Shell-Shocked (a.k.a. ‘The Chicken Feed Puzzle’)

This story is dedicated to my sister, Debbie. Though the story isn’t necessarily about her—it is. (Even though it really isn’t). Thanks, Deb for everything.

Perhaps you’ll remember  . . .

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This story almost never saw the light of day, so to speak.

It vanished quickly in a fog of ether three years ago—an unwitting stowaway hidden among circuit boards, RAM and CPUs—when my computer was stolen at a park in downtown Saigon late one night. (see: STOLEN (a.k.a. Army Crawling Toward Enlightenment))

The only remains of the story were preserved in an emailed copy I had sent to myself a couple of weeks prior. Regrettably, those weeks had seen an overwhelming number of edits, re-writes, word tweaks and grammatical alterations. The piece had changed so drastically, in fact, that the thought of even looking at that saved, obsolete copy made me want to puke up my Café Sua Da, Gỏi cuốn and Pho.

And, so it went, for three years this story sat rotting away like a digitally-entombed virtual corpse.  Mummified in cyberspace it existed in ‘saved e-mail-limbo’ along with a few-too-many bank statements I didn’t have the courage to open and a far-too-many ‘Linked-In’ invitations from friends that I didn’t have the heart to delete.

A few months ago, fueled by what I have to imagine was an especially bad case of jet-lag and an intense desire for creative stimulation, I decided to begin its dubious resurrection.

Since that day the story has made the long, up-hill transition from dead, buried and forgotten, to alive, well and thriving; a full time obsession that has been the only thing I have been able to wrap my head around since that initial, bleary-eyed moment of rebirth. (I literally spent two long, neurotic days researching and contemplating nothing but the use of the word, ‘that’)

Yeah.

Would it have really mattered? You know . . . if this story had never gotten finished? Never seen the light of day?

No. I don’t believe so.

The greatest sin that any artist can commit is to think that anything that he or she has created really matters all that much in the overall scheme of things; worse still, to think that they are the one that has actually created it.

 . . . I don’t know.

Maybe it would have mattered.

To me.

Either way, it feels like I can let go of it now. Release it back into the ether where it belongs . . .

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Shell-Shocked (a.k.a. ‘The Chicken Feed Puzzle’)

"I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a ‘chicken feed puzzle’. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and a half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found . . . it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T. otherwise known as agent orange".

T. Colin Campbell, Biochemist

                                          *               *               *               *

Why do I keep coming back here?" I wondered . . . 

I mean, there was certainly no reason not to come back, but still, there was certainly no reason not to come back to many other places that I had actually not come back to, if you know what I mean.

The answer shot back at me quickly—as quickly as neurons are capable of processing thought.

Now, I'm certainly no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that there are a whole host of chemicals, glands, synapses and stuff involved in such a process. Regardless of these complexities, it all seemed to happen pretty damn fast. So fast, in fact, that if this verbal exchange hadn't been taking place in the confines of my own skull, my head would have snapped back rapidly like it does when someone has just snuck up and shouted something from behind.

You come here—because you are desperate to 'feel' again . . .

Chemistry aside, my answer surprised me a little.

"Ummm . . . Okay, perhaps this is true, but . . ."

I had certainly captured my own attention thus far.

“'Feel' . . .? Feel?”

“Feel what exactly?"

It was a fair question.

I'm not entirely sure, my inner-self went on . . .

Something?

 . . . ANYTHING?

"Ummm—yeah . . . a little ‘broad’,” I shot right back at myself . . ."What the hell does that even mean?"

The ‘tone’ that was rattling around my head at that moment; the sentiment it seemed to convey, was I was actually feeling very little at the time—if anything at all, and perhaps even suggesting that I had been subsisting in that unfeeling state for some time.

You know: Cold. Zombie-like. Robotic. Emotionally unavailable.

That kind of stuff.

The tone, I was beginning to suspect, seemed to suggest that I was becoming some kind of unfeeling, uncaring, self-absorbed prick. 

 

All right . . . a bit dramatic, perhaps, but I didn't like the sound of it.

Not one bit.

Even coming from myself . . .

