The Kite Eater

"Wow," he said, sitting back in his chair. "I didn't realize that it went so deep."

She nodded, taking another look down at her arm. "You bet. It's not just all cute jazz music and a kid who can't kick a football. There's real existential stuff going on there."

"I guess I never thought of it that way." He took a quick glance around the room, and she noticed. Was he concerned about other people hearing their conversation? "So," he continued, "the tree represents... what? Aside from being fucking creepy, that is."

She laughed, possibly for the first time since she moved in. "Well, I don't know what Schulz intended, but here's what I think... Charlie Brown could have flown his kite anywhere, right? But he always did it right next to this thing." She pointed to the spot on her arm where he was looking, the ragged green blob atop a long, thin trunk, clearly a tree... but sporting a hugely wide, white-toothed grin. "And it ate his kite every single time. Now, when I was a kid, I would read the comics, and I'd be like, 'Just how stupid are you, Chuck? Why do you always try something right next to the one thing that you're sure is going to ruin it for you?'"

He nodded, amused, mulling it over while still keeping his eyes on her tattoo. "So, you think of it as a blind force of malevolence? A symbol of an uncaring universe, or maybe even one that actively hates us all?"

She waited until he raised his eyes to hers to respond. "That's the second thing I thought. But after that, I came to a third conclusion..." She leaned forward over the table, and he did too, as if she were drawing him into a conspiracy, their foreheads almost touching over the cheap mismatched china and silverware with edges rounded by tens of thousands of washings. "I think Charlie figured it out long ago. Not only is he aware that the tree is going to eat his kite... he secretly wants it to."

The age-furrows already prominent on the man's brow deepened even further, the shaggy, too-long eyebrows knitting. "Why would a kid want his kite to be destroyed?"

"Because," she said, feeling relieved instead of frustrated by the question, finally getting to explain it in detail to someone, "that's who he is. Think about it... what would happen to good ol' Charlie Brown if things suddenly started working out for him? If Lucy one day let him kick the football? Or his dog started treating him with respect? And good God, what if he finally got up the nerve to talk to that little red-haired girl?" She didn't care if he was only feigning interest, she was rolling now. "Failure defines who he is. Sure, he gets his little moments of triumph from time to time, but the other ninety-nine percent, he's the one who gets knocked down and called a blockhead. Everything that he understands about himself is set in this framework of being the universe's punching bag. And I came to understand that, not only does he get this, but he embraces it. He has accepted it as part of his identity."

The man mulled this over, nodding slowly, and the reaction made her happier than she had been in a long time. It had been so long since someone had taken her seriously. Finally, he straightened up and pointed at her arm for emphasis. "But it's the tree itself that you got as a tattoo. So now I'm wondering, why is *that* what you chose?"

"Let's make this interesting... and see if you can take a guess. Figure it out... and you can have my dessert."

His eyes met hers, flicked his gaze down to her rice pudding, and then he gave her an exaggerated squint, like a gunfighter in a spaghetti western. "*Now* this has gotten interesting," he murmured, and then turned his full attention back to her ink. Seeing the way he looked, as if he were really concentrating, made her want to bounce up and down in her chair and clap her hands like a little girl. She was loving this. Absolutely no one else was listening; everyone else was just shuffling around in their little cliques, stirring up petty dramas when they could be -- should be -- taking this time to compare lifetimes' worth of notes on the human condition.

He adjusted his bifocals and leaned in even closer, until she could feel his soft breath on her arm. It raised the lightest rash of goosebumps along her spine. Finally, he sat back. "It's a warning," he said confidently.

She nodded slowly, trying to pretend that he hadn't gotten it spot on. "You think so? How do you figure?"

He began to speak in a way that made her think that he had probably been a teacher at some point. A professor, maybe. "You picked that kite-eating tree knowing that you were going to see it every time you looked in the mirror," he said. "So what the tattoo is saying, is this: Don't be like Charlie. Don't sabotage yourself. Be aware of things that are going to keep you from succeeding, and stay away from them. So it's a reminder and a warning... for yourself."

