Two elderly men are sitting on a park bench in a large city park in a large city. The man on the left, with glasses and a weathered, sun browned face, was once a politician. The man on the right, hunched and tired, with a tuft of white hair on his head, was once a children's author.
The men are old friends, having shared many fantastical times together. But at the current moment are sitting silently on a late summer afternoon and watching passerby city dwellers jog, or bike, or walk, or stand still, even talking on their cellular telephones.
The man on the right turns his head slightly, takes in a breath and exhales. The city is loud, it's always loud, even in the dead of night. But this spot, this bench in the park, is an oasis, a paradise.
The man on the right, turns his head back to the front again and smiles. He thinks of the time his friend, the man of the left, stood on the floor before congress for fifteen and a half hours to filibuster a bill that would have given guns to school children.
The school children were unsafe when they were unarmed, the bill said, and therefore should be armed to the teeth with every explosive and automatic weapon that god had put on this earth. God created guns, obviously, as population control.
So with the bill, and a generous sum of cash from taxpayers, each school in America would give a child a gun once they entered fourth grade. Nothing fancy, a .38 caliber. Each school would also have a mandatory gun training class, so that kids didn't kill themselves or their friends.
But the man on the left, the politician, said it was wrong to force children to learn to shoot, because eventually everyone would shoot each other. It was inevitable, he said. As Americans, we are predisposed to incidents of violent rage. That now there would be no sour words or fisticuffs, but just shoot-em-dead gun battles. That all of our kids would be dead before the program was even a year old.
And so the man on the left, the politician, successfully delayed a vote on it, and eventually the bill was dropped from existence.
A rollerblader shuffled by the two men on the path that ran past them, and the man on the right's concentration was broken.
How about the Mets, the man on the right said.
The silence now broken, the man on the left said, well, hey, yeah. They're really something this year, could win it all.
Yeah, and how about that pitcher. Throws so hard, I'll bet any amount of money he could take down a building with that speed.
Well yeah, hey. Danny something or other, right?
Who knows?
Yeah.
The silence set in again. A comfortable silence, not awkward or contested, soothing.
The man on the left fell into thought. His friend, the man on the right, had traveled the world in support of his writings for children. He was especially loved in the Soviet Union, which made things difficult for the man on the right. At the height of his popularity, it was the Cold War between the Soviet Union and basically the whole rest of the world, but mainly the United States of America, which is where the man on the right called his home.
For years and years, the man would fly on a small airplane from Lake Placid New York to San Antonio Texas to Guadalajara Mexico to Kwai Hawaii to Japan. From Japan he would meet a man named Kenji Wakasato who would give him falsified travel documents with a fake name and would take a boat to the mainland or Asia and reach the trans Siberian railroad by land from there.
Once, he made a stop at a town on the edge of Siberia called Waliterzck, a town with only sixteen buildings. The town had used all of their resources to bring the man to the town because the few children loved his books so much.
The town librarian had studied abroad in England when he was a young man and brought the man on the right's first few books back with him, which he had personally translated from English to Russian. And whenever he could, he would pay a passing traveler for whatever books they could supply.
The town children's favorite book of the man's was a book titled The Little Shrieking Bird, though roughly translated from English to Russian it was The Small Terrible Bird With The Loud Yell. It told the story of a small yellow bird named Richard who could only shriek to communicate. Because of this, Richard had no friends or family because no one could stand the sounds he produced. Eventually Richard decided to leave his nest and his tree and fly south. Along the way he stopped at a sleepy seaside town along the west coast of Mexico. There, nestled in the wooded area that bordered the beach, while resting before the next leg of his journey, Richard heard a loud shriek coming from the trees. Then another, different, but equally as loud shriek.
He took flight and hovered low, just above the tree line, trying catch a glimpse of the owners of the shrieks. In a clearing in a grove of palm trees, were two small yellow birds, one with a green tuft of feathers on the crown of its head and the other with a blue tuft of feathers hanging shaggily over its eyes. Richard came to land on a palm branch that hung over the two birds, trying to be as quiet as possible, but a leaf fall as he landed on the branch and the two birds looked up at him.
