What, then, is there to say?
That the sun is shining, but the wind is cold?
That there is a huge, overwhelming sense of defeat that sets in when the blossoming, rollicking emotions of summer give way to the leafless dormancy of winter?
That the gutters are full of slush, and the sidewalks are full of people? What's unusual about that? It may be terrifying, but it's certainly not unusual. This is December, in Denver. People are shopping for Christmas, searching for lunch, hoping for love to find them before the dark.
But among them shuffles a dingy, unshaven man, small but dense, in a dirty corduroy coat with small tufts of batting poking from the shoulders like down on a molting duck. Unremarkable, you say. True, many of his kind are about.
This one is carrying a large, double-bladed axe.
There's more to it than that. (Isn't there always?) He also carries a tattered yellow legal pad. His manner broadcasts confusion more than menace. Yet when he comes up close beside a woman waiting for a bus, she recoils in such precipitous horror that her rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses hang briefly in mid-air before snapping back onto her stricken face.
The Axeman glares at her briefly, then scrutinizes his pad for an oblong moment. He turns slowly on his heels and starts in the opposite direction. Rhinestones shudder in their plastic settings and the sun glints off the carefully honed axe-edge.
He does not, as Hollywood might have it, turn suddenly, raise the axe in a mighty slow-motion arc, and decapitate her as a trigger for the opening credits. No. None of that.
Instead the bus comes, and she gets on thankfully. Another incident where what might have been, is not; as indeed it cannot be without being what was.
Don't despair. Something else always happens.
Sometimes it doesn't take very long.
A block and a half later, the Axeman passes a doorway formed of peeling wood and smeared glass stuck in a crumbling brick wall. Annie emerges in a heated rush from teaching a noon-time country swing class at Arthur Murray--on her way to Walgreens for a new supply of Monostat--and sends them both sprawling. The axe stands briefly on its edge on the cold, slippery concrete, long enough for Annie's left ear to just slide past on its earthward arc without being separated from her head. Her coat flops open to expose a naked midriff, and she lands with a small piece of ice lodged in a lopsided belly-button that a poetic cowboy had once described as "mighty cute."
They grunt in unison on impact. Annie bounces upright like a toy punching doll, spitting apologies as she rises.
The Axeman doesn't move.
"Oh my God!" Annie shrieks.
The Axeman's eyelids flutter.
He feels certain God has nothing to do with it.
A bit of exposition, or perhaps explanation, is probably in order before we go too much further here. See Annie was not the type to merely ignore unsavory-looking characters like they were so many rusted lampposts. She was not one of those folks who strolled, head-high through the crowd, pushing a wave of cold indifference like a blunt-nosed ship in a choppy sea. When she had the time, she would stop and argue with the street-corner preachers. She wouldn't wave off a leaflet thrust in her face. She would stand there and read it and insist on an explanation if something wasn't right. If they offered her say, half-price liposuction, she would demand to know why the hapless leafleteer thought such a thing would be of interest to her. (For the record, even the casual admirer of her physique could tell there wasn't enough fat on her thighs to grease the average skillet.)
So, we should not be shocked--as were the passers-by--that Annie, having recovered herself sufficiently, commenced to give the Axeman an impassioned reading of the proverbial Riot Act. The Axeman--although he shared with most of us the disadvantage of never having read an actual Riot Act (this despite having grown up in a police state)--recognized it for what it was simply on the basis of her clearly threatening but curiously charming delivery.
He struggled to his feet.
"And be careful with this God Damn thing!" she concluded.
The Axeman blinked in disbelief.
She handed him back his axe. He snatched it abruptly.
He consulted his pad. Nowhere in the many pages of meticulous notations was he going to find any hint of how to deal with this.
Annie brushed the melting ice out of her cockeyed navel.
The Axeman stared, speechless.
He found her belly-button quite impressive, but that wasn't it. He was truly speechless, as in mute, from birth. A peek at his pad would reveal that he was also a prodigious doodler. That was his language; he was illiterate in any other. His hearing was quite good. He understood perfectly well she was demanding some form of atonement, which he wanted very badly to give, even allowing for the fact that it was her who knocked him down.
Then she noticed he was bleeding.
"Oh Christ," she said. "You're hurt."
It wasn't Christ's fault.
She grabbed his bristly chin, turned his head to one side, and pushed back the stringy hair covering a rather nasty looking cut over his left eye.
He reached up tentatively to explore the wound. She snatched his grimy hand away.
"Don't touch it," she ordered. "Come on, I'm on my way to the drugstore. I'll get some stuff to clean that up for you."
She produced a small wad of kleenex. "Here, hold this on it," she instructed. "Does it hurt?"
He shook his head no, pressing the tissue on the spot where she directed his hand. A fragrance drifted off her wrists. An easy breeze filtered through a damp pine grove and brushed across his cheek.
"What's your name?"
He shook his head no.
"No? You don't have a name?"
He shook his head no.
"¿No habla Ingles?"
This only confused him more. He didn't know a word of Spanish. He pointed to his mouth, and shook his head no.
