Short Story / The Observer

The world inhered around me, and I looked on.

I was there, of course, right there, in the world. I was part of it all. And yet I felt no closer to any of the stuff around me than a child feels to a kaleidoscope. Dazzling, melting forms—but separate. To look, to see everything—everything!—but not to touch. I was, in a word, an observer. First an infant, then a boy, a man, all the while encased in glass. Deprived from the warmth of life, like a thing in a museum. To see, mostly, and sometimes to be seen, but never to be, in the fullest sense of that word.

In my spring I appeared, just as the world was unfurling from its great white sleep, stretching out with a songful yawn, like a cat before the day. Where there had not been any me before, now there I was. In the same way those tenuous green tips poke, at first tentatively, through the black topsoil—first they are not, and then they are—breathing in life, gently, earnestly as they look upwards in awe at the sun, so did I emerge from primordial blackness into the sunlit world.

The days grew longer, a little warmer, brighter; the plants grew taller, a little greener, fuller; and I grew along with them. I began like any other plant: first a notion, a slight distension, now white, a node, a budding growth, a flood of color pouring forth. In this way I walked in step with the other children, but our steps diverged quickly, for I could not walk with them in the same way they walked with each other. They marched and melded, intertwined; they giggled and tickled and laughed; they hugged and ran, rolled and jumped, lolled and swept and scampered. Once I noticed it, this cosmic motion, I could see that I was, somehow, separate from it. Where they were all together, I was apart. Their minds were one, a mass whirling and sublime, but I was not with them: Mine was stagnant, over here. I didn’t understand it. I tried to join their games and dances, but there was something wrong. I flew toward the flock, but as soon as I arrived I found the flock had moved, and so I flew to where they were now but by the time I arrived again they had moved. But they did not move; I had been watching them the whole time. My eyes were fooling me—some trick of refraction. And then, when again I was flying after them or what I thought was them, I found myself imagining the rosy warmth they must have been feeling, that high-spring burgeoning sunny heat—and that’s when I noticed, I think for the first time, how profoundly cold I felt, even now, at solar noon, summer nigh. That’s when I noticed the glass.

It was glass—there was no mistaking it—that surrounded me, flat and clear. Not a seam to be seen. I could see it clearly. It was so clear, in fact, that I couldn’t actually see it. But I could feel it. Ever since that day, I knew it was there. I could feel how it separated me from everything else. Its force stopped my fingers before they went too far. It made everything have the same touch, cold and smooth. I was inside a perfect glass box.

Being encased in glass, I couldn’t play with the other children. I had no choice but to watch as they played. It suited my temperament, anyway. I was like those people you see passing the day on park benches, just watching the world happen around them. I was like a cat collected on a sill, eyes closed pleasantly, just existing. I don’t know if all those people and cats were encased in glass like me, but they might as well have been; it didn’t seem to matter to them. And so it didn’t matter for me, either. I thought, from time to time, even as a youngster, that I’d been old ever since I was born—certainly older than others my age, so old I was always out of place, an agedness either caused or simply exacerbated by the glass. I was like Benjamin Button in that respect, only I never got younger.

Not long after my private discovery, a girl in my class asked, “Why do you just watch all the time? Don’t you want to play?” And I just looked at her. She couldn’t see the glass, either. “I can’t,” was all I said. I couldn’t make her see it. She cocked her head and blinked at me for a few more moments. She wanted to say something more. So did I. But neither of us could, and neither of us did. Then she turned away, went back to play with the others. I think she saw the glass.

Discovering I was surrounded by glass did give me some comfort, a certain kind of peace. I didn’t understand it at first, but it was the kind of peace that comes from knowing. I didn’t have to chase anymore; the things I’d been chasing were unreachable. I was in a glass cage. Like a zoo animal, except the cage was inside out; I was the visitor here, and the whole world was my zoo. It was marvelous. But as much as knowing can bring peace in some respects, I would learn that it can also bring great pain.

