THE SLEEPER

THE SLEEPER

The man was quite elderly.  He sat on the concrete sidewalk, leaning against the building, one leg curled up under him and the other stretched out in front.  His trousers were frayed and faded and torn and were far too short for his long legs.  He wore no shoes or socks, and one could see ulcerous sores on the top of his stretched out foot and along the shin and behind, on the calf.  He was, as the homeless are, unshaven and unshorn, wrapped above in rags, and filthy.  Beside him was a one pound tin coffee can in which were a few coins.  The man sat and leaned with his eyes closed, and sometimes another homeless would warily approach and look into the can and if there were any bills, he would quickly reach into it and lift them out, then back away silently as he came, and, pocketing the greens, would continue with no guilt or bad conscience, but with a strong sense of covetousness regarding what he had lifted from the sleeper.

     The sleeper was old, as I have just mentioned, but he had not yet reached his three-score and ten, being shy one year.  He had not been on this block very long.  When a policeman came and told him he couldn’t beg, he would wearily rise, lift his can, and walk uptown one block or down one block until he found a likely spot, and he would rest again.  He had been resting now for not more than half an hour.  It was mid-morning, and from the early rush to work he had collected some coins in an amount he never took the trouble to ascertain, and these he emptied into his hand and put into his trousers pocket. 

     Then, instead of rising, as he had planned, his effort left him lying on his back against the building and the sidewalk, and he found himself staring up at the tops of the tall buildings and at the slender strip of blue sky that showed over the street.  He felt no pain.  His body had become wafer thin and he seemed to himself to lie almost like a leaf.  He knew he was dying, and he had no regrets, of course.  He wanted only to look at the strip of blue sky and to see it for as long as he could keep his eyes open and focused.  He resolved to do this. 

     As he looked at the sky, he felt what little energy he had, the very energy he spent to keep his eyes open, sapping away, so that he let his lids close for a moment.  But he concentrated all his will on his lids, there, one workday morning of mid-summer, as he lay on his back, people walking by, cars and buses and trucks rumbling only a few paces away, and in as true a victory of life over death as any won by mankind, he raised them up and once again saw the sky; and heaven, in its eternal benevolence, had given him at that moment two wonderful things to see--a sun-struck jetliner climbing to cruising altitude, and, a great bit closer, just above the pole tops and electric cabling, three pigeons sailing up the street and just above him flapping to roost on the building ledge.  He saw these two things with great clarity and a powerful feeling of gratitude, then closed his eyes again and died.  But death was not the end for the sleeper, for in the few moments immediately following his expiration, he had another vision, one that did not come to him through his open eyes.  This vision is what this story is about.

     Once, the sleeper had been a vigorous youth, and he had a varied life, one that was often troubled by the events that shook mankind in his early days.  He was eleven years old when Hitler invaded Poland.  And when the war spread eastward, he and his whole family were engulfed by it, and his village in the Ukraine was not only destroyed but obliterated so that it was as though it had never been.  He became familiar with death and dying long before he knew what it meant to live. 

     Having lost his family and become a refugee in his own country, and living, like a domestic animal gone feral by abandonment, in the woods and on the outskirts of military camps and the towns and villages in their advance, he found himself eventually making his way south, across the great inland seas, to Palestine, and, after the war, from there even further south, to the very end of the continent, where he lived for a while in relative contentment, and found work enough to support himself.  But being young and wanderlusty he traveled north again, by himself, often on foot, living as he liked best to live, alone, passing through the Transvaal, a place where he could disappear and not see humans for months and months on end, unless he wanted to be seen.

