He sat on the rock and wondered at his place in time. Flashes passed by his mind’s eye, dim figures in the night, some laughing, some howling. Bare feet padding the wet grass. Sometimes alone, sometimes in herd. He recalled the pang of tin and the blood rush of fear. Recalled afterward the relief of the sun over grass and a wide open sky. There he could run and they might never catch him. He remembered his feet up on the wooden rail and the purples and pinks of the sky painters playing off their conversations. He remembered her tears and wanting to understand but he was as dumb as an animal and no better with his urges. He remembered laying his head back in the waters until his ears lost sight of the world and the way they laughed out into the world as though the rest of civilization and all its weight had shot off to Mars and left them with this big world and these green muddy waters for them to play in until the end of time. He sat on the rock and saw himself grow old and young. His heart hid away from the times and curled up on the rock as they flowed by like some slow-moving lava flow that would burn him if he stepped off. And it tickled him to think of the times he’d gotten in trouble and he smiled at the times he was in love and he tried to remind his feet the way the many places had felt when he had stood there. And he stopped his reading for a moment and looked out over the waters. They were clear and blue. They were one and many. He wondered how to define a lake or a river and shrugged it off. He knew only he wanted to feel them kiss his shoulders in the light. He stood and pulled his shirt over his head. Before he jumped, he halted—and wondered at leaving his spot in time. He hung there over the water, some place before the future. He grew afraid. But the flashes pooled and welled. They swirled beneath him and he smiled that they had ever been at all. In his heart he called out across the mountains, he flexed his toes and flew. There were rocks below and dark water and ancient things to be found. He was already gone when he found the present.
The crown prince had never wanted to be a crown prince, but he had to admit the cars were nice. The night he left he took one and pushed it down the dark roads winding down the coast. He knew what was coming. Anyone with half an emotional brain would, so why—at the thought, the crown prince let off the gas and looked in the rearview. Maybe he could go back. But his father would never listen. The prince wore the scars to prove it. He pressed the pedal down to the floor and took comfort in the pull of the engine near his feet. He pulled off to a dirt track and drove into the hills. Hidden there an airfield was kept by the last loyal men in the country.
A few lights blinked in the dawn. At the sight of the car, the propellers began to turn. The prince’s personal art collection had been loaded into the plane a few weeks before. The prince had smiled to himself as he heard them whispering. The men believed they were handling a fortune. A treasure trove of stolen art and culture. Things precious to men who valued money above all else. The prince had said nothing.
Now, the men blinked at him when he told them to go.
“But sire,” one said.
“No sire anymore,” the prince smiled, “enjoy my collection.”
The crown prince drove his car back up the coast road. At a wide bend, light screamed over the crest of the next hill, an hour too soon for the sun, and the prince realized that the palace was alight. He parked some ways away and walked into the fray. Bullets raced towards the stars and hoarse voices screamed manifestos as he stepped through the crowd to see him: his father was still alive. He was crumpled and small. Two men held him at their feet by a strap looped around his throat. The prince watched his father’s eyes dart around. He was an animal locked in fear.
The prince stepped forward and the voices fell away. The gunfire too, halted. The prince kept his eyes on his father as he stepped over debris. His light shoes padded up the steps to where the old man sat. The prince nodded at the two men who held his father. He sat at their feet, looking out to the crowd. The two men knew who the prince was. Everyone did. The prince had spoken out against his father publicly. The prince had spoken for them for years. He had even accepted the punishment in place of a man whose only crime was hunger. The crowd hushed and the prince looked out on the same square he had seen most every day of his life. It was normally empty, populated only by a few guards and he saw the folly in that now. The prince looked out at the many faces of the crowd and he cried and smiled. For a moment, the grace between them nearly stayed the mob, but then a man cried out and another fired his rifle and the prince let them place the noose on his neck. He looked at his father who sat with his eyes downward. He saw a man who valued power above all else in life reduced to this. The prince placed his hand over his father’s, and his father’s fingers squeezed back. The mob killed them at sunrise.
The men who unloaded the plane spat on the ground. There wasn’t a single piece of treasure from the palace. Instead, they found a host of old candlesticks and the entire collection of some amateur painter who scrawled a lazy ’P’ at the bottom of each painting.
