by Mitch Albom
Eddie looked confused.
“People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
“This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.”
Eddie coughed, trying to bring up his voice. He was tired of being silent.
“I am your first person, Edward. When I died, my life was illuminated by five others, and then I came here to wait for you, to stand in your line, to tell you my story, which becomes part of yours. There will be others for you, too. Some you knew, maybe some you didn’t. But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever.”
Eddie pushed a sound up from his chest, as hard as he could.
“What …” he finally croaked.
His voice seemed to be breaking through a shell, like a baby chick.
“What … killed …”
The Blue Man waited patiently.
“What … killed … you?”
The Blue Man looked a bit surprised. He smiled at Eddie.
“You did,” he said.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
He is seven years old and his gift is a new baseball. He squeezes it in each hand, feeling a surge of power that runs up his arms. He imagines he is one of his heroes on the Cracker Jack collector cards, maybe the great pitcher Walter Johnson.
“Here, toss it,” his brother, Joe, says.
They are running along the midway, past the game booth where, if you knock over three green bottles, you win a coconut and a straw.
“Come on, Eddie,” Joe says. “Share.”
Eddie stops, and imagines himself in a stadium. He throws the ball. His brother pulls in his elbows and ducks.
“Too hard!” Joe yells.
“My ball!” Eddie screams. “Dang you, Joe.”
Eddie watches it thump down the boardwalk and bang off a post into a small clearing behind the sideshow tents. He runs after it. Joe follows. They drop to the ground.
“You see it?” Eddie says.
“Nuh-uh.”
A whumping noise interrupts them. A tent flap opens. Eddie and Joe look up. There is a grossly fat woman and a shirtless man with reddish hair covering his entire body. Freaks from the freak show.
The children freeze.
“What are you wiseacres doin’ back, here?” the hairy man says, grinning. “Lookin’ for trouble?”
Joe’s lip trembles. He starts to cry. He jumps up and runs away, his arms pumping wildly. Eddie rises, too, then sees his ball against a sawhorse. He eyes the shirtless man and moves slowly toward it.
“This is mine,” he mumbles. He scoops up the ball and runs after his brother.
“Listen, mister,” Eddie rasped, “I never killed you, OK? I don’t even know you.”
The Blue Man sat on a bench. He smiled as if trying to put a guest at ease. Eddie remained standing, a defensive posture.
“Let me begin with my real name,” the Blue Man said. “I was christened Joseph Corvelzchik, the son of a tailor in a small Polish village. We came to America in 1894. I was only a boy. My mother held me over the railing of the ship and this became my earliest childhood memory, my mother swinging me in the breezes of a new world.
“Like most immigrants, we had no money. We slept on a mattress in my uncle’s kitchen. My father was forced to take a job in a sweatshop, sewing buttons on coats. When I was ten, he took me from school and I joined him.”
Eddie watched the Blue Man’s pitted face, his thin lips, his sagging chest. Why is he telling me this? Eddie thought.
“I was a nervous child by nature, and the noise in the shop only made things worse. I was too young to be there, amongst all those men, swearing and complaining.
“Whenever the foreman came near, my father told me, ‘Look down. Don’t make him notice you.’ Once, however, I stumbled and dropped a sack of buttons, which spilled over the floor. The foreman screamed that I was worthless, a worthless child, that I must go. I can still see that moment, my father pleading with him like a street beggar, the foreman sneering, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I felt my stomach twist in pain. Then I felt something wet on my leg. I looked down. The foreman pointed at my soiled pants and laughed, and the other workers laughed, too.
“After that, my father refused to speak to me. He felt I had shamed him, and I suppose, in his world, I had. But fathers can ruin their sons, and I was, in a fashion, ruined after that. I was a nervous child, and when I grew, I was a nervous young man. Worst of all, at night, I still wet the bed. In the mornings I would sneak the soiled sheets to the washbasin and soak them. One morning, I looked up to see my father. He saw the dirty sheets, then glared at me with eyes that I will never forget, as if he wished he could snap the cord of life between us.”
The Blue Man paused. His skin, which seemed to be soaked in blue fluid, folded in small fatty layers around his belt. Eddie couldn’t help staring.
“I was not always a freak, Edward,” he said. “But back then, medicine was rather primitive. I went to a chemist, seeking something for my nerves. He gave me a bottle of silver nitrate and told me to mix it with water and take it every night. Silver nitrate. It was later considered poison. But it was all I had, and when it failed to work, I could only assume I was not ingesting enough. So I took more. I swallowed two gulps and sometimes three, with no water.
