Boris Kermoff's Pages


Change-the result of decisions made at turning points brought on by other changes from other decisions at other turning points. Boris Kermoff saw the pattern quite suddenly and he hated it. The pattern: the string of redundancies of response and consequence that made up life, but this seemed wrong, backwards. The consequences should be first, thought Boris, that is how we shape our responses to bring other desired consequences; that is how we learn. So he began writing a book; he wrote the first page and set it aside. Then he wrote the second and set it on top of the first. And the third went on top of the second. It went this way until he finished the last
page and set it on the top of the stack so that now the last page would read first and the first last. Thus, the book would read backwards, and--if there was a God and if, by god, God was as backwards as we in His image, then--brilliantly.

Boris wrote twenty-five pages in one frantic spurt-then stopped. The End. Twenty-five pages amassed his fifty years of life insight condensed to ink and paper. All the things he held quietly within, wanting sometimes to scream them in the face of everyone he encountered; all the things that burned him secretly and made him think, "People should know this!" Yes, that was the opening line of page one (or page twenty-five depending on how you look at it): "People should know this, and learn everything, and then crave more of what they've been told is impossible." He lived by that sentence. Shouldn't everyone?

"Twenty-five pages and that is all!" cried Boris. "Twenty-five pages? This is it? Just one page for every two years of my life! For you two years!" he counted the pages "and you two years, and you two years. Fifty years for this pathetic stack that reads backwards! Dear God, is it true? Am I really that ridiculous?" There were, in fact, fifty pages because Boris had typed on both sides of the paper, though he put the same page number on both sides.

Now thoroughly disgusted with himself, Boris retrieved a ladder from his garage and took it to the back yard. "Twenty-five pages," he muttered as he leaned the ladder against the house. He climbed to the roof, struggled into a precarious balance, and hollered up to the stars, "Fifty years! Of my lifelong hard work, this is it-this is my wisdom and these are my seeds, my children! Take them, you merciless destiny-take them you cruel wind, plant them in someone's heart and make them grow!"

He tossed the twenty-five pages into the wind.

Being as the time was approximately 2 A.M., Boris's neighbor, Bob Nodder, had been asleep, though lightly. Nodder awoke to hear the cursing of fate and the petition to the wind, and sighed to himself, "Jeez, Kermoff, go to bed."

Exhausted, Boris climbed down from the roof and lay on the cool, dewy grass of his lawn. "Dear God," he said, "I feel so empty."

Twenty-five small, featherweight, typed children flew on the wind,
landing on streets, lawns, and trees. Here is what happened to each: two were murdered by streetsweeper, ten starved and died in trash barrels, three washed down some gutters, two were torn to bits, four dwelt in hidden places until the sun and rain erased their faces, one met an unknown fate, one met a little boy and made him happy, one met an old woman and made her sad, and one might as well have changed the world.


First, the boy:

He was twelve years old and pounding his callused brown feet on the hot sidewalk the way boys will do when they are bored sick, suffering the frustration of knowing that summer vacation was trying to sneak away. His name was Gene Gallan, and he was thinking of summer, warm sun, cool breezes, shading trees, and tall green grass; they reminded him of the smile of a girl. The laughter of friends, the bark of a dog, and the buzz of insects reminded him of something else-something really big, bigger than any one thing. It was everything together, but none of them at all.

He stepped on a piece of paper; then he began reading the paper.

"People should know this, and learn everything, and then
crave more of what they've been told is impossible."

The paper used a lot of big words that Gene didn't understand, but toward the bottom of the page was a message that he did understand. He understood it and loved it, for it clarified exactly what he felt but could not explain.

It said:

"And so there is a great mystery that every human being feels, but cannot truly express. We stare at our bodies and think, 'How strange and marvelous I am.' We stare at other's bodies and think, 'How beautiful those are.' We stare at the earth and think, 'What a magnificent place, how great to be here.' But, how sad because we don't know how or why we are here. Yet all the time, there is something that tells us why-it is all around us all the time; it makes the sun shine warm, it makes the wind blow cool. It is magic. There is magic around you, inside you, filling your lungs, pumping through your veins, and running from your eyes to your fingertips. It is magic. Or, more correctly stated in words that appease our critical thinking, cynically scientific society, it is LIFE!"

That's it, Gene thought. Yes, that's it. I'm alive! I'm really alive! He ran home and told his mother, "Hey Mom, I'm alive, I'm really alive!"

"Well, duh," said his mother.

"No," he said, trying to explain. "I mean, I'm just bones and blood and skin and brains and stuff, but being alive is more than living. Being alive is realizing that you're living and that everything around you is living!"

"Well, duh," said his mother.

Gene ran to his room and wrote on a sheet of paper, "Being alive is
realizing that you are living. AND I AM ALIVE!"

