At The Edge 

“At the Edge” is an original short story, written to make you think about the meaning of life. If you knew you only had a short time to live, how would you spend it? Would you feel satisfied with the life you were living, or the one you had already lived? I’m sure many people have a bucket list, and good answers to those questions. But sometimes we can live through a lot, and still feel a bit empty. This is a story about that emptiness, about feeling lost and unsatisfied even when everything around us says we shouldn’t. And, it’s a story about making meaning for your own life. 

When I was a child, my mother made me come with her to Saint Thomas on 5th Avenue where I sat and looked at the walls while adults said words I did not understand. I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in church until my mother took me to the Good Friday service on a black, rainy spring night. The moonlight shimmered over the stained glass windows and in the little water droplets, little figures of light reflected off of one another and blazed against the crisp night sky. Near the end of the service the choir stood to sing their anthem, and I sat quietly like I had during every prayer. The song came soaring from the choir and I was swallowed by the noise, and then the quartet section started and I heard the high treble part. I looked around to see everyone’s eyes were shut as they joined each other in the little pocket universe made by that falsetto. It was a little blond boy singing at the rail of the pulpit, his cheeks rosy and his chin stretched outward. The throat of a ten year old boy had the nebulous power to remind everyone in the room that they were going to die.

 For many years after that first night that I heard the Allegri sung I tried to find a recording of that song, or find any other choral group that could reach my soul like it had that night. But I never did.

As I returned each year I knew each high C was a strain on his voice and that soon he would not be able to reach it, and no one could sing it like him. The day I would never hear the boy sing a high C again was barrelling forward for the reason of his maturing, I thought. 

The boy died of typhus the next winter. They held his funeral at Saint Thomas and one of the other choristers sang the Allegri. It felt like a dishonor. 

Every night in the trench before I shut my eyes, I thought of that boy and heard his voice in my head. I thought of him the day before the war ended, when it would be over so soon I could taste it like blood on my lips- any second now. I thought of him on that day when the sour German soldier shot me in the rib. As that bullet barrelled through me and began to burn and everything that I had been thinking moments before meant nothing, I thought of that boy and I heard his voice in my head louder than ever. Most days I wonder why they had to remove the bullet, why each of the dozens of times they told me that today could be the day I die, it was not, and why on the day weeks after the end of the war when they finally told me that I would not die, they were wrong and I would. Nearly two and a half years after I had been shot I had developed sepsis from the bullet wound, and the doctor said it would be unsurvivable. Two months maybe, maybe a year, hard to say really, he had told me. I better get out and do what I wanted to while I still could.

After the war, the UK gave me a visa and I went to London to stay for a while. At first I thought I would stay there only a few months but I met a woman there, and her name was Annie and she was very short and very sweet and she took very good care of me. I did not love Annie but she loved me and she wanted me to tell her I loved her and I wanted to stay in her apartment with her and someone to take care of me so I told her I loved her. I thought I had plenty of time to fool around and I was young. 

“What are you thinking about, dear?” I was often up before dawn but she usually slept through the sunrise. Today she had awoken and rolled over to see me lying awake, staring at the opening in the blinds over the window where the moonlight crept in, and it had been troubling for her. I did this often, but she did not know.

“Nothing, go back to sleep.”

“No, what is it?” She had huddled up on my arm and her hair touched my bare chest.

“It’s okay, go back to sleep.”

“I’m serious, Peter.”

“So am I.” She did not say anything, only held my arm tighter and nuzzled her head into the crevice between my neck and shoulder. I stared at the windowpane, at the light from the moon and the stars reflecting off of the windows of the hotel across the street as they sunk in the sky. 

“Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you sad all the time? You’re going to die but we’re all going to die, love. And you knew, you knew when you left for the war that you could die and you knew after you were shot that you would probably die, and now, the doctor tells you you have months to live and you act like you’re already dead.”

“I’m not sad I’m going to die.”

“Then why are you sad?”

“I don’t know.” I paused for a moment, staring out the window as the orange light from the sun finally started to peek through. “On the field when the medics are trying to save everyone and two men are screaming and they take one look at the first man and know he’s going to die, they move on to the next one. If they didn’t, they would be some crappy medics.”

“I don’t think you stole anyone’s time, Peter. You were meant to last this long, not anyone else, if you hadn’t we never would’ve met.” I chuckled. “Well whatever, Peter, be cynical, believe whatever you want, I don’t care. But I don’t think you’re wasting someone else’s time.” She backed away from me and went back to her side of the bed, rolling over so her back faced me, and shut her eyes to go back to sleep. “I think you’re wasting your own.”

While Annie was at work that day, I decided to go out and visit Bristol. There were very few people out and I went into a café to have lunch. I drank two beers with my lunch and felt very fine, and went back out to walk along the river and look at the birds flying above. As the day went on, the sun grew warmer and I could feel it on my skin and the weight of my feet as they moved straight along towards nothing. I did not know anyone in Bristol. It was a beautiful day and I felt fine.

 I boarded the bus with the tourists towards London a bit early to get a good seat. I sat in a window towards the back, and cracked open the window so the fresh air could come in. I hoped no one would sit next to me. I sat for half an hour before the bus left and watched the people file on board and waited for one of them to sit beside me, but no one did. 

