Peripheral Visions: Keepers of the Light

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Keepers of the Light

Sometimes I have a sensation of falling - reaching out for a handhold and finding nothing. A sense of things slipping away before I can grasp them. A sense that things can't be controlled.

Time. Time is like that. I can't stop it, roll it back, or slow it down.

Time. A reflex of the cosmos, an inscrutable god. So lovely when we're young; so cruel as we get older.

I wake up at night sometimes, gasping, feeling the touch of darkness that dawn will not dispel. It was hard when I was with Felix, because he didn't understand these things that I don't understand, and being with him was like being lost without a compass.

I need a compass. Even if I have no idea where I am going or what I'm going to find, I need a sense of direction. That's what I found in Sam.

When I wake up at night gripped by that wild sense of falling... a feeling of missing something or leaving something behind, something I should remember but I don't... I listen to Sam breathing, and it comforts me. I brush a hand against his smooth white skin. I feel his wholeness and his strength. I feel his vibrant energy, I taste his sunlight. Even asleep, he'll reach over and take my questing, searching hand in his, and I'll feel our two souls start to mesh. It puts me to sleep, gives me a sense of surety... even in a cosmos I know good and well is wild and uncertain in its foundational principles, I feel safe with Sam.

Sam is my anchor.

Sometimes he finds me in the middle of a bright summer afternoon or a dark, blustery morning, and he knows I'm in that space where I feel the world is spinning out and I'm spinning with it. He won't ask; he doesn't have to. He simply knows. With a smile, with a look deep into my eyes, he brings me back to some sense of meaning.

Once he said to me: "I think you have a kind of Weltschmerz."

"Really?" I asked, laughing at the idea. "All the pain in the world, you think I take that into myself?"

"No," he said.

"I don't take pain from others any longer," I told him. "I learned how not to do that. I learned how be myself, within myself, and not spill into other people or let them spill into me. For one thing, it's an invasion of privacy."

He laced his fingers with mine. "Sometimes what you might fear is an invasion of privacy is actually deep sharing."

"There are exceptions to not letting myself get meshed with others," I said. "I mean... an exception. Just one. That's all I want."

He grinned at me. I grinned back.

"I don't think you take the suffering of the world into yourself," he said. "I mean a different kind of Weltschmerz. A pain that comes from being in the world."

Bless Sam. He had put into words the source of my recurring unease.

I know people think it's cheesy to say this, but Sam completes me. It's strange that he's so much younger than I am... two dozen years... and sometimes I fear that our marriage is unfair to him, because although I am youthful and healthy, I am not young. I know that it's not realistic to think that twenty years from now, when he's the age I was when we met and I am eighty years old, that I will still be as healthy and energetic as I am now. I've managed to stay youthful despite my years, but time... time will see to that, sooner or later. Probably sooner. And Sam? He'll have to deal with an elderly spouse. I fear it won't be easy for him.

Sam knows when those thoughts trouble me, too, and he responds the same way: With his smile, with his gentle light, with his beautiful, soft way of holding my hand, or my heart, or my whole body.

That's how he held me the night we both woke up feeling loss: Him knowing that I knew something, and me knowing that Tia had died.

***

"Will you be gone long?" Sam asked me the next morning, after a phone call had confirmed the news.

"Not too long." I showed him my phone, and he looked at my ticket: Berlin to New York to Missouri. Four days later, Missouri to New York to Berlin.

"Do you want me to go with you?" he asked for the third time.

He knew I didn't want that. He knew I had to go say goodbye alone. It wasn't that I didn't want his company; it was that I was going to be preoccupied, and he would end up left out.

That happened with Felix, when my mother died. Felix was angry that I was so sunk into myself - self-absorbed, he called it, using words in English. That was fine; we were both fluent in English; but he was wrong. I wasn't self-absorbed in the sense of caring only about myself. Rather, I was absorbing everything else that everyone around me was throwing my way: My brothers, my aunts, my cousins, the neighbors. Even the walls of our childhood home were buzzing, were upset and throwing off a jittery energy of everything that had never been resolved.

