HAYNTA-4
The boy who crossed the Norgold Mountains in winter, I imagined as Nolk, the janitor:
The first thing I noticed when I came to Clarks Hill, and I don’t think I was unique in this respect, was the janitors. They were hard to miss: Possessed of solemn, nigh unto righteous, bearings and garbed in orange, hooded robes, they invited attention. As you got used to them, they faded into the background and you almost didn’t notice them, any more than you’d notice janitors wearing regular work clothing; but when I first arrived they seemed to me to swarming about the place like ants. One got the impression they were everywhere: amidst the subtle greens of the grounds and the faded blocks and stones of the schoolbuildings and its surrounding wall, they stuck out. They were, and I’m sure still are, one of the first things visitors notice when they come to grand old Clarks Hill Institute. I think the administrators have always been happy about that, too: it’s a memorable, distinguishing feature of the place.
But why? Why, you ask, do the janitors wear orange robes? I, for one, was most assuredly curious about that when I first saw them. Well, and this I heard from Mr. Chimneylark, the history teacher before Mrs. Catnip came, the Institute commenced its illustrious career as a monastery.
The Monks of the Iron God built the majority of the structures that now comprise Clarks Hill about 250 years ago, at the height of the Monastery fad in the troubled years leading up to the Shark War. The construction took four years, and when the building was at last complete and the grounds seeded with the appropriate vegetation, the good Monks spent their days meditating, worshipping the Iron God, denying themselves the basic necessities of life in the name of piety, and, naturally, wearing orange robes.
They intended these robes to be the color of raw iron, which in the Clarks Hill area is a reddish-gray, but as the story goes, the dyer botched the order, and the robes ended up a lot nearer to orange than red. Some 120 years later, as the era of the monastery was coming to a close, the Order of the Iron God, one of the last of these religious communities, or “stalwarts of elegance,” as they described themselves, “against a rising flood of banality,” sold the place to the founders of the Institute. It wasn’t their wish to sell it—in their minds, they remained an active order—but their company had dwindled to such a paltry number of monks, and these holdouts of such an advanced average age that despite the zealous dedication of their spirits they could no longer take care of the grounds, or the buildings.
So pious were they, however, that in the contract for the transaction, they stipulated that the by-then signature orange robes be worn by the teachers of the new Institute, their hope being that the robes themselves would transform the teachers into vessels for the spread of the Iron God’s law. The founders of the Institute would not agree to this stipulation, however, and after much wrangling a compromise was reached in which the janitors, or “caretakers of the holy grounds,” as the Institute founders worded it, with delicate tact, would wear the robes.
In time, the Order of the Iron God died out, but by then the wearing of the robes was such a tradition that the agreement, which with no Monks remaining to lodge a protest, could have been ignored without any legal ramifications, was never breached. The only conduct of the Institute that could have been considered a breach, even if the Order had still been around to cry foul, was that in successive manufactures, the robes became a much brighter orange than those that the monks had worn.
So, the conclusion in the present day of all of this skylarking was that as we (that is, the students of Clarks Hill, if I’m to include myself in that company, which seems appropriate in this instance, it being a case of literal experience rather than spiritual accord) went to class and studied, went to the dining hall and ate, and went to our dormitories and goofed around, orange-robed janitors, with their faces shadowed by hoods, spread out all over the grounds and in the edifices like burglars after a bloody battle, cleaning and maintaining the place. The hoods-up thing wasn’t an actual tradition or expectation by which the Monks had lived, but a rule of the boss janitor of the present, as I learned later: He strongly encouraged all of “his janitors” to keep their hoods up at all times. He would have made a very pious abbot.
You could see in the slumping, slouching gaits of most of the janitors, along with their gray beards, glazed eyes, and faces frozen in attitudes of dissipated outrage that their number was dominated by old, spiritless individuals; but there were a few young ones among them, and of these, Nolk was probably the youngest. He wasn’t much older than the oldest of the students. He wasn’t much older than me.
It’s hard to say how long he’d been working at the Institute before he came into my purview. It could have been a day, or it could have been a month. As I’ve said, the janitors became part of the setting of the place, part of the background, and we, the students, didn’t take notice of them. But when my eyes did by chance lock onto him for the first time, cleaning a fountain, as I recall, I always noticed him thereafter. I couldn’t not notice him.
