A false serenity born of a misplaced pride in my own cleverness was shattered within moments, as was only fitting, I told myself. How sure I had been that I had succeeded in imposing my will on the flow of events, as if the other were not there as anything other than a recepticle for the thoughts I would have put within him. I owed the beast more respect than that. Though he might not have known of the gentler impulses of civilized society, there was a raw energy that showed in his every movement, a closeness to the ways of nature that those of us, wiser in the ways of man, must have surely lost. How much he could have taught me, in his own crude way, given better circumstances or failing that, more attentiveness on my part, as he certainly was teaching me a lesson at this very moment.

This alley or passageway, or whatever one wished to call this rude enclosure of brick and concrete and planks (that had been long overdue for replacement when our grandmothers still thought that our grandfathers were being far too familiar with them) had a special meaning for me, one that had grown out of my own fears of being far too familiar, myself. A meaning that I had been prepared to conceal from her to whom I most desired to reveal it, but sometimes even the fool has enough wisdom to know that he is the fool, as I must have been in her eyes. No clever words out of my mouth, just empty prattle about the news of the day, as if she could not read, which I breathlessly poured forth, without a thought of my own to add. How sorely I must have tested her patience!

A lesser woman would have turned me away and heard no complaint, but this angel did not. No anger showed in her eyes, just the gentlest of all possible correction, that look of sorrowful compassion that said "surely you have more to say than that." Surely I would have, had I taken the time to not just read, but sit quietly in that company of the wiser men whose voices I had heard or works I had read in my life, that assemblage that lived on in my memories of all of the moments I had lived and, so guided, formed my own humble thoughts, so that I might have something of myself to share. How could I come to one whose intelligence shined so brightly in her eyes, having done any less?

This, she could have said openly without receiving any criticism in return, but her heart was too kind to let her do so. Words will be remembered by all who hear them, passing from friend to friend until the memory of one's folly outlives the fool, but who shall remember the brief look that nobody but I and she would even be sure had ever been seen, just a moment later? She had allowed me to keep my ... pride? No, for that would have been my downfall. No, she had allowed me to keep my sense that even if what I was at the moment wasn't worth valuing, that what I might become was. All of that in a glance and in the gentle, loving sigh she uttered, reassuring me before walking off to bring light and understanding into the lives of others. Why, I had even seen her talking to the beast, at times, though she must have held even less hope for him than she did for me.

Still, I had thought, she kept coming back to him and to me, so perhaps there was something in each of us that we had both failed to see? And surely she would know better than I who she could or could not reach?

That thought, having returned to me so many times over the last few weeks, shaming me whenever I found that the scorn I felt for the beast had become too deep, presented itself with a special urgency on this evening. I thought of the nights I had spent in that one special passage I had found as somebody had returned home. I had not meant to follow her, only to speak to her in a place where speech was not so out of place, and found that the words had eluded me more successfully than she had.

If, indeed, she were trying to elude me at all? Perhaps ... maybe ... was she letting me find her, granting me another chance to give a better account of myself? I had remembered that sad smile and, struggling to find the wisdom I had not yet prepared, let our only conversation be the response of my own footsteps to hers, softly losing themselves in the echoes that followed her down the narrow streets. To gain her attention then would have been to claim that I was ready to retake the test that I had failed before, and I respected her too much to tell her any lie, least of all one so transparent.

Trembling, looking in my heart for answers it did not possess and asking my mind why it did not help, I continued along what, to my good fortune, proved to be a very short way. Generous but honest soul that she was, had she gone ten steps further, I was sure that she would have had to have ended her charade of pretending to have not heard me, as respectfully careful as I had been in muffling each footfall, honoring the rules of the game that she had set forth. But then, this was not fortune at all, but the product of her own wise and careful design. She would have called me out in the beginning, had she known my pursuit of her was doomed to be a fruitless one. She had her own purposes in allowing all that passed that night that, only now, I imagined that I fully understood.

I tarried for a while, seen yet unseen, as the gate closed with a soft but solid click, lost in wonder of the thought that this moment had happened at all. Had I done no more than delude myself, sensing acceptance in somebody who had never known that I was there? Fear overwhelmed my better judgement, and I broke the rules.