It was a lot to have to handle, and Felix just wasn't a part of it. There was no room for him in that chaos. It was understandable he would feel left out, but the way he took it as a personal affront was part of what made us a bad match.

We didn't stay together long after that.

Going back to the U.S. to attend Tia's funeral was going to be a little like that, too. There was nothing that was unresolved between her and I, but there was still some unfinished business, and there would be intense memories. There would be the tag ends of days than had never quite been finished. There was a question that needed an answer, and I wondered whether I'd have the chance to offer my reply.

"I'll make it up to you," I told Sam.

"You don't have to," he said. "You need to take care of yourself, and sometimes I can't be there for that."

"Not in the moment," I told him. "But afterwards."

"Afterwards," he agreed. "Which is, how did you explain it? That what happens next is the same as before?"

"Not exactly," I said. "I was saying that time can run forwards or backwards, and it makes no difference to the mathematics of physics. Of course, it makes a huge difference to us."

"Or maybe not," Sam said. "Not when the past still lives in the future."

I laughed. He's an artist, and perhaps his talent comes from the way he has of tying contrary ideas together.

*** *** ***

Sam and I have only been a couple for four years. It hasn't been enough time to explain all the kinks and twists of our lives to each other, even though we are both highly sensitive people - highly sensitive in the physiological sense of our nervous systems processing sensory information more thoroughly than most people, but also in the mysterious sense of being empathic, or sympathetic, to the moods and the energy of other people, and even of places and things.

Of the two of us, Sam is by far the more sensitive; I can be in the same room as a person and know if they need a kind word, or a boot in the ass, or a sandwich, but Sam can pick up a century-old wedding ring and tell you all about the man who wore it. I mean that literally: I let him hold my grandfather's wedding ring, and he told me all about Opa Jonas. Born in Tübingen, highly educated in that same city, never really left it. Married a sweet woman from Magdeburg. Had seven children - three of whom died, two in the second world war and one of a childhood disease. Opa Jonas spoke four languages, which was quite a feat for someone who never traveled much. He died at the age of ninety-seven, forty years after his wife. He never married again, never had any interest in another woman.

Despite not quite believing Sam could actually "read" all this from a ring, I was only half joking when I asked if Opa Jonas might have been schwul.

"Your Opa had a great, loving heart," Sam said. "But no, he was heterosexual. The pain of losing her... that pain, in a way, kept her close to him, and he didn't want to surrender it by falling in love with someone else."

I understood exactly what Opa Jonas must have felt. That's how I feel about Sam. I almost hope he doesn't feel the same way about me; the difference in our ages means I might very well die while he's still relatively young, and I wouldn't want him to suffer lonely decades that way Opa did.

I do believe my dear Sam can read things about people from the objects they owned and wore and handled every day. I do believe what he said about Opa Jonas. And I also believe that he understands more about me and my life than I have ever explained.

I never told him about Norm, for example, but he's said a few things that suggest he has a sense of who Norm is... was... no, is to me.

*** *** ***

I was seventeen, a native of Mannheim, and working at Tia's gift shop in Robertson, Missouri. It was the summer before my junior year of high school, which I attended in the United States as an exchange student. The family I was living with were next-door neighbors to Tia, and their son Pete - my brother, as I came to think of him, the brother I always wanted but never found in my biological brothers - had worked for Tia in summers past. But Pete wanted to work outdoors now, tending lawns and gardens with his friend Curtis. The two of them had decided to go into business together. Pete invited me to join in, but I had met Tia and liked her and she had told me how much she would miss having Pete around the store. Also, I don't like bugs or sweat or hot sun.

I had arrived in mid-June and started working at Tia's shop at the end of that month, so it must have been only a few days before I met Norm for the first time. Otherwise, I don't know what day it was, or what month, or even what century. The first time I was near Norm was like being struck by lightning: Suddenly, I couldn't breathe, my nerves were on fire, my heart was hammering, I was lightheaded... I thought I might pass out.

Tia noticed, and stepped in to collect Norm's eighty cents and put the birthday card he was buying into a little bag. "Thanks, and come again," she told him.

