The Realist

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He was sure he was sure. He took pride in it. He was steady. He was unvarying.

He rebuffed all contenders.

He was a soldier of What Is.

He made sure never to remember his dreams. When he awoke in the morning, he stepped from battles with demons, collaborations with networks of underground spies, flights above mountains, banquets, and he went straight into a cold shower.

He stood under the water and built walls in his mind for the coming day.

There was one outside voice he let in. The voice was scrambled. He tried to decipher it, but he couldn’t.

Finally, nine years later, on a spring morning, at the age of 67…

He made out what the voice was saying. It was reciting a heraldic poem.

He had the sense that the voice had been reciting a very long poem for the past 50 years or so, advancing each day…

A month later, he wife said to him, “You realize you haven’t gone to work for quite a while now, don’t you?”

Sitting on the couch, he nodded and held up a finger for silence.

He was listening.

The language of the poem wasn’t English, it was a combination of Sanskrit and ancient Greek.

He was sure he was sure this was so, but he didn’t know how. The only language he spoke was…Sumerian.

He asked his wife for a cup of tea. She stared at him for a minute, then turned and walked into the kitchen to make lunch.

Sumerian was a rather stark and harsh language, so he decided to forget how to speak it. Sanskrit was more flowing. He closed his eyes and looked through one of the walls he’d built in his mind. Yes, there was Sanskrit, laid out like a symphony.

From now on, that’s how he’d talk.

His wife called a professor she knew at a nearby college, a man she’d been thinking about starting an affair with.

He dropped over.

The husband took a break from listening to the poem and began speaking Sanskrit to the professor, who said, “You’re speaking in Sanskrit.”

They looked at each other.

The professor shook his head and left.

It was quiet in the house. The wife was upstairs packing for a trip to her sister’s. She needed a break.

That night, after his wife left, the man realized there were several dialects of Sanskrit. He reached back and found the first one, the original.

But how had that dialect arisen? Had it been built from pieces of earlier languages?

Did it just appear one day, more or less full-blown?

And if so, how?

That was an interesting question. He pondered it for several hours.

Unlikely, he thought, that a language as sophisticated as Sanskrit could have been constructed on the fly.

It could have been there, all along, waiting to be called upon, like a horse in a barn.

Time to ride.

He stopped listening to the heraldic poem. Instead, he went to his study, sat down at his desk, and began writing his own Sanskrit poem.

A few hours later, he found himself jotting down the formula for an herbal remedy.

He got up and left the house.

He drove to the other side of town, to a small shop, where the owner sold old television sets and phonographs and toasters and mirrors.

The owner looked at the formula for a minute, nodded, walked through a curtain into another room and came back with a short squat bottle holding a brown liquid.

The man took it, removed the cap, smelled it, and drank a sip.

“Is this a dream?” he said (in Sanskrit).

The owner nodded yes.

The man tried to remember how the dream had started. Had it begun when he was a small boy? Had he buried the dream all these years?

There was a full-length mirror leaning against a shelf of toasters. He walked up to the mirror and gazed at himself.

He was a tall man, but not now. Now he was short and rather fat. He had a smile on his face. A very cheery smile, light and floating.

He laughed.

A vaporous train slowly passed through the shop. The people sitting in the train waved at him. The train passed through the curtain and was gone.

The man looked around. The owner was gone, too.

The man walked behind the counter and waited.

A few minutes later, three people came into the shop. They were speaking a language he’d never heard before. It was quite languorous.

They gestured for him to follow them.

They went through the curtain into a small room whose many shelves were filled with bottles containing liquids. They moved out the back door of the shop into an open field.

People were milling about. He caught pieces of their conversation. They were speaking a number of different languages, none of which he understood.

It didn’t seem to matter.

He was quite happy.

In the center of the field stood a tower. It was under construction. Men and women and children were working on it at various heights. They were placing bricks and using some sort of clay or cement to hold them in place.

A woman walked up to him.

In Sanskrit, he said, “What is the tower?”

She shrugged and said (in Sanskrit), “It’s just for fun. Something to do.”

“Oh,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere in particular?”

She laughed. “Going somewhere? I suppose it will, if you want to count space as somewhere. But it’s just an idea. We decided to keep making it higher. Why not?”

The man looked at her face. She reminded him of his wife as she’d once been, a long time ago. Before he…

Before he raised all the money and built the church and appointed the pastor and the governing board, and took charge of the permanent fundraising project. That life seemed quite strange to him now, looking back on it.

He took the woman’s hand and walked over to the stack of bricks and picked one up.

She picked one up, too.

“Let’s climb a ladder,” she said. “The view is wonderful up there.”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

***

(The Realist reprinted here with permission of the of the author.)

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