A comical figure I must have cut, searching the streets in the lonely hours for pebbles to fling at my beloved's window and, finding them not, settling for the pieces of a broken brick that I had found and swiftly smashed apart. Was this another of her tests, I wondered - see if I could prove my resourcefulness in this manner? Had she, maybe, left the brick there for me, to see if I would find its use?

It did not matter. My throwing arm was terrible. My first few throws barely cleared the gate, clattering uselessly in the courtyard, the next few dozen coming closer and closer to a window that I just could not hit. Inches, merely inches to the left or right I would be, but never glass, only concrete, as gravity reached out and took my squandered ammunition away from me. For hours this continued, as I found more bricks, breaking them into every larger pieces, wondering if bulkier missiles would be easier for my trembling hands to control, but always, failure greeted my every try. I might have stayed there until sunrise, sinking ever deeper into the knowledge of my own failure, but I heard voices and footprints and the coarse blare of radios approaching me. Fearing who or what might come, I fled, hoping that this chance had not been my last.

Bitterly ashamed of my own cowardice and failure, I decently hid myself from the world for the next few days, knowing myself unworthy to greet it, having squandered such a beautiful chance as I had been given. I wandered back one night as the new moon came, hidden from the sight of decent people by shadows even murkier than those that had offered me so many wonderful promises that first night, wondering how many tests a student could fail before even the most gracious teacher might have to send him away.

At least one more! I couldn't believe it. The gate was wide open, welcoming me in! How generous, how forgiving was she, my muse, who now greeted me in her austerely beautiful garden of brick and manmade stone! How I would treasure this opportunity and waste it no more. Stepping through the gate, I turned the corner into that place I had spent so much time imagining, and was overwhelmed and surprised, and yet not amazed. It wasn't austere at all, not at all as I had pictured it, and yet as I stood there, I could see the rightness of it. My astonishment was reserved for my earlier lack of insight. Where else could such a spirit have dwelled? This narrow gallery before me was at once lonely and welcoming, beckoning the traveller who was graced with an invitation to behold it to enter, and find his place within it. His destiny, if he we so favored.

Once, many had lived in the rooms overlooking this closed in space, too broad to really be a passageway and yet too narrow to be a courtyard, no doubt watching the activities below, calling out to good friends across the way through windows that were not yet boarded up, covered with wood that had clearly seen the weathering of more seasons than I had. Though I was sure that I was no carpenter, I did know the look of time, and this place was heavy with it, once well made bricks crumbling at the edges, mortar on one side of the gallery - yes, that seemed a good word for it - starting to come loose. All spoke of neglect, of old beauty foolishly allowed to go to ruin, a vision that might have brought great sadness, had it been left to itself. But this, my Margaret would not do.

The gallery truly was a gallery. Yes, every row of windows save the one along her home was covered, but where we would have seen broken windows, she saw a charmingly crooked wall, one which she decorated with mosaics and bas reliefs in a material which I did not recognize. This, and other work in colors so luminous that I feared that by their glow they would reveal my position, seemed to cover every inch, the clear light issuing from that one remaining apartment - hers - bringing those colors to life, softly glowing through what I could now see to be the almost pitch black night. Only now could I see how poor, dark and grey had been the surroundings which I had taken for granted, failing to question their poverty, not of things of substance, for that mattered not, but of spirit. Of beauty. Of love of a place for what it was, and what it might be.

How easily I could have been captured on that first night, not just by the clever Meg, but by any other fool off the street, so enraptured was I by this loveliness which I had not expected to find. I awoke briefly from my reverie with such a start at that thought that my joy almost fled, but listening quietly, only heard the night at first, as silent as only a city night can be. This did not last for long.

Faint footsteps approached from above. The game was still to be played, for introductions had not been made. Cover! Where to find cover? A half collapsed wooden stair to a sealed door above was close at hand. I ducked beneath it, and through the slots, saw her look out on her work and sigh, but not in contentment. She was too humble to do that, I was sure. This was a sigh of longing, one for dreams unrealised, and in this, I saw my place. I could have asked for no more and yet, night after night, presumed to do just that. I would not be disappointed.