Norm smiled at her and then winked at me - winked! I had no idea what he could mean by that. "I still need to buy a present," Norm said, "so I guess I'll be back tomorrow." He left the store, stepping into the bright sunlight of the early July evening.

"You need a glass of water," Tia said, giving me a side-eye.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," I said. "I had lunch. I don't think I'm dehydrated."

"Uh-huh," Tia said. Then: "That's Norm. He does that to people sometimes."

It was the first time it occurred to me that what had just happened was because of Norm and hadn't simply happened by chance at the same time he had come into the shop.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Tia shrugged. "Child," she said, "I have no idea. But he's a live wire, that one."

"You mean Norm?'

"Yes, I do," she said, but she didn't elaborate.

I was working the next day, and Norm didn't come in. But he came in the day after that, I felt his approach. Or rather... I heard it. It was a deep rumble, a low tone so far down in the Earth and on the scale that it almost fell out of the range of hearing. Actually, it did fall outside od hearing; I wasn't registering the rumble with my ears, but with my innards.

I don't know how to explain it otherwise. I remember thinking that maybe a catastrophe was about to happen - I had read about people who could "hear" when earthquakes were imminent.

But there was no earthquake. Just Norm, who came in about two minutes later.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi Norm," I said. My heart was pounding, and the blood was rushing to my head, or out of it... I didn't know which. There were spots in front of my eyes. I had been find a moment before, but now...

"So, I'm looking for something nice," Norm said. "You know, maybe something kind of cute. For a girl."

This bothered me in a way I utterly failed to understand.

"A... a girl?" I asked.

"It's her birthday this weekend," Norm said. "She invited me to her party on Saturday."

"So..." I was trying to balance a lot of things: My own shortness of breath; my wish to be professional and helpful; and also, a sudden, urgent curiosity about this girl, and who she was to Norm. I had no idea why I should care about her, or about him either, but it wasn't something intellectual. It was cellular. Somehow, my body was responding to him.

With that thought came a new thunderbolt: Scheiße, bin ich schwul? Finde ich ihn attraktiv? Or, in other words, was I getting hot for a guy?

*** *** ***

Now, of course, I'm used to finding men attractive. I'm gay and I know it, and it's fine. Back then, though... well, back then it was kind of a different story. This was just before AIDS, when it was almost cool to be gay, at least in Mannheim. But I wasn't in Mannheim, I was in Missouri, and I had gotten a very definite sense in my couple of weeks there that being gay was not cool in Missouri, not even with my new brother, Pete.

I liked Pete. I didn't have any sexual interest in him... well, looking back, maybe I had the general sort of interest in Pete that you have in anyone. As Tia liked to say, humans are human, and whether they want to say so or not, everyone is sexual to a human being in some way or another, even if it's in a strictly negative way. I could see that Pete was handsome, with his red hair and his bright smile; he had the muscles of a young man, with biceps and shoulders and a chest that he'd built up with weight training. He even had ripples of muscle under the smooth skin of his abdomen.

I took note of Pete's physical attributes, but that was as far as it went. I had no yearning for him. We shared a bathroom, and I saw him naked plenty of times, but other than the strange sight of his circumcised manhood - which I was curious about, but had no idea how to ask about - I had no particular interest in him, not even when he would lie on his bed on hot August afternoons, reading books, without a stitch of clothing. Where eros fell short between us, though, jocularity took hold: The word for "erection" was "latte" in German vernacular - literally, wood - and I found it hilarious whenever Pete, who liked coffee drinks, talked about wanting to "get a latte"; but again, that amusing image didn't inspire any lust in me. Pete was too much like my brother, and besides that, he wasn't my type.

I didn't feel like I had any sexual attraction to Norm, either. My intense physical response to his presence was strange, but it might have made sense if it came along with a sexual interest. Then again, I thought, if I wasn't sexually interested in Norm, why did I care about this girl he was talking about?

Maybe because in the back of my mind I was thinking vaguely that a gay American friend would have been nice to have.