Soon enough I learned to read, and that’s exactly what I spent most of my time doing. Reading is just the sort of thing a boy in a glass box can do well. I read every book in the house, twice, and then I discovered the library. The library was an alphabet itself, and I began making my way through it all, albeit out of order, starting with PZ and working my way outward in both directions.

Spring blurred toward summer, and the boys and girls around me began to pair off. Sensationally at first: When Pat and Bridget held hands for ten seconds while Mrs. Gilmore went next door to borrow a globe, the whole class was whispering about it for a week. It wasn’t long before others were holding hands, too. Surreptitiously at first, and then openly, bumptiously. After a while the kissing started, covertly, quickly in the morning corners, dryly, and then longer and wetter and progressively more tongueful. I knew what was coming next; I’d read about it. As the years passed the pairs grew closer, pressing themselves together in more and more places with less and less clothing as if they were trying to become not two people but one.

I was not immune to this.

“Who do you have a crush on?” Jimmy asked me one day at recess. The two of us were sitting on the knoll overlooking the parking lot where the other kids in our class played kickball. I always sat there at recess, sometimes reading, sometimes just watching. Jimmy usually played kickball with the others, but he’d recently fractured his ulna jumping off a swing at its apogee and his doctor said no kickball for six to eight weeks. It was the fourth week, and we’d gotten to know each other pretty well over all those recesses. It amazed me how you could be in the same eighteen-person class with someone for seven years and still have so much to learn about them. By this time, it was rather well-established that a person always had a crush on someone—it was just a question of who. And so it was only natural that the question would come up eventually. “Bridget, is it?” Jimmy said. “She’s single again, you know. Come on—I won’t tell. Or Mary?” I think he wanted to make sure we didn’t have a crush on the same girl. I guessed the two he mentioned were the ones he had his eye on it.

“Janet,” I said.

“Oh, really?” A flash of relief. “Nice! You know, I can help you talk to her if you want.”

“Maybe.” The truth was I didn’t have a crush on Janet. As I looked out at the sweaty adolescent bodies scattered across the blacktop—standing, rolling, kicking, running—I knew that I didn’t have a crush on any of them. But I also knew that it wasn’t acceptable to be uninterested in such matters at this age. Later on, looking back, I think the only person in my class I’d had a crush on, if you wanted to call it that, only I didn’t want to let myself acknowledge it at the time, was Jimmy himself. Now, now—don’t get ahead of yourself. It wasn’t a crush in the boy–girl sense; rather, it was more like I found him the most interesting to observe. I looked forward to sitting with him and talking on the knoll at recess. I liked the way the hair by his ears curled around his glasses, and from time to time it occurred to me how wonderfully defined his Achilles tendon was—more than most—and how funny it was the way he said melk and pellow. Was that a crush? Part of me thought so. Structurally, these were the same things that constituted boys’ crushes of girls. But if a crush had to entail romantic desires, then it wasn’t. In any case, I could never have said anything, not then or ever, or else Jimmy would stop sitting and talking with me at recess. And, worse, he probably would have told the others. Perhaps one or two of the other boys, and then suddenly everyone would know. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. But they would think they understood—they would think they understood very, very well. But how could they? Their job was to be, while mine was to observe; only an observer can really understand. But, know-it-alls, they’d start acting different around me, and my zoo would be ruined. It was best for me not to have a crush on anybody. To pretend I had a crush on Janet. For safety.

Thus my adolescence progressed. For those around me, the years seemed to be characterized by crushes and acne—both here today and gone tomorrow and soon back again in a different constellation. As much as I wanted to be like the others, I couldn’t. Most of the time, pairing off with another was simply uninteresting to me. There were, over the years, however, a few people with whom I might have liked to pair off, but a young man encased in glass can do no pairing off. And so I merely observed.

By high summer I was a man. In substance, at least. I may have looked grown up, but I didn’t feel it. To me, a man had agency in the world. As for me, when I stuck my hand in a basin of water, there were no ripples. Those who live in glass cannot make ripples outside it.

I became an academic. I devoted myself to the study of flags, formally and annoyingly known as vexillology, focusing on the European flags of the early colonial period—specifically Spain—and their subsequent adoption and adaptation. These are topics that interest me, but I wouldn’t say they’ve made ripples, either. In any case, my work was deemed worthy enough for an appointment in a university department of history.

