Bibliotherapy

When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them. When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined.

They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates.

Guest Blogger: Chuang Tzu

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m taking a little breather today so I’ve invited one of my favorite bloggers, a beautiful guy all the way from China in 300 BC, to sit in my chair instead. I’m talking about Chuang Tzu, that awesome parable-speaker and explicator of the Tao, and if he doesn’t mind me saying so, let’s face it, he’s a lot more fun than the Old Man himself. So Chuang –- or should I call you Tzu? -– what have you got for us today? Don’t tell me it’s the one about how you dreamed you were a butterfly and then when you woke up you didn’t know if you were Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

“No, young man, I – “

Because I have to tell you, that’s like a fantastic story but we’ve all heard –

“I know. I’m sick of it myself. Been telling it for 2300 years, time to take it off the set list. No, today I’ve got ‘Owl and Phoenix.’”

Owl and Phoenix? Sounds profound. Very oriental, if you know what I mean. So the owl and the phoenix – I can do plots, listen to this – the owl and the phoenix are like hot for each other, and –

“No, this is a spiritual tale.”

Okay, we’ll give it a shot anyway. How long does it –

“It’s two tiny pages in those little Shambhala editions that you can stick into your phone pocket with room for a three-pack of Magnum Ecstasies to spare. Don’t worry, it won’t tax your attention span. The book is The Way of Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton (yeah, him). Here goes:

“Hui Tzu was Prime Minister of Liang province. He had what he believed to be inside information that Chuang Tzu coveted his post and was intriguing to supplant him. In fact, when Chuang Tzu visited Liang, the Prime Minister sent out the police to arrest him. The police searched for Chuang Tzu for three days and nights, but meanwhile he presented himself before Hui Tzu of his own accord, and said:

Have you heard about the bird
That lives in the south,
The Phoenix that never grows old?

This undying Phoenix
Rises out of the South Sea
And flies to the Sea of the North,
Never alighting

Except on certain sacred trees.
He will touch no food
But the most exquisite
Rare fruit,
Drinks only
From clearest springs.

Once an owl,
Chewing a dead rat
Already half-decayed,
Saw the Phoenix fly over,
Looked up,
And screeched with alarm,
clutching the rat to himself
In fear and dismay.

Why are you so frantic
Clinging to your ministry
And screeching at me
In dismay?”

Wow, Chuang Tzu, man, amazing. That phoenix. He’s up there, and the owl thinks he’s after his half-decayed chewed-up rat. Dude, that’s the story of my life. How did you know?

[confused] “Which one did you think you were?”

Peacock Blue

The empty envelope had my childhood address in peacock blue ink, and hers in the corner.

Empty, and with two corners slit. I’d found it in a box of old books when I was rearranging the garage. Maybe the letter was somewhere among all these boxes, with a dozen others she’d sent, but I had no idea where. Maybe I’d thrown them out in a seizure of anti-nostalgia, or they’d been lost in one of my dozen moves.

Was it a letter rhapsodizing about making love for the first time? Or pleading with me to go to the same college as her?

Peacock blue: the color of junior year of high school. Her handwriting: careful, regular, every letter standing straight. A schoolgirl’s handwriting, belonging to someone who thought that to be mature is to do things correctly.

Peacock blue. We wrote letters obsessively though we lived only half a mile apart. Outranking the late-night phone calls and intense afterschool talks, the letters were for deep, enduring questions that couldn’t be allowed to evaporate into air. They’d continued into the first year of college, traveling a thousand miles. Then they’d stopped.

The smallest souvenir can take you the furthest back.

We’d been landmarks for each other, like pencil marks on a wall to record your height. Impersonal. Not that it could have been anyone—no, we really liked each other. But we hadn’t even had selves yet to know. I didn’t know who’d written those letters, or answered them.

I tried to wonder what she was doing now, but it didn’t work. If I’d learned that she’d been married, divorced, had children—my God, by now she could have grandchildren—had this or that illness or occupation, they would be arbitrary facts, unattached to a solid form, like pushpins without a map to pin them on.

What I would have thrilled to see, what could have told me something, was, What is her handwriting like now?

Lifting Water

An old man stood hip-deep in the ocean, lifting water. In a relaxed position, beginning with hands at sides, he raised his arms slowly, wrists bent at a sharp angle to the sky, fingers pointing down to exert their pull on the sea. Breathing deeply inward to reach all his power, he raised his hands to eye level, at which time the exertion of raising the waves caused him to expel his breath and slowly lower his arms. He repeated this action hundreds of times. The waves rose and fell, and washed in and out.

