for a friend, N. Barry Carver [distant reading .TXT] 📗

Somewhere in some heaven, there is a stranger tonight.

I laid him away as he wished and, since there is nothing on earth that can change this final chapter... that was the last anyone will ever see of my friend.

But the last of his story hasn’t been told to you and, as a reporter and his friend, it’s up to me to do it.

You know of his loves and losses. You’ve heard of wild exploits in unimaginable places. You thought of him as beacon that would never fail. But, at heart, he was nothing more than a small town boy. A lot of people mistake that view of the world for naïveté or a lack of education but with him it was a deep-seated goodness that simply could not be shaken no matter how often people tried or how viciously they chose to respond to it.

He simply did a job... a job any of us could do, but none of us did.

If he ever truly loved, it could only have been one woman. A woman that remained alien to him no matter how close they became. Her affections for him were met with politeness and friendship – but there was really never anything more. Lust and passion, which some call part of the "killer instinct", he simply did not have. I knew him more than fifty years and I never once saw him lose his temper, do anything vindictive, or suffer even a moment of regret. Maybe he was too alien from me as well... and, even though he worked his heart out for them, he certainly had nothing in common with the average citizen of this, or any other city.

He was an avid reader and retained plenty of it – until his last few weeks. Nothing philosophical but more on the order of manuals and plans... and the occasional autobiography. His study, if you could call it that, was limited to the actions of individuals–what they had done and what reasons they gave for it. He looked at Hitler like an open wound and wondered what it would have taken to heal him. He studied criminals and presidents and, finding their actions sometimes interchangeable, could not comprehend how that could be.

It has been noted that great heroes, a pantheon of which would place my friend at its head, tend to draw great evils to match their goodness. It is speculated that grandiose villains only manifest when there is such a hero present. Now, with him gone, they too should dissipate... but I rather doubt they will. It is a sad trial of that supposition and, I fear, a bitter future ahead. My prayer must be that, since we have seen tremendous power that did not corrupt the individual that wielded it, we may seek something better than the pettiness of our usual lives, the sum of our history and the tiny hopes to which we aspire.

He had such power in his hands and he never once used it for his own gain. Too alien indeed.

When his eyesight failed him and his gait had become unsure, he asked me to take him quietly, by boat, to an island no one seems to have an interest in. It was a rocky spike out in the Barents sea with a hidden inlet to the earth's inner soul. With the last of his strength he pulled a key stone and had me place an explosive charge, that I set off upon my departure.

I spent too many years in old darkrooms with my hands in solutions and my breath full of fumes to be anything but a companion to his wishes. The millions of tiny tumors plaguing my lungs and spine and brain were never considered operable by any surgeon I ever met. No therapy has been designed for anything so invasive. And yet my friend, until his vision failed, needed only to focus on them for a second, one-by-one, to eradicate them utterly – if only temporarily. Now that his power has failed, the little power I have will quickly follow. His life has been so tied to mine that even in my last hours, I am a minor character in his great story.

Whatever allowed him to traverse the air, as you and I tread the sea, made it possible for the frail old man you see before you to lead him carefully into the opening and down a long, cliff-sided slope. When he could maintain himself no longer, he shook my hand – exactly the way he had on the first day we met – and, without a word, stepped off the cliff and fell several hundred feet into the stagnant lava below. He laid there for a while before it finally consumed him, as if his life force held his flesh and bones together. As if he were impervious to all these mortal things until he stopped acting and thinking – and then he simply melted and burned away, just as any of us would do whether we wished to or not.

Not even the slightest trace was left of him.

When he was gone, and when that fact finally got through my disbelief, I am not ashamed to say, I gasped as if the world had ended. I fell back against a rocky wall and saw the greatest light of my time extinguished forever. Had I not been by his side so many times, I would swear it had all been a lie... but now, it’s worse than a lie. Now it is a truth that is gone, that cannot be replaced. One that we need more than ever.

He had grown old. He went from his prime to his dotage in less than a year as, he said, was the way with his kind. Even in that I envied him. He was a diamond that turned to ashes before the world could catch him being human.

I wonder, was he simply that? Was he a man as I am? Did he simply choose to be unaffected by bullets, malevolence and despair? Was he that Christ-like figure whose faith was strong enough to stand-in for so many of us that have none left? Was it simply his will that was made of steel?

If he was the one-of-a-kind we've all believed him to be, my life cannot conclude soon enough. I have seen great wonders and lived through interesting times and, with no possible replacement for this hero, I have no interest in the future to come. But, if there is even the slightest chance that he was just a good, and not super, man... If he held himself in check and thought only of the greater good... If he defied the laws of physics and yet upheld the laws of humanity–all by the strength of his will, or his faith, or even his naïveté, then perhaps there is another hero to be had. A tiny sequel to this story forming in every heart that even imagined that they knew him.

Perhaps the next great hero is all of us.

Maybe that is what his life has meant. It is a bit of stretch I know, but as I lay down my pen tonight with the thought there is nothing more I will ever say, that is the thought I am going to close my eyes on. And, no matter how quizzical the look he would have given me for doing so, I’m going to pray I’ve come upon the truth.

Yours in saecula saeculorum,

Jimmy

Text: © 2012 Barry Carver
Publication Date: 05-24-2012

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