Friday, March 04, 2005
Hiding the Giant
Back when I was little I didn’t need glasses; I could see just fine wherever you pointed me. That’s why I’m pretty sure the giant was for real.
On summer evenings I’d be put to bed before the sky was entirely dark. My bed was nestled in a corner of the room; a window had been cut in one of the walls next to the bed, but up high so I couldn’t see out of it without standing on the bed - unless I looked across the room, where an old mirror hung on the opposite wall. I could look in the mirror out the window high over my head; from that angle, though, my view was pretty limited - I was peering generally upwards and all I could see was a piece of sky, black at night but azurulean for a time after sunset, a rich and satisfying color that still gives me a sense of safety and comfort.
My view of the sky through the window in the mirror was not entirely uninterrupted - a few leafy branches dangled above the windows so I cold see them from my supine vantage, and beyond those, a few boughs of refulgent acacia blossomed in dark silhouette against the blue heavens.
My youthfully acute vision was unchallenged by these abstract blotches of black on blue - I could easily make out the different leaves, limbs and trees as they arrayed themselves into the distance. But then again, I got bored sometimes and stared too long at these rorschach blots as the light leached from the sky until I thought I could recognize figures in the shadows - a face, an arm, a flower, a bird in flight.... some presented themselves with coy stylism and demanded interpretation; some showed through with trompe l’oeil realism. Night after night I’d let them emerge from their two-dimensionality and become tangible parts of my reality. I marvelled at how detailed these objects were, wishing I could draw with my hand half as well as I did with my mind.
One night in particular I lay staring at the mirror and thence out the window when I suddenly got a strong sense that something was going on out in the sideyard, where nothing before had ever actually happened. Knowing this truth only too well, I delayed in standing up to peek out the window, doubting myself; eventually the premonition was too much for me to resist and I leapt to my feet and peered out my window into an intimately-known but seldom-visited landscape of sideyards stretching out down the block.
Perhaps I was asleep; I don’t think so, but it’s the easiest explanation for what I saw: a giant, bigger than a house, trying to hide as quickly as possible behind the neighbor’s garage. He had wavy hair, regular classical features, a tanned naked shoulder, and a look of terrible consternation in his eye that chilled me to the bone. I was not supposed to see him; he was not supposed to be seen. My glimpse of him threw the worlds we each inhabited out of kilter. My heart was pounding - I wanted to see more, to see him more clearly, to scramble out of bed and outside to get a good look at him - but I knew that he couldn’t let himself be exposed to my ilk, he’d run off before I got near enough to view him in person, and then we’d both be in trouble - me for seeing him (and for leaving bed to do so), and him for being seen.
The fearful expression I’d seen on his face distressed me and I didn’t want to make a bad situation worse, so I denied myself the adventure of seeking him out and instead laid back into the bed, tried to think of other things in the belief that they would help to resolve the crisis I’d provoked with my precipitate peeping. I tried to console myself by losing myself among patterns and figures I was used to seeing in the silhouette shadows in the mirror. I could see them, too, but I couldn’t get lost in them as I had before. I knew a giant was out there, a real one. The little faces and creatures I had envisioned just earlier that evening seemed fantastic, unbelievable, just patterns of light and darkness that my mind had knit together into pictures it interpreted as coherent. I saw just leaves now, not familiar faces; branches, not hands. The magic had evaporated. I wasn’t terribly disappointed, though - it hadn’t just left, it had been chased off, and by a real live giant, no less. I wouldn’t complain; neither would I brag. The giant was in trouble enough as it was and I would not make things any worse for him. My silence and the loss of my shadow fantasies were a small price to pay to keep a giant hanging around the side yard.
