Silver
3
“Come in and glimpse Heaven!” The little man had his stick arms out to his sides as if he were prepared to take flight. “Just through those flaps… look into the eyes of one of God’s most perfect creations!” And he wiped his mouth with one greasy hand. “He is part light, part flesh! Part human, part angel! He is Silver… sleek and brimming with God’s first notion! Come one, come all! Only five dollars!” The top hat he wore, which was awkwardly tilted to a side, threatened to slide from the oily lanks of hair that tumbled from underneath it like old, blackened lettuce. “Come one!” His voice croaked. “Come all.”
Isolde thought the man looked a little sad with his crooked hat and determined speech and she wondered how they got into this life, yet she was intrigued by it just the same. The whole place was like a queer hallucination, or the kind of dreams that drop in on you when you have the flu, everybody, everything, seeming displaced and out of context with the world, yet perfectly right with it at the same time.
“He’s come down for a visit, people… for a look see… come down to show you what lies behind the veil… come down to show you what is more than suffering, what is more than loneliness, what is more than pain… come down to show you what is more than life… come down to…”
People filed in; through tattered blue tent flaps and into darkness—paid the man their money, thus vanishing into heaven, out of suffering… But would it be everything that he’d promised?
Of course not, thought Isolde. Nobody was that stupid.
But the strangeness pulled her in. Why? Because she was human, and humanity needed to know that there was something beyond itself even if it was pure carnival drivel.
Isolde placed the five dollar bill in the man sinewy fingers. “Welcome to bliss,” he told her with a rubber smile.
“I…” And she drifted into the slumbering warmth-darkness of…
Isolde’s heartbeat slowed as her head became somnolent. The walls of heat in front of her opened in layers and the deeper she went the hotter it became. And there was very little light in here; a single reddish-brownish bulb glowed in the back like amber. Isolde moved toward it and it felt like she was floating; like she was in space or a synthetic version thereof, perhaps an incubator for whatever was contained within. And than a sound, like water trickling or people talking quietly among themselves; after all, several people had entered the tent before her. Still, she could not see them, nor even fathom that anyone else existed in the world other than herself. Yes, a lonely feeling came over her, but it wasn’t the kind of reactionary loneliness that came from knowing that you could not connect with anything because, contrarily, Isolde felt like she was connecting with everything.
And then her heart stopped completely and Isolde felt like she was about to die; and she could see…
He huddled in the back of a glass cage, oil sheen skin flickering in the darkness like a burning tapestry. It wasn’t exactly silver, yet what else could you call it… Impure light? Birth defect? And his head, completely bald, rested on his pulpy shoulders like the head of pin. Silver… cradling himself like an infant; lost, frightened, suffering- everybody was, but he was doing it for everybody. And his eyes, so large and beautiful, brimming with ancient secrets and tears; he was like a tome waiting to be opened, yet a child needing to feel love. It was exhausting to look on him, yet necessary… How does one deal with no space, no time? Only dreams and reason to believe that God exists. But he lived their all the time and even a laymen among sympathizers could see that his burden was too great.
