Jacob's Ladder

The old man on the park bench had not given much thought to the fact that it was Monday when Mel's Ice Cream truck came around. On such a hot day, the arrival of the frozen confection van was a cherishable affair, important enough to drive any other considerations far away in time and space. Besides, such heat sucked the mental acuity right out of a person's head; an old-timer could be expected to remember such temporal details for only so long.
Mel always ran the park route on Sunday. That was the day small children congregated, tugging their mommys' coats and pointing at Mel's van, whining, "Just wuuuuuun." The old man, one Jacob Arlington, a carpenter by trade, made it a point not to watch too closely, lest he be accused of being a pedophile. And yet his eyes wandered, and he saw the diminutive people performing noisy and accurate imitations of their elders.
Jacob was not, in fact, a child molester. His true identity, however, is the crux of this story, and it cannot be revealed, just now, exactly what sort of man Jacob was.
Everything in its place, and a place for everything, my father told me.
The park was a nondescript place, an urban falsehood nailed to the tarmac in lieu of anything better. The old man visited there every Sunday, and sometimes other days as well. He looked forward to the ice cream with unabatable enthusiasm: It was not just the taste of the delicious treats melting in his mouth which aroused him, but the actual process of eating them, which reminded him of life, and his childhood. The emotions and the sensations in his head which stirred and fluttered and took wing like a belfry full of doves made the appearance of the truck a provocative sight.
At eighty-nine, there remained only so many provocative sights, only so many things which could make taking one's next breath a worthwhile endeavor. At eighty-nine, breathing did not come easy. Oh, the lungs worked all right, a little less expansive than once upon a time, but nonetheless still able to provide the ethereal fuel his body was used to. It was, rather, the notion that with each breath, the pain would continue. With each breath, with each successive day of life, came further heartache, further exposure to the misery and the torture that people presented to one another, and which innocent bystanders had to endure. Yet do not be misled: Jacob was no weakling, no innocent babe in the woods. What Mr. Arlington had was empathy--oodles of it. It is a different beast than mere sympathy--tougher, more evolved--and it demands a great deal more from its devotees.
When the sun came up on Monday, a lone gunman had already killed three people at a local Jack-in-the-Box restaurant; the morning newspapers had revealed that Syntex Corporation had dumped five hundred thousand tons of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere last year (and they were at the bottom of the list of offenders); a promising fourteen-year-old violinist who lived down the hall in Jacob's tenement building had jumped in front of a Mack truck in response to his own insufferably jarring perspectives.
So much for the day of the moon.
Mr. Arlington had not reached this point without having undergone a considerable number of Mondays. Why, he had asked himself on each one, did the doom and gloom of the world press so closely, become so acute? Tuesday was like doughnuts and coffee, Wednesday a serving of apple pie and a good book. Thursday had always been for cheerful wanderings. Friday
was a rush--a sexy, toothy animal seeking the unexpected. And Saturday and Sunday, by agreed-upon convention, signified the energetically lazy opportunity for everything left undone.
Why had Monday been assigned its devilish role in the calendar's play of time? It seemed unfair and all out of proportion.
Of course, the same could probably be said for life itself.
Now, it may appear from all of this that Jacob Arlington was a periodically bluesy sort of fellow. Well, it depends on one's outlook, doesn't it? All of us are beset by similar coursings--the eternally cheerful person is an aberration among us--and the wise among us have been unable to point out what it is about the human psyche which is responsible for this travesty.
Our hero was only too aware of this small addendum to the book of life.
Mr. Arlington had a newfound purpose, which he was only peripherally aware of.
Jacob's mission was a marbled aspiration tainted by what the poets call terrible majesty; if that is too abstract a phrasing, be patient, for Jacob Arlington himself did not have it writ in stone, and it would be, after all, grossly unfair to anticipate the merit of the design without having first explored the matrix which could give rise to its nature. Once it has been established what sort of man we are dealing with, it should become more clear where the signifiers of this tale are meant to lead.
The sages have been able to remember that the moon was full when Jesus died.