Only one of the men, the one who happened to be there and speak to the prince on the runway that night—the one who had witnessed his easy smile and the last words he ever spoke—offered to take them. He took every painting and every candlestick and kept them in a room in his apartment. He hung some on the walls in his house. And he studied the others in the long light of afternoons filtering in through his blinds.
He began to sell them at the market, and to each person who bought one of the paintings he would lean in and whisper to them the identity of the painter, and each person’s eyes went wide and they hugged the painting close and cherished it.
Bart Fellini fed hungry dogs from his spoon. They told him he always had. And even as the house divided, he sat in his own quiet and chewed slowly, patting the dogs on the head. It was all he could do not to get up and scream. They cut at each other with their words, fighting to win, and Bart Fellini sat at the table and swore to himself that he’d have a different destiny to deal with. When the last old dog died, Bart rose from his table. He left young.
How many eyes must’ve gaped at him from their car windows? The lanky kid on the side of the road, wearing a worn hat he must’ve dug out from some mildewy closet. He had.
Doing everything and shrugging when people asked him what he did.
He became a cook, a carpenter, a trapper, a servant—all while he worked his way north—learning the flicks of the wrist, the laws of physics, and the eyes of people when they were honest, when it was not yet closing time but they were far past their limit. He smoked cigarettes so they wouldn’t have to be alone. He saw the world from under the brim of his cap.
He kept a castle on some cold isle and fell in love with a girl named Nat from the village. His mornings became the brush of her skin and the cold mountain views of the lochs. His nights were filled with her laughing smile in the lantern light. Bart was happy. But then came the day that Nat got her letter.
“Come with me,” she said.
And Bart felt only his stomach as he said goodbye to the old stone walls and their little kitchen. He mopped the hallways while she attended classes. He stood awkwardly in the corner while she laughed at parties. They waved him over but he took to the rooftops. He couldn’t explain why he couldn’t offer them what he’d offered every line cook on the other side of the river. Nat shrugged him off. He began to sing alone to the many antennae of the old district. Dogs howled to join him.
And the couple began to fight. And Bart remembered the promise to himself. The morning he left, he made breakfast and left a letter by the plate. He shouldered his bag and pulled his worn hat down to his brow. He looked once more at the room, at her bedroom door, and he turned to go.
For years, he traveled. He wrenched on a cruise ship. He served drinks on an airliner. The world wasn’t big enough and he knew all the songs too well, and the dogs howling only reminded him of his childhood friends.
He shot off. Left the world.
He was a pool boy on Mars, his skin prickling in the warm red domes. His boss was a rich woman that made him look downward, but he never blushed. He drove a lunar tractor and kept the guys laughing when break times grew cold. They swore he made the best coffee and wondered amongst themselves where he came from. He landed a gig as a maintenance engineer on a distant space station and was one of five people to ever fly that far. The others onboard were scientists of the highest caliber. He kept them laughing in the lonely nights as they doled out the ship’s stash of whiskey, imported farther than any other barrel in human history. One night they asked him, “Bart, what do you miss most about the world?”
“Earth?” he asked them.
They nodded, smiling, coffee cups of brown liquor in their hands.
Bart thought a moment.
“Dogs,” he said.
And they wondered after him as Bart turned in for the night.
Some time after six months, news came of another ship on its way. A new station would adjoin and the crew rejoiced. Their numbers would double. A list of scientists and one pilot appeared on the screen. Bart froze.
Dr. Ainsley.
Nat.
She was on her way.
For the first time on the station, Bart elected to send a personal message. He typed carefully as the crew whispered behind him and sent it to the oncoming craft. Within an hour, a message appeared.
Bart lost his breath. It was Nat. And she was still Nat. He could see it in her words, in a cold, electric medium her warmth floated from the screen and Bart’s heart fluttered. That night, Bart began to sing from his bunk. At first the other crew members began laughing, but they quickly fell silent when they realized it wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t entertainment. Bart sang song after song. He skipped the laments and remembered the old love songs he had sung on the castle grounds, on the road, in the alleyways behind steaming kitchens. Bart reveled in the feel of his voice. The vibrations went along with his dreams of Nat, and he wondered what it would be to see her again.
So it went for three months or so, Bart and Nat exchanging messages, Bart singing at night, leading the crew in drink after drink. Bart worked with a renewed vigor. He polished the bolts and wiped the screens. He made jokes over the intercom as he floated from one junction to the other, repairing the bits and bashes of space. He smiled to himself often. He slept well.
