The Window Lurker

One returns to the self as if to an old house
with nails and nails, so that
a person tired of himself
as of a suit full of holes,
tries to walk naked in the rain,
wants to drench himself in pure water,
in elemental wind, and he cannot,
but return to the well of himself,
to the least worry
over whether he existed, whether he knew how to speak his mind…
-Pablo Neruda

The old man was approaching the gnashing jaws of death. He was only a few feet away from the incisors that would have delivered the first chomp, and the molars that would have enjoyed chewing on his mortal coil until it was nothing but at peace with the dust. He felt the death-breath permeating his entire being. It made him feel cold, meek, insubstantial, weak. It made him feel helpless. But the old man just didn’t sit around and wait for death. As weak and helpless as he felt, he still managed to dress himself, urinate into the commode like everyone else, and get by as the quintessential bachelor for his age. He was no longer running from himself by trying to convince himself he was something he was not. Those delusions were shed long ago, like many rinds protecting the vulnerability of his soft core. He simply accepted himself to be that which he always had been: a cantankerous nitpicker with a penchant for brazen honesty and eavesdropping. He was like every other “quintessential bachelor” of his age—he was a spy for an agency of his own making.

A dreamer. Yes. A dreamer.

A weirdo. Yes. A weirdo.

It was March. The monolithic snow hills were slowly melting, and sand was seeping from out of their white folds, staining the concrete in abstract patterns of bronze. The air reeked of petrified dog shit and, in certain vicinities, junkie shit. (After all, no one would have been able to tell the difference; both man and beast somehow managed to eat corn and peanuts during those long months of intolerability.) The ice ruts on the road were disappearing. More people walked on the streets. The hibernation was over, and many craved the empty promises of hope.

His weathered hands methodically peeled back the semi-opaque blinds which separated his being from the outside world. As he peered down upon the empty street, he noticed a dead fly on his windowpane. He even noticed the little spot the fly haphazardly hit. The old man realized that the fly probably couldn’t take the foul smell of his room any longer. It wasn’t an act of self-destruction, but rather a vain attempt at heroism. If it made it to the street, the fly was going to tell all his friends that it escaped from the prison known as his room.

A prison. A prison for a lonely and wrinkled grump. A prison for a poor soul vanquished by time and experience.

His weathered hands each took a wing and, in a rare act of benevolence, he placed the stiff bug in its final resting home—a waste receptacle replete with snot-saturated tissues. After the old man shuffled to the wastebasket, he resumed his examination of the outside world. He placed his hands on his hips. He drew in a wispy strand of the foul air that surrounded him, the air which seemed to be decaying in tandem with his very own flesh. He coughed.

A little boy was running on the street below. Tattered clothes adorned his supple body. As he raced against the howling of the wind, the old man watched him as he pulled a tiny plastic boat from out of his pocket. The boy placed the boat in front of him as he ran. It was almost as if the boat was testing its hull against the ocean of invisible air which surrounded the boy’s body and his imagination. When he got tired of running, the boy placed the plastic boat in a miniature stream of salty water and watched the toy propel itself right into a sewer grate. Before he could properly react, the toy fell helplessly into the sewer and was never seen again. The boy, feeling like a helpless victim of his own freewill, flogged the cracked concrete with his two tiny fists. Unabatedly, the howling of the wind spoke in a jeering tone until the first tears of the morning fell into the salty stream.

The old man felt elated by the mere sight of such a helpless boy. Although he sympathized with the boy’s disheveled appearance—he was a poor youth as well—the old man didn’t sympathize with poor judgment and a lack of foresight. In other words, he sympathized with the boy’s reveries, but he didn’t sympathize with the execution of that particular reverie: the one involving the boat, the wind, and the mercurial churning of his luminescent mind. This is why he softly chuckled to himself when he saw the boy cry. He thought the boy was rather weak.

Hour by hour, the day does not pass,
it passes sadness by sadness:
time does not wrinkle,
it doesn’t run out…
-Pablo Neruda

The boy’s frustration provided the only highlight of the morning. For the rest of the morning the old man periodically watched the street and listened to his old-time radio tunes. Chimerically speaking, Frank Sinatra’s voice serenaded the monolithic snow hills and caused them to melt that much faster.

He drank black coffee. His hands told him stories about the ways in which time contorts or decomposes matter. The next time he looked out the window it was in the mid-afternoon, and an odd streetwalker was already sublimely pacing down the sidewalk. Just based off the slope of the shoulders he could tell it was a transvestite.

The afternoon faded into night, blackness gobbled up the blue, shadows fell on every delicate hue. While lying in bed listening to the sound of distant gunshots, the old man drifted off into a place where the warp and weft of his imagination reigned supreme.

The dream was disturbing enough. He was standing by his window and on the street were long, odious vines. They were strangulating bumpers, molesting empty baby carriages, humping lampposts, and having philosophical conversations with iron posts. Christ! They were everywhere. But the old man wasn’t even sure if ‘they’ were responsible for such a display of omnipotence. He ruminated over the possibility of it being just one entity—an entity with countless appendages and countless thoughts. Just then, out of the corner of his bamboozled eye, the little boy came storming down the street with his little boat swinging in his hand. The little boy appeared to be in mortal danger. Those vines certainly did move behind him in a ominous wave of green. At that very moment in the locus of the dream, he felt like screaming to the boy and telling him to watch his back, but he realized the glass would have just bounced his raspy warnings back into his wrinkled face. All he could do was really watch the maelstrom below.

The vines eventually snuck up behind the boy and wrapped around his neck like sinister ribbons. They broke his neck like a twig and stole his precious boat. The dream ended just as the vines were about to break through the old man’s window and devour their next victim.

He woke up the next morning and, as quickly as he could, went to the window and checked for any sign of the little boy. But he was nowhere to be found. The old man had a premonition that he would never see the boy again.

He spent the rest of the day reading the stories contained in his hands. He abhorred the one about the gnashing jaws of death. At one point he noticed that the delicate lines of pink looked like sinister vines. He drank too much black coffee that day. Way too much.

How shall we wash your face,
city, our own heart,
wretched daughter,
how do we restore your skin,
your springtime,
your fragrance,
how may we live with the living you
or kindle your flame,
or close our eyes and sleep inside your death
until you are breathing again and blossoming
and how do we give you new hands and new eyes,
human houses, flowers in the light!
-Pablo Neruda