Agnostic Faith-Healer

 Tilting the head upon meeting.  A tall and charming man who makes you feel a sense of importance.  A chuckle and smile that are infectious.  Perhaps a bit much but still disarming. A practiced genuineness.  An emersion into the roll.  The kind that leads actors to take a year off between characters.  Cleansing the mind from having gone so deep.

He sits at his local with a pen and notebook but a friendly crowd is no place to write and his thoughts are interrupted in regular intervals as he bids “Hello, deary!” to yet another friendly face.

I have taken a step closer, into the mind of the actor, not the character.  I have been there when the curtain falls and there is no audience to impress.  I have seen the swift turning of his demeanor from sunshine to dark.  I know how many years he had expected to live and how he surpassed them only to set another limit.

These limits.  They do not remind me of prognostication.  They are not the product of tea-leaves, read.  Nor are they some scientific estimation.   Size of the cranium.  Health of the gums.   Proper flow of bile and the like.   They are not predictions of any sort.  They are excuses.  At the heart of it, the function of an early-death-statement is to justify current destructive behavior.  There is no point in a healthy life if it is not expected to last. As if a doctor has seen your death as imminent and advised you to enjoy what time you have left.  Every day seen as a victory lap until the victory laps outnumber the actual race.

I have brought him to writing and I see a spark ignite.  He brings pages to me at the bar and I take time away from my responsibilities to carefully read his difficult penmanship.  I could wait until I am off but the kindling of this fresh spark, I fear, will die if not nurtured carefully.

In this sense, I have taken him on as a project.  Ignoring all the things that are wrong with myself, I run off to fix another.  No statement could better describe me.  Broken fixer of the broken.   I smile and laugh to myself as I imagine the coughing doctor, asking about your medication routine between deep drags of a cigarette.  Lecturing you on mediation through slurred speech.  The signing of a waiver acknowledging that the procedure is experimental.  The good doctor, unlicensed.  The prognosis indeterminable.

Come one, come all!  Witness the lower-case miracles of the agnostic faith-healer!  Sermons held in alleys where sinners go to be left alone.  Tending to a flock in an open field as not to notice when a sheep flees.  To reduce the captives' urge to test the gate.

I turn to him, exhale smoke and sip from a small glass filled with a brown elixir believed to temporarily relieve symptoms.  We have argued and are sitting in expectant silence.   He has become entrenched.   I have pushed too far.

“We've found something in that notebook that seems to be a passion.  Something to work on.  To live for, for now.”  I say, backing up carefully from the brink of losing him.  “How 'bout this?  F**k the expiration date on your life!  Okay?  How 'bout you go home, sleep, get up tomorrow and write?  Never mind how may years.  How 'bout you just give me tomorrow?  Maybe even Tuesday.  We'll get together at the bar and write.  How' bout that?”

Again, his demeanor changes. That wry smile and lilt in his voice I find so pleasing. “I see what you did there, Philly.  Cheers!”

We drink and light another smoke.  The procedure over, all that is left is the wait.  The wait to see if the wound heals with him constantly scratching at it. To see if the stitches take. If the patient has the strength to fight the infection.

We share words of affection and he wanders off with an unspoken promise to meet Tuesday to do some writing. I sit alone for a few minutes, my thoughts performing a pleasant, self-gratified waltz.

Primum non nocere, I whisper to a disinterested evening. I press the cigarette out into the tray and stare, undecided at the small, empty glass.

First, do no harm.