed like a long time. Sometimes the different streams of air would mix slowly, sometimes they stayed separate and complete.
Most often he would sit with the person watching the painting until the colored air folded and dissolved back into the unpainted air and he would say simply, "Three dollars American."
Occasionally, he would say to the person, "I will wrap it up for you," and he would take a piece of paper off of the table and let it fall to the ground without paying any particular attention to where it fell. Then he would continue talking to the person who was sitting on the ground. After a while he would bend down and pick up the piece of paper, now covered with paint and hand it to them and say, "three dollars American."
Very infrequently he would pick a piece of paper off of the table and looking at the person not the paper in his hands, with deft little motions he would pull and push it through the colored air, tilting and shifting it until it was saturated with paint vapors, and then he would hand it to the person with his request for payment of "three dollars American."
"Did you ever see one of those paintings?" someone asked the Man with the Ladder, after he had told the story of Utei.
"They were very private paintings", he replied.
"Did he ever make a painting for you?" his listener asked. The Man with the Ladder blushed.
"One doesn't talk about things like that," he said gently, looking at the person who had asked the question . But then renouncing the admonition he said "Yes," he did. "On the ladder," he said pointing. And it was true that on the side of the ladder about the height of a short man standing or a tall man sitting, in paint of luminous hues, was what looked like a colored ink drawing of a man sitting on a ladder with a butterfly resting on his outstretched foot.
After he had been spray painting in the park for a few months Utei acquired two apprentices and changed his routine.
On his days off he would come to the park earlier and sit and wait by his blanket. Then his apprentices would show up, each in a homemade black robe. They would move at Utei obliquely, carefully circling rather than approaching the master directly, and they would bow in his direction, more or less, and end up, one on either side leaning against him. One Sunday, the Man with the Ladder noticed that the black girl whose name was Cindy had a little table of her own. Then a few weeks later that the other apprentice, Gregory, had a table of his own.
On the girl's table was a sign in Japanese script that the Man with the Ladder could see had taken prodigious labor. It said "little painting" as far as the Man with the Ladder could tell. Gregory's table had a fragment of a mirror standing up, pressed into the wood, On the back of the mirror scratched into the reflecting surface were the Japanese characters for "photograph" or "facsimile copies."
The Man with the Ladder was somehow not surprised that Utei had attracted an apprentice or two. After spending some time with the master the Man with the Ladder had considered asking if he could become an apprentice himself, but Utei anticipated the request just as he was ready to make it, and said something like, "your path is to be an apprentice without a master." Utei had a habit of speaking obscurely when it served his purpose even though he had an excellent grasp of colloquial English. It was not clear exactly what he said except that it came down to no.
The Man with the Ladder was surprised at the particular apprentices that Utei finally acquired. He once asked Utei why he had selected these two people as his apprentices.
"Didn't pick them," he said, "were picked for me. Very little to say about it," he lamented. "I would have liked a Swedish blonde," he said, making sharp, well defined gestures describing the shape of the apprentice he would have preferred.
"Apprentices are picked to continue the education of the master. They are always chosen so that both the apprentice and the Master learn, one from teaching one from being taught. "Who does what?" he asked, merely posing the question and not expecting or waiting for an answer. "It is a great gift to someone who is learning to have a student from whom he can learn."
None of this explained what the Man with the Ladder wanted to know, and he couldn't get over the feeling that Utei had chosen his apprentices badly. One was a black girl he remembered seeing only once in the park. She was on a skateboard with bright yellow earphones that swallowed her head but she seemed familiar beyond what his memory could account for. The second was a slight, intense boy who swaggered and postured as he roamed the park. The Man with the Ladder thought they were unlikely apprentices to a Zen master who painted on air.
The Man with the Ladder tried to spend some part of every Sunday in the park but inevitably there were Sundays when the claim of accumulated, postponed work at home had to be honored and he spent Sunday piecing together the jig saw puzzle of fallen tiles or painting a wall.
It was when he returned to the park after one of these hiatuses, that one of the other park workers he knew, brought him a letter from Japan that was addressed simply, The Man with the Ladder, The Park, New York City, N.Y.
The letter seemed beautifully typed on rice paper and it was only after he read it a few times that the Man with the Ladder realized that it was not typed at all but done with a tiny brush.
"I have come and gone and not left at all," it said. "My apprentices are better than their master. I have learned all I could stand to learn from them. Would you please keep an eye on them while they are in the park. I hope your journey is completed well. Utei." Actually there was no signature on the letter only the reproduction of the little sign that Utei kept on his table when he was doing his spray painting.
After he received this letter from Utei the Man with the Ladder spent a much time with the young masters as he could. It was during this in loco parentis role, that they told him how they came to become Utei's apprentices. He learned the girl's story first.
"You remember the time I nearly hit him with the skateboard?" Cindy asked. "That was the beginning. Actually I wasn't after him. I was after you and that damned ladder. Only there he was, and he was a better target than you. I thought, damned Jap. Just sitting there. So I headed for him. Only I couldn't quite hold the skateboard to where I had set it. I didn't really want to hurt him, only skid by him and throw up some dust. I had this beat going in my head from the earphones.
"A weird thing happened. I mean besides the fact that I couldn't hold the skateboard straight, which never happened before. When I went by him the earphones went dead and there was the loudest, longest quiet I ever heard. It was as if the earphones were producing pure silence. I thought they broke, but when I got past him, the sound poured in again just where it had left off.
"It was spooky. I went home and I swore to stay away from the Jap. I thought he was a man witch. But I was drawn to him. For a while I just would circle him on the skateboard when he was sitting in the park. Every once in a while I would test out the spook, you know, get close enough to kill the sound in the earphones. It worked every time. Then I started to sit way off to the side and watch him. It was the first sitting I did for a long time. Couldn't sit in school. Tossed me out when I was eleven. When you learn to sit come back, they said. I never did.
"I didn't know what I was doing watching this Jap shooting paint into the air. He was getting three bucks a squirt so I figured it wasn't a bad hustle, but thinking about it I felt angry. Why should a Jap rake in all that money for squirting paint in the air? They have the cars, the T.V.'s, the cameras, why should they have the painting too? I painted a little," she confided in the Man with the Ladder. Suddenly the Man with the Ladder remembered where he had seen her before and shuddered, but tried not to let the memory interfere with his listening.
"I moved a little closer and got a little noisier," she continued.
"For two Sundays whenever someone would come up to him I would yell, 'it's just a trick Jap paint that's all, save your money.' The third week it was overcast and looked like rain, you know.The park was nearly empty. I yelled at him for most of the day. Then in the early afternoon he turned to me and made moves like he wanted me to come over. I was scared but I went.
"He didn't say anything and there was that quiet. 'What kind of trick paint is that?' I asked straight out.
"'Not a trick paint.'
"'Bull,' I said, 'it's a trick jap paint.'
"'You think so,' he said quietly. He reached down and rummaged around that satchel of his and pulled out a glass. "Go to the fountain. Fill this with water.
"I went and did as I was told. Somehow I wasn't afraid, only angry at the hustle. He was so cock sure of himself. I brought the water back. 'Watch,' he said, and filled his mouth with water. He turned and emptied his mouth in the finest mist I ever saw. He made his mouth into a can of spray paint. There was no sun in the sky to speak of that day. But the water he sprayed out of his mouth hung in the air and broke into the brightest sun colors I had ever seen.
"'It's a trick,' I yelled. I was terrified. I had never seen any colors like the ones that hung in front of me. They made a pattern I remembered, but couldn't pin down.
"'It's a trick,' I yelled again. 'There was something in the glass. You're a sneaky jap,' I screamed.
"'Yes, and you don't know how sneaky,' he said.
"'You think it was something in the glass,' he said to me quietly.
"'Yeh,' I insisted. 'You put something in the glass.'
"'You're sure?' I was a sure as I was terrified, if not more so. 'Sit,' he told me. I sat.
"You know that robe he always wore," she continued. "He untied the belt that held it together. At first I thought he was going to hit me with the belt for being a bitch. Then he hoisted up the robe and it dawned on me what he was really going to do.'No, No,'I yelled. 'I take it back, it's not a trick.' But I couldn't stop him. He hoisted that robe up nearly over his head. He was facing away from me into the wind and I thought, 'shit', I wanted to look away but I couldn't. And there was this naked Japanese behind, wiggling in the wind and in the other direction, again, a mist was being sprayed into the air, more brightly colored that the water he had sprayed from his mouth. It hung there and made the same pattern of gorgeous colors and this time recognized it.
"I cried after that. And he put his hand on my shoulder but it didn't help and he let me cry until I couldn't cry any more. After I stopped he just pointed with his head to the misty curtain in front of me and we both sat there until it dissolved. Then, in a sly voice he said to me, 'when you know how to spray paint, you know how to spray anything', and got up and bowed a little bow, collected his table and went off without saying another word.
"Next Sunday I was waiting for him when he came to the park. I sat about ten feet away from him through the afternoon, through all of the painting he did that afternoon. We didn't say a word. When the last customer had gone and it was clear that he would make no more paintings that day he looked in my direction and made a move I interpreted as his wanting me to come over. He didn't say a word, just rustled around in that satchel and pulled out one of those little hand brooms and handed it to me and pointed at the ground. I had no idea what he wanted but he refused to give me directions and waited until it dawned on me that he wanted me to sweep the grass. It seemed stupid to sweep grass which was covered with spray paint but as soon as it was clear that that was what he wanted me to do, I did it. It was odd. The paint came off the grass as if it were flour. It had very little color. I picked it up, and we put it in a cup someone had conveniently discarded and threw it away. After that I was his apprentice for real.
Utei's second apprentice was completely different. He about the same age as Cindy, scrawny, with bright red hair. There was an intensity about him that made him seem as hard as the wooden table he sat behind. He swaggered instead of walking, as if he owned the park. His name was Gregory.
"The very first time I saw the master," Gregory told the Man with the Ladder, "he was in the middle of a painting. I saw exactly what he was trying to do but I couldn't understand why he was doing it so badly. There was this 'thing' in front of him . It was there clear enough, even though I could not make out exactly what it was, and there was this little Japanese man, trying to cover it with paint. It was writhing and twisting and I could see that covering it all over was not easy. But he was leaving out what seemed a big piece of it.
"I walked over to him. I didn't want to interrupt but it was so clear that he had completely overlooked a section of it that I just couldn't hold myself back. 'Hey', I yelled, 'you missed a piece'. He just ignored me.
"He never did cover that piece. What fascinated me was how he could avoid it. There was paint everywhere. He had forced it into crevices of the thing, whatever it was, and he had managed to cover spots that were wispy and tenuous and weaving in and out like a snake. Yet here was a flat, tilted, obvious section like the top of a box that didn't have a spot of paint on it. It fascinated me. I watched him for the rest of the day and there was some piece of every painting he did, an obvious piece, that he left unpainted.
"I came back each Sunday after that, taking a seat at what seemed to me to be a show of incompetence. I yelled at him a couple of times that he had missed a piece, but he didn't take any notice. I even tried to talk to him once or twice but he paid no attention to me, as if I were speaking a foreign language. Finally I decided enough was enough and I would just show him.
"It was simple enough. I made up my mind that the next time he was almost finished with a painting I would just go up and take a can of paint and cover the section he had left uncovered and that is what I tried to do. He had just finished one of his paintings and was in the middle of a conversation with his customer when I strolled by and picked up one of the cans of paint from the table and turned to cover the piece he had left unpainted.
"I don`t know how he did it. His back was towards me. He reached up and grabbed my hand. I have never been held that way before. I could not move my hand, or the body that was attached to it. I stood there for what seemed like an hour in the grip of this little man who turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder. 'Not yet,' he said, 'not yet' and he held me while he finished talking. Then after the person went away he seemed to spring up in a single motion. 'Look,' he whispered to me, 'look,' and he pointed my hand with the can of paint in it, to the section I had intended to spray.
"What looked so solid before, appeared, as he held my arm and pointed to it, more like an open window from which the paint he had sprayed, seemed to come. It was not flat and fixed, but moving in on itself, as if it were the orifice of a living thing. It was, from this perspective, my own hand pointing it out to me, the only shifting moving place in a curtain of fixed surfaces. 'You do not see what is out there. You see your imagination. You must learn to see before you paint,' he insisted, 'really see.'
"He let go of my wrist and I put the paint can down and ran off. I was confused and embarrassed.
"I came back the next Sunday and watched him, and the Sunday after that. The third week, after he was done for the day, he motioned me over and picked up a can of paint from the table. Then he turned to me, 'This is the way you hold the can of paint,' he said. 'Do you see?' I saw nothing.
"'You hold it this way,' he said, 'otherwise accidents can happen.' He repeated, accidents and as if to demonstrate, he 'accidentally' hit the cap sending a spray of paint off to the side of me. I did not notice anything there except the paint hung in the air forming a pattern which shifted and glided next to me. It seemed to be misshapen, ugly, and fearsome. He pointed off to my side. 'Accidents,' he repeated.'
"'You believe there is something out there; it is not true,' he insisted. 'There is nothing there. You mistake your imagination for something out there thrashing.' He repeated, again and again, that painting on air was not covering something that was out there with paint and I insisted more vehemently that there was something out there and that only a blind man could miss it, and that painting on air didn't seem to be to be anything else than putting paint all over it, no matter what you said you were doing.
"I learned to hold a can of paint to avoid accidents. With Cindy, who was his other apprentice, I swept up, shook the cans, cleaned out the nozzles and wiped off the table. Mostly we watched Utei. As much as I learned, he and I disagreed fundamentally about what was where.
"I think he almost gave up on me. Then one Sunday morning he called me on the phone. It was 4 a.m. 'Meet me at the park,' he insisted. 'It's the middle of the night,' I said. 'I know what time it is,' he replied. My mother was furious and suspicious, and didn't want to let me out of the house, but I went.
"It was still pitch dark when I got to the park. He was sitting there behind the table as if it were 2 o'clock on a sunny, Sunday afternoon. I could hardly see him.
"'You believe that you see something out there which you spray paint over.'
"'Yes, I am certain of it, I replied.'
"'Can you paint what is out there now?' he asked.
"'It's pitch black,' I answered. 'You can't see a thing.'
"He did not say anything only grabbed my arm and pushed me gently to the ground. 'Watch,' he said quietly.
"From the table he took two cans of paint and began to dance in front of me spraying the air. I could not see him or the paint, only hear his feet doing a little dance on the ground, and the imprisoned paint being liberated into the air.
"He moved rapidly and surely in the pitch darkness. Then he was by my side. 'We will wait,' he said.
"We sat there for two hours. I was sleepy but he kept me up telling me stories about his childhood in Japan. I was sure he was making them up. He talked that way until the sun peeked into the sky. We had been facing west and the sun made its appearance as shadows of the trees by our back. 'Now,' he said, grabbing my arm, 'now look.' I turned.
"In front of me was a painting on air. The paint covered something like skin covers a person but there was no something there. I believe not a molecule had moved since he put it there. Its outlines were clearly defined by an edge of paint. The colors were magnificent. I couldn't take it. I cried like a baby.
"'Don't concern yourself, You will learn to see,' he said. 'Painting is not clothing a naked body, or covering a form with color, or filling in an outline. It is something else. Do not concern yourself. You will learn.' He seemed to let the painting go because at that moment it collapsed as if he had been holding it up. 'You must forswear illusions, even your own—especially your own, he said.'"
The Man with the Ladder made a copy of the Utei's letter and cut out the reproduction of the sign that was his signature and pasted it on a envelop and sent him a letter.
"Dear Utei. I have kept my eye on your apprentices as you asked. They have comforted me in return. I have learned from them that a large object may be illuminated by the smallest lights. Sometimes you see objects by the way they cast shadows and sometimes by the way shadows fall on them. Your apprentices have convinced me that spraying on air is easy but spraying on what Utei sprays on, is impossible. Yours, the Man with the Ladder."
The Man with the Ladder and the Zen Master had something in common. They were both fascinated with the ordinary. Perhaps it was this fascination that made the ordinary act out in their presence in most extraordinary ways. For the Man with the Ladder what happened was always unexpected and unrepeatable, but with the Zen Master, the ordinary huddled in his shadow and came and went at his bidding– or so it seemed to the Man with the Ladder.
Whenever he asked the Zen Master how he did what he did the Zen Master denied he was doing anything out of the ordinary, and he denied there was any special technique for doing something that was not out of the ordinary. He said that, of course, it took a greal deal of practice and skill to get the ordinary right and while most people had a lot of practice with what they took to be the ordinary it was usually wasted. The Man with the Ladder believed he protested too much.
He asked the Zen Master to take him on as an apprentice but the Zen Master refused, saying that he did not have to become a Zen Master to do what he did best. He added that an apprenticeship was only necessary for some people—like the girl on the skateboard—who had trouble keeping their feet on the ground and that the Man with the Ladder had different problems entirely and insisted that he should look for a different way of strengthening the connection with the ordinary. The refusal only provoked the Man with the Ladder 's appetite for Zen.
