In this town, there is only one road. If you drive over the thirty-five mile an hour speed limit, you would surely miss all of the landmarks of this little place called home.
You would miss the duck pond and the gas station, the grocery store and the school; you would even miss the little candy shop on the corner that sells the jawbreakers that swirl colors in kaleidoscopic patterns. Red yellow green blue orange red I watch the colors spin in and out and finally I become so impatient, so longing to see the tree-ring configuration of the nucleus of this little piece of candy, that I crack it in half with my teeth and then examine my tongue in the mirror, coated in vibrant color and looking so unordinary—so unique.
Spectacles are rare here, and people flock in primal fashion when there is one to be seen. The crowd quickly forms a ring around their scene. Chalk patterns of equations and formulas distend themselves across the pavement in intense neon patterns, and mathematical algorithms ornament the once mundanely black street.
He mutters frantically to himself, “C, product of sigma five squared…negation… secant—negation!...Linear…log 55 base 3…derivative…products—solution is thick… viscous solution, molasses solution…delta…inertia, twenty-three thousand more dead! We will fight the war with guns but our minds shall win it!...It is all sophistry to them and it will be their end!”
His chalk is flying across the pavement. His car lies abandoned in the center of the road, door still swung wildly open, his coffee long ago turned cold.
“Pragmatic!” he shouts. “Dogma! It rules you, but if you would only look you might for once see!”
The crowd’s whispers have tuned themselves to a higher pitch more fraught with worry than curiosity. Parents shield their children from the theories he has splayed across the road. His hands are coated in dusty residue.
“Listen to me!” he rages as he stands and swings his arms in furious gestures. “Why won’t any of you listen to me?” he asks, desperate.
His wild eyes efficiently calculate the crowd as its droning swells. There is fear in them. There is a delicate equilibrium in this town. When winter comes and the lake freezes over, five men come and carry the ducks away to a nameless place until the ice thaws and there is water once again. It upsets them.
“Do you not see?” he shouts as he kneels on the ground. “Why can’t any of you see?” There are tears now as he grips his hair and sobs into his arms. His equations smear. They blur and are obscured.
They have come for him. The buzzing dies down and a familiar calm solidifies itself within the crowd. They drag him away but his body is lifeless and his feet and legs drag listlessly.
“I just wish that one of you could see,” he says, as they pry the chalk from his hand and push him into their car.
I do not know where they will take him. Perhaps they will take him away with the ducks. He may be brilliant but we will never know.
There is an imminent rain that will wash the tar clean again. There will be an irrefutable return to familiarity, but I will wait until the ice begins to thaw.
I will wait for his return.