Especially coming from myself.

                                                                 

A nerve had been touched. 

"Oh, I feel! I feel . . . A LOT!” I hollered back internally in a defensive tone that reverberated inside my cerebrum as the agitation began to escalate, "I feel many things! You can't be seriously suggesting . . . COME ON! I am—YOU are, a kind, sensitive, thoughtful human being - I . . . we care for others. I try to help others when I can!

I certainly wasn't giving in easily.

Especially to myself . . . 

                                                                 

Whoa! WHOA! Calm down, buddy! Take it easy! No reason to get worked up here! We're in this thing together, remember . . . you and me? . . . Oh, and by the way—yeah, I know this is probably not the best time to bring this up, but that haircut— that haircut really does look terrible. You could probably sue that guy . . . TERRIBLE!

My inner-self can be a bastard sometimes.

                                           

Seriously though, this is important . . .

With this point, we were in complete agreement. 

My agitation seemed to drain away as fast as it had set in.

WHY is it then . . .?

WHY . . .?

Why DO you keep coming back here?

Yeah . . .

I had to admit it.

I had myself there.

                                               *               *               *               *

         

I was frozen in position, standing inside the second floor exhibit room of the War Remnants Museum in downtown Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam. I had been renting a tiny one-room apartment hidden away in a secluded little alleyway in the city for a couple of months.

Photos, images and weapons of brutality and tragedy; of sadness and the horrors of the Vietnam War (known as the American War here) surrounded me from all sides. It was my third time here.

The first time, I nearly broke down at every turn.

I would imagine that just about anyone that comes here for the first time nearly breaks down at every turn. I mean, anyone that has the slightest shred of human decency and compassion; anyone that has a heart beating within the confines of their chest cavity . . .  

                       

Not everyone, though, I reminded myself, comes with the need to ‘jump-start’ that process, however.

Why are you here, Ron?

"Why do I keep coming back here?" I whispered aloud, suddenly startled by the sound of my own voice.

I found a seat in an adjacent foyer on a cheap plastic, vinyl and chrome bench next to an exceptionally large man wearing camo shorts and a black sweat-soaked t-shirt that was imprinted with a peace-sign.

I closed my eyes and surrendered . . .

‘Self-absorbed prick’? Okay . . . that might have been overstating it a bit, I thought, but I certainly couldn’t deny the fact that there really was something going on for me. I was feeling a little empty inside. A little detached. A little isolated. A little emotionally benumbed. If I honestly examined my state of mind in that moment—the contents of which had just dragged me across town, yet again, to a place that I would imagine for most, a single visit would more than suffice— then I had to admit: yeah, something was a little . . . off. I mean, I know myself well enough to know that I’m certainly no masochist. I’m not one who gets off on the whole pain and suffering thing--though, I freely admit, at that moment: I needed it. I needed the emotional crack-across-the-skull that it provided.

"Okay. I can accept that I come here out of a need to feel," I thought, safely back in the confines of my own head once again, "the ‘what’ or ‘why’ is what we seem to be working with at the moment."

"Okay . . . . give me a minute, huh?"

Take all the time you want. I'm not going anywhere. Nowhere at all . . .

My inner-self has a soft-side as well.

                                 *               *               *               *

          

The Vietnam War had haunted my childhood in strange, inexplicable ways.

Being born in the early part of the sixties, I was much too young to have had to endure the angst and overriding fear that dominated that epoch; the menacing boogeyman that haunted every teen-age boy's dreams during that time:

The draft. 

My father sat fairly safely on the other side of that curve. The likelihood he would ever be drafted into the war given his age at the time was so remote it may as well not even have existed at all.

I had no older brothers or older male relatives to be concerned about either.

From what I can remember, the closest personal connection that I had to that war, as obscure as it may seem, was a bracelet; a bracelet my mother wore around her wrist.

The ‘POW/MIA Bracelet’ became popular in the later stages of the Vietnam/ American War. It was made of copper (some were also made of brass) and was engraved with the name of a random American Soldier that had been captured and held captive in Vietnam. The bracelet was to be worn until that soldier had returned home safely. I honestly didn't completely understand what that bracelet meant at the time, yet it troubled me in ways that I couldn't, and to this day, still can't quite explain. 