Wandering in a book store one day with Reb Dunzel– who was looking in the new age section for a book about dialects in chants, he saw, between the book "Alchemy for Vegetarians" and "The Complete Book of Pagan Sports,"a book called Zen Mastery for Dummies. He browsed the book while Reb Dunzel looked at "Chanting through the Internet." The book felt light and it made zen look easy. He bought it and took it home and started reading it right away.
He reported his progress to the Zen Master.
"I've been practicing. I think I've mastered it," he said.
"What part?" the Zen Master asked.
"The breathing in and breathing out part."
"Oh," said the Zen Master. "It took me a while to get that right."
"And the sound parts," the Man with the Ladder said. "OOM," he intoned.
"Oh," said the Zen Master .
"No, Oom," the Man with the Ladder repeated.
"Oh, OHM," the Zen Master said. "Ohm."
A few days later when the Man with the Ladder met the Zen Master in the park he reported more progress. "Finished the book," he said. "I've been working at it like a tiger for 7 days. I think I've mastered it all. "I'm ready to take it for a spin," he added, "a final test."
"You might be," the Zen Master said looking at him queerly "What kind of test?"
"Well there was a parable in the book I really liked," the Man with the Ladder said. "The way the book put it was, "Before you know zen a tree is a tree, a mountain is a mountain, a stream a stream. And after you master zen a tree is a tree, a mountain a mountain a stream a stream but three inches off of the ground. I'm going to try to raise my bed, three inches off the floor. Three inches isn't very high and if I fall off at night I won't get hurt but it should make sleeping much more comfortable and it will demonstrate I've learned what a dummy needs to know about Zen."
"It's a heavy bed as I recall," the Zen Master noted.
"Zen is very powerfull in the right hands," the Man with the Ladder said.
"Raising a bed is impossible," the Zen Master said. "I am sure of it," he said and shuffled away.
When the Zen Master met the Man with the Ladder the next day the Man with the Ladder was grumbling. "It didn't work," he complained.
"What didn't work?"
"Raising my bed off of the floor. I tried all day yesterday. I made a lot of sounds. I brought my consciousness to a sharp focus. I really concentrated. Nothing happened."
"I told you raising the bed was impossible," the Zen Master reminded him.
"How about you trying?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Trying what?"
"Raising the bed," the Man with the Ladder said.
"It's impossible. Why should I have better luck doing the impossible?"
"It's an ordinary bed," the Man with the Ladder said, "the kind you sleep on. I wouldn't think that three inches of anything would be that hard to do. Give it a try at least."
The Zen Master looked at him. "Three ordinary inches," he mused, "but where, what, on whom. It's a gigantic distance but, OK if it will make you feel any better, I'll try, but I'm sure its impossible."
When they got to the Man with the Ladder bedroom's the Zen Master asked him to describe what he had done.
"A lot of sounds and a lot of concentration. I stayed motionless for hours at a time. I kept at it without stopping except a break for coffee and a pastry and to watch a television show or two that I watch every day. But almost all day."
"Ohm," the Zen Master said.
"I focused on lifiting the bed up with my inner eye," the Man with the Ladder added.
"Your inner eye didn't work either," the Zen Master said incredulously.
"No, it didn't move." The Man with the Ladder pointed at the bed which seemed glued to the floor.
"It's a heavy bed," the Zen Master said. He got down on all flours and examined the bed. "It's still on the floor," he said getting up. His body creaked as he unwound himself.
"You try," the Man with the Ladder said.
"I told you its impossible," the Zen Master replied.
"But you didn't even try," the Man with the Ladder complained.
The Zen Master looked at him. "If I try will you promise to give up learning zen from books."
The Man with the Ladder swore he would give up trying to learn Zen from books.
"No matter what happens,"the Zen Master said. "And tapes and videos and the internet and CD's," he added.
The Man with the Ladder agreed.
"OK, here goes," the Zen Master said. He looked at the bed for a few seconds.
"I've tried," he said "The bed didn't rise did it?"
"You call that trying," the Man with the Ladder grumbled.
"I tried as hard as I could," the Zen Master said "to raise that bed. It's solid maple. I told you it was impossible." He stared at the bed. "It takes a while of course," the Zen Master said. "Zen's not instantaneous."
"You didn't do anything," the Man with the Ladder complained. "No sounds, no focusing the inner eye."
The Zen Master turned to the Man with the Ladder. "You'd be surprised at what I didn't do," he said and looked at the bed crosseyed and grunted, ohm. "Raising the bed is impossible" the Zen Master repeated again. "I've got to be going now, my cats are waiting."
The Man with the Ladder walked the Zen Master to the door. He was disappointed and his disappointment showed in his face.
"Don't be disappointed. It's taken me a lifetime studying Zen to accomplsih the simplest ordinary things," the Zen Master said. "You might try sleeping on a mat. Mats are easier to move around."
"Well thanks for trying," the Man with the Ladder said. After the Zen Master left he went back to be bedroom to search for a flaw in his Zen and see if he could discover any reason other why the bed hadn't moved. He opened the door and nearly fell over. The bed was floating three inches off of the floor.
He rushed out to tell the Zen Master that he had done it, that he had raised the bed, that his Zen was more powerful than he himself gave it credit for. He knew that at the pace the Zen Mastered slid and shuffled where he was going, he could catch up with him before he had gotten a few blocks. When he saw the Zen Master doing his shuffle and slide walk ahead of him he started to run. "The bed. You did it," the Man with the Ladder blurted out when he got abreast of him, "You did it. You raised the bed," the Man with the Ladder said.
"No," the Zen Master said.
"But I saw it," the Man with the Ladder insisted. "The bed was three inches off of the floor. You raised it."
The Zen Master grasped him firmly by the ears and pulled his head down so that they were eye to eye. "Things are not always what they appear to be. You shouldn't see what you believe, and you can't always believe what you see," he said, His voice reverberated in the Man with the Ladder's head.
"But you raised the bed, I saw it," the Man with the Ladder repeated. "It was floating three inches off of the floor."
The Zen Master released him and spun him around. "I told you raising the bed was impossible. There are somethings that are impossible even for Zen. Raising the bed is impossible," he said, turning to go and dropping his voice, "I just lowered the floor a little."
The Man with the Ladder and Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones had known one another since they were children. They had grown up together, gone to school together and stayed in the old neighborhood when almost everyone else they knew moved away. They thought of themselves as more than the closest of friends, not because their feeling for one another was stronger than that of best friends, but because they saw one another as central pieces of the reality that made up each other's everyday, natural world.
Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones had been born in Ireland and came here with his father and mother and sisters and brothers when his father got a job driving a Orange bus in Queens. One of the things that had attracted the Man with the Ladder to Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones was his rich brogue. In the 30 or so years that the Man with the Ladder had known him, the brogue had deepened and grown thicker and richer like the coat of a smart, forest bear.
They had moved in separate directions out of the old neighborhood and they did not see one another frequently, so it was with considerable joy that the Man with the Ladder looked down one spring day to find Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones standing by the side of his ladder looking a little ragged and a smidgin depressed. When Patrick Timothy opened his mouth his voice came out naked and shorn like a spring sheep, and the Man with the Ladder had to look again to assure himself it was his friend.
"What happened to you," asked the Man with the Ladder, "were you beaten up?" It was clear to him that Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones showed no signs of an assault, so that, even as it came out of his mouth, the Man with the Ladder knew that it was the wrong question, but he could not think of anything else to describe the damage that appeared to have been inflicted on his friend.
"It's a long story," Patrick Timothy replied.
"You came to tell it," replied the Man with the Ladder with certainty.
"That I did," came the response and he began.
"I am doing nothing in particular recently, so I have plenty of time to do it in. And yesterday I am wandering my afternoon wander, treating myself to the streets, when on the sidewalk I see this oriental gentleman selling watches. He has this makeshift table spread with a feast of timepieces. Now I have no particular need to be apprised of the time. My stomach strikes the even hours well enough and my throat the odd. But it was a feast for the eyes, all glittering and glowing, and safe enough I think, because I have no money to speak of, unless 47 cents is money to speak of. I was wrong."
The Man with the Ladder hesitated to interrupt unless he was somehow instructed to do so which he was not.
"Now most of the watches were of your jewelry store variety. They told the time and the date. No bait for the fancy at all, and I was ready to move on, when I spied this special sort of timepiece, a wonderful, miraculous instrument. It told four sorts of time and chimed odd quarter hours. It told the day, and the date, and the phases of the moon. It had a little window in which pictures conveyed the weather at two places in the world. It could calculate Pi to the 123rd digit and it gave the price of pork bellies in the morning and grits in the afternoon. Desire rose in me like I haven't felt since the lust for Phoebe came over me twenty years ago. It was a sister to that lust that seized me for this watch. It was a wonderful, wondrous watch but wondrous expensive also," he said sadly.
"Now I had no money except the 47 cents. I am despairing at how I can connive this watch and I remember I have my father's pocket watch with me, the gold one he left me when he went off."
"'How about this gold watch?' I offered. I felt silly offering to trade this 'this' for that 'this' with a stable of 'thises' before me."
"'Have enough watches,'" the oriental gentleman replied, accurately enough.
"'It's genuine gold, not that plated stuff.'" I handed it to him. He opened it and shook it. He was no fool this oriental gentlemen. "'No need more watch, even of gold, especially if broken,'" he said, handing it back. I was fully despaired at that point and not thinking swiftly only the lust was nearly bursting inside of me. It was the lust put the idea in my head. This oriental gentleman in front of me speaks a horrible English. Marks him it does, I thought to myself. So I say, "'for that watch I will swap my brogue.'" It was out of my mouth before I knew what I had said.
"'What's a brogue?'" he asks. It's a hell of a job I have trying to identify which part of me is the way I talk, and I start talking to him with a mind to fixing the idea in his head that my way of sounding when I talk will give him a business advantage on the street."
Now the Man with the Ladder could contain himself no longer."How could you give it away?"
"I didn't give it away," Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones insisted. "I traded it. I got a watch for it, and a wonderful watch to boot. It cost my mother and father plenty, that brogue. The old country was hell sometimes."
"That's hard to believe," said the Man with the Ladder. "You were always trying to lose…," he hesitated before the word accent, "that way of talking."
"You're right," Patrick Timothy replied. "I couldn't shake loose from it and I tried a lot of ways. But in all that time trying to talk American, I never tried to trade it away, and it traded away without a trace, like it had never been."
"Well, what happened?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
Patrick Timothy continued his tale of woe."I go home with the watch and Phoebe nearly throws me out claiming I'm an imposter. My children treat me like I had a disease, and the neighbors think I'm putting on airs. And what's worse I look in the mirror and everything's OK until I open my mouth and then I even look different to myself."
The Man with the Ladder found it a difficult story to believe. On the other hand here was Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones with no accent to speak of or none more that the Man with the Ladder had, and he always thought of his own speech as free of encumbrance or enhancement.
"What should I do?" Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones asked.
"Try to get it back," the Man with the Ladder said definitely. "Try hard to get it back. Do anything to get it back. Winter is coming and you won't last anytime at all without it."
"I just wanted to hear you say it," Patrick Timothy answered. "Just to make sure."
It was a week before the Man with the Ladder saw Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones again. He showed up waiting on the grass in the shade near the depression that marked the ladder's home in the park. He sat there a long time not saying a word leaving the Man with the Ladder in doubt as to what his insides sounded like. But when he spoke it was the old Patrick Timothy that was recognizable in the brogue.
"You got it back," gurgled the MAN WITH THE LADDER.
"I got it back," his friend said, blanketed under the fuzzy brogue. "And it cost me. It was a devil of a time finding the oriental gentleman. Straight out he says to me, 'with your brogue business has improved greatly, me boy,' without me askin anything such as would provoke such a response. 'People recognize it as the genuine article,' he adds."
"When I hear him talk it is like hearing an echo and it wrings my heart. And I noticed he was killing the brogue. He can't handle it, I thought to myself. It slips out from under him and turns and twists his wanting to say things. And I look at him and he smiles. 'You like the watch?' he asks. 'Oh, a wondrous watch.' But I couldn't hold myself in and play the wily trader. 'How about taking the watch back in exchange for, lets say, my brogue, I say to him?'"
"'Couldn't do it,' says he. 'Watch is used now. It has lost value.'"
"'So's the brogue,'I say."
"'I've got used to it,'he says."
"I realize the game. 'So I'll make up the difference,' I say. We dicker for a while. 'Only I get the brogue back now and I'll make the difference up slightly at a time,' says I."
"'OK,' he says looking in my eyes. 'Why don't you work part of it off,' he suggests. 'It will collapse the debt and give you something to do,' he adds. We make the trade and the brogue leaps back to me smooth and natural and only a little worse for wear in the East."
"So you're selling watches now."
"Sort of," Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones says. "It turns out we really only sell one watch."
"The one you bought."
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Occasionally we sell one of the others. But our business is that one watch. It's funny what people will trade for a object of desire," he added. "They always want it back after a while though," but he refused to speak of selling watches any more after that and the rest of the afternoon was spent reminiscing about other things.
The Man with the Ladder met his friend Tranny walking down the street. Now, no one ever called Tranny by his given name. They called him "Corkscrew". They called him this because something was always happening to him. He had a natural attraction to disaster that led people to avoid him if they could.
Nothing happened to him in the way things happened to everyone else. Misfortune always tunneled towards him in a spiral, usually with its pointed end first. And if you were close to him when something was about to happen and by chance he ducked, you got something that wasn't really meant for you, usually full in the face.
"How are you?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"OK I guess," replied Corkscrew. "Only…" A spiral misfortune is coming, thought the Man with the Ladder. "Only, a strange thing happened to me," Corkscrew continued. "I got a call from someone I haven't heard from in four years. It might even be five. Perhaps…"
There was another horrible habit that Corkscrew had. Not only did things come to him pointed end first and always in a spiral, but he came at things the same way, working around in lazy circles only inching up and up towards where he was headed.
"Was he a friend?" asked the Man with the Ladder.
"A friend, no," replied Corkscrew. "I'd say we were more than friends. We grew up together. We went to school together, played on the same teams, helped each other out of jams, shared the same women. We were closer than the very best of friends, only…"
"Only what?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Only our friendship was fragile and delicate. It would catch and tear on the dullest of points."
"Well," asked the Man with the Ladder".
"Well," replied Corkscrew, "we had this argument." He shivered. "It was one of those arguments that only the best of friends can have. It was ferocious, hard and intense. We fought constantly, consistently, up close, at a distance, directly and through friends and neighbors. Like a tornado, everything and everyone around us was swept up into it. We became best enemies and that relationship was solid, tough and unyielding. We fought for weeks, perhaps…"
The Man with the Ladder interrupted his narrative. "And?"
"And nothing. One day he just wasn't around any more. He was gone. I asked around. People said he went to Tulsa. Some oil job. But I'm not sure I believed them. I haven't seen him in three years, it might even be four. Perhaps even…."
The Man with the Ladder waited but Corkscrew had finished.
"So what's the problem," the Man with the Ladder finally asked.
"Well, what I can't figure out," Corkscrew continued with a twist of his head that brought the Man with the Ladder scanning wildly for something heading in his direction, "what I can't figure out is what he wants from me."
The Man with the Ladder relaxed. It seemed absolutely clear to him. "What he wants, Corkscrew, what he wants," he said with the definiteness of someone who was quite sure of what he was saying, "is to continue the argument."
"I'm not sure,"said Corkscrew very slowly, but his face lit up.
The Man with the Ladder had a reputation which traveled further in the world than he did. It moved in circles he did not know existed. Of course, even if he had known about these circles, he would not have been allowed to approach them, much less participate in them: they were the circles of the rich and powerful, and the talented who serviced the rich and powerful.
He had visited places like the Kremlin and Peking, but unfortunately for him, only by reputation. And he spoke Russian and Chinese also, but only when he was a character in one of the stories people told about him. He would say to his ex-wife, "my reputation leads a richer life than I do," and complain to her that people never made a connection between him and the "Man-With-A-Ladder" in the stories they told with such relish, even though he thought that the resemblance was obvious.
But after he unburdened himself of these complaints, he had to admit, if only to himself, that most of the things that happened to the Man with the Ladder in the stories he had heard, never had happened to him, although often he could remember something had happened that vaguely resembled an occurrence that took place in the story. What was more damaging, was that the "Man With A Ladder" in these stories, said things that, not only had he never thought of saying, but that he did not really understand. So he finally came to believe that he had a double, that there was another "Man-With-A-Ladder" out there in the world, only more resourceful, more intelligent and cleverer than he was, and probably handsomer too.
The "Man-With-A-Ladder's" most recent excursion was to Washington where his reputation met the President and a distinguished collection of businessmen, soldiers, and diplomats. The occasion was a conference on the challenge of the 90's. People were invited to the conference only if they had already succeeded in meeting the challenge of the 80's, meaning they were rich and powerful.
It was out of the mouth of one of the embodiments of success that the "Man-With-A-Ladder" was introduced to the Washington elite.
Of all the people attending the conference this particular successful man was perhaps the most modest, honest and generous. He was invited because he was the owner of a chain of stores that sold computer hardware and software. What is more, not only did he own each and every one of these stores, but he had started the chain before the personal computer age had really begun, so that people believed he was extraordinarily foresightful as well as sensible enough to be rich. And not satisfied with reputation, wealth, and success, he had recently designed a radically different computing instrument and had begun manufacturing, as well as selling, computers.