"Pretty astute," she said, finally leaning back in her chair, giddy but kind of exhausted. She reached out, clapped her hand down over her miniature bowl of pudding, and was about to slide it across the table to him, when she stopped herself.

"What's the delay?" he asked, arching an eyebrow at her.

She slowly drew the pudding back toward herself. "Give me a chance to win my dessert back. Let's see some of *your* ink, and then let me try to figure it out."

He looked at her warily across the dining table. She noted how his breath ruffled the gray of his minimally-groomed mustache, as if she had suddenly made him nervous. Hit a nerve, had she? The goosebumps intensified.

He lifted an arm, started to unfasten the cuff of his right sleeve. It was a light blue button-down Oxford, and as he rolled it up, long shaded expanses of the dark skin of his arm came into view. So he had a sleeve much like hers, she mused, just as faded from at least as many long years of living. She loved how the bright colors of an exposed tropical flower on his wrist popped against the background, seeming to radiate from deep within his skin. But he moved with no hesitation now; this wasn't what her request had initially made him think about, and she thought she knew why.

"That's lovely," she said, gesturing to the flower, "but that's not the one I want to see."

He froze, caught in her headlights. She reached up and tapped on her own arm, the one closest to him, signifying his left arm, as if she were a mirror image of him. "That one... what's that?"

He looked down at his bicep, then realized that he could see what she saw through the light material of the shirt: a small dot of neon red, just barely visible through the weave.

"I..." he began. "I don't..." He stopped speaking, but kept looking at that one little spot, just as she did.

I've hit on something, she thought. Better tread lightly now. Don't scare him off. She spoke after a moment of silence, her voice small as she could make it. "Could I please see that one?"

He was still considering. Whatever it was that was making him hesitant, it ran deep. And the fact that she could guess at what sort of tattoos caused that reaction made her want to see it even more, the fear that she was about lose the one person she had felt comfortable talking to her even sharper.

He looked up at her finally, his large brown eyes searching hers as if to say, can I really trust you? She could almost feel it when his attitude shifted. He flipped down the cuff he had started to roll up, and started to actually unbutton his shirt. Right there in the dining hall. She had to restrain herself from squealing in excitement.

He paid no attention to anyone around them, and although she grew aware that there were a few passerby who paused, wondering why this man was taking off his shirt during dinner, she remained focused only on him. Let them look; she knew that if any one of them were to roll up their own sleeves, there would be nothing there but old, spotted skin.

He leaned forward, working his arms out of the sleeves, and she noted that he still had some muscles on him despite his age, evident under the sleeveless undershirt. When he had fully gotten free of the button-down, he draped it over the arm of his chair and plunked his elbow down on the table next to her, as if he were ready to arm-wrestle.

She was suddenly presented with the red dot she had glimpsed through the fabric, and found it to be the eye of a crow, blazing with what looked like reflected firelight. It was the only bit of color in the portrait of the bird, the rest of it about the size of her hand, portrayed in jet-black ink.

It took her a few moments to realize the context of the bird and what it was doing, not just because of complexity of the image, but because of the way it almost seemed to hide against the darkness of the background. He seemed content to let her look at it as long as she liked. The bird had turned its head around and was plucking at something clinging to its wing, which eventually revealed itself to be a cluster of bandages. The bird's beak was tugging at them, in the process of unravelling them. The other wing, extended to its full length, appeared to have just shaken off the last of these wrappings, which it had done so enthusiastically that the folded, twisting gauze fluttered up and around the bird, still present but no longer binding it.

"What do you see?" he asked. His tone seemed to convey that he was second-guessing his choice to expose this piece of himself to her.

