=The Glyph=

"…..the story is very well-written, the premise more than interesting, but the main character somewhat hard, finally, to relate to……"  —rejection letter from some journal or other

1.

By the time Jodi reached the place on the path where the man had fallen—it couldn’t have taken her more than ten seconds—he was already dead. “Are you a doctor, Ms. Westerly?” she could imagine the police officer asking her later. No, but you didn’t need to be a doctor to see that the man was dead. He’d fallen flat on his face, his arms folded like empty sleeves beneath him. Even instinct had abandoned him, including the most basic: throwing out one’s hands to break a fall. 

The funny thing was that only moments before he collapsed she thought that if she were a doctor she’d feel professionally obligated to tell the man that maybe running wasn’t the best thing for him. She wondered, if not professionally, than certainly ethically speaking, how any doctor wouldn’t have done the same thing. The man must have run passed a doctor or two at some time or other. Why hadn’t anyone thought to warn him?

He was an older man, in his sixties, at least, and not in the best of shape, thin-shouldered, thin-chested,  pushing a lax paunch, as if all the extra fat had settled into a life-preserver around his midsection. His spindly legs were pale and knobby, like the branch of a tree with some kind of unpronounceable botanical disease. He was barely lifting his feet off the ground as he ran, sort of shuffling himself forward. His face was a mask of exhaustion and displaced agony. Whatever the health risks of a sedentary life might be, surely this kind of exercise couldn’t be good for him.

It wasn’t the first time either that Jodi had seen that expression on older, middle-aged runners in the park. She came and ate her lunch at more or less the same bench every afternoon when the weather was halfway decent, spreading the paper from the sandwich she’d made and brought with her that day on her lap.  She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen this exact man before; it was possible, however.  The expression they wore was so similar they might have been wearing identical masks of agony. What would you call such a mask, anyway? “Man  Ascending a Voluntary Golgotha of Transcendence,” perhaps.

She crouched beside him to get a closer look. Looking…for what? A dark inlet of blood was seeping out from underneath his head where it struck the pavement, the blood flooding a delta of pollen and crushed leaf dust. She shuffled her feet back to protect her shoes. He’d already taken on that flattened look that all dead things have, that she remembered her guinea pig having in the cedar shavings at the bottom of its tank when she was a little girl. It was as if the core of the earth were pulling him inwards. It was if the strings that had held him aloft against gravity, against nature, against all odds had been abruptly cut.  His part in the play was over and there was no more to be done about it.

If the police asked her how she knew he was already dead, that is what she would say and probably they would look at her like she was crazy and maybe she was.

2.

She wouldn’t have been able to say how long she crouched there staring down at the man. She didn’t think it could have been too long, maybe only seconds, though, honestly, it seemed much longer.  At one point, she had to consciously hold herself back from the spontaneous gesture to pat down the flap of wispy white hair she could tell he normally combed over to cover his soft pink scalp. The hair fluttered in the slight breeze that Jodi hadn’t noticed until that moment. That trembling flag of dry hair was the most alive thing about the man—and the saddest.

She hadn’t been praying at the man’s side, but it was something like that, the same timeless state of transport. She didn’t, however, see such states as religious in the ordinary sense of the term. She didn’t, for instance, believe in God. When she came back to herself, she was gripped with a feeling of urgency. She had to leave the scene as quickly as possible. She was gripped with the fear that by witnessing the man’s collapse she’d done something wrong, or, at least, terribly inappropriate.

Of course, she knew this fear was irrational, but when ever in her life did knowing that something was irrational make it feel any less real? Not once, for instance, had she ever been able to talk herself out of a panic attack, despite all the techniques offered by those self-help guides and CD lectures on overcoming anxiety that she’d read and listened to over the years.

She glanced nervously up and down the path and saw no one. She stood up slowly, brushed the leaf-crumb off the knees of her tweed skirt. She’d been careful to keep her shoes out of the spreading seepage of blood, but she checked them again all the same. She had her cell phone in her hand. She was surprised to find it there; she didn’t remember taking it out of her bag; it must have been instinctual. She presumed she was about to call…who? Terry, most likely, who would no doubt instruct her to dial 911, which was the only sensible thing to do.

She imagined the commotion then, the questions, the paperwork, the follow-up interviews, all to no real purpose; there was nothing more to be done. It was too late.