Tamping down my hammering heart, I said to Norm, "Tell me about her, and maybe I can help you pick something out."

"Well," Norm said, squinting at the wall as if studying her image, "she's pretty. Blue eyes, straight brown hair. Pretty smile."

"Okay," I said, "but what's she like?"

"Oh, she's great," Norm said. "Really nice to everybody, always cheerful. Likes candy."

"We have some assortments of chocolates," I suggested.

"Oh, no, I don't think I better give her anything like that," Norm said.

"Why not?" I asked, thinking: Halte mal, der hat ihr nicht gesagt, daß er sie mag? He hasn't told her that he likes her?

"Her dad wouldn't appreciate it," Norm explained.

"Uh... okay," I said. "Do you have to ask his permission before you can take her out?" I had heard this about Americans.

"What? No." Norm started laughing. "She's six! Turning seven!"

*** *** ***

After that I saw Norm once or twice a week, often on Fridays when I would work the store from four o'clock to closing time. The Friday night after he went shopping for his young neighbor, as I was straightening things up - people always moved things, and tourists especially left the place in disarray - I heard... felt... that deep terrestrial rumble once again. I looked up, feeling his approach: His energy reached the store, lit up the place two minutes before he strolled through the door.

"Hey Norm," I said, trying to sound casual.

"Hey," he responded. He paused in the doorway, looking around the shop, a black ball cap perched on his head. I fixated on that cap, on the equally black tufts of hair that peeked out from beneath it.

Norm looked at me and grinned, and I felt lightheaded all over again. "What's that accent?" he asked. "Where are you from?"

"I'm German," I answered.

Norm walked into the shop, browsing from shelf to shelf. "What's it like over there?" he asked.

"In Germany? It's different in some ways, but mostly the same. I mean... the sky is blue there, too."

Norm gave me a quizzical look.

"I don't know why," I said, "but for some reason I imagined that the sky over America might be a different color. Green. Red. Yellow. It's... it's stupid," I said, suddenly feeling shy and small.

Norm grinned at me. "No. You know what? I kind of always imagined the same thing about places like Germany."

We both laughed.

"You know, my dad... he fought over there," Norm said. "He was young during the war, and he was kinda old when he had me."

"Okay," I said, not sure what he was trying to say.

"And here we are," Norm said, looking at me... looking me over in a way that made me tingle. "Our dads might have been enemies, but we can be friends."

Was hat er den vor? I thought, wondering if he was checking me out... wondering if he was having erotic thoughts.

My dad had told me a year earlier I was old enough to start having "relationships," by which he meant sex. He's had a girlfriend when he was sixteen; he had stayed over at her place, and their parents all approved of this. He carried this attitude forward to his own sons, and my brothers had been only too happy to live up to expectations. I was the disappointing one; my father was ziemlich sauer that I hadn't gotten around to having sex yet, and he had a habit of reciting to me the virtues of all the daughters of the families we knew. Hildebrand was pretty; Detmer had lovely hair. Wiltrude was sweet and would make any young man happy.

I wanted none of that, nothing to do with any of them. Neither did I want anything to do with boys... not in that way, at least.

But now this American man, this Norm, was standing in front of me, his eyes peering into me. He wasn't taking my clothes off mentally, I realized; he was looking past my skin, past my bones, into my cells... or into my soul.

His words rang in my ears and I became conscious that seconds were passing. "My father didn't fight in the war," I said. "He was too young. But he remembers what it was like. He saw Dresden after the war was over."

"He grew up there?"

"In a village nearby. And my mother's father lived in Tübingen," I added, though I could see that meant nothing to Norm. "Anyway, my father said the city was... what's the word? Everything fallen down, everything in rubble. His father, though... my grandfather Hannes... he never came home."

"I'm sorry," Norm told me.

"Why? Like you said, we don't fight each other."

"I'm just sorry about the way the world keeps veering into war, stupidity, chaos." His mouth tightened into rueful line.

"Veering?" I didn't know the word.

"You know, like a car when the driver is drunk."