"What? You mean you can't talk?"
That's right, he nodded.
"Heaven help us," she said. "Come on, I've got to get to the drugstore before I go nuts."
The Axeman was surprised such a girl was so religious.
It occurred to Annie that being mute might be a very positive quality in a man.
She went into the drugstore for supplies. He sat on a bench outside, scribbling madly in an attempt to somehow represent these inexplicable events. He had expected her, upon arising from their chance encounter, to shove him roughly into the gutter and storm off. Her reaction had quite completely upset his understanding of how people behaved in this strange country where blue lady soldiers rode horses and rich men talked into little radios while they ate lunch. Now a girl with purple legs and a naked belly was gently but thoroughly swabbing his gashed forehead with alcohol.
"Jesus, you're a mess," she said.
She ducked her head to where she could look into his eyes.
"Can you understand what I'm saying?"
He nodded yes.
"Well look, I'm sorry about this, it's totally my fault. See I was in a hurry because I've got this yeast problem..."
A blank stare.
Her discomfort, between this inscrutable stranger and the microbial rioting between her legs, had grown acute.
"Forget it. But I need to go up the block here to see someone. You come with me, and I'll get you fixed up with a shower and a cup of coffee. How does that sound?"
Like maybe God did have something to do with it.
They went to a little combination coffee shop and bookstore owned by a friend of hers. The Axeman thought the doorway--tucked in a tight corner off an alley--looked familiar.
"Spiros," Annie called, barging through the door. "Get us two coffees, and I'll be right down. I've got to use your bathroom."
Spiros didn't even look up from whatever it was he was reading. He waved his hand at her as she skated past and up a small flight of stairs in back.
"Help yourself to coffee," he said.
The Axeman stood frozen.
Spiros finally looked up. He blinked, slid his glasses up onto his head, and blinked again at the Axeman's backlit profile standing against the glare from the window.
"Why don't I just get it for you?" he said.
Axeman clutched the tool closer to his chest, trying to cover it with his coat.
Spiros got the coffee and, using it as bait, lured the Axeman into a beat-up old chair in the metaphysics section.
Then he dashed for the stairs.
As Spiros entered his apartment, Annie emerged from the bathroom looking immensely relieved.
"Who on earth is that awful man?" he demanded.
Annie closed her eyes and released a deep breath.
"Well? What have you done this time?"
"Relax. It was just a simple accident. I bumped into him on the street. We fell and he cut his head."
"Well he stinks."
"Excuse me?"
"God Annie. He smells bad, and he's carrying some sort of large implement. He's positively creepy."
Annie caught the remark with an elegant toss of her head.
"Then I guess we better disarm him and get him a shower," she said. Casual as a well-fed cat, she headed downstairs.
Spiros followed nervously in her wake.
Disarming him proved quite simple. He held the coffee cup tightly in one hand, showing no inclination to release it. When Spiros offered a blueberry muffin, he had no choice but to release the tool to Annie's suggestion that she stand it against the shelves by his side. She reached for it slowly, and he let her draw it away almost thankfully. His legal pad he kept wedged firmly under his arm.
Communicating with him presented a bit more difficulty. A shake of his head told them he didn't have family or a place to go in town. He seemed unsure about how long he had been in Denver. They got hung up on figuring out where he had come from.
Having finished his muffin, he produced a pen, found a blank space on a page in the pad, and deftly sketched out what proved to be an amazingly accurate outline of the Great Lakes. He pointed to a spot at the far western tip of Lake Superior.
"What would that be, Spiros? Minnesota?"
"I assure you dear, I have no idea."
"Minneapolis?" No.
What else was in Minnesota?
"Duluth?" He smiled.
She saw then he was not as old as he first appeared. Her father's age perhaps, not much more.
At the suggestion of a shower, the Axeman brightened considerably. Spiros looked a bit pained.
"It'll be fine," Annie said as the Axeman started up the stairs. "Have you got any clothes he could use?"
Spiros uttered a low, choking sound. Then he remembered the greasy dufflebag he had found in the doorway one morning. He had stashed it under the counter, meaning to get Annie to take it to the Salvation Army or one of those places.
"Here, let him try these." He held it like it might be contagious.
Annie grabbed it and disappeared.
The shower had stopped quite a while ago. Annie was flipping through a magazine while Spiros wrung his hands.
"Shouldn't we go check on him?"
"Go ahead."
"Well, I mean, he could be up to something."
"Such as?"
"Lord knows, dear. He's your friend."
"Chill out Spiros. He doesn't have his axe."
Just then, they heard the first tentative notes being plucked from a guitar.
Spiros levitated out of his chair, squealing like a wounded rabbit, and bolted toward the stairs.
By the time Annie caught up, Spiros was standing over the Axeman, who sat terrified on the floor, back against one wall and the guitar in his lap.
She took Spiros by the arm and moved him gently to one side. The Axeman expected this to be his cue for a hasty exit. It had been good while it lasted, but the guitar had seduced him, and now it was time to go. He prepared himself to be beaten, but the purple-legged one knelt down in front of him and leaned in close to his face. Then she reached for him and he flinched.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she said, drawing back suddenly.