Because he was honest, he knew that it was not foresight that had led him to the front rank of the revolution. And because he was generous, when it was his time to speak, he gave credit where credit was due.
"I am certain," he began his talk, "that successfully meeting challenge of the future will require many virtues. Not the least among these virtues are discipline, intelligence and willingness to work hard. I have these," he said, not dwelling on his virtues. "I am not sure, however that the most important virtue of them all can be cultivated. I am not sure I can even put the most important virtue of all into words.
"The most important aspect of the future is the unexpected part. The problem is preparing for that part. If, in the 70's, I had met the challenge of the 80's," he said, "I would be the owner of a shirt store and not the owner of a chain of computer stores. But, in fact, in 1975 I met the challenge of the 90's. The only thing was that I didn't know it. The trick of meeting the challenge of the 90's is to leap ahead and meet the challenge of the next century before that century comes. If we can do that our success is guaranteed.
"My story may be both an inspiration and a lesson about meeting challenges.
"For the first 12 years of my working life I was a clerk in a government office. All the time I worked in that office I yearned to have my own business. I saved and saved towards the day when I could buy a store of my own. There was no particular thing I wanted to sell, only something. It was the romance of being my own boss that enthralled me.
"The chance to live my dream came when the owner of a store in a tiny mall near a subway stop in Queens, N.Y.C., died. I heard about it from someone who worked in the office with me. They told me it was a steal and that they personally knew that the person who died had amassed a fortune from this one store. I bought the place from the widow. The price I paid was cheap for a gold mine but expensive for what the reality turned out to be. With what I paid, the person who told me about it and the widow went off to Florida to start a motel. He wrote me a note saying 'I never did like you much, but good luck'".
"It turned out that the owner had shot himself because he did not want to outlive his business. I spent what money I had saved and borrowed to fix the place up. I had a sign constructed, one of those large clever signs that changes over time into a cute antique. It said, 'Shirts and Things.'
"Rent was cheap and for good reason. The store was one of six making up a mini-mall in a little courtyard. The entrance was on a busily traveled street, and the subway was about fifty feet down the road. It seemed an ideal location. The trouble was that it was the easiest thing in the world to pass that entrance; for some reason I could never figure out, it took some effort to turn into the mini-mall. Looking at it as you walked by, you could entertain the illusion that you were in the country, an illusion that somehow vanished as soon as you entered the compound with a purchase on your mind.
"There were six stores in the courtyard. It was actually quite lovely. There were benches, trees, cobblestones. And each of the six stores was dying.
"We put a juggler by the entrance. We put a clown by the entrance. We put a nearly naked girl by the entrance. Nothing helped. Collectively we were dying and, as the newest store, I was dying fastest. More and more, as I stood by the counter looking at this courtyard which appeared to me like the center of a little village somewhere in the midlands of Pennsylvania, the office I had worked at for 12 years haunted me.
"I remember exactly the day when fame and fortune knocked. I have, in my mind, a little picture postcard of that day, painted from memory after the fact, that I send to myself whenever I get puffed up and think I'm an extraordinary fellow.
"It was a hot day in May. Summer was firing a warning shot. I had reluctantly let go the two clerks that came with the store when I bought it, so I was in the store alone when this man came in dragging a ladder behind him. 'Excuse me', he said, 'do you sell soda?'"
"Now you have to understand. I had been caught between the hard rock of fashion and the soft cliffs of ecology, and I was being ground down slowly. I was starved for customers. I had just spent two days changing the stock to prepare for the summer season. Bored with failure, I had no patience for someone whose appearance made it clear that he was probably wearing his collection of shirts on his back."
"'No,' I said, 'we do not sell soda. Try the next block and I turned away.'"
"'I saw the sign outside the entrance,' he said, 'Shirts and Things.' I thought the "'Things" might have included soda.'"
"'We sell shirts,' I said. 'Now if you want a shirt, something light for a hot days like this… He seemed not to have heard me.'"
"'I was thirsty,' he continued, 'a Coke would do just fine. Even a root beer.'"
"I exploded. 'We sell shirts and ties and cuff links and even socks. We sell suspenders and handkerchiefs. We do not sell soda.'"
"'I'm sorry,' he said. He looked so sheepish, I backed away into the miserable heat and lost myself in the sense of failure. I did not even hear him leave the store.
"He came in a second time a few weeks later. The summer had begun a little early. The day was a mixture of heat and failure for me. I had just used up my cash reserves to pay last months bills."
"'A cream soda,' he said, putting 50 cents on the counter."
"'We sell shirts and things. We do not, I repeat, we do not sell soda. You were in here a few weeks ago, I remember. We didn't sell soda then and we don't sell it now.'"
"He was apologetic again. 'I forgot,' he said matter-of-factly. 'I've been working down the block. It was hot and I thought "Shirts and Things…'" He accented the 'Things.' I did not reply and he picked the change off of the counter and left."
"The third and fourth time he came in were about the same. He would come in and ask for soda, and, each time I would remind him we did not sell soda, and he would apologize saying he had forgotten, or it had slipped his mind.
"Each episode stoked my anger and frustration. I was not selling shirts and this strange man's coming in and repeating his outlandish request, outlined my failure in bold perspective.
"My sense of failure concentrated on him. He represented in my mind both the source of my failure and a punishment for that failure.
"I began to think about teaching him a lesson, about extracting some pleasure from punishing this foolish man who appeared to forget the simplest of things from week to week and lacked the elementary logic that would tell him a store that sold 'Shirts and Things' did not sell soda. I was certain that he was just playing with me, taking some perverse pleasure from coming into the store and making the same idiotic request over and over. I became obsessed with the idea of revenging myself on this man with a ladder.
"I expect I was not thinking clearly because the only punishment I could think of was to satisfy his request. I convinced myself that he knew very well that I did not sell soda and that if the next time he came in and asked for soda I would produce some for him, he would see instantaneously that I had seen through his game and he would be thoroughly humiliated and embarrassed. I don't know why. I thought this would be an unforgiving, harsh act and a profound victory.
"I went out and bought a dozen or so bottles of soda one of each flavor I could think of and I bought a little plastic case to keep them cold in and some ice. And I waited. He did not come in again for two weeks and by that time I had changed the ice three times but when he did come in I was ready. He came in as he always did, gingerly setting his ladder by the door.
"'That shirt in the widow is lovely, really lovely. Does it come in Apricot?'"
It was a work shirt. 'No,' I said, my interest perking up and collapsing in the same motion. For an instant I almost totally forgot what I knew was coming. 'It's a durable cotton blend work shirt. They come in blue. They are for working not for dancing, I said curtly.'"
" 'Very nice,'he added 'but it would be nicer in Apricot. By the way,' he asked as an afterthought, 'do you sell soda?'"
"'Do you sell soda?' he asked. It's hard to describe the joy I felt inside as I felt the trap slam shut catching his pride and holding it firmly. I had to suppress the urge to shout. 'What kind would you like?,' I replied nonchalantly, affecting commercial indifference to a minor sale."
"'A coke would be fine,' he said, also affecting indifference as if this were the most regular transaction in the world."
"'Could you open it for me?' he asked, putting 50 cents down on the counter."
"'I…', I stuttered. I realized I had bought bottles and had forgotten the opener. He reached in his pocket and took out the largest Swiss Army knife I had ever seen. He seemed to rummage around in it before he found the opener.
"His eyes met mine for only an instant. 'Thank you. You don't sell bottled water?' he asked. And he answered himself quickly as if he recognized he had gone to far. And then he said something very strange. He said, 'I thought you looked Hungarian.' Before I could ask him what in the hell he meant, he lifted up the ladder and was out the door.
"I was brimming with a feeling of triumph, and yet his response, as if finding the soda was the most natural thing, dismayed me and I felt a little foolish for forgetting the opener. I could not fathom what he meant by that statement about me looking Hungarian. But it made no difference in my mind. I had won, and I basked in the feeling of victory I had not felt in a long time. That feeling did not last long though. I realized now I was stuck with 11 bottles of assorted soda.
"I hated soda. If I had not been staring bankruptcy in the face I would have taken the picnic basket around and given the bottles away to the my fellow failures in the mall as a way of celebrating. But in my condition of penury I felt the soda had to be brought into the arena of commerce. I penciled a sign "COLD SODA" and put it in the window: as I went out to buy an opener from the store in the mini-mall that sold gadgets, I penciled "COLD SODA" on the little sign that announced 'Shirts and Things' by the entrance of the mall"
"The bottles of soda I had purchased to show this man with a ladder that he could not trample over reason and rationality went in the first hour the sign was up. I even sold a few shirts. I closed up the store went to a supermarket a few blocks away and got two dozen more assorted sodas and they were sold almost as quickly.
"I spent the rest of the afternoon making a soda connection. The next day a large refrigerator came and cartons of soda. Now my contribution to all of this was the phone calls. I did think it would be nice to have something other than soda so I had the wholesaler send me some bottled water.
"The weather got behind me. It was a miserably hot summer and this was the first week of a record breaking heat wave. Business for all of the stores improved but mine grew unreasonably better. It looked as if I would survive. In the fall I shifted to selling coffee and hot chocolate as well as soda and bottled water and I developed a little section that sold pastries and gourmet foods.
"My shirt business had improved also. I winnowed my stock of shirts to only a few brands and added a special line shirts I had made especially for me. They were derivatives of work shirts but in a variety of pastels. I remade the sign on the store and had a new slab made for the slot by the entrance. It said, Shirts and Stuff & Soda and Things.
"I did not need an accountant to tell me I was thriving. In the first flush of success I had made a pact with myself that when the man with the ladder came in again I would thank him because I felt in some vague and odd way he had contributed to my success. But he did not come in during the next two months and my resolution to repay this imprecise debt got crushed under the real work that had to be done to maintain the habit of success. But once success had become habitual it erased the memory of the times when I balanced perilously on the brink of failure and it wiped out my sense of obligation and debt.
"I was spending more time in the little office I had fashioned out of what was previously a stock room. I had rehired the two clerks I had let go and added two more so I did not spend much time selling any more"
"It was odd then, that I was alone in the store when he came in again. And, although I can not quite explain why, when he did come in, I did not recognize him."
"'Can I help you?' I asked.
"'Do you sell software?'" he asked?
"I thought he was referring to a brand of shirts. 'I don't carry that brand but we have other shirts of good quality and if you really want that brand I could order you some.'I was impatient to get back to my little office to plan the continuation of my success."
"'No,' he explained, 'I mean software. For a computer.'"
"I recited the inventory of things we sold. 'We do not sell software.'"
"'I'm sorry,' he said,'I thought the "Stuff" might include software.' He apologized for bothering me and left."
"Now I know it will be hard for you to believe but I did not remember having gone through this before. I assure you this is true. There was a turmoil in my head and a vague buzzing, but I did not associate it with him, and although I took it as some sort of a warning, I could not tell what it was a warning about.
"Now I knew vaguely what a computer was. At least I knew there were such things. I had no idea about how they worked or why. I had no idea what connection there was between a computer and software, and what is more, I had no interest in finding out. I wanted to get on with my success in the most direct fashion. I wanted to stew over the decision I had already made in the privacy of the little storeroom to put the whole business on the line in one swooping expansion. I thought the time was ripe to box in the retail shirt and gourmet food market, and I thought I had figured out how.
"I spent less and less time selling and more time in my office doing what I called tactical planning. I had worked out a strategy for expansion. I was refining and developing it. Nevertheless I was on the floor selling shirts and things when he came in about two weeks later and it was me he managed to find free."
"'Excuse me,' he said, 'I wonder whether you carry software for computers here?'"
"I am sure you are wondering about what I wondered about afterward. How can a person un-remember what, at one moment, memory held closest and dearest? I didn't know then and I don't know now.
"I had convinced myself that my success was due to my grasp of the fundamental principles of business and commerce. I had become intolerant of anything that implicitly challenged that premise."
"'You have to understand,' I began lecturing to him, 'we sell shirts and…'"
"He interrupted me. 'I thought the "Stuff" might include software for computers.'"
"You'd think the bells would have gone off then and there, but my anger pushed whatever messages my sense was sending my sensibility. I was rather rude.
"As I have said, I knew nothing about computers other than such devices existed. That they required software programs was unknown to me. But If I had recognized my ignorance, it would have made no difference. I was insulated by success which protected me from my ignorance and made it unnecessary to have to know those things. I believed I had done it my way and success had indicated that my way was more than adequate. And my way did not include anything about computers.
"'We don't sell software. Anyone can tell we have nothing to do with mechanical devices,' I insisted. 'A blind man could tell that.'"
"He apologized profusely. 'I really am sorry, I just thought perhaps…'"
"I thought he looked pitiful as he lurched out of the store but, I had developed an intolerance and contempt for customers who were unsophisticated, inept shoppers. I began to feel that the simplest elements of commerce were beyond some people and that one had a right to treat them curtly.
"Over the next few months he came in repeatedly somehow always managing to catch me on the floor without a customer. Each time some variation on the same routine ensued. Each time my anger was turned up a notch. I decided I would teach him a lesson.
"Looking back I find it impossible to understand how, somewhere in the course of this repeat performance of something that happened less than a year before, I did not recall the first episode. Perhaps it was a benign forgetfulness. Perhaps, as I have come to believe, some people have to power to make themselves, and events connected to them, invisible in some way, to make you forget, to so draw you out that you lose the ability to remember and connect simple sequences of events, so that each time the sequence appears new and different. My encounters with him took on an exaggerated importance. I had become obsessed with the growth of my business. Surviving and prospering was no longer enough. I had to dominate. It turns out that the problems of domination are as difficult as the problems of survival. While before, this strange man had claimed the frustrations of failure, this time he showed up just in time to become the focus of the anxieties and grievances associated with success.
"I rediscovered anew the ideal solution to the problem of this annoying man. I resolved to put him in his place, to teach him a lesson by the simple expedient of providing him with a selection of software. I would teach him a lesson, humiliate him and get rid of him in the same motion.
"It took me three calls before I managed to get the number of a wholesaler of software. It turned out to be someone who sold software from their home. You have to remember that this was before the microcomputer revolution had arrived. Microcomputers had just come onto the scene but they were esoteric and rare. The people who sold them and sold supplies for them were still in the cottage phase of the business.
"'Send me over some assorted software,' I insisted against the man's explanation that such a purchase did not make a lot of sense. 'I don't want to know the details just send me over some software.'"
"'Any particular programs?' he asked."
"'I don't care,' I remember saying, 'I don't care at all. Just some software. An assortment.' It was an accepted way of buying shirts and stuff I did not see why it wouldn't work for software.'Two dozen should be enough. I'll pay on an invoice with the merchandise.' I could hear the man sigh. 'If they come in apricot, include two apricot.' I heard the man on the other end of the line choke and curse. He hung up quickly. Two days later UPS delivered the software. I didn't open the box just removed the invoice and gave it to the bookkeeper to pay.
"I spent more time selling than I was used to. After a while I realized I was waiting for him. But after two weeks the man with the ladder slipped my mind and the software also. They were buried under the slow advance of my plans for expansion which required bank credit and considerable dickering with a management firm and examining locations for outlets. The box of software became another box of merchandise and took a place under the counter next to a box of novelty items we were giving away.
"And just as he and his annoying request had been buried under the details of expansion and routine, he came in again. It was lunchtime and except for a part time college student who was helping out, I was alone in the store."
"'Excuse me.' I recognized the voice even though I had been turned away from him. 'You wouldn't by any chance carry software?'"
"I treated the request as the most normal, customary inquiry about a Pepsi or a Tigre shirt."
"'Of course,' I replied reaching down gracefully for the box of assorted software and bringing it to the counter. 'I'm sure you'll find what you want here.'"
"He rifled through the box."
"'It's an interesting assortment,' he commented. "'I think this might be what I am looking for. Could I see it run?'"
"I hadn't the least idea what he was talking about."
"'Could you run it for me. I just read about it in a magazine. I'd like to see it working.'"
"'This is a shirt store,' I said in exasperation. I had been astute, on the ball, in possession of myself, dominated the situation, communicated successfully. But I had run the string out. I hadn't the least idea what he was talking about or what he wanted."
"'Well', he said, 'if you sell software you have a machine to demonstrate it on.'"
"'Of course,' I said. 'What good is software without a machine to run it on.' It was starting to make sense to me. In order to do something with software you needed a machine.
"'It's in the shop being repaired,'I said, improvising nonchalantly. 'You know those machines.' He nodded."
"He said no more than, 'next week,' then 'and thank you,' and left."
"I called the man I had bought the software from. 'Send over a machine.'"
"There was silence for a moment before he asked tentatively, 'which machine?'"
"'Look,' I said, 'you sent me over software, send me over the machine to run it on.'"
"'I sent you over assorted software,' he said, trying to hold back his sense of violation. 'What machine…?'"
"I cut him off. 'Send me over a… few that will let me run the software you sent me. Is that right?' I added, just in case I had said something entirely wrong."
