The Narrative
 
The occasion, on this fall afternoon, was to honor a man, who now stood before an audience assembled in the Adelaide High School auditorium. With yellow-gray hair, glasses and a fine if old-fashioned suit, the slight man looked out and waited. As the applause that had accompanied the hero to the podium began to fade, he lifted a hand to stop it. "When you're making up your narrative as you go, you may develop whole sections of action and dialog for one purpose, only to change your mind later on, and then—out of some silly attachment—you don't delete them. Instead, you re-commit them to the new purposes, leaving them as they are.  You do so because the old purposes bring their own flavor to the mix, like a well-seasoned pan—or an old man with a lot of experience." 
 
The speeches of learned men often begin with irony and build from there. The smiles that had burst upon the attentive faces, assuming there was a joke there somewhere, lingered. He went on. The story of his deeds had one literal meaning. He had rescued two young girls from a dangerous abductor and had relieved that man of his miserable existence, and brought closure to the girls' families. But there was a back-story that gave the whole affair a different meaning. It involved a woman with whom our hero had corresponded as a young boy. "It may be that I'm a fool with a weakness for a literary motifs. But motifs, my friends, are guides to life and action. They rule in politics as well as in arts."  He had not consciously intended to rescue the girls, least of all kill someone in the process.  But he had done it all for that letter-writing woman, in some strange way. 
 
He went on without his notes, "Memories began to resurrect themselves the moment I arrived in Adelaide. Her name by coincidence.  No relation to your quiet township and my friends' given name. Nevertheless, once the perfume was unstoppered, I was reliving as much as remembering. I was tearing open Adelaide’s tissue-thin envelopes, running from the mailbox to the lawn, feeling the sun on my crown, seeking the shade of a wonderful old sycamore tree, and seeing her words on her pale blue paper as clearly as I had so many years ago. Suddenly her heartbreaking story became…significant in extraordinary ways to what was going on here.
 
 

"I dare say everyone here has heard the story of what I did, but none of you knows what was going through my mind at the time, and how the different connections I was making colored the picture for me, and made me, of all people, catch what should have been irrelevant. My friend Adelaide had been held captive during the war.  I was thinking about her horrible ordeal when I heard about Amy and Joan, the children of the town of Adelaide, who had been missing since July.
 
"You have called me a hero and shown me the depth of your gratitude. For you a hero is probably someone who knowingly and selflessly risks his life to help others.  I may not be that kind of hero, but I may be another kind, if you allow me. 
 
"In literature, a man can be a hero today merely if he is the focal point of the story. This hero is the one whose thoughts are known." Saying this, he tapped, with slender finger, on his large skull. There would be regions inside this prodigious orb where thoughts might only communicate with each other, making almost no contact with body or, through it, world. Deep in that head, discussion might play in an endless loop about possible things, impossible things, generating, by the divine ability of being discrete, a pattern that is a new idea.
 
"He cannot be this hero, the player who has not one soliloquy. It's not enough to be struck and to strike back. Reaction is not heroic, not in the sense to which I aspire. To be hit indirectly, in that organ of sympathy, and to respond obliquely, with the mind, is, to me, to be the master of great, creative action, to be heroic! I do not know if I deserve to be called this latter kind of hero, but it is the only kind that I might possibly be, because I am not the other, however much you might like me to be. And I do want to be a hero, of some kind, for you, since you've gone to all this trouble. If I can try your patience a moment longer, I will recreate my mind in those hours.
 
"My friend Adelaide knew my father in the war, in what capacity and how well were details we avoided with delicacy and mutual respect. Suffice it to say that she was with him when he died and had promised to contact me when I came of age to explain to me certain things. I never told my mother about Adelaide. 
 
"We exchanged letters for more than two years, until her death, though she was not yet old.  She and my father had been held together and tortured, each within sight of the other. She survived, and he did not.
 
"I had been in your town for two hours, maybe three. Stopped for lunch. I half overheard conversations at the diner.  Saw the signs about the missing girls. Saw the look on Sheriff Thomas' face. When I was driving out of town, and that amazing sycamore near the Krueger place came into view, I stopped. A hoary noble tree, with its many blanched trunks splitting off from the main, standing perfectly centered in the frame of that beautiful valley. Nothing could be more idyllic. No place could seem a less likely backdrop for cruelty. I got out of my car and sought its shade, to think of her was all I had in mind. 
 
"So absorbed was I in my own memories that I wasn't thinking of the pain of the two girls or of their abductor. I didn't mean to be a hero. I am just a bookish old man who had never fired a gun before that day. And yet, I accepted your gratitude, let you call me hero, let you think I was bravely following a hunch where to look for the girls. In a moment of remorse, I almost declined your offer to appear today, but I finally decided that in some very bizarre sense I did save the girls exactly as intended. It was luck, yes, that made me walk toward the right tree, but I wasn't being pushed along by life's vicissitudes. My own structured thoughts had driven me there.
 
"So then I had got myself to the right place at the right time. I heard a cry in the barn and ran toward it. That part was instinct, and I take no credit for it.  A small voice in pain drives all men, proverbial woodcutters, to answer. 
 
"When I opened the door of the barn, I was actually thinking about Adelaide's torturer. I saw Potter holding one of the girls. In a stream of vicarious hatred and fear, red hot like molten iron, I was able to do what should have been impossible for a man like me. I saved Adelaide, the town, because my father could not save his Adelaide. I actually saved Amy and Joan, but that’s not what I thought I was doing.
 