I guess, in a sense, that bracelet connected me, us—my family—in an odd, obscure way, to an American soldier that was actually there in Vietnam. A captured American soldier, no less.

Perhaps, in a more immediate way, that bracelet came to symbolize to me, the unspoken and still undiscovered evils of the world; of war and killing; of death, torture and captivity.

Don't get me wrong, my family experienced the Vietnam War in the same way most American families of our generation did—the way the majority of Americans experience most wars: from newspapers, magazines and the images broadcast on our grainy console television. The majority of it, however, left little more impression on me than the Saturday morning cartoons my brother and sister and I watched together. It's odd to say that I remember most Brady Bunch episodes more vividly than I remember specific events from the Vietnam War.

Still, there was something about it . . .

That war.

Somehow, even without my realizing, it burrowed its way deep, deep into my psyche . . .

In ways I can't explain, the Vietnam War left a serious mind-fuck of an impression on me.

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I shuffled slightly on the vinyl bench in the foyer and opened my eyes momentarily. The large man in the camo shorts had moved on and had been replaced by a middle-aged woman wearing— what looked to be—very uncomfortable shoes. I wondered briefly if she regretted her choice of footwear that day. She sipped water from a plastic bottle and fumbled with her cell phone. . . 

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I guess I never fully understood it: that war. 

By the time I was old enough to understand, it was already over.

Then there were much more important things to worry about:

Puberty, school, poison ivy, rusty nails, bullies, house-fires, robbers, Bigfoot, chicken pox, tornadoes, mean neighborhood dogs, shots from the doctor, tidal waves, sharks long division,clowns . . . .

Girls.

That kinda stuff.

I mean, I certainly couldn’t deny the impression that that war, consciously or not, had etched, scratched and carved into my subconscious. Yet, that latent, emotional blueprint certainly didn’t extend outward in an ability to understand the objective reality of it all: Who was fighting whom exactly, and why.

For an adolescent American boy, the details of such events matter very little when pitted up against, say, an exceptionally severe case of poison ivy that has morphed one’s left hand into a catcher’s mitt.

As an adult American male however, surrounded by the gruesome images of innocent children suffering the long-term effects of Agent Orange, Phosphorous Bombs and Napalm— the manufacture and usage of which are unequivocally attributed to your country of origin— the need to find understanding rapidly escalates to that of great importance— if, for no other reason than one’s own selfish desire to rid themselves of the shame that suddenly, for no logical reason, rushes in like a torrential flood.

                                        *               *               *               * 

        

I forfeited my position on the plastic bench in the corridor. The sweaty haze left behind on the black vinyl in the shape of my form—the only evidence of my having been there—evaporated quickly as I stood. A group of Japanese tourists passed by; the flashes and digitally replicated shutter-clicks from their high-tech cameras punctuated their ceaseless chattering. I was suddenly jealous of them for no reason . . .

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I had come to the conclusion that I needed to change my strategy if I were to have any real hope of resolving the existential dilemma I had dumped into my own lap.

I thought that perhaps if I could track my own progress through the museum—stealthily fragmenting my mind into both experiencer and observer, I just might be able to piece together clues that would help unravel the inexplicable puzzle that had plagued me since that very first visit.

This was no easy feat, mind you, for the very second I become aware that I was, in fact, stalking myself— tracking my own progress—the progress itself became pathetically sterile, mechanical and synthetic. Worse still, as the awareness grew even stronger, I became self-conscious to the point that I would freeze up altogether; engaged in a mental tug-of-war, second-guessing even the simplest of actions.

Ultimately it became impossible for me to gain any level of objectivity whatsoever; impossible to determine which actions were genuine and unsolicited and which were forced and deliberate. 

I was ready to abandon the whole ridiculous plan altogether when something interesting happened . . .

You see, I got so caught up in over-analyzing; so hopelessly lost in my own restless, erratic thought process that, without realizing it, my mind and body instinctively switched  to autopilot—going not where my over-analytic brain thought I should go—or shouldn’t go for that matter—but where I had intended to go all along . . .