She thought carefully, scanning the entire image at once to make sure she was processing it correctly. She began to just articulate her thoughts as they came to her, unfiltered: "Hm. I don't know if it's a crow, or a raven... It's been injured, but now it's healed, it's getting ready to fly again..." Then, in one of those rare mental moments when everything lines up, she suddenly got it. "Oh, it's a blackbird!"

The slightest beginning of a smile broke at the corner of her new friend's mouth. She kept talking, unable to stop: ""My grandma played Beatles songs all the time." She sighed with the endorphin flood of mingled relief and nostalgia. "The 'Paul songs' were her favorite. That's what she used to call them. She thought John was too weird for his own good, so my first act of rebellion was to fall in love with those instead, and argue endlessly with her about them."

The man listened to her patiently. He shifted a little in his seat, and the movement made the bird's feathers ripple a little bit, as if in a slight wind, drawing her attention back to its blazing eye. Taking a quick think through the lyrics of "Blackbird", she found herself recalling hopeful words, not something that would seem so, well, *dire* as what she was looking at.

"But there's something more," she mused, not yet looking up at him for confirmation one way or the other. "Something more significant than just a recovery." She looked more closely at the wrappings above the bird, which looked as if they were being whipped around, either by the animal's thrashings to be free of them, or a wind that had picked up. The more she looked, the more their random crossings and loops started to look markedly less so. Numbers? Maybe Roman numerals...

Then their significance snapped into place. "The date. I know that date..." With dawning horror in her eyes, she turned her eyes to his. "Were you there?"

His eyes filled with emotion as he realized that she had figured out what his tattoo meant. "No," he said. "My wife was."

She nodded. The air around them had suddenly changed, although not in any tangible way. It was still just as filled with clinks of dinnerware and chatter as it always was, but the understanding that passed between them seemed to have its own particular weight. "Did..." she began, unsure of how to proceed. "Did she survive the attack?"

She felt a wave of relief when he nodded. "Not easily," he said, "but, thankfully, yes. She was one of the lucky ones, but still had multiple injuries. There was... a very long recovery period." She could feel him wanting to tell her, to divulge every last, horrific detail, but holding himself back. She hoped that one day, given enough time, he would allow her to hear about it all.

She felt like she was continuing his words when she said, "So you got this tattoo when it was all over. That's why the blackbird is unraveling the wrappings that spell out the date. She finally learned to fly again."

And now tears, absent when speaking about her injury, filled his eyes as he spoke about what came after. "We had another good eighteen years after that."

Then she leaned forward and wrapped her hand around his arm, her thumb coming to rest alongside the blazing eye of the bird on his arm. "I bet that she thought the very same thing."

And for just a moment, they were merely two old people in an assisted living community, sharing pieces of their pasts, pieces they felt so deeply that they had no choice but to etch them into their bodies. They were alone in a full dining room, among people who had maybe forgotten their earlier lives, or had walled them off behind defenses, instead of making them manifest in inked skin, ever-present reminders and declarations and signposts and warnings. They had lives full of stories to tell each other and all the time in the world, never mind how short that might actually turn out to be.

His face had softened by the time he looked directly into her eyes again, and this time he reached out and tapped a spot on her inner forearm, an elephant's head with its trunk triumphantly raised, as if issuing a blast of hot savannah air.

"Now tell me about this one," he said.

Persistence

You almost locked yourself out of your apartment on your way to work this morning, twice. The first time, you had leapt out the door with the adrenaline rush of lateness and nearly pulled the door shut behind you. The second time was after you had reached in to grab your keys out of the small ceramic bowl you kept by the door specifically to store them in. Then, knowing that you had taken care of that little task, you turned away, not noticing until the door was closed but not quite latched that you had just as deliberately placed the keys back in the bowl as soon as you had picked them up.

