Lazarus

 

The sky cracked opened, and a mega-sized billboard with blinking light bulbs that spelled the word

 

“WHY?”

 

squeezed through the slit in the blue canvas of the heavens and hovered obtrusively above the tree line of Mount Lion in the early morning mist. There was nobody to witness this miracle save for one man. Showing no signs of surprise or shock, he stared at the 100-feet letters, and wiped the sweat from his brow.

 

Squinting, narrowing his eyes, he studied the path trying to guess what lay ahead. He began to ponder whether he should go on at all. As far as he could tell - or, rather guess - he must have been about halfway up to the top. The path was winding, and he couldn’t see more than a few hundred feet ahead.

 

He sighed, and plumped down on a boulder that lay on the side of the path. The bulge of his wallet, tucked away in his back pocket, made him feel uncomfortable. After some stretching, moving and groaning, he managed to retrieve it. The leather was soft, warm with his body heat, and wet with his perspiration.

 

He opened it and studied the contents: some cash, receipts, business cards, photographs, bank cards, and ID cards. “Lazarus Adams, 5 Midway Street, Providence.” He read his name, address and other details a few times trying to feel a connection between the information and himself - in vain. The fake smile he wore in his ID photo, the magnetic chips on his bank cards, the logos and slogans on the businesses cards seemed grotesquely alien to him as if they, or he, belonged to a different world.

 

Lazarus was lost. Not in the geographical, but rather, in the existential sense of the word. Despite the middle class cul de sac, the career and the income that were both moderate but provided a stable footing in the quicksand of 21^st century societal wilderness, he lost his way. Somewhere, somehow he changed lanes on the highway of life, took a wrong exit, and he didn’t even notice it until it was too late. He kept on going, but found himself in a dead end street.

 

Lately, the sky had been opening up above him more and more often, in the most unexpected places and most inconvenient times. He could be in a meeting, in traffic, or in the bedroom and the air around him would grow denser and denser till it was almost solid, encasing, suffocating him. Then it would open up as if cut by a cosmic scalpel, the message board would squeeze through and show words, images, or just punctuation marks.

 

“END.”

“AND?”

 

Cryptic, suggestive messages like this were driving Lazarus mad. At times, he sensed the significance of the messages; at times their meaning eluded him. When, for three weeks in a row, he had to watch a runner who, at the sound of the start gun, finds himself chained to a treadmill, he knew what it meant. The image of a bleating mule tied to a pole in a big, empty field, or the deflated hot air balloon that he was forced to watch as it crash-landed daily for two weeks were obvious enough references to his own life.

 

The backdrop that appeared behind all of the words and messages was the image of a face. It wavered and undulated as if it was made of clouds, painting the billboard a pale grayish blue - the color of a slow, sunless, sleepy, drizzling autumn afternoon. It was her eyes, her smile, her visage that watched this microcosmic drama unfold from the other side. Perhaps she saw different messages projected onto the screen, perhaps she saw nothing, or perhaps she wasn’t even there.

 

The word

 

“LOVE”

 

flashed across the imaginary billboard in bright red. It blinked three times, and then gave place to a gigantic

 

“?”

 

that also blinked three times.

 

Then, it was

 

“RU”

“RU”

“WHO RU?”

“RU”

“RU”

“WHO RU?”

 

Suddenly, he had an overwhelming urge to throw his wallet, which he viewed now as a testament to his whole sham life, over the cliff, down into the dense forest below. He imagined it landing in the undergrowth, getting wet with dew morning after morning, being covered with rotten leaves and broken twigs, discovered and invaded by insects and worms. Mold and moss would grow on it, and in time the photos of his fake smile would fade, the likeness of the pretty woman would be nothing more than a colorful blur, the names on the business cards would become indecipherable, the money would disintegrate, and eventually the wallet would become a handful of dirt, indistinguishable from the clods surrounding it.

