To One of Many
Or The Storyteller
It is an odd thing, but I find that the greatest tragedy of most people’s lives is that they are not tragic in the least. Now, at first that might not seem like such a big problem; worse things have happened, one might say, and one would probably be right. But even so, consider for a moment how awful it must be if you are one of those rather extreme and curious people whose sole dream is to be interesting, and that, try as you might, you are forced to admit in the end that you are not; that it is no one’s fault but your own; and that your story is not worth reading to anyone, not even to you.
I knew such a person once. His name was Matthew Leonard, and I ask that you read this book for him. At the very least it can be said of him that he tried to be interesting. Whether or not he succeeded, I leave up to you.
I met Matt in the fall of 2007, and I believe the manner of our meeting determined the manner of everything that came between us afterward. I was young and felt very brave in the world then, and I would not usually have noticed anyone as supremely average-seeming as Matt. He was quiet, plain in all aspects, and sad looking, though never so much as to wonder at his wounds. I have always craved personality, have rather shamelessly wanted to know all the unique and intricate ifs and thens of other people’s lives, and Matt likely would have struck me as far too one-coursed at the time. To some extent, such an instinct would have been right; he was one-coursed, perhaps, but I think it was a valiant course for all that. Many are the unsung heroes history leaves us, but far fewer and more select are those that choose instead to leave it as an unheroic song, living each moment like swans at their last, and forever composing their own requiems…
We were both at Brown University and, ironically enough, in the same intermediate fiction class. Our first assignment was to write a dream we’d had. The teacher partnered us up with someone to share our work and, quite naturally, decided to do so alphabetically. Loedel came after Leonard and so, with an elegant touch of fate in the first crisscross of our lives, Matt and I were partnered for the sharing of our dreams.
Our introduction was standard, except that we discovered we were both from New York, and lived not very far from one another. After the usual small talk, which did not interest either of us and which we were both quite bad at, we exchanged work. Even then I did not have as many dreams as I’d like to remember, so I chose one from my childhood. It was an odd dream, and I liked it for its oddity. I had dreamt that, as I was coming home late one night to my building on East End, I found a revolver lying carelessly in the middle of the street. I had rushed to pick it up, thinking it must be dangerous where it was, but before I could get there a squirrel ran out suddenly from behind a tree, picked up the gun, and shot me dead in the chest.
I always liked that dream as it won a laugh, which is rare for me, and because it made me seem naturally attuned to the chancy hand of death and the all-in-all absurdity of life. Essentially, I liked it because it made me seem a born existentialist, and as I observed Matt smile mildly, I remember guessing proudly that a stranger must have liked it too. I confess, in this regard, that I did not begin reading Matt’s own piece until I felt assured he was impressed with mine.
And Matt’s dream, well, if mine had just barely skirted the hectic surface of our human comedy, his had sounded whatever grey depths make up the curse of our silence, and it held that tragic note aloft and solitary like a dead virtuoso playing nocturnes in endless midnight. He said he had never gotten it quite right, but in my opinion those three thousand or so words came together so perfectly rough and hard that they rattled like the bones of a skeleton, and with such thick emptiness as to seep forth and almost drown you. I wish I still had them to copy here, so that my opinion might be corroborated and so that I might give you over fully the dread metaphor I read that day, but, as it is, you will have to do with my word and take my less significant description of it. Fortunately, I do remember it quite well…
A boy and an old man were walking on a deserted beach. It was cold and sad and seemed like autumn though there was no sign of it. There was no sun, but there was no sunset either. I do not think there was even a sky, only an abyss that loomed in its place, and though there was a sea, it left no waves to creep upon the shore. Still the boy and the old man walked on quietly, heading I do not know where, watching I do not know what except the distance itself, until they came, very strangely and mysteriously, upon a certain clown.