What was wrong with you? You managed to reflexively kick the door back open before it shut entirely, stubbing your toe but reversing its trajectory so that it flew open and bumped against the doorstop, placed there to prevent the knob from punching a hole in your apartment's interior wall. Then you snatched up the keys again, feeling their metallic zigzags hitting the palm of your hand in exactly the same way as they always had before. This time, you gripped them tightly in your hand, paying attention to assure yourself of their continued existence, as your free hand -- well, not free exactly, but there were two fingers that weren't currently engaged in holding your travel coffee mug -- pulled the door definitively shut. You twisted the knob one way, then the other, verifying that it was locked, and then you raised the keys to fasten the deadbolt.

There were two keys on the ring that were quite similar. One was for your door's deadbolt, the other was for the laundry room in the basement, and the landlord apparently thought it wasn't up to him to make any kind of distinction between them. You tried first one, then the other, then the first one again, and that was the one that finally sunk home into the slot. Sighing, you ratcheted the bolt and turned to descend the stairs.

Your foot came down hard on the bare floorboards a good two feet before the dropoff of the first step down. You had been expecting it already, letting your weight fall down the anticipated nine inches. Instead, the crack of your work shoe's heel on the wood jolted you back into full awareness. You actually stopped and looked ahead of you , wondering if the stairs had always started that far away from your front door. Finally, you decided that they must have, and watched your feet closely as you began to descend toward the street. Your hand bumped the rail and a thin thread of hot coffee spilled out of your mug's little mouth slot and down over your hand. You winced involuntarily, but did not allow the pain to distract you as you brought one foot down after another, each bringing you closer to street level.

In the apartment building's vestibule, you tugged on the front door's handle several times before remembering that it actually swung outward. You were glad there was no one else around to witness your continuing difficulties; this was starting out to be a jim dandy of a day, but maybe you could still salvage your good mood if you didn't have to acknowledge your apparent idiocy to anyone else.

It was the sounds from the street you noticed first. You initially thought it was something about their timbre, the way the hum of the cars and trucks and buses sonically collided with the constant conversation and rolling rattletrap gaits of people, overlaid by the pervasive buzz of everything electronic in the air, random streaming phones and buzzing earbuds; it all seemed to be combining in new, unexpected ways. You made sure to keep your feet walking in their accustomed pattern down the street, but as you continued you tried to figure out why everything sounded so different on that day.

You soon figured out that it wasn't any individual sound that seemed any different than it did on any other walk to work; it was the way the sounds fused together into the usual morning tapestry. Or, rather, the way they didn't quite fuse; it was almost as if they were steadfastly refusing to fully coalesce. Every sound wave around you was apparently asserting its independence, making sure that it was heard, melding with no other, so that instead of a wave of noise, you were hearing thousands upon thousands of individual sounds.

Not only that, but there were so many sounds, embedded in the mix, that didn't sound familiar at all: odd roarings, distant and diffuse; mysterious clickings that were much closer to you than any physical object that could have made them; a high sort of singing that seemed to soar up into invisible ultrasound and back down again without caring about the difference. It made what should have been the most mundane act in the world -- walking the same street you always did, toward the same place you always went -- an act rife with newness, which made you equally fascinated and unsettled.

A city bus rolled by, every individual huff of its superheated engine giving it the aural aspect of an old-fashioned steam train as it passed. You started to wonder, smelling the burnt exhaust molecules left in its wake... Your sense of distraction leaving your apartment had at first made you consider if you were being extra-forgetful, but now you postulated that you were experiencing the morning with a sense of acuteness he had never experienced before, and that was what was driving him to distraction.

With this in mind, you started paying more attention to the people around you, sharing the sidewalk as they all made their morning pilgrimages. In them, you saw the usual spectrum of human features, but something about the morning light gave them a kind of clarity you had never seen before. You realized these must be, for the most part, the same people you always passed as you made the fourteen blocks' distance to your office. Today, however, you noticed every crease in their faces, each pore on each nose. The sunlight seemed to fill every square millimeter with easily readable information, each disappointment or triumph etched there, all readily decoded. Although you couldn't have articulated them if you had been pressed to, you imagined that you had some of specific sense of the life of each passerby, its general shape and tenor, and where the scales would likely have fallen if this happened to be their day of ultimate judgement (and, you suspected, if you were to look even more closely, you might be able to determine that fact as well). All was plainly evident on that bright morning, becoming as clear as if some eternal morning fog were burning off of everything around you.

