Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 5. Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It

I had ceased, by that middle stretch of October, to pretend to myself that I came to that window by chance.

I had told myself so, the first evening, and told myself so still, weakly, for some nights after, that a man might wander to any window at all and find himself there merely by the accident of an aimless spirit's aimless drift. I could no longer, by the middle of that month, sustain so poor a fiction against my own better knowledge. I came to that window now as a man comes to a labor he has set for himself and will not set down, the wall mended and mended again though no mending was wanted, and if any part of me marked the resemblance to another labor, another wall, another boy who had once stood at it hauling granite against a silence that gave no answer, I did not permit myself to dwell long upon the marking.

I did not yet know his name.

I own this now with no small measure of shame, that I had watched him so many evenings, had catalogued the lamp's particular fall upon his hair, the manner in which he held a pen when some thought struck him he did not care to lose, the small crease that gathered between his brows over labors that plainly cost him more than they ought, and had done all this hungrily, entire, without once possessing the one small thing that might have made of my hunger something nearer to knowing him, and not merely wanting him. I had a face. I did not yet have a name to set beneath it, and a face without a name, I have since come to understand, is a species of idolatry no less complete for being unintentional.

There stood against the near wall of that room a small writing desk, waisted and turned prettily at each leg, and I marked, the first evening my eye fell properly upon it, that it was no plain thing, but old, and of a fashion I had seen before, though not often, and not lately. I had known, in the years of my own boyhood, men grown gray and silent before their time, who had gone off young to the great war between the states and come home changed in ways no neighbor thought it decent to inquire after, and one or two among them, I recalled, had kept near them the whole rest of their lives some small writing box very near the fashion of this one, carried with them into that war and carried out of it again, and asked no man why they would not part with it, nor did any man think to ask. I did not know what history this desk carried, whose hand had first owned it nor what letters it had held. I knew only that I had seen its like before, in rooms belonging to men who had buried more of their youth than any man ought to bury, and that the knowing of it settled over me, that first evening, a quiet and unlooked-for kinship I had not thought a dead man still capable of feeling for the living.

I thought of it seldom after that first marking. It was not the desk I came for.

It was upon an ordinary evening, no different, so far as any sign foretold it, from a dozen evenings before, that the matter of his name was remedied to me.

He came to the glass that evening in a fashion he had not come to it before, not settling at the desk as was his custom, but crossing the room with the phone already lifted to his ear, and stopping, of all the places in that room he might have chosen to stand and wait for the call to connect, directly before the window, near enough that had the pane between us been any thinner substance than glass, I might have reached him with the whole of my arm outstretched and touched, at last, what I had for weeks only permitted myself to want.

I had looked upon him a great many times by then, always at the same remove, always through the same tempering distance that a man's own reason, had reason still been fully mine to command, might have called mercy. I had not looked upon him close. I had not known, until that evening, precisely how much a little nearness might undo in a man who had thought himself already thoroughly undone.

He was thinner than the distance had shown me. I marked it now with a clarity I had not been granted before, and did not want, and could not, God forgive me, look away from: the fine architecture of a wrist where it met the phone, more bone in it than flesh had any comfortable business allowing; a pulse working, faint but visible, at the pale hollow of his throat, quick in a way that spoke less of the ordinary business of living than of a body laboring somewhat harder at that business than it ought. There was a want of color in him, too, up close, that the lamp's kind distance had before now softened, a paleness that was not merely the paleness of a boy who kept indoors, but something with a colder root to it, and I found, looking upon it, that I did not feel first, as any decent man ought to have felt first, alarm.

I felt wonder.

I have set this down, in the long telling of this tale, with more honesty than comfort, and I will not spare myself here. I ought to have grieved, seeing what I saw. Some part of me did grieve it, distantly, as a man grieves a thing he has not yet permitted himself fully to understand. But nearer the surface, and shameful for its nearness, there rose in me instead a species of admiration entirely unbecoming a dead man's proper feeling for a living boy's frailty, a sense that even this, even the visible cost of whatever burden he carried, only rendered him dearer to my sight, as a single crack renders fine porcelain no less precious for the marking of it, and perhaps, God help me, no less precious for the marking, but more.

I did not step back from the glass. I have never, in the whole of my long watching, stepped back from anything that offered itself to my eye, however plainly I understood I had no right to the offering.

The call connected. I heard it, faint and tinny, some voice on the other end I could not make sense of nor cared to.

"Hi," he said. "This is Julian."

The words reached me whole, unmuffled, unbroken, as no sound had ever yet reached me whole through that pane, and I had not known, until I heard it, how starved I had gone for so small a thing as a name spoken plainly by the mouth that owned it. I have turned it over every hour since, the sound of it, the particular unstudied ease with which he gave himself away to a stranger on a telephone line, the very thing he had never once, in all my watching, given so freely to me. Julian. I said it back to the glass, soundless, my own breath, had I breath left to fog a pane with, would have written it there entire. Julian.

I did not think, in that moment, to ask myself why the window had let the whole of it through so clean, when every lesser sound before had reached me broken and partial, nor why the cold that gathered always where I stood seemed, that evening, to linger a long while after he had turned from the glass and did not fade so quickly as it once had done. I had eyes, that hour, for nothing but him. I did not think, either, to wonder at it, then, or for a good while after.

He spoke a while longer, some ordinary business I gathered only the shape of and not the substance, a scheduling, I believed, some appointment made or confirmed, his voice careful in the particular way I had come to recognize as the voice he kept for anyone who was not himself alone in a room at night, brighter than his true humor, steadier than I suspected his true strength that hour allowed. He thanked whoever spoke to him. He said he would see them then. He said it was no trouble at all, in a tone that told me, though I could not have said precisely how I knew it, that it was rather more trouble than he would ever own to a stranger on a telephone line, and I understood, watching him, that this was a performance he had grown skilled enough at giving that it had very nearly ceased, even to himself, to feel like a performance at all.

He ended the call and stood a moment longer at the glass, not looking out through it, I think, so much as simply resting there, as a man rests against the nearest solid thing when he has spent, on some ordinary and unremarkable exchange, rather more of himself than the exchange had any right to cost him. I watched the tiredness settle back over him once the brightness he had borrowed for the call was no longer wanted, and felt, watching it, the same shameful wonder I had felt at the sight of his wrist, his throat, his want of color, a hunger that dressed itself, not very convincingly, in the coat of tenderness.

He went to his desk, after, that same small waisted writing box I had marked that first evening, and did not speak again that I could hear, and took up whatever labor the evening still demanded of him, and I stood at that glass a good while longer than I had ever yet permitted myself to stand, marking how the cold that gathered always about me seemed, that night, in no great hurry to disperse, and how the whole of what had passed between the boy and the telephone had reached me clean and entire where every lesser sound before had come to me broken, and thought nothing more of either strangeness than a man thinks of a single warm day arriving early in a cold season, a mercy, merely, and not a sign.

I know better now. I did not know it then. I had eyes, that whole long evening, for nothing in the wide world save him, and would have had eyes for nothing else, I think, though the sign had been written before me in letters a yard high.
Julian.

I said it to myself the whole of that night, and the whole of the next day, and have said it, in some fashion, every day and night since, as a man says over a coin he has been given by a hand he can never take hold of, turning it, testing its weight, unable quite to believe so small a thing might be so entirely his to keep.