Slow-walking man

Five years ago. That was the last time I happened to be in this town. Back then it was my temporary residence as a result of an appointment I had at a research institute. Everyday I commuted by tram and spent a stimulating day at work. In the early evening, as I got off the tram at my final destination to walk the last ten minutes to my rented flat, I could always see the same beggar in front of the sliding doors of a local supermarket. A man in his forties, quiet, shy and serious, he never asked anyone for money. He just sat in a tiny folding chair in the company of a tiny old dog. The dog was as quiet as the man himself and was always sleeping on his lap. It was through my routine commuting I discovered that the man was frequently holding a notebook in his hands, where he wrote day in day out. Occasionally, when he was not writing, he would be reading a newspaper. A little box at his feet signalled the purpose of his presence. The coins it contained never seemed to amount to much. The man hardly interfered with the flow of people in the street, I never saw him actually begging, he seemed satisfied with whatever dough he made by just being there, reading or writing in silence. His presence was an immutable fact in the continuous succession of days and weeks, just as inevitable as sunset or dawn or the roller-coasting of the stock market.

Now I am back in this town again, doing the same research I was doing five years ago, collaborating with the same colleagues on similar topics. Still having fun. I just arrived today, early in the morning, after an unpleasant flight. I headed straight to the institute from the airport. I have not yet seen the hotel where I am staying or inspected the changes the city has undergone in the elapsed years. I am willing to start comparing.

Time has run slowly today but finally the hour to make for my hotel at the centre of town has come. Inside the tram a novel helps me to detach myself from the noise of the conversations that surround me. Vonnegut's Galapagos. I can read without being interrupted by those conversations. I take advantage of the fact that the language that reaches me is alien to me. It revolves around me as purely background sound that my mind does not care to interpret. I am focused on the book but as the tram approaches a specific spot along the tram line my mind sends me a warning message in anticipation of what may come next. It is then that I notice for the first time that this is something I was expecting. It just dawns on me. I had so far remained unaware at a concious level. I set my eyes off the book and turn my head right to look out the window. A little smile crosses my face as I see a familiar man sitting on a tiny chair before the doors of a supermarket, writing on a notebook, his good-old tiny dog sleeping on his lap.

The same town, the same tram, the same dog, and the same beggar. It is a remarkable fact that the routine of yesteryear keeps being routine today. It makes quite an impression on me that this lonely man is still guarding the entrance of a supermarket, as it were, begging in his quiet way, anything but begging-like. I have to conceal a prompt impulse to get off the train at the next stop and approach the man and talk to him. I keep on board instead, my eyes fixed on the man all along until he disappears in the distance when the tram makes a turn. I head towards my hotel, both amused and bemused from what I have just gone through. I stuff Galapagos back into my backpack, much too distracted now to resume my reading.

The hotel room is spacious, tidy and silent, despite the building is right at the heart of the city. I turn on the radio at low volume and tune it to a classical music station. The image of the beggar is fresh in my memory, as I take a shower to try to get rid of some of the fatigue from the day. After the shower I eat some fruit that I have bought at the cafeteria of the research institute. Such light dinner seems more than enough today.

On the next day, as I ride on the tram to work at an early morning hour, I fail to see the man by the supermarket door. I am still confused by the vision of the beggar. It so clearly brought back the memory of a few years ago, when I used to see him every single day, that the similarity of the situation turns those years nonexistent. At work I count the minutes to get back to the tram and head for the hotel. He sure is there at his place in the evening when I get back. I decide to get off the train and walk towards him. I had made up my mind to approach him and talk to him but the idea feels suddenly inapropriate once I can put it into practice. Instead, I get close enough to see him without being seen. I stop at a suitable distance and watch his actions. He is writing in his notebook, with the poise I most vividly associate with my recollections of the man. He uses a pencil and his movements are slow yet resolved, as if he were merely transcribing a text he had already laid out before in his mind. The pauses in his writing are scarce and only caused by his stopping to acknowledge the eventual person who leaves a coin or two in his box. I stay watching the man for quite a long time, the dog placidly sleeping on his lap all the while.

