Distant Murlocs

Distant Murlocs

            (Apologies to James Joyce)

I had not gone to the door with the others.  I was in a dim part of the stairway gazing up toward my son Ted’s room.  He was seated at his computer, against the far wall, in the shadow also.  I could not see his face, or the computer screen, but I could hear little save the noise of sword clashing with sword, as it were, a few chords struck on a brutal piano.

I stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch what the blubbering, evil-sounding voices were saying and gazing up at my son’s back.  There was grace and mystery in his attitude as if he were a symbol of something.  I asked myself what is a young man sitting at his computer playing World of Warcraft a symbol of.  If I were a painter I would paint him in that attitude.  His disheveled light brown hair would relieve the lizard green skin and salmon pink crop of the ubiquitous enemy.  Distant Murlocs I would call the picture if I were a painter.

My wife came into the living room and motioned up the stairs to where Ted was sitting.  Now that the apartment door was closed the clashing of swords and snarling of Murlocs could be heard more clearly.  I held up my hand for my wife to be silent a few moments more.  The sound of battle, made plaintive by distance and by the Murloc’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief and bloody defeat:

Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!

RwlRwlRwlRwl!

The evening was getting dark.  A dull yellow light brooded over the apartment buildings and the parking lot; and the sky seemed to be descending.  It would be snowy underfoot; and only streaks and patches of snow lay on the inadequate garages of the apartment complex.  The few garage lights which were still working were burning with a cheap yellow hue in the murky air and, across the complex, the office building stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.

A wave of tender joy escaped from my heart and went coursing in warm flood along my arteries.  I longed to recall those moment when my son was a small boy, before the years came to separate us as he grew up.  Not so long ago I had told him:  I know you are a young man now and life here may seem dull and cold for you, but when you leave here you must remember where you came from, and as long as I’m still alive your home includes me, no matter where you are.

Like distant music these words I had said before were borne towards me.  I longed to be back in our apartment in Germany when we had family time every evening at eight, and no one had anywhere else to go.  I backed silently down the stairs, and without a word, took my wife into my arms and held her.  A few light taps upon the pane made me turn toward the balcony window.  I watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the cheap electric lights.  The weather channel was right:  snow was general all over Michigan.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the oak covered hills, falling softly on Calder Plaza and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Lake Michigan.  My soul swooned slowly as I heard the snow falling faintly through my universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.