The Message, the Messenger

There was no time to deliver his message, the man to whom it was to be delivered was dying and dying fast, and the village through which this message was to travel could not bring itself to follow the other villages and towns throughout the world in their manner of delivering messages.  No, these villagers thought at some time when the internet was just getting its legs moving across the world, its spidery legs spinning and weaving its web, a message is to be delivered person to person, always person to person, no matter how hard that is, no matter what it takes, takes from you to get there, takes from you to see the look on the person’s face when he hears the words from you as breath, and not as mere scribblings, digitized or otherwise, scribbled so either because you were too lazy to take the words directly to the person’s ear or because of some other chance circumstance, some hellish indifferent roll of the dice.  Not only this, not only was there not this ease of communication through whatever medium, but there was also another factor to consider: the traffic all around the village and the density of the people gathered there now, for there was a festival commencing at the time, ironically, a festival of life and a celebration of life.  There was no time, no time at all, to make it to the man who, by the way, lived clear on the other side of the wide river cutting through the village like a sharp blade with rippling edges.  He would be dead by the time the messenger made it to him, and the dead don’t seem to care about our messages to them.

            But he is my son, my only son, and I cannot bare to have him disappear from this earth before me. You know my ailment, and that it is even unlikelier that I would make it there to say this to him than you.  You still have your strength and your wits about you, more wits than I, and could manage to slither your way through the crowds now gathering in the streets to say this one last thing to my dying boy…please!  The messenger couldn’t refuse such a request, and felt the pain of loss in his own heart, so he went at once to the street below the father’s apartment, the street with fine examples of cheer all around, food you would like to eat, company you would like to share, music you would like to hear, thick and impenetrable.  The messenger gawked at all the happenings around him, gawked and was envious of the others’ romping about him.  His heart was torn but quickly moved, as this messenger was never much of a faithful servant to the ways of his village, always took pleasure as pleasure and opportunity as opportunity, and could not bring himself to refuse this opportunity, to celebrate life with living flesh in this way.  He reached into his pocket, where was stored a small slender device he kept secret from the others: a cell-phone; he took it out and sent a message, did not even call the man, the message with which his employer, indeed his friend, had entrusted him.  How could I be so provincial with all this joy around, he thought to himself as justification.  He delivered the message the new way, in the new, faithless manner of the world, and simply trusted, with simple, unnerving trust, that the message had made it to the dying man.