1.
His body was stiff when he woke. He winced as he pulled himself to a seated position and glanced around. The sun was high already, the streets choked with traffic. The clack of rollerblade wheels on sidewalk rang loud in his ears.
He'd dreamed of the blank apartment again, its walls like dingy snow. And the pale man in white, sitting on a crimson velvet chair, retelling his only story. The darkness, the boom boom, and the fear.
Already the dream melted, like a skin of ice on a sunlit puddle. He remembered the voice, soft and jerky as though automated. He remembered the man naming himself Peter Stillman, Peter Rabbit, Mr. White, Mr. Green.
Green sounded good to him. He would be Mr. Green today. He would match the leaves on the bushes and trees.
The thought pleased him. In another few months he would need to become someone else, of course—Mr. Rust, or perhaps Ochre. Colonel Mustard. He chuckled, scaring away a pigeon.
But for today he would be Green. Green, remembering White.
That's right: he was looking for Mr. White. The towhead who spoke God's language was in the city somewhere, Green was sure of it. Brushing bits of refuse off the seat of his pants, he rose, and took his first steps of the day.
He wasn't certain where he was going, but once his body warmed up, he walked as though he were. He knew the power of behaving as though something were true.
2.
The city is a library, and each person in it a book with missing pages. If you look with the right eyes at the throngs swirling beneath the constellated ceiling of Grand Central Station, you can read snatches of stories as they pass each other by.
The woman in the dove-grey suit and pearl-pink camisole thinks there's been a mistake. Something is missing; she feels this keenly. At this very moment she swerves around a man carrying a black leather briefcase, who is slurping a pumpkin spice latte and trying to remember the periodic table. They don't collide.
The man selling trinkets, fake African antiques made from balsa wood and shoe polish, is taciturn because no one here has ever sought his truth.
The man haggling with him over a Christmas gift is anxious, afraid the gift won't be enough, already flipping ahead to the part of the book where he's drinking whiskey alone. He fumbles for a twenty.
The three children riding the subway alone for the first time don't yet know what kind of books they are yet. They're outlines, all setup and foreshadowing.
The oldest, who is twelve, thinks she would like to be a tale of adventure. She imagines a cadre of reporters drinking martinis by the pool at a Beirut hotel. They will have more stories than they could possibly tell. She doesn't know what a martini tastes like, but she pretends.
No one can be translated. No one knows her own ending.
3.
It is said that in the moments immediately preceding death, one's entire life scrolls past. Stillman had never believed this, and was surprised to discover that in the instant between his leap from the Brooklyn Bridge and his contact with the water, time slowed.
He didn't relive factual details of his life. Not his marriage, nor the birth of his son, nor even the morning he'd woken to a dead wife and an empty pill bottle. He remembered ideas.
Man's first disobedience, and the fruit. Adam bestowing names, calling forth essences. The word "cleave," which means both "to join together" and "to break apart."
Babel, the shattering of linguistic unity. God's response to hubris. How the mere sight of the Tower's ruins could make a man forget everything he'd known.
How desperately he'd wanted to recover latent innocence. John Dark had prescribed forty days and nights in silent darkness. Of course, there had never been a John Dark, not really.
Time had moved differently in Biblical days, anyway. Forty is the number of fruition, the weeks between conception and parturition, the days between planting and harvest. If only he could have kept his son pure and unsullied through that cycle of fullness.
Tracing the sidewalks with his feet, like a scribe's quill wearing invisible grooves into the parchment of the city. Telling his son he could die happy.
But had that really been his son? The question plagued him, and suddenly he wished desperately that he could undo his fall.
4.
When Green can't sleep, he distracts himself with lists. Tonight he begins with his own name—if it really is his name. He suspects that it is not.
It's not easy being green, he thinks, remembering a snatch of the song. Green is the color of earliest leaves, at the raw start of spring, so bright they hurt the eyes. There is the green of ripe zucchini, so deep it verges on black. There is the green of conifers, fir and pine and spruce, leaning forlorn against a chainlink fence four days before Christmas.
There is the green of money, crisp or faded. The green of bananas picked too soon, and the green inside a kiwifruit. There are green frogs of many gradations, some poisonous and some benign. There are green beans and green design. There are humid greenhouses.
Green is the color of Islam. Green is the color of envy, and of sickness. There's the green of a stoplight saying "go." Green is the color of the Lantern, the Arrow, the Goblin. The green light in Gatsby, representing idealized past and unattainable dream.
There are green politicians, and greenhorns. Grass green, and Greenpeace. Some parrots are green. Caterpillars. Preying mantises. The small lizards that dart across windows and walls in high summer in the southern resort town where he vacationed once, in a former life.
In the Middle Ages, green represented evil beings, including dragons. Sometimes green represented love.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, he remembers, green stood for hope.
5.
Most important of all, to remember who I am. To remember who I am supposed to be.
It's been a long time since I ran out of pages. But I've learned to get by without them. I don't need to ration my speech anymore. It's okay now if I write words on top of other words. No one minds a little glossolalia.
To remember what it feels like to wear other people's clothes. I was a married man once, and a father. I was a widower. I was William Wilson, whom no one had ever seen. I had a typewriter, and a favorite highball glass. I liked how the chip at its edge glinted, made it different from its fellows.
Being me wasn't always comfortable, but I bore it patiently. I learned to sleep in increments. I was a man on a mission. I was Fanshawe. I was Max Work. I was a private I.
No one noticed me. I had nothing to fall back on but myself.
In my dreams I am king of the hill, standing atop a mountain of rubbish. I am a man for all seasons. I have the same initials as Don Quixote. I'm not sure who I'll be when I wake.
I become aware of the details. I learn to read strangers' stories in the tilt of their heads, the cast of their eyes. I name everything I see.
I am the narrator of every story. Every word in every language is my name.
The End