The Night Walk Men

by Jason McIntyre

  And he would clarify. He has clarified for me so I know. Life, He has said in my presence, is not like art insomuch as art contains finality, absolution, insomuch as art may contain meaning, depth. Insomuch as art may have recurring motif or symbols that convey universal truth. Or even characters with moral compunctions, conundrums and eventual successes with such conundrums. In life, not in art, good rarely seems to triumph over evil. Good does not always leave the table with all the chips. Not in real life anyway.

  I believed what he told me. And, in turn, you should believe what I tell you: there is no real art. Real art only comes by accident. And there are no accidents. Certainly, there are compromises. There are mistakes. But there are no authentic accidents.

  I mean to say this:

  You didn’t honestly believe that train wreck in Bolivia was an accident, did you? Or that landslide in Northern British Columbia? Or that red light that made you late for work on a Monday morning? Everything happens for a reason. Gabriela knows that now. And so should you.

  All’s fair. I told you I’d have my turn. So let me ask you something further, since you’ve had free reign to ask of me.

  What if, at the age of fourteen in 1461, Christopher Columbus had died of Typhoid in Genoa before ever setting foot on a boat?

  What if J. Robert Oppenheimer had developed his throat cancer twenty years earlier than his death in 1967 and perhaps one or two years before a single atomic bomb fell on the Japanese city of Hiroshima?

  What if Louis Pasteur’s parents had never met? Or, what if young Pasteur had stayed in the Jura region of France and pursued his first love of art instead of his second love of science?

  What if the rifle of nineteen-year-old Slavic Nationalist Gavrilo Princip, had jammed, not allowing two rounds to be fired on Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in 1914?

  On December 9th, 1980, what if Mark David Chapman had given into his urges? What if he had barged in on the gay couple having sex in his neighbouring hotel room at the YMCA instead of waiting for John Lennon outside the Dakota, his New York City apartment.

  Do you think any of that would have changed anything else?

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  Yes. There are mistakes. A mistake was in letting Braille the Raille live so long. He was a hundred and nine, that’s too long, even for you. You wouldn’t know what to do with that much time, you would go mad. And Braille, he nearly did. Though he did a far sight better than most would have done, I will argue that to the end.

  There are mistakes. Gabriela’s parents taking her to Dow Lake by train, that was a mistake. Gabriela and her brother almost not coming into this world, that was a mistake. Gabriela falling into that long dark tunnel filled with metal rails and crushed rock, that was a mistake.

  But, likewise, Obsidion ignoring his orders and letting her carry on, one could make a case for that being a mistake too.

  No, Gabriela is not evil, she surely has no bad intent. Letting her go on will not invoke a third world war, don’t kid yourself. She will not grow to a bitter and damaged sort who opens fire on a crowd of children (never!) nor will she calculate the assassination of some Higher Up to change the world order.

  If you want to keep believing me, you should go right ahead. I can’t make promises but I can tell you some things you probably didn’t know.

  I can tell you that, in time, Gabriela is set to do something very important, very altering, very crucial.

  And I can tell you this.

  A Night Walk Man is not a Godly sort. There are some startling contrivances which attend to the Work that He does, but He is not holy and not divine. We are not seers. We get no fraction-grasps, no smoldering hunks of Yet To Come. There are broad strokes, mind you, large trends that are interpreted and ordered upon, but, just like it is in your world, those decisions happen farther up the chain than you or me or even Obsidion. All of us, we can only wait for the Orders to come down. And for the most part, we can only sit tight and wait to see how it all plays out.

  What I do know (and what Obo the Hobo knew) is that there are certain souls, whether by right or by might, that have to move in certain directions. Franz and Sophie, the archduke and his wife, they had to be on that step in 1914. And Pasteur’s mother and father, they had to fall for each other. Just had to. The whole house of cards would have crashed down otherwise. And these kinds of little things, these impossibly small details, they click into place every night, every day. Even when it’s raining.

  And, surely you must know by now that, just like that, lickity-split, our Gabriela had to come out of that train tunnel well with breath in her lungs. Had to.

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  Fate? A silly notion. Fate is a man hurrying to get a can of pizza sauce from the grocery store at rush hour. Fate is his car wreck as he dodges a bicycle rider on the way instead of slowing down to a stop. Fate is his head touching the windshield at 45 mph because the few seconds to fasten his seatbelt would have made him miss the green light.

  I told you that mistakes are made. Even up here. Even in the heavenly world of Cruithne. What you don’t know is quite how the mistakes played out for Obsidion and Montserrat.

  So I will tell you this. I will tell you and then you must promise to go because I will have nothing more for you then. Nothing at all.

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  Obsidion walks through a torrent of white birds. Not doves. But sea gulls, crying as they ascend.

  On the plain, he marches through waves of grasshoppers, among the honey-coloured staffs that flow with a gentle breeze and His presence.

  He stands now in a wheat field in the middle of what you call the bald prairie, just an elongated breadbasket that, at harvest time this year and most every other, will offer up your survival.

