Kuunari

Arthur Mearls slowly cut the thick, green pepper, while the soup simmered on the kitchen stove.  The faded, yellowing wall paper was thick with grease from countless meals. He paused after every couple of slices, counting the pieces of pepper on the cutting board before dropping them into the soup.  A thick smell of stew filled the kitchen, a vegetable stock tinged by salt.  He no longer forgot that Theresa didn’t eat meat.  Finally, when the pepper had disappeared into the soup, he uncurled his back,  filling his 6 foot 3 frame, and breathed deeply, enjoying the wift of soup mingling with radiator heat.

Fall had finally come, the days were shorter, and colder.  He moved delibrately around his small apartment, with an awkwardness his friends associated with absentmindedness.  He opened and closed cabinets and drawers until he had assembled a suitable array of dinnerware, and placed them carefully on the table in his living room.  He had spent 2 hours cleaning, and the place had that appearance of recently cleaned.  His bedspread carefully straightened, the table cleared of papers, the kitchen sink empty, he loved the feeling of how everything that falls apart comes back together again.  And he waited for the beginning of something that he already knew would end.

During his life, Arthur told very few his secret.  Maybe no more than 10.  While most of us view time as a linear progression, a set of causal relationships spiraling towards our death, to Arthur, time was a book that could be opened to any page, to be read in any order.  The last page of that book was in fact the first, and on page one Arthur finally succumbed to old age.  He lived life in reverse, being unglued from time.  Everything that had happened and would happen, he remembered, although he got confused on some of the particulars.  He had spent some of his time attempting to determine why his life was so different from all those around him, and had come up with little.  And so he lived.  His odd way of doing things merely a byproduct of a human attempting to live backwards in time, his human brain always trying to place time in it’s correct order, unable to process cups repairing themselves and falling up onto the table, or food that slowly fell out of his mouth.  And instead, his life was disjointed, time skipping around, sometimes moving backwards, but mostly moving forward, at least forward to us, to varying degrees.

I had met him and had struck up a friendship of sorts with him.  By this time in his life, he had been alive for about 800 years, and had the appearance of a slightly aging young man.  A friendship with Arthur is not a normal friendship. He struggles to remember you, as the years and the people he meets gradually blur together.  Sometimes he is caught in past or future memories, and confuses you with someone else.  Or else he is blindingly depressed, wrapped up in his thoughts, unable to communicate with the rest of the world.  I suspect that he told me about his odd temporal state out of the loneliness it caused.  I would like to believe that it was because I was someone he could relate to.

I was immediately struck with wonder about two thoughts he must have, how he loves and how he views death.  He refused to answer questions about death, saying even he doesn’t know, but when I asked him about love he told me this story.   He claimed he had taken the name Arthur at that time in honor of an old friend of his.  I knew him by a different name, but for simplicities sake, have chosen to stick with Arthur throughout.

And so he waited, or had waited, tenses are often confusing when talking about Arthur, for Theresa to arrive.  Each moment was excruciating, made worse because Arthur knew how it would be and how it would end in the future (or Arthur’s past).  But he told me that this was also the most amazing moment.  While, for the rest of us our last memory of a love is saying goodbye, for him it was saying hello.

The doorbell rang, and Arthur sprang up from the chair, and then slowed himself down and walked to the door.  He knew that she would eventually grow weary of his ecentric ways and take a job in another city where she would try to let him off easy after trying the long distance relationship. It was hard for him to focus on the present, but he forced himself to.   As he opened the door on this first night the last rays of the sun disappeared behind the house accross the street and he fell in love again with her, for the first time.  And in her eyes, the look that had gradually been growing the past (for Arthur) few months as she fell back in love with him.  Her hand, forgetting it’s role, let the cheap bottle of wine fall, still in it’s paper bag.  Arthur, anticipating this, dropped to a knee, and caught the bottle, cradling it to his chest.  “Hello”, he said.

“Hello,” she replied, gazing down in wonder at this man.