"'It's right, I guess,' he said, 'but it's a hell of a way to…'"
"'Never mind,' I shouted, 'just send them over…'"
"'But the price…'"
"I screamed at him. 'I don't care what it costs. Did I ask you. Just send two over. Two assorted to run some of the software.'"
"I had not looked at the invoice for the software so I did not know in what ball park we were playing. I thought at worst I was dealing with an item like a television set or tuner-amplifier. But it did not make a difference. Getting this man with his ladder off my back, teaching him a lesson once and for all, was the only thing on my mind."
"'I'll have the machines over tomorrow. By the way,' he added, 'I'm sending a Cromemco and an Apple,' he said."
"'I'm sure that will be fine,' I replied. 'I'll pay on invoice again. You got the check for the software.'"
"'Yes,' he replied. I heard him sigh again."
"He was as good as his word. Next afternoon six boxes came marked computer with my name on the label.
"As I unpacked the pieces of the systems, I realized I had jumped in over my depth. But the face of the man with a ladder stared at me. I understood his request as a challenge, a challenge that I could ignore only at the price of losing my self esteem and sense of well being, although I could not tell why I felt this way. I put one of the computers back in the box and focused my attention on the other, the Cromemco.
"It took me two weeks to set the system up. I was never much for mechanical, let alone electronic, gadgets. I had to pour over the manuals that came with machines for hours before I felt comfortable putting a plug in a socket.
"And after I had finally assembled the machine, the mystery of what to do with it just grew greater. It took me fully another two weeks before I could hook up the apparatus properly to try to run a program.
"During this period the man with the ladder never showed up but I found that, while the anticipation of his appearance had been the motivating force behind what I was doing at first, as I got more and more into the computer, I became fascinated by it. I spent less and less time in the store selling and more and more reading manuals. About six weeks after I saw him last, the man with the ladder came into the store.
"He came into the store in the afternoon while I was trying to get the machine to do some simple processing. The college student who was minding the store knocked on the office door and announced a strange man insisted on seeing me about software.
"I resented being interrupted. My interest in teaching this little man a lesson had been buried under my sense of accomplishment in getting the machine together and actually running programs. I reluctantly told the clerk to bring him to the office."
"'Do you think I could see that program run?' he asked."
"'Of course,' I replied."
"'This is a very nice installation,' he said quietly. 'I haven't seen many set ups so well arranged.' I accepted the complement with pride."
"'Thank you,' I replied, genuinely pleased that he seemed to think it was well put together.'It's ready to run,' I said and moved out of the chair to let him work the machine."
"After he played with it for a little while he turned to me. 'It's slow, isn't it.'"
"'You could always alter the way it's configured. Probably would involve considerable debugging,' I said, not quite sure if what I was saying made sense, let alone if it could be done."
"'I've read,' he said to me, rather quickly I thought, 'that they're coming out with an update in a few weeks. I'll wait for that I think. Thank you for showing it to me. I hope I haven't inconvenienced you. I…'"
"'No,' I said, caught between wanting to talk a little about the machine and at the same time wanting to get back to playing with it. 'No, no inconvenience at all. Come back when the update comes out. I'm sure I can get it for you and I'll run it.'"
"He seemed not at all inclined or interested in hanging around. As he turned to leave our eyes met briefly and he said something I recalled hearing before, something whose meaning is still a mystery to me. He said, 'I knew you looked Hungarian,' and he left."
"The rest of the story doesn`t bear much telling. When I got the bill for the machines I realized that unless I could figure out something to do with them, teaching the man with a ladder a lesson was going to be the most expensive exercise in civic virtue and public education that I would ever undertake. Since I knew how to sell things I decided I would try to sell software and computers. I did what I did with the soda. I put a sign in the window and a sign by the entrance to the mall. Although it took a little more time, the consequence was the same. By the fall I had winnowed the shirt section of the store, triaged the soft drinks and gourmet foods and transformed 'Shirts and Things' into 'Computers and Things.' The second store and the third came soon after the first.
"The microcomputer revolution had begun and I had caught the first long rolling wave and I was riding it to fame and fortune. After a while I went back to school. I dropped out when it became clear that graduate work in computers was not going to teach me anything I needed to know that I could not learn on my own. I worked for a while in the back of one of the stores and designed the machine that bears my name.
"I am sure you want to know if I ever saw the man with the ladder again. I am not sure exactly. One day I was in the store demonstrating a program I had written for the machine I had designed. The demonstration was over, and the small group of businessmen were impressed. These were major managers of large businesses in the metropolitan area and I was sure that their acceptance of the machine would shift me into a manufacturing operation of major proportions. I was filled with pride and certain that the future was secure. As I turned from the machine a man came up to me, unceremoniously and asked in what I thought was a impish voice, 'do you sell shirts,' and before I could give him an answer he replied lightly to his own question, 'I guess not,' and he smiled and left."
The Man with the Ladder was what everyone called him. Everyone, even himself.
For a while after no one called him anything else, he clung to his last name for formal affairs like weddings and circumcisions, and to his first name for those informal occasions when he wanted to criticize himself thoroughly. But finally he gave them both up and forgot them. He got the name because he carried a ladder around almost all the time.
He depended on it for work. He did mostly odd jobs. He changed light bulbs in high places, he painted ceilings, he filled high shelves, he retrieved animals from trees. He would do anything that require a man to situate himself in a vertically inaccessible place, a man with a ladder.
When he wasn't working, he carried the ladder around anyway. At first, he told himself that it it was because you could never tell when a job might present itself. After a while he relinquished that illusion and accepted the simple truth that he liked to sit on the ladder, on its very top step, and look at the world from it.
He loved Chinese food. He believed that his taste for Chinese dishes was an inherited trait, part of his genetic endowment, although he knew for a fact that his father and his mother loathed Chinese food even though they liked it better than anyone else in the family.
Everyone who knew him agreed that genetics probably explained a little more about him than it did about most people. Even his casual friends suspected that after genetics got done explaining all there was about him that could use explaining, there would be very little genetics left over.
Something he had read in the Readers Digest had offered him hope that when the human genome was completely mapped, the discovery of a food preference gene would explain his affinity for Chinese food. But anticipating that discovery offered him little comfort because he felt that his enjoyment of Chinese food was deteriorating slowly because he could only promise himself that someday his cravings would be explained, and, like many of us, he needed to feel that he fully understood his cravings in order to be able to indulge them.
He was always considering other, ad hoc explanations.
He scrutinized the hypothesis that the food was cheap and good and that the portions were large. He weighed the fact that there were Chinese restaurants everywhere. He evaluated the idea that all of the food groups were included in almost every dish, including some food groups he had never heard of. He even entertained the possibility that he might be addicted to fortune cookies. All of these fragments of an explanation he rejected as mistaken and misleading.
He even discarded the notion which appealed to him on other grounds, that it was the exotic character of the food, not so much the dishes that were served in the restaurants he ate at in Chinatown, but the food sold in the stalls—the spiny ocean things that thumped and swished at the people walking by, and the dark, splotchy, dried lumps of things that held their breath and waited, listening in earthen containers lining the sidewalks in front of stores. And although no restaurant he ate at served these things he looked forward to tasting one of them someday before he devoured his pan fried shrimp or General Paos chicken.
He decided after he thought about it a long time that he ate Chinese food in Chinatown because there was an invisible cord that tied him to China or China to him, and that eating Chinese food was snuggling up to China from the inside out, shortening the leash so to speak. And, when he thought about it a little more, he guessed that he ate in Chinatown because there were many Chinese adventures hanging around and that being there was his way of inviting one of these adventures to happen to him.
He ate in Chinatown at least once a week but not the same way every week. He had embroidered a routine for himself. He would alternate weeks. One week was for adventure—and he would seek out a new restaurant; one week was for security—and he sought out what he called his anchor, his regular restaurant, in the sometimes stormy culinary China seas.
There were always new restaurants to try. It was a curious fact about Chinese restaurants that there were always new Chinese restaurants opening but very few Chinese restaurants ever closed.
In fact, before the night he saw the closed restaurant on an unfamiliar cull de sac, the only restaurant he could remember ever going out of business was Sam Wu's, which had been his regular restaurant—his anchor—when it very suddenly disappeared: one day Sam Wu's was there, crammed with people stuffing dumplings and noodles and steamed crabs into their mouths, the next day, in its place, was a shop selling thousand year old eggs, roots and souvenirs.
The loss of his anchor was a personal calamity. It shattered his faith in Chinese restaurants. For a long time after his mooring was lost on the stormy seas of Chinese commerce, he fought his attachment to Chinese food out of a fear that all Chinese restaurants might suddenly flick out of existence one day and, unable to eat any other kind of food, he would slowly starve, or, what he believed was worse, have to survive on his own cooking.
In the window of the restaurant at the end of the cul de sac there was a large sign in English stating ambiguously, "Closed; going to visit the Queens." The front of the restaurant was wrapped in a brightly colored red ribbon with Chinese characters on it which, although he could not understand its message, he was sure proclaimed something entirely different.
He passed the restaurant warily because a closed Chinese restaurant was a omen. He was apprehensive also, because, seated on the steps of the restaurant was a very well dressed man who had the saddest, most forlorn look on his face that the Man with the Ladder had seen on a face for a long time.
The look stirred up memories.
The only person he could remember on whose face a look so profoundly and piercingly depressed had ever appeared, was Mr. Schmidt, his second year High School English teacher who was so completely demoralized and frustrated trying to convey the sense of "The Ancient Mariner" to a bored and disinterested class, that he threw caution and twenty years of teaching experience to the wind and made Fat Lisa come to the front of the room and lock her arms around his neck and hang there pretending to be the Albatross. Under the weight of the fat girl and the classes determined refusal to comprehend anything, he made a face, or, as the Man with the Ladder remembered it, a face appeared on his face, a face suffused with pain and suffering, which everyone in the class identified immediately as the face of the old sailor in the poem.
Unfortunately the effect of the demonstration was misdirected and a generation of students understood that an Albatross was a fat girl with braces and that the poem was a metaphor for a really unhappy relationship. It was that face that had reappeared on the well dressed man sitting on the steps of the closed restaurant.
The Man with the Ladder was caught between a potent curiosity about the closing, which pulled him forward to peer into the window of the restaurant, and an intense desire to avoid an encounter with the seated man, which held him back. For a moment he just stood paralyzed. As curiosity won and propelled him forward, he found himself snared as the man suddenly looked up, caught his eyes, and made a noise that resembled something between a warning and a cry of being trapped which sounded like "don't something".
The Man with the Ladder was sophisticated and street smart. But the seated man looked so tormented that the Man with the Ladder, like Mr. Schmidt before him, abandoned intuition and experience, threw caution to the wind, and sat down on the step of the restaurant next him.
"What is it?" he blurted out. "There are other restaurants. As I remember this one it wasn't all that good." He lied. He had never eaten in the restaurant; in fact, he did not remember every having seen it before, but the impulse to reduce the man's suffering was overwhelming. "I…, Don't what?" The look on the man's face silenced him.
"It was in this restaurant I met her."
The Man with the Ladder twitched, pricked by the impulse to leap up immediately. There was nothing like a love affair gone sour to kill an appetite for days, not only the unhappy lovers' but anyone's within in 50 yards of the recounting of the tragic episode. Empathy for one's fellow man was one thing, loss of appetite for Chinese food was quite another. The man reached out, grasped his arm and held him down.
"It was not like that. Not at all. It is a sad tale."
The Man with the Ladder was sure it was. And he was sure it was going to be a long and appetite killing story also and he wanted to stuff himself thoroughly once before he kissed goodby to his taste for Chinese food for a while. He interrupted. "If you don't mind could we go somewhere and eat while you are telling me the story. It's not that…"
"I understand," the man said and stood up and waited dumbly until the Man with the Ladder swung around and headed immediately for his regular restaurant, his anchor, even though it was an adventure week, because he hoped it could buffer whatever tale the man could tell.
When they pushed into the restaurant the owner who usually greeted the Man with the Ladder as a long lost relative because he ate there as regularly as the waiters, stared at him oddly as if he were a stranger, completely out of place.
"Are you sure you have the right restaurant?" the manager asked. "We don't want any trouble here." Stunned, the Man with the Ladder could only nod mutely. The manager seated them as far away as possible from everyone else in the restaurant. When the tea came the Man with the Ladder's companion began talking.
"I like to eat Chinese," the man said, staring at the empty tea cups filled with napkins on the table. "I've must have eaten at every restaurant in Chinatown, at least all of the restaurants that were here as of…," he scrutinized his fingers as if he expected them to remind him of the relevant dates, "…until two months ago."
The Man with the Ladder, not sure he was not already in deeper than he wanted to get, throttled the impulse to tell the man that by chance, he had found a soul mate, and scurried back to the role of sympathetic listener. "What happened then?"
"I went into the restaurant, the one you found me sitting in front of. I had set out to eat in another restaurant but they were having a party. Every restaurant in Chinatown seemed to be having a party that night except that restaurant. It was curious. I did not remember seeing that restaurant before that night and I thought I knew Chinatown. I went in reluctantly although I could not tell why." He hesitated a moment before he continued as if he were marshaling his memory against forces which were preparing to assault it. "It was very strange. You saw the building," he said. "The inside seemed much larger than the outside. It was the mirrors. There were mirrors everywhere. Usually Chinese restaurants are set up so that every table is on a straight line from the kitchen. But in this restaurant you couldn't tell where the kitchen was. Even though there were no people sitting at any of the tables I could see, waiters, carrying trays loaded with food burst out from behind mirrored partitions and quickly vanished behind other mirrored partitions carrying empty plates.
"The restaurant manager dressed in long robes came out from behind the counter where you pay the bill. He bowed like a mandarin official."
"'Smoking or non smoking?'"
"'Smoking, I said.'"
"'Vegetarian or non vegetarian?'"
"I was puzzled. I wasn't sure what he wanted to know. No one had ever asked me to express a preference about that in a Chinese restaurant."
"'Do you eat meat?'"
"'Yes.' He looked mildly critical."
"'Kuazi, chadzi.' I looked blankly at him. "'Chopstick or fork,'" he asked."
"I began to resent the questioning. The restaurant was empty. He repeated the question."
"'Chopsticks,' I said with pride."
"'How many in your party?' I looked around."
"'Me.'"
"'One,' he said to himself softly. 'Do you have a reservation?'"
"I stared back at him blankly. The restaurant was completely empty."
"'I might be able do it this time but…' He looked at the reservation list which I could see was blank. 'But.' It was a stern warning. Then the questions began again. 'Do you prefer music or non music?'"
"I could hear nothing."
"'Anywhere,' I said. 'Anywhere.'"
"'It is not so simple,' he said quietly."
"'It is,' I insisted. 'There,' I said pointing to a table next to a mirrored wall in the middle of the restaurant."
"'Sorry,' he replied, 'that table is reserved.'"
There was silence for a while. "'I think there,'" he said after a minute, indicating the table next to the one I had pointed to. 'There might be possible.' Three waiters were lounging against the wall. He called one of them over and they had an energetic whispered conversation in fluid, rolling Chinese."
"He called each of the other waiters in turn and spoke with them. They went back to the wall and stood vigilantly."
"'It will be a minute,' he said to me."
"I couldn't imagine what was going on. I worried for a minute that I had stumbled onto a private preserve of some Tong Don, the counterpart of those Italian restaurants that always seem to be waiting for the party of some mafioso godfather. I thought he might have been trying to warn me with the obscure questions. None of it made sense. I decided to eat at Mcdonald's."
"'If it's too much trouble'" I said, "'perhaps I'll come back…I can…' I was apologetic."
"His look chastened my lack of patience. I waited a few minutes longer and anger replaced my confusion. But the instant I had decided I had had enough of this charade and turned sharply and silently towards the exit the manager bowed slightly and said loudly, 'your table is ready,' and a fourth waiter, not one of the three waiters hanging on the wall, walked from behind one of the mirrored crevices and took me by the elbow and moved me quickly, first to the right then to the left around a mirrored partition. We ended up at quite another table than the one to which the manager had assigned me."
"'But the manager…'"
"'The manager. The manager. He thinks he's the emperor.' His voice was laced with contempt. 'This table is better for you,' the waiter said in conspiratorial tones."
"I was disoriented. The restaurant did not seem exceptionally large but he had moved me around and I could not tell exactly where I was. I could see the manager but only reflected in a mirrored partition that distorted distances and directions. The table to which he had led me was filled with the half eaten remains of a meal. I had not seen anyone eating but steam still rose from the soup. The three dishes on the table had only been nibbled at. They were incredible dishes. In all of my eating in Chinese restaurants I had never seen such dishes. Each sat on a finely wrought porcelain platter. The food on the first plate was an intricate and only slightly disfigured architecture of noodles and bean curd and mushrooms. The second plate held a barely damaged, delicately carved fowl with deep reddish skin flecked with spices. It was as if the diners had removed bits of the food but not disturbed the form and character of the dishes. A bowl held the third dish, a soup in which pearlescent fish shaped noodles seemed to be swimming in the pale, yellow liquid. In the ashtray a cigar smoldered. I smoke cigars. The aroma was spectacular. I looked at the band. It read, Montichristo, Habana."