“Soon, people were looking at me strangely. My skin was turning the color of ash.
“I was ashamed and agitated. I swallowed even more silver nitrate, until my skin went from gray to blue, a side effect of the poison.”
The Blue Man paused. His voice dropped. “The factory dismissed me. The foreman said I scared the other workers. Without work, how would I eat? Where would I live?
“I found a saloon, a dark place where I could hide beneath a hat and coat. One night, a group of carnival men were in the back. They smoked cigars. They laughed. One of them, a rather small fellow with a wooden leg, kept looking at me. Finally, he approached.
“By the end of the night, I had agreed to join their carnival. And my life as a commodity had begun.”
Eddie noticed the resigned look on the Blue Man’s face. He had often wondered where the sideshow cast came from. He assumed there was a sad story behind every one of them.
“The carnivals gave me my names, Edward. Sometimes I was the Blue Man of the North Pole, or the Blue Man of Algeria, or the Blue Man of New Zealand. I had never been to any of these places, of course, but it was pleasant to be considered exotic, if only on a painted sign. The ‘show’ was simple. I would sit on the stage, half undressed, as people walked past and the barker told them how pathetic I was. For this, I was able to put a few coins in my pocket. The manager once called me the ‘best freak’ in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.
“One winter, I came to this pier. Ruby Pier. They were starting a sideshow called The Curious Citizens. I liked the idea of being in one place, escaping the bumpy horse carts of carnival life.
“This became my home. I lived in a room above a sausage shop. I played cards at night with the other sideshow workers, with the tinsmiths, sometimes even with your father. In the early mornings, if I wore long shirts and draped my head in a towel, I could walk along this beach without scaring people. It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely known.”
He stopped. He looked at Eddie.
“Do you understand? Why we’re here? This is not your heaven. It’s mine.”
Take one story, viewed from two different angles. Take a rainy Sunday morning in July, in the late 1920s, when Eddie and his friends are tossing a baseball Eddie got for his birthday nearly a year ago. Take a moment when that ball flies over Eddie’s head and out into the street. Eddie, wearing tawny pants and a wool cap, chases aft
er it, and runs in front of an automobile, a Ford Model A. The car screeches, veers, and just misses him. He shivers, exhales, gets the ball, and races back to his friends. The game soon ends and the children run to the arcade to play the Erie Digger machine, with its claw-like mechanism that picks up small toys.
Now take that same story from a different angle. A man is behind the wheel of a Ford Model A, which he has borrowed from a friend to practice his driving. The road is wet from the morning rain. Suddenly, a baseball bounces across the street, and a boy comes racing after it. The driver slams on the brakes and yanks the wheel. The car skids, the tires screech.
The man somehow regains control, and the Model A rolls on. The child has disappeared in the rearview mirror, but the man’s body is still affected, thinking of how close he came to tragedy. The jolt of adrenaline has forced his heart to pump furiously and this heart is not a strong one and the pumping leaves him drained. The man feels dizzy and his head drops momentarily. His automobile nearly collides with another. The second driver honks, the man veers again, spinning the wheel, pushing on the brake pedal. He skids along an avenue then turns down an alley. His vehicle rolls until it collides with the rear of a parked truck. There is a small crashing noise. The headlights shatter. The impact smacks the man into the steering wheel. His forehead bleeds. He steps from the Model A, sees the damage, then collapses onto the wet pavement. His arm throbs. His chest hurts. It is Sunday morning. The alley is empty. He remains there, unnoticed, slumped against the side of the car. The blood from his coronary arteries no longer flows to his heart. An hour passes. A policeman finds him. A medical examiner pronounces him dead. The cause of death is listed as “heart attack.” There are no known relatives.
Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue, where one worker calls another worker over to marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.
“You see?” the Blue Man whispered, having finished the story from his point of view. “Little boy?”
Eddie felt a shiver.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
He is eight years old. He sits on the edge of a plaid couch, his arms crossed in anger. His mother is at his feet, tying his shoes. His father is at the mirror, fixing his tie.
“I don’t WANT to go,” Eddie says.
“I know,” his mother says, not looking up, “but we have to. Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.”
“But it’s my BIRTHDAY.”
Eddie looks mournfully across the room at the erector set in the corner, a pile of toy metal girders and three small rubber wheels. Eddie had been making a truck. He is good at putting things together. He had hoped to show it to his friends at a birthday party. Instead, they have to go someplace and get dressed up. It isn’t fair, he thinks.
His brother, Joe, dressed in wool pants and a bow tie, enters with a baseball glove on his left hand. He slaps it hard. He makes a face at Eddie.