My life has been mostly solitary. Not as an effect of my academic life, but, more pointedly, as a cause of it. I’ve always longed for closeness with others, but this glass has prevented it. It’s difficult even for me to wrap my head around, but even the, shall we say, intimate encounters of my undergraduate youth felt, even at the time, somehow distant. My solidarity has, I think, led others to assume I’m independent, shy, solitary, whatever. Maybe even uninterested in the affairs of others, or downright unfriendly. From my perspective, this is far from the truth. But how could I convince those who cannot see the glass box that limits me? If only this glass weren’t here.

Loneliness has been the order of the day, the year. The order of the lifetime. And I find this deeply tragic: I only get one lifetime, and there’s so much I’d like to experience. Real intimacy, for instance. I already regret the possibility that I might return to dust without having gotten the chance to know another person. I think about all the flags I’ve seen after windy days, wrapped around their poles, clinging, adhered. I long for closeness.

I did fall in love, once or twice, to the extent that the unreciprocated can be called love. The question is, oddly enough, who was the one not reciprocating? Cases could be made in both directions.

There was Sharon, first of all. We found ourselves sitting next to each other in our undergraduate course on the philosophy of human nature, required, enjoyed. A word here bloomed into a phrase there, and before I knew it we were colocated quoting Hume in the library.

“What do you think about the whole idea of tabula rasa?” I asked. “Could we really be born empty, nothing there?”

“Do blackboards come pre-written?”

“Don’t be dumb—we’re much more than blackboards.”

“What, do you think we come with an OS pre-installed? Maybe your parents get to choose between Mac and Windows?”

“There’s only one choice, though.”

“So we’re all the same?”

“Well, we’re all human, aren’t we? The same in a lot of ways.” I was going to say something more, I think, but I didn’t.

“We’ll never know for sure,” she said. “Even Hume comes to that conclusion, funnily enough.”

Our conversations penetrated the very stuff of consciousness—can you get more intimate?—and yet something kept us apart. More precisely, something kept me from her, an invisible barrier. More precisely, I was encased in glass. So I watched Sharon, like a zoo animal, a creep, lamented her leaving when the doors closed, cried in the darkness when the lights turned off. Hume said that he whose circumstances suit his temper is happy, and he who suits his temper to any circumstance is excellent. Easy for Hume to say, I think. He doesn’t have to be alive anymore.

The second came, years later. The circumstances were different, but the story was the same: not philosophy, but vexillology; not Sharon, but Patrick; not the library, but a cafe; not Hume, but Smith. Hand on the glass, lights out, loneliness. Patrick: He was beautiful, brilliant, soft and understanding, his head tilted, always, slightly, considering, considerate. And the way he looked at me, I knew, but I could only look back. Zoo animals were for watching, not having.

By autumn I thought I had come to terms with my glass. It kept me sheltered, safe. I was protected from the turmoils that ravaged the lives of others. I heard stories of terrible breakups, of scathing seething hate, of one-eighty reversals, of misjudged character, of capricious betrayal, of deep-seated tyranny and selfishness. I became quite sure that this wasn’t worth the ostensible rewards. I sat and watched, did not participate, observed.

And now it’s winter. I haven’t yet retired because I don’t know what else I’d do with my life. With my time now I sit alone, either in my top-floor apartment presiding over the youthy residents below, observing their stories unfolding, their own seasons advancing, or in my top-floor office presiding over the youthy faculty and students below, milling about, busy, fancying myself interconnected. I think I’m happy sometimes—as Hume said, this sort of existence suits my temper. And yet at other times I am stricken with—what else to call it?—the gravity of solitude, nearly a hundred years of it.

My life—it sounds bathetic but there’s no other way to say it—is characterized by intermittent turmoil. Heavy, hard, no happiness there. In these times I wonder: Have the circumstances changed, or has my temper? Neither, apparently, or both. For a person who’s devoted his life to answering his own questions, this one has been persistently evasive. Nothing and everything always never change.