And when a certain person says a certain word about my ink-slashed cotton colors I give pause.
I chat. I walk with them awhile. We peer into the great glass of the sea. I sidewise peer into their soul. Sometimes we stroll for hours, a longish session with the weather. Usually it takes but that one day and, not knowing with whom they walked, scot-free, they are discharged all unwitting patients.
They walk on down the dusky shore toward a fairer brighter eve. Behind their backs, the deaf-blind man waves them bon voyage and trots home there to devour happy suppers, brisk with fine work done.
“Or sometimes I meet some half-slumberer on the sand whose troubles cannot all be fetched out to die in the raw light of one day. Then, as by accident, we collide a week later and walk by the tidal churn doing what has always been done; we have our traveling confessional. For long before pent-up priests and whispers and repentances, friends walked, talked, listened, and in the listening-talk cured each other’s sour despairs. Good friends trade hairballs all the time, give gifts of mutual dismays and so are rid of them.
“Trash collects on lawns and in minds. With bright shirt and nail-tipped trash stick I set out each dawn to . . . clean up the beaches. So many, oh, so many bodies lying out there in the light. So many minds lost in the dark. I try to walk among them all, without . . . stumbling . . .”
The wind blew in the bus window cool and fresh, making a sea of ripples through the thoughtful old man’s patterned shirt.
The bus stopped.
Dr. Brokaw suddenly saw where he was and leaped up. “Wait!”
Everyone on the bus turned as if to watch the exit of a star performer. Everyone smiled.
Dr. Brokaw pumped my hand and ran. At the far front end of the bus he turned, amazed at his own forgetfulness, lifted his dark glasses and squinted at me with his weak baby-blue eyes.
“You—” he said.
Already, to him, I was a mist, a pointillist dream somewhere out beyond the rim of vision.
“You . . .” he called into that fabulous cloud of existence which surrounded and pressed him warm and close, “you never told me. What? What?!”
He stood tall to display that incredible Rorschach shirt which fluttered and swarmed with everchanging line and color.
I looked. I blinked. I answered.
“A sunrise!” I cried.
The doctor reeled with this gentle friendly blow.
“Are you sure it isn’t a sunset?” he called, cupping one hand to his ear.
I looked again and smiled. I hoped he saw my smile a thousand miles away within the bus.
“No,” I said. “A sunrise. A beautiful sunrise.”
He shut his eyes to digest the words. His great hands wandered along the shore of his wind-gentled shirt. He nodded. Then he opened his pale eyes, waved once, and stepped out into the world.
The bus drove on. I looked back once.
And there went Dr. Brokaw advancing straight out and across a beach where lay a random sampling of the world, a thousand bathers in the warm light.
He seemed to tread lightly upon a water of people.
The last I saw of him, he was still gloriously afloat.
The End