  It is the morning after our Gabriela has fallen, the morning after she is brought out of the dark train pit. Obsidion waits.

  And then Montserrat is there. The rains don’t come--not yet. But thunder and lightning tear the sky apart, light it up like the flashbulb behind an angry sun. Inside a dome of quiet, however, where Obsidion and Montserrat stand silent, there is stillness. It’s the complete calm you’ve only ever imagined but have never found yourself. It’s like death. But the most peaceful sort.

  They stare each other down. They do not speak for a long time.

  Montserrat’s robe stands still down to his feet in the dirt.

  Then Montserrat says, Welcome Brother. I am sad that it comes now to this.

  I’m sad too, says Obsidion. But do what you must.

  I charged you, Montserrat says, charged my Next In Line with taking Gabriela because she is destined to do momentous things. Momentous things that cannot come to pass.

  And where do you come by this knowledge, Obsidion asks.

  We are all Next In Line to someone, Montserrat answers. You to me. And me to another...further up the chain, he says. For you, Obsidion, that knowledge should be enough. It’s always someone else’s decision to make. Perhaps even mine. But not yours.

  Obsidion cries. Momentous things? You stand here and claim that she will do momentous things? Her momentous things are to be battled for, not sacrificed, not destroyed... They must pass and I know this. So why was it her? Why? You made me return her to this world at her start, he says. She is like a daughter to me. You know that. I have watched over her since the beginning. In a sense, brother, I made her. Why make me take her?

  And Montserrat only makes the statement he has always made. Duty, o brother. This is yours. And you should have attended to it. Now we are both to blame.

  No, says Obsidion. Duty is nothing for me now. I have let so much go in the name of duty. I have taken great friends because you have called it duty. I am finished with that, brother. I am finished with all of it.

  And so are we with you, says Montserrat, a touch of sorrow and sadness in his voice. He doesn’t want to do what comes next but his sense of duty is intact. And with the tail of his words, a new torrent comes out of the sky. Black and grey, churning ag
ainst the stillness of the empty night, it burns down through the darkness from a hidden moon above the clouds. It tears across the open plain, breaking asphalt and grid roads, approaching the meeting of these two phantom brothers, lifting the soil and the wheat and leaving a wide open carriage path in a farmer’s field near a town whose name I can’t recall.

  Then Obsidion is gone. Taken.

  It is punishment for insubordination.

  You want to tell me that Montserrat was wrong, that I told you so. You want to tell me what I’ve told you countless times already: Mistakes are made, Sperro, and Montserrat was on the side of err. A train edges off the track in Bolivia, you say. A plane goes down over the Pacific. A bomb goes off in a crowded theatre. And a twister touches down on a hot summer evening. Gabriela was meant to live--you believe this--and she lives at this very moment. You want it to be correct, don’t you?

  But let me ask you this.

  If there is a mistake, who pays for it? Someone has to. Don’t you think?

  And in the chain, somewhere above us both, there is a nod of agreement. Overhead, the heat is sucked into the atmosphere. The rains finally do come. Thunder and lightning lock the sky in a war of light and dark, silence and sound. The heat wave is over and a giant hand of welcome coolness and moisture sweeps from the plains out here all the way across to the island, to Gabriela’s home on Sheppard Street. Out to the ends of the earth at Dow Lake and across the roves of people we are meant to protect and to herd.

  But Montserrat was wrong, wasn’t He? Or was He?

  It really doesn’t matter. He went into his brother’s flock.

  He too went against the Word.

  It was Monserrat who steered Galbraith’s hand as he threw Gabriela’s dolly, he who gave it the distance to see it over the edge of the platform. And it was Montserrat who took Gabriela’s hat from her head and blew it down the track twenty paces.

  So His robes are pulled taught by the wind as it rises. He looks skyward. The fabric is yanked. It flaps and fusses about his head. And He understands what is coming.

  Unsuccessful or not, His punishment is the same.

  Death comes to them both because any chain of command will fail if there are hearts and minds near the bottom.

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  I told you that all Night Walk Men have a Next In Line. Obsidion was that to Montserrat until they were carried off into the sky by another on the chain. Fallow, as you’ll remember, was Next In Line to Obsidion. He was our father. And to Fallow, my twin brother, I am His Next In Line.

  It all comes down the line, you see. Just like that. Just as it should. Just as the rains always come after the heat has been here too long. For the most part, things move along as they’re meant to.

  I say again: was Obsidion right? Or was Montserrat?

  Who knows for certain at this late hour?

  All I can offer is that I am the last to carry on. I am the youngest, but older than you by at least five hundred years.

  I must leave you now. I am Sperro, a Night Walk Man. I have my own discourse to write and I have my own Work to do.

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  About The Author // Jason McIntyre

  Born on the prairies, Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him and coalesced into what would become his novel, "On The Gathering Storm". Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist. His novel,"On The Gathering Storm" is available now.

  Learn more and connect with the author at

  www.theFarthestReaches.com