Each evening, I would stand, lost ever more skillfully in the shadows that I would almost have come to know as friends, had I not known them better. No, not friends, but teachers, proctors in the exam that this part of my life had become, testing my worthiness to progress to the next level, perhaps? No more nonsensical a thought than any other, so I embraced it with whatever love I had not reserved for another.

Do I ... have I sounded as if I had been mistrustful of the night that had shelted me so well, even as it brought me such a gift? Perhaps I was, but many was the test that was cut short in the nights that followed as voices approached, sometimes few, sometimes many, but always laughing in a way that didn't sound friendly or wholesome. I wondered about my beloved Margaret's boldness in leaving her gate undone, night after night, but knew in my heart that she must have known what she was doing. Uncertainly, fearfully I would flee, but not far, lingering in shadows but slightly removed from those which I had more joyously sought, listening for danger from an inset just around the corner. Always, the threat was averted, the bestial young men I heard either standing, silently in awe or sighing so faintly as to be barely audible, so taken were they by the beauty of the place. I longed to see more of it, myself, than could be seen from my hiding place, but always, as soon as the voices fell silent and the steps faded away, I could see that the sky was lightening and that I had to leave.

But I knew that I was making progress. How prepared I was for the game! "What are you doing down there?", she might finally have asked. "Why Margaret ... is that your name?", I would cleverly respond. "You must forgive me, for I am but a poor failed artist, one who did not know that you lived here. Surely you must have noticed how beatifully the moonlight finds its way down onto this path, bouncing from window to window until it envelops all in a soft glow that reveals nothing while singing the praises of all that it touches? How I have suffered, trying to find a way to show that too subtle for oils to capture, as if I were Monet pondering the fog as it rested upon the waters. I know it is foolish to be so absorbed in a task to which I am so unequal, but is it not in struggling against our own foolishness that we grow to wisdom? Can you forgive me?"

As of course she would, for I would have honored the game, playing it by the rules she set forth, passing her test. How blessed I would be by the smile with which she would have graced me, her student, at that moment, one blessing to follow the many that had come on the nights before. How delighted I would be, how enraptured, as she would come to the balcony clad sylphlike in garments as graceful and light as her soul. Sometimes she was even garbed in that wondrous simplicity of which few men would dare to dream - and yet all do on lonely nights - gazing on the stars in that clean night air, as I offered silent thanks for the private audience which she had granted me. That light that had rendered the mundane intriguingly mysterious on the walk below, seeing the glory in her for which no embellishment was needed, lost its coyness and embracing her without restraint, revealed all with perfect clarity.

How briefly she would linger before shutting the doors, muttering beautiful words which I always tried to catch, never succeeding. But each of those moments seemed like the eternity of which the sages had spoken, the one that would pass in the briefest of moments as the spirit of the one merged into the all, finally dissolving in a moment of perfect bliss, its purpose finally found in that union. So was she in my heart, the brevity of each unspoken meeting no source of grief to me, just the promise of even greater moments to come. So radiantly did she shine, that I wondered if it was the moon's light I saw, or her own.





But the last of those silent meetings had been a few days ago. A strange subject to think about, when I had such a pressing concern, courtesy of the beast? I would say no, if one's last moments of existence are upon one, why not spend them as happily as one can, on fond remembrances that one will not be able to have tomorrow, especially if they offered a little added hope for that uncertain day? Those moments, burned lovingly in my memory as they were, seemed to offer the promise of salvation in this current moment of difficulty. Would she not be home at this hour? I knew that our quieter meetings were not to be shared, but were these not extraordinary circumstances? Surely, she would understand?

Toward her balcony we would wander. If all became too grim, I would cry out to her and she would save me. I had seen how the beast had looked at her in church - nobody is that fond of a monstrance. I wasn't fooled. She could tame him, if anybody could, probably with just a few words and a sad, disappointed glance. Yes, I would be breaking the rules of our little game, but if I were done, there would be no games to come, no chance for further lessons. This consideration would outweigh all others, would it not?

But as that familiar place came into view, my heart sank. Only the faintest of lights could be seen in that window, and nobody stood on that platform. Only I and the beast were present, the only realities to be created in that moment ones of our own unenlightened making, and I began to ponder the uncomfortable realities of my own circumstances. My own avoidable circumstances.