     It was here that he had experienced an event that made possible his vision on the streets of New York, in an unforeseable future, unclean and still alone, with a few dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes in his pocket.  He was sitting out the heat of the day in the shade of an outcropping of great rocks, completely hidden by the tall grass that grew there, when he saw a pack of wild dogs, those with the big oval-shaped stand-up ears and long thin legs, chase down a gazelle.  They had run the animal to near exhaustion when one, passing under its belly, lifted up its snout and grabbed at the skin of its abdomen and tore it away.  The gazelle, ripped open, but seized by its adrenalized flight instinct, again streaked off, paying out from its belly all its intestines, so that it looked like a long rope had been attached to it.  The dogs didn’t chase, but stood together in a pack and watched it and waited.  Then the gazelle stopped, turned back to look at them, and slowly and deliberately walked back to them, and when it got near, it lay itself down and stretched out its neck, whereupon one of the dogs came and grabbed it by the throat and shook it vigorously, while the others had already begun devouring the intestines stretched out behind the scene for a good long way.

     He watched the dogs feed and knew that he had seen something that was terribly meaningful, something that had a lesson in it he should not forget, but he wasn’t sure he understood all the finer points of this lesson.  He had seen Germans kill Ukrainians and Ukrainians kill Germans; he had seen other villages than his own laid waste, and the bodies of children his own age swollen in death so that they no longer looked human, he had seen Arabs kill Jews and Jews kill Arabs; he had seen whites kill blacks in South Africa, with impunity, like they were gazelles in the grassy plains to be killed for convenience or for sport.  But none of this killing was like what he had seen.  It was hateful and ugly.  Here, he witnessed something so strange that it haunted him for the rest of his life.  Yes, the dogs killed the gazelle, as predators do for their own survival.  But it was the gazelle’s return to the dogs that so moved him and seemed so wonderful.  It walked calmly back and laid itself out as though to say, here is the banquet, come and feast.  It offered its throat.  And the ungentle dog took it and did with it what it had to do, even as its pack mates began to feast on the long rope of intestines trailed out behind it.

     He made his way back to what had now become Israel but chose instead to live on the West Bank in the ancient city of Jerusalem.  There, in the desert heat, he lived in a room on the roof of an old mud brick building and came to know and love the Palestinian family that lived below.  But there was much agitation and discontent among the people, and one day the family left, so he packed his few belongings in a leather bag and went to live for a time in a camp across the river in Jordan.  The old mud brick building was demolished, together with its neighbors all round, and new homes were built.  And in just such a manner, the world had changed. 

     Eventually, he made his way to England, and after some years, he emmigrated to the United States.  He lived in Brooklyn in the basement of a row home that had been fixed up for rent and which contained a kitchen, a bathroom, and a livingroom-bedroom combination made possible by a convertible couch.  He worked at many jobs to afford his rent, which was very high, and came at last to American Airlines, where he earned his livelihood polishing the exterior aluminum skins of aircraft in one of the great hangers at Idlewild Airport.  He worked there for many years, dreaming of the great wings sailing over the world, remembering his home in the Ukraine and his travels in Africa and the Middle East, until he was sixty-two, and had one year to go to retirement. 

     But the shop foremen who were in charge of his crew were instructed to find ways to fire men who were near retirement, so that the company would not have to pay them their pensions.  Having contracted malaria in his youth in Africa, he was on occasion feverish and unsteady.  One day, his foreman, seeing him in this condition, assigned him to work the wing tops.  When he had nearly fallen and made a great deal of trouble for the crew, his foreman fired him, living up to his own contract in the ruthless world of power and privilege, of getting and spending, of which our sixty-two year old man knew nothing and which caused him to enter the hapless company of those who dwelled in the streets.

     He felt no anger or resentment at his firing, nor did he detect the fraudulence in the concern of the foreman over the safety of the men and his own best interests.  He left, as he left so many other places in his youth, with his face pointed in a direction that his body followed.  He had no friends, and since he never married, he had no family, no one, for sure, among his true family in the Ukraine, for they were all killed long, long ago.  He lived silently, speaking only when he had to.  

     But he loved many things.  He loved the faces of children.  He loved animals, especially the small ones, like squirrels and rabbits, and finches, especially finches.  The sight of a monarch or swallow-tail butterfly was a day’s reward for him, for he got a pleasure from it as great as any he knew.  But one pleasure was greater than all, and it shaped his life and gave it what meaning it had while it lasted. 

