Zodiac lived in a concrete world. And so did everybody else. His teachers told him, “That’s the thing about concrete.” He asked, “What’s the thing?” And they shrugged because they didn’t actually know. But Zodiac had a feeling. He had a fleeting thought of a feeling. He had the suspicion of a fleeting thought of a feeling forming in his mind: I know. I know the thing about concrete.
So, Zodiac started a concrete pilgrimage. He started touching the concrete buildings and the concrete fence posts. He started looking more closely at the concrete trees and grass and flowers. Something was calling him, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. I know the thing about concrete, Zodiac whispered to himself as he walked.
It didn’t take long before he attracted a following.
“Zodiac! Hey, Zodiac!” Three kids, a bit younger than himself, trailing him from a few yards back. “Why are you touching that tree?”
Zodiac looked at his hands. Both were splayed out wide against the tree. He could feel the bending, weaving ridges underneath his palms. But something was missing. The heat? Everything was always hot. The concrete made sure of that. Zodiac watched his own fingers arch and unglue themselves from the tree trunk, spiders stretching their legs after a long day in the web.
“Something’s wrong with it,” he said. He took hot hands and stuffed them in his pockets.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked the littlest boy. He was probably four.
“Not sure,” said Zodiac, who was only six himself, and he looked up into the branches weighed down with concrete leaves. The others looked up too, and the little one mumbled, “Not sure…”
It was the four of them for a while after that. Zodiac kept up his walking (it was summer after all, and he had little else to do) and the boys followed close behind. Then, when Zodiac put his hands against a concrete car or a concrete slide or a concrete swing-set, they would wait until he made space for them to place their hands as well. Eye contact. Raised brows. Sudden exclamation. These were the features of their expeditions. Hands against a concrete bicycle: “Lift it here, lift it. Can’t you tell?”
Actually, the littles didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but it was such a rousing adventure they couldn’t help but nod, and Zodiac would grimace so thoughtfully that no one dared ask the question: What is the thing about concrete? What is it, Zodiac?
It wasn’t until he plucked his first peony flower that his ragtag crew started feeling it too.
Nobody had ever picked a flower before.
This is how it happened. Summer was over. Zodiac was in class, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away from a group of peonies outside the window, which was, of course, an absence in the wall more than a thing in itself (glass being an absurdity, an unthought thing). He stared at the flowers all throughout his class as they moved from reading circles to math blasts to sculpture time. Finally, the teacher walked quietly up to Zodiac who was chipping away at his concrete toy house. He was on task (technically) but his eyes were fixed on those flowers outside. The teacher glanced down and followed his gaze out that window. “What do you see – ” she started to say, when Zodiac stood, ran to the window, and jumped out of it.
The entire class converged on the open square. A new lens. Watching Zodiac through this frame, they felt the intimate distance of television, and they understood his actions as the actions of one dearly beloved; indeed, for some, his actions were those of a person they might one day become; and for a quiet few, his movements were their very own.
Through the frame:
Zodiac kneels, his knees gentle against the unyielding fabric of his world. He leans forward. A wind ricochets off corners and sharp edges; everything is still. Zodiac lifts a hand, his fingers trembling because he can see something that nobody else can see, and that can really only mean a couple things.
Insanity. Reality.
When his fingers meet the flower, his touch sends tremors through the stem…
And it was at that point that Zodiac’s teacher gasped, “Impossible!!” And as soon as the word had been spoken it was exposed for the fragile sound it was, destroyed by the rising voices of the children as Zodiac stood to his feet with a full wind giving form to his shirt and his hair and the petals flowing from the flower in his hand. Pale and veined with white. Pollen spilling subtle threads of life. Green shining and twisting between his knuckles.
For a second, everyone could see it.
By the time he made it back to the window, though, Zodiac was holding a dull, grey substitute for the real thing, and the teacher was saying words like, hush and, don’t worry about these kinds of things. A few of the kids were crying, but they weren’t sure whether it was because of the flower that had been or now was, and even Zodiac seemed disoriented. He climbed back through the window with the bright sun still in his eyes, the colors of the finished flower in his mind, and darkness on the other side of the frame.
This event was something Zodiac pondered for a long time. He stopped walking. He stopped touching the concrete trees and flowers and buildings and vehicles. Instead, his followers found him most days at the beach, at a place the village people called Tomorrow. It was a vast space, an expanse called water. A concrete desert of sculptured waves, reaching. And Zodiac watching.
The children still flocked to him, however, and even more in number than before. After school and all through the holiday break, boys and girls could be seen, walking in pairs to the water’s edge, and pausing where Zodiac sat squatting upon the concrete sand. The littlest boy was there the most often, and sometimes he would take Zodiac’s hand, and he would sit cross-legged beside him, and he would say, “Not sure?”
And Zodiac would squint and nod and picture the pale, pink peony he had once held in his hand. That’s the thing about concrete, he would think to himself, and he might have stayed there years (some people do) if it weren’t for the littlest boy who one day said:
“Zodiac, are you crying on me?”
And of course it was the ocean spray, liquid and living against the boy’s forehead and eyebrows and lips, anointing. Zodiac leapt and whooped and ran with abandon into the razor waves. Nobody else was watching that time, just the littlest boy and, of course, Zodiac himself, when the lethal concrete disintegrated into the cleansing foam of a holy tide.
Zodiac spun around, and he shouted, “I know what it is! I know what it is!!” and the littlest boy laughed and hopped and clapped his hands, wet now with the water that Zodiac splashed back at him, scooping it with his hands and kicking with his feet.
By dinner that day, all of the children were in the water, and even some of the grown ups, but none of them really understood except for Zodiac and his friend.
“I know the thing about concrete,” Zodiac whispered to the littlest boy one night, a week later, as they lay side by side with their hands behind their heads on the transformed shoreline. Their hair pressed lines of new meaning into their fingertips. Their eyes found old stories in the sky.
“What is?” asked the littlest boy, and he really wasn’t sure. He didn’t know what to expect. Although he could see the water and even some of the flowers, he didn’t know the secret.
“It crumbles,” said Zodiac, and he said it with a knowing pause, like the littlest boy should maybe be confused and ask another question, so the littlest boy said, “What?” and Zodiac said, “Look at the stars.”
Here’s what the littlest boy saw. Maybe this is an answer:
Dust falling like rain in the glare of distant lights. Cracks in the geometry of that dark canvas and piercing white. Static shadows crumbling under the pressure of movement. Lines making pictures making ideas. Unity making a difference making sense. Every star like an aching question. Every soul in the stellar fires. Deep blue, and black and beautiful, thinking and hoping, breathing not choking, not hurting but holding.
Holding.