There are cages in our lives. We build them ourselves, or others build them for us - it really doesn’t matter, and we live within them for the protection of others and the containment of our feelings. We can pull the wires that attach them to the ceilings of our emotions, to the floors of our realities, and raise or lower ourselves in these confines to a point that is comfortable for us. We can do that. We are humans and we know how to do that. We know how. We learn the trick of manipulating our tiny worlds, our cages, in order to do this. Those of us who cannot adjust our places in the room that is our relationships sometimes crash to the floor and, as our world shatters into hard metal strips and shards, we hopefully pick our way out of the debris in which we find ourselves. Those of us who can do otherwise, do so. I am one of the latter. Usually.
When I was a boy I had a puppy who tore newspaper into strips. She would hold down the remnants of the day’s news and with her teeth she would rip those lengthy strips of over-inked newsprint. That was her way of dealing with the loneliness she felt when she was being ignored by me. Max has his own methods and they are not very dissimilar from my puppy’s. He lowers his particular cage to a halfway spot in his underwhelming world and he rips my heart into long, empty strips. He does it slowly and methodically, like the puppy, and he does it without even knowing he’s doing it.
I can handle the pain of being torn to shreds, but I cannot abide not knowing what is behind such an action. It is not my nature, my operatic nature, to just stand there and not reach for the high note, the low note, the middle register and the words that those notes amplify. I am forced, ultimately, to speak. That is the journey I take in my cage, my hydraulic stage of life.
"Are you going to explain this?" I asked him.
Max didn’t answer me. He stood there, looking forlorn and not speaking a word.
"Max, you have to say something. Even if you don’t explain what’s been happening, you must say something."
"Hello, Paul."
"Well, that’s something anyway," I said. "Now, would you mind saying something worthwhile."
"There’s really nothing to say. He’s an old friend."
"He didn’t seem very friendly to me."
"He wasn’t. He’s had a bad week."
"A week? Really?" I wanted to laugh at that, but I couldn’t. I’d been having a bad month and Max hadn’t reacted this way.
"He’s not like you, Paul."
"No one is, dear boy."
"No. No one is." Max came over to where I was standing and he placed his hands on my shoulders. "I’ve admired you my whole life, Paul."
"Oh, tush!" I pulled away from his grasp.
"It’s true. In the darkest times I had your voice and your music to soothe me. You know that. I’ve told you that before."
"Yes," I said. Just that.
"And you’ve been great to let me live here and work for you and go to school."
"Every boy needs an education," I replied.
"It’s not just that, Paul, you know it. You’ve let me into your life, your world. I’m very grateful for that."
"Then show your gratitude and talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you."
He shook his head, too slowly I thought, before speaking and then, after a tentative "I..." he stopped speaking and looked away.
"Who was that man?" I was whining, I could hear it, and I didn’t care.
"An old friend."
"And?"
"And now he’s not a friend. That’s hard for me."
"Well, what is he now?"
"He’s nothing. Not a friend. Not an enemy. Nothing. That’s hard."
"I don’t understand, Max."
"I don’t know how to explain it. We were close friends. He was my first lover. Then he stopped being either and went away. Just like that. No reason. No explanation. I was very hurt by that. Then suddenly, there he was. And the man he was just wasn’t the boy I knew."
"He’d moved on, Max. That’s all."
"All?"
"It happens to everyone. We grow out of the people we knew."
"I don’t like it, Paul. It means I’ll likely grow out of you, too."
I took a deep breath and said what I had not wanted to say, ever. "You will."
"How will I know..."
"...when that happens, Max? You’ll just know. Then you will do what you must."
I reached for his hands and held them in mine. I smiled my most radiant smile and pulled him toward me.
"I’ve never wanted to own a person, Max. It was never part my psychological make-up. However, if I did ever want to have someone made a permanent part of my life, I think it would be you."
He didn’t respond to this. He stood there, held firmly by my hands, and he looked straight into my eyes, seeing behind them, I could sense, seeing into my brain, into my thought patterns, trying to read the heart in my head, seeking the deepest recesses of my brain to find the real meaning in my words. It hurt me to stand there like that. I pained me deeply. It made me wish that my particular cage had an electrical button I could push, perhaps with my nose considering that my hands were full, a button that would take me way high up, away from this confrontation that was making me so uncomfortable.
"It wouldn’t be me, Paul," he said suddenly and I felt my cage begin to descend, rapidly, slightly out of control, rocking a bit from side to side. The hand in my mind reached for the cable, grabbed it and lost its grip instantly as the burning flesh was stripped away by the metal cable rushing through it. I waited for the crash, that terrible, anticipated crash, but it never came. I just kept going down further and further,hotter and hotter, without pause.
"Paul, are you all right?" I heard Max say from somewhere far away.
"I’ll be fine," I shouted.
"Paul! Don’t go away from me."
There was something in the sincerity of that statement that enforced a natural braking system in my mind’s cage. I slowed and stuttered and the sense of descending ended abruptly. I was on solid flooring again. There was no movement in my world. It was growing cooler again.
"I want to tell you about Mikhael," Max said from somewhere above me. "Let’s sit down, and let me tell you everything I can remember."
I nodded and was suddenly standing there next to him again. We were the same two people we’d been before, close, companionable. I sat down on the sofa and Max sat down next to me. He was still holding onto my hands. I looked at him, nodded and he told me the story, from the beginning, about himself and Mikhael and a girl named Freddy. I heard the words, but I wasn’t truly listening, for all I cared about was that he had opened his cage door, left it and entered mine.
The hydraulic motor that moved me up and down took over and we started on a very slow ascent and the world was shining again. Max was confiding in me. Finally.
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