This clown was buried to his knees in the sand and appeared dismally from the knees up. His clown suit was a worn, urinary yellow, his red clown wig was knotted with sand and brown seaweed, and his red clown nose hung lopsided from his silly ruined face. When the clown saw the boy and the old man he waved his arms frantically about, welcomed them to his beach, and asked if he could perform for them. The boy asked him, noticing how he was buried, Have you been here forever? And the clown answered, Ohh yes. And you’ve been waiting for us? the boy continued. Ohh yes, the clown answered again. Pozzo’s always waiting for a friend. Your name’s Pozzo? That’s right, I’m your good friend Pozzo, just as you thoughtso! I can do such a lotso, just let me show you so good Pozzo doesn’t continue to rotso! Rotso? the boy repeated with fright, and Rotso! the clown assented, nodding fervently. Very timidly the boy then asked, Are you sad? No, the clown answered, no no no. Pozzo’s the happiest clown of the lotso!
The boy asked the old man if they could stay and watch the clown perform for them and, as the old man did not answer, the clown took leave to do so. First he told some jokes that fell flatly. Then he tried to juggle some old fruit, but as his legs were stuck and he could only flail his arms about to catch an item that strayed, he soon lost rhythm and stood watching the fruit tumble down around him; one piece of fruit, an orange it seemed, actually hit him on the wig on its way down. Though the clown was a little disgusted through all this, and a little awkward, he merely brushed it off with more of his bad jokes. He giggled terribly after each one, hehehe, hehehe, like a giddy little villain it seemed, and it was fearful to think this evil clown’s laugh was the only sound of this ethereal shore. At any rate, the clown proceeded, claiming then that he could make a nickel disappear. This he tried three times, and three times the nickel reappeared in the palm of his hand. Are you sure you can do it? the boy asked. It’s okay if you can’t. Not so, not so! the clown squealed back, as he tried again, and again the nickel reappeared in his palm. After this last failure the clown threw the coin away into the sea, and the boy felt so hollow and ugly inside that he could not watch anymore and tugged on the old man’s coat to go home. No no no! the clown squealed again when he saw this, Give your friend Pozzo just one more teeny, tiny little shotso! I promise he’ll impress you an amazing lotso… The old man still said nothing and, giving the clown another nickel as a tip for his troubles, he and the boy walked on, leaving the clown behind.
After a few steps the boy felt sorry for the clown again and he turned back, to smile at him maybe, but the clown was gone. The orange was gone, and the mound where the clown had been lodged was gone, and even his brand new nickel was gone. It was simply as if he never existed. Where’s the clown? the boy asked the old man, but the old man said nothing. Where’s the clown? the boy asked again, where’s the clown? The old man still said nothing, and now the boy understood, understood the clown was gone, understood he always would be gone, and he was afraid he would be gone too soon. He was afraid and afraid and afraid and then the dream was over.
I looked up at Matt almost dazed, as if I had been woken from his dream to another just as strange. Matt, on the other hand, looked as stolid and ordinary as he did before, with neither satisfaction nor even a tinge of curiosity in his far-looking eyes, and for a passing moment I wondered if the dream could really have been his, or if it must have been another’s.
“How old were you when you had this dream?”
“Five I think.”
“Five you think,” I repeated incredulously, and perhaps a little sarcastically. “Five. And this dream, it’s important to you?”
“It’s the most important thing in my life.”
I am sure now whatever psychological chain of cause and effect that has led me years later to take up his torch and pursue the meaning of his life as if it were my own, must have begun with this answer.
“You do not want to become the clown?” I ventured.
“I must not become the clown,” he corrected.
“You must not disappear.”
“I must not disappear.”
This exchange was whispered fairly like a secret between us, but at the moment it reminded me more of whatever sigh-like breeze might have blown forebodingly on that haunted beach of his. The classroom’s worldly buzz had fallen utterly out of our queer new sphere of metaphysics, and I doubt if we heard it at all.
“And how will you not disappear?”
“I suppose I’ll have to have a meaningful life.”
“And how will you do that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I mean to find out.” He spoke this last part cheerily and it was the first time I heard any sort of personable creature in his voice, I think.
“That will be difficult,” I said.
“Oh yes. And dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“It must be dangerous if it is impossible.”
“Impossible?”
“Well, some people say it is, anyway.”
“A meaningful life?”
“Oh yes.”