The first week goes by surprisingly fast. Day after day I get off the tram on my way to my hotel and approch the supermarket to watch the man sitting on a low folding chair by the door. I never have the nerve to talk to him. All I do is watch him write down words on a notebook or read a newspaper, like a spellbound spectator attending a fascinating show. His little dog is as quiet as him, in an almost continuous state of sleepiness. My periods of observation stretch a bit longer each day but I always leave the place before him and without interchanging a single word. At night I ponder over the meaning of his life and feel that my own confusion does not want go away.

At the research institute I seem to exist in a universe running parallel to the one in which my other self lives, the confused self which spends long hours every evening watching in awe the doings of a familiar beggar. The work I do during the day is leading to interesting results. A long-term colleague and I have recently put forward a new idea to reduce the amplitude of the unphysical oscillations that appear in numerical solutions of lattice QCD at finite density. It has been mostly his idea but he seemed to need my support to gain the final bits of confidence he needed to move forward. The hours pass unnoticed for the two of us as we discuss all implications of the idea, search for possible improvements, and implement it on a Monte-Carlo computer code. At least this methodical task helps to stabilise my thinking and keeps my mind away from the underlying confusion it lives in when I move along that other worldline.

Within the second week I carry on with the same routine monitoring the activity of the beggar. Not taking further action is becoming increasingly pointless and I decide to make a new move. As every other day, once I reach his usual spot the course of events follows the same eventless routine - the man writes in his notebook, the dog rests on his lap, the supermarket-goers get in and out the supermarket, the sliding doors tirelessly perform their mechanical task. Meanwhile, I watch all of this from a safe distance. This time around I am determined to stay longer. Presentely, the beggar picks up his belongings and leaves the place. I realize this is the first time in years I see him performing an action different from reading or writing. He moves down the street, pulling his chair in a little two-wheeled trolley and carrying his dog in his other arm. His walking is exceedingly slow, his steps short. I give him some distance and proceed to follow him.

The direction the beggar takes carries us away from the centre of town. Little by little the urban scenery changes as we gradually enter what looks like a more depressed area. This part of town is unknown to me. We have been walking for about an hour when the man stops. He seems to have arrived at his destination, a place which looks like some kind of public building. Still carrying the dog in his arms and pulling his trolley the man disappears inside the building. I approach the door. On the wall next to the door I find a small plaque which informs me that the complex is a nursing home for the elderly. I decide to stay outside for a few minutes to see if the man reappears. He does so only ten minutes later. He is now pushing a wheelchair which an old woman occupies. The dog dozes on the woman's lap.

His progress through the streets is now slower than before. About forty minutes after he left the nursing home he stops in front of a two-story building. He has reached home. He disappears behind the brown wooden front door of the house. The sky above is already dark. Street lampposts are few and far between and their light is dim and an ugly yellow. There is a doner-kebab shop across the street where I enter to keep the hints of hunger pangs at bay.

Back at the hotel I ponder about the pursuit that just took place. The beggar is not alone after all. He has not only his dog to keep him company. There is also an old woman he has to take care of. His life is not as simple as it seemed at first glance, despite the fixed routine he goes through every day. I let out a prolonged sigh. It seems it does not want to end.

On the next few days I have to leave the city due to some work-related commitments. All through my absence my mind keeps coming back to the beggar at the slightest opportunity. I attend meetings and see long term friends but I am longing to come back. During those few days away I become convinced I need to take a step further. On the evening of my return I proceed as usual. I reach his place before the supermarket doors a few minutes before he leaves, then I follow his slow-motion steps to the nursing home where he fetchs an old woman on a wheelchair and guides her to a two-story building opposite a donner kebab restaurant. They disappear behind the front door and I am left alone at the corner of a poorly illuminated street.

