I could observe back through years of decisions, ones that seemed crucial but turned out not to be, as well as the reverse, and conclude that I have mistimed my leaps with startling regularity. When someone I care about needs help, and especially when they both need and request it, I am too focused on the moment at hand to measure how routinely or markedly they miss their jumps as well. There is just no question in my mind that there is a wide spectrum of mistake-making, and it participates in no obviously discernible relationship to the other, nearby spectrum of severity of consequences. It’s nice—and I mean that genuinely, truly: nice—to think that I have learned, learned to leave a building which may either be threatening to achieve sentience or implode due to force of sound, learned when to guide and when to release, when to punch back and when to absorb abuse, but the jury is very much out and, as it is Kafka’s jury, it likely as not shan’t return.
But this was not the time for me to reenter, nor was it the time for me to impede my companion from so doing. Nothing would be helped by both of us being inside at once, or so went my thinking, and I could be more useful out here. I also really wanted to see him appear from behind the shimmering window, it would do me a great deal of good to witness something familiar within something so strange. Or, again, so I thought: the effect of any of these decisions was wholly guessed at, or at best intuited. So Jack strode one of his Jack-y strides back down the walk, turning every ten feet or so to doff his hat to me, not so much mockingly as reassuringly. Jack is someone who must feel as though reassurance is required of him regularly, which, if true, he must find exhausting. I did not solicit this reassurance, but it was a kind gesture. He knocked, or pantomimed knocking for my benefit, and opened the black wooden door on the side of the structure, brushing off falling pieces of paint and debris as he entered.
So I stood there for a bit, continuing to drink in the situation at hand, running through various scenarios and how I might address them. It may have been no more than a factor of my getting used to the sound, which remained loud but not painfully so, but it seemed to grow a bit more uniform, disentangling the long tones from the perforated, more percussive ones. It would be a stretch to call it musical, but the negative space was of the encouraging rather than menacing variety. This went on for some minutes, and gave the impression that Jack was wrestling with the guts of the place, straightening out without ceasing the racket that it made. Still I stood there, still I stared at that window as though I might manifest him, or some friendly signal, with my attention alone. But it was not soon forthcoming, and a low tone wound under the regularity I thought I had detected—this one entirely menace, from where I stood—and I…
I felt a great sadness, unlike any of the despair I had experienced in the basement. This was a weight in which I was ensconced rather than was lain upon my shoulders. It renewed itself in waves: I am standing in the sun, watching a house dance, I am unshakably sorry, I am standing in the sun, I am consumed by the fear of unknowing, I am standing in the sun, I am alone. The waves crashed against the shore of loneliness, loneliness which cannot be rationalized away, loneliness which cares nothing for the sun, loneliness which is simply alone, it is itself and it made me myself. The menace grew, within and without, and I sat under the tree and twisted a long strand of grass to distract myself as best I could from being so very alone.
