Sketches in Words

"The unfinished story is the most promising, for it holds all the mystery and excitement in its potential."

"I come out of the shadows, into the world."

The Long Red Line

I remember a long red line extending without end on a background of white; blurred but certain in its relentless continuity. I remember faces, too. Indistinct, stretching to infinity as they merged with one another. And sounds. People talking in muffled voices, in familiar sounding words that I could not quite comprehend. They could be whispering in my ear or screaming somewhere afar. But I was not confused. I knew exactly what was happening. I knew. And I felt many sensations. I felt like many people. Different people, but all me, all the same.

That was a long time ago. But still, I remember..

Small Things

Big things happen because of small things. You look right instead of left just for a second and your whole life changes its course forever. You may get killed. Or you kill somebody. And the worst thing is, there’s no rewind button. What’s done is done. So that’s how it was with me. I looked right. And I killed somebody. Not then, not that day, but later. And perhaps, inevitably. So it was that moment that changed my life forever. I looked right for a mere flash of a second and I saw something. What I saw forcefully ejected me from my life’s path that I had been following until that moment and landed me where I am right now. That’s why I’m sitting in this prison cell serving life without parole. And you see, there’s not much life to speak of for me anymore. You could say I’m a ruined man. But it was not for nothing. My life changed at that moment, but so did the lives of many others. You’ll see. I’ll write it all down. I’ve got time. I don’t have much else, but I’ve got time. Lots of it.

My life has three chapters. That’s how I see it. The first chapter is pretty ordinary. Middle-class parents, good education, a white-collar job, wife, mortgage, divorce, no kids. Ups and downs for sure, but nothing out of the ordinary. And I was OK. Really OK. All that changed when I turned my head that day one way rather than the other. It is then that the second chapter of my life began. That was the exciting part. It was also the shortest, but more things happened to me in the following two months that don’t happen to most people in the whole of their lives. And it ended me here. This is my third chapter. This is the part when I do the thinking, the analysis. This can potentially be the longest chapter, too. But that won’t happen. I know that. And you’ll know, too. I am going to tell you why.

Melissa and the Handmaker

And it is here that I must end my story, for I never saw them again. I returned home the next morning and silently slipped back into the patterns of my former routine; that insignificant existence we call everyday life.

It is through the eyes of an ordinary man living a quiet life now that I realize the events of those three days were so bizarre, so extraordinary. And so wonderful. I know also that it all sounds so incredibly fantastic. And yet, this is the true course of events as I have experienced them, without adding or subtracting anything.

I have not kept in contact with the characters after the events, but I know through other people that the Handmaker is still somewhere in the city, living a quieter life now and not getting himself in trouble anymore; or at least none that I’ve heard of. As for Melissa, she was never seen again, but I've heard that she moved out of the country; where, I do not know. 

Maybe one day our paths will cross again, somewhere. I sure hope the circumstances will be different..

What went wrong?

I’d like to think that I’ve done nothing wrong. But some may suggest (and they may have a point) that I’ve been the architect of my own predicament. And they might add that it was my curiosity that did me in. I know, I’d left that part out about me. That’s because I know we're not supposed to be curious about things that have got nothing to do with our small existence. About things that do not, should not concern us. It’s not the Renaissance any more, you know. Who cares about the cosmic background radiation, the art of playing Go, the history of the Roman Empire, the latest in String Theory, the secrets of the pyramids, extrasolar planet search, how bees find their way back to the hive or the Nazca Lines? I know, some do. What I mean is, who cares about them all? I am no scientist or anything. My day job is about counting numbers. But I have an insatiable curiosity to know.

As a kid, I used to read encyclopedias when my peers were reading comics. I was not a nerd or anything. I played Cowboys and Indians or joined in Atari tournaments, just like every other kid. So I grew up thinking there’s nothing particularly wrong with my personal interest in consuming all the information I could get my hands on. I'd already listened to my parents and chose the path most travelled, hadn’t I? But yet, I kept alive my curiosity about the universe we live in. And the internet didn’t help. Here was a medium which put the whole of mankind’s knowledge, ideas and sheer junk at my fingertips. It would not be too much to say that it is the world wide web that caused all this mess.

Knowledge, as better men than me have pointed out (and as most of our leaders would concur), can be a dangerous thing. And you may have read in some cheesy spy thriller that there is such a thing as knowing too much. I know that now. I know things now that I wish I hadn’t. I know that most of what I used to take for granted, what you take for granted, is not true. And knowing this is, well, painful.

You know how sometimes as you ‘surf’ on the internet you click on one link and then you are taken to another web site and then you click on a link there and it takes you somewhere else and so an and so forth and after several hours you find yourself reading something completely unrelated to what you had started out with? That happens to me a lot. One thing leads to another. That’s a fair and simple way to explain how this peculiar situation that I now find myself in all started: One thing simply lead to another.

