The old man wrote tragedy,

and for decades had been amazed that it kept him fed. Once, an interviewer asked him why he penned the stories and characters he did. His answer was simple. 

 

“That’s what I see,” he said.

It was all around, every day. Fiction was a dark mirror and it reflected the tragedy that was us. What the old man strove to do was raise it above just another sound-bite blurb on an endlessly repeating loop. He took it away from pancaked talking heads and gave it back to humanity. There was no twinkle in his eye, no almost smirk on his face. He took it as his solemn duty. That was the promise he had made to Gwen as her hand got colder and colder in his, the cardiac monitor next to her bed beeping out their last moments together. She had seldom asked anything of him in their twenty years together. But she had asked him this, there at the end. 

Make them see they’re still human, Frank. Remind them what that means.

His first novel cast in this new mold, so different than what he’d written before, poured out of him in an isolation filled only with music, and memories that sometimes brought him to his knees, the room swimming and his throat constricted by grief and loss.

People responded. They loved it or they hated it. That was people, forever needing to polarize, to concede only a spectrum of possibilities that consisted of extremes. The book did well commercially, and he kept writing. Along the way he recognized that amid the darkness and the stink there were lights that rose like glowing balloons. They were what made it all worthwhile, he knew. Those bits of illumination put it all into context, gave the mindless chaos and depravity meaning it would otherwise lack.

Now, his breath failing, his own trembling hands going cold and no one to hold them, the grandfather clock Gwen and he had salvaged and restored ticking away the remainder of his days, the old man closed his eyes and wondered if the words he had wrenched from himself had been adequate. He supposed that in a world made of stories, every teller must wonder the same from time to time, even God. 

 

The sound of the pendulum swaying back and forth to mark the linear progression of a force he knew to be circular accompanied him out of the world, his last mortal thought one of regret for humankind’s need to impose meager definitions on things greater than it let itself perceive.

He went into darkness alone, as he had known he would.         

                                           

Only, he was not alone. Amid a sensation of both rising and falling endlessly, he saw in his heart and felt on his face and heard in his mind the pulsing musical light springing forth from a multitude of glowing spheres. They filled the blackness as far as he could discern in every direction, and they traveled together although they were apart. Their myriad songs were one.

He smiled, his own bleak music unfettered by words, the only lyrics reflections in that dark mirror.

The old man understood then that he was one of those balloons of light, filling a void with illumination, one pinprick at a time, and he always had been.


SR