And, just like that:

There it was . . .

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I stood in front of an enlarged, black-and-white photograph that had been fitted into an ordinary, solid-black frame and hung on an indistinct, crème-colored wall. The photo was lit by a dim fluorescent bulb mounted overhead—chosen, I would imagine, in an attempt to create some kind of balanced neutrality.  It was surrounded by a dozen-or-so similarly-sized, similarly lit, similar-themed photos all hung in a near-identical fashion. 

To others, I imagine, there was probably very little distinction between this photo and the others that surrounded it.

For me, however, nothing could have been further from the truth.

But, you see—this was not the first time I’d stood in front of this photo.

I had, in fact, stood in this very spot several times prior, just as I stood now: breathless and transfixed, feet held firmly in place as if dipped in cement, shoulders drooping heavily downward, hands and arms dangling flaccidly to the side, head held defiantly forward as I struggled against tears that were daring to be cried.

‘Some things,’ I was reminded, ‘are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.’

The thought had very little time to settle in before I was off again, moving at an even, steady pace through the museum. The cement that held my feet had turned to dust; the breath that had been stilled had resumed; my soul deftly gathered back the tears that dare not be cried. I knew instinctively that there was more to be seen . . .

By now there was no longer any need to fragment my mind into separate compartments. No reason to trick myself into anything. No reason to waste time engaged in a losing game of tug-of-war against a listless opponent

.

A switch had been flipped.

And just like that . . .

I skidded to a halt in front of another black-and-white photo in an altogether different section of the museum. This was not the first time I had stood in this spot, either. This photograph was slightly smaller than the first. It was unframed and mounted on a flat, thin board that hung along with several others on a simple white wall. It was lit in such a way that the light from above refracted off the polished floor below like moonlight on a frozen pond. My feet slowly melted downward into that dark, nacreous void and I was immobile once again—arms and legs frozen solid, head held stationary, unable to turn away.  My soul held its breath, defied its silent, unshed tears once again, and a gentle voice bubbled up from somewhere deep below the surface of that icy, fluorescent pond . . .

This . . . is  . . . why  . . . you are here.

And just like that the whole process began again.

And then again . . .

Each photo rushed-in in a deliberate, even-paced succession—each photo as intimately familiar, each equally anesthetizing, and each as devastatingly heartbreaking as the next. I knew for sure that this was—these were—this scant, dozen-or-so, half-century-old, monochromatic images—the very reason . . . the only reason I had returned.  Each might have differed slightly in size, proportion and composition, but every one of these photos carried within the borders of its pixelated pseudo-reality, the same, uncanny ability to penetrate directly—like an adrenaline injection stabbed straight through flesh, muscle and bone—to my heart.

Somewhere deep inside, a latent memory was churning to life; desperately fighting its way to the surface like a drowning man struggling for breath. Like a desolate, tortured prisoner it pleaded for release— or, at the very least: recognition . . .

That recognition would not come, I realized, until both halves of the puzzle had been resolved—the ‘why’ of the ‘why’, so to speak. I mean, by now there was certainly no denying the fact that these few random photos scattered throughout this much vaster assemblage was indeed the reason that I had returned. This understanding, however—as valuable it might have seemed— in all actuality solved only half of the equation.

There had to be more to it.

  . . . And there was . . . 

The other half of the equation, I recognized in a sudden, serendipitous flash, lay hidden within the very photos themselves: concealed within each face and every guileless gesture; every expression and every graphically-frozen movement. Moreover, there was a blatantly obvious thread that ran through each and every one of these photos; a thread that bound each of them together in a neat, undeniable, simplistic manner—so simple, in fact, that I had brushed it off long ago as insignificant.

The thread was this: The facial expression of every single person in every single photo was, with little variance and few exceptions—the very same expression.

Out of nowhere, a quiet whisper rose from my throat and floated to my lips like a mantra:

 I know this . . . I know this . . . I know this . . .

And I did.

I knew it well.

I just wasn’t quite sure . . . how.

And then, without and kind of warning—any warning whatsoever, the whole fucking thing exploded inside my frontal lobe like a land-mine.