He ran back outside, once again hearing the laughter of his friends, but now that sound served to remind him that he was alive and his friends were alive too. And the shade of the tree meant that the tree was alive too. And the barking dog and the insects-yes! Life! All of it!

Gene lay on the grass to watch clouds floating in a pool of blue sky. Now this boy has some potential. Perhaps, someday, he will have more than twenty-five pages of wit to throw into the wind.


Now the old woman:

She was very old, older than she looked. Her hair was still naturally blond and her eyes still clear, deep blue; her shape a little plump, her teeth a little false, her smile just as stunning as it was when she was sixteen. Her name was Deirdre.

Deirdre woke every morning to see the light of dawn, hazy with downtown smog, glowing in her simple apartment. The few pictures that hung on the age-yellowed walls and the smell from the gas stove were welcome to her. And everyday, she went straight to the window and looked down on the cracked and potholed alley three stories below.

This morning, it is almost 6 A.M., and he will be coming soon. "He" is the young man who cleans the restaurant next door and every morning at 6 A.M. he pulls a cart loaded with garbage down the alley to the dumpster. He is tall, husky, and blond, handsome in a rough sort of way, but with a delicate manner about him, as if he were painfully shy.

Deirdre likes to watch him--Oh, but he is so young, twenty-five perhaps. Too young for her. She was old. Very old. Oh, but still--

He always came out to dump the trash at 6 A.M., so Deirdre wrapped a robe over her nightgown, slipped slippers on her feet, grabbed a small plastic bag of bread crumbs, and made for the alley.

The young man was in the alley by the time she got there; struggling to pull the heavy cart of restaurant trash. Deirdre noticed how strong he must be to dump all that trash every day.

Deirdre wished that she were young and beautiful again. She was once very beautiful. Many handsome young men had asked to marry her, but she would not marry. In her long life she had never married, never made love, never even kissed. She had always thought to herself, "I will wait for Love and Love will tell me when and who is right." Apparently, Love is mute as well as blind.

And so here is this young man and Deirdre is thinking, "What if, just what if? No-he's too young, I'm too old! That's silly. But still, what if, just what if?"

He was dumping the trash, heaving barrels to the chest-high dumpster lip, and he saw the old woman. She walked into the alley, as she did every morning, wearing a robe and slippers, a sweat perfume fragrance following behind her, and she looked up at a tree and began to say, "Good morning, are you ready to eat? Are you hungry?"

Deirdre dropped a handful of bread crumbs on the ground, moved a few feet away and dropped another handful, moved a few feet away and dropped another handful. When there were four small piles of bread crumbs on the ground, she stepped away and waited. Birds flew from the tree she spoke to and flocked around the bread crumbs.

After his labor is completed, the young man watched. He watched the birds, then Deirdre, then the birds, then Deirdre. Finally, he smiled at her and nodded. "Good morning," he said, pulling the dirty cart past her. He disappeared into the restaurant.

Watching him go, Deirdre leaned against the wall of her apartment
building and murmured, "Oh, dim city."

A piece of paper tumbled and came to rest near her feet. She picked up the paper, thinking, "There is already too much trash in this city." Especially was this true in the region where she lived.

Soon, Deirdre was back in her third floor apartment reading the typed print on the sheet of paper she held, both sides of which were numbered as page 11. She began to read.

"Oh my," she said out loud. "I wonder what the other ten pages must be like."

The portion that caught Deirdre's attention read like this:

"This is what leads me to that ugly son-of-a-bitch we call Love. We call it Love, but it is not. It should instead be called 'Selfish Longing.' And we do not fall in love so much as we see something we want and develop an infatuation for it. The only true love people feel is for themselves, and sometimes this through difficulty; though, perhaps, a person may be generous to share their self-love with someone else, and they call that Love. So look for your true love, but I promise you, you will not find it. The best you can hope for is to become the object of someone else's selfish longing. Go ahead and marry your 'soulmate,' but you will regret it. When you drag yourself to that place you call home (but that doesn't feel like home), suicidally weary, and needing Love, you will only find that hideously selfish creature waiting for you, waiting to see what you have left to give it, waiting to see what it can leech out of you. Then you will realize: I have to feed the leech or it will leave me; I must feed the leech because it is the only thing in this world that gives me any attention. Then you will understand how cruel Love is. Then you will understand that there is nobody-never was anybody, never will be anybody-who loves you."

Deirdre stopped reading and thought about the young man, who was, at that instant, back in the restaurant, washing his hands, preparing to go home. He was thinking about how hot it was, and what he wanted to have for breakfast.

Deirdre was forgotten.

Then Deirdre forgot.


And that last page of Boris Kermoff's manifesto, the one that might as well have changed the world?

Indeed.

The last page came to rest on a busy sidewalk. As Boris himself would have found a bitter, almost humorously bitter, irony, he had miscounted the number of pages typed. There had only been twenty-four pages of typed material.

The twenty-fifth?

Blank.