566
FRANK CONROY
cover of the ringing bell. (Remember a children's game called Giant
Steps?)
I sit up cautiously. My body freezes. Rising before me over the
foot of the bed is a bright, glowing, cherry-red circle in the darkness,
a floating orb pulsating with energy, wavering in the air like the
incandescent heart of some dissected monster, dripping sparks and
blood. I throw myself backwards against the wall behind the
bed.
Books tumble around me from the shelves, an ashtray falls and
smashes on the floor. My hands go out, palms extended, towards the
floating apparition, my voice whispering "please...." Impossibly a
voice answers, a big voice from all around me. "FRANK! FRANK!"
My knees give out and I fall off the bed to the floor. I can feel the
pieces of broken ashtray under my hands.
From the comer of my eye I see the red circle. I keep quite
still,
and the circle doesn't move.
If
I tum my head I seem to sense a
correspondent movement, but I can't be sure. In the blackness there
is
nothing to relate to. Step by step I begin to understand. My body
grows calmer and it's as
if
a series of veils were being whisked away
from my eyes. I see clearly that the circle is only the red-hot bottom
of the stove ... a glowing bowl, its surface rippling with color changes
from draughts of cool air. The last veil lifts and reveals an image
of
magic beauty, a sudden miracle in the night. I fall asleep watching it,
my shoulder against the bed.
Hours later the cold wakes me and I climb up under the covers.
When dawn comes my limbs relax. I can tell when dawn has come
even though I'm asleep.
(At every tum I see myself falling down without ceremony ...
running into parked cars, going limp at imaginary voices, etc. The
clumsiness of children is comic, not pathetic as the sentimentalists
would have us believe, but funny like the Marx Brothers. Children
and adults are the same in their attempt to live harmoniously with
forces greater than their minds can grasp. Children stop falling when
they learn to avoid situations where they've fallen before, not because
they understand gravity. Men deal with more complex problems
in
exactly the same fashion, disregarding the fact that having learned
to
stand by experience they are still liable to fall, that in fact from the
beginning they've learned everything the wrong way. From an article