"No one came to clean off the table so I stared reverently at the remains of the meal until my waiter came and took out his little pad and hovered over me. As casually as I could I said, 'Eating isn't really important to me.' I looked at him to see if he registered the indifference I was trying to display as sophistication. 'Anything will do. Just bring me the same things as the people who were here ordered.'"
"The waiter scrutinized the table and scratched characters on his pad. 'None of that soup is left,' he said with a tone of satisfaction."
"'Well whatever…' I tried not to let my disappointment show. 'A soup like whatever this soup is.'"
"'Not likely,' the waiter muttered and disappeared, whistling."
"I sat there. I was hungry. The dishes in front of me were still warm. They tempted me. I am a lawyer, a successful lawyer," he added as if the Man with the Ladder might get the wrong idea, or not get the right one. "I thought of diseases, of what my clients might think if they saw me picking at someone's left over meal. I fought with myself. The food looked so delicious. I even entertained the notion of a puff on the cigar. I struggled with myself before I gave into temptation and decided to graze a bit before my duplicate of the meal came. Just as I raised my chopsticks a busboy materialized. 'These not yours?' he asked loudly. 'No,' I set the chopsticks down. He harvested the plates and the ashtray."
"I was embarrassed and disappointed but hopeful. My own meal would come soon. I knew it was going to be an extraordinary dinner and I prepared myself mentally for a remarkable experience. Behind some mirrored partition someone was singing an oriental melody. It was very, very Chinese."
"My waiter's voice hurtled from behind me. 'Dinner's ready.' He set down three plates before me. They were nothing like the half eaten meal that had been kidnapped before my eyes. I was dazed."
"Reflexively, I lifted my chopsticks as he scrutinized me."
"'Not bad kuadzi technique' the waiter commented, 'for a big nose. How do you like it,' he asked solicitously."
"I tried to be cool. My raised expectations spoiled the meal, which was above average. 'Not bad, but are you sure these are the same dishes that the people here before me ordered,' I asked."
"He took out his pad and loudly announced in Chinese the names of dishes. 'Absolutely the same.'"
"What are they called in English?"
"'Very hard to translate.' He squinted at his pad. 'A dish made of chicken,' he said very slowly, 'Something made of pork.'"
"They both seemed like beef dishes to me and they both tasted the same, but I said nothing."
"'Soup different of course,' the waiter said. 'I told you.'"
"I had not looked at the soup. 'The soup is called, Soup of soup ingredients.'"
"But are they the same as…."
"He seemed impatient and read the characters from his order pad and checked the table and said again loudly. 'Exactly the same.'"
"I ate the meal in silence. The idea struck me that perhaps I could salvage something from the disaster yet. As I was finishing the dinner the waiter came around to check on my progress. "Do you sell cigars, I asked?"
"'Does a Panda eat rice noodles in the stands of bamboo?' he replied. I tried to figure out if that meant no or yes and decided not to let it matter. 'Bring me the most expensive one you have,' I responded. He disappeared reappearing momentarily carrying a Garcia and Vega Perfecto. The disaster was complete. He stood around while I fumbled with the cigar staring implacably as I removed the cellophane and reached resignedly for matches."
"'This is a not-smoking section,' the waiter said belligerently. I looked around. The restaurant was empty. I sensed he was resentful, as if I were withholding something from him, pleasure at the meal, satisfaction with the cigar. Then I realized he thought my lack of enthusiasm would affect his tip. As if to confirm my suspicion he disappeared only to reappear almost instantly with the check."
"Something was wrong, but I could not tell what. I scanned the table without a real awareness of what I was searching for. It was barren. Then I realized what was unusual. I had never eaten in Chinatown without some token dessert, fortune cookies or orange slices. There was nothing on the table but the bill with totals scratched out and replaced a number of times. I stared blankly at him. I blurted out, 'fortune cookies.'"
"'No fortune cookies,' he snarled with the same contempt he had expressed for the be-robed manager. His eyes brightened. 'We do have a fortune teller however.' Before I could say anything he darted away to fetch from the hidden kitchen the mother of fortunes, who turned out to be a grizzled old man in a filthy apron. 'Sun Ming,' he announced, 'Little flower. He sees the future and the past.'"
"The waiter pushed him towards me. The diminutive personage stuck his face very close to mine. 'Surprises await you.' He turned and looked blankly at the waiter. "
"'He's shy,' the waiter said matter of factly, and gave him a little shove."
"'Surprises await you,' the grizzled man repeated loudly. He looked down at the plates then up at me. 'You will experience disappointments. When you see the light it's wonderful but sometimes afterwards, you yearn for the darkness again. Buy Australian gold stocks, Lodestone International. More disappointments. You will prevail if you persist but you are a person who lacks direction and purpose.' He wrenched himself out of the waiter's grip and fled back to the kitchen."
"The fortune disturbed me and I left more of a tip than was appropriate and fled from the restaurant. I could not eat anything for three days," the sad faced man added as a footnote.
"After a few days my memory of the event changed; the picture of the episode softened and became droll and humorous. When someone at the office proposed we eat out in Chinatown I immediately suggested this restaurant, recounting the story in a way that made it seem a comical adventure."
"I had some trouble finding the restaurant and the moment I shepherded the small party through the door I realized that something was different." He sighed. "Everything was different. The manager was no longer dressed in the robes of some official but wore a Armani double breasted suit. Most of the mirrored partitions had been folded and removed and the kitchen doors were line of sight. The restaurant was nearly filled with eaters. There was muzak in the background."
"'How many in your party?' the manager asked."
"'Five,' I said."
"He asked no more questions."
"'Don't you want to know if we eat quickly or like music?'"
"The manager looked at me curiously. 'Those are no concerns of ours. We are not communists,' he said gently."
"The waiter was the same waiter who had served me before. He was polite when he brought tea and bright red menus and handed them around. 'Our special today is tripe with orange mixed sea food platter.' He gave no indication that he recognized me."
"The meal was not much better than the usual restaurant fare but my companions whose usual Chinese meals were takeouts on Long Island were pleased. At the end of the meal the fortune cookies came with orange slices. The only unusual thing happened when our order came and my companions were distracted by the waiter setting down the dishes. For some reason I was staring at the kitchen. The door opened slightly and the head of the fortune teller, Little flower, popped out, winked at me then disappeared back into the kitchen."
"My office mates teased me about the story I had told them. 'That must have been some meal. Too much mu shu in the pork. Shanghaied your mind. You're sure it was this restaurant?' I was sure. There was no way I could explain what had happened to me to them or to myself and I did not try."
The Man with the Ladder twisted in his seat. Listening was making him hungry. The waiters were flitting around but it was as if he and his sad faced companion were invisible. He tried to get the attention of the waiter he knew by name but even he ignored him. The Man with the Ladder's companion seemed not to be hungry at all. Indifferent to where he was and why, he seemed to be still sitting on the steps of the closed restaurant.
"I went back," he said. The Man with the Ladder knew that there was more to the story but hoped he could eat while he listened.
"I went back," his companion repeated.
"Because of the difference," the Man with the Ladder responded just to say something. He stuck his foot out a little, hoping to trip one of the waiters into paying some attention and taking their order. He knew exactly what he wanted.
"Yes, because it didn't make any sense and…." The 'and' caught the Man with the Ladder's attention, "and…I made a lot of money on the gold stock."
The Man with the Ladder was confused.
"The Australian gold stock. The fortune. Out of the blue my broker called me up and suggested I shift a piece of my portfolio. 'Your hospital stocks haven't moved in the last three months. Why don't you sell them and buy into a biotech company I just happen to have a tip on.'"
"'What about gold stocks,' I asked, 'lets say,Lodestone, It's an Australian issue.'"
"He took a minute to get it on line."
"'I wouldn't recommend it. Hasn't moved in two and a half years. Worse than your hospitals. Dead in the water. Now this Fleshtech, lots of action. I have a tip that its going to climb vertically.'"
"'Buy me the gold stock. Move me out of the hospital stock and buy Lodestone.' He tried to talk me out of it."
"'Look,' I said, 'if it doesn't move we can sell it in a week and buy Fleshtech.'"
"'OK,' he said, 'but who knows how far up Fleshtech will go in a week. Where did you hear of Lodestone?'"
"I felt a little silly telling him a fortune teller in a Chinese restaurant told me, so I made up something about a date I had had with a secretary who worked in the economic section of the Australian embassy." He held his breath as if he was waiting for something that might change the past. When it did not come, he continued. "They discovered a vein of something or other. The price of the stock soared and I made a mint. I felt I had to go back to the restaurant although I wasn't quite sure of what I really wanted or what I was going to do."
The Man with the Ladder was following the figure of a waiter coming towards them. He shifted so that he could get up and physically grab the waiter who saw the maneuver and veered off sharply just as the Man with the Ladder's companion reached over and grabbed his elbow.
"It was just as it was."
"Which time," the Man with the Ladder asked, feeling he was obligated to play the role of listener until he collapsed from hunger.
"The first time. The first time," the sad man repeated, impatiently. "The manager in robes, the waiters lounging, the emptiness, the mirrors, the questions, all the same. It was like a bad joke. There were the remains of the same meal on the table. My request was the same and the meal that the waiter brought me was exactly the meal he had put down in front of me the first time and bore no resemblance to the leavings on the table. There were no fortune cookies."
"'Little flower is gone today,' the waiter said, after he brought the check. 'He's off. You do not get a real fortune teller with every meal,' he added. 'But I will tell your fortune.' He took out his pad and read a few sentences in stumbling Chinese."
"'What does not mean in english,'" I asked."
"'I am sorry', he said. 'It's hard to read, harder to translate. It starts in the future then it clouds up until the very end when it says something about 'a beginning, dizzy heights… it isn't exactly clear, is it? Do you want a cigar.'"
"'No,' I said, I'll pass up the cigar to day."
"The waiter seemed a little disappointed. I left what had become my usual tip, paid the bill and left."
Although the Man with the Ladder's attention was chasing the waiters gliding around the restaurant, he tried to look interested. His hunger was overpowering him and he realized that, instead of killing his appetite, the story had stoked it. He knew the story was going to end badly, it was just a matter of when it took its fatal turn.
He knew also that it would take that turn unexpectedly and when it did, his appetite would trip on it and get mangled and he was afraid it would happen before he had a chance to give it a few pan fried shrimp to tide it over what he knew would be a long recuperation. His stomach was complaining and he could not explain to it or to himself why, today of all days, everyone connected with his anchor, his refuge, was shunning him, whereas on every other time he had eaten in this restaurant the waiters were friendly and anxious to get the meal served and see him stuffing himself.
"And I went back again," the sad faced man continued undaunted. "I don't know why. Perhaps, he said I was looking for another tip on the market perhaps it was something else. It was…" He hesitated. "China. Perhaps it was China." He hesitated. "There are still mysteries in the world, you know."
The Man with the Ladder was certain there were mysteries in the world. He was confronting one now. Why were the waiters who were usually all over him, a few of whom he even thought about as personal friends, why were they absolutely ignoring him. And China? He could feel China's profoundest mysteries in his bones.
The sad man spoke up again from some far away place. "Why do we take the paths we do?" He looked beseechingly at the Man with the Ladder. "I could not help going back. It was pretty much the same. I tried answering all of the questions differently. It didn't help much. They seated me at the table beside the one I usually sat at. This time it was the table with the left over meal. I tried hard to think changing something that would make a difference. I decided I would not make that futile request for a duplicate of the meal that lay before me."
"'Bring me a menu' I told the waiter when he came to the table. Every table but mine had a large fat red folder on it. He reached back into his rear pocket, whipped out a creased sheet of rice paper on which five columns of Chinese characters were written, and handed it to me."
"'Couldn't I have a regular menu,' I complained, pointing to the fat book on the table next to mine.
"'This is the menu,' he said. 'Those are for show, for tourists,' he said condescendingly, 'not for regular customers.' I basked in the compliment although I was not sure it was intended. I wondered if he didn't really mean suckers."
"I picked up the piece of paper and stared at it. The waiter reached over and turned it right side up in my hand."
"'I can't read Chinese,' I explained. It seemed the only question the manager had neglected to ask when I came in."
"'I will explain it to you' the waiter said, pulling up a chair."
"He pulled a writing brush out of his pocket and pointed with the scraggly hairs to the first pair of characters. 'Confucius chicken with black fungus and strong noodle.' He scratched his head. 'The second,' he said 'is Confucius chicken with black fungus and strong noodle made with Confucius's own recipe—without the noodle. The third is a variation on the first dish. It's made not quite black. This, 'he said pointing to the fourth pair of characters, 'is the chef's version of the first dish. The chicken is plumper, meatier. Finally there is the same dish made with duck—but unfortunately we are out of that today.' He poured a little tea into the ash tray where the ashes of the Montichristo lay smoldering and stirred the ashes. They dissolved and made a rich black ink. Then he drew a fine black line with the brush through the last column of characters. He sat back proud of his performance."
"I pointed at the second column of characters. The waiter stood unmoving.
"'Of course,' he said, 'an excellent choice, but I would recommend the chef's variation. It is his favorite. He lavishes much more care on it.'" He set the sheet of rice paper on the table and went off whistling to the kitchen. The whistling jarred and disoriented me and for some no reason at all the argument for a point of law I had been struggling for a week to recall popped into my mind. I turned the menu over and jotted down the citations and stuffed it in my pocket.
"When the dish came it was the same dish I had always gotten only with a flower exquisitely carved out of a turnip dyed blood red. I was ready to eat the flower when I noticed not only had it been carved exactly but details of the leaves had been traced on the surface also. It was an exact reproduction. I tried to calculate how many hours it must have taken to reproduce the replica.
"The waiter watched me. 'The flower…,' I said."
"'Oh that, not significant at all.' He reached over and plucked it from the dish and dropped it into the ashtray. I ate a forkful of the meal."
"'Wonderful dishes,' the waiter said very seriously.' Perhaps you would like to hear the story of the dish.' Without waiting for me to consider the offer he sat down and began: 'This is the story of Confucius' soured curd goldfish.'
"But this is a chicken dish," I interrupted.
The waiter rose instantly. 'Sorry. Some other time perhaps,' and disappeared.
As his sad-faced companion lapsed into silence, The Man with the Ladder's stomach made a horrendous noise. He scanned the room for the waiters who seemed to have momentarily retreated to the sanctuary of some other part of the restaurant. His hunger squeezed up like a balloon filled to bursting with emptiness and thrust his restraint aside. He stood up suddenly up and, looking around wildly yelled, "WAITER." When he realized what he had done he collapsed instantly into his seat. His appetite fled momentarily in embarrassment but none of the other patrons paid any mind to him.
In a minute or two a scowling waiter appeared.
"Could we have a menu?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
Before the waiter could move the Man with the Ladder's companion touched his arm. "It's not necessary,' he said and pulled out of his pocket a piece of rice paper on which five columns of Chinese characters stood, one with a fine black line through it. He handed it to the waiter pointing at the first two pairs of characters.
The waiter looked startled, grasped the piece of rice paper tightly and backed away from the table.
"I kept the menu," the Man with the Ladders companion announced. "At least I think it's a menu," he said, looking at the waiter.
The Man with the Ladder sank deeper in his seat. He was convinced they would never eat or worse, that a non-descript, flat meal of the sort his sad faced companion had described would appear at the table. He had looked forward to pan fried shrimp in the shell and he had requested the menu only out of politeness and consideration for his companion.
The next moment the manager appeared with the rice paper menu in his hand. "I knew there was going to be trouble," he mumbled.
He held the piece of paper out in an almost threatening way. The Man with the Ladder's companion stared at the manager and the waiter who stood wincing nearby. "The first two," he repeated in an assertive voice. The manager retreated glaring over his shoulder at them, mumbling loudly in Cantonese.
A moment later the chef came out waving the paper and spoke rapidly at them in Chinese. The sad faced man stared at him impassively until the agitated cook stopped speaking. Then he reached over and put his finger on the first two sets of characters on the paper and nodded. The chef whined and retreated in the direction of the kitchen.
"What did he say?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"I haven't got the slightest idea," his companion said. "I expect its not a customary order."
"What did you order?"
"Confucius Chicken I think, but I really don't know." the man said. "I never used it before. I only thought since I was telling the story you might as well see what…"
The Man with the Ladder regretted the fact that he had abandoned his street smarts and sat down beside the sad faced man. The taste of pan friend shrimp withered in his mouth.
"I went back again," his companion repeated, resuming his story. "The next time was… " He stopped. "It was the same but different. First the questions, then the half eaten meal and the half smoked cigar again. I mean everything at first was the same but…"
"But what," the Man with the Ladder growled.
"She was there." He sighed. "After my usual meal came and I sat back for a moment and thought about what was going on. I decided that my fascination with the restaurant was bordering on the absurd. It became clear to me that it represented an attempt on my part to escape from a very ordinary existence as a successful lawyer, and find something unusual and exotic without having to take any risks. I convinced myself that the meal left on the table, Little flower's fortune, the menu on rice paper was routine incompetence disguising itself as something profound. It suddenly was obvious to me that continually coming back to the restaurant was just a form of neurotic self deception. Then I saw her."
