STEEPEST DESCENT
“Why are people so intent on concealing who they are?” Trent wondered as he flipped through the photo album. The strange antics, the turning away. “Here it is,” he said, pointing to a solemn pose he affected at age eight. He remembered staring into the lens, studying his own reflection, oblivious to the ocean and siblings surrounding him. He handed the photograph to Amari adding, “See? I told you I’ve always brooded.”
She traced his image with her index finger, hovering just above the paper as if lifting his innocence, affirming the legitimacy of his intense expression. She seemed to blot, even soak, his premature angst. He could earn it later. Besides, he was old enough now to decide who he once could be.
He had deep set dark eyes even then. His hair was now a bit longer than his childhood buzz cut. Its sandy color and his wiry frame were unchanged. He grew into the man suggested by the boy’s body. He had never suffered eating as a vice. His face was lean, not chiseled; his arms were strong, not powerful; his countenance was confident, not prideful.
“I’ve never known anyone to admit to brooding before,” she said. “He didn’t used to be that way,” she thought. She hesitated, then added, “Brooders should think more.” She believed that people could think their way to happiness.
He didn’t understand why she said that. He studied her subtle smile. It revealed nothing. Nor did her eyes of experience blink with understanding, they stared at him without judgment, they studied him with care. He brushed his hand against her thigh, so lightly that he barely felt her, but like even the most diaphanous of spider webs, that lightest of grazing vibrated her attention. And like the evening dew he escaped, but not before being noticed, not before being ignored.
“Maybe we don’t think enough,” he said, “but we always feel.” That comment felt familiar to him.
It was her turn to study him for meaning. He left but a shell for her to examine, for he unleashed his soul to wander.
“Let me explain,” she said. Her dark, thin straight hair slid off her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her complexion reddened with the prospect of hurting him. She curled her lips over her teeth and closed her mouth. She interlocked her fingers as children do when making a church with a steeple, as adults do when thoughts come easy and words come hard. She looked at her hands, the tall and slender parishioners were wiggling in their pews. Looking up at Trent, she said, “I just think brooders could spare themselves misery if they stepped back to appreciate life.”
Trent recognized all of her gestures and her comment, he was part of this conversation before. Both Amari and he were acting their parts according to a pre-ordained script, saying what they should, how they should, when they should. He continued to speak the words he had spoken before. “They maybe could if stepping back didn’t entail detachment.” His pulse hastened as he hesitated before delivering his next line. He wanted so much to deviate from adding, “That’s the problem.” He felt compelled to say it. It was foretold, it was mandated. He knew that he was ensnared inside a déjà vu. He had but a few seconds to comply or to challenge its will. He could attempt to disrupt fate and not utter that simple statement. He could risk its wrath. He had no idea what would happen if he violated the natural course. In every previous such situation he had played it safe, he didn’t risk becoming himself. This time he quickly considered that perhaps he could stave off the brooding and live anew.
This incident was triggered by viewing the twenty-year-old picture of himself. From that moment, he saw the next five seconds of his future. He knew he had little time before Amari was preordained to ask, “What’s the problem?” He squirmed and scowled as he thwarted temptation to follow the flow, but resisted it he did. He chose to exercise free will, a free will that was to enclose him.
Amari saw his pained expression and asked, “What’s the problem?”
Trent didn’t know which problem to address so he responded, “I chose freedom.”
Amari shook her head. “I don’t know about you sometimes.”
They had been living together for over six years. Long enough to know all about each other. In recent years, Trent held to the past, clutching the corpses of old opinions, in the graveyard of expired ideas. He often reminisced about their fanciful escapades. They used to travel every weekend to the frontiers afforded by their budgets. The further they traveled, the more Spartan the accommodations, the more eventful the journey. They thrived on the path of no destinations, no reservations. Amari had grown, he had dismissed it as a phase, she had grown apart. She was escaping, he no longer knew her, she was exploring. All the while, she had built more security, too often at the price of freedom. He only knew who she had been and, now, even that was redefined. For his freedom he had paid the price of aloneness. It was time for him to venture, to break out, to become.
He anxiously waited to find out what, if any, consequences came of having thwarted fate. Each passing uneventful day increased his worries, for he always expected to encounter some form of doom. Maybe he had forsaken his opportunity for spontaneity, perhaps he had relinquished wonder. Amari kept her distance. As far as she was concerned he had redefined broodiness, taking it to a new extreme. His office mate at the print shop, Rob, recognized an even more disturbing change, so much so that he, too, avoided Trent, but for entirely different reasons.
