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 top