Two boys came along and, when they asked, he told them what he was doing. “Fool old man,” they said, “you not lifting water.”

“Then how do you explain the fact that every time I lift my arms, the water rises?” he said as they pelted him with sand. “Not only that, the weight of the water is strengthening my arms.”

“Water lifting you.” For indeed, every time a swell came, it carried him off his feet. “Water lifting water. You lifting you. Only thing not happening is you lifting water.”

“You have no understanding,” he said. The boys ran off, despising him with their laughter.

Ten years later, a huge wave came and washed away buildings, boats, and swimmers, and the old man died of grief. The next day one of the boys, a man now, stood hip-deep in the man’s old spot and began lifting water.

Reforesting

A bird tries to nest in the mirror reflection of a tree. The bird flies into the mirror, which wobbles, falls, shatters.

Why not plant a new tree to replace the one that fell?

The Imaginary Philosophy

It was one of those newsmagazine articles that explain the latest impenetrable philosophy to readers who are flipping through on their way to the movie reviews and are keen to learn of something they can hold over the heads of their spouses. It told of a book eight hundred pages long, three hundred of them footnotes, that purported to overturn all conventional views of identity and consciousness. Fueling the excitement was the fact that the book was unreadable.

Jespersen was avid to understand this outpouring of genius but he knew in advance he would never be able to slog through the book, and probably not even a single chapter. He would have to make do with the magazine article instead. Taking each journalistic phrase as the distilled essence of pages of leadfooted inference, by the third column of the article he came to a thunderous realization: he understood! The philosopher was analyzing the human mind as if it were a mechanism and the physical universe as if it were a human consciousness. Jespersen teased out the meaning further: animate and inanimate were equal creations, twin mirrors of the double face of their creator, who could see himself only in them. There is no social agent, there is no experiencing ego, there are only reflections of the invisible.

From then on, Jespersen lived in the charged air of a disciple. He wrote poems inspired by the new system. His diaries recorded how the modernday Pythagoras’s thought had transformed his life. He bored his coworkers with clumsy explanations of exactly what the great thinker meant.

Then one day, feeling that he had at last prepared himself, he read the book--and its ideas were not at all what he had expected; he had completely misunderstood. All that about the human and the inanimate, the identity of creation and creator--it was nowhere to be found in the eight hundred pages.

Overcome, he sat in his bathroom looking at an open razor. Then he shut the razor and put it away, bemoaning his lack of nerve.

He sat on the edge of the tub all night, wondering how he could have believed in a philosophy that had never been invented at all, that had been thought of by no one.

The Festival at 3 a.m.

The last links of jalapeno smoked sausage have been washed down with wildly inappropriate wines. From the tentsites in the hills come guitar chords and whoops of celebration, and no one shouts, “Hey, I’m trying to sleep.” You sit at a campfire with people you don’t know, listening to songs you’ve never heard before. You half-stumble in the dark on the path to the community toilets, moving aside into a branch of a juniper to let two lovers pass on their way to their tent. Down in the hollow you stay another half-hour to watch the fire dancers twirl their flaming torches behind them and through their legs and across their shoulders as they bend and turn and arch their backs to a fierce song strummed by a hoarse singer.

If you spread your sleeping bag at your host’s campsite you’ll just toss awake listening to the song circles at the campfires. So you keep walking past the darkened outdoor stage, past the entrance gate, to the rocky, rutted farmer’s field that’s the parking lot, and for ten minutes you search for your car. Sometimes a couple or a threesome walks nearby, uncatchable phrases fluttering like batwings. Eventually you fit your key into the door lock. You perform a number of tests to see which would be less uncomfortable, curling up in the back seat or lowering the front seat, and your head knocks the rearview mirror awry and you knee knocks into the gearshift. The rear windshield is damply mud-specked but is that an almost-full moon through it? No, it’s the white light from the parking lot lamppost.

You get into position but you’re still awake. It’s a matter of waiting now, waiting for your mental state to shift, for hybrid animals, long-gone friends, and movie stars to appear and the landscape to change like a slide show, and then for it all to bow goodnight and sink away. You watch your consciousness slow down, speed up, a leg twitch, a new thought, a replayed conversation, a remembered face, will your mind spin till morning, which side will the sun rise on, will you wake up with a neckache, and is there any reason not to feel that this is the peak moment of your life?

