Malley
The pregnancy of Malley’s mother, which led to his birth, was unwelcome all around. Neither she, Malley’s father, nor what were soon to be Malley’s two older brothers had any desire for an additional member of the family, and considered his conception at best a vile accident, at worst a stroke of cosmic vindictiveness.
After his uncelebrated arrival, his father, secretly suspecting this wasn’t his doing, simply ignored him; his mother, who wasn’t gifted with an inexhaustible supply to begin with, withheld her love; and his brothers tormented him with impunity and righteous indignation.
Some would call that a bad start.
And things didn’t get better.
Do the unwanted and despised exude some subliminal chemical that alerts the people waiting in each subsequent phase of life? Apparently so, because the cruelty and ostracism of grade school unfolded inevitably when he got there.
He survived.
In high school the situation grew official with the advent of the “Hate Malley” society—not exactly a club, more of an underground conspiracy enabling everyone besides Malley to have a Malley: someone to whom all recognition, support, love, affection, and friendship was denied. People need that.
But at least they recognized a “him.” Which for a shaky moment enabled him to experience the first spasms of ego formation.
Then high school ended and that changed. The world ceased to hate, but just forgot him, which killed the ego thing and gave him some breathing room.
He found a job managing a warehouse for a small manufacturing company. A solo job at which he became so proficient no one else was needed. He had no way, and no need, to tell time—he just appeared at work and left punctually, went to bed, woke up, ate, likewise.
Malley found a rental house within walking distance of his job, ate very little, and had almost no needs or wants. He had no car, no computer, no phone, no television, and though once or twice he had heard a strain of music that kind of roused him, he had never really caught on to the music thing either.
So he was able to save the better part of his salary. As the years went by, his weekly walks to make a deposit at the bank resulted in a substantial sum, and when the old man renting him the house had a stroke, his family offered to sell Malley the house, so he bought it.
As he grew into middle age, luckily the manufacturing company survived the moody economy and stayed in business, and he kept his job. He didn’t want, and never bothered to imagine, any other.
Except for the occasional mildly curious glance of a random stranger, or someone in the grocery store or bank who had been seeing him there for years and paused to wonder, it was as though he had dissolved so deeply into the fabric of existence that no one was any longer aware of him.
He was the only free man in town.
Since it was so empty, Malley’s life was full. At the bifurcations of daily life—turning to the left or right, entering the first or second door, stepping or not on a crunchy leaf, for example—his mind habitually dramatized a flash projection of every path not taken: the different perception of reality from another angle, an alternate sequence of events, an uncrunched leaf being blown by the wind under a camellia bush where it could remember its days of sun rays and chlorophyll in peace. His mind was a theater, constantly playing scenarios that either might have, could have, should have, maybe somewhere else had, or never would have, happened. Whenever he closed his eyes, places he had never been, people he had never seen, situations he could never have purposely imagined, materialized effortlessly, ceaselessly, and he just watched.
Time was equally footloose in his timeless mind. He often found himself in the far future experiencing the present like a memory, walking through a world dreamy because it had already happened. At other times he experienced the present from the past, simultaneously seeing his projection of what the future might be, as it didn’t match but, as it were, shadowed what the future had settled for.
Some days he saw something when he looked in the mirror, some days he didn’t. When he did, he experienced what he would have called humor if he’d had need of a word for it, which he didn’t. He would probably have said that sensation was the essence of everything, if he’d had the inclination to formulate a philosophy, which he didn’t.
Walking onto the endlessly interesting blank canvas of his leaf and twig and acorn littered driveway after work, no eyes watching him, alive in no one’s mind, he might see a squirrel high in the water oak and inevitably find himself seeing the world from that perspective, sharing the squirrel’s consciousness. Same with birds. He never tired of seeing the stationary world through their darting eyes. Or the ants at his feet, into whose intricate kingdoms his imagination burrowed. Or he might notice a twig in the yard and experience its time-lapse decay back into the earth—or its disintegration by lawn mower blades, the pieces searching for other parts of itself, haunted by the ghosts of those days of being a twig. He would share the life experience of the beans he ate for dinner, from the sprouting out of the warm moist earth, to the hands picking them, to their entering his digestive system and becoming a part of him.
After dinner, weather permitting, he would sit on the back porch and watch the sun set, just as he would watch it rise out his front window in the mornings. He never got tired of that slow, suspenseful drama. He could see, as from a distance, the great ponderous globe slowly creaking around, could see the speck of himself as it turned into or out of the light. He spent endless hours trying to reconcile the vertical depiction of the world with its horizontal perception. Weather not permitting, he might spend the time in the clouds.
What did Malley believe in?
A meaningless question. And a waste of time.
He didn’t believe in anything, which is how he how he could believe in everything.
December 5, 2019