I could identify him even before he had a face, that is, before I saw him with his hood back: Something in the way he moved was beautiful to me and set him apart from the other janitors, a youthful spring, I suppose, but also a care he took in everything he did, from polishing the stone fountains and benches in the Nonagon, to tending the vegetation, to raking leaves, to mopping the floors or dragging bags of waste from the lavatories, a smoothness or grace in his motion, which, however, gave the impression that it wasn’t a genetic, or inherited trait, but was born of long practice and a respect for something, something intangible. Life itself, maybe.
Needless to say, I loved watching him work. I craved it. I looked forward to going out into the Nonagon to study, so that I could watch him. The Nonagon was the area within, and surrounded (on nine sides), by the nine buildings of the Institute; it was an area of winding brick walkways, stone fountains and basins, stone and granite statues of people and animals, and hundreds, well, a hundred wood and/or stone tables and benches, all richly garnished with an assortment of bushes, decorative grass, small trees, flower arrays, ferns, and other leafy vegetation. It was a plum study area (and indeed, not an insignificant number of plum trees were numbered among its items of vegetation). I seldom went there, myself, because, it being so pleasant, it was very popular, and thus crowded, unless the weather was uncooperative. Even if staying in my room to study was precluded because Turta had a bunch of squawking gabbling visitors, I preferred the library despite the lovely greenery of the Nonagon, because, for one thing, the library was quiet, and more importantly, I could hide in a booth there, where I could do my thing without feeling accosted by the closeness of so many prying, judgmental eyes.
A.N., though (“after Nolk”), the Nonagon became my first choice in study areas. Every day, when I got back from my classes, I would look out the window of my room, scan as far up and down the Nonagon as I could, and if I located him tending the gardens, scrubbing a fountain, or otherwise working on the grounds, I’d go out and sit at the unoccupied table nearest to him. I’d say I located him about 40% to 50% of the time: sometimes he was tending to the grounds or buildings somewhere outside of the Nonagon, and sometimes, I’m sure, I just couldn’t find him. The Nonagon was a large enough area that despite his being easy to distinguish from the other janitors, pinpointing him amongst all the activity there, not to mention the vegetation, wasn’t a sure thing.
So, after a year and a half of never, or rarely, “hittin’ the Nonagon,” which was a common student euphemism for studying, I was a regular. I wasn’t really studying, though. I was half-studying, and half watching Nolk, glancing up to look directly at him as often as I dared, and otherwise letting my eyes wander towards him in their sockets while maintaining a tilt of the head indicative of deep absorption in the books and papers before me. It was strange: I considered myself invisible to every other student, who as a group were unabashedly unobservant anyway, and yet I was fearful that I would get caught watching the janitor. Did I believe I would get ridiculed, or jeered for such an indiscretion? I doubt it, but I didn’t under any circumstances want to get caught watching him, and, which was even more important, I didn’t want him to catch me watching him. That, I thought, would be appalling! So, I was circumspect in my observations.
Now, as much as I was drawn to him, as much as I liked watching him, as much as I just plain liked him, in the sense you can like anybody without ever having interacted with them, I had no intention of ever saying anything to him—that, I knew, would be well beyond the borders of my courage—nor did I have any expectation that he would ever say anything to me; but just as Mrs. Camden’s class gave me something to look forward to in the morning, so his presence gave me something to look forward to in the afternoon. And, well, sometimes you talk to people without knowing it.
I talked to myself all the time, as I’m sure most people who don’t have any friends do. When I was alone, I talked loudly, or I should say, at a standard two-person conversational volume, which I think would be considered loud by talking-to-yourself standards, which I’m sure somebody wrote out somewhere at some time, probably while he or she was talking to himself or herself. If anybody else was in my vicinity, however, which was more the norm, I muttered. I muttered to myself; in fact, my nickname back home was Miss Mutter. “Afternoons in the Nonagon,” which is what I would title this short era of my life, I kept silent when I was watching Nolk; but if in the midst of my observations, he’d happen to finish his work in the Nonagon, and depart, leaving me with only the half-studying part of my half-studying, half-watching Nolk dichotomy of activity, and therefore opening up 50% of my time, a discussion with myself would at some point, sooner than later, commence. It’s possible, indeed probable, that I muttered a little bit even while I was keeping an eye on him, it was such an ingrained behavior of mine.
