Timing
I do not understand what it means exactly. Examples of good and bad timing are far too abundant in the literary world to pick just one that sparkles brightly in the blaring light of what we call the coincidental, so I will share one from real life with the express promise to not do it again for a very long time.
My list of "neighbors" has always been short - just old David Halper and eventually Olajuwon, who took his place. David was an odd and great neighbor to have. My first encounter with him was when, after taking a short nap, he knocked on my door to ask me if I felt the vibrations. I answered positively, though was unsure if they were his delusions or my own. Several days later I noticed him outside the apartment, rubbing his back against a light pole and then the subsequent stain on his coat that must have been from rubbing his back like that each morning of the last twenty years. He looked like a happy bear. David knocked on my door once with a poorly printed, heavily creased piece of paper that he must have been saving for years: it was a short paragraph containing his memory of being an extra on an episode of Leave it to Beaver. This was, like all facts in my life, nothing I cared to confirm - so I assumed it was yet another delusion of his, much akin to the vibrations that seemed to trouble him. It was a more interesting story if it was not true, anyhow. For three more years, he would knock occasionally and ask that I turn down whatever music or television I had on (I never had any on the times he asked) and aside from our nods and waves in the halls or streets, that was it.
His apartment began to smell, and he grew a lot more withdrawn over the course of my last year in college. Oddly, this timing struck me as particularly symbolic and quite "heavy". David began to shout more at the door rather than answer it when I knocked for him, and after a week of this I finally sought help with the management and building owner - both of whom confirmed that he was in fact sick, and was refusing any sort of help. Over the next month, from what I gather, his infection went from benign to quite malignant and due in part to his environment and religion, he stopped breathing. He stayed in the apartment for about a week - I lived so close to him that I knew he was gone, but was unable to convince the building's owner and manager of this fact since the whole rest of the month he was locked up in there and still alive. The city's Health Services and another social service that I forget the name of were the most helpful to me, and eventually were able to send a policeman and coroner (both were more than rude to me, and less than respectful to David.) The hard part came several days later, though, when a woman knocked on my door in tears, announced herself as his Sister, and explained that because he was a Christian Scientist, we would have never accepted even the water and bread I kept leaving for him outside his door.
Of course, the coincidence deepens only when looking at this timeline overlaid atop my own personal timeline. Him progressing towards a very real death, me on my way up and out of the stranglehold of college and into the freedom and mortality of the real world. I was not naive enough to feel this accomplishment tinged with a bit of sadness.
Luckily, it was not long before Olajuwon moved in and with him came a real sense of Home. See, his timing was less about seconds and minutes and more geographically based in Coincidence - he happens to have been born and raised only several streets away from my own Father, and Uncles.
Now, on to the actual intention of this account: The Gnome. No, not those often comical and ironic little things that live in the garden - he was another neighbor of mine. He got his name because he was, well, a bit gnome-ish in appearance. His nose was bulbous and resembled a potato, his cheeks were always so rosy that they could have been painted by Walt Disney himself, and he even had a way of chuckling in a very rumbly sort of fairy-like way (though, his voice, on the whole, was magical sounding it was not the higher pitched kind - he was a real man after all, and one who smoked and drank and thus his timbre was tempered with just so). I think the main aspect of his look that lent itself to the garden variety of Gnome was his pointed peak of his hooded sweatshirt, always over his head in sun or rain. His beard reached to his knees, too.
When he moved in, the management were compelled to hang various signs alerting us residents of his presence.
A jolly man, he would often get stuck in the lobby when careless residents would forget to close the elevator gate, or when the power would go out for hours on end for no reason at all, and with few options at his disposal he would yell. I would often lay in bed wishing I had the guts to bring a comfortable chair down to the lobby along with some snacks and a bit of cannabis for him, figuring that if he couldn't get into his own apartment without the elevator, he might enjoy some company and comfort wherever he might happen to be stuck.
The two or three friends that I keep might remember The Gnome inside the apartment gate, staring out at the people of Post Street. Those of you that are more familiar may also recall his perch outside the front door of Divas, the famed and fabled transvestite strip club that was across the street. He was not a "creepy" person, he was simply lonely. Oddly, the transvestites that walk the streets all day and night happen to be lonely, too - and it seems politely fitting that they all made friends. With him inside the first apartment gate but not all the way inside the lobby (it would be called an "antechamber" had it been a prestigious address) he was treated to their conversations and a little bit of human connectivity while they were treated to a welcome moment of pause during their busy and walking-filled day. The Gnome would never allow any of us to help him into or out of the elevator, he was always happy just pushing his little joystick forward, and rocketing out of the tiny cage at full speed with a chuckling trail of exclamation points.
