A Tale

He was an old man. Tall and wiry, he smelled of the sea. His eyes were an inky black, deep pools of memory, and his salt-and-pepper stubble covered innumerable scars. When he walked, it was with a shambling step, and when he spoke, it was with a gravely baritone.

Tonight, he wore a salt-stained pea coat and a tattered whaler’s cap. In the place of his right hand, a hook gleamed fearsomely in the pale moonlight. He stood unperturbed as he heard a quiet clicking sound. A gun was pressed lightly against the back of his head.

The sly youth holding the gun did not know the old man. He did not know where those faded scars came from, nor how that hand was lost. He did not know the old man had seen his shadow, so faint in the lamplight, and had steeled himself for this encounter.

"My money, I suppose?"
The ease in the old man's voice startled the youth.
"All of it," he spat out, and he believed he did so without hesitation or stutter.
"Couple o' ha'pennies and some snuff all I got. Not worth a bullet. Off to your mother, now."

The youth could not swallow. He could not speak. He wanted to spit in the old man's face for this humiliation, but the bile was heavy on his tongue, and the old man was facing away. The old man began to walk away. He turned to catch the youth's eye, to nod and send him away. His assailant's eyes were fixed on the granny knotted laces. But the eyes of nearly a dozen other boys stared back at him through the night. Pale eyes, unblinking, and unburdened with pain or tenderness.

They were childish thieves of the night; lost intellectuals craving some reason to fight.  In skinny jeans and navy turtlenecks, they moved in closer, silhouetted by a lonely streetlamp.  The old man couldn’t make out their faces, but he could see their breath and hear the soft, rhythmic beat of their sneakers kissing the pavement.  One lit a cigarette, illuminating his face for a moment.  He was just a kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but he had the dark eyes of someone who had danced with the devil and made love to the cruelest of women.  He took in a deep, fulfilling drag and slowly let the smoke drift out of his lungs as he began to speak. 

“The thing is, mister, this kid hasn’t got a mother.” 
The old man stood his ground, unfazed by the pistol pointed at his heart. 
“That’s a shame.  Even sailors have mothers.” 

The youth holding the pistol suddenly felt a resurgence of vigor. 

“Yeah?  Well, how’d you get those scars?  Does your whore back home have a temper, or did God just make a mistake when you came tumbling out your mother’s rotten womb? 

The old man looked up at the stars and the stars looked through him.  Their light ran through his body, and the intellectuals could do nothing but stare into the old man’s soul and feel the depth of his words. 

“As a kid your age, I would occasionally wander into the night and listen to the sky, as I have done tonight.  It's been known since the days of Pythagoras that the stars and planets resonate harmonies that can be heard by lovers of the universe.  There is a symphony in the cosmos, if you take the time to listen.” 

For a moment, there was silence as the intellectuals tilted their ears to the sky.  Then, the dark eyed youth broke the stillness with words. 

“You’re a liar; I can’t hear a god damn thing.” 

And thus, came oblivion.

Or at least that was the intention.

The shot rang out, echoing off the ground and decaying in the cold air.  Though shot in the right arm, the old man didn’t flinch.  He let out a small chuckle.

“So much for appealing to your better qualities, I suppose,” the old man said quietly.  With his left hand he reached for the gun, as he grasped the weapon he could feel it trembling in the boy’s unsure grip.

“What are you doing?” The boy stammered as the man pulled the gun, and the boy’s arm with it, towards his chest, finally bringing it to rest pressed against his heart.

“If you want to kill someone, it’s best not to leave it to chance.  I take it this is some kind of initiation?”

The boy nodded.  The old man turned his gaze to the dark eyed youth, who let his cigarette drop from his mouth.

“And this child is the leader?”  The boy began to nod.

“Child!?” The dark eyed youth interrupted, “who are you—”

“You wait your turn, child, I’m having a conversation!”

The dark eyed youth moved towards the man.  Violently the man reached out with the hook on his right arm and sliced the petulant youth’s throat.  The other boys had fled by the time he hit the ground.

The man redirected his gaze to the boy. “Take it from someone whose done the deed: killing a man don’t make you one, least of which when his back is turned.  Are we clear?”

The boy nodded.

“Now I can forgive you for shooting me in the arm, since it’s a false one and I’m not terribly attached to it.  But you make another attempt on my life and I will strike you dead just like your friend here, we clear?”

The boy nodded.

“Good!”  The man let go of the gun, turned around and began walking again.  After a few paces he shouted.

“Well come on!”

“Where?”

“My ship!”

The boy ran up to the man and began walking with him into the fog.

“What do I call you?”

“You can call me whatever you like.  I was baptized Marlow, but most call me Captain.”

Marlowe. Captain. I didn’t know why I was following him, exactly, but it felt right.

Or, shall I say, closer to right than everything else I’ve felt.

I have spent so much of my life trying to find meaning, and it always came down to Jensen’s point. There was no meaning. WE are the meaning. We do what we want because we make our own meaning on this spinning shit rock thrown out from some dying star. Well I just saw how far Jensen’s meanings got him. Fish-eyed with a second smile carved none too gently into his throat.

This guy, though. Marlowe. Captain. He hears the symphony. If the stars have a song that we can hear, then we were meant to hear it, built to hear it, destined to hear it. This scarred old wineskin can feel those notes somehow.

Wait, what the hell am I saying? This sonofabitch is as crazy as every other mystically-oriented lie machine out there. He’s as bad as the Christians and Democrats and teachers and all of them! He wants to hear meaning in those emotionless, distant lights. He is weak, affected. Jensen died because he was too slow, he died like everyone dies. No providence, no fate, no fundamental cause, Jensen’s atoms just aren’t as tightly bonded as they used to be. Fuck this shit, I’m out.

The boy stopped walking, for just a second, and his head was torn to pieces.

Every feeling of pain, wrongness, rage, moral indignation, and shame that he had ever known came back unheralded and sevenfold: he fell to the ground, writhing in a state of torture that only the deepest pits of hell could echo with accuracy. The old man stopped, turned, and smiled. The pain left the boy in a flash, and left him shriveled and terrified, alone and answerless. Marlowe waited, infinite patience in his eyes, as the young unbeliever shakily regained his feet. Without a word, the pair continued on.

As Marlowe and the boy walked, they passed streetlights and windows, open taverns and places of ill repute. The light from these sources shown down on the pair, illuminating their shadows as they moved towards the docks. Two shadows, one young and one very, very old. Two shadows with four arms and four hands total. Four hands. And one hand of that old shadow, the right one, was gently reaching back to hold the hand of the young, shaken shade. Thus guided and comforted, the boy’s shadow walked on. The young man himself never bothered to look at his shadow as he trudged, hands in pockets, thoughts recovering somewhere far away, following a very old man to a very old ship.

Part VI coming soon.

Part I by Peter Stein (Dartmouth), Part II by Eddie Harrison (University of San Francisco), Part III by Jordan Michael Blake (Brigham Young University), Part IV by Andy Heriaud (NYU), Part V by Sam Linder (University of Minnesota)