A smoggy rain starts to fall. I look at the windows of the building to find signs of human activity inside. No lights have been switched on after they came in. I let a few minutes go by and approach the front door. The light from a distant lamppost barely allows me to find no evidence of a doorplate. Hesitantly I try to push the door open. It is unlocked, and spreads open perhaps much too easily. I come in and close the door behind me without a sound. The interior of the house is in total darkness and I must let some time pass to get my eyes used to the absence of light. My heart is pumping fast and loud. After a little while I can start to recognize the interior of the house. A long corridor extends before me. The place seems to have no furniture. The kitchen on my right looks utterly empty save for the sink. As I walk quietly along the corridor I pass by a room on my left that has two armchairs, a low table and a mirror. I see my image reflected in the mirror, startling me. I reach the end of the corridor where a flight of stairs leads to the second floor. The muted sound of something being dragged on the wooden floor above my head reaches me. My mind tells me I should leave but an uncontrollable curiosity prevails. The light from the street sneaks into the house through the windows but it is barely sufficient to guide my steps. I sit against the balustrade and wait for complete silence to resume. After a while I start to climb up the stairs. Each step is followed by the creaking sound of the wooden floor. I am painfully aware of that sound and fear I may not be the only one. There seems to be only a single bedroom at the upper floor. Beads of cold sweat run down my back. My heart pumps so fast now it seems unreal. Time seems to have come to a halt. Before it finally freezes I manage to reach the door of the bedroom. It is partly opened and something inside me plucks up enough courage to let me look inside. The bedroom is irrationally large and as devoid of furniture as the rest of the house. At the far end there are two small beds on which the man and the old woman lay face upward. They both wear oxygen masks over their faces. Two storage tanks hum silently at the back of the room.

The Monte Carlo code my colleage and I wrote is giving excellent results. The unphysical oscillations have been reduced to negligible levels. We are wrapping up the results fast and will try to publish them as a rapid communication. My colleague is very excited. I am also excited but certainly not as much. I seem to have used up my quota of excitement with the events that go on along the parallel wordline I sometimes find myself in. A week has passed since I entered the house where the man goes to after his daily begging. I am yet unable to make sense of what I saw. The house is for the most part devoid of furniture, household objects are nowhere to be found, the kitchen shows unmistakable signs of never being used. If that were not strange enough, the image of the man and the old woman wearing oxygen masks in their sleep defeats all explanation. I find nothing better to do than to continue with the mere contemplation of the man in front of the supermarket and to follow him on his thereabouts towards the nursing home and the two-story building. All days proceed like that. There is no change in the routine of the man. Neither in mine for that matter.

One warm evening towards the end of spring routine suddenly twists. The beggar is no longer at his spot. He does not appear in front of the supermarket. At first I think I have arrived much too late and he has already left. Not quite. I took the same tram I take every day and I arrived at the place at my usual time. There was nothing unusual on what I was doing. Only the beggar has vanished.

Not finding him reading and writing in his chair leaves me uneasy. There was no anticipation for this change in the course of events. His absence, as far as hints suggest, seems to be the first in years. The look in the faces of some shoppers shows they are also surprised to not find the familiar scene the beggar and his sleeping little dog display daily. There is no need to wait in the distance. I get closer to his spot. I stare at the pavement in the precise place where he uses to sit. I seem to be waiting for an indication on the pavement that may explain his absence. Unlikely.

The same happens on the days to come. The man is gone. The beggar is suddenly no longer following the routine he had this far so regularly followed. His fixed procedure has been shattered and with it my own balance seems at stake. I ask a few customers. Some of them seem as startled as I am not to find him at the entrance door. Some give me funny looks.

On the tenth consecutive day of prolonged absence I decide to walk to the two-story house he lives in. Just as the beggar has vanished without a trace I discover that the building is also gone. I stop dead in my tracks. All that remains in the place of the house is an empty plot where a few stray cats wander about. It is as the man had never existed, as if he were a product of my imagination. The man, his house, the sleepy tiny dog, the old-woman on wheelchair, it all seems to have just vanished into thin air. A wire fence encloses the area. There is a note attached to it. The place is for sale. A telephone number is bound to provide further details.

During the following days I find myself thinking about the beggar more often than ever before. I cannot seem to take him out of my mind. I am maniacally thinking about him. His disappearence has left me tense and anxious to the point that I sense people at work beginning to notice that something is the matter with me. Helplessly, I stop at the tram station and walk to the supermarket day after day. Every time without exception the man is no longer there. Reality starts to lose significance. It becomes difficult to tell what is important from what is not. My own existence has been turned upside down.

