The color black is like silence. An experience we all know, yet does not exist.
Morning. The sun is well above the horizon, yet not at full glory. I am biking to work. Suddenly I am aware of the nature of the color around me. The shirt I normally call black is truly a dark red, the pants a hint of green. The road is a vibrant thing, shimmering red, green, blue. The primary colors of light. The further I look ahead, the more they blend into white.
I drop a little ticket and a bill for 200 yen into the machine that sits next to the driver. It makes a small noise, and the he looks at the machine. His eyes widen, he starts speaking in a hushed but urgent voice. I watch blankly until my friend translates. "You paid too much. It was only 150 yen. He doesn't have the right change. You should have used the other slot for change."
"What is that, like fifty cents? Tell him not to worry about it." I move to get off the bus.
My friend gives me a funny look. "He's not going accept that." She tells him anyway.
The driver seems on the verge of panic, he raises a hand to the side of his forehead. The door closes and he stands up, starts talking to the other passengers with that same urgency. Many passengers appear concerned, possibly pitying. A woman brings out a white purse. They exchange money, bow their heads to each other several times.
The driver turns back to me, bowing and smiling in a slightly strange way. As if he had barely avoided disaster. As if I were a fickle giant who might have crushed him had he failed to return with a little coin.
"Thank you," I say, hoping he is one of the people who recognizes that phrase; hoping that he won't recognize up the edge of confusion and irritation I hear in my own voice.
When we are on the street my friend warns me "He probably wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight if that woman hadn't given him change. They are very careful with guests, so don't make it hard for them. It's kind of rude."
That's the second time she's had to warn me. I am certain that I am a foreigner.
I open up the top to see what is contained within. Stone walls in a tight circle all the way down, a slight outcrop near the bottom and a pipe, rusty and worn, leading either in or out on the left-hand side. At first I cannot see the bottom. I drop a few small stones and hear them hit bottom. Sound of solid dirt, and when my eyes adjust I can see it. Brown earth. Perhaps twenty, twenty-five feet.
I am growing nervous as I consider that it should be possible to reach the bottom. There are spider webs and the walls are rough. This would be nothing to a rock-climber.
There is some risk, a fall could cause one to bang his head, and the walls slope inward toward the top. This could make it a bit tricky to move from the section below ground to the one above.
I find myself straddling the wall, convinced that there is a difference between the man who climbs down and the one who doesn't. Such a small risk - if one has not the courage for this than the more important chances in life would be too much indeed.
Soon I am at the bottom, testing the ground carefully before giving it my weight. I look upward as the sun filters down, take note of the way the light diminishes along the walls around me.
There was a moment of worry on the way in, moving past the point where I could simply pull myself out by the rim, but the trip was easy. There are more spider webs than I'd anticipated, but spiders here are mostly harmless. I take a few breaths. The air is cool and damp. I let myself grow comfortable before ascending.
I've been walking for about three hours, an afternoon stroll in the neighborhood somehow turned into trek to the center of the city and back. I'm thinking about how faces change as darkness sets in, the slightly curious amusement of people on a late Saturday afternoon shifts, becomes a guarded question: "am I safe with you around?" From the color of my own thoughts, my face must be the same.
I keep saying to myself "life is supposed to be an epic."
I am passing yet another of the grungy bars in Fishtown, broken glass and grates and buckled concrete ground. A car honks from a block or two away, and I hear a woman yelling "get the fuck out of my car!"
She's a widow now. Sitting in the pew in front of me, her hands are visibly shaking. For the most part the room is empty. The doors are still closed, but her mother and and a few friends surround her.
She's wearing black canvas shoes, a tee-shirt over the long sleeves. Not crying, just shaking. Then she's up, pacing, more people trying to be useful. Her mother, red hair and attempted restraint, keeps talking about the inadequate amounts of water.
The MC intercedes, separates the family from the friends. I stay put. She moves.
There will be more, a man who might well have been his best friend will be very eloquent. He was quite the story-teller earlier. It's not just for show though. Jack was one of the good guys.