As it turns out, around last Christmas his motorized wheel chair bit the dust. The scene was touched with a bit of eeriness -- the manager's tastelessly decorated door, the blinking and semi-gleeful lights, the repeated digital drone of "feliz navidad", and then a brick through a plate glass window: his empty wheelchair. Timing - it was a strange slice of coincidental timing. My optimistic thought was that perhaps he got a brand new, fully automated chair and simply shed the cocoon of the old one. As it turns out, his old and only one was simply broken beyond repair though the man was no where in sight. Only later did I learn that four firemen at the firehouse across the street picked him up and carried him the one flight of stairs to his apartment, only after trying with the crane to lift the entire chair up and in through his window. It seemed like a scene worthy of a photograph, which is now affixed to the top of this text. Please stop, please stop reading right here, and go back to the top, head upward, upward, and stare at the photograph. Focus on it. Envision the gnome. See his smile, hear his grumble, smell his beard.
Only last month I moved out of the apartment and building in question - after giving the place almost eight full years of my life. As a final tribute, I loaded the old camera with film only to find that there was a roll in need of development. Having just hosted some guests, it was only obvious that this roll contained those photos of that trip. I began to snap little details of the space, a corner here, the kitchen, the windows, my stains, my marks, the squalor, the memories, everything but the people. The twist of the staircase, the elevator's mirror, and even the garbage chute that for so long was the setting for a dangerous struggle between management and residents. I even buried a few corpses: behind the stove lies a photo of my brother and his skateboard as they fly over the trunk of my fathers car, launched off of a home made ramp back in 1981 as well as the piece of paper that David gave me with the story about his time spent filming an episode of Leave it to Beaver (the only detail that comes creeping out of the fog of memory is that he was a boy who did something bad and was talked to by a police officer - sweet, savory coincidence). Knowing they are there and consciously choosing to leave them seemed like the right thing to do. I can't help but worry about the things I might have forgotten...
To make the most of timing, the rolls of film were dropped off for development only just after handing over the keys that I held in my hand for all those years, so used to their jingle. My thought was that after relinquishing my physical ability to enter the place, I would only have left the photographs which would allow me a nonphysical way to enter the space.
The timing occurred instantaneously, the very moment I opened the first envelope of prints and realized that the roll that I had thought was only 2 months old happened to be more than 6 - it was the roll of film I had shot over Christmas, prior to my accident and well before even thinking of moving out. As I flip from photograph to photograph, I hear my name called and am forced to stop and enter into my first conversation on the street with my former neighbor, Olajuwon.
"Tragedy has struck 1082 Post!" he says, with a very sullen look on his face.
Being the narcissist that I am, I responded with something witty and over his head about how I was very sad to leave too, but that I am happier in my new apartment.
"No, no -- real tragedy! Do you know the man in the wheelchair?"
I looked down at my photographs, I was stopped midway through the roll and was holding in my hand the photograph of his empty wheelchair.
"Yes, I do. Oh god. Don't say."
Olajuwon said it: "He passed away. Just the other day. Right after you moved, or maybe on that day."
It stuck, it stuck right in my throat. I tried to cough it out but I couldn't. Instead, I just kept it to myself.
The photograph becomes something else entirely - the captured image, the captured feeling. Even a ghost! Yes, I think that is a ghost. If you look very close, so close that it all blurs out, well, then you might see it. Almost right in the direct middle of the photograph, along the top third, is a semi-transparent spirit, a fairy, a sprite. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is his ghost, with his chair, only 6 months before his death. I understand the light of this space, and I understand the way that the film would capture it, and after taking photographs in that very lobby for more than five years I can say that I have never caught an apparition-like non-entity before, and that's enough to convince me that the timing was just right. It's just a threshold to cross, that's all. One minute he's in his chair, the next minute his chair is dead, and a minute later - he is too. And, if all that death means is not inhabiting some little box any longer, then I think my timing is expired as well. Like David and The Gnome, my body is not peopling that space any longer and I have left something ghostly behind, perhaps. Timing, oh that ride.