Memories poured in like liquid-fire from an irate, blackening sky: Darkness, pain, fear, sadness, suffering and vulnerability all clashed together in an all-out, apocalyptic fourth-of-July, cluster-fuck of a synaptic explosion.

The latent memories that had been churning indolently now erupted fervidly. The drowning man that had struggled for breath brutally thrashed and clawed his way to the surface. The tortured prisoner’s quiet plea for mere recognition had escalated to a barbaric battle-cry vehemently proclaiming:

‘YOU—WILL—RELEASE— ME—NOW!’

And just like that:

there—

it—

was.

 . . . .

 . . . oh.

 . . . .

 . . . shit.

 . . . .

yeah.

it was that expression.

. . . .

that fucking expression.

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I am twelve-years old and on my way home from elementary school... 

The bullies had spent the day as they always had: demonstrating dominance over us—the non-bully masses.

My favorite game was the ‘Motherfucker Walk/Don't Walk Game’. It went something like this:

Bully 1: "Motherfucker, if you don't stop walking right now, I’m gonna hit you up-side yo’ motherfuckin’ HEAD!”

Bully 2: "Motherfucker, if you don't START walking right now, I’m gonna hit you up-side yo’ motherfuckin’ HEAD!”

Yeah . . .

It was quite the conundrum.

Quite the conundrum indeed.

Not only was it peppered with the threat of immediate bodily harm, but it was also psychologically rooted in delicate, subtle layers of paradox as well . . .

It was a lot for the pre-adolescent, hormone-riddled neo-cortex to wrestle with.

In all actuality, though, from what I can remember, in the end, no scenario ever actually resolved with an ill-fated motherfuckin’ hit up-side anyone's motherfuckin’ head.

But I digress . . .

            

I had just rounded the corner from the main road. I took the shortcut through the apartment complex that led to the park, crossed over the wooden bridge near the big tree, passed the playground with the old, rusty slide; circumnavigated my way along the dirt path that ran alongside the tennis courts and was beginning to weave my way through the twisting maze of paved pathways that would eventually complete the short journey home.

In the distance I could see my little sister, schoolbooks still clutched under her arm. She was stopped along the pathway and seemed to be talking to some friends. As I began to get a little closer, it became alarmingly apparent that one of the guys she was talking to—a guy I knew from school—was actually harassing her.  He was harassing my little sister.

Now, truth be told, this was the same sister I myself had harassed incessantly, 'round the clock without end, day-in and day-out, week after week, month after month, year after blessed-year for the vast majority of her short life up until that point.

This, however, was different—or so it seemed to me . . .

With the protective instinct of an older brother kicked into high gear—that afternoon’s episode of ‘Motherfucker Walk/ Don’t Walk’ still red-lining my nervous system, I began to sprint across the grass field that separated us. It took very little time to reach them as adrenaline was rocketing through my sugar-addled bloodstream at light-speed, biochemically priming my gawky, boney frame for . . . well, something.

I hadn’t exactly thought the whole thing through . . .

Irrespectively, I ran up, full speed, and with all the strength I could muster, I reeled back and decked that kid in his shoulder as hard as I could. 

It was his right shoulder. I remember it distinctly . . . 

Yeah, strange choice . . .

The shoulder.

You see, I honestly didn't have it in me to hit him—or anyone else for that matter—upside their motherfucking head as, I guess, one might argue, might have been justified at that moment.

At the very least would have been a more decisive statement . . .

If I was playing the role of the hero coming to rescue the girl in a movie, I probably would have been laughed right off the screen.

STILL . . .

The effect it had on me couldn't have possibly been any greater. If I had pulled-the-pin on a grenade and tossed it in his direction leaving his body in a mangled, bloody mess that afternoon, it couldn't have made more of an impact on me.

That punch, that moment, the feeling that it left in me that day all seeped their way into the deepest recesses of my temporal lobe; frozen in time like some sort of monument to lost innocence.

The look on his face—

It was that exact same expression . . .

That fucking expression!

It was the look of sheer terror; of horrified shock and total submission; of disorientation and humiliation; of desperation, helplessness and heartbreaking sadness.