Her shaking up front, and just the few sentences. They loved each other. He made her a better person. Dense/meaning/intimacy. They were well past the stage when one mind emulates the other internally, the other is present even when absent. She must still feel him, be surprised every half second by the repeated epiphany of his absence.
This morning, sometime before nine o'clock. A light blue car pulls up to the intersection as I'm biking through. Driver is dark skinned, blonde dyed hair, turquoise suit of some kind. A string of obscenities spews forth as I pass. Later I joke to my boss that our species ought to be euthanized. My jokes are often accurate statements made with just enough vocal distortion to pass for humor.
For most of the day I sit before a computer I once named "black-dragon" issuing commands to other machines. Black Dragon sings me old songs that remind me of what I once thought important.
"And you gotta make it where?
To a sanctuary that's a fragile American hell
An empty dream
A selfish, horrific vision
Passed on like the deadliest of viruses"
An e-mail update from a friend comes through. Her stalker is in jail, she's going to have to testify. A bit of good news, it was tricky helping with the hide out. Relief is short lived, still nothing on the horizon I can imagine getting excited about.
Fall back on an old mental trick, tell myself I've been dead for years, just keeping the body around to wrap up a few things for the people I left behind.
Much later I am amusing my girlfriend with episodes of Farscape, which I stopped watching years ago. Aeryn, the one I understand best these days, gives me a flashback - "I'm just a simple warrior who thinks love means you're willing to fight and die for your fellow living beings."
Technically my existence makes it easier for others in this country to eat, to keep their houses. Get medical care. It means that soon my college loans will be gone, and I will have no further obligations. Perhaps forty-odd years from now I will pass a small legacy to some worthy organization.
My father spent his whole life fighting AIDS, cancer, locating lost children. He has a similar response to all of this.
So what?
Jerry is a big man, with square features and muscles that look like they have been carved more than chiseled. Looking at him, one gets the impression that he would have been more comfortable living in the world of Sin City than something so mundane as real life. One also supposes that might be why he has spent the past eighteen years practicing Muay Thai kick-boxing, one of the more brutal martial arts I've ever seen.
I am a slight, soft figure in this room, aside from a few other obviously new students, the place is full of major and minor giants, crew-cut men who all seem used to being the biggest man in the room, and therefore don't often have a lot to say to each other.
I make a poke at light conversation with Jerry, mentioning that I've recently turned thirty, that I was kind of stupid in my twenties. I used to want to travel. He bites that one. "Travel? What for? The only thing you'll ever find is yourself. Seems like a waste of time." He goes back to his post, leaning out the window in silence.
He hasn't convinced me that I wouldn't like to see more of the world, but I'm convinced there's a bit more to this than I first thought. There is truth to what he said. At least for me, all I've ever found is myself. So I'll stay awhile, maybe get a little stronger before I find something else to do.
Chinatown smells of fish and incense. Sky is dimming, clouds coming in just as the sun in starting to set. I am locking up my bike and Erin is crossing the street, looking for a place to stash hers. I finish up, wait for her to come back.
Erin is wearing black, an unusual break from her normally colorful appearance. Goes well with her dark hair.
We climb five flights of stairs in a white, alley sized hallway and then enter a room with wooden floors, few windows, and a gold-colored archway set into a red wall at the back. A guy named Micheal introduces himself, points us toward the restrooms. When we return, I tell him
I'd heard about the school from another student, and he tells us a bit about Tai Chi Chuan, or Tai Chi Boxing.
The main thing Mike wants to get across is that Tai Chi is misunderstood in the west. After the communists came to power in China, a lot of Tai Chi practitioners were forced to either give up the art or water it down, convert it into a breathing exercise which has little more
defensive value than dancing. The way he practices came from a lineage that pre-dates the changes made, and is still focused on teaching good fighting principles.
Erin and I are curious enough to stick around and watch. It is interesting, the students move slowly and with some grace, but they take stances and make movements which are extremely challenging; Deep, low, and fluid pushing exercises.