By now I suppose I missed the ease of our poor banter and small talk and I was probably trying to re-inject a dose of it into our conversation after all: “I don’t know that I’d take you for one that lives dangerously,” I said.
“Yes, I guess that’s true. But they say, don’t they, that a man can do anything if he puts his mind to it.”
“And you will do anything?”
“I will put my mind to it.”
Although it was my first glimpse into that very unusual mind of his, I knew this was no mere excuse for him, no fancy philosophical sticker he could slap on any one of his bad choices or wrong actions and save under the gallant heading of ‘meaning.’ No, I felt then this project was more to him than that, though how exactly I cannot say.
“The old man in the dream,” I said after a pause. “Is he your grandfather?”
“He’s my father.”
Now the whole Leonard clan had interest to me. I did not much mention the old man in the dream, but he had seemed throughout to brood at nothing with the intensity of a blind seer, and, though I am no interpreter of dreams, I surmised from his stern cold figure that the famous primal bout between fathers and sons was alive and well here.
“He doesn’t seem to be very interested in clowns,” I said.
“No, I guess he doesn’t.”
Matt tried to shrug this off with more than his usual impassivity and I gathered my comment had scratched along a vague scar of his. I was satisfied to know it was there and felt I could return to it in time, so for now I let it go.
“It’s Matt, right?”
“Yes, Matt Leonard. And you’re Danny?”
“Yes, Danny Loedel.” After a shared, knowing smile that appeared to augur in a new sort of intimacy and the official grand opening of our friendship, I resumed with the line I was more interested in: “Matt, there’s something terrible about this clown dream of yours.”
“Yes, that’s what my father says.”
I do not know what about this answer so surprised me, but it made me stop to reassure myself I would not trespass on whatever sacred trust it seemed he was bestowing on me. “Terrible but great,” I continued at length. “Are you thankful for it?”
“For the dream?”
“Yes.”
“Can you be thankful for a dream?”
He said this innocently, like a child that knows nothing but earnestly would like to, and so, like his pretend wise parent, I answered him, rather stupidly I think now, “You can be thankful for what it gave you.”
“For what it gave me,” Matt repeated, very gravely. Although he seemed to consider the prospect some moments, I could tell he had no need to, and that his answer had been ready from the first. “It gave me a ghost,” he said. “Can you be thankful for that, for a sort of ghost?” I told him I’d never had a ghost and Matt answered, “Not yet. Not yet you haven’t.”
I do not know if he already had a plan for his story and the part I would play in it then, or if he merely saw an opportunity to prophesy himself full throttle into my life, but either way it should be clear to the reader by now that this prophecy has since come true; Matthew Leonard is my ghost now.
Our friendship took off slowly from there, as Matt kept to himself and was rarely one to be run into. We did not meet regularly, and we never talked regularly. I tried to occasionally, bringing up such so-called normal things as weekends and people and girls, but he only ever nodded and ‘I guessed’ at me, and I was not long in giving it up. Though the clown dream did not come up again, it was always waiting like a shadow in the background, and I, in turn, was always waiting to see what would be done for the sake of this shadow.
He was a senior when we met and graduated two years ahead of me. I saw him even less after that, but we stayed in touch in our odd, airy, philosophical way, musing together at random on the common link of our mortality, and kneeling reverentially at the temple of Meaning we hoped to build in its shade. It was three more years before we were again living in the same city, and it was at that time the story I hope you will now read began.
I do not know precisely when Matt started writing his story. I do know he had finished it by the fall of 2011, however, as it was at that time the manuscript first came into my hands. Apparently he had tried to get it published but failed, and I am now trying again for him. I hope, as I have said, that you will give him this chance. For at the end of the day, I think it is all he really wanted, and that it is all most of us really want, if we are being honest with ourselves – just an audience to say our troubles are worth having.
It should be noted before proceeding that I was left with the right to edit his work. It was nothing technically legal, but there was nothing legal to be spoken of. He was gone, and I had all that remained of him. I tried to take as few liberties as possible, and I did not do very much on the whole except fix a few odds and ends and add an alternative title to the one Matt himself had given it. His was One of Many; The Storyteller was mine. Take whichever one you please.