"Did I fall?"
The day was bright and sunny. Several young children were playing with a ball in the modest playground. The ball was a soccer ball, but it was meant as a toy for children to throw to each other. The ball flew from one child to another, increasing their expectation that it would fall. If the ball fell on the side of one of the boys, that boy was given a penalty that prevented him from playing one round until the other child lost.
By and large, the game was not very interesting, but the boys enjoyed playing it, even if their arms got tired from the endless tossing of the ball in the air. A fun, carefree childhood that passes in passing, with no possibility of repetition. Repeating the game, of course, is possible, but experiencing the feelings gained as a child from such activities is beyond the power of any adult.
This was the cycle of Glenn's life, not wanting to grow up because it only brings problems and nothing more. His unsettled life, full of joy in childhood and only regret in later life, was a burden from the weight of which anyone could fall to his feet, hesitating whether to move on.
A lone child, seemingly fleeting in appearance, with dark eyes, stared at the children nearby. And who could look at him, alienated? That's why he walked alone, unaccompanied by his young peers.
Even from the outside it was obvious that the game the boys were playing was the most boring of the kind, but the fragile hands of the dark-eyed boy trembled, longing to join in and feel the pain in his palms as he tossed the ball. A childish, ridiculous lust for which the six-year-old boy with the dark hair had a whole soul.
Glenn was standing next to this child, and the child seemed to sense the young man's presence. It was as if Glenn seemed invisible, though he was actually standing there, looking at the boy. On reflection, he realized that he was in the abyss of his time-forgotten memories, and he assumed that he would have to review the rest of his past, up to and including passing out in front of his friends, the members of the literary club.
He thought that now his body might either be in a critical state, or it might be his last seconds of life, before fading away. With a wave of his hand, the guy realized how awake his body had been in a conscious dream.
"Distant past?" he looked closely at the boy standing to his left. With a smirk, Glenn wondered why he hadn't been able to talk to those boys then, but just continued to stand on the sidelines.
Glancing around the circle, the first thing he noticed was that the surroundings had a much different infrastructure than the Tokyo one he was accustomed to. This courtyard was one of hundreds of others in small Berlin neighborhoods, where the tenants knew each other and interacted with each other in a friendly tone, soon showered with happy rumors received from hearing about this or that tenant.
Most friendly to all his neighbors and to the tenants of the neighboring blocks was the father of the dark-eyed boy, about whom there was perpetual pesky news in the neighborhood that in his work as a surgeon he had managed to save one man's pancreas and some other organ of another. Among all the others, he seemed the perfect, literally exalted man from heaven, with his one smile bringing the county to a rapid flourish.
Little Glenn turned toward the road and walked away, thinking deeply about his fear of talking to strangers, even peers.
"This place isn't ablaze with fire," Glenn continued to peer into every quietly peaceful corner of the five-story apartments as he followed the boy. "I seem to be seeing things now that I could remember back then, before my father died."
In slow steps they moved aimlessly along the empty sidewalk, and the boy's eyes dared not rise, examining only his feet. His ears heard footsteps approaching ahead of him, and the boy lifted his gaze and was surprised to find a man from him whom he could not then have thought of meeting — the tall and slender figure of his father appeared before him, smiling in his direction.
"Out for a walk?" his innocent, calm voice came out, striking the ears of both the boy, whose eyes immediately sparkled, and of Glenn, who had not seen his father in person in nearly a decade. Glenn involuntarily opened his mouth, losing his composure, and his thoughts were only occupied by the presence of a grown man of thin build and shiny blond hair with a neat haircut.
"Yes."
"Hmm? Is something upsetting you, son?" the father didn't take his blue eyes away, waiting warmly for his son's answer. "Did your friends hurt you?"
"I wasn't offended by anyone. Father… why aren't you at work?"
Scratching the back of his head, his father answered gleefully that he was obliged to take today off from work. Following that, he ducked his head toward the low-slung boy.
"Who do you spend time with outside?" he asked, and Glenn averted his eyes to the side. Stroking his dark hair, his father added, "It's okay if you don't have any yet. It's easy to make friends at your age; you'll see, your peers will come running to play with you.
"I don't want any friends," Glenn pouted deceptively, and soon laughed when he saw the amused monkey grimace his father made to cheer his lonely son up.
"Then," the father rose, removing his palm from his smiling son's head, "don't you want to play with Father on the playground?"
The boy gleamed a beam of light, and shook his head relentlessly.
"Please, Father!"
Nodding, he took his son to one yard, which contained a sandbox, and played "building towers" with him. Sure, his father's neat pants got a little dusty, but that was the price of his son's joyful mood. Glenn, with shaky eyes watching them from the sidelines, seemed both saddened and happy. His father's smile, his snow-white teeth, and his warm look were a fragment in the young man's life that he had arbitrarily chosen not to forget since childhood.
They rode the swings, talking about the essentials, spinning on the shallow merry-go-round, and falling down the short slide. Sometimes their games could be seen by the neighbors, which made him feel uncomfortable, but they only looked at him with amused looks, just like in the movies at the sight of a landmark.
His heart was at peace at the sight of his son's happy dark eyes, rejoicing in such seemingly carefree things, but his father wished that these weekdays would last forever for the boy, for in the future he, like everyone else, would no longer be able to afford such joy.
"Enjoy your weekdays more often," he muttered, causing a shapeless question mark to appear on the boy's head. "When you grow up, son, your thoughts will be occupied with entirely different things."
"In that case, I'll never grow up!" the boy straightened up haughtily. "And there won't be any adult problems."
His father was shaken by this answer.