If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock

I once knew someone who collected litter, or threatened to. The scraps people tossed away, which the wind from cars had stirred. Shopping lists, torn halves of photographs, crushed cans, a single glove. In them she imagined she would find a culture’s identity, and mysteriously, her own, the long-sought meaning of her quixotic self emerging in the pattern of drinking-straw wrappers and magazine subscription cards dropped by strangers. She probed the unconscious of the city, reading the tea leaves of the street. From the crumbs she tried to reconstruct the loaf.

This is the kind of person I decide to believe. And if a stray bottlecap can tell us our identities, what about the fugitive words that slip away the moment we try to hear them? Words said into telephones passing by: “Is it okay if I come semi-dressed up?” “Made a redneck corkscrew for the pinot: a drywall screw and two vise clamps. Pulled that sucker right out of the bottle.” “I’ve known her for eight years and I have never known her to say the word Yes.”

I listened and thought, “These are the expressions of my truth.”

I heard my birth-cry and heart-sigh in the sounds a car makes when it drives past: the motor sound, the muffler sound, the tire sound, the airstream sound. The textures of a bird’s singing: how its voice moves its feathers, moves its branch, how the notes echo subliminally off the houses.

She came home one afternoon carrying a child’s grimed pink anklet with a big hole through the bottom. “Look!” Was this the piece of evidence that would take her back to the first months of her life, even the moment she was conceived, and cancel out all dread?

I heard the child crying, the mother scolding, at the throwing away of the sock.

The woman and I stared at the sock on the kitchen counter. “I have a feeling this is the central discovery,” I said, wanting to love someone.

No, no, there can’t ever be a central discovery. “I need to get over this obsession,” she said, and that night she ransacked under the beds and threw out all the unsorted orphan objects, which now seemed to her like junk.

What Sky Held and Water Knew

Once there were three little brothers who lived by a pond. Their parents must have lived there too, but the story doesn’t say anything about them. What do parents matter, after all?

The pond was so clear that it reflected the white house and the green trees and the blue sky perfectly, with only enough of a ripple to show that everything it mirrored was alive. When the brothers tired of playing ball or wrestling each other down or chasing blackbirds, they sat on the shore of the pond looking at themselves in the watery mirror, and when they tired of themselves there was the whole reflected world to admire.

“We could look at this forever and all it could ever do is show exactly what’s in front of it,” the oldest brother instructed.

The youngest said, “What if it decided to show something different? Like what if it showed the house orange?”

His two elder brothers were in the midst of mocking him when he stood up in the greatest excitement and, pointing down at the water, said, “Look, there’s a balloon in the reflection and there’s no balloon up there!”

While his brothers were turning this way and that, he ran along the rim of the pond, his forefinger jabbing down at the ripples to point out the red balloon. He splashed into the water and tried to high-step onto the balloon, but it bobbed in the reflected sky and rose toward the center of the pond, pushed by the kicked-up wavelets till it diminished out of sight.

“Hey, I saw it too,” said the middle brother, coming up beside him. “That was neat.” Then he returned to the lawn and pulled up a stalk of grass to chew and seemingly forgot all about it, for he always thought about where he was going to be rather than where he was.

“This means we can do anything!” the youngest said. He felt an urgent knot in his chest –- he tried to tell his brothers how important this day was -- that the balloon wasn’t only for them, it meant everyone and everything -- but he didn’t have words for it.

The oldest said in a knowledgeable voice, “All it means is that something unusual happened. Unusual things happen all the time.”

The youngest pointed to him: “You didn’t see it!”

“I did too!” the oldest said.

“Oh yeah, what color was it?”

“Red,” the oldest guessed, and the youngest turned away with a pout.

“Well, I’m going to remember it for the rest of my life,” he said.

All summer the three brothers sat at the rim of the pond hoping to see another gap, for “gap” had become their private word for the separation between what sky held and water reflected. But it seemed that the one small sign, a balloon escaping from somewhere unimaginable, was all they would be granted.

Summer after summer they looked, with this difference, that each year they talked about it less. With each inch they grew toward the sky, they grew away from the pond. Then came a summer when the youngest asked, as always, “You think we’ll see a gap today?” and his elder brothers told him, “Enough. That was just a child’s story.”

“I still remember it,” he muttered to himself, although perhaps what he remembered most clearly was not the balloon but the vow to remember it. At night in his bedroom he drew the scene on a pad, and played tunes on his flute, tunes that sounded like a balloon in a pond. The drawings and melodies became more and more wonderful, but at the same time of course they were less and less faithful likenesses of a balloon in a pond.

