From: derek
Date: Sun Feb  1 00:12:58 MST 2004
Subject: The Blind Man and the Etch-a-Sketch

The Blind Man and the Etch-a-Sketch a short story by Derek Hugen, 1-31-04, written at Bentley's Coffeehouse The bells will ring in about ten minutes for him to pray. He sits up in bed and his eyes start to collapse again. It had been a long night filled with strange dreams. Now the bed and the walls and that small chest in the corner all seem surreal and distant. It's like staring into a Salvador Dali painting knowing that something is wrong with it but being unable to concentrate to know what it is. His heart beats within his chest. The silence of the room echos softly in a low hum of reverb. The first thing that comes to him is an image of a herd of pigs slopping full-speed through a lake and some man with power on the shore pointing. Pointing. Nothing more. The pigs understand this in a way that words would cheapen and never explain. A man with power. What did he look like? Muddled hair and a dirty robe as seen from behind. The man on the bed cannot rotate this view in his mind. Then the thought comes in a creeping cold and dark reflection. What if it is only this snapshot? What if the camera were to change its angle, and it turned out to be only in those two particular dimensions and it all disappeared? What if these years of belief had just been cheap? He fell back into the bed. He wanted to bury himself there. Just because he could not see it, doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was logical, he supposed. It was those people in the room with the elephant. How did that go? One had to be blind. Maybe all of them are. He sits up again. He is having a crisis of faith and he is trying to answer it with an analogy he can't even remember the ending to. It was like the beginning of a bad joke, really. A group of blind men in a room with this elephant. . . What would the punch line be? "Time to get a new watch," he speaks aloud for no real reason. What does all this mean? He remembers a few fragments of dreams either from this morning or whenever. The fragments float through his consciousness like a semi-translucent jet stream then kicks out just before he recognizes them. It was vanity on his part. Why else would you walk into this place? A place where your job description is poverty and celibacy? It had to have been vanity. Step out into nothingness alone. No, he had God with him. But God probably had better things to do then to sit with him in his cell. God did stuff like running marathons or performing at those revival things or playing instruments for musicians when they called out high from work. The cell is useless. Meditation and solitude are for clowns who can't do mime. He sits in his bed and has his head buried in his hands. What if Jesus is two-dimensional? What if he is one of those old etch-a-sketch things with the two knobs and the slider. The ones where if you start to shake it the entire magnetic balance of the universe would shift into some perpendicular alternate version of reality. Then the picture you had screwed up would fade back into the nothingness from where it had come, and you would be left with a black stupid nothing to stare at until you finally would manipulate the knobs to draw it back again. He had an etch-a-sketch as a kid and had loved the thing. Now he had trouble seeing the point of it. What if Jesus is like an etch-a-sketch? The bells finally sound, echoing through his cell and through his mind. It breaks him from further contemplation. He stands up and looks at the room. He remembers the story he had been meditating on the day before about the demons being cast into pigs. He looks at the simple beauty of his cell and smiles widely, then opens the door and walks down the long hallway toward the chapel.

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