For long moments, you reveled in this feeling, this revelation of every object around you, becoming acutely aware that you could, with one glance, see three sides of each building you approached. Somehow, they were starting to unfold like origami, opening to tell you all their secrets, fighting for attention in a riot of morning activity like you had never seen.

This was when you started to feel uneasy. Along with the clarity every new exposed facet of architecture and biology and ambient audio around you, also came the delineation between those individual items. And within that delineation, spaces began to grow. As contradictory as it seemed, you began to *hear* the sliver of silence between the heel-clack on the sidewalk and the echo of it returning from the nearby building facade. The seams between overlapping layers of leaves swaying in the anemic tree you passed under began to have as much of a presence as the leaves themselves, the corner between the north- and west-facing sides of a building so distinct that they might have been the far side of the moon.

Your feet kept moving forward along their accustomed path, but your mind began to reel within its bony cage. It was as if the reality of the day were being continuously ratcheted up, and was now starting to push uncomfortably past its natural constraints. Commonplace things were starting to look like garish cartoons, the world becoming shot through with larger between things, splitting and dividing the world around him over and over. You weren't sure how much longer your feet would continue to come down on solid concrete, if things continued this way. How long until you inadvertently put your foot down in a yawning crack that was merely the space between one pavement block and the next and you fell through, never to be heard from again?

Little cracks of sunlight began to appear between the larger objects at that moment, as if the car, or stoplight, or office building, or whatever you were looking at began to actually fly apart in slow motion. Between all the individual parts, you were beginning to actually see slivers of the pervasive bright, blue-pink morning air. The world was breaking down, there was no denying it now, and in your fear you kept moving unerringly straight ahead, unable to do anything else.

You now avoided looking at your fellow pedestrians. You didn't want to experience the disintegration that you suspected must be happening to them as well. How would your mind rect, you couldn't help but wonder, if you suddenly started to see bright background morning light leaking through the separated features, for your face to feel the breeze blowing through the empty spaces between everything, which were becoming more pronounced with each passing second?

You couldn't even close your eyes, fearful that you would find that your body was separating into its constituent parts, just as everything else around you was. You didn't think your mind could stand lowering your eyelids, only to find, between lid and lashes, and even between the lids themselves, an unceasing flood of late-spring sun, which seemed determined to find its way into your mind by any and all means available.

Yet you moved forward, legs churning under your conscious mind, the motion apparently being the only thing keeping you from flying apart entirely, all the while more aware that you was merely a collection of loosely bound shapes, moving past and around other bundles of shapes, wondering when the moment would come that you would no longer be able to differentiate between "they" and "me", but knowing that it would be soon, so soon...

Off on your right, something caught the attention of your fragmenting vision. As you swiveled your eye parts to find it, you realized that it was not something missing, but something that was blessedly present; the absence of absence. There was a patch of world over there where the sunlight was not bleeding through every increasing gap, not pummeling your brain into submission with the sheer volume of its presence. In that area, there was dimness still binding in the world, which soothed you like an oasis. Your feet -- so distant and disconnected now that you could not see how they could be effectual at all -- turned instinctively toward this darker bit of the world, and headed toward it, with all the measured restraint of a drowning swimmer meting out the last of his strength in pursuit of a savior's boat.

Before you realized it, you had passed into an area that, on any other morning, would have been the paved street that ran out in front of your apartment building. It resembled nothing of the sort now, the parallel yellow and white lines rising from the asphalt and beginning to tilt crazily, the vehicles flying by resembling little more than clouds of angry metal shapes that barely held their relative distances to each other, each gap filled with the same pervasive background light that permeated everything else. Everything else, that was, except for the blessedly coherent section ahead of him.