So she put the cell phone back in her bag and walked briskly up the path and out of the park and back to work. She encountered no one until she reached the main street, which, in itself seemed something of a minor miracle, as if she’d been under some charm of invisibility.

3.

She spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for the inevitable sound of the siren—police car or ambulance or fire department—the jagged music of emergency. She set to work undressing and re-dressing the mannequins at the front of the store where she could command a view of the street all the way to the park entrance. 

She worked at a small, up-scale boutique that sold exclusive designer clothing to the type of woman who could afford to pay five-hundred dollars for a pair of blue jeans made in Vietnam just for the exclusivity of the label. She found the clientele generally insufferable, flip-flopping in after their forty-dollar pedicures with their mocha lattes, complaining about their Lexus leases and making extensive arrangements for charity foundation dinners on their Iphones, all the while pointing impatiently at what they wanted her to fetch from the racks. 

But for all it’s shortcomings, it was an undemanding job and close to home, exactly the tentative first steps back to normality after the whirlwind of panic attacks that had come sweeping into her life from out of nowhere, lifting her out of a high-profile publicity job in the city and dumping her in the middle of a nightmarish terror-stricken funk, virtually housebound, for nearly three years.

Jodi watched the entrance to the park but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No crowd of people. No emergency vehicles with lights flashing. She saw some mothers pushing strollers into and out of the park, even some more joggers; but nothing seemed to be amiss. It would have been impossible to overlook the man lying facedown in the center of the path. Could she have been mistaken? Could he have regained consciousness and staggered his way out of the park on the opposite end under his own power? She thought about placing an anonymous call to the police or even the hospital to check, but was there even such a thing as an anonymous phone call anymore?

She stayed a half-hour passed closing time, fussing about the mannequins, rearranging the sweaters, vacuuming what had already been vacuumed, promising Maggie, the owner, that she’d lock up when she finished. She had it in mind to walk through the park on her way home. If she came upon the body she might call the police then, she told herself, pretending it was the first time she’d come upon it. Life, she thought, and not for the first time, would be a lot easier to live if we were provided instant replay.

But daylight savings time had already ended—it was mid November—and the sun had gone down for nearly an hour by the time she left the boutique. It was dark and chilly and, upon second-thought, a walk through the park didn’t seem like a good idea. Besides, if she saw the body again there was a very good chance she still wouldn’t make the call a second time and that seemed only to complicate her dilemma, make her more complicit, but complicit in what, she still couldn’t say. So she turned off the lights, locked the front door, and hurried home instead. 

4.

That night, at dinner, Jodi knew was the last time she could bring up the incident in the park with Terry and still retain some semblance of normality. A semblance, because, really, she should have told him earlier, that afternoon, immediately after it happened. But with every mouthful of food, every word of small-talk, the chance to retain that semblance of normality was  swallowed-up, disappearing forever She should have called the police when she got back to the shop, and then called Terry. She should have told Maggie; she should have immediately made the incident—and herself—the focal point of everyone else’s attention. A man had died, after all, virtually at her feet. That was an event worth noting. Noting? It trumped everything else in the course of a normal day. Death stopped time itself, at least for a beat or two. 

Jodi herself was entitled to some support and sympathy. She was expected, in fact, to need it. Why didn’t she? That she didn’t need comforting, what did that say about her? That she didn’t say anything to anyone was instantly suspect. But suspect of what? What was she hiding? If she were the police encountering someone like her, she would be suspicious, too. If she were her co-worker, she would be justifiably creeped out. If she were Terry, she would feel not only creeped out, but betrayed.

Still, Jodi ate her red pesto fettucini that night and made small-talk with her husband just like she did on any other night. Afterwards, they stood side by side at the sink, he, washing, she drying, and discussed plans for the upcoming weekend. She didn’t say a word about what had happened that afternoon. She didn’t so much as accidentally drop a plate to subconsciously give herself away.

They watched television sitting side by side on the couch as they usually did. Terry running up and down the channels with the remote to avoid the advertisements while she glanced up from her book whenever he left a program on long enough to follow. They went to bed at the usual time and Terry turned over to her purposely after turning out the light.