Then the children were grown and they went into the world to find their futures. The oldest brother did serious work and was much acclaimed. But the memory of the balloon he hadn’t seen nagged at him, and when years had passed he saw that his work had been too serious to really matter. One winter, telling no one beforehand, he returned to the house by the pond. And there he sat by the edge of the water, peering, peering. He cracked the ice morosely with his boot so it could reflect the sky. He took water samples and squinted through a microscope, he snapped photographs and blew them up, he hunkered at the pondside day after day, year after year, fiercely keeping watch for what he never saw, and when anyone asked if he had seen something yet, he snarled, “I will.”

The middle brother traveled far away and made an immense fortune. On his desk he kept a picture of a red balloon in a blue sky. But he thought one miracle was enough and never visited the pond again, and whenever he thought about that day of his childhood, he gave a little laugh and shrugged.

And the youngest brother? Ah, the youngest brother… Your guess is as good as mine, because he could do anything.

Clear Communication Is the Last Disguise

I mean everything I say. To do otherwise would be beneath me. I know myself, and that’s why I can show you so much. I want you to know me fully, however you’ll respond. I lay myself bare for you. For you, yes, but more for me, as a spiritual exercise. To be an open book is the highest state.

I don’t understand those others. The ones who hide. The ones who lie. I’ve tried to copy them, but it doesn’t work. My lies are so transparent, they only work against me. I never developed the skill of it.

Do you remember the time you asked me that question? And the answer I gave. I meant it then, and I mean it now. I can’t promise I’ll always mean it, because we can’t know the future. See, I’m revealing even this.

That’s why you can believe me when I say you should do what I want you to.

The Coin Sower

In a weedy lot on the walk between my house and the used bookstore, I once found more than two dollars in coins. I smiled secretively and slipped them into my pocket, telling no one. But what I wanted to do was shout like a child, “Look what I found!”

The next time I walked that route, I checked the grass, more to remember my lucky find than expecting a new one, and to my amazement I saw two quarters, three pennies, and a nickel.

A bubbling spring of coins? An anonymous philanthropist sowing happiness on the ground? I imagined a silent, unacknowledged relationship between a homeless man and a benefactor he never saw. Or maybe the vacant lot was a private shrine, a superstitious neighbor’s tribute to local gods. This time I didn’t pick up the coins. They were for others, not for me. I’d already taken my due.

The third time, they were strewn everywhere, like baubles at some tribal wedding. I counted three dollars in quarters before I stooped close enough to touch them. Then the smaller change, the shiny and the tarnished, in plain sight and hidden in the grass, everyplace I searched, as if my looking multiplied them.

I imagined a voice saying, Who are you to refuse what the world sees fit to give? What if you picked these coins up and broke a spell you hadn’t even known had been cast on you?

My fingers grasped a penny. And as I hunkered in the grass, dreaming, a car horn blasted behind me and a young male voice called out, “Hey!” like a whip across my back. I slipped in the dirt; I hit the ground, then bolted to my feet, angry at myself for being startled. Noticing the penny in my hand, I dropped it to the grass.

I stared at the field of treasure and thought, Your way is the way of renunciation. My eyes unfocussed until there was no glinting left to see. I stepped off the curb and scuffed away along the asphalt.

A few yards down I stopped and looked back. I dug into my pants pocket and pulled out…eighty-nine cents.

“Here, kids!” I shouted, and flung my coins in a shining arc of copper and silver. They were all for me.

Poetic Gestures

She’s going to write a poem about these blueberries, which she’s transferring from the grocery aisle to a pondside in Michigan. (She makes a note to read up in her books of Great Lakes flora and geology; she comes from there but it’s been a long time.) Out into the parking lot and the exit driveway she’s in lost in fields of memory: she has to brake suddenly, waking, to keep from rear-ending the Nissan in front of her at the stop sign. The first lines are already forming up in her mind, at about the level of the rearview mirror. By the time she brings the grocery bags through the side door she’s so excited she leaves everything on the counter, even the frozen food.

Then the words, the lines, oh, she has to find words again, that’s all she ever does, and you’d think she’d know them all by now and only have to choose the best-looking ones, like picking the bluest fruit from the display. But no, when she settles for that, the words are withered and juiceless; what she needs to do, every time, is invent the language anew, and that’s impossible.