Were it the correct thing to do, Jacob's nature would already have been fully expounded. But one cannot comprehend the oak tree without first having duly noted the acorn (Besides, my father, as I mentioned, would disapprove). Jacob's soul had been badly hurt many hundreds of years ago. Since then, it had been on hiatus, growing hoary and wise and noncomittal. Now and always before enraptured with the human condition, his was the first recorded acknowledgment of a difference between the divine and the mundane.
It should help to know that--it should give a clue as to the sort of man we are dealing with. Jacob was essentially a carpenter in the symbolic sense: He did use a hammer and nails when he went to work, but these were only formal accoutrements--random interjections into what was actually a philosophical pathway. He had chosen carpentry, fallen right into it, when seized
one day by the specter of a man on a cross, who did not speak to him but only nodded, as though knowing that this would be sufficient augury for the one it was directed to. And on that day, at the age of seventy-four, Jacob was quietly infused with his destination.
Besides sitting on park benches and surreptitiously watching the children play, Jacob Arlington spent his time meditating and mediating, dabbling in interpersonal affairs. The crisis which drove him, which had borne him, which was the actual reason for his vision, steered him toward an appropriate lifestyle. . .

He was sitting at a table in Furr's Cafeteria just the other day when his ears picked up the sounds of an argument coming from behind him in the next booth. Two voices--one rough and guttural, the other a juvenile tenor wheedling--skittered through the greasy air and impinged upon Jacob's tympana, sending an experienced wince scudding across his face. The fork on its way from his mouth to his plate halted in its course. There came a sigh from Jacob's lips, a sigh of utter familiarity, and then he turned his head very slowly until he could see the faces behind the altercation.
Patience, tinged with dreary determination, transformed Jacob's countenance; an observer would have said he had played out this scene before. While writ upon the faces of the two vocal antagonists Jacob now encountered, there lay naught but an all-too-common hostile and childish belligerence dredged up from the most stubborn depths of human nature.
On one side of the booth, an angry father sat facing his equally angry teenage son. All Jacob could see of the boy was the back of his head, which was shaved to reveal the legend, "L.A.", but his sulk was clear enough as he said, "You promised me I could drop out if I got a job. You can't go back on that." The angry father glanced over his son's shoulder at the intruding face of an old and curious man and inquired abruptly, "What can I do for you?"
Jacob sensed this one might take a moment.
"I am sorry, I couldn't help but overhear your tension. I was wondering if I might borrow your ketchup?"
The younger of the bucks turned his head and met Jacob's eyes with his own, revealing in the process that he had long since written off whatever pearls might be forthcoming from fossils such as this. He reached a surly hand for the ketchup and tossed it wildly toward Jacob, who casually snatched it out of the air.
To his surprise, and his father's, this did not immediately get rid of the old stranger.
"You two should perhaps consider the brevity of your acquaintance, you know." Jacob grasped the ketchup bottle firmly and turned away, using it to patiently inundate his hash browns.
Turning back to his newfound friends, both of whom seemed a bit discombobulated, he cocked an eyebrow and looked at the boy's father, then leisurely transferred the look to the boy, who squirmed in his seat and wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. With a fine sense of the dramatic, Jacob's voice rose to a stentorian range, his eyes whirling in his head. "In a fit of symbolic pique, Jesus died for your sins, though you had not yet been born. If you were perfect and never sinned, would this bring Jesus back to life?"
The poor lad nearly jumped out of his threadbare Lees. His father started, and thus embarrassed himself. "Get the fuck away from us!" he demanded. "You're crazy old man!" He rose from his seat and took two threatening steps forward.
Something in Mr. Arlington's eyes, some vacant or infinite backdrop, slowed the irate man as he advanced. His son, having recovered himself, took up position next to his father and grimaced with his own macho shame. Mildly, their victim dismissed their bluster with a slight, spontaneous wave of his hand, as though calming turbid waters once again.
"Your son obviously knows a thing you have not yet practiced: It is better to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt."
So just like that, there was one less arrogant, self-assured father in the restaurant. The man's confidence melted away like a popsicle in Madonna's mouth. Like the end of a grand song, it faded to silence, leaving silence. . . purposeless without a tune to carry it.