You were so intent on getting to that place, before you dissolved entirely, that you paid no particular attention to the fact that you was, as far as anyone around you was concerned, stepping out into morning rush hour traffic, and before you knew it, you were surrounded by buzzing, angry collections of metallic shapes flying by at inexplicable speed. You could have sworn, at one point, that you intersected at the same place at the same time with one of them; you winced in anticipation of some kind of collision, imagining that it might be the thing that finally undid all your tenuously connected parts, but with a grazing sensation that brought to mind the image of handfuls of sand being thrown through the air at each other, the danger slipped over and around and through him, and was gone.

Emboldened, he kept moving toward that area of coherence... on any other morning, the distance to the far side of the street would only be a few dozen meters, but in this disjointed, falling-apart universe you appeared to be occupying, it seemed to be maddeningly distant. But, you resolved, as long as your dissipating legs would carry you toward it, you would try to reach it.

Even as you neared, the intervening objects continued to fly apart, the shimmering morning light between their parts threatening to blind you. You tried to keep your focus on what was starting to look more and more like a blossom, an area where the real world was either not separating, or was actively starting to come back together. There was something at the center of that place, but it was hard to make out because of the way your vision was not only becoming more and more diffuse, but straining harder and harder against the overwhelming presence of all that clear, blue background air. But still, there was something there, some solid heart that seemed to be holding the world around it together...

You lifted your foot and hopped up onto what used to be the curb on the far side of the street, relieved beyond words that you actually recognized it for what it was, thanks to the increasing solidity of this part of the world. You began to move forward with even more determination, feeling (but not looking down to verify) that your own body was becoming more whole as you walked.

The center of this zone of sanity was becoming clearer, revealing itself to be a thin, striding figure, obliviously gathering the world around itself as it walked. It moved with purpose, much as you imagined he must have looked on most other mornings, only on the other side of the street, and moving in the opposite direction from you. Was this person -- a man, you determined as you moved ever closer -- doing the same thing you had planned to do this morning; to walk to work, mostly ignoring the same old world as it passed by? So why could he resist the disintegration of everything? what was this person doing differently?

You found himself moving into the path of the man, the reassuring feel of the pavement under your disjointed feet growing stronger and stronger as you neared. You let out a long breath of relief, feeling your own body gain coherence along with the rest of the surrounding world, as this unusual person approached.

Out of all the horror of dissolution that you faced that morning, there was one final moment that made your entire body flood with gratitude and relief... When the walking man, the one who drew the world back into sense as he moved through it, lowered his eyes from somewhere on the horizon, and locked your gazes together. Then, as if passing some sort of magic by look alone, you immediately felt yourself as another nexus, drawing the appearance of the world back into line with the way it actually was. You looked around yourself, watching bricks become reknitted into their lattices, human beings accumulating out of what had been mere swirling clouds of organic shapes.

The man stopped walking. Now the two of you stood, just looking across the blessedly small gap between the two of you, regarding each other coolly. It was such a relief not only to see this solid, strong man standing before you, but to feel that you were being seen, as well. The man you stood before was handsome, not just because of the way his features obeyed the laws of physics as you had always understood them, but because of the way he seemed to be holding the world together. You found that you wanted to stay in that miraculous force field, all the time. If the world was determined to fly apart in every place except this one, this was where you wanted to stay. The only question was if you were going to be allowed to.

To find out, you slowly raised one hand, reaching out to the man who kept the world together. A long moment passed, and you began to worry, suddenly afraid that the man would sadly shake his head and continue walking, dooming you to watch him and his field of coherence disappear into the distance, feeling the sun working its way into you, between all the parts of you, until you finally dissolved into bright blind morning sky.

But that's not what happened. The man raised his own hand, and pressed it into yours. And together, the two of you looked into each other's eyes, as the world continued to unravel around them, save for the slowly-expanding field they produced, your combined strength spreading out from you in waves, knitting it all back together.