Falling Idols

back. Except it does, of a fashion. Stare long enough and shapes will arise, minutiae of texture and shading, and suddenly you realize what’s actually going on here. Basic psychology, fundamentally no different than staring at ink blots. Okay, you’re back on track, you can accept this after all.

“I see the top of a skull, without the lower jaw — these dark spots are the eye sockets, and there are the teeth — do you want me to show them to you?”

She shakes her head, directs you back to the rock.

“There’s a snake crawling from a broken eggshell … and that’s an axe head … there I see a little guy, it looks like he’s caught in the jaws of this primitive-looking fish.”

That makes four from the top of the rock. She stops you and has you turn it over. You orient yourself to the new topography and keep going: A curved dagger. A branch with decaying leaves. A butterfly leaving its cocoon. Screaming faces in profile.

“That’s enough,” she says, tougher to read than any doctor you’ve ever been to. What must she think of you? Does she reserve judgment at all? You watch her lose herself in thought so deep it could be a trance.

“So what’s next?” You can’t contain yourself.

“Next?” she says, and shrugs as if wondering how you could be asking this in the first place. “Go put the rock back.”

*

You’re feeling different even before you reach your door once again, as if you’ve been less than vigilant, let slip a crucial guard. You’ve as much as admitted there may be more to the world than you give credit for, a wizard behind the curtain of Oz. One slip is all it takes. Which facade will be the next to crumble?

What better proof than this: You didn’t cheat. You returned the rock to the precise spot where you found it, as if somehow Ellen would know if you conveniently tossed it in the nearest lot.

Her bag is packed and by the door when you return, and she’s obviously been waiting for you, dreading the need to look you in the eye. She does it anyway, for you are the world. And you are in worse trouble than you ever dreamed. Her gaze is brutally honest.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I can’t help you.”

No. Of course not. She’s got you talking to rocks — where can you go from there? And why are you crying?

“Think of what you saw. The symbols, their meanings.”

Again, they drift forth. Images of transition, of death to old lives, emergence into new. Pain and torment and tools of their infliction. These weren’t in the rock and you both know it, just as surely as you know their true origin.

“You’re undergoing a change,” she tells you. “You’re becoming someone or something else. I’m sorry. It’s not for me to interfere with this.”

“Because,” you murmur, “the universe creates what it needs. And you wouldn’t dare tell it it’s wrong, would you? That it’s got no right to do this to me. Would you?”

Your voice grows more ragged as she backs away from you, and how you wish her eyes looked younger, less knowing, less certain.

“What does it want from me?” you scream as Ellen takes flight down the stairs. You’re sliding to the floor, arms wrapped around yourself in defense of the cold you suddenly feel. “What does it WANT from me?” Her footsteps fade, leaving you with empty stairs and hollow corridors, where even your kindest neighbors must now hide behind their doors if they don’t want to see what you’ve become already.

*

You spend days dwelling on all the people and institutions and ethics into which you placed your faith, only to have them now failing you. Not that you cast blame — it isn’t in your nature to blame. You come to realize that the city is the only thing that hasn’t let you down. Solid and gray, it’s always there. Not that it takes notice of you, but at least it doesn’t spit you back. These days that’s a lot.

So it’s inevitable that it becomes your true home after you return from a movie one night to find that your apartment building has burned. And you cry not for yourself, but for her, the way her existence has been systematically erased. Even her clothes are now ash, plus all the photos that kept her alive. She might now have been no more real than a daydream.

You sleep in your car, park where you can, walk when you’re no longer able to tolerate its confines. Your crusted skin becomes a barrier between you and them, all of them, with their safe and placid lives. You used to be one of them, but no more — perhaps this is why they no longer see you.

You could get away with a lot, with this new invisibility.

You wonder what it all means, and why you were chosen to play the fool’s role in this grand illusion. This whole city a stage, with so few of its players even aware of their own parts.

That most peculiar woman continues to wave at you from afar, her hideous red grin more lascivious now. Sometimes she seems to laugh. She knows, oh, she knows all right. Your secrets are hers and always have been. Does she find you during your random travels or do you naturally gravitate to wherever she happens to be?

Does it even matter, when in all likelihood you’re destined for each other?

The next time you see her she’s waving from the third floor window in a monolithic old apartment building of gray stone. Its gables and cornices look heavy, vast, crumbled by the decades. Its walls stand mottled by years of water, seeping and trickling. It looms over you, set against a blue-gray evening sky threaded with hints of dying rose. The block you’re in is a gauntlet of bare trees. Their leaves underfoot weave a ragged, wet carpet, slick and spicy with decay.

A few steps closer, a shift of light and perspective — you now notice the gargoyles perched on the building’s corners and nestled above its eaves. Winged, horned, they hunch and squat above you in silent dominance, caught there like corrupted souls, or grotesque children birthed from granite.

They alone watch your entry to the building.

You find the stairs, and they beckon you up. One floor, two — what a chill this building holds, a mausoleum in the middle of a world that only looks sane and ordered. Cabs and cable TV would never know how to find this place.