There is no point in waiting any longer. I phone the real estate agent. A cheerful secretary answers the phone and gives me an appointment for this very same afternoon. I research what has happened. The old woman died and her son vanished. Nobody knows where he is. Nobody has claimed him missing to the police either. It was her desire to tear down the house after her death. Her son was living off her pension. Nothing of value was found in the house but a large collection of notebooks stuffed below the matress of one of the two beds. For lack of a better use they have been given to the modest library of the residence for the elderly where the man took his old mom every day.

The end of my stay in this town is approaching. It does not seem to matter anymore. I am confused as to where I belong to. The date to leave becomes nothing but a meaningless number, a commitment of no importance, minor, irrelevant. I know what I have to do. The anticipation of the outcome hides a somber truth. Still I know that I have to do it. There is no risk. There is no danger. I look at the ceiling of my hotel room. It seems I have been sleeping in this room for eighty thousand years. I can feel its weight on my chest.

I spend the following days going through the array of notebooks. The personnel of the nursing home has allowed me to use their library. I have stopped going to work. At midday, two members of staff eat their lunch at the library table. After lunch they invite me to a cup of tea and we have a bit of small talk. They do not ask me about my interest in the notebooks. I do not ask them about the old woman and they do not bring that topic in the conversation either. They are surprised by the large amount of notebooks their patient's son managed to write. They do not seem in the least interested in reading them. Every one of the notebooks has a date on the first page which indicates when the writing started. They are neatly displayed on a shelf in chronological order and this is the way I proceed to read them. The very first one dates from the days when the beggar was only a young man. From page one I am totally absorbed in the reading.

The notebooks tell the story of a man who spends day after day looking at the actions of a beggar. The plot diverts along multiple recognisable paths, and is remarkably filled with details. There is no irony nor humour, there is nothing trivial or inconsequential either, there is just the perfect amount of layers and thickness. The reading grasps my mind tightly, and along the process my own self becomes unmistakably hollow - for lack of a better word to describe the profound alteration it undergoes. The beauty of the discourse is unprecedented to anything else I have read before. The finest drawings can be found all through the text every so often. Towards the end of the week my emptiness seems complete. I am as detached of myself as I could possibly be. I'm nothing but a lost, vacant, distant memory. The address of a local graveyard is written at the very last page of the last notebook.

I often dream about the man. I visit his house in my dreams. The darkness is complete. I am surprised by the reflection of my own stare in the mirror. The wooden stairs creak as I climb to the upper floor. Oxigen masks lay on the two beds upstairs but there is no one in the room. I hurry to leave the house only to find that the exit door has vanished.

Days later I walk to the address written in the notebook. It is the address of a small church, not far from the two-story house where the man and his old mother lived. The gates of the building are closed. My quest must have had a purpose and it may be taking a more definite shape inside my altered hollow mind. Aimlessly I stroll around the yard. A few tombstones are randomly scattered at the backyard of the church. I look at the inscriptions on the stones. Anonymous names. A crow descends from a nearby tree and lands on the top of a gravestone in the corner. It makes a raucous cry as if calling my attention. I move towards the grave. The crow remains on the stone and stares at me as I approach. It does not seem to mind my proximity. The grave in front of me is plain and simple. Its stone bears a short inscription - "Mr. N., walked slowly". In a split second the thought strikes me that I would have written "slow walker". I decide on the spot that "walked slowly" is far superior. The awkward finding of the beggar's grave does not escape me but presently this minor sintactic detail is the only aspect of the scene that bothers me.

I'm sitting on a bench some ten meters away from the grave. One hour has passed. My mind is no longer confused. I experience the most pleasant feeling of emptiness. It has descended from somewhere far above in the sky to bring me into a state of seamless calm. The beggar's dog appears from behind the grave. It sniffs my shoes and performs an agile jump to lay on my lap. It falls asleep in an instant.

I walk slowly towards the supermarket, carrying the dog in my arms. I reach my spot. I sit on a folding chair and read familiar notebooks.