Journey to the Tower

A Story by Matt Penrose

A story of an old man's death, and a boy's searching for immortality.

Albert Wells was wheeled out onto a trolley on the front lawn of his house one morning, and from a short distance away I saw the look of his ghost-white body. Shrunken grey features petrified like stone. The two flanking paramedics looked dubious as they slid him into the back of the ambulance, and the old man glared solemnly into the overcast sky above. That night I learnt he had died.

I have known Mr Wells for as long as I can remember. He was our next-door neighbour for over two decades. He was never married, and his retirement days rested simply with the pleasure of tending to his chooks and large garden of fruit trees and plants. For several months, Mr Wells had been making a chain of trips to the hospital for checkups on his deteriorating health. It was expected of his age, it was routine. But I knew in my heart that day was different, that day when everything seemed to change inside me.

It deeply saddened me to learn of his passing. It made me remember that all must die, that this life here wasn’t going to last. I too would have to confront that same fate one day, as he had to, and see the same overcast sky with whitening features and blurring eyes. I would be part of just another generation passing; what young boy would be watching me being wheeled out into the back of an ambulance?

Not long before he died, I had managed to catch up with Mr Wells in a conversation from over the fence of our two adjoining backyards, as he quietly set himself to pick oranges from a tree. Through the white brush of hair hanging over his mouth, he began to bring up his numerous trips to the hospital, and I found myself reluctantly asking him whether he was afraid to die or not. I suppose it was said out of curiosity or just plain foolishness, but Mr Wells didn’t seem to mind, and he merely shook his head and told me that he wasn’t. He told me that he had seen someone, a place; told me that he wasn’t sure if it was God, or his imagination. I asked him why that was so, but he never replied. At the time I didn’t know what to make of that, and honestly, I still don’t.

That was all two years ago, and despite the passing of time, never quite slowing down so that we living in it can catch up with ourselves, I’ve never managed to bear for myself the question of an old man’s mortality, such as Albert Wells’. Even now, what he had said still lingered in the midst of my mind. I still remember the look of calm in his eyes as he turned away from me, the feeling that he had found some kind of peace within himself, even though death lie just around the corner for him.

I wanted to know why Albert Wells wasn’t afraid to die, wanted to be ready for when my time came, to find the strange calm that I had seen in him. This last question of mine is the end of my journey here, the one I had hoped to never again walk. But here I am, walking it.

The tower beside me, an old and rusting signal tower, was the peaking monument centring a large hill sheltered with gum trees and iron bark. Its tall glinting peak overlooked the surrounding town, and the bronze evening light was dull against its skeleton frame. A cool stir of wind brushed through my hair. I watched as the unseen breath pulled loosely through the tops of gum trees and iron bark around me, like a ghost spreading its fingers, leaving me to the voice of rustling leaves. In the distance, a buzz saw chewed through the silence from an unseen backyard.

I am isolated here. Isolated from the rest of the world, like this long-forgotten tower. Houses were barely visible beyond the bristling walls of trees, and the hum of cars against the highway waned slowly like the sun above. Birds jumped from one tree to another, rustling in the shrub and undergrowth of the mingling forest, the calls and chatter of the evening’s dreariness filling the void in my thoughts. The horizon sank under the far-reaching carpet of gum trees, covered in a grey haze and crowned with the tall rise of distant mountains. It was cool up there on the hillside, and the weak blue sky hardly contained the warmth of the sun, struggling behind a mist of clouds. This whole world around me is one of eternity, like eternity, unyielding and breathing. It is a refuge for me, a place where I can gather my thoughts and find peace.

In my mind, I feel a calling; a gentle stir of wind pulling me always to the other side of the path that I am walking, over the horizon of the tall hill. It had led me here. Now that I am here though, the voice I heard has seemed to have disappeared, and I knew I was truly lost inside.

A light mist of rain began to patter gently against my face, and I looked up to see the slow movement of cloud forming over me. A rainbow had appeared out of the forest some distance away, and its wide arch formed a spray of vibrant colours against the carpet of grey. Flocks of Gullahs with red bellies and grey-feathered wings flittered through the sky, returning home to calling nests where chicks eagerly awaited company. The wind was full of the Gullah’s squeaking calls, and many were perched in the tall, waving tops of gum trees that arose around me. Some birds were singing a song of the approaching night, bathed in the glory of the golden sun fading beyond the far reaches of the nearby forest. The evening is calm and slow. Inviting. It is late winter.

My eyes fell upon the distant horizon of gum trees, where distant mountains formed a curtain of grey fog. I wondered if this was the place that for all these many weeks I had hoped to find, or if the place I was searching for indeed lay somewhere else. Was it a place of the mind, the heart? In any case, there is some kind of strange peace here, an unworldly calm.

Golden wattle sat brightly, out of place, among the dull green and grey of the woods surrounding me. The aroma of the wattle is thickly sweet to my senses, and I gaze in wonder as the wide, arcing ember of a jet flared across the sky like a comet as it reached for the heavens.

I tried to convince myself that Albert Wells wasn’t afraid to die because there was no way from it, that he had no choice but to accept that which was awaiting him. It didn’t matter whether you wanted to die or not, because that’s just the way things were; and a man had to accept his mortality once he realised he was part of this world; this great movement of people living and people dying. But maybe he had seen and found what I had; maybe he too had been searching. Searching for this immortality. For the root of all that was, that is, that forever will be.

The rain slowed to a brief murmur of drops, before stopping completely and the light of the sun suddenly broke out through a hole in the overhanging clouds. Long bars of white stabbed the earth below. Its rays caused sharp glints on the tower’s frame behind me, and the thick carpet of autumn wattle marking the forest floor a short distance away suddenly began to grow bright white as the sun began its long descent into the foot of the grey mountains. Its rays peaked out through the rusting tops of trees.

In one great leap, the birds leapt from the haven of gum trees and iron bark, and scattered along the top boughs, pulling up and winding about through the sky, before sinking away into the branches of the forest and the fading light of the sun. What I am searching for was no longer, I sensed, of this world.