The Telescope Tower People
John actually doesn’t need to, but he wants to live in the telescope tower with the other people. The people who live in the telescope tower never close the hatch, although they aren’t constantly looking through the telescope. Because of that, in winter it gets very, very cold in the telescope tower—as cold as it is in the open outer space. The people who live in the telescope tower snuggle underneath big dark blankets, and in the midst of the night, everything is silhouettes, gray and black, immobilized; they have stars instead of eyes.
During the day, the telescope tower people work in a dining hall for the unemployed. This means that even though they don’t own their own homes, they are not unemployed. They don’t cook the food, but they serve it in paper bowls: for example, a deep bucket of soup is brought in, they dip a big spoon halfway down the bucket—not too deep in order not to take too many vegetables, but not too shallow either in order not to take too little—and pour soup in a paper bowl. Then they put a paper lid on it and hand it to the unemployed person in line. The telescope tower people work at the same station, never far from each other. They talk loudly and laugh from deep within their throats, so that everyone can hear.
John can’t visit them in the dining hall for unemployed people, unfortunately, because he’s not unemployed. He works at a supermarket and receives a larger salary than three telescope tower people put together, but he wishes he could work at the dining hall. He loves nodding, and because filling a paper bowl with soup takes less time than scanning someone’s groceries, he would be able to nod more times per hour if he worked at the dining hall. At the supermarket, he takes people’s money in exchange for their groceries, and parting with their money makes people irritated, which cuts short his enthusiasm to nod. In the dining hall for the unemployed, money is not involved in the transaction, which would allow him to nod as much as he feels is appropriate.
It takes John twenty minutes to walk from the supermarket to the telescope tower, and he likes walking, so he sees no reason to use any other means of transportation. His steps are jerky, and his arms dangle jerkily along his body as he walks. He is so weird! He is tall, even handsome—high cheekbones, blond, wild hair, a stern look. With the skirts of his coat in the air, he talks to himself as he walks. He overemphasizes each nod. When he opens the door for someone, he makes a giant nod; when he says ‘okay’—giant nod; when he says something to himself and agrees—giant nod. In moments like this one, when he agrees with himself only slightly, he makes numerous shallow nods, one pouring after the other.
In twenty minutes, he is in the telescope tower and offers its inhabitants a deep, meaningful nod. The moment when he finally sees all the telescope people is the peak of his day, with endorphins being released at full speed in his brain. The dining hall closes at six, while his shift goes on until ten, so they are always back much earlier than he. Some of them have already started to drift off, disappearing under dark, heavy blankets. He wishes he could spend more time with them; he tried to move his shift, but the supervisors told him he couldn’t. Still, he is glad he can sit on the floor with his back against the wall, curl up in his jacket, and watch. The telescope tower people who are not asleep hover over each other and talk within themselves. Their speech is a husky whisper, words indistinguishable, eyes wide open, glowing like stars.
A telescope stands diagonally in the middle of the tower. It is a telescope, so it is turned towards stars in outer space, toward the vastness which exists in our minds as the sky. The hatch is open, and the stars are visible without a telescope: points of light somewhere deeply away on the z-axis. The telescope stares at them without blinking so as not to miss a shooting star (although, as a telescope, it knows shooting stars are not actually stars). The telescope stares at its stars, and John stares at his telescope tower people.
The telescope tower people don’t talk to John, and John doesn’t talk to them, only nods. He’s thought about talking to them. He could ask them about the dining hall, about the soup, about the stars possibly. He never manages to push the words out of his mouth, though, because they don’t seem as meaningful as a nod.
In the morning, the telescope tower people wake up slowly, one after the other, until the movement of bodies is so audible that even the sleepiest ones sit up and rub their eyes. They all leave for work together, almost holding hands in a line like kindergarten kids. John walks a few meters after them; not intimidating but not letting them get out of sight either. They touch each other on the shoulders, on the arms—they share some body heat on a frozen morning. John wishes they would touch his shoulders, but he doesn’t dare ask them. Fallen leaves beside the sidewalk are topped with frost, their red whitened, glossed over. John stops to look at the leaves. He opens his mouth to tell someone about them, but the telescope tower people are way ahead.
A little further, the telescope tower people turn right for the dining hall, and John continues further. At the corner where they turn, a bench sits on its four legs under a brown-and-red tree. Its leaves have been falling for the past few weeks, so the soil underneath is covered in ice-glossed leaves; the bench as well. John sets his weight down on the bench on top of the leaves and thinks about the telescope tower people’s torn coats for a little bit.
A witch lives nearby and visits John once or twice a week in the supermarket. She buys a few tomatoes, some bread, and some spices and goes up to John’s register.
“Hi, John,” she says and lets him see her front teeth but hides the brown one on the right. “How is work today?”
“Good.”
“Do you have any free time these days? You were going to come to my house for tea, remember? I promise, I’ll make delicious tea with lots of honey and the traditional cake that my mom used to make! You’ll love it, I swear!” Her eyes are begging.
“I don’t have free time anytime soon, I’ll be working twelve days straight.”
“Okay. Then I will come back on the twelfth day and ask you again, okay? I hope you can spare some time for me then.”
She leaves, feeling a little down but still skipping almost imperceptibly, tapping one foot on the ground a couple of times, then the other. The curls and knots in her hair caress her shoulders.