Rob showed up late to work one day to find Trent hacking into his computer. “Hey, what are you doing?” he shouted as he ran up to Trent.
Trent saw no reason for his concern. “Don’t worry, I’m not looking at anything. I’m just seeing if I can visualize all of your passwords.”
The fact that he had been able to boot up the computer then enter the protected email account and restricted databases demonstrated that he could. Rob, however, suspected foul play. How else could Trent know passwords that had numbers inserted between letters, letters that otherwise spelled the names of childhood pets that he never discussed, not even with his wife?
Rob did worry, so much so that he unplugged the computer then alerted their boss. Trent tried to explain. “I just had a hunch, Rob. It’s nothing. Really. It’s nothing.”
It was something, though. The boss agreed with Rob that Trent had either watched him type in the passwords or had somehow installed a program that would capture them. Either way, Trent had jeopardized his job. Neither considered that Trent might be telling the truth, that just maybe he possessed powers that could change lives far more significantly than simply unlocking electronic doors. Trent held the master keys to peoples’ souls. He just didn’t know it yet, and he certainly wouldn’t know what to do with them if he did understand.
Trent sidetracked many more déjà vus during the next month. Each one denied guided him in a new direction. At first he gained skills of sight. He could see distrust and desire in the quivering of lips, daydreams and disappointments in sonorous sighs, distance and departure in hugs so shallow. At an art gallery, he saw messages sewn into a quilt, feelings that needed release, depression that found its way to fingertips and into threads that connected the colors, the patterns, the textures that delighted the sightless. He did not see the quilt, he saw the stitches and in them he saw the chaos that the delight of creation had stilled.
He tried to explain this to Amari, but by then she had grown weary of his insistences. “Trent, you’re beginning to frighten me with this talk,” was all that he heard. He was deaf to her concern for him. He could not feel her shake him, he was too preoccupied seeing elsewhere.
One afternoon, a few days later, Trent came home to find Amari painting – a simple piece, an acrylic depiction of long and lanky green grasses bending with the wind. Each blade was blurred at its edges, they overlapped together. He stood back without speaking, he saw without looking, he pointed to the color he knew she was about to choose. She didn’t understand, neither did she question. And so, Trent and Amari painted together this way until the canvas was covered in rich hues. Amari held up the completed painting for him to see. His only words were, “Do you see the discontinuous continuity?” Her response was to slightly smile her understanding, the first such look he had received since he began denying déjà vus their way.
They painted like this for the couple of weeks, each day infusing a new image with meaning, each day reacquainting themselves with each other. They created impressions of blooming and wilting flowers coupled together, of clouds transmuting into billowy faces of awe, of simple rich orange and blue hues peeking from under lifeless drab purple splotches born of the mixing of all colors.
Amari was painting a portrait of her crowned canary when Trent entered the room. He stood and stared at the artist, the subject, and then the drawing. When he turned his attention to the palette, Amari shouted, “No!” They locked eyes. She added, “I will not add shadows of the cage to the top of his feathers. I refuse to…” Her voice abandoned her, it dissipated, it diluted amidst the expanse of the room. She realized she wasn’t responding to his words, he hadn’t spoken. She also realized that Trent had acquired a new depth of sight, she felt him seeing her thoughts. She closed her mind for the shyness, she blocked her mind for the fear.
Trent calmed her saying, “I know. And you know, too.” A few moments later he added, “You’re still just painting, not yet fully expressing.”
She threw the paintbrush in his direction. He didn’t flinch. “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded to know.
“Tell me to stop,” he calmly responded.
She rose to pick up the brush. She returned to the palette and without looking up dabbed it in the puddle of dark ghost gray paint.
Such incidents occurred with greater frequency. And Trent no longer held her back as she had been complaining about for so long. She felt their roles reversed, she preferred the old ways. In a moment of almost silent calm, Trent spoke of her fear of butterflies, about the day when she was five years old, while she played alone in a field of daisies. About how one alighted on her shoulder and she felt its bite. How it fiercely hung on and bit even harder as she ran. How she continued swatting at it, wildly turning in circles until she tripped in a hole, fell, and lost consciousness. In hearing him speak these few sentences, Amari lost her hold on reality. Her beliefs were shaken. “I never told you that. I never told anybody about that. Butterflies don’t bite… You can’t know that! How do you know it?”
Trent simply said, “Now I know why you didn’t like that mounted green butterfly I gave you.”