"When the driver... oh, when he's besoffen." I grinned. "Yes, the world is like that. The nuclear arms race. Everyone..." I hesitated. Why would I tell him this? Just to impress him? Well, why not? "I wrote a paper this week that won an award," I said. "About how the people my age... yours too, right? How old are you?"

"I'm nineteen," Norm said.

"Yes, so you too, maybe. The people I know at school, here and in Germany, we all... we all feel that there is maybe not a future. You know? America and Russia, two swaggering countries, bigger than everyone, bullying everyone, bullying each other and making a big risk for everyone." I sighed, hearing how badly I was speaking English. Even before I'd arrived in Missouri, I spoke better than this. But there was something about Norm that made me feel like my brain was disconnected somehow. I felt excited, and stupid, and stupidly excited in his presence.

"I feel it too," Norm said. "Like it's not a matter of if, but when. We're gonna be ashes, right? Everything ashes. So why do anything, why plan for the future? But still, here we are, and we have to do something with ourselves. Something constructive."

"Yes, I think so," I said.

Norm nodded. "Well, I gotta get going," he said. He glanced at a rack of refrigerator magnets as he turned back toward the door, and then looked back at me. "Don't sweet the little things?" he asked.

"What?"

Norm pointed at one of the magnets, a yellow square with funny, jumbled lettering. "Don't sweet the little things," he said.

I laughed. "That says 'Don't sweat the little things'," I told him.

Norm glanced at the magnet again and smiled sheepishly. "Ah. Right. Well, that's true, I guess."

"And it's all little things," I said. I had heard Tia say that while talking about that same magnet with a customer.

Norm clicked his tongue and pointed at me. That moment - him with that smile, his hand in the shape of a gun with thumb cocked and finger pointing, his dark eyes and black ball cap, an intoxicating light all around him and the air itself trembling between us - that moment engraved itself on my brain. I see it even now, just as I saw it in that brief moment.

*** *** ***

"You're quiet," Tia said to me the following Thursday night.

I'd been wondering if Norm would come in that night, or the next. I shrugged at her comment.

"Aren't you supposed to be exercising your English?" she asked.

"I am. I speak all day at school and then I'm here or with my host family," I told her.

"Yeah, well, exercise some more. Tell me a story."

I shrugged again. Nothing came to mind.

"You got a girl back home?"

I was October at this point, and she had never asked such a personal question. It unsettled me.

"Why does everyone ask me that?" I said. "I think I don't... I mean, no."

"Why not?"

"I have other things to think about."

"Like that paper you wrote," Tia said. "Congratulations, by the way. When are you going?"

"What?"

"When are you going to the youth conference? Didn't you win a scholarship to that conference because of your paper? What weekend is it? I can cover you, honey, don't you worry about that."

"Oh. I didn't... I mean, yes, I won, but no, I'm not going," I said.

"Why not?"

I shrugged. "I don't want to."

"Why not?"

"I just don't want to."

"Is it Thomas?" She meant the father of my host family. Thomas was an ex-Marine, and he thought my paper on the nuclear fears of my generation was an expression of naïveté at best, and communist sympathies at worst. In any case, he made it clear that I was ungrateful to people like him who had laid their lives on the line for the freedom of America. Margerie, his wife, told Thomas that I wasn't an American, and with so many American missiles being sent over to my homeland of Germany, I had every right to feel a little scared. After all, Germany was much closer to Russia than America was.

"It's not Thomas," I said, though in fact that was part of it; I admired Thomas, with his big chest and thick arms. He was a strong man, sure of himself, and I wanted to be more like him. In a stupid, juvenile way, I also wanted him to like me. I saw the way he was with Pete, how Pete was an echo of his dad and his dad was proud of him. My father was never so proud. He made a point to let me know all the ways in which I, unlike my brothers, fell short. My father and my perfect brothers were one of the reasons I wanted to spend a year in America - just to get away from them and their constant disapproval.

I wanted Thomas to approve of me.