Mike likes to talk, explains a lot in terms of Chi energy. He tells a story about his father, a hunter, who apparently developed a lot of Chi energy by hunting. His father would just sit by a tree in the woods, waiting for something to shoot, all the while he was relaxed and, so
doing, developing Chi.
I like the way they move, but after a while Erin and I head out. I'm thinking I'd rather spend time practicing and understanding what I'm doing based on observable physical facts, Erin just thinks they need to spend a little less time on the talking and more on the doing. We head down stairs, make a spontaneous stop for dinner. We chat a bit about existence, the fact that we are clouds of atoms, wonder a bit if anything can come of remembering that. She tells me about a book called "Human Dynamics," which she thinks I would like, and briefly mentions her new relationship.
It's raining when we leave. I try not to get distracted looking at her hair in the rain, but I think she knows where my mind has gone. I figure I'm like any other guy, shrug it off. Later she shows me her art studio before I head back to my sweetheart, and she to wherever she's going.
Friday. Lunch break. I'd normally head to Yoga but was in no mood. I was bothered partly by little details of my interactions with old friends, a bit about the lack of love felt for my work, and wondering how I might go about addressing questions of movement and connection. That's another way of saying spirituality.
I decided to take a walk, simply take in a bit of the city and let my mind do whatever it wanted. As I walked I suddenly became aware of a presence, something creeping up behind and to the left of me. I looked over.
"Hi," says Ryan.
"Hi,' I say back, "I haven't seen you in a while."
We used to take Kung Fu together. He's one of eight people in something like twenty or thirty years to ever earn a red sash from our instructor. He's a bit short, shaved head, powerfully built. Winding black tattoos decorate forearms that are easily as big as most biceps. I've seen him jump and clear a good five feet, and once saw a larger man try to tackle him only to be lifted overhead and thrown half across the room. Ryan isn't much of a kidder.
"You look really irritated," he says. I tell him a bit about my frustrations, noting that they are minor. Ask how he's been.
He's been taking a form of martial art described as "Tai Chi boxing," apparently he loves the instructor for being even more precise than our old Kung Fu teacher. I ask him about applicability, about ground fighting and whether they actually practice hitting in class. He makes a pretty good case for the quality. Hard to imagine Ryan
getting these things wrong.
One could easily claim serendipity, if one were the type to say such things. To be honest, I'm torn between the desire to be truly free of illusion, see only what can be proven, and an innate craving for mysticism. The question is whether I'm going to jump on the MMA bandwagon or go for something potentially less effective in the hopes of discovering something of internal value, of satisfying that space that Yoga touches but is too passive to fill.
Regardless of how that pans out, I will need to spend some time dancing. If I've learned nothing else in the past few weeks, I have at least established that Hol Baumann cures all mental stress.
It is this season last year. I am in the grocery store, collecting oranges and dairy-free desert. Then I find her working in the park. It is hot, and she coos happily at the gifts.
"Some guys tried to hit on me earlier," she says. I prepare to hear a funny story.
"They were lawyers. They said 'Now that is a strong woman! I'll bet she don't take crap from nobody,' and I said 'Nope! I sure don't!' I told them they weren't my type, and I have a boyfriend. I was hoping you would come before they left."
"Oh really?" I ask, eyebrow raised in that combination of satisfaction and amusement she always brings out in me.
"Yeah, they were like 'oh, let me guess, is he really hairy and plays the guitar?' so I said 'No, he's more like a ninja.'"
A few months will pass, far too quickly, and we will be sitting in my room. "I like being close," she will say, "but not that close."
I will tell her that I am angry that this has happened, but that I want her to be happy. I will write a goodbye, and, like any ninja, I will vanish.
More time will pass. There will be others who like me better. Then one day I will find myself looking at oranges in the grocery store. I will remember. Color, heat. Sliding over the curb and dismounting my bike, the two of us laughing at nothing in particular. The time she put me in the passenger side of a two seated plane and flew me to the ocean, and I knew I was done for.
I will wonder how she has been.
I will know better than to ask.
I will buy myself mangoes and cherries, and decide to keep the memories after all. Perhaps someday I will offer them to someone else.