"Saw who?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"In a mirror, only a reflection. The back of a woman. I realized that, except for the day when I had come with my companions and been deceived, I had never seen anyone else eating in the restaurant. I thought the restaurant must be doing all of its business during lunch. The fragment of an image of another person startled me. I could tell by the hair it was a woman. From what I could see she was wearing was one of those long Chinese dresses with a slit but it was difficult to be sure because I had only a very partial view. I could tell by the way the half of head held itself and the fragment of the delicate arm moved that she was beautiful. At least that is what I wanted to believe."
"Was she?" the Man with the Ladder asked. The story had suddenly become interesting. The way the woman had appeared in the story captured the Man with the Ladder's imagination.
"I couldn't really tell. I told myself that it was another trick, something like the half eaten meal on the table. But it seemed to me she was beautiful even though I couldn't see enough to be certain.
I tried to maneuver myself to get a better view of her but no matter how I shifted the mirrors took her out of view. I settled back into my old position and settled for the half image."
"When the waiter came with the check I was afraid to mention the woman. I thought of a ploy. 'You know I'm still a bit hungry. I'd like to order another dish, I said.'"
"'Sorry,' the waiter answered, scribbling out the bill, 'the kitchen's closed. The chef is meditating.' He presented the check. 'I'm afraid Little flower is still away,' he said, flipping through his check pad, 'and I have no fortune today. But I will tell you a story instead,' he stated, and pulled out a chair and sat down.
"'Well this is a story of Wu Min,' he said. 'Actually its a story of Wu Min before he became Wu Min, the Wu Min that we know. Wu Min the Zen Master.'
I must have looked distracted because he pulled his chair closer blocking my view of the fragment of the image of the woman."
"'You've heard it before?' he asked."
"'No.' I really was distracted."
"'Well then, Before Wu Min was Wu Min but after he knew he was going to be Wu Min the devil came to him—to see if he couldn't tempt him out of it. You have heard of Wu Min? 'he asked, suddenly suspicious."
"'I'm afraid not,' I answered."
"The waiter shook his head. 'He was…he was brilliant—a nut case, a thinker, a Zen Master. You really never heard of him,' he asked incredulously?"
"'Out of what,' I asked trying to keep him from dwelling on my ignorance."
"'Out of becoming Wu Min.'"
"'But he was Wu Min.'"
"'Not that Wu Min, not yet. The devil tried to tempt him into not becoming the Wu Min all of us know—at least most of us know,' he added sarcastically—'and respect for his knowledge and wisdom,' he added."
"'He brought a woman to him. A beautiful woman. A really beautiful woman. Really beautiful.'"
"I shifted my chair to see if I could catch a glimpse of the woman in the red dress but the waiter shifted with me."
"'He brought this really beautiful woman into Wu Min's village then paid a visit to Wu Min just to make sure he got the message.'"
"'There's a new beautiful woman in town,' he said to Wu Min. 'I think you'd like her. She's just your type. Then he disappeared.'"
"'It was true. The devil had made this woman just for Wu Min. She was constructed to satisfy his every whim and desire. She completed him perfectly. The devil knew that Wu Min would see through any half baked temptation, a woman with merely a veneer of beauty, so the devil decided to pay the cost of the real thing.'"
"'Wu Min went out to find out what the devil the devil was talking about. True enough, the cousin of a cousin of Wu Min's had come to town. She had been sent to live with her uncle because of some family tragedy. One look at her told Wu Min she was the woman of his dreams.'"
"'But Wu Min was ready to become Wu Min, the real Wu Min. He knew that if he married the woman he would not… could not become Wu Min, that he would lead the most satisfying life a man can have on earth but that he would never attain the insight into the world that he would attain if he pursued his path to knowledge. He immediately went home packed his bags and moved to the southern capital. He never saw her again.'"
"The waiter looked at me to see if I had gotten the point. When he had satisfied himself that I hadn't he asked, 'Well. Don't you see.'"
"See what. Would he?"
"'Would he what,' the waiter asked."
"I was thinking of the reflection of the woman in the mirror. 'Been happy with the woman. '"
"The waiter made a didactic face. 'Perfectly happy. Perfectly content. He would have been the happiest man on earth for a little while not the crotchety, gloomy, mystic Zen Master he became. The devil was willing to pay that price.'"
"What happened to her?"
"'To whom?' the waiter asked."
"The woman."
"'Oh, she married Wu Min's brother who lived a life like a contented cow and had 14 children all of whom grew up to be officials.'"
"He pushed his chair back and got up. 'I hope the story enlightened you.' I shifted to try and catch sight of the woman. She was gone."
"I went back again, of course. The manger gave no sign that he recognized he. The questions started as they usually did. Smoking or non-smoking. I paid no attention to them and I repeated my choices by rote."
"'You must live a dull life,' the manager commented as he told me that it would take a moment before my table was ready. The waiter came and escorted me to the same place I always sat. I did not mind it because I knew that she would be there."
"How did you know?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"I don't know how I knew, I just knew it. The way we know a lot of things we don't know we know."
"She was there, or her reflection was there, in the mirror. The same long hair, the same red dress."
"'Who's the woman?' I asked casually when the waiter brought my meal?"
"'What woman?' the waiter answered innocently."
"'That woman,' I said, pointing to the reflection in the mirror."
"'Oh, that woman, probably a customer. Not at one of my tables though,' he added."
"'Do you think I could have a table closer to her,' I asked."
"'Not possible, sorry,' he said,'all of the tables are booked.'"
"I spent the meal looking at half of her reflection in the mirror and wondering how I could get closer to her. I figured out a clever ploy. 'Where's the bathroom?' I asked the waiter on one of his check out runs to see if I had enough tea."
"'Thirsty today, lot of court talk, eh. Over there,' he said, pointing in the direction of the woman. 'But you've got to go this way. Construction. Make a left by the plant then a right, then a sharp move forward then left again. Volli.'"
"I headed in the direction he had pointed out thinking that I would move toward her as soon as I was out of sight. It was hopeless. The restaurant was a maze of mirrored passages. With the first turn I took I got lost in a maze of reflections; with the second I had lost my sense of direction entirely."
"With each pivot I worked myself deeper and deeper into what seemed an maze of self enveloping turns. I could not believe I had gotten inextricably lost in what was really a very small space. Completely confused I finally stopped and yelled 'Help' loudly. The waiter appeared instantaneously and led me to the bathroom. It was embarrassing. "
"'I'd better wait for you,' he said, as if he might have been talking to a child. When I got back to my table she was gone of course."
"The frustration was wearing me down. I went through the motions at the office but strangely enough my work did not suffer. In fact, it seemed to improve. The law seemed to become transparent to me. I was able to disentangle the hidden form of the law from the overgrown snarl of case and interpretation. I was able to splice the case to the principle absolutely clearly. I seemed to be able to accomplish what needed to be accomplished effortlessly. "
"Legal work became simpler than it was before. But the restaurant. It seemed to grow in complexity. I noticed things about it each time I went back, ordinary things that I had never noticed before, the pattern on the managers robe, for instance, and the positions of the waiters seemingly stuck to the wall."
"And the woman?" the Man with the Ladder asked, trying not to seem excessively interested in one detail.
"She was there each time I went."
"The waiter and I became friendly. 'How's work?' he asked the next time when I came in. 'The food is really special today,' he squinted at me, as if we had some private understanding about the food. He took out a new piece of rice paper. 'We lost the old menu' he said in an accusing tone. 'This is a new menu.'"
"The same ten characters were set neatly in five groups of two. 'I'll have to explain them again, I suppose' he said resignedly."
"No need. Let the chef pick. I was anxious to see her again or her reflection or half of her reflection. The same meal came that always came."
"I tried to get them to move me closer to her. I complained about a draft. They shifted me to another table in her direction. But it turned out that while her reflection was closer, she seemed to have been displaced further away. I got more frustrated. I decided to just get up and move closer. I knew it would not work even though I could not tell why it would not work or how it would fail. But the certainty of failure did not discourage me. I waited until my usual meal was delivered. The waiter looked at me conspiratorially, as if we shared a secret. I had the feeling he wanted to say something but held himself back. I tried to plan the move around the mirrored barrier so that I would not startle her because, since I had first seen her, she had given no any indication she knew there was anyone else in the restaurant."
"It was hopeless." The Man with the Ladder's companion sighed.
The Man with the Ladder found himself pushing back nervously in his chair.
"I tensed to get up, and…"
"And," the Man with the Ladder repeated.
"And the doors of the restaurant opened and a hundred Texans, men in wide brimmed hats and woman with flowered handbags swarmed into the restaurant like gnats. A bus had disgorged its entire load of tourists into the restaurant. They teemed around me. When they settled down she was gone."
"I was obsessed. I started to come earlier than my usual time hoping to catch her coming in. I fantasied we could come in together and get the same table. But each time, no matter how early I got there she seemed to have just preceded me." He sighed again.
At this point the Man with the Ladder's companion stopped talking for a moment and seemed to listen to some voice the Man with the Ladder could not hear. "Most of us live incomplete lives. We live without encountering the whole of ourselves, without even noticing a parts of us are missing. Sometimes, if a person is lucky he or she manages somehow to connect with a part of themselves they never knew. If they are very lucky they connect with the part of themselves that is certain about the pieces of the world that they never knew were there. Somehow that evening in the restaurant I found the answer to a question without recognizing that there was a question and I found the totality of my self to the bargain."
The Man with the Ladder had no idea what his companion was talking about but felt it would be impolite and probably not very sensible to ask.
"The next evening I walked into the restaurant as if it was the first time I had ever eaten there and at the same time, as if I was home and had been eating there all my life. The manager in his mandarin robes bowed to me and I bowed back. Although I thought it might surprise him, he hardly seemed to notice it."
"'Smoking or non smoking?' he asked as he always did. As I listened to the question I realized it was a material question and that it raised interesting issues. I thought about it for a moment. 'Smoking,' I said. I listened carefully to the rest of the questions and answered each one as exactly as I could. When the manager was finished with the queries he turned to check his empty list of reservations. 'Wait,' I said to him. 'Tonight I have two requests. The last few times I ate here you put me close to a woman. The woman distracts me from my food. Seat me where I will be free of that distraction.' The manager bowed slightly and moved backward. 'A second thing' I said, in my most authoritative voice. 'The table you sit me at always has the remains of a meal on it. That meal diminishes my pleasure in the dinner you serve me. I do not want to see it on the table before I eat my food. And today I am not particularly hungry. Tell the waiter to bring me what I usually ask for.'"
The Man with the Ladder looked at his companion. "But…"
"It does not make sense, does it?"
"No," the Man with the Ladder said. His appetite had suddenly abandoned him and left him feeling naked and defenseless with a foreboding that his world which was almost totally bent out of shape, was going to get another twist.
"The waiter accompanied me to a table next to her. 'I'm sorry,' he apologized. 'All of the other tables have been booked for a special party. I really apologize for seating you here… and….'"
"'More bad news,' I said feigning unhappiness. My insides were churning with joy with the anticipation of being able to see and talk to the mysterious woman. I had forgotten completely about eating."
"'I'm afraid so,' the waiter mumbled apologetically. 'Our cook is sick. Little Flower is cooking today. He,' he made a pained movement 'is not quite up to snuff. I'm afraid he only knows a few plain dishes.'
"There was no denying me. I put on a pained look. 'What are loyal customers for?' I said. 'Whatever he cooks, it will be fine.'"
"When the waiter left I looked at my eating companion. She was beautiful, more beautiful than I had imagined. I got up and walked the few steps to her table. She smiled. I told her how many times I had seen her partial refection in the mirror and how much I wanted to meet her."
"She was surprised. She had never noticed there was someone else in the restaurant. She had never eaten in any other Chinese restaurant but this one in Chinatown and she thought this was what all Chinese restaurants were like. I suggested we eat our meal together and she agreed enthusiastically. When the meal came it was the spectacular meal that I had see on the my usual table each time I had come into the restaurant."
He stopped talking and seemed to collapse.
"It was a disappointment," the Man with the Ladder concluded. "That is why you look so sad."
"On the contrary. It was more than a man could have asked for. Siverado, Shangri La. The dishes were the epitome of Chinese cooking, they seemed to embody China."
"And the woman?"
The man shuddered.
"It was like finding the woman of your dreams. Our conversation flowed carried along by an electricity that vitalized our words. The food moved us toward one another; it pulled us in directions we never would have thought of going in. We explored one another in Chinese directions."
"The waiter was more solicitous about tea than usual. We made small talk and large talk.
"Was she Chinese?
"Oh you mean the dress. No she was not but she seemed to be in love with China although it was a mystery to her why a Jewish girl born in New Jersey should feel that Jiaozi were more palatable than Blintze's and that Confucius made more sense than Maimonides. We talked endlessly. When the waiter came to pour tea he deposited two fortune cookies and asked me if I wanted a cigar."
"'No', I said, 'they are too expensive.' "
"He beamed. 'We had some left over from a party. On the house!' he said as he whipped out a Montichristo, from Habana."
"'Smoking or non smoking,' I asked, and the waiter winked. I looked at the woman whose name was Ellyse Matay. I thought she might resent the smell after the meal. 'My father smoked cigars,' she said quietly, 'I love the smell.'"
"I lit up."
He fell silent.
"The meal, the woman, the cigar—heaven," he sighed and then relapsed quickly into silence. The Man with the Ladder's appetite came creeping back but he pushed it away. It was not often someone told you a story of heavenly delights.
"We made a date," his companion continued, "for the very next night. We agreed to meet at the restaurant. She said she had to go back to work for a few hours. She had only recently come to New York and this was her first real job. I took her to a large office building in lower manhattan and kissed her good night." He shuddered with a mixture of pleasure and pain.
"And,"
"The next day when I got to the restaurant it was closed. Just as it was tonight, with that same sign on the door. I waited for her but she never showed up. I have been going back each day for a week but it is closed. She never shows up."
"Perhaps she is busy at work," the Man with the Ladder said, feeling helpless.
"Or gone to China." The sad faced man sighed and the sorrowful face, the face saturated with unhappiness reappeared, and the Man with the Ladder was reminded again of his high school teacher with fat Lisa around his neck. His companion sighed again. "I will go back. Tomorrow," he said, "tomorrow—or the day after, or after that——she will come, I know it."
A commotion brought the Man with the Ladder back to the reality of the restaurant. The chef and his two assistants were heading up the aisle towards his table with the dinner. They seemed exhausted. The ceremony they were putting on was daunting. They set the plates on the table solemnly, bowed slightly and said something in Chinese that sounded like something between a prayer and a curse.
The Man with the Ladder had never seen such a meal in any of the Chinese restaurants he had eaten at, certainly not here in his anchor. The food was spectacular to look at and the smell revived and cured his appetite. A miniature chicken had been constructed of vegetables and bean curd and stood next to a fat plump genuine mahogany colored chicken flecked. Over the glorious bird a cupola of noodles had been constructed.
The Man with the Ladder hesitated. The dishes posed a moral quandary. It did not seem quite right to destroy such a assemblage just to satisfy ones appetite. The chef stared at him expectantly dispelling the dilemma. The Man with the Ladder tucked his kuaizi into eating position. The chef leaned forward. As the Man with the Ladder pulled a piece of chicken apart, the chef tensed and stood inquiringly until he chewed and swallowed it. He said the only chinese phrase he knew; "zui hau chrde fan."
The chef and his crew retreated with smiles on their face raising a racket banging knives and serving platters leaving the Man with the Ladder and his companion eating in a strange silence. The Man with the Ladder was quiet out of respect for his companions dilemma and because the tastes that swirled in him mouth saturated his mind with a sense of a far away and mysterious place.
His companion picked at the food, unable to stir up any enthusiasm. He could have been eating rice gruel. The Man with the Ladder tried to synchronize his eating so that he would not appear impolite until his companion said to him, "I'm not really hungry eat up."
When he had consumed all he could eat, the Man with the Ladder turned to his companion and indicated that he was prepared to listen again.
"That all there is. I go back every night and wait for her. Its not important. I have direction and I am patient."
They sat for a while until the waiter came with the check. He was apologetic. 'We seem to have run out of fortune cookies,' he said, apologetically. 'We made do.' He put down two moon cakes out of which jutted pieces of paper on which fortunes had been hand written and the check.
The Man with the Ladder usually did not like moon cakes, but the thick shaped mounds of dough, like the meal which preceded the, were exquisite. The pattern which the dough had been impressed with showed clearly people eating joyous meal. He reached for his fortune then pulled back deferring to his companion, who plucked his fortune and read it out loud. "When you see the light its wonderful but sometimes you yearn for the darkness again. You are a person with direction and purpose. You will persist and prevail. OK, buy shares in Fleschtech technology." At the bottom of the fortune someone had drawn a little flower. He let it drop to the table.
The Man with the Ladder handled his fortune gingerly. It said simply, "Sometimes your fortune looks better on someone else."
While his companion went to the bathroom the Man with the Ladder gathered the rice paper menu and the two fortunes. When his companion returned he offered them to him. "No, the sad faced man said, "if you'd like them keep them, as souvenirs." The Man with the Ladder took out his wallet but his companion gathered up the bill and insisted on paying for the meal and leaving the tip.
"Thank you for listening," the sad faced man said when the Man with the Ladder thanked him for the meal, "it felt good to get it off my chest."
