Читать книгу Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles - Kira Henehan - Страница 18

12

About the gravel, discussed only, if you’ll recall, cursorily quite early in the proceedings: It was no joke.

You may likely have thought, then, of the gravel one might find in somebody’s driveway in a rural community, or a vacant lot: vague scattered bits of stone, mostly dust really, covering a solid surface.

This gravel was not that gravel.

This gravel seemed to be covering nothing so much as more gravel. I don’t know a) how deep it went or b) what was below it, but my guesses would be a) deep and b) as already noted, gravel. Atop more gravel, atop marshland.

That’s how it seemed. To walk around atop this gravel was like walking in those dreams one sometimes has, where the walking one does can hardly be called walking at all. Those dreams where one’s legs seem to have lost all connection to the previously not-necessary-to-even-think-about-so-automatic-is-it mechanism attaching and coordinating the limbs and brain.

Or like how I would imagine it feels to be in one of those huge boxes of balls that they sometimes provide as an amusement for children at carnivals.

I have never, so far as I can surmise, been turned loose in one of those boxes, but I have seen the children wobble about, legs giving way under every step, and so can imagine at any rate the sensation.

There would appear to be nothing amusing about it.

The balls are perhaps less uncomfortable than gravel to thrash about in; nonetheless.

Although children evidently enjoy the chaos of such endeavors. I wonder why. Is it that their lives are generally more ordered than ours—told when to wake, brought to their various appointments and schools and recitals, read aloud to from books of someone else’s choosing, put to sleep at the proper times and so forth? Do the children who live less ordered lives perhaps not so much enjoy being plunked into the unstable world of a box of balls? The children of opium addicts, say, or gypsies? It might be something for someone to study sometime, perhaps in a report of their own if they find themselves so inclined; it however is beyond the realm of this particular account, which remains precisely and professionally focused on the matter at hand. I bring up the gravel simply to shed some light on certain realities. For instance: the difficulty we faced on an almost constant basis, in the most basic facet of locomotion; the shortness of temper at times displayed by certain members of our party; the perhaps unduly lethargic pace with which we carried out our Assignments.

But has that light been shed at all? I mean simply to suggest that in a well-ordered existence, one in which the various tasks of the various days are not so various at all but consistent, regulated, one might perchance decide that to dive willingly into a box of balls would be a fine and worthwhile endeavor.

I would not be that one.

I would not willingly dive.

I would not mind, however, getting into some stage-acting. This seems to me to be a perfect blend of the regulated and the chaotic: One is provided with a narrative, some lines of dialogue, some instruction on how to move about within an admittedly confined space among an admittedly limited cast of characters, all the while operating under a small amount of duress and uncertainty as to the outcome. This stage-acting thing, yes, I think I would not so much mind.

Which is, as it turns out, the only light that was needing to be shed in this extended descriptive passage, although I have perhaps managed to ink in the landscape a bit, which could certainly come in handy. At some point. For someone.