That night the telescope tower people aren’t in the telescope tower. Their blankets are also gone. John sits down with his back against the wall and waits. An hour later, he gets up and walks along the circular wall of the tower, looks and looks for little objects at the edge where the wall meets the floor, but there is only dirt. He sits back on the floor with his back against the wall and falls asleep.
The next evening is the same: no telescope tower people, only John and the telescope. John continues to wait, however, until one week passes. When he comes back into the tower on the seventh day—one week after the last time he’s seen them—he jumps and stomps his feet on the floor as hard as he can, lifts his knees high in the air, brings them down with the strength of a giant, and shakes the telescope, its hatch, and the stars looking at him at that very moment. He jumps and stomps until one ankle breaks in an ugly angle pointing outwards with his bone sticking out, diagonally pointing at the stars like a finger of ridicule. He stomps on one foot now with the same force, and the telescope tower responds with more shakes. His second ankle breaks too, and he falls to the floor. Now he occasionally thrusts a fist on the ground, but not too violently. After a while, he stops moving and only weeps.
The witch can’t wait until the twelfth day. She has already chosen the type of tea and knows all the ingredients she needs for the cake. Her heart pounds more quickly with every day, her craving becomes unbearable, like a drug addict deprived from his heroin. She sets off for the supermarket on the tenth day. I’m sorry, John, she thinks, but I can’t wait any longer.
In the supermarket, she is met by a bucket of cold water, though: John isn’t there. Maybe he lied, maybe he doesn’t like her, as she has worried sometimes. Her chest freezes from the inside; the numbing creek spreads to her stomach.
The manager needs to make sure no one gets sick or seizes or passes out in the supermarket, so he approaches her:
“Is anything the matter, ma’am?”
She regains her voice in a few seconds.
“Isn’t John working today?”
“Ah, in reality, he should be, but he has not come to work in three days now. He would be fired even if he came in tomorrow.”
The witch turns on her heel. Does he dislike her so much? Is he sick? Is he dead?
She comes back the next day and the day after that; still, no sign of John. She knows it is time now to go to the telescope tower.
“John?”
“Jooooohn?”
She comes in and sees him prostrated on the floor beneath his jacket. He is asleep, she thinks, and then sees the bones sticking out of his legs. She gasps inside; no sound travels through the air. With a hand motion, she lifts him in midair and transports him to her house.
She is so happy! Now she’ll make him cake and tea, and he won’t be able to escape because his legs are broken! She doesn’t have beds, but she lays him on top of ten or eleven pillows, just in case. He is close to landing in his own body now and regaining consciousness: he nods awkwardly, diagonally, his messy hair follows suit. She sits by his head and follows the lines on his face with her fingers. A look at his ankles tells her that they are healing alright: she put them back in their original places and applied some healing potion. But not too much—she doesn’t want him healthy and leaving her house tomorrow. He nods diagonally again. Seeing that he still lingers in limbo, she goes to the kitchen to prepare deliciousness for the ill man.
John’s survival instinct brings him back to his body and opens his eyes. On his left: a bookshelf packed with purple and yellow books, old and new, moldy and dusty, little sheets of notes sticking out of them in all directions. Disorderly piles of books stand in front of the shelf because there is no more space on it. In front of him: a long wall with sparkly, warm paintings in maroon, deep crimson, ochre, unrecognizable shapes in all paintings. The paintings are set one right next to the other, no white space between them to allow each painting to be viewed separately; no, they are one big palette of color that a child has lovingly mixed and splashed over the entire wall. On his right: plants, and plants, and plants growing in variously sized pots, all brown. Each plant chooses its way to curve its spine and intertwine it with the others’, so they all come in an embrace that forms a tall, green jungle where plants lose track of which leaves are their own. He can see a little bit into the kitchen: a long-haired fairy dances with teapots and cake ingredients. Her dress twirls like a whirlpool, and her feet soar half a meter above the ground. John cannot tear his gaze away from the fabric of her dress: its curves begin as purple, then they fall into green, and then they land back again into purple. She turns to look at him and smiles. It’s the witch! he shouts inside his head. No, I need to leave, leave, no… His legs can’t move yet, they are far from being healed. He examines them: no bones sticking out anymore, his skin shows no signs of wounds, only he can’t move them. When he concentrates, he feels blood vessels carrying blood there, calcium atoms flowing, little cells rebuilding the bone where it shattered. He releases his weight into the pillows and buries his face in feathers and cloth.
The witch comes closer with a plate of cake in her hands, and space and time warp around her. She goes down to her knees and sets the plate of cake next to John’s head; he sees himself as a part of the energy that forms a static vortex around her spine. What seems like a second later, she is going down to her knees again, this time with a teapot in one hand and two ceramic mugs in the other. One mug has a unicorn drawn on it, the other has a purple frog. The witch lifts the hand with the mugs, indicating a question: Which one do you prefer, John? Which one do you like better, John? In which one would you like your tea, John? John, baby, please choose a mug to drink your tea from! Which do you prefer, John, unicorns or purple frogs?
If only the telescope had someone to look at the stars with now, it would have been a perfect world.
He pushes it all to the side—the cake, the teapot, the mug with the unicorn, the mug with the purple frog—and throws his arms around her waist. They clasp behind her back, and he hugs tightly. His head on her lap, his forehead against her pubic bone, he weeps. With a slight motion of her hand, she returns the cake back to the plate, the tea back to the teapot. The witch strokes John’s unruly hair as he nods awkwardly into her pelvis.