“Hey Bart, we have a breach.”
Bart nodded from his bunk. He put his book down and slipped into his suit and went through the airlock. His tools were looped to his belt. Bart swung around the outside of the station.
“You see it?”
“Got it,” Bart said. He began to work—patching the hole made by some passing debris, when the alarms sounded at the controls.
“Bart, we’re getting a reading. You should wrap it up and get inside.”
“Almost done.”
“Bart, they’re coming on fast.”
But they were already there. Stones the size of Bart’s fist flew by. They didn’t make a noise, there was no place for noise to go. They simply hit and tore and in a matter of seconds Bartholomew Fellini was no more.
His body drifted off. The crew cried.
For days, the crew looked at one another and then at the flashing on the screen. Six messages for Bart. Ten. Fourteen. Another. And Another. Finally, the captain replied.
Immediately, they got a reply. One of disbelief.
The captain confirmed.
“He’s gone.”
The messages stopped.
Nat was the last one to board when they arrived. The captain let her go through his belongings. She took the book that rested on his bunk, and she took the old worn hat and put it on her pillow.
They yelled at him again. It seemed the whole crowd had joined in:
Get the ball, get up, come on, let’s go—
He crossed his leg, resting it on his knee. He’d heard it before, and he’d heard the ball plop down somewhere above his head. He wondered if the clouds meant a storm coming. He hoped so. Then maybe tomorrow’s game would be canceled. He’d go out into the fields and watch the rain run straight for his face and he’d follow the clouds across the sky. He might come home dripping wet. Maybe he’d see lightning. Watch the little flowers shake from the thunder. If it was anything like today, then he’d be set. The warm rush of air and the smell of grass. He missed the walks in Fall but knew they were coming and did not wish to rush a single day. So he wouldn’t rush this inning. The center fielder had arrived now.
“What are you doing?” the center said, “you just gave them a run.”
“One run, two, what’s the difference,” he said.
“What are you doing out here?”
“A question we must all ask ourselves,” he said and he crossed his other leg and folded his arms under his head, resting his long hair on the worn leather of his father’s glove. The other players thought him daft. His own father, the coach, was disappointed most of the time, but very now and again, the boy felt like playing and he played the way a dolphin played in its waves. He ran the bases laughing, faster than anyone in the state. He winked at the pitchers and swung as though his joints were parts of a single, well-oiled machine made to grasp a bat, and he covered the outfield at a jog, catching the high-arcing shots with a confidence that made everyone think he had five minutes rather than five seconds to act. They loved him then so much that they suffered him at these other times, when the movement of celestial bodies concerned him more than that big kid from the next county. Why should he care anyways?
Years passed and things grew worse between he and his father. His father explained everything through parables and convenient little sayings, all having to do with the game. He didn’t doubt that there was some zen center to the game that described life, he just knew it couldn’t be formulated in a cute, two-piece saying that also found a way to rhyme (which agitated him all the more). It wasn’t long until he never showed up, never played, never came home. Instead he walked the river bends, grassy hills, and even the desert to the south. He never went out looking for something and never looked forward to anything more. With adulthood came freedom, and he bought a bus ticket and few heard anything more than whispers of his whereabouts.
His father grew sick some years after. It was a hot summer and he lay in the dark in their living room when there was a rap on the door.
His mother answered and cried when she saw his face. His face was thinner, his eyes sharp. He hugged his mother and came in and saw his father and the two said nothing for a time before his father offered him a drink even though he couldn’t rise anymore.
“What are you doing home?” he asked.
“I’ve signed on to a club. Gonna play.”
His father scoffed and the room grew quiet. They didn’t speak again for a day but the father felt better so they set him up on the porch and the three of them: he, his mother, and his father sipped lemonade as the cicadas rang.
“I’m glad you’re home,” his father said.
He nodded.
The team gathered for the summer to train and stay sharp and each afternoon he came home and shared the goings on of the practices and how his arm was feeling. The three of them sat on the porch each night and it seemed as though time had paused its stream and the sickness might never take dad.
But he died that Fall and his son never got to tell him of the truths he found out there on the road or how all the sayings had something to them and that profound truths found alone are worth little if they are spent on more isolation. And he rose in the ranks through the leagues because he’d discovered the present and played as though he were a boy again. When the reporters asked him for his thoughts, he only ever offered a parable or some clever little saying before he stepped off the podium to go walk in the night air.