But I also wanted to be there in case Norm came in. I was sure the conference would be fun, but it would also be exhausting. School was bad enough: More classmates than I had ever had in my life, American classmates with an energy that more hot and tingly than the energy of my German classmates. Americans had more friction in them, more itchiness. I had just got used to the kids at my American school; it would be too much to have to deal with a lot of people I didn't know at the conference, people asking me about Europe and Germany and if we were all Nazis.

I was sure five minutes with Norm would be more fun than a whole weekend at the conference. And I was starting to have a sense... inchoate, dim, undefined, but strong and getting stronger... that Norm had something to tell me, something to show me, something I needed to see.

My mind flashed again to erotic possibilities I had always feared to entertain. But did Norm want to show me anything of that sort? He had a kind of charm that I was sure was not for me alone. I was susceptible to charm like his, but I also understood it was like the light from the sun: It radiated in all directions, and everybody liked it. No one could claim it was specifically for them.

Tia was looking at me intensely. I felt embarrassed, exposed. I kept looking at the glass countertop next to the register. There were all sorts of candy bars on display in the glass case. Despite the glass, they made the area smell sickly sweet. It was the only thing about Tia's store that I disliked.

"It's Norm, isn't it?" Tia asked.

"What?" I asked, my embarrassment abruptly turning into panic. How would she know? She was never even there on Fridays or Saturdays, when Norm typically came it - though he also came in mid-week, when my shift overlapped with Tia's by an hour or so.

Was it that obvious? Was I radiating needy fascination and curiosity about Norm the same way he radiated charisma?

"Look," Tia said, "I've known that kid my whole life, and I know he's one of those people that just has something. He has an effect on just about everybody. Hell, if I was a couple decades younger, I would be smitten with him myself. So, I don't blame you for liking him. But I bet you'd have a nice time if you went to the conference."

"It's not because of Norm," I said.

She gave me a skeptical look.

"You make it sound like I'm gay, Tia," I complained.

"And no seventeen-year-old can stand that," she said, before biting off what she was about to add: especially if he really is gay.

She didn't give voice to the words but they hung in the air like a neon sign, and she saw me see them.

She looked at me with a few words of apology - also unspoken, also obvious. I looked at her and saw for the first time that she was like me: She saw such unspoken words, she saw how the air filled with colors when people got upset or happy.

"Well, do what you want," she said. "Just, I'll cover for you if you like."

I did what I wanted and skipped the conference. I worked my usual shifts the weekend of the conference and she didn't say anything, but her disappointment lent the air between us a deep purple tinge for days.

Norm didn't come in that Friday. Saturday, I saw him walking in the park with a young woman at his side. She was about his age. She was talking to him, and he was listening intently. They walked slowly. I wondered if she might be his girlfriend. I didn't see anything between them... no sexual spark, no glow of love... but that didn't it wasn't there.

And anyway, I told myself, it was none of my business.

The next day was Sunday, and I saw Norm again, briefly, through the shop window that looked over the parking lot. He was at the wheel of a small pickup truck, driving the vehicle across the parking lot - probably on his way to the grocery store adjacent to Tia's shop. The truck bed was full of young men, four or five of them, all laughing and chattering. The air between them was lit with companionship... a kind of casual male energy that I yearned to be part of, but didn't possess and so couldn't share.

I should have known, I thought, that leaving Germany and visiting America wouldn't mean I found a place to fit in. People were people everywhere, and somehow... on some fundamental level... I was different.

Not because I was gay... and I was starting to accept that I was, in fact, gay; I just chose not to worry about it yet... but in some other, even more fundamental way, I wasn't like other people.

I felt sick and lightheaded again, but this time not from Norm's magnetic aura. It was because of the gnawing pit of hopelessness and isolation I carried inside myself.

Norm was right, I thought. The future might be fucked, but what mattered was being able to live in the present moment. If you couldn't do that, then the whole idea of a future lacked meaning.

Norm's pickup rolled out of sight. He wouldn't be stopping into Tia's shop that morning. Somehow, I knew he wasn't coming back at all.

*** *** ***

It was months later, in that same park that I'd seen him walking with the girl, that I saw Norm for the last time. It was in the spring. My American adventure was coming to an end, and I was going back to Germany in a few weeks. My English was better; I'd even made a few friends and was feeling like less of an outsider. Still, this was not my country, and I was looking forward to getting home again.