Glenn saw a past he wouldn't have remembered at all, and found himself glad for his father's concern, at that moment trying hard to teach his six-year-old the makings of adulthood and the many facets of adult life. In his current life, he wanted only one thing, to meet the times he had previously considered reckless, to leave in his memory.
When they heard footsteps near them, they turned to meet the ball kids that little Glenn had been looking at earlier. He was instantly uncomfortable when their eyes met, but his father, sitting on the swing with him, took hold of his son's hands.
"We see you around a lot," one of the boys said, "but we never got to see eye to eye."
After presenting the boy with the ball, they asked him to play with it. The father cracked a smile.
"I want to play with Father," Glenn cringed, making his father chuckle.
"Then let's add a sixth player! Uncle, would you mind joining us? We're playing ball."
The dark-eyed boy looked back at his thoughtful father.
"No," the father smiled back at them, and turned to his son and encouraged him to play with them.
"You won't go play…?"
"I'll watch you play and cheer for you, son. That's all right!"
"Then… watch me play!"
Dad nodded. Where would he go — he's supposed to protect his son from all sorts of things: trouble, excessive aggression, and impatience. Accompanying his father in his son's life, in his opinion, was considered the best support he could offer.
"Regardless," Glenn muttered to himself, invisible to the rest of us, at the sight of the boys playing ball and a joyful father, "which is totally inappropriate for a ball game, we had fun playing. Don't I think I felt a real euphoria at the time, having a relationship with unknown people for the first time?"
In the light of dusk, which enveloped the whole neighborhood with the evening scent, the boy who was in the house finished his supper. It was one of the following days.
"Mommy!" he called out to the woman who was humbly wiping the plates from the finished meal near the countertop. "Where is Father now?"
"He should be in the attic right now. Just don't bother him — he's working!"
"Uh-huh!"
By attic they meant a small room reconstructed into a private room for Dad, where his desk was with tons of papers in the corner. Glenn's mother was as young as his father: they were in their thirties and tails at the time. Mom, who had delighted people since birth with her attractive Asian appearance and dark hair, was a wonderful cook and an excellent financier at her job. She always returned in the early evening after a long day at work, but her son never saw her tired — she hid her impotence from him, lest the boy inadvertently learn the habit of getting tired for no reason.
Their house was two stories high, which was a rarity for an apartment, but it did not attract the faces of its guests with much modernity, trying to seem remarkable only for its modesty.
Opening the door of the room, the boy saw a quiet father sitting at his desk, writing something on papers. The attic was saturated with sloppiness all around, but it was the kind of approach that made his father comfortable. The room was lit by a single yellow lamp on the table. Turning his head toward the boy, his father removed his glasses.
"Father… how are you?"
At the time, Glenn didn't know what his father's job was, but he was always fascinated by his activities at his desk.
"I can see it in your eyes, son: you're eager to hear something that interests you."
"And what is your occupation? I haven't had to find out before…"
Setting his glasses on the table, my father uttered: "I see. I'll tell you," which made the young man's attention sharpen against the wall by the door.
Comfortably seated on the couch, the father began to tell his son about the work of a surgeon and a doctor, showing examples the boy was capable of understanding.
"So your job is to save people!"
The father only nodded, reflecting on Glenn's positive reaction.
"That's strange, isn't it, since you have to help for free!"
"My job is not only to help, but to save lives, too. For example, we can use an iron stick to heal any wounds in a matter of minutes!"
"Come on!" the son was interested in his father's work, flashing his eyes, which made the father confused. He had no way of knowing that his son would enjoy such an area of work.
Deciding not to dwell on brief explanations, at his son's request he began to talk about the hardships of life as a surgeon, etc.
It was only after dozens of minutes of talking about the same subject that the boy reluctantly fell asleep in his father's lap. The light from the light bulb reflected off the chain around the blond man's neck, whose eyes were closed with fatigue. No one dared to disturb them, and the time they spent together remained untainted by malice, only covered by the family warmth that was lacking in the young man who turned to his father, who soon fell asleep.
"How could I have forgotten," Glenn snuggled closer to his father, "that the care you have given me has succeeded in making me into the kind of person I suppose you would not want in your life. By no means can I blame you for my foolishness, Father…" the young man seemed remorseful. "All this time I thought your look was cold to me. How could I have forgotten your concern, Father?"
Outlines of dark smoke crawled out of the room's open door, which gradually crawled around all corners, enveloping the surroundings in colorlessness.
"All this time the question has been troubling me: did you, Father, put nothing before your work? Your determination to save people had boundless dimensions of ambition, which I fortunately came to inherit. But didn't… my mother do anything about it? At least some kind of compromise — did she try to find a different outcome to the circumstances? I can't remember the truth, so I don't think I'll ever know it… Why did you, Father, have to hide your life commitments from me…?"
The darkness that filled the whole room and all around except the young man reincarnated into a boundless cosmos in which the purple colors of galactic dust and the bright colors of millions of unseen stars reigned, and the Milky Way itself shone before his face. These expanses reminded him of the versatility of human life, and the questions that Glenn had been digging for answers for nearly a decade headed his current consciousness. The stars of the Milky Way cycled one after another, forming glowing rings.
"Did you suspect then that our father — son communication would turn out to be the communication of two suicide bombers?"
As he nonchalantly glanced around the galactic expanse, he noticed that he was floating in the air, not feeling the surface beneath him. The Milky Way was still floating on its steady course, combining both whole orbits and human values: greed, lust, concern for loved ones, opinions, and striving for the best.
"I wish I knew before I died what you really wanted, Father."