It sickened and horrified me. It saddened me in ways that I can't possibly explain. It splintered my heart into a million irreparable pieces and shook me to the very core. I hated it—hated the way I felt at that moment. I hated knowing that I held that power within me; the power to elicit all that grotesque emotion so eerily stitched into his expression at that moment; all of the pain and fear so unnervingly alive in that expression.

Something died inside me at that moment.  It died in a quick, brilliant, iridescent flash only I could see.

It died right there in the park next to the swing-set and the jungle-gym.

It died as my little sister and her friends unknowingly looked on . . .

And yes, one could argue about the laws of karma, the Biblical ‘eye for an eye’, about righteousness and justice and how ‘he had it coming to him’ –how it ‘served him right’ and on and on . . .

I might even agree on some of these points . . .

Still . . .

The only thing I really knew for certain at that moment was that I never, ever wanted to see that expression on anyone’s face ever again.

It changed my life—

that expression.

that fucking expression . . .

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It was a strange ride back to my rented room in the lonely alleyway that evening.  My brain sloshed and gurgled with a mish-mosh of conflicting emotions as I hammered away at the clunky pedals on my cheap, borrowed bicycle.

Sure, I had, for the most part, unraveled a minor mystery that had been plaguing me for some time—but, in the wake of that unraveling I had dredged up childhood memories that just might have been better left . . . un-dredged. I mean, the memories themselves were fairly painless and non-threatening, but still, I couldn’t help wonder what the point of it all was: What had the whole experience actually revealed to me? What had I gained from it all?

I relaxed and submitted to the damp, monsoon wind that fell against my face as my bike stuttered and grinded its way through its rusty gears. I felt the blood pump through my legs as I weaved in and out of the sea of motorbikes that flooded around me as I battled my way across the city. The wetness from the recent rain mixed with the oil on the city street and glistened in all manner of colors like an abstract painting . . .

For a mere fraction of a second I felt fully present, alive and aware—

And just like that . . .

It took only that fraction of a second to resolve months of relentless inquiry and tireless contemplation; to resolve endless hours spent wandering among the images of war and suffering as my brain fought its way upstream against a ceaseless current of insoluble questions; to resolve countless, sleepless nights, and the drowsy, eerie, dream-like days that often followed—all inadvertently sacrificed in the service of truth.

That same fraction of a second effortlessly belched-up a single word: One solitary word that concisely encapsulated all that had been gained over that two-month period:

  

That word was this:

Nothing.

The experience had revealed absolutely nothing at all. 

Nothing had been gained.

Nothing had been achieved.

NOTHING.

I’d merely exposed my demons—not exorcised them.

Nothing had been resolved.

Nothing had been concluded.

All of it amounted to naught.

That was that.

That was all.

So—?

 . . . now what?

                                *               *               *               *

Three years ago when I first wrote this story, I would have ended it right there.

Anti-climactic.

Hopeless.

Disappointing.

A bitter dose of bad news.

And I would have loved to have ended it there.

I wanted to be the kind of writer that wasn’t afraid to let a good story end on a downer—a low note, if that was where it was supposed to end. Life, I told myself, wasn’t all happy endings and sunshine. Sometimes it just, well . . . sucked. And sucking was okay. Sometimes really bad things happened to really good people. Sometimes horrible, unspeakable things happened—even to children. War was hell and that was that.

I wanted bitterness. I welcomed negativity. I wanted to, just once, be okay with throwing a shit-storm of bad news into the toxic, polluted atmosphere and watch as it settled on the stinking, rotting carcasses of hopelessness and despair.

More than anything, though, I wanted truth—and such was the truth at that moment:

Nothing had been gained. 

Nothing was resolved.

 . . . and they all lived shittily ever after.

-The End-

But—such is the value of time.

And such was the gift, I’ve come to realize only now, of having the original version of this story stolen all those years ago in that park in downtown Saigon—cut down in its prime by an artful Vietnamese thief.