"What are you going to do now?" the Man with the Ladder asked, genuinely affected by the story and concerned about his companion.
"Its a nice night. I think I will go sit in front of the restaurant. When you come to Chinatown again to eat, look me up. You know where I'll be," he said, and walked away silently.
At least a month passed before the Man with the Ladder got around to eating in Chinatown again. For four weeks each time he decided to make his pilgrimage to eat Chinese food, some misadventure or mishap stepped between him and China. When he finally escaped from circumstance, he debated with himself for a longtime before he decided to risk the detour to see if his sad faced friend was still waiting on the steps of the restaurant.
Much to his surprise the restaurant at the cul de sac was open. A great many plants in large pots wrapped with banners proclaiming something loudly and clearly in Chinese, lined the entrance. A new sign had replaced the announcement in English that the occupants had gone to visit the Queens. It said, Under New Management!!! Grand opening: Open for the restaurant business. The sad faced man was nowhere to be seen on the steps in front of the restaurant.
He hesitated before pushing open the door. The restaurant seemed empty. The manger stood, in long robes stood with his back to him. When he turned around the Man with the Ladder recognized his sad faced eating companion.
"Welcome," his friend said, his voice full of excitement and genuine enthusiasm. "It's really good to see you again."
The Man with the Ladder was startled. "It's you. Why aren't you sitting on the steps," he blurted out, then, "what happened? Did she…"
"No," the be-robed man interrupted him, she has not returned yet." He bowed slightly before he continued. "After we ate a month ago I walked around for a long time. The solution to my problem struck me. I have you to thank for it. Thank you, thank you," he said, bowing awkwardly.
"What solution?" the Man with the Ladder asked, confused.
"I…, I bought the restaurant. I hired a cook and waiters. It is a certain way to be sure I will be her to meet her when she comes back. I know she will come back and I am ready. It was obvious." He seemed content. "Are you hungry. Would you like to eat?" he asked the Man with the Ladder. "Today is a special day, our grand opening."
"Yes," the Man with the Ladder replied, thinking of the meal they had eaten together. "I am hungry."
"Wonderful," his friend the manager said. "Uh, Smoking or on smoking."
"Non-smoking," the Man with the Ladder replied. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to stir and a buzzing rose gently in his head.
"Kuazi or no kuazi?"
The Man with the Ladder looked puzzled.
"Fork or chopsticks?" his friend explained the question.
"How about music?" his friend inquired quietly. "Do you like music or quiet."
He waited while the Man with the Ladder puzzled over the question. "I… I…quiet," he answered. The buzzing in his head got louder.
"It will be a minute before your table is ready." The Man with the Ladder looked over the mirror studded plain of empty tables devoid of customers. After five minutes the manager finally led the Man with the Ladder past three waiters who were lounging against the wall and showed him to a table which held the remains of a nibbled at meal much like the meal they had eaten together and nearly full bottle of a rare single malt scotch whisky that the Man with the Ladder had read about in a magazine called the 'Gentleman Gourmet.'
"I will serve you myself," his friend said with a wink. "I need the practice." As the Man with the Ladder sat down, the manager took out a piece of paper from his pocket. "Our chef is still getting the hang of things," he explained. "Our menu is still at the printer's." The Man with the Ladder tried hard to avoid staring at the fat red folder on the table next to his.
"Heres today's menu. I would recommend this," he said pointing to a set of characters on the sheet of rice paper he held out. "Its something special. A fish dish from the west of China. Where Confucius came from. Its the Chef's specialty."
He stopped as if the presentation of the menu was over.
"What about the other dishes?" the Man with the Ladder asked innocently, although he could feel his appetite shake loose from its moorings and start to drift out to sea.
"They're the same thing—a vegetable more, a noodle less."
The Man with the Ladder nodded although his head seemed to fill with the buzzing and he heard a quiet but shrill voice begin to screech something silently at him which he could not quite make out. "I'll have the first dish."
"A very wise choice," the manager said as he pulled away bowing slightly.
It seemed to the Man with the Ladder that someone or something had very quietly moved very close and was standing just behind him. It was as if someone had opened a door and an uninvited, very Chinese guest had walked in and stood waiting to be acknowledged. And even though the meal took a long time in coming he sat very still; and after it came even, although it tasted much more like beef than fish and had no bones, he ate it with his head down and said nothing; and although he thought he saw a movement in the mirror in front of him and thought he heard the rustling of silk somewhere in front of him, he kept his face buried in his food did not look up once; and, even though he knew it was impolite, he did not unroll the oddly folded piece of paper that had FORTUNE printed on its face, and he paid the bill without looking at his friend and said goodby hurriedly and pushed though the bunting bound doors with his head down and his ears shut as tightly as he could without actually covering them with his hands.
The Man with the Ladder had just entered the park when he was approached by a seedy looking man with a clipboard who came up to him and without any introduction at all said: "We need a man with a ladder, do you want a day's work?"
Because, like most self-employed men, the Man with the Ladder found it impossible to refuse the offer of a job, he was seldom curious about what the job entailed.
"What would I be doing?" he asked. The bluntness of the offer had startled him.
"Whatever they need a man with a ladder to do." the man said matter of factly, "Whatever a person with two feet solidly on the ground couldn't possibly do."
"Where will I be working?" It was the other question he rarely asked.
"Right here," the man answered, pointing to a the center of the park, where the Man with the Ladder noticed for the first time, that a stage was being erected.
He had to think about the offer a moment. He had worked all over the city, his ladder marked him as a handyman, a useful visitor to any community. It served him as a passport. But the one place he had never worked was the park. The park was where he relaxed, where he spent his leisure time; toiling where he usually played gave work an entirely different cast.
"You get paid cash at the end of the day's work," the man with a clipboard added.
It was an offer the Man with a Ladder could not refuse. He assented with a nod and the seedy hiring agent wrote something down on the clipboard and started to walk away.
"Don't you want to know my name?"
The agent looked up from his writing, "You're a man with a ladder, right?"
"The Man with the Ladder." he corrected him.
"A difference that doesn't make a difference," the man with the notebook shrugged, "except perhaps to you. They're waiting for you up there." He pointed in the direction of the stage.
The Man with a Ladder made his way to the center of the park, scrambled up on the stage and plunged into the mob of milling workers. The individual supervising the construction was someone who seemed vaguely familiar, a rough, wild looking person who barked out directions to the workmen on stage and whose supervision consisted of watching a person carefully until he figured out what the person was doing—or about to do—then ordering them, loudly, to do it.
"Hey ladderman, work on the sky," the supervisor yelled just as the Man with a Ladder stretched up to arrange a few of the clouds which drifted on wires above the lampposts on stage. He screwed light bulbs into the lampposts and brushed the leaves on the trees.
"I don't think our boss has any has any idea about what it's supposed to look like," the Man with the Ladder whispered to a man in overalls leaning against one of the lamposts smoking a cigar. "So far it looks like a mishmash."
The supervisor stared at him coldly as if he had heard the comment. "If you think you can do better you can be boss!" he announced loudly to no one in particular and hopped down nimbly from the stage and sprained his ankle.
"I'm glad you fired him." said a woman in a smock who was creating a lawn of grass out of shredded paper.
"I didn't fire anybody." the Man with the Ladder said.
"He didn't fire me, I quit!" the supervisor shouted from below them.
"I'm just a workman." the Man with the Ladder explained to the heads turned in his direction.
"Then how did you fire the supervisor?" asked a large man who was working on a miniature stage in the middle of the park on the stage.
"He didn't fire me, I quit!" the supervisor shouted, hobbling from the park.
"See I told you," said the Man with the Ladder, "I don't even know what we're working on, do you?"
"It looks like a mishmash to me." offered a man in an apricot work shirt repeating what the man with the cigar had said to him. He was trying to add realism to the trees by getting them to lean in exactly the same direction as the trees in the park. Without the distraction of orders and supervision each of the people on stage quickly and efficiently finished what they were doing. Instead of resembling a mishmash the stage took on the appearance of a park, very much like the park in which the stage sat.
When the work was done and there were no more details to be fussed over, the workers milled around asking, "When do we get paid?" Everybody looked at the Man with a Ladder until he finally said, "we get paid at the end of the day's work," repeating what the man who hired him said. It was enough to calm everyone down although someone—he could not figure out quite who—mumbled, "when does the day’s work end?" Reassured, the crowd of workmen climbed off the stage and drifted off.
Finally, alone on stage, the Man with a Ladder gave one last look around—as if he were somehow responsible for one final check—and climbed down from the platform into the park. Looking up at it, the artificial park on the stage looked very real indeed, as if a part of the real park had been jacked up a couple of feet off the ground.
He positioned his ladder with a good view of the stage and sat down on the top step. A slow but steady stream of people began to fill the park and swirl around his perch. 'Where there's a stage and an audience, a performance is bound to follow,' he thought to himself.
When the space around him had filled in, people started yelling at him to take down the ladder because it was blocking their view. Reluctantly, he tilted it on its side and sat on it sidesaddle. He was immediately joined by four strangers who appropriated the free seats without asking permission. The space they vacated was filled immediately by a young couple on a blanket who were not disturbed by the slight blockage of their view of the stage because they were busy preparing a pallet on the floor as a stage for their own private performance.
When he looked up he could see that someone had pulled the curtain across the stage and hid it from view. He tried to get himself to worry about getting paid but his real interest was in what he had helped construct. There was no doubt in his mind that some theatrical event was imminent but he had no idea what. He tried to remember whether he had seen notices tacked on the trees announcing some performance but decided after retrospectively searching his memory that he hadn't.
The first idea he thought of was that it was going to be a performance by some visiting troupe of performers from a foreign country in a foreign language, and the reason he had not seen any announcements was they had been posted in a language he could not read in a neighborhood he never visited.
He looked around him at the throng of people who were massing for the performance, Streams of people were searching for seats, eddying towards the stage, and backing up in rivulets. He tried to imagine, to what ethnic group these people might belong, but vacationing Martians was the only description that seemed to fit so he considered the possiblity that it might be some off, off, way off Broadway performance.
He was still pondering this when he thought he recognized a brogue over the general noise of the crowd. He stood up and looked around for the person that he knew was attached to the brogue, his friend Timothy Michael. The brogue was so loud and clear he knew his friend had to be close by but he paused before letting the ladder out of his sight. "In such a tight crowd," a voice in his head said ‟with the weight of four behinds on it, your ladder isn't going anywhere." Convinced by what he took to be an irrefutable scientific argument he headed in the direction of the voice. It seemed to recede as he approached but he finally made it to the source which turned out to be an old Chinese man selling watches. Disappointed and a bit confused, he squeezed his way back through the throng to where he was sure he had left his ladder anchored to the earth by feet dangling from four attached behinds. He waded left, then right, but his ladder with its passengers was gone.
The partly obscured familiar face of his friend Reb Dunzel caught his attention. "Reb Dunzel you've got to help me find my ladder," he wailed, tugging on what he took to be his friends arm. When the arm refused to move the Man with the Ladder moved around to confront the face directlly and realized the countenance before him only resembled his friend and he was yanking the arm of a hawker of amorphously shaped hats.
As he stood there, immobilized by his confusion, a man in a business suit came by selling cans of soda, and without asking him if he wanted any, thrust one into his hand, winked at him and disappeared into the crowd.
When the familiar image of Tatanya Schwartz being led by her mother appeared out of the crowd he started to wave to them but his arm froze as they drew nearer because it was clear that like the other people he thought he recognized, they only resembled the people he knew.
Confused and embarrassed, he let his arm fall and pondered the odds of so many duplicates inhabiting the same world, let alone the same neighborhood. He looked suspiciously at the people around him. Were they real and his friends mere counterfeits of them. Perhaps his memories were themselves forgeries. The question seemed reasonable because some of the characters he loved in literature seemed much more real than a quite a few of his neighbors, and there were characters on television who were much more real than the last President and the current Vice President. Perhaps the friends who seemed so real were merely characters in a story he had read—or had written? The idea frightened him and to avoid seriously confronting it, he began searching frantically anyone that he really knew, for his ladder, for anything he could anchor his reality to. He bumped into a couple of men, a large hulking individual with a shorter companion wearing glasses in his shadow.
"Well if it isn't the Man with the Ladder," the large man shook his hand.
"Are you blind?" the shorter man interrupted. "Can't you see this man has no ladder."
"Oh I'm sorry, mistook you for someone else."
"I am the Man with the Ladder," the Man without the Ladder protested, trying to remember where he might have met this Mutt and Jeff pair.
"What a coincidence," the large man said, smiling weakly.
Just then an oriental man who looked suspiciously like Utei, the painter on air, joined the group.
"Hello, hello," the big man shook the Asian man's hand vigorously. "We are strangers," he said by way of introduction, "but doesn't he"—he pointed to the Man with the Ladder—look just like the Man with the Ladder?"
The Japanese looked him up and down carefully. "He doesn't look at all like he has a ladder," he said matter of factly.
"See, I told you," the small man in glasses chimed in.
"Maybe if I was holding a ladder you'd recognize me," the Man with a Ladder suggested and looked around frantically for the ladder whose loss he felt even more sharply.
The large man folded his arms horizontally across his chest and leaned rigidly against the Man with the Ladder.
"You do indeed look like a ladder," the oriental complimented the large man who maintained his angular stance for a moment, "but even with a ladder this man looks nothing like the original."
"But I am the Man with the Ladder!"
"Oh come now," the short man scoffed, "If you're the Man with the Ladder where is your ladder?"
"I left it for a moment to greet a friend and when I came back it was gone."
There was a moment of silence then the Mutt and Jeff pair exploded in gusts of laughter. Even the Japanese man smiled sharply. "You must not know the Man with the Ladder very well," Mutt said. "If Saint Peter was tugging on one of his arms and the devil the other, the Man with the Ladder would manage to fix some part of his anatomy—he jammed his elbow into the Man with the Ladder’s chest saying, 'wink wink',—around that ladder." The other two men nodded their heads in agreement and collectively turned away from the obvious imposter. "It looks like I got here just in time," the oriental man said.
"Yes, indeed you better hurry backstage. It looks like its about to begin."
"Are you one of the performers?" the Man with the Ladder asked.
"Of course, aren't we all?" the man replied said seriously, then turned and headed for the stage.
"Would you know what kind of show it will be?" the Man with the Ladder asked the big man.
"Show? I didn't say anything about a show," the big man turned to the little man. "Did I say anything about a show?"
"No, I distinctly would have remembered if you said anything about a show," the short man replied trying to hide his obvious amusement.
"I should say it will definitely be more then a show," the big man said with a smile. "definitely more. Closer to the real thing," he said deliberately.
The Man with the Ladder tried again to remember where he had met the two men before, but the more he struggled, the blanker his mind grew. Something inside him held his memory back and as he fussed and fretted to reach it a steep walled, flat faced wave of doubt overtook him and caught him in its tow and turned him over and over in an ocean of confusion and left him thrashing, waterlogged, disoriented, gasping for breath and wondering who and what he was.
Whenever he thought objectively about the incidents that made up his life, they seemed implausible. Someone said to him once, ‟everyone's life consists of a nearly random collection of nearly impossible events."But the collection of incidents that made up his own past seemed particularly bizarre and if someone had suggested they made up a life, anyone's life, he would have refused to believe it. If he would refuse to believe they could make up someone else's life, why should he believe they made up his own, why should he take his own memory at face value? What if the real Man with the Ladder was just a fictional character? That would make him a poor imitation of someone who didn't exist in the first place.
"There he is," a familiar voice interrupted his thoughts.
"Is that you Reb Dunzel?" the Man with the Ladder called to him cautiously.
"Of course it's me," his friend said offended, trying to force his way through the crowd that stood between them. ‟For Cary Grant not even you could mistake this face."
Before Reb Dunzel could reach the Man with the Ladder the big man swung around, shook his hand, and pulled him forward. "Doesn't my friend here look just like the Man with the Ladder?" he bellowed.
"He is the Man with the Ladder," Reb Dunzel protested.
"Where is his ladder then?" the big man asked querulously.
"Maybe St. Peter took it," the short man suggested.
Reb Dunzel eyed the Man with the Ladder cautiously. "Don't listen to their nonsense." the Man with the Ladder said.
"If you are the Man with the Ladder where is your Ladder?" Reb Dunzel asked suspiciously. "And if you are the Man with the Ladder what were you doing with St. Peter? You're not Catholic, you're not even religious."
"I knew he was an imposter the minute I laid eyes on him." the little man boasted.
"I left my ladder for a moment trying to follow the sound of Timothy Michael's voice," the Man with the Ladder frantically explained.
"But I just got here," Timothy Michael declared, popping up the from the crowd behind Reb Dunzel. ‟I've been with Reb Dunzel here on the other side of town all afternoon."
"I didn't follow you, I only followed the voice," the Man with the Ladder explained.
"Why didn't you take ladder with you?" Utei, who was also in the crowd, probed.
"Four other people were sitting on it. I never thought a ladder that size weighed down by four posteriors could disappear so fast."
"It sounds far fetched to me." Timothy Michael concluded.
"It must really be him," Reb Dunzel said. "Who else would offer the inconceivable as an excuse for the improbable."
