But realistically I guess he should have.
To any normative person, any reasonably observant or conscious human being raised under these conditions, that is to say in the United States at this time, in that type of family, with these influences, and all the knowing earmarks and affectations and afflictions that such a person labors under in order to be seen as a relatively conscious but sufficiently naive and ergo trustworthy john average in this week of this age – it would have struck a chord, somewhere, in the deeper medulla nigra, in the primitive and consistently on some level alert (if only recognized when stirred) thing that lives somewhere below and far away from the civil face.
The at once righteously vindicating and wrenchingly saddening part of this creature was his inability to feel such things.
Rare as it is to find something beautiful, sensitive and smart rarer still is it to find one aware and intact. It has been my life experience to realize, as many times in as short a period as is necessary to affix it to my ideologies intenuably, that very frequently and for the most part, no matter how a thing seems and for all the rhetoric and ephemeracy that we may forcibly apply, it will not return. That is to say, it will not be undone. With no value scale applied, things do not naturally revert. Let entropy be considered my axiom of choice, or listen to the lost existentialist who coined the slightly less trite phrase about injuring eternity. Not going back again. The brokenness of a thing may not be intrinsic to its nature, but a broken wing is not an applied value. I find it interesting and deeply troubling that of all the things I have done, none of them reflect my core belief that nothing is worth saving.
This is not a story about applied value.
This is a story about freezing ankles and tests of will that end with nothing. This is a story about drama on the tightly-stretched screens of men who will tolerate none, things that having assumed great size and tangible proportion pop and are gone without leaving a remnant to assure you that they were there to begin with. Even ball lightning leaves marks or dead kittens. This is the story about German Nightingales who have to sing at 96 decibels to be heard over the noise pollution, about whoever thought it was a good idea to grow lactoferrin in rice, about people who thank the government of the people-who-live-below for a stipend that comes from the erasure of their culture, raping of their resources and the Problem which has already robbed them of nutrition, home and livelihood and that those-below have the luxury of denying exists. Which is in turn related to the freezing ankles. And everything that happens after.
I made four people cry last month. I was caught by surprise every time. I didn’t know any of them very well or share anything remotely intimate. I was not offensive or frontal or even disagreeable. I’d like to say I did no harm.
But he didn’t. He kept walking as everything else looked up knowingly and let him pass. And even the cobblestone held its breath, for a moment, until things realigned. You’d think that by now he’d have noticed. What’s lost has always been, accordingly. He hadn’t.