The difficulty of achieving anything at all makes her impatient with herself, so in response she sits –- she’s learned how –- patiently, patiently, at this same desk year after year, and gradually the syllables brighten with sun, the words hang ripe and blue in the slash of northern light, and one by one she picks them into her dear old heirloom basket. But some of them turn out to be sour to her tongue; she tosses them away; and then there are passages where everything tastes wrong, it’s torture by berrypicking.

But conditioned reflex comes to the rescue. She knows how to write a poem. She knows how to trawl for a metaphor, how to stitch lines together with assonance and consonance (and the occasional alliteration, not too much), she knows how to intertwine nature images with love-memories and transcendent ideas. So here is Listen, the first word, followed by a colon, herding the reader with an authoritative bark. Here is wind in the next line, another short-i sound, and then lent to tie the l’s and n’s and short e’s through three lines. Here is blue forgiving the encroaching purple, forgiveness is always good, and linen-clad dandelions whisper together, with that l- n-short-vowel combo again, and personifying nature’s voice is a reliable tactic. She makes the gesture of a surprising epithet; she makes the gesture of a truncated line; she pays witty homage to a better-known colleague’s best-known poem.

There’s a comfort in conventional gestures, a feeling of arriving early. The phrases are in place, there’s a reassuring familiarity to the alternation of print and white space of the page. She has heard the longed-for click at the back of her skull, and she can rest. In a few days, when she’s sure, she’ll send it to editors who are themselves poets, who know the struggle, who recognize what you sometimes have to do to make the form work out. One of them will take it. Then the shock of seeing it exposed and beyond help, revealed but half-hidden, among accidental companions with a disquieting family resemblance, all of them, no matter what words they use, moaning of the same lonely labor.

And she will still wait, patient past belief, wait to be granted the only wish she has ever had: to write the real thing.

The Adagio Kid

Gunslinger pushes through the doors of the saloon. Glares around at the shudder that rises among the barflies, the gamblers, the piano man. Pushes away the dance hall girl who sidles up against his shoulder, orders her to wait for him upstairs.

“I’m a’lookin’ fer th’ Adagio Kid. Hear tell he frequents these parts. Hear tell he c’n be found here of an evenin’.”

Throats clear, and everyone looks away from the dark rear corner of the room, which is exactly where the newcomer turns his gaze. Where a chair scrapes on the splintery, bullet-gouged floor; where a lean man stretches up from his seat like a cobra uncoiling.

“You’d be looking for me, then. What is it you want?”

The gunslinger’s nostrils flare, snorting one after the other. “Hear tell you mean to slow down time. Hear tell the world’s too fast fer yeh. Mean to bring it back to a sane pace. Back to long books and unmiked music, back to movies ‘bout people’s lives, back to softly swingin’ songs. Back to talkin’ ‘stead a shoutin’, back to sayin’ what yeh mean. Well, I’m a’gonna show yeh who’s too fast fer yeh.”

Lightning quick, the stranger’s hand goes to his gun and brings it out blazing. The Adagio Kid smiles. He sees the bullets streaming toward him through air, slow as Zeno’s tortoise. He picks one out of the air with his fingertips, flicks it over his shoulder. He blows another out of his path. Just for fun, he lets some of them close in on him, closer, closer, and moves a millimeter out of their paths at the last instant.

The interloper’s Colt hangs empty, his jaw hangs slack.

“If one person slows down, it slows the whole world. Now get going, mister—pronto.”

With a deceptively languid gesture, the Adagio Kid darts a caught bullet straight at the gunman’s chest. Watching it spin toward him, the gunfighter gapes, and runs out of the barroom and races through the street, agitating the dust.

A grin forms gradually on the Adagio Kid’s face. He wraps a leisurely arm around the dance hall girl. “Come on, Sad Eyes, let’s mosey on up.” And with all the time in the world, they climb the stairs thoughtfully, step by deliberate step, as the piano player starts the Mozart K. 540.

Plans

It’s a late night, no school the next day, and you’re sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, staying and talking with them the way they like, and for some reason tonight they don’t talk about superheroes and combat games.

“Dad, when you were in school, were you popular?”

Well, you tell them, you weren’t one of the most popular kids, you always felt like an outsider, but you had a little group of kids who all thought they were outsiders too, and you hung around with them.

“Are they still your friends?”

No, you haven’t seen any of them since you became a grownup. Lots of times friends drift away as they get older. People go to different colleges, people move, people just develop different --

“When I grow up I’m still going to be friends with ________.”

That’s good, you hope so. “And even if you don’t see each other when you’re grownups, you’ll always remember that you were best friends your whole childhood. That’s a precious thing.”