Perhaps life isn’t always sunshine and happy endings. But what are ‘endings’ really, but subjective, punctuation marks placed as temporary gravestones for what is essentially a fluid reality. Simply put: What some call the end, others clearly see as a beginning. If we eliminate these subjective landmarks, then there really are no beginnings or endings—only one continuous journey.

And somewhere in the midst of that journey, I recall standing amongst the grisly images of war and violence in a museum in downtown Saigon as some long-buried aspect of myself began to transition its way from upward to outward—first with a humble appeal for recognition, and then with its final, emphatic demand for release.

Now, three years later I realized that time and circumstance was granting the opportunity for an even more valued asset:

Renewal.

Yeah, life might not always give us sunshine and happy endings, but it damn sure always gives us the opportunity for renewal.

And renewal this time, I understood, had to begin exactly where it had been left all those years before: with a twelve year old boy and a mind-raping experience that had just been lobbed into his lap like a grenade.  

I really had no choice.

I had to go back for him.

Back where it all began . . .

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I recognized him right away. It wasn’t hard to do—I’d have known him anywhere.

Even though he was moving fairly quickly along the pathway, he was easy to track. But, of course, I could predict his future. I’d made that same walk home from school hundreds of times. We didn’t have far to go.

I hovered in the background. I didn’t want to get too close and startle him. He’d just had his world flipped upside-down. He had a lot on his mind.

   

He skirted his way through the winding maze of paved pathways that ran through the park, crossed over the short metal bridge—

His heart was beating fast. He was clearly upset. But, of course I knew why . . .

—Oh, I wasn’t reading his mind. I didn’t have a crystal ball or Tarot cards—nothing like that. I didn’t need parlor tricks or psychic powers to know what was on his mind or where he would go next—

He passed through the narrow gap in the tall boarded-fence and took the short-cut through his neighbor’s backyard—everybody did. I guess that’s the price one pays for living so close to a park.

And a path.

It was probably going to kill their resale value . . .

He made his way through the yard quickly. The small, white dog barked from the other side of the fence as it always did—but we both barely heard it. There was much too much to think about.

He took the short, worn dirt path that led from the yard to the street. His house was very close. Just a right turn here at the sidewalk, a quick left there, and—

There it was. I recognized it immediately.

I sure loved that house.

I watched as he returned to his bedroom: the bedroom with the blue shag carpet he kept so carefully vacuumed. I watched as he sat at the pine roll-top desk that he loved so much: the desk he kept so well organized—paperclips here, erasers there, pens placed just-so in the small aluminum mug with the glass bottom, loose-leaf paper pressed carefully into the back left corner . . .

Tears sat dormant in the corners of his eyes as they waited for just the right moment.

Only, the moment wouldn’t come.

Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

He clicked his ancient Panasonic cassette deck into play: the deck with the small condenser microphone built into the top and thought and thought and thought . . .

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I wondered what he would have wanted from me: his future self, just then. What would he have hoped that I would have done with this massive assemblage of indispensable information that he had so painfully wrestled from the gnarled, clenched grip of the universe that afternoon; all the emotional cuts, scrapes and bruises that he had just endured in the name of greater understanding and growth?

Of course he couldn’t have known any of that, for such were the limitations of the peculiar set of circumstances that we found ourselves in at that moment, and such were the limitations of the one-way mirror view that I held into his life just then. From this side of the mirror, I could easily gain access into his life—my past—but try as he might, there was no way that he could ever, ever glimpse the future on the other side of that mirror.

It became fairly obvious that my side of that mirror had its own limitations, for as much as I longed to console him; let him know that everything would work out okay—I knew at once that I never could.

Besides—he really didn’t, I began to sense, need my help.

He would turn out just fine in the end. I was proof of that . . .

And just like that—

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place . . .

HE WOULD TURN OUT JUST FINE.

I . . .

ME—

I—WAS—THE—VERY—PROOF!

He didn’t need me in that moment! I, in fact, needed him! The two of us—the ‘me’ of the past and the ‘me’ of the present were there at that moment not for ‘him’ as I had initially suspected —BUT FOR ME!  

It was finally, undeniably clear:

That moment there in that park all those years ago—

    

It really did change my life.

It changed everything . . .

