The High Cost Of Blindness And Bread

The day the bread stopped its plunge from hidden skies into his outstretched hands signaled the end of his blindness. On that day Peter sat on his sidewalk for a while stunned and vague, his stomach in the final pleasurable pain of fullness, its essential emptiness revealed. He watched the world take shape around him.

It wasn’t a rebirth. More a creation.

His long years of night had reached dawn.

And that fashioned no sense to those who walked past Peter on his sidewalk in route to a towered job in a city that threw its human discards into cardboard shelters on the street.

No sense at all.

They were chosen.

They said. To lead. To tower.

And forget that Peter had been a man, too. Not just a waste of space in their towered hearts.

For thirteen years if anyone had asked what Peter wanted, he would have said sight. And through those years he pleaded his meals while his face blossomed old in his darkness. Peter stretched out his hands in petition for bread. He ate. And slept. Ate again.

But he so wanted.

To see the street.

The wrinkled eyes that judged him. As he judged himself.

Most of all, Peter in the darkness wished to see the son he had left behind, a boy neglected one day at a time in a series of days that each promised: when one more day of neglect passes, it will be the last. A promise over and over broken.

All the things broken. Things that breathe. And love.

Now. His discarded life on the street wasn’t his fault he would tell if asked. But nobody did.

They suffered their own darkness.

It wasn’t his fault Peter would tell if asked at night when streetlights cast no sodium light on his vision. He had abandoned his faith for good cause and been punished without reason.

Excuses.

Made to cloud a truth of his own making.

He had been a proud man once, sighted, revered and respected. A towered man of business. His profits mounted bank accounts and galloped. Then the markets died and his fortune bled dry. And when the light abandoned his conviction, it fled from his eyes as well.

A sorry man.

With a crown of wet pride.

Reduced to rabble.

Who will have me? Peter asked on the day the bread stopped its plunge from the hidden skies. Who will believe in me?

The answer fell hard in the silence. It opened Peter’s ears and eyes, crushed his defenses. There was no one but himself to blame. He played his life’s symphony solo.

Peter rose from his concrete throne of thirteen years, a reign of pity for his dark life, unendurable not in its pain but rather its decadent gratification. He marveled as his blindness blew soft to the skies and vanished.

When he had been kingpin of cash, and the markets bowed to him, he told his son to find someone else to throw the ball in the yard. Peter had meetings to attend, and prices to prod higher. He had judges to dine, and laws to define.

He was an important man, and all let him have his way, his passage paid.

But November came with its misfortunate fickle storms. Markets crashed. His assets and his prestige fell. Plummeted. His pride took the death blow by Christmas, and the next year he was done.

A tattered top dog.

Left faithless. And blind.

To stain the sidewalk with his shame.

Linger his hands out for bread.

And when he finally accepted his blame, Peter quit his sidewalk, and followed a trail of memories to the place he once lived, a proud house for a once towered man. It stood painted new, but his family had fled from the taxes and humiliation.

Who are you? asked a woman when Peter knocked.

I am Peter.

The one who fell to the earth?

You know the story.

Yes.

The woman called herself Ruth she said, and asked Peter inside for a cup of tea while his world mended.

If it can, he said, and shook his head. He entered.

Do you know my son? asked Peter. They sat near a garden window.

A man now for sure, said Ruth.

Yes. It must have been so. Thirteen years grows a boy, not just in height, but in distance from a father’s heart. And Peter knew.

The pain he had painted.

His abdication, his neglect.

For a long while in silence the tea trickled their throats. Peter lit a lamp on his past. Obsessed with a fattened future, he had forgotten to love the moment. And his son had suffered. Now, as the clock struck today, forgiveness lay quiet in a distant land. Perhaps it, like his son, was forever lost.

But he would find his son, he told Ruth when he broke the silence, and ask the boy, now man, what price a father’s betrayal. Ruth nodded.

Peter thanked Ruth for the tea, and rose. A bird struck the garden window and fled injured.

For thirteen weeks, Peter moved through the city and looked for his son. A desperate task, he knew, but a miracle had created his sight from a long span of despair, and if he could somehow find another marvel, he would ask nothing more.

On the metro Peter saw dreams of what could be.

In graffiti, signs and wonders.

In plate glass reflections, a man resurrected from concrete clutches.

Determined, hopeful.

Then the buzzer on the tea shop door sounded and the boy man who sat at a table looked up.

I’ve come to throw the ball with you son, said Peter.

You’ve got nerve, said the boy man. But his eyes flickered south.

Yes, said Peter. The nerve of a failed father. With nothing to lose.

None of this is real or false, a fantasy of feeling, which also makes no sense to towered men who never felt their family suffer. But to Peter and his boy man son, the buried pain bubbled up and spoke a truth that only a love can witness.

The pain bubbled up and broke its resentment upon the floor, where it flowed to the door and fed the gutters.

I’ve forgotten you, said the boy man son. But it was a lie. He had wandered and wondered, too, for thirteen years in the emptiness between embraces.

Can we now remember? asked Peter.

The question hung expectant, as condemnation waits reprieve. It planted a possibility in the air with its seed.

Will you stay this time? asked the boy man son.

That’s why I’m here, said Peter. His lip trembled.

Then sit with me, said his son. And Peter moved slow to the table and sat. Behind him, whispered and weak, a ghost relaxed its long grip and in stillness slipped out the door.