He entered her after the usual preamble and she clung to him in the usual way, watching the images behind her closed eyelids appear and disappear without commentary. The old man collapsed on the path dominated the images tonight. That was to be expected. He was probably about as old as her father was, wherever he was now, probably still in Houston, which was the last she’d heard of his whereabouts, but that didn’t make Jodi want to call him or write him after all these years; she was just noting the fact that they were about the same age. She had noted it earlier, actually, wondering if the collapsed man was anyone’s husband, anyone’s father. Probably, he was, she concluded, but, in the end, that was neither here nor there. When Terry was finished he kissed her and held her and told her that he loved her and she said she loved him too, and she meant it.

She had swallowed an old Xanax before climbing into bed, horded from the prescriptions she filled back in her panic-attack days. She was beginning to feel it’s effects now, a dark blurriness working its way inward from the edges of her consciousness. Before she knew it, she was surrendering to the night. Her sleep was deep, dreamless, undisturbed. In the morning, she’d been awake for a good five minutes before she even remembered the man in the park and when she did it seemed like something that had already happened a long time ago.

 5.

The remainder of the week passed without incident. She checked the local papers, did Google searches, but there was no mention of a man found dead—or even injured—in the park.  It was a small enough town that such an item would make the local news, Jodi thought. She didn’t hear any mention made in the Starbucks where she bought her morning coffee or from any of the customers who drifted in and out of the shop.

While she was at it, she ran a few Google searches looking for mention of her father, thinking that maybe the man’s collapse might be a sign, but these searches also came up blank. Not that she believed in “signs” or omens. As far as she knew, her father was still alive. She would have to assume that she’d have heard from someone if her father had passed.  Although exactly who it would be to deliver the news Jodi couldn’t say. Her mother, probably, would hear. But, then again, how? No one her mother knew still had any contact with her father, as far as Jodi knew. Sometimes her mother would even ask her if she had any news.

Still, death has a way of making itself know, of spreading the news of its arrival. It has its own network; it’s a master publicist. So shouldn’t Jodi likewise presume that if the old man in the park had really died, she would have heard mention of it from someone? It was only logical. But death, like panic, was beyond logic, beyond reasoning, which is something people generally liked to forget. It made life too uncomfortable to think otherwise.

6.

It wasn’t until another week passed that Jodi returned to the park and then, highly self-conscious of the old maxim about the criminal always returning to the scene of the crime. But what was her crime?

She brought her lunch to her usual bench. She sat and unwrapped her sandwich and it sat there on her lap forgotten. She watched the bed on the path from where the man had come. She saw him in her mind’s eye, spindly legs in oversized shorts, staggering, gasping. She followed in her imagination his progress to the spot on the path where he collapsed, strings abruptly severed. She saw the ooze of dark blood, the flap of white hair trembling on the breeze.

There was nothing there now but a patch of orange and yellow leaves plastered to the asphalt by the previous night’s rain. It was another chilly afternoon. A cold stiff gust blew intermittently. The last leaves were shaking down from the nearly denuded trees, revealing a sullen. steely sky. Thanksgiving was two weeks away. The sandwich remained uneaten in her lap. The sandwich wasn’t the point.

Each bench in the park had been dedicated to the loving memory of someone or other. Everyone wanted to be remembered, or to remember, someone. The bench where she sat had been dedicated to the memory of George and Helena Stannapoli by their loving children Paul, Rebecca, Robert, and George Jr. Jodi had purposely brought along her cuticle scissors.  Now she took them from her bag, opened them carefully, and using them as a stylus, carved into one of the wood slats a symbol that would mean nothing to anyone who might happen to notice it. How could it since it meant nothing to her?

It was a purposely meaningless, unpremeditated glyph signifying that on this spot she’d seen a man fall and die, if she’d seen him fall and die, because that was still in question, after all, wasn’t it? But whether she’d seen a man die on this spot or he had crawled off or been discovered by another passerby and taken to the hospital where he recovered or died or was still recuperating, that wasn’t really the point either. It meant only that it marked the spot where she’d seen the man fall, and it meant that only to her, if you could say that a language that one invents for oneself to communicate only to oneself means anything at all, because what is a language, after all, if it doesn’t communicate something to someone else.  It wasn’t possible to say what the point was in so many words. That was the purpose of a glyph. That was also, it suddenly occurred to her, the purpose of prayer.

She looked at it carved into the wood of the bench, a message from herself to herself, hermetic, a tattoo by proxy. The only way it could be tied to her, to what she’d witnessed, to her guilt was in the freshness of the marking, the rawness of the exposed wood, but that would soon change. The wood, the wound, the memory would weather, as everything did, in time.