I don't remember why I was in the park. Probably I was just enjoying it before leaving; that park was a place I liked to stroll, to think my own thoughts in German or in a wordless glow of concepts, to not feel pressed in upon by other people.

Norm was loitering by a tree, looking at the ground. He seemed to be looking for something.

My heart jumped at the sight of him, but I wasn't lightheaded this time, and I didn't hear a seismic groan from deep beneath my feet. He was still bright, though, and still magnetic. He looked up at me. A smile appeared on his face, and that made me unaccountably happy.

"Hey, long time," he said to me as I approached him.

"It's been a while," I said. "Have you been away?"

"Your English is really good," he said. "I mean, it was before, but..."

"But now I don't sound so German?"

"You sound like any other kid from around here."

That wasn't quite true. I was still obviously speaking English as a second language. But I accepted his compliment. "Did you lose something?" I asked him.

"No," he said. "Well, maybe. My girlfriend had this necklace, and she can't find it now. So I'm just having a look because we were here last night."

I wondered if it was the girl I'd seen him with before.

"I've been away for a while," he said. "My uncle in Florida is a house painter. He had some big jobs... new apartment buildings, and all the apartments needed painting. He gave me a job."

"Do you live there now?" I asked.

"No, I came back. I made some good money, but..." Norm shrugged. "Home is home, you know."

He looked at me with a somber expression. He might just as well have been smiling; the air still danced around him, and he was still handsome with his dark eyes and black hair.

I wanted to say something about it, ask him if he knew he lived inside a cocoon of... something. Beauty. Potential.

Sunlight. The word came to my mind by itself.

He lived in his own shell of sunlight. That didn't mean he didn't also feel alone. That was something else I was seeing around him now: That he was alone, and lonely. That he was as much an outside as I was.

"What?" he asked.

I almost panicked, thinking once again that I was too obvious, that I was too transparent. I started speaking, and the words formed themselves, echoing a conversation I'd had with Tia a few days before, when I was in an existential funk. My impending departure - the end of my seemingly endless American excursion - had me feeling for the first time the reality of my own limited life, and the essential transience of all things.

"What's the point of all this?" I asked him.

"The point of what?" he asked.

"Everything. The world, people. It's all gonna... I mean, the whole universe, it's all gonna burn out some day."

"Oh," he said. "Still worried about the future? Well, all I can tell you is that it means something. And the ending - well, the ending is part of it, just like the beginning and everything that happens in between. It's true for every person's life; it's true for the whole world."

"But what are supposed to do about it?" I asked.

"You know what?" Norm said. "Someday I want you to tell me the answer to that."

I laughed. "I don't know when that will be. I'm going back to Germany."

"End of the school year," he nodded. "Of course you are."

He held out a hand. I took it, wanting to say there was no need for the moment to end so soon, but then realizing he was feeling a pressure of time. Someone was waiting for him. He had some task someone needed him to do.

"Don't worry about the future so much," he said. "You won't find yourself there. You'll find yourself here, in the present."

"For all the good that will do," I said.

"Hey." He gave me a stern look that surprised me and, unexpectedly, sent a thrill through me. "You're here because you're supposed to be. The trick is to find out what that reason is, or at least to find a sense that you have a purpose."

"Okay," I said.

"So promise me you will," Norm said, his dark eyes still gripping mine. "If you're here, it's because the world needs you. I know it's a disappointing world, but maybe what's important isn't what it has to give you but what you have to give to it."

I nodded.

"Okay, then." He gave my hand a quick, firm pump. "Till then, all right?"

"Till then," I said, as he started walking away. Then I called after him: "Hey, Norm?"

He turned.

"Don't sweat the little things."

He grinned. "And it's all little things, right?"

*** *** ***

"So," Norm said, standing in the cracked pavement of the parking lot, the dilapidated shell of what was once Tia's shop behind him. "Here we are." His hair was gray and his face was weathered, but his dark eyes were still alive with that same light. He still possessed a magnetism.