When Amari demanded that he explain all to her, Trent told her what little he knew about what was going on inside his mind and body. She didn’t want to believe, she couldn’t help but to believe.
Amari had always enchanted him with her silence, the whisper-like way she moved across a room to rearrange a flower or to smooth a satin sash between her fingers. He never before had seen her, he never before had looked. He long before had cared, only now did he glimpse her soul.
Déjà vus began appearing more frequently to him. He voided them all. He informed Amari of each one until she conceded, preferring ignorance. Weeks passed. He read all that he could find on the subject. He spoke to many, trying to learn all that he could. He learned little except that many profess to having talents that only those who deny their abilities do possess.
With every defiant refusal to follow fate’s road signs, he grew stronger, seeing more, feeling more, able to see the sometimes verdant, pastoral landscapes of strangers’ dreams. He could feel the coarse, dark burlap-like texture of their sadnesses and the flowing, refreshing liquidity of their joys. He regularly missed work, choosing instead to roam the downtown streets. He practiced searching souls, dangerously delighting in telling strangers their secrets. Each trip he tried something new.
His old pals from the neighborhood had long since abandoned him, they had no interest in learning who they were while swilling beer during happy hour. His family found the revelations disruptive as he opened the door to their closeted past. So, he spent the day sharing with strangers, thus sparing Amari her privacy at night. He explored his strengths far too much. The visions of the nomadic souls became his. He lost control of his choices and fell prey to the meanderings of others’ attention. He lost his way. But not before he found he learned what solace and satisfaction he could bring to others, and therein lay the hook. A barbed hook that seemed to promise a better place, the life he sought to create for himself.
The day after the brooding discussion, Trent encountered a short, stout middle-aged couple bickering over the choice of watermelons at the market.
“It was easier before you started helping me,” she said while placing the hollow-sounding thumped one into the cart.
“I’m telling you, Angie, the sweetest ones have that big sugar star on the side, like this one.”
She responded, “Yes, dear,” and wheeled the cart toward the berry counter.
He waddled after her carrying a behemoth melon. When he caught up with her she refused to take hers back. They were facing off in the aisle criticizing each other’s choices when Trent walked up to them.
The man barely heard Trent whisper, “Why?”
He spun around to face Trent and asked, “Why what?”
“Why do you have to be right?”
The man stepped closer. “This is none of your business, why don’t you just…” Angie grasped his forearm, distracting his aggression. She saw that Trent knew what she couldn’t say. Instincts from her husband’s fighting days kicked in, he snapped his arm away from her, startling both of them as he did so. Trent softened his voice, drawing the attention of the disarmed couple.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Trent explained. “It’s just that I saw something that maybe you haven’t noticed in a while.”
“Like what?” Angie asked.
“Hank, that is your name isn’t it, Hank?” The man stared with suspicion and nodded. “When was the last time you thanked Angie for what you learned from her?” Hank glared at Trent quickly and shortly enough to conceal it from Angie. Angie awaited his response. Trent approached them both, “Here, I’ll make it easy for you.” Before Hank could back off, Trent placed one hand on each of their shoulders. Through his touch, he reminded them both of their days of youthful passion. They saw each other’s core that they knew so well, they felt the awe and sensations of uniqueness of falling in love. Trent left them with the words, “You are both right.”
A few days later, Trent walked past a nearby schoolyard. The children were picking on the smallest boy for his awkwardness and slowness on the soccer field. Some taunted, one poked. Trent watched for a while until he noticed something about the boy. What he saw provided him the opening he needed. He interrupted play when he walked across the field and approached the small child.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I think you’re about to lose something out of your pocket.” The other children encircled them to see what was happening. The boy pulled a laser pointer out of his shorts. “I can see why you’re so careful how you run, I would be afraid of breaking it, too.”
The boy looked up to Trent, sensing his trust, appreciating his notice. “I got it from my biggest brother. He’s in Germany.”
“I’ll hold onto it while you play, if you’d like.”
The boy knew he should be careful. Everyone taught him so, but Trent was different. He was like another brother, someone who noticed, someone who cared. He removed the light from his pocket. The children all had to see and touch it. He handed it to Trent. Trent shined red streaks of light across each of the bully’s faces. The game resumed. The boy was no faster, but he did play with enhanced confidence. Trent stood watching the children until they hungered and tired. When the boy returned for his light, Trent told him, “I have something I’d like you to think about.” The boy squinted his eyes, cocked his head slightly, and listened. “Just remember, you become what you see.”