How a lost little black book led to revealed wealth

Over numerous years, Kim’s books had been disappearing. Green books and read books, hard books and soft, books rigid in posture and embarrassingly stained, they all were drawn to some secret place that was not at hand to Kim. These losses included the history texts of his degree in history, the law texts from his degree in law, the clinical therapy texts from his attempted Masters degree, his draft thesis in another and many other collections of words, bound and digital, literary and semi-literary. If the school bookish items were largely discarded by Kim himself as an assurance against ever getting too close to the emotional drains which those subjects represented to him, others were simply and definitely purloined. His year book from the International School of Dempasar, his family tree and the computer within which it was stored and each and every address book he ever tried to put together, including a number of little black books.

Nor were these disappearances his to endure alone.

Six month’s after the death of one of his many paternal figures, this one a step-father to whom he was close, Kim received a call from an erstwhile step-sister inquiring as to whether, during the upheaval of death and its indignities, Kim had acquired for himself the social history of an earlier generation, by stealing yet another small black address book? The question reminded him of this particular sister’s choice to mail only half the ashes back to Campbellford for laying in the family plot because, she had said, she lacked sufficient postage to ship a fuller urn. Really, she just could’t part with all the crematorium ash, representing, as it did, how her thighs once trembled. “No,” Kim answered, “I never planned to call Dad’s old buddies from the seminary.”

He never added up the missing black books into the leap of faith required. Being followed did not cause him any further insights into the matter even if it was clear that the followers were being heavy footed on purpose, just so he would notice. Kim was disentangled from any relationship again and in the loneliness of the singular. No amount of informational gravitas was pulling into his centre. Nothing was providing waves of insight to solve the puzzle. Therefore, he settled on being an icon of endurance and waited upon this new whirl wind to settle and cast its history upon the ground, as whirl winds are want to do,

In the meantime, the spaces freed up by books were available.

And in the meantime, thinking about the strangeness of these disappearances, he sought and found his birth father's will. It was not lying amidst the pages of one of the books since they were gone. It wasn't with the DNA confirmation of paternity for that was gone too. Indeed, he had never been sent the will. He found it online, for £1.50 from the United Kingdom Probate service. As he read through the rather perfunctory will - a will that dealt with millions, perhaps billions - his name was decidedly absent. Perhaps it was with the missing books, the addresses and the DNA report. Perhaps.

On a trip with his father to the patneral golf course, the owners of the Bentleys, Jaguars and Rolls kept referring to him as 'Mr. Lepot', which his father failed to correct. At the time, he thought it a kind of upper class English rudeness or paternal vanity since he carried an adopted moniker. Now, he thought, 'Maybe more security precautions.' And then there was, his name, on the last line proper of the will. A simple acknowledgement of paternity. 'Yah,' he thought, 'something not lost into the swirling colours of the universe.'

On a night coloured white by crystalline precipitation, in the middle of a cacophony of singing viral Peter Pans, whose short ribonucleic acid codes are thought to be the beginning of all life, Kim went out to examine his followers. He expected to find them huddled at the local church, trying to get out of the sluice-works of warm streets mixing with cold company. He felt it likely that within that sanctuary would be found the thick footed robbers of his books, addresses and paternity, clothed as the meek, cloaked as the homeless, as the disparaged, as the excluded, as the wounded, as the exhausted - but with buried traits, not brittle like the caramelized sugars that somehow enslaved millions but hard enough to challenge a whole world about its preconceptions. Kim was prepared. There was a woman with a pretty face, coloured hair, bent at the waste so, from the chair, she could rest her head on the table.

Kim exchanged pleasantries, discovering the woman at the end of an ish dance. She was tired, referring to the condition as withdrawal, withdrawal from crystallized methamphetamines, slippery like the wet snow pulverizing the air in advance of a pandemic.. He gave her $10.00 to end the trials. And the flash of money brought the flash of brown eyes and a giggling waltz of rubber booted feet into the mix, and this other, this Deloris, soon held a green Queen's $20 note made of petroleum and asked if they could visit for coffee.

That is how Kim stopped collecting books and started making a home for people. First, there was the brown eyed Deloris, then her boyfriend Zajak, then the incendiary Ken, the girl. Initially, Kim surrendered books. Then he surrendered time. Then he surrendered his depression and his fear. All the time allowing for more room for the sacred. For the Other.

There is going to be crowding. There is going to be sacrifice. There is going to be a rediscovery of the sacred. The wet white snows are the new mana for sharing. And these bonds of humanity are our new wealth and our new scripture. We will return to resting. We will rest in each others arms. Our frenzies will slow. We will make some room into a home. We will stop heating our world and start its healing by setting aside the welding torches, by letting the planes rest, by turning off the foundries and the space flights, the pulp mills and the coal mines, by capping the oil wells and shutting down the cell phone factories enough each year that the continuing frenzied heating of the body abates.

Oh ya, I guess there will be an abiding inheritance, forced or otherwise, too.

And the little black book or the many black books?: Unimportant for the time being.