It Loved To Happen

He looked like lost memories. A prisoner in solitary confinement even as he was surrounded by dozens of parishioners of the drink. His clothes were the anachronism of a smartphone in a World War II USO photograph.

The man downed his vodka like a tumbler of bad news. Quick like that. Give it to me straight, Doc, I can take it. He opened a little black book and jotted down some quick notation in the manner of a rich man signing a check.

Flipping to the back of the book, he took out a single crisp one hundred dollar bill. The stranger stood, placing an old-fashioned fedora on his head and giving it a jaunty tilt as he moved to the bar.

Then I knew. I had to have that book.

I did my usual bit. The wobbly Charlie Chaplin drunkard. Make him want to help me, but not so bad that he actually remembers me after the fact. A simple shoulder bump and I go down to the beer-varnished floor of the pub.

The man helped me up. I patted his sparrow chest lovingly, giving thanks to his kindness like a peasant laying palm leaves at the foot of Christ and his donkey. I lifted the book from his inside coat pocket before he even knew what hit him. Then I’m out the door and gone like a one night stand.

In the park a safe distance away, I sat on a bench and examined my trophy. Although there were two more crisp Benjamins pressed between the moleskine cover and the back page, I didn’t actually do it for the money.

No, it’s about getting something truly original. Something irreplaceable. Photos of dead wives. Heirloom jewelry, ugly in that way the finest of finery once looked cheap as an old west whore house. Or maybe a book with the deepest musings of a man who looked as out of place in that bar as a parrot in the Arctic.

I had to know what sort of secrets a man like that keeps in his little black book.

I turned to the first page. The inside cover had a little rectangle window cut and sewn into the leather. It was designed as a slot for holding business cards, I think. Or maybe a place to personalize ownership. If found, please return to Johnny Rube at 123 Lost My Book Terrace.

That sort of thing.

Only the stranger didn’t do any of that. Instead he had written in a flourishing script, similar to an autograph and just as hard to make out:

“The first thing was first and it was the beginning of the end.”

On the page beside this, the first front-facing sheet in the little book, was a quote I remembered from a J.D. Salinger novel. But not The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe Franny and Zooey. In tight little boxy letters, small and cramped so as to look more like the cross-hatched shading of an ink drawing than actual words, the man had written the phrase “It loved to happen” over and over again.

“Serial killer much?” I said to the air.

A chuckle of wind drifted by, carrying a pigeon.

Then I recognized the image in the words. It was a face. A thin pale face almost alarmingly similar to my own. My blood ran cold at the resemblance and I quickly turned the page before the face in the words could — I don’t know — wink at me or something.

On the next page, all alone on the left hand side, were the words, “It was Franny and Zooey. A favored quote from Marcus Aurelius written on a white surface filled with other favored quotes.”

I pictured a plaster cast on a broken arm, signed in Bartlett’s quotes instead of the names of friends. The next page of the book simply said, “Not a cast.”

Suddenly panicked, I flipped to a random page in the middle of the book. A perfectly rendered drawing on the left hand page showed a man batting furiously at a seagull. The man had stumbled into a busy road as a delivery van barreled toward him. Like a New Yorker cartoon, a caption beneath the drawing read, “Save him from the churro and earn $20,000. You can do nothing and remain innocent. You can clip the wings of the butterfly and soar to heroism. The only villain in this story is the churro.”

Weird.

Beyond weird. It was insane. But twenty grand would change my life forever. I could pay off my student loan debt. Clear my credit cards and be the one thing I always dreamed of being in this world — free of the capitalist thresher that turns people into commodities. I never wanted a big house or a yacht. I only ever wanted to be free. Invisible in the eyes of that system that makes neighbors into competitors.

But did I dare believe it? And, even if I did, was this gift even on offer to someone like me? Or was it strictly reserved for strangers in anachronistic fedora hats?

I flipped to the next page. The compact script read, “I had considered going back and preventing the invention of the churro, thinking it would be as easy as ensuring the survival of the Twinkie, but it turns out no one is exactly sure whether the churro was invented by the Portuguese, Spanish, or Chinese. Algorithms suggest it was all three at the exact same moment. This level of simultaneous invention is rare, but makes the churro as inevitable as the gun, prophylactics, or boy bands. It’s been said you can’t fight city hall, but city hall, like Disneyland, has a churro stand out front.”

It went on like this until the entire page was almost black with text. The stranger had filled the page from margin to margin in text no bigger than the Surgeon General’s warning on my pack of American Spirits.

I lit up a smoke, feeling uncharacteristically shaken. What had I snatched from that weirdo in the bar anyway?

