Vagabond, Class of '75

THE STORY of the vagabond was a story of other people's lives as they intersected ours. It was a story of the sadly sweet man we met in the diner just off Route 46, or the educated lifeguard at a pool in London. Or the hippie women, vacantly following in down the street late at night. Or a little French hunchback having fantasies of war against the road of the sea. They all pulled me out of myself for a while and I loved them. They were all little-love affairs suspended in time.

When I wrote their stories, it was their lives that were suspended, not mine. My life stretched upward certainly; when my future was secure, their love meant one happy moment past and another to replace it.

But now the past loves seem really lost My friends are strangers to me now the way those strangers were my friends. On their faces is superimposed a picture of my own. Because the glass elevator I was riding has suddenly stopped. Without conclusions of the tradition. I find myself in that one gutted instant between the window and the ground.

I have forgotten the interesting people I exchanged pantomimes with through the glads on the way up the sweet men, the hipple women, the French lunchback-and I have no interest in the curling streets below me, or in other people's lives unrolling beneath me. There is only me, planed to the air, with a frantically unresolved question in my head. Did I jump or did I fall?

Jumped or fell Newspapers politely circumscribe the early morning leaps into New York traffic It makes a difference if we take ourselves by the hand and lead ourselves over the brink, or if, putting one foot in front of the other one day, we reach the edge of the building and drop.

A jump is a decision, a controlled movement. If I were in control. I would have stayed in my other life, watching the vagabonds move in and around my path. But in my free-fall, I have no control. I may eventually hit the sidewalk. I may spin here in mid air forever, continually fascinated by my four limbs, unattached to any points around me. I may suddenly swoop back up and find myself breathless on the top of the building. Not knowing my fate, I ponder my origin: Did I jump or did I fall? Am I in control?

THE STORY of my fall will be my vagabond for a while. When I do not know my future, other people's presents are almost imperceptible to me.

I spend my days creating an illusion of control. My clothes are piled neatly in drawers, my papers filed in alphabetleal order. I write two letters a day in the gap between classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, instead of staying around the Square and eating lunch. I walk the mile house to see my mail. As each letter of rejection comes. In, I attach for to the master copy of my letter of inquiry and move to the appropriate, file. The faceless letters pile up and my own fact floats in the air before me, record my body temperature daily and keep pardon copies of my letters to friends.

I spend my days trying to find some way to prove to myself that I jumped. If I have no future I will make one, I will marry a man I once loved and be his wife, I will save a thousand dollars, head is Europe and not return when the money is gone. If jumped once, I can jump again. Net off a building into free fall, but in front of a rushing train and eyes wide open, I will push through life and not hover above it.

But now, being pushed, I am waiting for the coup that will pull me out of stasis. I write letters to my friends to ask them if they still know me, they are not part of my life any more, but points in my fall. The stories I used to write about them told them I knew who they were and that their lives shaped mine, The stories I write to them now tell them I am falling.

When I meet a person on the street, I look for my future in that person's face. Having no certainly everything is possible and anything may be delivery. I make plans and surround myself with them, If I read in a book about God; I make my future as a num. I see a life in a cloistered garden, pulling tiny sharp scissors from my black belt cutting sunny flowers.

OF ON A SUNNY DAY the false spring day, I see one thing I understand, I write a book about it and that book takes on a life of its own and takes me with it. If I meet a Ruth on the street I follow her to Africa. If I understand why site is going my life will start over at that point.

But Ruth is a woman governed by chance the way I am, I don't tell her that she is a vagabond, and part of my matrix of futures that will never come true, part of my fall. When we say goodbye and she is gone, the future I created from her goes with her; there is nothing to replace it. When I knew where I was going our shared past was something tangible. Our two futures are an illusion now and they overshadow our presents.

Because Ruth is falling too. I see in her vacant eyes, not the shadow of romance that I once gleaned from a vagabond, but a true mirror of my own eyes. Ruth looks at me and asks herself. Did I jump or did I fall, She looks at her future and seen that I am not part of it. Our two futures are an illusion, Trapped in between our past and nothing, falling through space, we conspire to kill the present.

Ruth and I are suspended in time, not the time of the vagabond, but a time without issue. When we learn to control our fall, we may once again take hands and lead each other over the brink, eyes wide open. But there will have been a succession of days, days without meaning, false spring days, that are overland with our nonexistent futures. And however controlled our flight, those days will be a part of our nonexistent past. We will never again let the vagabond pass into our lives, and, carefree, pass out again.