The Longwinded Intake of Breath

What happens here is a seaside story, a tale of shades in meaning.

   It’s my habit to stroll down to the waterfront and get a mug of black coffee with no sugar at Velma’s, a hunched diner tucked between the crook of a convenience store and a souvenir shop. This one morning I go inside and light a cigarette and watch the deep roots of blue smoke coil around the silver steam from my coffee mug. Bored, I looked out through the window and watched the mosh of activity hanging over the wharf. Here and there men wandered around with their heads down scuffing their boots along the weather-washed wooden planks, while overhead seagulls caught in silent screams arced through the air with a whoosh, a swoop, a dip and a hover.   

   A shadow spilled over my table and broke my reverie. What I thought was an old man stood there before me, but I couldn’t be sure. I squinted against the bright light trying to catch a glimpse of his face but his hands formed a circle around it and this had the effect of blotting his face out. To this day I can only recall a thin tuft of hair that the wind whipped straight across his forehead, snapping it like a tattered flag.   

   He bent over and picked up an old bucket and it swung, creak, creak, creaking in the wind. A shower of rusty flakes tumbled to the ground and trailed behind him as he ambled over to the far corner of Velma’s storefront window. He stopped there and with a slight nod he plunked the rusty old bucket, dented and deformed, onto the sidewalk. He reached into it and pulled out a sopping black rag. It was dirty, dark or both; smeared brown grey black and sagged like the soggy arse of his overalls.    

   With a heavy thump he splattered the rag onto the window and a thick black sludge seeped out of it and in a slow almost hypnotic counterclockwise motion, the faceless old man spread the black ooze over the window.    

   From the table next to me I heard a girl tut and mumble something about the guy being a crazy bum or something. She flipped her bottle blond hair over her starched white collar and rearranged her proud red polo sweater. Her boyfriend in DKNY crinkled his eyebrows into a steeple and confessed that he felt so sorry for the guy, that he probably lost his boat during the crisis, and that they should go easy on him. Ya know, give peace a chance. They stared at each other stone-faced and then slowly, imperceptibly, their facial muscles stretched and cracked and the girl burst out a mule bark that sent lettuce leaves and half chewed mushrooms cascading over the table. Their bodies fell forward, laughing. “Shut up, Jimmy. You idiot.”    

   Meanwhile, the old man kept at it: hauling the bucket, sopping his rag and smearing the thick dark grime over the window. Bit by bit a deep, dense blackness drowned the other side of the room.  

  Food was forgotten; coffee went cold. One girl twisted and knotted a paper napkin in her hands and leaned over to her girlfriend whispering that she thought he was that politician guy who murdered his family, all five of’em shot in the head, execution style. That guy who locked himself in his house and no one ever heard from again. That maybe it was him, that guy, ya know? That Mr. Gein guy, wasn’t it? Another group, mid-thirties, with Blackberries sprinkled between half eaten club sandwiches heard that the old man was an immigrant, a Math professor from the Old Country who couldn’t make a go of it here.

   Outside the rusty bucket continued to scrap along the sidewalk while inside the failing light was filled with whispers. Some said he was a failed artist or something and still others murmured guesses that I couldn’t quite catch, guesses that buzzed by my ears.   

   Minutes passed and the darkness stretched across the room. Like a lunar eclipse, over half the room was drowned in darkness; while the other half, my half, rested in a milquetoast light. The room was silent now. Hesitant. The clink of saucers and cups died down and the scraping of forks and knives on porcelain died down too. And one by one the rumors and whispers became murmurs and murmurs, hushes, and the hushes finally died down to silence.   

   Everyone watched as the old man toiled away blacking out the window, In short order only a small circle of light remained. This circle sat in front of my table and I felt nervous. His work, I presumed, was almost done. I squinted into the darkness trying to see across the room, but the girl with the starched halo collar had disappeared, her boyfriend too. In fact, the whole room had disappeared; the darkness swallowed everything. 

   I leaned forward and looked out through the remaining hole of light.  I saw the old man looming there before me, but he was a blur. A large bulky shape–a general idea that I couldn’t make out.  

   I watched as he reached down into his bucket and pulled out the black rag, the sludge dripping off of it and onto the sidewalk, and slowly he stretched it out towards the last circle of light. The rag grew larger as it neared me and then, with one final swipe, the old man shut the window’s eyelid.

   And with this final counterclockwise motion the gulls and the wharf and the boats and the meandering old men with shaggy beards, they all disappeared. At the last second, before total darkness fell, I leaned forward and saw the old man’s hands: they were smooth.

   The whole restaurant rested in darkness. Behind the blackened glass I could barely make out the old man’s outline. It was indistinct and vague; a ghostly black shape that hovered scarcely visible behind the mucky black window. It wavered there, considering. Then it drifted to the center of the window and stopped.   

   The ghostly smudge, the faceless and shapeless and undefined old man, raised a faint arm and there in the middle of the window a point of bright white light appeared. I thought I could see a fingerprint, but the light was too bright and I doubted that ghosts had fingerprints anyway.    

   And then the point of light moved forming circles and arcs and lines and what I thought were some old runes or letters began to take shape.    

   No one moved and the only sound was a longwinded intake of breath from somewhere far off in the back of the room. And when the outline’s shadow drifted away, there in the darkness, blearing through in an angelic white light, was the following:     

   “Do you see me now?”