In any case, one unseasonably cool day in mid-spring, I had made my usual mid-afternoon nest in the Nonagon, happy that the day was cool, because as on most unfavorable weather days, the Nonagon crowd was thin, the atmosphere of it less busy than the norm, and the ambient sound less of a roar, more of a murmur. I was sitting in the vicinity of a lilac bush, whose sweet aroma added to the ebullience of my mood, and had been doing my half-and-half thing for a decent while, casually reading selections from Jumpere’s abstruse treatises about alternate realities that were coyly inserted into Chapter Four of my philosophy book, and watching Nolk tend to various plants; when to my disappointment, he departed, his tasks in the Nonagon evidently completed for the moment.
The janitors, Nolk among them, had been working long hours in the Nonagon, planting the spring flowers and freshening the paths with gravel and bark, which was good in that it meant that Nolk was there almost every afternoon but bad in that because of the nature of much of this work, which was more dynamic than for example standing in one spot for hours scrubbing a fountain, it was more difficult to keep track of where he was. Also, he was apt at any time to depart the Nonagon for a bit, to go get another barrow-full of gravel or bark, for example, or to run an errand for one of the other janitors. As he had today, leaving me to study with Jumpere, and, of course, to mutter to myself.
In one voice, I said, “Well, this sucks.”
In a higher but more masculine voice, I said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. There’s some interesting stuff there. It’s funny that Joecon called him ‘Jumper,’ for example.”
In the first voice, I said, “And why is that funny?”
In the second voice, I replied, “Because he jumped dimensions, in a way.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch.”
“These dimensions, it seems like just a lot of mumbo jumbo to me. All this about alternate timelines, infinite possibilities. I suppose you take it as serious discourse.”
“Sure, I don’t think it’s ‘mumbo jumbo,’ as you so eloquently put it. I think it’s possible that all of those possibilities exist. It’s not impossible that they do, if I may say so.”
“Good one…but doesn’t he mean that for any event, in the past, you know, there were infinite possibilities, and that once one thing happened, all those other possibilities became impossibilities? For instance, when I get up from this bench, I could walk away in any of several different directions, and then depending on what direction I walk, my next action could be this or that or this, and then depending on which of those actions I take, my next action would be this-this, this-that, this-this, or that-this, that-that, that-this, or this-this, this-that, this-this, you see what I mean, and so on for the rest of my life, so that the number of exact paths I might take in my life would be, for all practical purposes, infinite. But once I’ve lived my life, the number of these paths would be reduced to one, and every other path would be an impossibility, right?”
“No I think he means that every single one of those paths exists—happened, will happen, is happening, I don’t know—in some dimension or another, an alternate timeline, if you will.”
I said, with as much dramatic flair as I could muster (which wasn’t much, if truth be known), “I was afraid that was what he meant.”
At this point, I happened to glance to my right, where the lilac bush was flanked by a fountain, and who was there, but Nolk, in profile to, but turned at a slight angle towards me, scrubbing the fountain with a special split-bristle brush that the janitors used for polishing the statues and fountains. How long he’d been there, and how much of my ridiculous conversation he’d heard, there was no way for me to know.
His dark face was shadowed by the orange hood of his robe, but I could see it in vivid detail: the texture of his skin, the gleam and green striations of his eyes, the scars on his cheek, forehead, and chin. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen his face—he worked with his hood back on occasion (specifically, I learned later, when the certain janitors who would be liable to tell the boss janitor that he had “unhooded” himself were not around)—but this was the first time I’d seen it so close up, and the beauty I had discerned in the way that he moved was reflected and magnified there. Or so I told myself later: let’s just say that my being, which includes my body, my mind, and that thing that as Mrs. Camden would say, cannot be encapsulated by the sum of one’s body and mind, let’s call it a soul, responded to him, strengthening the visceral draw I already had to him.
And he was smiling in amusement.
I was so startled he was there that it took a beat for my shyness to kick in, and I said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you ever talk to yourself?”
Without pausing from his work, he said in the quiet, offhand way I was to learn he had of saying almost everything, “I used to.”
At this point, another janitor, an older one, joined him at the fountain, with the words, “Is there a problem, Brother Nolk?” (Which is when I learned that his name was Nolk.)
“No,” he said, busying himself with renewed vigor, brush to stone.
“Good,” the old janitor said, with, in my humble opinion, an undercurrent of threat in his voice. And that was that, the end of my first conversation with Nolk, a veritable summit meeting it was; but it was the beginning.