“Those were my old shoes,” Joe says. “My new ones are better.”
Eddie winces. He hates having to wear Joe’s old things.
“Stop wiggling,” his mother says.
“They HURT!” Eddie whines.
“Enough!” his father yells. He glares at Eddie. Eddie goes silent.
At the cemetery, Eddie barely recognizes the pier people. The men who normally wear gold lame and red turbans are now in black suits, like his father. The women seem to be wearing the same black, dress; some cover their faces in veils.
Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says something about ashes. Eddie holds his mothers hand and squints at the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he will have his birthday back.
The First Lesson
“Please, mister …” Eddie pleaded. “I didn’t know. Believe me … God help me, I didn’t know.”
The Blue Man nodded. “You couldn’t know. You were too young.”
Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.
“But now I gotta pay,” he said.
“To pay?”
“For my sin. That’s why I’m here, right? Justice?”
The Blue Man smiled. “No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you.”
Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.
“What?” he said.
“That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.”
Eddie shook his head. “We were throwing a ball. It was my stupidity, running out there like that. Why should you have to die on account of me? It ain’t fair.”
The Blue Man held out his hand. “Fairness,” he said, “does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”
He rolled his palm upward and suddenly they were standing in a cemetery behind a small group of mourners. A priest by the gravesite was reading from a Bible. Eddie could not see faces, only the backs of hats and dresses and suit coats.
“My funeral,” the Blue Man said. “Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
“It is why we are drawn to babies …” He turned to the mourners. “And to funerals.”
Eddie looked again at the gravesite gathering. He wondered if he’d had a funeral. He wondered if anyone came. He saw the priest reading from the Bible and the mourners lowering their heads. This was the day the Blue Man had been buried, all those years ago. Eddie had been there, a little boy, fidgeting through the ceremony, with no idea of the role he’d played in it.
“I still don’t understand,” Eddie whispered. “What good came from your death?”
“You lived,” the Blue Man answered.
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”
With that, the Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming in his body, the loneliness, the shame, the nervousness, the heart attack. It slid into Eddie like a drawer being closed.
“I am leaving,” the Blue Man whispered in his ear. “This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet.”
“Wait,” Eddie said, pulling back. “Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?”
The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. “Then my death was a waste, just like my life.”
“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
He stepped back toward the gravesite and smiled. And as he did, his skin turned the loveliest shade of caramel—smooth and unblemished. It was, Eddie thought, the most perfect skin he had ever seen.
“Wait!” Eddie yelled, but he was sudd
enly whisked into the air, away from the cemetery, soaring above the great gray ocean. Below him, he saw the rooftops of old Ruby Pier, the spires and turrets, the flags flapping in the breeze.
Then it was gone.
Sunday, 3 P.M.
Back at the pier, the crowd stood silently around the wreckage of Freddy’s Free Fall. Old women touched their throats. Mothers pulled their children away. Several burly men in tank tops slid to the front, as if this were something they should handle, but once they got there, they, too, only looked on, helpless. The sun baked down, sharpening the shadows, causing them to shield their eyes as if they were saluting.
How bad is it? people whispered. From the back of the crowd, Dominguez burst through, his face red, his maintenance shirt drenched in sweat. He saw the carnage.
“Ahh no, no, Eddie,” he moaned, grabbing his head. Security workers arrived. They pushed people back. But then, they, too, fell into impotent postures, hands on their hips, waiting for the ambulances. It was as if all of them—the mothers, the fathers, the kids with their giant gulp soda cups—were too stunned to look and too stunned to leave. Death was at their feet, as a carnival tune played over the park speakers.
How bad is it? Sirens sounded. Men in uniforms arrived. Yellow tape was stretched around the area. The arcade booths pulled down their grates. The rides were closed indefinitely. Word spread across the beach of the bad thing that had happened, and by sunset, Ruby Pier was empty.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
From his bedroom, even with the door closed, Eddie can smell the beefsteak his mother is grilling with green peppers and sweet red onions, a strong woody odor that he loves.
“Eddd-deee!” she yells from the kitchen. “Where are you? Everyone’s here!”
He rolls off the bed and puts away the comic book. He is 17 today, too old for such things, but he still enjoys the idea—colorful heroes like the Phantom, fighting the bad guys, saving the world. He has given his collection to his school-aged cousins from Romania, who came to America a few months earlier. Eddie’s family met them at the docks and they moved into the bedroom that Eddie shared with his brother, Joe. The cousins cannot speak English, but they like comic books. Anyhow, it gives Eddie an excuse to keep them around.
