Written March 12, 2020

Ivan ran his fingers over the scraped varnish of the wooden bench. There were two sentences carved in small, clumsy capital letters in two different handwritings. One was a question, and the other an answer. 

“What are you most afraid of?”

“Living.”

The former was a strange inquiry for someone to have in their minds for a number of reasons. For one thing, it could not be responded to directly by another person. Additionally, the cause for such a question to be asked in the first place could not be easily traced. Was this person asking themselves? The world? Did this person know that someone would answer? And what compelled them to carve it into a bench in a train station? The writing was faint, but Ivan could not tell if this was because it had been there for a long time or because the person writing it was indecisive about whether the question should be asked.

The reply was even more muddling. Ivan could have guessed that someone in a train station would answer a simple question with something so profound it became sarcastic. Living. Whoever wrote the answer deserved respect for not saying something overused like “Dying.” Indeed, this answer was quite interesting. A cynic would dismiss it as physical proof that society was filled with bored people with nothing better to do than to answer another bored person’s silly question. A romantic would think the indirect transaction to be a bit poetic. Two lost souls speaking to each other across a void, expressing—in less than ten words—their deepest fears and sorrows. At the moment, Ivan did not feel the need to determine which side had merit. Perhaps it was a little bit of both.

“Hey, Ivan, what are you most afraid of?”

Ivan turned around. “Excuse me?”

“What are you most afraid of?”

Ivan had forgotten he was sitting with friends waiting for a train to the countryside of New York. This time the question was not carved into a wooden bench, but spoken by one of those friends.

“Why is that question becoming so popular all of a sudden?”

“What do you mean? Emma and I were just talking about our greatest fears.”

“Never mind, Celine.”

Celine was sitting on the other end of the bench. Emma sat to her right, and Ivan’s college roommate Paul sat to Ivan’s right.

A few seconds passed. “Well?” Celine persisted.

“Well what?” Ivan said as he opened a thick paperback book and unfolded wire-framed glasses.

“Nothing,” Celine huffed.

Ivan had the paperback open in his lap, but was not reading it. He was studying a piece of gum near his left thigh. It was gnarled and graying, but had still retained some pink coloring. If he looked closely enough, he could see a fingerprint on the smoother patches. Ivan wondered who left it behind, and if they were the same person who carved the question or answer into the bench.

“Living,” Ivan said abruptly.

“What?” Paul grunted after a moment. He had been fiddling with his phone case.

“Celine,” Ivan called.

Celine was talking to Emma.

“Celine,” Ivan repeated.

“Yes?”

“What if my answer was living?”

“Your answer to what, Ivan?” Celine asked, a small crease forming above her nose and between her eyebrows.

“To your question.”

The crease deepened. “Are you okay?” Celine said.

“I’m fine. I was saying it hypothetically. Don’t worry.”

More moments passed. Ivan thought about how many moments like those passed, and if they could be considered important after they had.

“I think it’s a pretty good answer,” Paul said.

Ivan took off his glasses and turned toward his friend. “Do you?”

“Well, yeah. Living is a good an answer as any. One could argue that it’s the best answer.”

“Why’s that?”

Paul appeared to be searching for words. “Let’s say you’re afraid of spiders. Spiders are life, so you’re afraid of life.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said pensively, “That’s a pretty big leap.”

“How so?” Asked Ivan.

“How can a spider equate to all of life?”

“How doesn’t it?” Paul asked.

“Because it’s only one thing.”

“I think Paul has a point,” said Ivan. “A spider may only be one thing, but lots of one thing can add up. You see what I mean?”

Emma thought about it. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that I’m afraid of life. I’m afraid of a few things in life, but not life. Not the big picture.”

“Are you afraid of death?” Ivan asked.

Emma smiled. “Of course.”

“Then you’re afraid of life, because an intrinsic aspect of life is how it ends.”

The friends looked into space for a brief time.

Celine broke the silence. “Pretty heavy stuff going through your head before a little train ride, Ivan. You sure you’re okay?”

Ivan ran his fingers through his hair and sighed, bringing his hand firmly down on his knee. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.” He looked at his watch, then leaned forward and squinted past the crowds of people at the grimy screens displaying arrival and departure times. “Paul, you know when our train leaves?”

Paul stopped fiddling with his phone case again and checked the time. “Not for another twenty minutes.”

“Why in the world did we come so early?” Ivan grumbled, sitting back on the bench. He watched the people passing by. Some were no more than half a foot away from his knees. None looked at him. Ivan looked at their eyes and the lines in their faces. He wanted to glimpse a piece of their lives, find a window into their reality.

He sunk down into the bench and let his eyes wander up the thick pillars caked with dirt and soot to the skylights of the ceiling. They were cracked and opaque from weather. He watched as a small bird flew into the station from a smashed skylight. It flapped its wings frantically, desperately, traveling from one end of the building to the other until, finally, it found the smashed skylight. The bird flew around the opening three times before making its escape.

The back of Ivan’s neck was getting sore from leaning against the rounded top of the bench. Heavily, he pushed himself up to a sitting position with the heels of his hands. A waft of sewage made its way to his nostrils. “Life moves too fast,” he said to no one in particular.

“Just a few minutes ago you wanted to leave,” Paul said.

“I changed my mind,” Ivan answered, smoothing his shirt. He looked at Celine and Emma. They were whispering to each other, glancing out into the crowd. He looked in the direction they were, but saw nothing.

Emma turned around. “Paul, Ivan,” she said, “There’s a strange man staring at us.”

“At you?” Paul frowned.

