Today she stopped at an outlying house… a worn, rundown thing. She wondered what type of lights would live there, beneath the paint flaking from wood and the worn gaps about the edges when the front door opened and a man walked out.
Alba froze as she realized he noticed her. His clothes were stitched where they were cut, splattered in paint, grease. They would have been bright once. He wore a hat and matching vest that would have been smart once too, back in another life. His eyes were wide, magnified by his goggle like glasses. She wasn’t sure if his expression was surprise or blindness.
“Well hello! Alba! How are you?” He waved her over.
Alba waited, her lunch basket hanging from a hand in an awkward way against her hip.
“I’ve never seen you before… when did you get here?” She asked.
“Yes you have…" he corrected her, “we will have had lunch and watched the sunsets… it was quite nice while it lasted.”
“No – I don’t remember doing that. How do you know my name?”
He smiled, it was disarming. Alba, never one disarmed by disarmament, didn’t like it at all. He said, “You always will have had problems remembering the things that haven’t happened just yet. You’re like me in my old age… just… in reverse.”
She tilted her head to one side, as if trying to better aim an ear that would understand him. “Tell me your name.”
“I don’t remember what they will have called me,” he told her, “You call me Olaf though… you will have said something about Czarnków, thinking I might have been born there in a book of yours. You tell me a story about a temple I would have built by shaping earth over my clenched fist and then removing it. You think you know me but you get it wrong, It’s rather peculiar.”
Alba stared at him.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I mean it will be a fine story. It’s just the situation will be peculiar because I will have no memory of right now, you see. So I won’t know why the story is important. I won’t know why many things are important. Oh! The windows!”
He rushed over to pick up a crude square of wooden planks roughly nailed together. He told her he’d made it. He made a window to what had already happened. She asked him how that worked. He explained he couldn’t use it anymore because he couldn’t remember what to look at. “I’m stuck, I’ve been having problems… sorting things out, lately.” he said, “I only seem to go forward these days, and the window - it only looks backward. I’m getting old. I survived war you know!”
“Which one?” she asked, certain he meant the great war.
“All of them I think. It goes dark.”
Alba nodded sympathetically for this old crazy man. He seemed nice, he seemed harmless and confused and mostly kind of lost. He seemed trapped in a prison in his head, trying to fit things that didn’t exist to a mold of the world. She could only imagine the private loneliness of wondering why imaginary things weren’t nicer to you… didn’t love you more… never came around. She felt truly bad for him. She looked at his framed piece of empty air and watched herself yell to Bérénice to get some water because she’d just set their playhouse on fire trying to bake some cookies when she was seven.
Alba dropped her lunch basket.
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