His son perceived the change, and he looked at his father--while Jacob observed--with the careless eyes of a fifteen-year-old who has not enough to lose in dropping his guard and embracing the possibility of a different future. Jacob had discovered that the young are much more elastic under duress, though they tend to hide it really well.
Mr. Arlington sat still and waited. He'd have broken the heart of anyone who happened to look his way.
The boy's father, too, could no more keep the emotions from fleeting across his face than he could prevent his body from deflating like one of those cheap vinyl dolls that comes through the mail in a brown paper wrapper. The magnificent house of mirrors that is the sum of our years spent cultivating the facades and nuanceful reactions which become the cell from whence we shout our existence to the world had been laid to shards by a few nasty, crazy words from an old coot fresh out of Ward 62. First came hurt. Then shame, anger, wonder, loss.
Beautiful, thought Jacob.
"Dad?"
Daniel, Jacob told himself. I'll bet the boy's name is Daniel.
"Are you gonna' cry dad?" A plea uttered from the depths of Pandora's box--framed in desperation, tinged with a deadly fear of the unknown.
So dad did.
Cry.
Silently.
And shortly Jacob Arlington stood up and looked down and bade goodbye in his heart to the two figures who had forgotten him already. They were ready to fight again, but they would be all right now, they were going to get better at it”at the talking, the touching, mutual respect”because of a stray moment in a restaurant, when a strange old man intervened with some sort of spell or something, tracking magic dust through their innards.
That episode was one of the few rosy clouds in the metaphorical sunset which was our hero's fading life. The ponderous clock which had been ticking away the centuries was nearly
ready to sound once more. Jacob Arlington would soon die--but not forever, not permanently--oh, no no no. Such a path was not mete for this soul. This soul, as I have begun to explain, was something special, something out of the ordinary, and no ordinary end would serve to punctuate the statement its passage had been intended to make; Jacob, though he knew it not, had several potential return trips ahead of him. Not an encouraging thought, but necessary.
In Times Square the sun goes down each day through a haze of sin and degradation, creating the most flavorful sunsets in the civilized world. The neon kicks on, the traffic congests, and the coming of darkness is hailed by the denizens who, roaming in packs, have forgotten their own names.
This particular evening finds our hero walking down a cracked and bleeding sidewalk in front of the XXX SEX PARLOUR. His shoes provide a rhythmic shuffling counterpoint to the ragged sounds of his own breathing. All around there is chaos, but Jacob feels calm, though a bit disoriented: He feels like nothing more than a tired old man. The vague sense of communion he had been prone to using with undefined intent is nowhere to be felt. The poor and the sick press in all around him, creating in his belly a familiar feeling of timeless despair.
Each year that passes, goes a thought chugging through his sluggish mind, so many new individual packets of sorrow birthed all over this world. . . the memory of a college mathematics professor he had once been acquainted with wafts in from some unseen corner of his brain, bringing with it the man's frightening Newtonian parable pertaining to the overcrowding of the planet; a Mason jar full of bacteria will double its population every minute--given an hour in which to busily multiply, the answer to when will the jar find itself exactly half-full is something of a shock: 00:59. Only at the very brink of disaster would it become apparent to a bacterium with a brain that a very serious problem had somewhere along the way been overlooked.
This little illustration had always bothered Jacob more than most. He tries now to banish it from his mind, the better to concentrate on the immediate woes surrounding him; somehow that is less painful.
His thoughts, however, are scattered--his mind seems incapable of focusing. He thinks of the park where he has waited for Mel every Sunday. He thinks of the little children, and he begins to weep.
"Whatsa' matta', y'ole faht? Watch whe' ya' goin'!"
He recoils from the voice and the body he has bumped into.
Eventually, his legs grow tired, his spinning head becomes heavy, too heavy to hold upright. The night air commences to swirl and blow, carrying with it a light drizzling rain: These elements, along with the pervasive neon backwash, irritate Jacob's eyes--he squeezes them shut for a few seconds. When he opens them again, there is a young black man standing a few feet in front of him, shaving his fingernails with a six-inch stiletto, rocking back and forth on his black leather bootheels, and casting a disturbingly frank appraisal upon Jacob.