     On the block where he rented his little basement apartment, there lived a girl who went to the local parochial school, and who used to walk past his house in her uniform.  He would stand with his arms hanging loosely at his sides looking up through the window, which, at sidewalk level, passersby never noticed.  And so this girl never knew she had been the object of his veneration.  She had sandy brown hair and a dark complexion, much like he remembered his sister.  She reminded him, in fact, of his sister, which is one reason why he began to wait for her to pass, early in the morning on her way to school and later in the afternoon on her way home.  These were the only two times he saw her.  But for him she had a face of such purity of expression and saintliness of character that he soon began to pray to her.  Over the years, as she grew and changed, this appearance which the sleeper attributed to her--purity and saintliness--always remained for him a constant, a part of her nature which growth and change could not alter, because in growing and changing they only became more themselves.  At night he would pray to her image, which he held in his mind and examined with utmost attention to every detail, and when she ended her schooling at that stage of her life and moved on to another school which called for her to take a city bus and thus leave her home in a different direction, he saw her no more.  No more, in spite of the fact that she lived only half-a-block away.  But he felt privileged to have had her image in the living flesh to gaze upon and ponder.  And that, for him, was enough.

     But all this was long ago, when he was still working and still young enough to think about a future.  At the age of sixty-nine he died on thirty-fourth street in Manhattan, and lay unnoticed at the feet of passersby for many minutes before someone had stumbled over him and saw that he was dead.  The police were informed and his body was removed and cremated and the ashes gathered and stored and, eventually, after some years, no one coming to claim them, they were disposed of. 

     In those moments after he closed his eyes for the last time, when his heart stopped beating and he felt fully consumed by his experience of life, he found himself a young man again standing in a clearing in a wood into which the sun radiated with exceptional intensity, but not with a noticeable warmth.  In the center of the clearing sat a silvery sphere, and on this sphere a man was standing, barefoot and wearing clothes that had once been new and clean but which now were stained and browned by age and long use.  This man was clean shaven and had long soft hair that draped over his shoulders and was standing erect with his arms raised out from his sides.  The sleeper recognized himself in the man’s face and was filled with wonder, for the man’s eyes were alight with the reflected sun.  He felt the ground under his feet as he looked at the man standing such, with his arms upraised.  He could smell the air.  His senses were alive and stimulated by the things around.  He didn’t want to take his eyes off the man, but his curiosity compelled him, and, looking around the glade, he saw many familiar things and knew he was in the Ukraine, for he recognized the clearing as one in the forest near the village where he was born. 

     He returned his eyes to the man on the globe, and he felt himself becoming more and more youthful, until he was a boy.  He went then to the globe and found that though he was standing on the earth, he was at the side of the man, and here he sat, looking up, recognizing himself but not understanding.  And then he was fulfilled, and he understood many things else he pondered during his life--he understood the Germans and their marauding and killing, he understood the deaths of his family, for he saw his mother die, he understood the hatreds of men for one another, he understood the meaning of the gazelle, and he understood the replication of this meaning in his veneration of the little girl, and he saw, as in a moment of eternity, the whole life of the girl, from the time he last saw her to her death, which will not happen yet for many years.  He saw that her life was, like his own, filled with chance experiences and that everything in it might have been otherwise than it was, but that unlike him, she did not ponder these chances but plodded on and on through one mystery after another. And strangely this discovery did not sadden him.

     It did not sadden him, but it saddens us, for this story cannot go any further, and we, as readers, cannot find this girl to tell her of the mysteries she will never know.  This story does not tell about what happens next, for it is not a story about the afterlife, about which all speculation is futile; it is rather a story about a few moments in the life of this old man which expire after there is no longer a pulse upon which the words can beat.  This is a story that is as much a mystery as those moments are, for it should be apparent to anyone who reads it that it essentially cannot be told. But some things which are perfectly plain are utterly mysterious once we think about them.