You’re sticking to the facts and yet keeping all your answers optimistic. You admit that there are discomforts in life, but you portray the universe as essentially a friendly place, a place of happy endings -- for no one knows what happens when we die, and some people believe in heaven and others believe in reincarnation and many scientists think that all time is always present, which means we’re always here alive, or maybe trillions of years will pass in the blink of an eye and you’ll wake up in an entirely new universe, remembering nothing, but safe and alive.

“Think I’ll be popular when I’m in high school?” the older one asks, and says of his brother. “I’ll bet he’s going to have every girl in the school following after him, just like he has now. I probably won’t have that many.“

“But you’ll have real interesting ones,” you say.

“I think I’ll have maybe seven who have crushes on me, that’s all. And I decided for college I want to go to Harvard, or maybe Yale.”

The younger brother asks, “Why?”

“Because they’re the two best colleges, that’s why.”

“Then I’ll go there too. Then we can live together in the same apartment.”

“That’s be so awesome! Dad, think we have a good plan for college?”

Yes, you tell them, a fine plan. And the conversation ebbs a little, ebbs more -- it’s really getting late now, kids, it’s time to get to sleep -- the sound of torsos turning subsides, the sound of legs shifting subsides, in the silence you stand up slow-kneed, and as you’re cautiously straightening your legs from a crouch you whisper, “Good night, kids,” and you’ll share this conversation with your wife and smile dreamily and touch hands in bed, thinking of your plans, all your plans.

Ask the Cards

One of the aunts has brought a tarot deck, and after the dinner things are cleared away everyone stays at the table—they’ve come from separate, distant parts of the country for an elder’s birthday—to take turns getting readings. You silently ask the cards a question, and then—well, it’s not fortunetelling, but it gives you a snapshot of the psychic moment, the synchronic netting you’re webbed in, the archetypal currents by which your future will be pulled. And she always gives good readings. She doesn’t go for scaring her clients or forcing them to face unpleasant possibilities. With her, a crisis is always the forerunner of growth, and death is merely a symbol for change.

So they take their turns, and as they move their lips or blink their lowered eyes you can tell what general area their questions come from. This one is asking whether her newest lover is going to stay, and that one is asking whether his career will take an upturn, and that one is asking for a prognosis.

A nine year old boy is at the table too, his eyes lighting up with each turn of a card. He believes in every kind of magic. Rather than sitting in his seat, he’s squatting on top of it like a catcher, bouncing up and down, leaning out across the table towards the cards, his sleeve dipping into a bowl of melted peach ice cream that someone thought they were still eating. He’s commenting on every card, biting his lip, groaning and laughing, crossing his fingers against any chance that any of his relatives won’t end up completely safe and happy.

“My turn!” he calls, above the white noise of wishful strained interpretation after the last grownup is done. He grabs the cards and shoves them into something like a pack: some of them splash away when he tries to shuffle, and his aunt patiently returns them. Now, she explains, you ask the cards a question.

“My question is—“

“No no no!” the grownups rush in, as if pulling him out of the path of a car, or perhaps imagining their own questions revealed aloud. “Don’t tell us. Just ask it to yourself.”

“But can’t I say it if I want to?”

The tarot-reading aunt shrugs: well, it’s not against the rules…

Okay. He jumps down from his chair, clamps his hands down onto the table edge. Okay, cards, his eyes are saying; tell me, tell me…

“What’s my life going to be like?”

And someone at the table takes in a breath. Someone else looks downward, hotly blushing. Someone bites a lip and turns away. Someone holds back a smile and reaches for a drink.

All of them would give anything to be able to ask that question again.

Miniaturist

He paints tiny enamel figures with brushes as fine as cat whiskers, paints mountains and rivers the size of fingernails. Signs his name in letters so small he has to look through a microscope to write them. Collectors visit his little studio, a cottage between two high-rises, cluttered with inch-long paper sketches and thimble-sized jars of paint.

“Do you ever do anything bigger? I have a wall I need to cover.”

“This is my metier. I love small things. If you look closely, you’ll find as much here as in any wall-wide canvas. Why should I waste the extra materials?”

They sigh, and understand.

He goes home to his one-room apartment, stares at himself in the mirror. “Small. Everything you do is small. Puny, lightweight, feeble. No scope, no breadth, no depth, no stature. Insignificant, invisible, shrunken, cringing, trivial.”

