2. CATCH THE WIND

We seem to be stuck on the marble stairway...

“Look,” stammered the fat man with the big sack and white whiskers standing only part way up the long and shining marble stairway, “look, I’m already halfway up!”

“If you think this is half way you must have a few cogs missing,” chided his alter-ego, “this is only a handful of steps from the bottom and there’s an endless number in front of you.”

“Endless?” At that word the fat man cringed. “What do you mean, endless? Do you mean I’ll never reach the top?”

“Oh, you’ll get there, with me chivvying you on?” yawned the other, “that’s all I’ve done all our lives, chivvy you on. Just you look at the angel waiting up there to greet you, that’ll chivvy you on all right, imagining things, day-dreaming fantasies, feeling the breeze of her in the air...” He indicated the smiling woman who seemed to be waiting for something or someone. Was it him or might there be some other fortunate somewhere out of sight, also aiming for a moment or two with the beautiful young woman.

At least, he thought she was young.

Or ageless. She might have been ageless, neither young nor old but as she stood there having all the finest attributes of both youth and old age. At least, that’s what he thought and it seemed to make sense.

“She’s beautiful,” he whispered.

“Oh, she’s more than that! Her reputation has gone down through the ages like a shining light of perfect femininity and modesty, of virtue and the power to engender the most perfect love...” murmured his alter-ego. “There never was a woman with more absolute and thorough decency in her being. Everyone who believes in her loves her, and that’s quite a few souls: and look, she’s beckoning you! That’s what she’s doing: she’s got her eyes on you and wants you here and now! But you’re only part way up the stairway to Heaven and she’s at the top.”

The fat man looked around him. He was still alone on the marble stairs that led up and up and up and looked as endless as anything can look.

“Why am I here?” he asked.

“You need to know the answer to that?” cackled his alter-ego, “you need to be told why you’re here? Can’t you see? The perfect woman is waiting for you and all you have to do is climb up and up and up until you get to her, that’s why you’re here.”

Then the fat man decided to ask the one question he absolutely knew the answer to but didn’t like to think it. It’s the question nobody would like to hear the answer to if it applied to them. A final sort of question, the answer to which makes every other single thing the thinker had ever thought or done sort of irrelevant. But he must know before he took one more step.

He looked at his feet, where they stood, and sighed.

One more step! So very far.

So he asked the question.

“Am I dead?” he asked, “and is that why I’m here?”

His alter-ego looked at him, shocked by his ignorance.

“Of course you’re dead!” he exclaimed, “didn’t you notice? We’re both dead if that makes you feel any better. You were there in that hospital bed with tubes and pipes connected to just about every part of you, and white-coated medics rushing around reading meters and dials, pumping all sorts of things into your veins and determined to keep you alive. But in spite of all that you died, and here you are.”

“But I don’t want to be dead!” suddenly sobbed the fat man.

“You don’t? Not even with that beautiful woman on the platform at the top of this stairway waiting for you and you alone.”

“She might be waiting for you!”

“That’s a given. And what if she is? We are inseparable, you and I, where you go I must go, and vice versa. So if I get her you’ll get her, and to be perfectly honest there’s enough of her for the two of us. Not the flesh, you understand, she lost that generations ago, but the purity, her mind, the love that bubbles inside her...”

“You make her sound like a witch’s cauldron!” snapped the fat man, “things bubbling inside her!”

“Now you’re being silly. Come on, lift that leg, heave that sack, and now the other leg. See, it wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

“It’s just that I’ve got no head for heights, and you should know that if you are who I think you are. I get dizzy and everything starts spinning around and I feel as if I’m about to start falling, falling, falling into a bottomless abyss...”

“Into Hell, you mean?” asked his alter-ego, curiously.

“Is that what it is down there? I never knew...” The fat man started shaking uncontrollably. Even his hat wobbled. “I’m going to fall,” he slobbered, “I’m going to fall down there into Hell!”

“No you’re not!” came the reply, not comforting because it added, “Because that’s where you’ve just come from!”

“What? I’ve been to Hell? What are you trying to tell me, and why can’t I remember...”

“You can remember, you silly man. It’s just that you didn’t know. You lived down there, flew that ridiculous sleigh of yours all over the place, towed through the skies by equally ridiculous reindeer… Where else could you have been if you weren’t in Hell?”

“I thought I was happy… I did my work, and I was happy.”

“You were a fat elf in a silly red suit and shouting ho, ho, ho every time you breathed!”

“I wasn’t silly!”

His alter-ego decided to remain silent for a few moments, to see what would be said next. He didn’t like the situation any better that his other half, but that didn’t mean he had to make a fuss about things. After all, they were where they were, weren’t they?

“I wasn’t silly, was I? The children...”

Silence.

“I mean, they loved me, didn’t they? The work was so hard. It must have been for a reason… to make the children happy.”

“I flew around the world in a single night! The strain...”

His alter-ego coughed. “Take another step, and I’ll tell you,” he said, soothingly.

“All right.”

That’s funny, thought the bubble on his shoulder, he hasn’t complained this time. Maybe the truth is beginning to percolate through. I mean, riding sleighs on dark winter nights! And he believed he did it! He really did!

This time the fat man, to dumbfound his alter-ego, took two steps, and they weren’t so difficult.

He looked up the stairway. The maiden looked much closer, as if by taking two small steps he’d covered a miniature version of eternity. He could even see her eyes quite clearly. Her shining eyes.

And she was so beautiful he gulped.

Then a fantasy teased his deepest depths. He felt the wind start stirring as if it was suddenly a spring day, part of him and not part of him, around him and not around him.

But around her.

A breeze from nowhere was blowing her long silken sari, making it swirl around her ankles like multicoloured clouds of light.

“I need that,” he almost shouted, “That wind! I need to catch the wind!”

The need took him five steps closer.

© Peter Rogerson 06.11.18