The Man with the Ladder turned to rub his small victory in the nose of the Mutt and Jeff pair but they seemed to have disappeared through the same trap door as his ladder. His friends seemed oblivious to the pair's sudden departure. "We were looking for you," Sally the bag lady spoke up from the back, slowly pushing her way forward encumbered by a train of shopping carts tied together by string, "We need you to settle an argument. I was telling Timothy Michael the story of the time you got your ladder stuck in a revolving door and he claimed I was just plagiarizing an old Gaelic folktale about a leprechaun with a large walking stick."
"Not a walkie' stick, a shillelagh," Timothy Michael corrected, "If you're gonna plager ya might as well get it right."
"We ran into Reb Dunzel but he thought it was a story stolen from an old Hasidic tale about a Rabbi with a prayer shawl that was too long. Utei insists it's a Zen story about a master with a knotted rope."
"Zen story three thousand years old," Utei added, "how old is Man with the Ladder?"
"You're all wrong." Utei's apprentice interjected from her skate board, "The mother of all mothers came from Africa and I know an African folk tale about a man in a tree that's says just about the same thing."
As the bickering crowd pressed in against the Man with the Ladder he relaxed. The warm chaos of the enveloping circles of arguments made him feel secure. The louder the dispute swirled around him the more solid he felt. Each argument affirmed a memory that it depended on and another that depended on it, and together they covered almost as much as he could remember having lived in his lifetime.
Absent mindedly, he extended and lifted his foot and shifted to lean on the ladder. At the instant he remembered that his ladder was not where it usually was, his foot squashed air and he toppled over into the crowd of his friends. The maneuver got their attention and he straightened himself up and pressed on.
"What you are arguing about," he began, "is just the commonplace evidence of the hard core no nonsense humanity that we all share, no matter how different the places we come from, no matter how we live our lives. These stories are just our way of trying to communicate the essentials of those realities just as our dreams are just gossip about secrets we keep from ourselves." He stopped and stared at his friends who were mumbling with their bodies, complaining about the obscurity of his argument.
"This mother of realities that fondles us, reaches back as far
as there was a reality in the world and it hugs everything that is real for us.
But there’s a shrouded, shadowy side to our lives, camouflaged by ordinariness,
that can’t be put into words, that is impossible to talk about. We use words to
make up stories about our reality, but words aren’t powerful or supple enough
to grasp what we feel, what we sense, what we know is true about the world.
Something besides the part of the story the words make up is essential, the
shape of the stories sometimes, the shadows they cast, the gravity that bend
the sense that falls through them.
"But if someone puts us on the spot and asks us to explain to them what we are talking about we stammer and stutter and feel foolish as if it were a figment of our imagination. And because we can't put it into words—and words are all that we can smuggle between us to tell one another about the world—we are forced to deny this reality out loud to ourselves, at the same time every part of us is convinced that it's as real as a toothache. This conviction is our constant companion," he said quickly. ‟What we do, and how we act, express hidden patterns that we trace as we hurtle willy nilly through our lives. It is just that they do not play well in words. We know they exist, we feel them yet we can not say them. So we dance and we sing and we paint on air…"
"And we make up stories," Tatanya added with a laugh.
"And we make up stories " the Man with a Ladder echoed, ‟to trace the intricate order in the chaos of the patterns. And maybe our stories are a little obscure and a little confusing because it is not the meaning of the words or the sentences the words make up but something in between, something that arises when the words coat the patterns like dust which reflects visible light.
‟And we do talk and sometimes tell stories," Tatanya added again, a little overwhelmed by the Man with the Ladder's ranting speech. The Man with the Ladder got the message.
"A story might make the point clear," the Man with a Ladder said quickly, blaming the distraction of the missing ladder for not having thought of it himself. He quickly tried to summon up a story that might beat confusion to a seat in the minds of his listeners. "This is a story about a Buddhist monk who meets a man with a ladder. The monk was on a pilgrimage to an obscure part of Newark, N.J., when…"
"Didn't I hear you tell this story outside Bloomingdales?" a man eating fried chicken interrupted from the fringe of the crowd, "or did I tell it and just hear you listen?" he asked.
"How can you hear someone listen?" Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
"It takes a lot of practice." the man responded. Utei nodded in agreement.
‟I wouldn't mind hearing someone listen right now," the Man with the Ladder grumbled, pretending to be annoyed in the hope that his friends would feel guilty and their guilt might make them more attentive.
His friends turned to him ready to cooperate, confident that his tale was going to do what his stories always did: make sense of the apparently irreparably confused present, mend a tear in a damaged reality and tell them where they had been and where they were going. He had always done it in the past; the circle of friends he had collected depended upon him to do it.
Making sense out of things, the Man with a Ladder thought, was like untangling a knot of bubble gum. But he had learned a trick: the secret was to put different spins on parts of the same event, to color the same thing with different colored crayons. This was possible because no matter how tightly the parts of a thing were joined, no matter how much a thing seemed like an indivisible whole, there was always a joint, there was always a seam. The trick was to find it, and insert words in the gap and wiggle them like a stick to loosen the connection. And, on the other side, no matter how distinct and different two things appeared to be, there was a secret bridge between them, a hidden place at which they were joined so that no separation between them was possible.
‟Getting back to the story," he said with a sense of urgency, noisily clearing his throat with the anticipation of filling it with the sounds of his story. To his horror and amazement no words came out. He could not remember what story he had begun. The story had just wandered off leaving in its place a story that resembled it but had an entirely different middle and ending. In the space between the two stories was a silence into which he had fallen. It had never happened to him before. He stood there speechless, looking at his friends who patiently waited for him to end his dramatic pause.
"As I was saying," he began bravely, "There was this man who hunted butterflies."
"Uh oh," said the man with a chicken bone hanging between his lips, opening up an umbrella, "The sky is cloudless and he's telling the rainy day version of the story!" he pointed out to Utei, "You never know what might come down." Utei moved closer the lip of the umbrella just in case.
"…and on this particular day he caught a glimpse of the most beautiful…"
Over the shoulders of his friends the Man with the Ladder noticed the actors collecting on the wings of the stage. It was very disconcerting because each of the people on the stage seemed a replica of one of the people to whom he was talking. "…of the most beautiful caterpillar," he continued. ‟And, uh, the man who hunted butterflies knew this caterpillar would turn into a most spectacular butterfly and he vowed that he would catch this one no matter how long he had to wait for it to change into a butterfly. So he prepared to wait."
Reb Dunzel who was listening intently to the story thought he had heard it before. As he remembered the story, there was a little responsive reading part where the listeners had to bend down and touch their socks, so he bent down to pull at his sock. When he straightened up he turned toward the stage. He had a little seizure of nervousness and twitched when he spotted a duplicate of himself on the stage.
"Is that me on stage or someone I look like or that looks like me or have I given up on reality altogether ?" he interrupted.
"Don't be silly," said the large member of the Mutt and Jeff team, materializing suddenly from the crowd, "That man is a little taller and handsomer then you. I'm willing to bet he's also a little smarter and wittier too." he elbowed Reb Dunzel jovially in the ribs as if he was sharing some private joke.
"Everyone on the stage looks familiar," Utei's apprentice pointed out, "Look! There's an actor one who looks like Timothy."
"He don't look a'tall like me. Look at da clumsy way he walks," Timothy Michael pointed out, taking a couple of clumsy steps toward the stage, "Plain to see they're amateurs."
"Of course," said the large member of the Mutt and Jeff team, "reality is put on by amateurs."
The Man with the Ladder tried to laugh as if there were no special significance to the appearance of duplicates of all of them on the stage, no import to the partitioning of reality, part close, part a distance away, as if what was about to happen was something innocent and opportune. But one sustained look at the stage showed that there were duplicates of everyone up there everyone except himself. The appearance of doubles was ominous and menacing in some unclear way. There was a buzzing in his ear and it grew louder.
Just then a person who looked like a stage director ran out from behind the curtain and waved frantically at the Man with the Ladder. A weak spotlight followed the man as he jumped around wildly.
"He's pointing at you." Reb Dunzel exclaimed.
"No, only in my direction." the Man with the Ladder insisted as a spotlight from the stage swing around and tried to pick him out, In response, he spun around determined to locate and point out the real object of the man's attention. Finding no obvious candidate, he turned back and pointed to himself quizzically and the spotlight crept toward him in lurching menacing hops and skips, but a hand appeared and yanked the man on stage back behind the curtain and the light flicked out before it enveloped him.
"I bet its one of those trick Jap plays where men dress up as women and animals talk," Utei's apprentice suggested. "The Japanese bought Shakespeare in the park, you know." She went on, rocking on her skateboard. "They bought the park too, you can never tell what those—what they will pull. The curtain will rise and there will be a big…" She looked cautiously at Utei who began to pull at his belt and began to adjust his pants, "… a Samurai Emperor in Dunsenanye woods in a Toyota or…" She pushed the ideas through, making the best of a risky deal and swung the skateboard into a defensive position.
"I've seen what's on stage." the Man with the Ladder revealed, "I helped build it. Its a model of the park we're in."
"Maybe it's a 'This is your Life' episode for parks, you never know what these Earthday people will do next," Utei’s other apprentice blurted out.
"Wait till you see how real it looks." the Man with the Ladder said, "I put up the lamp posts and it's got trees and grass and…" He stopped in mid-sentence when the curtains parted a few feet then stopped. In the gap between the curtains they could see what very much looked like the park. In the front of the park was a ladder.
"That's my Ladder!" the Man with the Ladder shouted, forgetting where he was.
For want of better entertainment the crowd stretched and squirmed trying to see who had just called out. The Man with the Ladder tried to hide behind Reb Dunzel who looked sheepish. "At least it looks like my ladder," he added softly. The crowd stared at the man with the ladder and his friends. "First we are on stage, now people are staring at us," Sally the bag lady complained. "What will happen next?"
The crowd was growing restless in anticipation of a performance. "No audience anywhere will quite settle for a fool yelling out from his seat," the Man with a Ladder whispered to Reb Dunzel "they require a fool yelling from on stage"
"But its better entertainment than whistling dixie," Reb Dunzel shot back, "and it will do for the time being." The small crowd of his friends became restless also, turning from him to the crowd and back to him as if a trap was beginning to close.
"Weren't you in the middle of telling a story?" the man munching on chicken chided gently providing a counterbalance to the crowds insistent and demanding staring. "Or did you skip the middle and just end with the beginning."
"Someone's messing with our reality." Utei's female apprentice declared taking a defensive stance toward Utei who just ignored her and attentively watched his double moving gracefully on the stage.
"Nobody panic," said the Man with the Ladder. As he issued the order not to panic, everyone around him, including himself, realized that they were panicking and while the realization calmed them for a moment it did not last long because the logic which told them they were panicking told them there must be a reason to panic and returned them to the lip of chaos.
The caterpillar in the story the Man with a Ladder was telling panicked and became the ugliest butterfly he had ever seen. The colors of its wings were muted and muddled, no prize for the hunter who went on his way but perfectly suited for the butterfly’s freedom. It made a few circles over the Man with the Ladder’s head then it flew off toward the stage.
"Everyone stay calm," the Man with a Ladder insisted. "It’s becoming clearer," he asserted. The 'it’s' had an ominous ring to it but none of his friends could figure out where 'it' was pointing. "Everything's becoming clearer," he went on, his head clouded and swirling, the buzzing growing louder in his ears as his memory strained to remember what story he was telling. "No one has to worry," he assured them, "so long as…" he tried to remember what the signal to panic was.
"Every 5 year old knows…" He tried to remember what every five year old knew. "Every 5 year old knows," he said, looking at Tatanya, who knowingly returned his glance, "that in every story there's an 'and then' and every adult knows that in life there are those little signals that tell you are in the deepest trouble." He took a quick but penetrating glance at the stage. "It’s OK," he repeated. It was clear to him that no matter how terrifying things might appear it was OK, because, although there were a lot of warnings of danger he had not heard the whiny, crinkly noise that meant the machinery had broken irreparably. He stopped talking because he was overwhelmed by the feeling he had stopped making sense a few sentences before. Yet he had not reduced his friends anxiety.
"There's no girl …" he yelled, almost as loudly as he had greeted the appearance of his ladder. It was not quite the right statement. His friends looked at him strangely. "No girl in…in a… " He realized he was not making a lot of sense. The people around him including his friends stretched and stared at him again . He scanned the stage intently. "TUTU" he blurted out, "No girl in a tutu, No girl in a tutu" he repeated as if saying it twice would make it clearer. The people around him shuffled. The murkiness of the remark reduced its entertainment value and the people looked around to see of there was any change on stage that corresponded to it or that it corresponded to.
For the Man with a Ladder hearing the words from his own mouth broke the dike. The wave he had encountered before swept him up again, turned him over and over in the water, and tossed him on the beach, waterlogged, with sand in his mouth but with an absolutely clear and lucid picture of what was happening. He remembered when he had met the Mutt and Jeff pair and where he was in the story he had been telling and which was the danger signal and which was the fail safe indicator. For some reason he knew exactly what the performance was going to be like and although it frightened him he was secure that in the end it would come out all right.
"It's clear to me now," he said, smiling confidently for the first time, turning away from the stage to face his friends." We're ok as long as, as long as…because there's no girl in a…I was worried there for a moment but…. Whatever the performance is going to look like," he said, "it is OK not to worry. Our feet are on the ground. Our ground. Our feet in our reality. We are here and…they are there…because as there is no girl… no girl in a…"
The Man with the Ladder turned away from his friends toward the crowd. He wanted to assure everyone in the park, all of them, that things were really all right. He wanted to leap out of his small circle and assure and calm them all, everyone who was standing around waiting for a performance to begin, for something to happen. He turned back to the circle of friends around him.
"It's OK … The play. There is no need to worry. It's about us!" he declared, shocked at the cunningness of the idea. "The play is about us, that's why the actors resemble us."
"Why would anyone put on a play about us?" Timothy asked skeptically.
"It's not about us, us personally," the Man with the Ladder quickly contradicted himself. "I mean It's about our performance as actors. We're just the bit players in an ongoing, re-occurring performance, and the actors on that stage—they're representing what we represent. It doesn't matter who you choose to represent us, it could be a man hunting butterflies or a rabbi with a prayer shawl that was too long…"
"…or a Leprechaun with a shillelagh…" Timothy added.
"…or a Man with a Ladder," Tatanya said knowingly.
"That's true," the Man with the ladder acknowledged with a small involuntary bow, absently mindedly stepping backward. As me moved rearward he almost fell on top of four people sitting on his ladder lying sideways with a couple behind it on a pallet caught up in a performance of their own. The Man with the Ladder laughed confidently as he recognized his ladder and sat down gently on one end. "I must admit I was worried there for a moment, but there is no reason to fear. Reality is not going to pull a rug or a ladder out from under us. "They are, them—the actors up there. And we are who we are. Reality belongs to us, the actors in real life."
"If their actions follow the patterns of our lives, they merely illustrate them. They are actors—counterfeits, imitations; no matter how real they seem, the line between the fictions on a stage and the reality in the audience is absolute." He rested a moment before the quizzical looks on the faces of his friends drew him out again.
"The final piece has fallen into place," he announced to his confused friends. The author of the play is to be congratulated," he went on. By merely erecting a stage and giving us a glimpse of the case he had prodded us through our confusion to confront our own roles in the performance we act in every day."
"Are you making this up as you go along," Reb Dunzel asked.
"Of course, aren't we all? Isn't that the way reality is made? You look at the ensemble on the stage and you think you are dreaming," the Man with the Ladder observed. "But we're not dreaming are we?" It seemed a safe question to propose but his friends refused to take anything for granted and turned to pinch one another surreptitiously and debate the possibility.
"Never mind, never mind," the Man with a Ladder groaned, trying to capture the attention of the people around him in order to return their confidence and certainty to them. "What's important is that I know that I am not dreaming. And if I'm not dreaming you are not dreaming for what would I be doing here in the middle of someone else's dream?"
"How do you know you're not dreaming?" the smaller member of the Mutt and Jeff team asked slyly.
"Well if I were dreaming this would be just the type of dream I would be having," the Man with a Ladder admitted,"but I know I am not dreaming because, whenever my dreams mimic reality, whenever I dream this vividly there is always a little girl in a tutu ready to jump out with a sign that says 'Surprise…' You can see," he said, with a triumphant quiver in his voice, pointing confidently to the cast which had assembled on stage in front of the curtain, "there is no girl in a tutu. It's only a performance," he stuttered to the crowd, "but don't worry, as real as it looks, as much as what's up on stage looks likes what it’s not… it's still OK, enjoy it because… because there's no girl, no girl in a…in a Tutu."
As the words flew from his mouth he stopped. There from behind the stage, off to the side, looking like she was running very very rapidly and was going to cover an infinitely long distance in an impossibly short time he saw a girl and the blur of a pink tutu that seemed to be chasing her and what definitely was the corner of a sign or a sign to be that was rushing ahead of her and he could see what was going to happen, that she was going to climb the copy of his ladder, and hold out the card and announce to everyone, but especially him, that it had all, all of it, even the most finely wrought detail, all of it, without exception was a…"