He goes to the pantry, pours a big glass of rum, turns on the stereo full blast, sings as loud as he can, and wakes the whole neighborhood.

Changing the Wind

Once there was a man who received a sailboat as a gift: a small sailboat with one little sail. He knew nothing about sailing, but he stepped into the boat and waited, and soon a gust of wind carried him away from the land.

The man sat back and waited for the wind to carry him further, but after a few minutes the wind changed and sent him in another direction, and then another, and then it slackened and the boat stopped. The man sat bewildered in the little boat, looking at the slack sail and wondering when another wind would come and take him in the direction he wanted to go.

At last it came to him that he had to change the direction of the wind. He stood up in the boat, wobbling from foot to foot, grabbing onto a rail, a rope, a hatch, and began thinking of ways to change the wind. “Turn to the north!” he called out, but the wind still came from the south. The man shouted his command louder, and still nothing changed.

Then he began to make up magic spells. He hurled combinations of nonsense syllables at the wind, and the wind flung his spittle back into his face. Wiping it off, he was furious that his nonsense syllables didn’t do any good. In his fury, he stomped and stumbled in the little cockpit and, as the boat turned, lurched forward clumsily, colliding with the boom. By sheer luck, the sail turned in the right direction and the boat began to glide through the light chop of the open water.

“Aha!” he grasped at once. “I shouldn’t try to change the wind, I should try to change the sail!”

Of course he still knew nothing about sailing, but from then on he began experimenting with shifting the sails this way and that. Sometimes he was able to turn the boat in the direction he wanted, but more often his efforts took him exactly the opposite way. He observed his results carefully, but by the time he noticed one effect he misremembered the previous ones, and it was so frustrating to try to recapture a successful effort that he kept making more and more mistakes.

In confusion and despair, he gave up and threw himself down into the bottom of the cockpit and sat with his arms over his head, refusing to even look at the water. But then he noticed that the boat was rocking more and more violently. Stretching his neck to look, he saw that his dear little sailboat was running toward a long, narrow reef, visible just above the water.

“I am going to crash,” he told himself, and as he watched the bow of his boat dip and rise as it closed in on the reef, he first felt alarm close to panic; but then it subsided for no other reason that it couldn’t keep itself going any longer; and as the reef grew close, larger, it seemed more beautiful, and his mouth opened in happy surprise. He didn’t mind that he was about to crash on a reef. It was quite amusing, really, and exciting. He watched himself close in on his goal; he watched the small foam break on the serrated edge of the reef; he said aloud, “This is it!” And at the last moment, without thinking, he reached out and pulled the line and the boat came about and swerved from the reef with only inches to spare.

From then on, he knew how to sail, and whatever direction the wind came from was a direction he could use.

The Matuszek Bird

Mr. Matuszek did bird calls. He did them in his work as a park ranger, and he did them at social gatherings too. He was an uncanny mimic of a wide variety of calls, and people were duly amazed. His coworkers had lived with it for a long time, but greeted each newly acquired call with gushing envy for Matuszek’s intimacy with nature. At social gatherings with people who were not Forest Service types, people were amazed to see that Matuszek, who seemed so bland and insignificant, had a special skill, a gift they could never duplicate. No doubt every one of the guests, hearing him produce from his very soul exactly – but more profoundly, more hauntingly -- the inhuman, opaque notes of a nighthawk or a vireo, was given fresh hope about the hidden uniqueness of people whom they had previously disdained.

The way Matuszek learned a bird call was, he made up a phrase that mimicked the cadence of the call. For instance, in the mornings outside his window he heard, “ Who wants to know? Who wants to know?” And “Jerry, Jerry!” And, “Ratatatatatatatatat!”

One spring day Matuszek opened his window at dawn to hear the birds while he washed and dressed, and he heard a new call. The call was deep and not at all warbly, and it said, unmistakably, “Matuszek! Matusez! Matuszek!”

He threw open the door of his Forest Service bungalow and rushed outside in his undershorts. The bird call had been one he had never heard before. He waited till it came again – but it did not.

“Matuszek! Matuszek!” he whistled to himself all day. And day after day, he whistled it over and over during his leisure time, although, unlike when he was studying other calls, he never heard this one again to help him practice.

Sometimes he wondered: had he really heard the call, or was it a misperception, a fantasy, a wish? But no, he had been studying bird calls long enough to know when he heard one.

Morning after morning he stood on the lawn outside his bungalow, whistling, “Matuszek? Matuszek!”, and waiting for an answer in the silence that his voice created among the birds. Answers came from “ Who wants to know?” and “Jerry!” and “Ratatatatatatatatat!” But the Matuszek bird did not answer.