"If this begins to sound more like deranged manslaughter than heroism, let me assure you that I had the presence of mind to realize immediately what I'd stumbled upon, so it wasn't quite pathological madness. My faculties of reason were employed, but the ruling emotions, that made all possible, came from elsewhere. I had the advantage of surprise—his, but more importantly mine, and I grabbed Potter's gun.
 
"You wonder why I have to spring this on you here, now, in this way.  I do not take it lightly, the social contract that I break, appearing here to accept your gracious honor, then telling you that there is a story behind that honorable act that will change its meaning. 
 
"But tell me. Can I still be your hero on these grounds?  Are they enough?" He put his hands at his sides and waited.
 

© V.N Alexander 2021
 
 

Signs and Symbols
 
“Of course, I knew that you would see it,” said the novelist, chuckling softly, pushing away his dessert plate, after having meticulously scraped up the last faint smudges of strawberry sauce and cream, like an artist with a pallet knife.
 
Minsk smiled hesitantly. Seen it? he wondered, but then he shrugged bashfully and accepted the compliment. 
 
Now satisfied that Minsk had indeed seen it, the novelist laughed and winked. Minsk laughed too, pretending. 
 
Nervously, Minsk picked up a dried date and tried to pop it into his mouth. The date missed the target, fell to the floor, and Minsk watched it roll over the grimy garish floral carpet and finally come to rest up against another diner’s shoe.
 
Later, as they left the restaurant, the novelist clapped Minsk’s shoulder and told him, again, that he appreciated his writing the review for the Times.  “The only thing though,” he said after they had started to back away from each other on the sidewalk, “don’t spell it out for the reader. Just give a good enough hint. You have my permission.” 
 
Minsk grinned and nodded unconvincingly and turned on his heels toward home. He had already let the gaffe go too far to admit that he hadn’t seen it, and now it was clear that the man wasn’t speaking generally about the plot twists. He was alluding to a deeper meaning to his novel that only a certain kind of reader would recognize.  
 
At home when he flicked on the kitchen light, an enormous roach, that resembled perfectly a dried date, scurried over the stove and disappeared between the counter and the refrigerator. Minsk put his book bag heavily on the kitchen table, draped his raincoat over the chair and set to making a pot of coffee.  His kitchen window looked out into an airshaft. Across the way that young single mom, whom he had yet to meet on the street (so maybe she didn’t really exist in the real world, only in the airshaft theatre), washed dishes. Her three noisy boys would be in bed. He regarded her as she violently shook her hands dry before patting them with a tea towel and left the room in darkness. Minsk suddenly felt conspicuous there in his lighted space peering out at her absence and went back to the coffee. 
 
Why does he think I got it? He wondered. Did I say something at dinner? or does he just think I’m up to his caliber? He sat down and took the novel out of his bag. It was thumbed, worn at the edges. He’d dog-eared no less than twenty pages and had jotted notes all over the margins, circled words, labeled phrases, noted themes and pointed back and forth between different passages. 
 
Books loved to be marked up, he thought. They don’t want to be respected and put on a pedestal. They wanted to be used up, entered, pulled apart, re-arranged, digested. He could never give up a book once he’d made his notes in it, after it had become an important part of him. He loved re-reading books after ten or twenty years and stepping into his old thoughts again in the margins.  He couldn’t read e-books like he could a paper book. He’d tried the highlighting function and recording notes with a click, but he preferred his own hand, his large florid capitals, especially the Fs and the Ts, and his minuscule lowercase cursive, like fine tangled arabesque. As an image, a marked-up page was aesthetically compelling—especially his, the way he diagramed and drew arrows and stars.  He mused for moments about launching a career as a conceptual artist, or whatever they are called, showing his “artwork” in fancy galleries. Or someday when he published a collection of his reviews, he could include facsimile copies of his marked-up pages. But that would be putting the critic ahead of the creator. He didn’t like that. 
 
Was he the kind of reader the novelist needed, expected? 
 
Do writers write for me? he mused.
 
He cracked the book open in the middle.  The spine was already so broken in so many places it hardly mattered. Where to start? It was pointless, he decided, to reread the bits he had already analyzed. The thing to be done was to start again at the beginning.  Now that he had been made aware of a secret design, he would be a different kind of reader.  Already he had identified all the oh-so-subtle allusions to the lines in famous novels, poems, historical quotes that echoed throughout the masterful prose. But that was just detective work. What He seemed to suggest that evening over coffee was something much more mysterious.  What kind of message would have to be hidden? What kind of message would one want to hide?  Did he feel censored? Was it political or personal? Was it something embarrassing that he felt the urge to confess through a screen?
 
The coffee was ready. He poured it out black and started reading page one. No. He went back to the preface and read that. Then the afterword, then back to page one. 
 
Twelve hours later he was three-quarters of the way through again.  In a state of spiritual ecstasy, he stood (mentally) on the threshold of meaning. He had seen the patterns, words like stars in the night sky formed tangential connections, sounds and shapes divorced themselves from their logic and echoed each other with a punning wit. He had laughed out loud many, many times throughout the reading marathon.
 
But truth be told he hadn’t quite put his finger on it, had he? He inhaled deeply and put his hand to his chest. Exhaled. 
 
Perhaps that was it. That feeling of being on the verge of understanding the greatest of all mysteries, of having full throttle faith that there is a mystery. 
 
He stopped there.  He didn’t want to get to the end. He wanted to stay there, right on the brink.
 
 
© V.N Alexander 2021
 
These stories are from the collection Meno’s Stories—Message without a Sender by V.N. Alexander