The birds quickly charged up at him, but Richard couldn't move, frozen in fear. And so when they reached the branch that Richard was on they quickly accosted him, with out much fight. The birds knocked Richard unconscious, and took him back to a cave which they inhabited deep in the woods. When Richard awoke, he was tied to a log hanging above a fire.
Please, he tried to say, please, let me go, I mean no harm, but all that came out were loud shrieks. He didn't know what to do.
The birds began to encroach upon him, and he shrieked and shrieked. Then he heard a guttural roar from somewhere in the cave, and the two other birds backed off. The roar came again, and the birds cut Richard loose.
They shrieked, and he went to respond, but what came out was a growl. He realized that he had grown to roar, he was a stronger bird than he'd been just moments before, and so he killed the two birds that had kidnapped him and flew back to where he'd come from, his home.
The man on the right had visited Waliterzck and read this story to the children in English, he'd not learned Russian yet, and made sound effects and acted some of it out and the children loved it. The librarian thanked the man on the right profusely. The man on the right decided to stay the night in the town and catch the train the following morning, rather than hitching a ride to the next outpost and meeting the train there, so the librarian said that the man could stay in the library overnight, just to leave the place the way it'd been when he got there.
In the night, after the man had gotten a good buzz off cheap vodka, there came a knock at the library door. What the holy hell, the man muttered as he got up to walk to the door to see what all the commotion was about.
At the door stood fifteen armed men in uniforms. Russian secret police, he would find out. He spent the next six years in a Russian gulag for what the Soviets called, "crimes against the well-being of Soviet children."
It was in this prison where the two elderly men met. The man on the right, a young children's author, the man on the left, a young photojournalist who'd been captured trying to capture the gulag he was currently in on film to prove that one existed.
The two men were situated in cells next to each other and would tap on the wall in morse code to keep from going totally insane. The man on the left had been there one whole year longer than the man on the right.
On the day they were released, the men had been sitting in their cells, tapping out messages. Their doors unlocked and revealed an empty building. And so, the two men walked out and for days through the snow before they reached Waliterzck.
It'd been six years since the man on the right had been arrested, and Waliterzck was worse off. The library was burned down, the train station was rotting. The town was down to only three standing buildings.
And so three days later, a train arrived and the men took it back to civilization, to television and American football and beer. The men became household names in the United States of America, and so the man on the left decided to run for office, and because of his heroic escape and noble cause for being in Russia to begin with, won without much contest and became a congressman of an empirical state.
The men, having survived the gulag, having endured fame, found a way to meet on the bench in the large city park for lunch once a week. The bench they sat on now.
The man on the left turned to the man on the right and said, Hey, well, how about the years?
The man on the right wrinkled his eyebrow, and said, sorry?
The years, my friend, the years. They are drawing to a close, I have a bug.
A bug?
Well, hey, yeah, a bug. It's eating at my innards. Some man in a big white coat told me.
Well. That's awful. What did Mary say?
Mary left, last summer.
Well.
Yes, and the kids haven't called in years. And now the bug.
Well, yeah. Life is absolute shit. Marge left me, my kids don't ever visit and I haven't written a good book in decades. But we've always had this bench. And a friendship.
Yes, the bench, but, why haven't we talked about our flailing lives.
Because, life is absolute shit. That's a given. Why dwell on life being terrible? We walked in the snow with canvas pants on to a town that burned down. We've done great things.
We have, the man on the left conceded.
And we've influenced people. So again. Life is terrible, yes, but life is great. And we've lived.
The afternoon dwindling, the men again set in silence, comfortable silence. Across the field a man and a boy pass a frisbee. A panoply of car horns swirled around the men. A blue bird twirled and dipped above them, landing on a branch and singing its song, controlled shrieks.
