The Wall

Abstract

The Wall Ben Black (bio) When the light was right, and in the right season, the Boy could see from his bedroom window the path where his father used to take him for walks. The path was often covered with pine needles or snow, and at these times the Boy and his father would remake the path with their footsteps—they walked it so often that no matter how the weather buried it, they could always find it. Usually they were alone and would walk in silence through the tall pines. If they ran into a fellow walker and were forced to engage in conversation, the Boy’s father would say, “Just showing the Boy some nature,” as if without his efforts the Boy would never see nature. At no time had the Boy ever heard his father refer to him by his name, only as “the Boy” and now that his father was gone this was how he insisted that his mother and everyone else refer to him, and how he referred to himself in his private thoughts. Despite his father’s concerns, nature was not a mystery to the Boy. He had it outside his window every day and night. Unlike other residents of the mile-high apartment complex, he never drew his window blinds. His mother insisted that the constant exposure to sun and moonlight must interrupt his sleep and hurt his eyes, but he would not be dissuaded. On days when the sun was too bright, the Boy would sit with his eyes closed and watch the patterns on his eyelids instead of watching the scene outside. One day the sun was so bright that it never set. It made its way slowly to the horizon, then stayed there, a bright white dot visible all night through the trees. Nothing ever dimmed it—even when tree branches waved past it in the wind, it was still visible. Yet all around it, everything was dark, as if setting was not so much a matter of disappearing as of dimming, reducing the scope of illumination to a single dot. The sun was the Boy’s secret. He didn’t tell anyone about this change in the celestial body, but he listened carefully for clues in the conversations of others. He was not the type to bring something up in converstaion—he always [End Page 98] waited for someone else. But no one—not his mother, not his friends from down the hall—no one mentioned the sun’s new way of setting. He tried to watch the sunset outside, but the huge buildings in his neighborhood never allowed him to see the horizon. The sun set earlier outside, disappearing behind the roof of his building hours before it set in the forest beyond, which he could see from his room. His mother had always reminded him how lucky they were to live in a building at the edge of the city—to not be boxed in on all sides by other people, by the noise of traffic and daily life. Here, she said, they were safe. And the Boy agreed—they were lucky, he was lucky, because he alone seemed to know that the sun was changing. He looked forward to the world changing too. The world changed in a way he didn’t expect. When he slept over at his friend Jeremy’s apartment down the hall, he insisted they keep the window open in his room. Jeremy, like most people the Boy had encountered (like his mother and his grandparents and his teachers) preferred to live by electric light alone, drapes drawn. But the Boy wanted to see Jeremy discover the secret of the new sun. At sunset, the Boy sat and looked out the window as Jeremy played video games. He hoped to have his friend look away from the screen at just the right moment to catch the sun transforming into its nighttime bright dot self. But at the precise moment, the sun reverted to its old ways. It merely slipped behind the horizon. The world was dark again. The next day the world seemed unsure of itself. The train he rode to school...