Those dark eyes flickered over me in a way that made me recall a moment, four decades before, when his glance had held me in a thrall.

"How are you?" Norm asked.

"Good. Fine." I took a deep breath. "Better."

Norm chuckled. "I like that. 'Good, fine, better.' I'm gonna use that."

I had expected to find him here. I didn't know why, but I felt a tug to this same old place - untenanted now, sad, with even the echoes of old memories silent. But I had heard it: That low, deep rumble in the Earth. I had felt it, a powerful pull that brought me right here, to where Norm was looking over the building that had once housed Tia's shop.

He was a realtor now. That was the reason he was here: Tia was gone, her family were selling the shell of the old building. That was why he was here. But it wasn't the only reason I saw it in the air between us: He had heard that same deep rumble, felt that same pull. Like me, he had to be here.

"You've grown into yourself," Norm said approvingly.

"Yeah," I said. "Thanks."

"You're here for Tia's funeral?" He glanced at the store - sad, abandoned, its large plate glass window grimy, its interior dark. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thanks," I said. "She was my American mother. Always sending me letters, all these years. Always on the phone, and even video calls the last couple of years. Always part of my life, always happy to give advice when I asked for it. Which I guess I didn't do enough. And now she's gone."

He nodded.

"And you're right, Norm. The end is important. She was starting to get a little sift upstairs. She was in decline, and she knew it. She was impatient to move on."

"And?" he asked.

"And I'll miss her, but her life - her story - was a beautiful one. She ended it gracefully."

"And you?" Norm asked.

"And I... you know, you were right. I started focusing on each day, and I found something."

"The light," he said.

I was startled by that and startled at my own surprise.

"You found the light," Norm said. Because that is why we're here, what makes us different... why we don't quite fit. We're keepers of that light. The world goes dark, but we don't go dark with it. So many others take that soft, easy path, move in a group, belong to the same victories or defeats, but we... we don't. We have a different purpose, a different nature."

I wasn't the only one who spoke better these days, I thought. Norm had grown into someone quite eloquent.

I shook my head, smiling. "I thought I understood," I said. "And now I see... I'm only now really getting it."

"You see? We're here for a reason. You and me - right now." Norm grinned.

"I found light in myself," I told him. "And I found it in someone else."

"I hope he's as bright as you are," Norm said.

"I hope she's as bright as you," I told him, assuming he was straight and married.

"Oh, she is. And our kids... they're lovely. And our grandkids, too, for that matter."

"No way." I laughed. "How old do I feel right now?"

Norm laughed with me. Then, more soberly, he said, "You're okay?"

"Yes. Angry sometimes, depressed sometimes, but the world is going where it needs to go, I guess. Though being German, looking at what's happening in America... well, maybe now those guys who called me a Nazi when we were kids understand how cruel history can be, how cruel it can make people who are caught up in its tides. And the universe swings... no, it veer... and there are miracles and atrocities, all in the same single breath, this brief moment of life and light."

Norm sighed, nodding. "Don't let the darkness snuff out your light. The light you keep... keep it well."

A moment hung in the air: A moment of separate pasts, of convergences, of sympathy and concordance.

He was about to turn and leave, but I stepped forward. "Come on, man," I said, opening my arms to him. Grinning, he stepped forward and we had a long, hard hug.

I'd wanted that hug all my life.

*** *** ***

Lying in the dark with Sam, home again, Tia at rest and Norm's colors... his light... still warm within me, I let myself flow outside my skin. Sam sighed in his sleep, shifted, and lay there warm and dreaming, his light more gorgeous than mine ever was... more gorgeous than Norm's, even.

I let us mesh. I let Norm flow from me, with me, to Sam.

If I'm a keeper of the light, then Sam's the light I'm meant to keep, no matter how the dark the world grows around us.

And I will.

All things end in their time. But if he's clever enough, or rich enough, can a man escape mortality? Or is his best choice merely to celebrate life while he's alive? Caduceus Trimble sets out to answer that question next week with the party of the year - an occasion when he'll be "King for a Day."