Nearly 20 years ago in an old rail town somewhere south of the Wyoming state line was the very place that he almost lost his life. He had been boarder at the old Armstrong Hotel, a rundown place in town. That town was unremarkable to a person who moved around. It had all the same old stuff, a main street from stem to stern lined with old stores with junk shops and stuff pushed unkempt against the window for all to see like car accident. Everything was covered with a thin coat of dust from the dirt roads on the edge of town. The only thing that seemed to keep the place afloat was the state agricultural university in the center of town. He was able to rent the room in the hotel after he got a job working on ranch out by the highway. Who he was and what he was doing was lost on him. He didn’t think of his life in terms of having a purpose or not, or having any sort of design. He thought in terms of survival, from one day to the next. He was living an aimless life as a transient and it wasn’t until the moment that he was laying on the floor of the hotel room that he thought about the grand design of life.
Nearly a month later he languished in the regional medical center after a brief coma. As he regained his senses he worried about the long term effects of his illness and what effect it might have on his facilities. Under such dire thought, he came to realize something, a thing he had not thought of most of his life. He was worried about the future. Not the future of now, of surviving from one moment to the next, but a future a long time from now. A future that someday he might be a part of, and in that future he would look back at these times and they would be so distant that he would forget the very circumstances that brought him to this moment.
That night, he clicked on the reading light in hospital room and he read short story from a little red book a nurse brought to him. The story that he read was called the, The Black Monk, by Anton Tchekov. With the book still in hand he drifted off to sleep. He had torturous dreams as the medication and his depleted physical state drew him into an extended slumber that lasted nearly two days. He dreamt about visiting with the Black Monk from the story he had read, and about libraries full of books he never read. The nurses woke him from time to time as if he was committing a sin by sleeping too long. When he was finally up, he remembered his dreams. He felt like he wanted to remember all of them. In one of them he had created a new language to read all the books in the world. He obsessed about the language. He thought about it for hours. He told the nurses about his dream, and they showed little interest of the recounting of his lucid slumbering fantasy. He was so obsessed with this dream he took a pen and paper and tried to write down the phonetic laws of his own private language. Strangely, he was able to do this with enough detail to a form that actually created a language that only he could speak.
Empowered with this new ability he wrote a love letter to his future wife whom he had yet to meet, and he translated the entire Russian novel at his beside.
Like a haunting memory he thought about one passage, from the story that he had read a couple of nights earlier.
“All day – since early morning,†he began, “my head has been taken up with a strange legend. I cannot remember whether I read it, or where I heard it, but the legend is very remarkable and not very coherent. I may begin by saying that it is not very clear. A thousand years ago, a monk, robed in black, wandered in the wilderness – somewhere in Syria or Arabia. Some miles away the fisherman saw another black monk moving slowly over the surface of the lake. The laws of optics, which legend, of course does not recognize, and listen. From the first mirage was produced another mirage, from the second, a third, so that the image of the Black Monk is eternally reflected from one stratum of the atmosphere to another. At one time it was seen in Africa, then in Spain, then in India, then in the Far North. At last it issued from the limits of the earth’s atmosphere, but never came across conditions which would cause it to disappear. Maybe it is seen today in Mars or in the constellation of the Southern Cross. “
He attached meanings to the passage. He thought of it in terms of numbers and symbolism. The number three, three times is 9 divided by pi. Equal factors put into binary code? What would all of it mean? On and on. All sorts of meanings that would make Tchekov question himself. Whole new worlds of possibilities, like looking into the infinite abyss.
The passage soon would fade. Each day went on, he thought about the dreams less and less. It didn’t mean anything. His language, his obsession, didn’t mean anything at all. The Black Monk as it was, served as a device. All of it didn’t mean anything, but it did mean something for at least that moment. The better part of all of it was, he survived. He would be ill again in his life, but never would he walk so close to the edge.
Years later, after he moved long away from there he couldn’t tell anyone about the Black Monk or why the story meant something to him. Moving from town to town he was not able to keep much, but he did keep that little red book of short stories by Anton Tchekov. The letter that he wrote to his future wife was lost along with the phonetic laws of his own language. (He thinks they might be in an old suitcase in his attic.)
When he would later try to remember the letter that he wrote to his future yet to meet wife, he would struggle. All he could remember went like this; I hope I will not disappoint you, I hope that I will always make you feel like you are loved. I hope I never hurt you deep down in your soul. I hope I am more than you imagined. I hope that I will always surprise you. I hope that if you get sick of me you will still want to see my face on the pillow next to you. I hope I will always love you.