He whistled it under his breath when he led tour groups through the park, and he whistled it silently in his mind when he attended staff meetings. It never stopped. What bird was it? Where had it come from? Where had it gone? Was it a member of a species, or the only one of its kind? And how could it be one of a kind? And yet increasingly he thought that must be the answer: there was a single Matuszek-calling bird in this world, flying unknown in forest depths, an avian yeti, an invisible, wary creature, harassed by shadows, shrinking from all companionship, who only revealed himself to – himself.

(Or was there a colony of Matuszeks living somewhere in an undiscovered sanctuary on somehow unsurveyed land, a grotto with a waterfall, where Mtuszeks by the dozen swooped up under a domed roof and around a splashing cascade, calling, “Matuszek” to eat and “Matuszek” to fight and “Matuszek” to -- to -- he scarcely knew how to think of it -- to mate?)

In the dark of his bungalow at midnight he called sweetly and softly to his bird, knowing by now that it would never return. He called the cadence of his name hundreds, thousands of times, and he heard it echoing.

Song in the Supermarket

He’s only going there to pick up some eggs, he’s got the carton in his hand and is heading toward the checkout when a song comes over the loudspeaker, a high-stepping guitar lead over a rippling piano, instantly recognizable: a song he hasn’t heard in maybe twenty years. It’s a song about missing someone. He stops in the middle of the aisle. Can’t go to the checkout now. He’s got to hear the whole song. The chorus is like a photo of a forgotten love. Fortunately it repeats many times in this song; you can sneak lots of looks at the photo.

He’s got to do something with himself while he’s listening, can’t just stand stock still listening to the ceiling like some kind of lunatic, so he starts moseying up and down the aisles, and soon he’s picking an item or two off the shelves: a pound of butter, a bag of chips. Then he’s got to grab a basket to put them in. The song is playing, he knows the lyrics of the next verse…

“Good afternoon, shoppers.” Blaring right over the song. It’s infuriating, it’s… “Look for our weekly specials blah blah aisle 23 blah blah…” She’ll stop in a second, he thinks, but no, there are more weekly specials to announce… What’s the point of making these announcements when the sound is so garbled you can’t tell what she’s saying? No one’s going to go to Aisle 23 because of her; what is she bothering for? If the song is over by the time she stops, he might have to throw something.

Thank God it’s a long song: five, six minutes. The chorus comes on, then an instrumental break and then the same ecstatic chorus again, those boys knew they had a good thing when they recorded it. Could listen to that chorus forever; it could be the soundtrack of the afterlife.

It’s so wonderful to hear that song again, he grabs more and more items – cookies, an organic soft drink, he’s a retail psychologist’s dream. He times his arrival at the checkout to coincide perfectly with the song’s ending. It’s over, he pays his money, he breathes a deep sigh, goes out into the hot afternoon…

He remembers the first time he ever heard that song. Funny, there was also a supermarket involved: he remembers turning on the radio in the store parking lot, and the song spreading across the sky like a revelation. It was a stinging cold night, the kind of cold that can make a car radio freeze, cracking into silence like a frozen tree branch splitting from its trunk. He drove back to his apartment in the below-zero dark, listening to that starbright twinkling guitar. At the time, he had no one to miss but felt that someday he might miss someone. And now there are so many, he doesn’t even know who the song reminds him of anymore. All of them really, every little one, every little thing, every little kiss. They blur together; it’s the missing that counts.

Bookstore Buddhists

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Pema Chodron. Do you know her?”

“Oh, Pema Chodron, she’s wonderful! She writes so clearly, she has such goodness and gentleness. And you know Charlotte Joko Beck?”

“She’s great. A little colder, though, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, cold, but she really makes you face things. For warmth I like to read Jack Kornfield.”

“He’s wonderful! So, do you practice somewhere here in town?”

“No, I’ve never really been into a formal practice.”

“Me neither.”

“I tried it once, but, I don’t know. The people there -- and it’s not really – I mean, the leaders, I don’t know how much esteem I actually have for the ones around here.”

“I know what you mean. Hey, I’m gonna be over there checking out the fantasy for a while.”

“Oh, you like fantasy? Me too. Do you like Neil Gaiman?”

“Of course! American Gods! Did you read that? But you know who I’m liking lately? Susanna Clarke.”

“Susanna Clarke! Yes, and you know who else -- ?”