"Watchoo doin' out here, ole' hoss?" the man says in a voice with a strong southern patina.
Jacob looks at the ebony apparition, and begins to feel recognition stirring in his hindbrain. The young shiv-aholic takes a break from his manicure. His eyes widen a bit, and his mouth moves to the beat of a name he cannot quite come up with.
"Jacob Arlington." An old, wrinkled hand extends toward the knife--slowly the young tough reaches out with his free hand and shakes it. A trace of wonder escapes from behind his ruthless facade and is gone into the atmosphere, where it will dissipate, for others to feel rubbing up against their goose pimples on this special night. Many people will begin to drift through the darkness, their feet leading them toward the old man in front of the XXX SEX PARLOUR, and they will not know why, and not a one of them will feel the need to ask.
In the meantime, unaware of his impending finale, Jacob Arlington engages the winning smile he has used so effectively over the years, and begins to discourse with the young man upon the meaning of misery and the purpose of pain.
A painted hooker, looking about twenty but actually fourteen, taps the young black man on the shoulder. "Is this him?" she asks, smiling when she receives an affirming nod. "What are you doing down here, old man? Wanna' have a good time?" She giggles, and the gleaming stiletto comes waving in front of her garish face. Her mirth comes to a choking halt, and she looks abashed, perhaps almost innocent. "I don't know why I said that. I'm sorry." She isn't apologizing to the knifer, however--doesn't even seem to notice him anymore. She clumsily tries to pull her crimson vinyl miniskirt down toward her knees, without much success.
"I think I spoke with you one time. I had some pills in my hand, and a bottle, and you told me some things--I don't remember just now exactly what you said--but I didn't kill myself because of you." A smile her face has not worn since she was a little girl in the arms of her mother dances onto her lips.
Jewish legend tells of the Lamed Vav--the thirty-six. In every generation of man on earth, there exist thirty-six righteous, good, and just men, and on their existence depends the existence of the world. Well, who knows? Jesus was Jewish, after all.
It is nearly midnight, and a throng has collected around Jacob Arlington, whose thoughts do not encompass anything so cosmic as Jewish legend, but are intent, as has been the case for many years, with the individuals who surround him. If he wonders at their mass but disjointed presence, it is only a fleeting question in his mind, a passing mist on the fringes of his concentration.
Now they murmur, and loudly but sheepishly call his name. "I knew you, once!" they cry.
The legend of the scape-goat is Jewish in origin, as well: A goat, says this tale, was sent into the wilderness, bearing the sins of all those in the village, in order that the lives of those left behind might be rendered bearable. It is a gripping notion, full of pathos and pregnant with guilt.
What, one might ask, does this have to do with Jacob Arlington, the roundabout old man whose story we have become so deeply involved with?
By now, you have seen through the clever metaphorical language of this tale and you know that this Jacob Arlington, this old man on the park bench and in Furr's Cafeteria and on the streets of Times Square in New York City, is related in some way to Jesus Christ. It cannot be said with any reliable amount of certainty that he actually is Jesus, but such hesitation is incidental. Whatever your own religious intentions, it must be clear that we are looking at something--and there is no way to shirk the confrontation--beyond human ken, and that is ultimately what counts, that is the lesson which must be learned. For our purposes, it matters not a whit whether or not Jacob is touched with the divine; he is a Samaritan, and that is ever so much more important. If you've been paying attention, you already know this to be true.
There will come a day, as they say, and it might well be the day which follows Jacob's night in Times Square, when a number of people will discover a new way of thinking, a new philosophy, grounded firmly in what has come before--how could it be otherwise?--unnamed and undreamt and, in all likelihood, unrecognized for what it is, which will work on its initiates like a seed crystal, inspiring a geometric growth, until eventually it will seize, in the form most appropriate to its own particular host, each and every individual on the planet.