Another random page went on exhorting the essential value and necessity of cheese to a functioning society. Even going so far as to claim the conquerors of any Great War, conflict, or even petty squabbles always had the superior cheese. Once again, this page was absolutely full to bursting with the tight block lettering of this book’s keeper.

The next page, however, simply read, “Love is an apron.”

I was beginning to suspect I had stolen the dream journal of a lunatic. I stood up from my park bench and took a long drag on my cigarette. Feeling resolved to return the little black book to the stranger in the pub, I flipped to another random page that read, “Cigarettes won the war, but that doesn’t mean they won’t kill ya.”

He even wrote the “you”’as “ya” as if to be folksy.

Spiders etched prophecies of doom on my spine. I flicked my cigarette into the road as I left the park.

Reading as I walked, I scanned a full page on the truth of the “Almighty Dollar.”

The stranger wrote, “Every college philosophy major thinks they’re the first to observe that money isn’t actually real. It’s simply a social agreement that gives value to printed paper. We know hard currency ceased to represent gold long ago, but the philosophy major is wrong. Money is not worthless. It represents the only real commodity a person can trade. Time.”

I bumped into someone as I walked, dropping the book in a flutter of pages. As I bent to pick it up I locked eyes with an obese woman in her sixties. She stood over me with an expression of pure hate. Her tee shirt, the color of Velveeta paste, read, “Do You Want Some Cheese With That Whine?”

I decided my apologies would be wasted on her. She had the look of a woman who would stab a cinema usher if asked to silence her cellphone. In the brief war of our colliding torsos, she had the better cheese.

Back in the book now, I read a lengthy analysis of the value of pigeons to the function of any decent city. The stranger asserted that there had once been something called a “Sin-Eater,” a person who consumed a ritual meal to absorb the sins of the recently deceased. In the absence of any central mythology, pigeons have become the Sin-Eaters of the modern world, consuming our bread and discarded trash as they routinely absorb our low-lying but pervasive hatred of one another, our cities, and our society.

The page concluded by saying, “Without pigeons, we would murder every old lady who bumped into us on the street.”

I looked up, feeling watched, spied upon, even pranked.

Across the street, a young boy dropped his peanut butter sandwich. A pigeon hopped and flapped like a dropped journal. The mother seemed to be wearing some kind of half apron, as if on break from a bakery job. As the pigeon ate his sandwich, the crying child clung to the apron like a man adrift on the ocean clings to a broken piece of his ship.

Love is an apron.

This was all too bizarre.

When I looked up, I said aloud, “Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover it.”

My wandering feet had carried me to the beach boardwalk. Seagulls hung in the air, waiting to dive bomb unsuspecting tourists. People crossed haphazardly in front of angry traffic. The pigeons absorbed all that hate. And the aroma of fresh churros hung in the air.

I saw the man in the drawing. At the Churro stand, he exchanged money for cinnamon goodness. I saw it all. The seagull zeroing in on the target. The delivery van with its harried-looking driver. The trajectories of an oncoming fatality.

Without understanding, I gave in to pure belief. Cheese winning wars. Love is an apron. Pigeon sin-eaters. Cigarettes will kill you. It was all true.

I stepped into the road, rushing to help the churro man. $20,000 and I just had to clip the wings of the butterfly.

As I ran to meet the churro man, a voice said, “Excuse me, sir? Do you have a light?”

I turned to face the stranger from the pub. He stood there in his anachronistic fedora, looking like Jimmy Cagney from the 24th Century.

Then I felt the red wave of a car plowing into my hip. I felt a flickering breeze before my head struck the windshield. I tumbled off the back of the car in a hail of screeching tires and tinkling glass fragments.

A woman screamed. The churro man looked on in wonder. The delivery van came to a stop in the street. I had suddenly drawn a crowd. People began to talk. Meeting strangers in a way they never would have without my error.

I was a pigeon. Soaking up the hatred of the city so people could be neighbors again.

The man knelt beside me and said, “It loved to happen.”

My eyes said, “What loved to happen?”

My mouth only gurgled in a tangle of blood and bone.

He said, “Death. Someone has to die to clip the wings of the butterfly. You’re my sin-eater. My pigeon. And thanks to your sacrifice, my ticket to $20,000.”

The little black book lay on the pavement, splayed open like a dead moth. As the man retrieved it, he turned a few pages and showed me his tight blocky handwriting.

The page began, “He looked like lost memories. A prisoner in solitary confinement even as he was surrounded by dozens of parishioners of the drink…”

It went on like that. My story. His handwriting. As inevitable as the churro. The man held my hand as I died.

It loved to happen.