Questions Persist

You haven’t forgotten, have you, how I stood there, right in the middle of that neatly trimmed gray lawn? Facing a small auditorium of thirty-odd people on plastic chairs. By moonlight, their rhythmic, out-of-sync swaying, rocking back and forth on the back legs of those chairs, was something sacred. An epiphany.

Thirty people who, right then, should have been dead to the world on their worn sheets, or maybe flipping through books, Bible to “The Great Gatsby”, eyes heavy with sleep.

Instead, they sat there, obedient, as if I were some indescribable beauty, reverent in five-degree weather. They weren’t checking their watches; I was doing that for them. They didn’t let their lower jaws drop with a clatter and vanish into the darkness. They stared, fixedly, at the sky.

You remember? Go on, tell me you don’t! Just try it.

The projector stood between us, right there on the damp grass, lens pointing up. I watched the mist rising from the wet grass curl around its hot casing, licking at my audience, backlit by that powerful beam. They, in turn, were staring at what was above them. The projector lit up the treetops directly overhead, slide after slide. Green, blue, red. Soul, brain, heart. What’s the connection? What’s the odd one out?

The slides had some text too, I think. Or maybe not. I was talking. Leading this seminar as if they couldn’t just sit in silence. They were zombies, after all. But every time I stopped, and my words, turned to mist, partly shattered against the light beam and partly shot upwards with it, silence still wouldn’t come. I heard the projector. It rustled and whispered. It made this high-pitched sound, almost out of my hearing range, a sound I’d once pulled from the same lamp that birthed everything I owned. It unnerved me, so I kept them entertained—or maybe entertained myself. What I was talking about didn’t matter. I could ramble on about project management—couldn’t hurt, right? Then maybe “accidentally” trip myself up and pick up where I left off last week: telling them how they don’t cook asparagus in China. They didn’t care. Either way, I was just playing with myself. Playing “earn-a-buck-any-way-you-can,” or playing the idiot, or maybe the opposite. I wasn’t supposed to hold an audience, to offer them anything. I was left to my own devices for a while. But for how long…

Green, blue, red. An hour and a half, two hours, all night. What’s the odd one out?

For those seventy-five cents each weirdo paid me to rock on a chair, it turns out I was supposed to torture myself indefinitely with my own inability to shut up. And even now, I can’t shut up. Well, you’ll understand, darling, I hope. My seminar was called “The Rising.” Really, it wasn’t a seminar at all, but a one-man show with three colors. A lawn theater with a projector. You won’t see that on SportsLive.

So, do you remember? You just looked after that beam of light, hitting the hornbeam branches, then shrugged. Was it the cold, or were you bothered by how often the leaves changed color at night?

Green, blue, red. Hope, faith, love. What’s the odd one out?