It has never happened before, but this time our continued well-being demands it. As does the spiritual evolution most of us still refuse to acknowledge.
The fire cannot be lit, however, without the inspiration of an exceptional spark.
Who might willingly adopt such a role?
This brings us back once more to Jacob Arlington. He himself does not see the window of opportunity, and that is a good thing, because if he did know he might well hie himself off to the nearest travel agency to buy an airplane ticket to the Bahamas, never to be seen or heard from again: whatever else Jacob may be, he is, in addition, powerfully human.
A little girl of about ten gives a tug on Jacob's hand. In the midst of his growing befuddlement, this is a gesture he can understand, a welcome token amidst his bamboozlement. He looks down at the child--the pressing crowd presents a lull in their mumblings--and his eyebrows draw together, his lips purse, for he suddenly feels more unsure of himself than he ever has. The little girl--Anna, he thinks--is obviously blind, and as gaunt as a cornstalk. Then his age is upon him, and he feels as though a mountain lay on his shoulders.
"What is it, pumpkin? What are you doing out here?" In his own ears, Jacob's voice sounds disconnected, far away.
The little girl turns her face up. "Are you him?"
"Am I who, little dove?"
"The man who told my mommy not to worry?" A gust stirs the child's hair, and for a split second she is crowned in the night with a honey-blond halo.
The uncertainty, the sense of an impending nebulosity, increases within Jacob's mind, upon his skin. "I might have done that," he whispers.
The little girl's eyes focus on the old man's waning face, but she is looking beyond him as she captures his entire life with a single word, "Why?"
There comes a roaring in Jacob's ears, a ponderous, thickening rush of voices built one upon the other, each containing that single, simple, deadly word--each growing louder and more insistent as it joins with its neighbors, all rising up in a deafening, unintelligible roar.
Jacob Arlington straightens up, his mind torn from its concern, and raises both arms up and out to the side, where his hands float free and begin to clench and unclench rhythmically, as though seeking to grasp the rungs of a ladder which is not there. He turns his face upward to the industrial night sky and allows the myriad manufactured shades and hues of an indifferent downtown advertising campaign to anoint his visage. There is anguish, and heartache, written plain as the driven snow for all to see and mourn.
It is not a yell, or a shout, but something indescribable, which builds and builds and finally erupts out of Jacob's mouth, carrying with it eighty-nine years worth of perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. Those standing closest to him fall to their knees, hard, eyes squeezed shut, limbs akimbo, while the succeeding layers of onlookers behind them clasp hands to ears and try to remember the last happy moment in their lives. Most will never remember that it was a word--a short and simple word--they heard rendered into the night, but will carry with them instead only the memory of the way their skin tightened up all over, and their mouths went suddenly dry. "Why" is a word they have used so often that it will not stand out in their recollections of this night as anything remotely profound, and so will become a pale and unremarkable aside in the face of that awful and majestic oral trumpet of doom which brought it forth.
Long before its echoes have faded, Jacob Arlington lies dead upon the sidewalk.
His body twitches a couple of times, and the weeping begins.
Spiritual evolution is a rough-and-tumble affair.
And were he truly the Second Coming of Christ, what then could be expected? Great signs, and portents, to stir the souls of all mortals? The end of the world, as foretold? To what end did this man, this Jacob Arlington, live and die? Can it be true that we are shallow enough to
focus our attention in such a selfish direction? Is it not enough that he was a good man--must we seek for signs of his divinity in order that his life might have meaning enough to soothe and inure us?
A man called Joseph steps forward, eventually, and wraps Jacob's body in a blanket, takes it down to the coroner's office, where three days later it turns up missing; the absence is attributed to clerical error and forgotten. Except by those who knew him, one or two of whom see his apparition some days later, and so are comforted.
. . . In the park, Mel sells his ice cream treats, and the bench once accustomed to the warm posterior of our hero is occupied by a young man named Martin. He watches the children play, and within his soul, something grows, something blossoms, and soon he finds himself talking to people, strangers, who leave him behind, shaking their heads, wondering at the odd sense of peace he has instilled within their confused and hurried lives.