On one ordinary evening, after an ordinary day, I came home from work, ate a fast dinner consisting of a cold turkey sandwich and a slice of tiramisu, I seated myself in front of the computer, first checking my e-mail account and then reading the news on my favorite news sites, a pattern which had repeated itself thousands of times before. But on this particular evening, as I was scanning the news sites, a short piece about Romania caught my eye. You don’t read much about Romania in the news, so I clicked on it. The news itself was not interesting but on the side of the page, there was a list of other news on Romania that had previously appeared. There was one on the tourism potential of the Carpathian mountain region. I clicked on that one. As I was reading that, I got more interested in Transylvania and did a quick search. After several pages, I found a site which had some history on the region. You know, Dracula and all that. As I had already read a lot on both the historical and the fictional figure, I was more interested in the fact that there had been a few archeological digs recently, uncovering ancient Dacian communities, the forefathers of the Romanians. Several clicks later I found myself reading a relatively recent piece of news about a mysterious burial ground they had uncovered somewhere near the city of Brasov. The story mentioned that archeologists had stumbled upon a burial site where they found items that were quite unlike anything else they had found before. They hadn’t been able to date the graves yet, as the site seemed to have been in almost constant use since the arrival of the first settlers in the area. Some graves looked like they could be two thousand years old, while some others looked no older than Medieval. This, they said is quite extraordinary and unprecedented, but maybe further studies will narrow the time period down to a couple of centuries. All this was interesting, of course, but not so much for me to lose any sleep over. I did lose sleep over it though, but not because of the difficulty archeologists’ faced over the dating of the site. There was a small bit of other information mentioned in the article. It was that all of the graves had one thing in common: All the dead were buried with an egg-shaped black stone in their right hands. These stones were all the same in their shape, size and shiny nature, no matter how old the particular grave was, further confusing the archeologists. As of the writing of the article, they had not been able to determine the source or use of these peculiar black stones. And that was all there was to the article. After reading it, I realized that I was quite tired and quickly went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep for a while as somehow the image of a skeleton holding a black and shiny egg-shaped piece of stone kept coming to me. I couldn’t shake it off. When I finally fell asleep I dreamt of these stones. I still remembered them when I woke up the next morning.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my life had changed irreversibly.

I’ve been a good boy all my life.

I’ve eaten my vegetables, drank my milk and never looked under girls’ skirts. I was told to study hard at school, not to cheat in exams, get a good college diploma, find myself a well-paid job at a big corporation and become a respectable, honest citizen. I did all that. I even filled all my tax returns correctly. It may not sound like much, but I was, by anyone’s measure, a successful - if rather boring - member of society. I believed in our democratic system and always voted. I never did anything out of the ordinary, except for a few youthful promiscuities (which need not be elaborated here) and minor indulgences, like listening to punk rock when in private. Oh, yes, and I like to hug my friends when I’ve had a few too many beers. But, other than that and watching the Discovery channel instead of celebrity game shows, I think I’ve been your regular guy by all accounts. And that was fine by me. Having secured myself a promising career, my next thoughts were a new car, a wife and a mortgage. I felt that I was on a conveniently predicable path to a good life. I thought I had it all figured out.

All that, of course, is now in the past.

In the battle between good and evil, ...

... reason and superstition, men and women, vanilla and chocolate, Pepsi and Coke, there comes a time when you may find yourself in that grey area, that no man’s land, that twilight zone, where ideas and opinions blur and certainty goes down the way of bell-bottoms and honest politicians. This is your "I wake up one day in a hotel room with a terrible hangover, I hear someone in the shower and I don’t remember a thing about last night" moment. You thought you were the Titanic and now you’ve hit the iceberg. You’ve just fallen into your own personal rabbit hole. You’re not sure of anything any more and you wish you’d paid more attention when  Sagan talked about that "Uncertainty Principle" on a Cosmos rerun you’d seen one night zapping like a zombie several years ago. You know, like that time when having defended your boss to your spouse the previous evening and justified your relocation to the archive department 3 months ago as an opportunity to further your career; you come to work the next morning and are told you’ve just been laid off due to the new "under-sizing" policy to help raise the falling stock price. "Unfortunate, yes, but not really unfair. It’s nothing personal, you understand. Most regrettable indeed and oh, good luck, we will miss you!" You are confused. You feel like the carpet has just been pulled from under your feet. But hey, you’re not the first one, are you now? Just pick yourself up and keep on going. The question is, of course, where?

Imagine you’re a Catholic priest who’s led an exemplary life, shepherded his flock through life's trials and tribulations, always telling them to trust in the mysterious ways that God works to test his children and promising heaven and salvation in the end. You’ve stayed away from all excesses, wedding tips and young choir boys. And then you die. Your last shred of a memory as your brain shuts down is of a pitch black shroud falling on you. No beam of light coming from the heavens to guide you up the steps. No nothing. And in that last split second of your consciousness you realize that, well, to put it mildly, you’ve been had.

And that’s exactly how I feel now. Had.

But let me explain how I got here. And then maybe you will agree how I totally not deserve to be here. Yes, I seek your sympathy, and why not? It’s the least I can hope for. For I have fallen and I have no idea about what to do next.

There is a certain phenomenon in the world: Some call it coincidence, some call it Jungian synchronicity, and some call it selective perception, while others may simply refer to it as "fate". Whatever it is, that’s what it was when …

Assorted deep thoughts on the meaning of life and other trivialities of existence

In the last chapter of his scandalous but chivalric book titled "Where is God?”, the world-renowned philosopher Virzan Alim meets God and they have supper together, talking about wine, women and divine conception. Overjoyed by the occasion, Alim asks the deity, "Are you really God?" God smiles back and replies, "Are you really Alim?" Astounded, Alim thanks God, becomes a skeptic and starts looking for God all over again. The story is a beautiful allegory of Man's endless search for truth and identity. Some claim that the meeting did actually take place, either during Alim's heroic solitary camel ride across the Kyzylkum Desert or the night that he got locked in after a visit at Madam Toussaut's Museum in London.