That awkward punch, that expression, the uncertain pain that I felt that day—all of those things led me here: minute by minute, day by day, year by year to this very moment; this very place—

The existential query that was born in that moment and the seemingly infinite chasm of introspection that it hurled me into that day all inadvertently snowballed into a relentless search for truth—a search that led from the “Do unto others” teachings of Christianity, through the inexhaustible gamut of New-Age philosophies, onto the “Four Noble Truths” of Buddhism and the Buddhist monasteries of Nepal, Thailand and India and finally here: to this ashram in Rishikesh, India where I have lived for the past two years studying a somewhat esoteric spiritual philosophy known as Vedanta—of which ‘truth’—truth of self, truth of the world, truth of everything is considered the very essence of this teaching. Nothing that I have discovered in all my years of searching has even come close to unraveling ‘truth’ like Vedanta.

And I now understood that this—all of this—began that lonely, unsettling afternoon in the park . . .

I wonder if he, my childhood self, would have ever imagined—even in his most off-the-wall, grandiose, abstract vision of the future—that it would have turned out the way that it has. As that episode in the park played itself over and over in his head; as the ache and uncertainty washed over him time and time again; as he wandered through the days that followed . . . changed, but really not  quite sure ‘how’, would he have ever guessed in his wildest dreams that four decades later he’d be holed-up in a room no larger than the bedroom of his childhood, seven thousand miles away, hunkered over a cheap pressboard desk, haphazardly pecking away at a worn, smudged laptop in-between Vedic philosophy and Sanskrit classes still trying to explain that moment?

The answer—and I say it with no measure of uncertainty whatsoever—is, of course: No.

I never imagined it . . .

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I did my best to send a simple message of empathy and compassion back to my childhood self—qualities I recognized were born that very same day in the park—before I left him for good.

He had remained silent and still all the while—a small, sad, lonely figure afloat a sea of immaculately vacuumed royal blue shag carpet while a mix of seventies pop-songs droned-on quietly in the background from his ancient Panasonic cassette deck with the small condenser microphone built into the top.

–Oh, it was useless, I realized—irrational: trying to ‘send messages across time’.

It was a naive desire; A childish wish.

No—there would be no over-the-top magical, ‘mystical’ dialog between past and present versions of myself in this story. God knows, in my over-ambitious quest to tie together a lifetime of experience, four different countries, the Vietnam War, a museum, jet-lag, the Brady Bunch, a stolen computer, POW Bracelets, bullies, lost childhood innocence, Bigfoot and the ultimate pursuit of truth, I’d already blurred the lines of reality reasonably well-enough.

Besides—I concluded: there was really no need:

I’d gotten what I had come for.

No.

It was time to let him be; time to let him get on with his life; time for me to get on with mine.

 . . . And time to conclude this story, I decided.

Right on schedule, apparently—

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I watched as he made his way over to his bed slowly and mechanically. He collapsed onto the mattress with a lifeless thud, while his arms—defying all natural protective instincts—dangled heavily and limply from their sockets throughout the entire process. It was as if all the life had been quickly and forcefully drained out from under him like air from a punctured tire. He lay motionless for only a moment before he buried his face in his pillow and cried and cried and cried.

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I felt the need to take one final glance back through the mirror into my past before I left it all behind, yet my own reflection was all that I could see anymore. The past had become just as blurred as it had always been.

I studied that reflection for some time through the haze of tears that was beginning to fill my own eyes.

I look old, I thought . . .

Oh—it didn’t really bother me—not the way that it might have in the past.

I had traveled much too far, invested far too much time in study and contemplation, sacrificed everything that I had ever known, thought or believed to arrive at all I know now.

The search for truth, I have come to understand, demands nothing less.

And, of course, as all truths tend to be, it is much, much simpler than I ever imagined it could be— yet, somehow, at the same time, all the more profound.

And it all began that day in the park so many years ago.

—I ‘am’.  I will always be. There was never a time when I ‘wasn’t’. There will never be a time when I won’t be. I am free. I have always been free. I will always be free . . .

And—

Just like that . . .

I could finally let it all go—

Release it back into the ether where it belongs . . .

                                     

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