Looking out the window I watched the moor and the green meadows, the sinking valleys and the hills of dry green grass in the July sun, and breathed the English air. The month of July was more lovely in the south of England than anywhere else. The sky was so utterly blue and felt so low, like a close ceiling but so wide, the low clouds hovered above in clumps and then wispy shadows trailing off, and the sunlight blared over the country road that winded us towards more meadows and more countryside. 

Around four o’clock, the bus stopped in a gravel lot and we were in a little town called Burford. I got off the bus and began down its one long street and then down a side street and towards a little valley until I turned a corner and saw a small cemetery, with old grey stones sticking up from the ground. Within the graveyard there was a winding gravel path only wide enough for one man that led into a chapel. There was no one around and I walked towards the chapel and peered up above the double doors. SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST CHURCH, read the letters above the doors. I pushed on the little metal flap above one of the handles and opened the heavy door. The stone floor and the dust and incense all danced beautifully together at the entrance. There is a special magic to walking into a church, like the walls are the pillars of the Bifröst for your soul.

It was light in the chapel and it was free of people. Dark oak pews filled up the front nave that connected to a larger space behind it, where there was a ciborium at the center, and I stood in the walkway between the two halves of the nave. As I walked further into the building, I was suddenly standing in the center of the church. Ahead of me was the altar and the crucifix hanging cardinally at the front, the hands and feet of a golden Christ that was bigger than life, staring at me, threateningly nailed to the cross. On each wall of the space behind me there was a door to a small room. One room had a little note pasted to the door that read, This is a quiet prayer space. Anyone is welcome to use this space for spiritual time and may bring with any relics or sentiments to deepen prayer. Please keep this room silent.

I entered the room. On the walls to either side were two small, gold altars, where people had left flowers and bibles. Everything in the room seemed to fit but one relic caught my eye. It was a small golden statue of the Hindu god, Ganesh, who seemed to be eyeing me wisely from his place on the shelf. I had remembered hearing a story about Ganesh before, but I couldn’t remember where. Ganesh once felt very hungry and so he ate and ate, but was never full and never satisfied, so he ate almost a whole city until one day another god came and gave him a bowl of rice. Ganesh ate the rice from the god and was finally satisfied.

A blind man can live forever off of only what the world gives him to hear and to smell and wonder in the back of his mind what it might be like to see. But a man who sees can see and see until he has seen everything and there is nothing else to see but the things he has already seen, and he could watch all the people around him happily striding through the darkness, ignorant of the light. The man who sees can sometimes fade back into the darkness, zoom out of his mind and into the world in front of him, but always deep inside is the hunger and the fear he will never fill it. Yet when the man sees the rice of god, it is only a mirage on the highway out of the city that slowly vanishes as he inches towards death.

I left Ganesh and the church and walked back through the cemetery and around the corner, up the street to board the bus, sitting in my same seat. I closed my eyes and did not open them until I heard chatter that we had arrived in London. Back at the apartment, Annie was sitting at her living room desk writing something up.

“Hello, dear. How was your trip?”

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

“Just walked around Bristol and then Burford.”

“Alright then. I was just finishing up a shopping list, I’m headed to the store to pick up a tenderloin to cook for us for dinner. Would you like to come with me?”

“That’s okay, I’ve been traveling all day. I think I’d just like to lay down for a while.”

“Okay, honey.” She stood up with her shopping list and pocketbook in hand and walked over to rub my shoulder. She made me feel oddly like the walls of her apartment came in tighter than they did. She was a small woman but she took up an immense amount of space.“I’ll be home in a little while then, dear. Take care of yourself and get some rest.” 

I walked into the bedroom and changed clothes before climbing into bed. Ahead of me, I could see the window I always peered out of in the early mornings, but now it was dusk and the sun was setting. I had spent many days traveling and seen many sunrises, over the ocean and New York harbour, over the fields outside of Cantigny. When I was shot and they thought I would die, my friends and family would come to visit me in the hospital, and each day I would wake up to see another sunrise and another sunset. The people came and went and when they went they went on with their days, went to work and then dinner, and then they went home to their beds where they slept until the sun came up again. They wouldn’t pay much attention to the sun, but I stayed in bed waiting to die, and up and down went the sun, like the boulder of Sisyphus, every morning I awoke to see the sunrise, it hurt. Now here I was, the sun setting. The people of London were out at the grocery store buying dinner for their families, writing up their business presentations for tomorrow, and I was here, watching the sunset.

I did not stay awake long enough to see the full darkness in the sky. As I drifted off I dreamt of the church on 5th Avenue, and with each snoring breath I could see the pews more clearly and the choir, and the raindrops over the stained glass windows, and my breath faded out and became more and more faint until it did not. My eyes opened and I saw the church clearer than ever and heard the faint sound of music playing. I could hear that it was the Allegri playing, bouncing off the walls of the nave. The quartet section began and the alto voice and second treble sang the loudest, cloaking the singer of the soaring descant that I so loved. The highest voice grew louder and louder in a glorious crescendo until I heard it clear as the sun and the blue sky over Somerset, and I knew it was the boy.