2006-01-09

Grey people

Driving back from the mall the day after Christmas, a man walked against traffic, traveling in the same direction, but on the road instead of the sidewalk. It had snowed a few inches, so walking in the fresh tire tracks of the street made some sense, but not enough to risk being hit by a car. He had a large pack on his back and a new-ish looking parka to keep the cold out and he plodded forward grimly, possibly marking the homeless or aged or both. As we passed slowly by him my brother and I turned to see his face; it was grey, the wrong kind of grey, so unhealthy like the walking dead, and instantly we voiced concern that this man, despite his robust steps, might be near heart failure. But we did nothing, save stare at his miraculous skin tone as we drove slowly past, and he mouthed something, probably malicious, and gave the finger to another car that honked at him as it passed.

Now, there is another grey guy here, this time sitting almost next to me as I write this, and falling asleep over his Sudoku in the coffee shop. I’ve seen him here before, always with a pen in his hand and six or seven papers, usually talking to himself and scratching figures into the little white boxes of logic and rules that Sudoku permits. I wonder what he is doing here, what series of events brought him to his current state, the unhealthy and dour tint of his skin, his obsession with the 81 squares (everything black and white), his extremely pale, and yes (what else), arctic blue eyes, squinting and blinking randomly, looking at but usually past where you sit.

Today he is sleeping, face first, on top of his puzzles and I suddenly think that this man is dying. From what I cannot guess, perhaps a life full of coffee and puzzles and not much else; probably nothing though, probably he is fine and will live 20 years longer. It is amazing, isn’t it, how long we can live with nothing. (And yes, I am saying he has nothing, when in actual truth this is probably not the case, probably he has daughters and dreams and regrets, maybe he’s on the verge of understanding something that has eluded him for so long – but for the purpose of where this is heading, and I usually haven’t a clue where that is, it seems more apt for him to have nothing and to go on living despite this.)

I guess I’m thinking of how we might have nothing to look forward to but the daily Sudoku and that a heart will continue to beat all the same. The maddening possibility we are constantly faced with that perhaps nothing really matters. That the brilliant and inspiring will be killed off long before their time by matters that otherwise do not concern them – a tire that blows up in a face or the random violence that follows someone home at night through the dark, an ash that falls from the end of a cigarette in the house next door or the creeping heart failure that every doctor failed to notice because you were young and beautiful and strong like an ox. It shouldn’t have happened but it did, didn’t it, or it does, and it will, and there’s nothing to do about it but go on living, Sudoku or not, grey or healthy, and try and find happiness as much as possible.

And I can’t live in that world, I can’t stand the idea of it, I detest it, and so instead I’m forced to believe there must be meaning in the void, a certain logic to events that is inescapable like the word destiny and which, in the end, will probably break your heart.

A professor I greatly respected once said to me that belief is the beginning of ignorance. That if less people believed things they couldn’t see, the world would be a better place. That’s fine, I said, and probably true, but it isn’t as simple as all that.

I guess what it comes down to is this: either you take truth at the expense of comfort or a reality subsidized by fiction. Either you make meaning by living or you wonder where it is as the world and all the events that happen around you grow increasingly strange and incomprehensible. Your actions change things or they don’t, maybe they never mattered, or maybe they do, because you willed it to be so.

And it probably isn’t as simple as all that either, but time and time again, I ask myself: if there’s no meaning then what the fuck are we doing here? And of course, there is no answer, but in the ways you choose to live.

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