A Surreal Little Easter Story

My bone china coffee cup sank through the breakfast table.  Strange when you see it: the lack of resistance; wood veneer a thick syrup.  It lasted just a moment, but the cup had submerged to the handle when the world pulled solid again, a listing little boat caught between a tomato ketchup buoy and the protruding tangs of a fork.

“Damn, I thought all that shit had stopped,” I said.

“You’ll never know what’s real,” she said, “or how long it’ll stay real.”

She had wrapped a towel around her head, the way she once did to soak water from her hair.  Joanie had been bald for months.

“What?  It grew back yesterday,” she said.  She gave the briefest of shrugs.

I watched as her cup, the twin to mine, parted from its handle.  It darted for the floor.  The liquid stayed, abandoned in mid air like the blob in a lava lamp, ignorant of gravity.

We looked at each other, conducting that thousand-word conversation which one expression captures in a moment.

“You or me?” she asked.

“I’ll go.  It’s my turn to do the necessary.”

“Yes,” she said.  “I believe it is.”

“The roof?”

“That’s where he usually is.”

She leaned down to retrieve her fallen cup.  It hadn’t shattered.  She scooped her floating coffee from the air as a man might land a fish with a net.  She sniffed at it as if unsure its aroma had survived the weightless experience.

“Tell him he ought to stop this nonsense,” she said.

“I will.”

I started for the door.  She wished me luck.

At the last moment, I said, “Show me your hair.”

She did.  She untwizzled the wet towel.  Her long dark hair fell down like years tumbling away.  Even time, it seemed, could be undone.

Up I went, onto the roof.  I was never sure what he’d be.  He changed so often, I sometimes wondered if he was him, or an imposter who had just happened onto our roof.  He fascinated me.  He terrified me.  He made me feel like a pet dog.

Today, white-bearded; community-service orange overalls; Marigold gloves to tend the roof garden.  He had dirt smeared on one cheek.

“The bluebells will be out,” he said.  A rake too close to his bare foot. He had black toes.  Hairy.

“You can’t grow bluebells on a roof.”

“You can’t?” he said.

“It’s a roof.  They need shade.”

“I can do shade, if shade is required,” he said.

Two long rake strokes combed through the soil.  His concentration kept them straight.  Content with the result, he looked at me.

“Daniel, isn’t it?”

“No.  David.  You know full well.”

He liked to tease.  Whenever he made mistakes, I always knew they couldn’t be real.

“You have something on your mind, David?”

“It’s happening again.”

“What is?”

“Fucked up stuff.”

“Ah, that,” he said.

“Yes, that.  Nature going haywire.  It’s bloody dangerous.”

He set the rake at his side for a moment.

“Dangerous to whom?” he asked.

“Everyone.  You can’t let it run amuck like this.  Not just do what it wants when it wants, there are supposed to be rules.  You know, laws for nature.”

“Laws, you say?”  He seemed to find the idea amusing.  “Yes, maybe but it’s very hard to enforce laws all the time.  I get so tired.”

“We need laws,” I said.  “Certainty.  We can’t be intelligent without certainty.  Everything we know could suddenly be wrong.  We don’t ask for much.”

“Ha,” he said.  At first, he didn’t seem to think I was serious.  He wriggled the rake head into the soil, then piled his hands on top of the shaft and held them down with his chin, as if making a stable camera for his gaze.   I realised his eyes were quite otherly.

“Oh, David, you ask for everything.”

He held me in that stare for a while.  Maybe he was thinking.  Maybe he was amused by my inability to break away.

He laughed.  “Perhaps I could introduce a schedule.  Tuesday, Wednesday, and through the weekend – on.  The rest of the week, anything goes.  Take cover if you haven’t the cajones for adventure.”

“That’s a bad idea,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said.  “But if you don’t like it… well… take the Monday as a duvet day.  See how you feel come Thursday, Friday.”

“Everyone would feel terrified.”

“And would that be such a bad thing?  I’ve been thinking about retiring,” he said.  “Chewing it over with my shrink.”

“You have a shrink?”

“Austrian fella.  Says I feel unappreciated.  Just the thing if I withdrew my services and let you all see what it would be like.  Something about my childhood, he says.”

“What was wrong with your childhood?”

He shook his head and stared at his black toes.  “Didn’t have one.  You don’t grow old, so you can never have been young.  Not that time means that much when you really think about it.”

He looked out over the roof towards the horizon.  The morning sun was battling with the last wisps of cloud.

“To hell with your damn shade,” he said and waved his hand.

As the sun broke through, his shadow was long and large, like a finger across his newly-raked soil.  The sideways light caught the crags and folds of his face.

“I’m not asking so much, am I?  Maybe just the one day a week then.  That would be enough to convince you all that I’m needed.”

“My grandmother fell down the lift shaft,” I said.

That caught his attention.

“Yes, straight through a newly liquefied lift floor and down 23 storeys.  It was her birthday,” I added.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know,” he said, which was of course an obvious lie.

“She didn’t die.”

“She didn’t?”

“Someone had placed three tons of goose feathers at the bottom.”

“Ah,” he said.

“You had placed three tons of goose feathers at the bottom,” I said, just to let him know that I knew who the someone was.

“Ah,” he said and started again with the rake.

“Of course, people fall all the time.  Not necessarily down lift shafts, or because the floor has turned to liquid.  I think the feathers say more than anything else.”

I let him think, long enough for thinking to turn into a nod.

“I get so tired,” he said again.  “So tired.”

“If you want more attention, I dare say we could arrange something.  A party perhaps?  All you’d have to do is show up, and… well… do one or two things to show the real you.”

“I could jump from the temple rooftop.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“I was being ironic.”

I gave him a puzzled look, which he mistook (probably deliberately) for confusion.

“I was saying one thing while humorously implying the very opposite,” he explained.

“I got that,” I said.  “Are you afraid of heights, perhaps?  I’m sure we could think of an alternative.  Turning water into wine?  Raising a few dead bodies back into the land of the living?  Eating three Shredded Wheat?”

“No,” he said.  “The point is it’s hardly a satisfying accolade if someone worships you only if you jump from big tall towers.  Faith is not the response of a salivating dog.  How would you like it if that – what’s her name?  Joanie? – only loved you for your money?”

“I haven’t got any money.”

“Ah, then you’re set,” he said.  “Lucky you.  She actually loves you.  You see the way you’re sorted, appreciation-wise.  Meanwhile, I’m lying on my back, crying my eyes out and talking to an Austrian psychiatrist?  I’m holding the universe together and you can hardly unscrew the lid from instant coffee.  When you’re as useless as you are, life is so easy.”

“It’s a bugger,” I agreed.

We smiled together.  Another thousand words passed in a look.

“Oh, well, better get on,” he said.  “Other gardens to sow and all that.”

He didn’t move for a while, then he said, “They were duck feathers.”

I looked at him askance.

“In the lift shaft,” he said.  “Couldn’t find enough geese.  Not this time of year.  They migrate.”

Then he trundled away, shouldering the rake as he went.  When he reached the edge of the roof, he gently lifted the horizon, squeezed beneath it, and was gone.