 

The word

 

“FREEDOM”

 

replaced the word

 

“LOVE”

 

on the projecting screen of his mind. He looked back, down toward the town he had left behind that morning. The complicated network of roads was a giant snake coiled up, biting its own tail. Lazarus marveled at the sight of this maze, at the lines that criss-crossed and dissected one another, at times merging, and then running parallel to each other, but ultimately leading nowhere.

 

The billboard became filled with flashing arrows pointing forward, and it also showed the word

 

“ON!”

 

“On toward what?” he screamed in frustration. He had been chasing the butterflies of his dreams, his self-created passions and desires long enough to know where they all lead. They were scales on the back of the great serpent, each colored slightly differently, capturing the imagination, stoking curiosity, fanning the fire in the furnace of his insatiable mind, and his greedy heart. He was tired of it all: the endless wandering in the labyrinth that formed between the scales, where lifetimes can go by, always chasing after whatever new goal, excitement or pleasure might be waiting just behind the next bend.

 

Lazarus let out a deep sigh and lowered his head. When he looked up again, a multitude of dragonflies and butterflies filled the air around him zigzagging and flitting excitedly. Perhaps they were there before, but he wasn’t aware of them. Lazarus stared at the miracle of life as if he was seeing it for the first time. These swift-winged creatures were just as wondrous and just as elusive as love, happiness, or freedom - the beautiful illusions he had been chasing all his life.

 

The rising sun peeked out from over a cliff and stared Lazarus full in the face, blinding him, flooding the deep, dark cave of his mind with golden light. He wanted to say something, but he just opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water. A sudden feeling of bliss came over him, and began sobbing uncontrollably. The wallet, that he had been clutching, slid from his hand and fell at his feet. His chest was heaving; his shoulders were shaking with tremors of emotion.

 

Soon, the wave of emotion passed over him, leaving him clean, purified, and restored. When he opened his eyes, his gaze was met by a dragonfly sitting on his leg, looking up at him with its big, bulging black eyes. It made some movements with its tiny head, as if to ask,

 

“SO?”

 

It was like a small child that can look anyone full in the face with openness, sincerity, interest, innocence, without judgment, without shame. It turned its head left, right, up, and down a couple more times, then Lazarus could swear it smiled at him just before it took to the air and flew off. It didn’t go far - just to a blade of tall grass, where perhaps he could enjoy the early morning sun more fully. Its body was a most wondrous, iridescent blue, and the wings a most delicate mesh.

 

As the man was taking deep breaths, drying his eyes, a black butterfly circled around him. He sat motionless, hoping the butterfly would also do him the honor of coming closer, of touching him. It circled around his head a few times before landing on his leg as well - just where the dragonfly sat a moment ago.

 

It was a moment of grace: for all those years, try as he might, happiness eluded him. Disillusionment waited behind every corner. Here, as he sat motionless, he was touched in a most gentle and graceful way by something ineffable. The billboard was still hanging over his head, and all the questions now appeared at once in a chaotic light show, almost completely obscuring the face in the background. But, there was something else: a glimmer of soft, golden light around the edges.

 

A dragonfly flew in front of the screen. It stopped in midair, hovered, flickered, and started growing larger and larger until it filled the whole screen. Its wings generated such a powerful a whirlwind that it knocked Lazarus off of the boulder he had been sitting on. He landed on his back, looking up at the screen that was shaking in the hurricane-like winds. A light bulb was ripped out of its socket, then another and another until the entire board was cleared of all the questions leaving only her face framed in golden light, undulating gently, peacefully like a willow after a passing storm.

 

Then it started fading, too, and soon Lazarus was staring at nothing but the clear, blue sky above. He waited for another message, another word, another picture, but there was nothing. A few butterflies were flitting about paying no attention to the man on the ground that had a ridiculous grin on his face and tears in his eyes.

 

A few minutes passed before he felt that he should probably get up. He dusted off his clothes, picked up his wallet; put it back in his pocket, looked left, looked right, and after a moment of hesitation he took a tentative step forward on the lonely mountain path on toward the summit of Mount Lion.