"Your cut is bleeding again. I'll go get the things and re-bandage it for you."
He placed the instrument gently back in its case.
God did have a hand in this.
She came back with the first aid supplies and found Spiros sitting on the bed looking at a handful of curled and yellowed pictures.
She knelt in front of the Axeman and began slowly removing the old, bloody bandage.
"What are those?" she asked.
"They were in the pocket of this jacket, in that bag. I think they might be his."
The Axeman nodded and the tape ripped off his forehead.
"Sorry," Annie said. "Hold still."
"What do you mean? How can they be his?"
"I found that dufflebag in the doorway one morning. He must have left it there. This looks like him. Maybe this is his family."
He nodded again. Annie sat back and looked at him, clean, smiling, like a man who once posed for family pictures, and not at all like one who wandered the streets all night with an axe.
"Let me see that."
She looked. It was him all right, standing in front of a small frame house flanked by giant pine trees, between a young girl and a middle-aged woman. He had one arm around each of them, and a smile that could have melted Iceland down to bare rock.
"Is this your wife?"
Yes.
"Where is she?"
His forefinger and thumb made a gesture beside his temple that was gruesome, but unmistakable. Annie abandoned that line of questioning.
Perhaps a few additional stipulations are due here. The next part might prove hard to swallow without them. Fact is, and you'll have to take this on faith, that Annie lived within the narrow band where coincidence lapses over into miracle. That the Axeman had been reunited with his personal possessions due--only somewhat indirectly--to the workings of certain microscopic organisms residing in her female parts may be amazing, but can reasonably be accepted as coincidence. After all, he was attempting to find a notation on his pad that he hoped would lead him back to the bookstore doorway when he encountered her.
For her part, she had unwittingly acted as the catalytic vessel for such reactions on numerous occasions. Wherever two stray bits of the cosmos were inexplicably captured by each other's gravity, there you would find Annie.
In the way of corroborating evidence, I offer that she once descended into a quite seductive split on stage, only to find identical men examining her style from opposite sides. Long-lost twins, reunited in the dim confines of some gone and best forgotten low-rent bar. Annie accepted a $10 tip from each of them and forgot the whole thing. Yes, Annie is a dancer, modern mostly. Quite a good one actually. But she finds it hard to pay the rent unless some of that dancing includes getting undressed to a less than decent extent. Don't be too hard on her. The exigencies of her situation could fill volumes, and it's just dancing. She doesn't do windows.
The twins are hard to accept as coincidence.
So we should take it in stride when we see that within the hour, Annie is on the telephone talking to the Axeman's daughter in Duluth, Minnesota.
"He's carrying an axe, you mean like you cut trees with?"
"What other kind is there?" Annie asks.
"A guitar."
"Pardon me?"
"He's a guitar player. Jazz. World class. They often call a guitar an axe. I have no idea why. After my mother died--she shot herself--Dad disappeared for almost a month. He left with his guitar and they found him in Chicago with that axe. He refuses to part with it. I think it's some kind of psycho-transference kind of thing."
Annie is quite perplexed. The daughter says she'll send money for a bus ticket to get the Axeman home, and Annie agrees to see that he gets on the bus.
"Does he still play?" she asks.
"Not much since Mom died, far as I know. Can you dance?"
"Excuse me?"
"My mother was a dancer. He used to write music and play for my Dance Ensemble. I'm a choreographer. I work in New York."
Annie sticks her head between her knees to keep from fainting when she realizes why this woman's name sounded familiar.
"Try dancing. Encourage him to play any way you can," the voice says. "It might help bring him around. He gets confused sometimes, thinks he's back in Bucharest."
Bucharest indeed.
They give him back the guitar. The haze thins. The Axeman once again becomes aware of the continuum of experience linking him with his mute adolescence in a land where silence was more a means of survival than a state of mind. Annie takes off her shoes and moves over the worn rug like a breeze on water. Axeman begins to fear this young girl with the whimsical navel will die of her compassion if she doesn't staunch the flow of it. She is beautiful, spirited, unsullied by bitterness, undimmed by experience. Her dancing wraps him up in all that should not have been. It inspires awe, and causes terrible pain, like someone dying, or being born.
He can't stop playing, or look away.
All afternoon, he coaxes the voices of long forgotten spirits out of the body of the borrowed guitar. Annie dances. His pad, it turns out, holds page upon page of his own private system of scoring music and motion all in one. To her, it is as if she has finally found her native language; the one she was always meant to speak but could never quite hear.
Come evening, Annie buys two bus tickets.
When the bus pulls out, they sit side by side, staring into the scratched darkness.
They pass the bookstore, where Spiros, in his rage (over the departure of Annie or his guitar is not clear), imbeds the axe in a ceiling timber.
When the bus reaches the Interstate, Annie takes the Axeman's hand and holds it. They recede to taillights and diesel fumes fading behind the swirling snow.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Could Providence be more than the biggest city in Rhode Island?