I must keep climbing, he thought. But this time there was a gap between the “I” and the “must.” Behind the white tapestry of snowy space, “I” was still a word that made sense; “must” was a vague command from somewhere else and was as useless as the sunglasses that pressed against his forehead. “I” was still here, on this steep slope blanketed with fog; “must” was drifting away with the wind.
He was tired; he had to sit down, to rest. Perhaps he should even take off the skis and lie down, if only for a moment. He had not allowed himself to panic about the pain he felt under his left arm. His heart had lost its rhythm just once or twice, and at this altitude, with the temperature so low, the winds surging upward at him, a slight tremor was to be expected in a man of his age. Alone in the storm, cold and tired, he deserved a rest.
He always did everything as well as he could, he thought, and if he fell short of his own mark, he worked to improve himself. He once saw a black man, all alone in a Broadway arcade, dressed in rags, playing a ball-and-ramp game and registering the highest score with each roll. Levanter started to play the game at another ramp, but after several attempts still could not score even the lowest number. He went over to the black man and asked if he could pay him for a lesson: he wanted to learn to play the game well, he said.
The black man laughed. “This game?” he asked. “What would you want to learn this game for? Nobody plays this game anymore!”
“You do,” said Levanter, “and you get the best score every time.”
“I sure do, man, I sure do!” The black man kept laughing as he rolled one ball after another, each ball finding its target easily. “But this game is all I know. So I play it because it makes me feel real good to know how well I play it. But you, man, what would you want to play it for?” He kept glancing at Levanter, his face full of joy, while his hand picked up each wooden ball as it rushed at him from under the ramp, his arm bent, then extended, and he released the heavy ball for another perfect score. He continued to laugh, pleased with himself and pleased that Levanter kept watching him play his game.
Levanter could not catch his breath. The icy wind filled his lungs. He grew confused; drowsily he covered his face with his arms. He had been scoring quite well in the games he played, he reflected, although, like the black man, he knew there were few others who would ever want to learn to play his game. The game was good to him, made him want to play it, yet even a solitary player needs his rest. He leaned on his poles, but the wind threatened to knock him over. He sank down and turned his face away from the wind. Slowly he reached toward the bindings; they were frozen but he managed to open them. He put the skis beside him; his knees and ankles suddenly invited to regain their movement.
He was lucky, he thought, to find this shell of a slope to rest in. The storm might be rolling past him right now, and he might as well sleep through it. Soon the sun would be on him, warming his body as it melted the white walls of this frozen vault.
His rest was not a surrender to the storm, he thought; his striving continued even when he rested. He no longer felt circulation in his legs or hands. To guard the little heat his body had conserved, he unzipped his parka and pulled it over his head. His chest felt tight, gripped by a vest of ice. His heart started to rebel, one beat following another over a block of silence. The ice vest tightened, locking his chest, but as he drifted off to sleep, he thought how snug a bed of snow could be.
Slowly, he began to realize that the cold he felt was of no more concern to him than the heat had been that day in Palm Beach when his friends wondered if it was too hot to stay outdoors. He did not mind the heat. He was observing a young boy on the beach. The boy had wanted to hear a story Levanter had started to tell him. But the boy’s mother, an anxious American divorcée, and her suitor, a boring Briton, disapproved of what Levanter was telling the child. They did not want the boy to listen to such stories, they said; he was to enjoy the sea and not to talk to strangers again.
The boy obeyed. He got up and slowly walked toward the ocean. He stood in the knee-deep water. When a wave rolled toward him, he assumed a fencing position and cut at it with an invisible sword. The wave washed by, lapping against the shore. When the next wave came in, he hit it twice before it flattened, foaming at his feet. Like a fencer frozen in a pass, he let the next wave swell on the sand toward him, and then the next. The waves deposited their foam on the steamy sand, one after another, one after another, and the boy, his back to Levanter, watched them mindlessly.
Jerzy Kosiński, Blind Date
(Series: # )
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