Whiteboard

A man is holding a marker and walking along steadily, drawing a line with the marker on an infinite whiteboard along an infinite wall.  The line glides along the center of the board, about shoulder height, and roughly parallel to the ground.  That is his life.  Every color of marker is available to it, and the line goes on and on, swooping up or down slightly as the heart beats, things happen, and colors change.    

Eventually, the man becomes aware that, far behind, he is being followed by someone holding a whiteboard eraser tight against his line.  The Follower is walking steadily also, and the line is disappearing behind him as he methodically brushes the eraser along the line, swooping up or down slightly as needed to catch the story of this life. That is time. 

At first, the man doesn’t give it too much thought, but eventually starts to glance back once in a while. One day, he glances back and sees that, unmistakably, in the distance, the Follower looms a tiny bit larger. The Follower is apparently walking slightly faster than him, and the realization shocks him horribly.

The man begins to walk faster to buy time. His breathing picks up and he keeps up the faster walking for days, and then months. And then years. For a while after he started walking faster, it looked like he’d maintained an acceptable distance from the Follower but after a very long time, it became apparent that the figure was not receding and even continued to approach, however politely. The man began to run, holding the marker against the whiteboard, holding his head high like a flag and running down that long wall in a straight line. These actions naturally straightened out his line and thinned it out also. The more he worked the less he was. The line took on a clinical monotony in the middle of the board as he ran along. All this, and a growing certainty of the futility of his efforts, eventually ushered in a new phase of walking again, and thinking. His first thought was “I cannot buy time.”

The man would now occasionally stop and push with both hands against the whiteboard, the way a runner would ‘stretch out’ against a wall before a race. But the pushing was out of anger and a powerful need to push back against being followed, and a frustration with knowing that even now, in this short moment of venting of the soul, the Follower has gained ground on him.

Much later, the man began to trade with the Follower more deliberately. Instead of stopping impulsively to push against the wall, he’d stop to draw things on the whiteboard with his marker; it became his only enjoyment as he walked along. He drew real things, like games in the fields when he was little. He drew the day he and his Love watched their doggy prance on the beach and in the waves at sunrise. He drew the trees in the forest, one by one. The Follower was much closer now, and his closing presence began to unnerve the man. The man would now occasionally break into scribbling as he walked along, jerking his marker-hand up and down the whiteboard like an EKG.

One day, in a fit of caprice, the man pushed against the wall again. He pushed with tremendous strength, straining every muscle, and pushing for tension relief with every fiber of his being. The wall suddenly crashed down with a tremendous roar, and the man found himself flat on his back on top of the whiteboard near the end of his line.

He looked up to a slow bright haze and small pulsings of light and soft audible alarms. Someone was asking him his name. His arm was slightly raised, and his hand was fisted to grip the marker, but the marker had fallen. Alarms got louder, activity in the room increased, and he began like an animal to scribble wildly in the air. At this, a nurse braced herself against him and the bed and held his arm fast.

At that moment, the man saw the Follower in the doorway. The Follower nodded as he might to a passenger on a train, then strode to where the man lay, leaned over, and picked up the marker where it had fallen from the man’s grip just a heartbeat before. He placed the marker gently back in the man’s hand. He then placed his own hands warmly around the man’s hand.

And then they drew that last little bit of line, together, at last.