“At all of us. Look there.” Celine took Paul’s arm urgently and pointed, keeping her elbow folded close to her body.

Paul leaned forward, contorting his face as if it would help him see better. “Oh, yeah. The creep. Look at him, Ivan.”

Ivan looked. His view was blocked periodically by people walking by, but there undoubtedly was someone staring at them. The man, Ivan guessed, was in his mid-seventies. He stood in the very center of the train station. Everything about him seemed symmetrical. His posture was impeccable, his arms hung at his sides, much like his perfectly silver hair that had grown past his shoulders and his beard that grew the length of his torso. He wore a white shirt—the billowy linen kind with coconut buttons—and loose jeans that frayed at the ankles. The man’s appearance was so unusual, yet exactly what Ivan expected to see.

“What should we do?” Emma asked.

Ivan got up, keeping a steady gaze fixed on the man. “I’m going to go talk to him.”

Paul grabbed Ivan’s wrist. “Now wait a minute. I have a feeling you’re not going to give him a piece of your mind about the rudeness of staring.”

Ivan looked down at Paul. “No. No, I’m not, Paul. I just want to talk to the guy.”

“What are you going to say, Ivan?” Emma asked, falling into her nervous habit of wringing her fingers.

Celine looked down at Emma’s hands and pried them off of each other. She looked at Ivan. “Yes, what are you going to say? I don’t see the point of talking to a drug addict about the weather.”

“How do you know he’s a drug addict, Celine?” Ivan asked, massaging his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “You know what?” He said, not waiting for an answer. “This is ridiculous. I’m going to talk to the guy. He’s not going to attack me in broad daylight in the middle of a train station. Guard my stuff and don’t go anywhere. Call me if I’m still talking when it’s time to go.”

He made his way toward the mysterious man, weaving through the crowd. Ivan was afraid that if the man saw him, he would walk away or disappear. Thankfully, he did not do either. He was like a static mass in the midst of pandemonium, a beam of light in a dark abyss. Ivan had never felt so sure about something before in his life.

Finally, he found himself standing in front of the man. They blinked at each other for some time. Ivan did not know why, but he looked down at the man’s feet. And they were just that. They were not clothed in any way. Not in shoes, socks, or rags. Yet they were perfectly clean. Ivan could not put a finger on why this fascinated him so.

Then, the man spoke. His voice was not the thing that was extraordinary to Ivan. It was his manner of speaking. As if he was being slapped on the back after every utterance, or trying to speak before an upcoming hiccup, he would rapidly release a stream of words, stop, and repeat the process. “Who is your god?” The man said in one breath. 

It did not sound like a question to Ivan, so he did not reply.

“Who is your god?” The man repeated in the same hurried fashion.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Ivan said quietly.

“Who is your god?” The man repeated for the second time, the only variation a brief pause after the first word.

“I don’t know,” Ivan said.

Ivan was beginning to feel his surroundings melting away. Reality consisted only of the present moment. He was getting lost in the eyes of the strange man, hypnotized by his voice.

The man leaned closer. His face, previously lacking of any emotion, lifted in a smile. “Would you like to see him?”

Ivan opened his mouth, but no words left it.

Holding Ivan’s gaze, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a mouse in a handful of white rose petals. The men looked down at the mouse and up at each other in unison. Now the man was grinning.

Frowning, Ivan asked, “That is god?”

The man nodded excitedly.

“I don’t believe you,” Ivan said.

The man’s face sunk.

Ivan looked down at the mouse again. “Why should I believe you?”

The man frowned and reached into his other pocket. This time, he pulled out a packet of ketchup. He held his hands side by side, palms up. One held the ketchup, and the other, the mouse in the bed of petals. “Which is more divine?”

Ivan laughed. “What’s your name?”

The man shrugged. “Whatever you would like it to be.”

Ivan cocked his head. “You’re a very strange man.”

“If you must call me something, call me Poet.”

“Alright,” Ivan stuck out his hand, “Poet it is. I’m Ivan.”

Poet looked down at Ivan’s hand, but did not shake it. “I know,” he said.

Ivan kept his hand suspended in time and space for a moment before looking at it. He clenched and unclenched it as if to make sure his nerve endings still functioned, put it in his pocket, and looked up at Poet.

“Who are you?”

“Poet.”

“No. Who are you?”

Poet lifted his eyes to the skylight above them. “God.”

Ivan made a sound that was between a choke and a chuckle. He swallowed, but his mouth was dry. “You said the mouse was god.” Ivan looked down at Poet’s hands to see if the mouse and ketchup packet were still there, but they had disappeared. He still had his palms turned upward.

Poet slowly brought his eyes level with Ivan’s. He smiled, but not the ecstatic smile he had worn a few minutes before. This smile was thin and pale like a crescent moon. “Which is more divine?”

Ivan felt himself beginning to sweat. He was breathing shallowly through his partially open mouth. He turned his head in the direction of the bench where he left his friends, the bench with the question and answer carved into it. They had forgotten about him. They were talking about books and movies, or the trip to the country.

When Ivan turned back, Poet was gone. He swung his head in every direction, but found nothing. He glanced down at where Poet’s feet had been, and saw a small bird. It looked like the same one that had been searching for the smashed skylight.

Ivan watched as it moved with jerking motions, dipping and pecking at unseen nutrients, its black eyes swimming orbs nestled in delicate feathers. It was simultaneously mortal and immortal, nameless, meaningless, worthless. “Divine,” Ivan thought, and turned away smiling.

Poet © Safira Schiowitz