Ahasuerus found the keys just sitting there on the subway seat and took them home.
He had seen much in his life, after all, his life was nearing two-thousand years. Nothing really surprised him anymore, human complexity only went so far. Just as Saussure had proposed that any language, from a distinctly finite set of phonemes, appeared to be infinite in the combination of the such, there was still a limit, a threshold that broached all other languages. In other words, for the exception of himself, which even this he knew was not true, all arrangements found themselves doubled, all originals become copies: history, in time, repeats itself. Despite what has been written about Saussure, and the subsequent sciences that have sprung from his philosophical pondering and the names that have muscled themselves onto the same page as himself, particularly in the twentieth century, Derrida, Barthes, Chomsky; many during his time ridiculed him. Ahasuerus remembers distinctly the mad method Ferdinand taught his classes, the fervor and passion and the glazed look in his student’s eyes. Ahasuerus was impressed then, he still had it in him for such things. Until the Holocaust.
After almost two-thousand years, after being damned to walk the earth by Himself until the Day of Reckoning, Ahasuerus was still not ashamed to be a Jew. He held it to his bosom as the Inquisitors held their rosary beads during the Inquisition. But now, now his grip was not exactly weakening, but his bones were stiff, the marrow of his knuckles were tired. Quite simply, he was bored. Even this, entering his apartment building, even the cities with their cramped cement towers and push of bodies, living in little apartments that reminded him more of the prisons they had in France. Many have said that the world is growing smaller, and Ahasuerus felt more as if the world was not growing smaller, with global networks and “letting your fingers do the walking”, but instead, the world was decompressing, simplifying in an exponential manner. All the lines of the world’s palm were disappearing and the hand itself becoming more cartoonish. He liked the idea and found himself smiling when he entered his apartment.
The keys still in his hand, he walked over to the window, where his desk and typewriter were. A stack of paper neatly beside the gray machine, a chair whose age he tripled, wooden and sturdy, and a desk that was uncluttered and everything set on it in straight lines. Ahasuerus read through what he had written the night before. He was writing an autobiography, it seemed the right thing to do, before he lost all taste for memory, which he found plagued him less and less these days. It would be a long one, and even now this truth soured in his mouth. He placed the keys on the desk and sat in the chair, turning on the typewriter and slipping in a blank page. He was now in the early days of the Middle Ages. Hands ready on the keyboard, he looked at the page.
Ahasuerus stared at the page for a few moments, then leaned back. He looked out of his window. The noises of a lazy summer drifted in and out, caressing it seemed to him, from the streets just outside. A siren from only a few blocks away, wailed as if it was stretching across time. He got up and went throughout the house, walking from room to room. Three and rather small, but still all there, all his for the time being, filled with dazzling shadow and light as the summer sun sank. When he walked back into the living room, he paused for a moment before returning to his seat. The sun had caught a dozen or so particles of dust in its light. Suspended as if the room was made of amber, sparkling, twisting so slowly in air. He sat back down, turned his chair back towards to the window and watched the sunset. Radiant yellows and oranges and reds. The streets were dark blue and getting quieter. A number of apartment windows across from his were blinking out, one by one.
He looked at the typewriter.
He turned it off and examined the keys from the subway. Ahasuerus jingled them. The Middle Ages reminded him of the Holocaust, as did the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Ahasuerus had not waned to die when they had huddled him into the gas chambers, he still had a tenacious hold on life, and he had been terrified that God had finally forsaken him. Even though he had been starved more than the others that were crushed with him, he could not eat after most of what he had seen, he only felt an ebbing of strength and a growling pain where his stomach had been. Ahasuerus had assumed that his body had begun feeding on itself for him not to have even gotten deathly ill. He truly expected to die and he shook against as well as with the others there with him. It had taken him years to write anything other than, ‘Do you know what it is like to be skin pressed against bone?’
He hadn’t written anything that night.
***
He awoke the next day and found himself still at his desk, clutching onto the keys.
Sweating, he let go of them and slowly got up. Ahasuerus wiped the sweat from his brow. He had dreamed again the same dream he had dreamed off and on for almost a lifetime: surviving as the others clutched their throats around him, crowded against him with no room to fall, reaching for him as if he had been the Messiah Himself, just as Christ had reached for him a thousand years before. Even though they could not speak, they gasped, their eyes bewildered, jealous, why was he still standing on his own two feet as they swayed and crumpled against one another? The hiss had been so silent but it suffocated their screams, those that had the strength to still scream. But the prevailing sound had been the moans, a din of voices moaning as one and a sea of heads lowering all around him. He blinked a number of times before he straightened his back, his back cracking a few times, slowly, as if it had not wanted to be bothered. Walking stiffly into the kitchen, he frowned with each step and ache. He poured himself a glass of orange juice, put the container back into the ‘fridge and walked back to the desk.
Ahasuerus touched the keys he had found. He remembered being shoveled along with a pile of bodies into the ditch; he remembered bitterly how much he had wanted to live.
He left with the keys snugly in his pants pocket.
Ahasuerus, no matter the time period, always found himself working. It was the one steady thing in his life, the one thing that he could not fail to find. Lovers had come, grown old and died, wondering how he had kept himself so well together through the years. They could never see that he had not aged at all, imagining wrinkles accumulate on his face that were either never there, or already were. “How could any mind accept you as indeed being the Wandering Jew? It is all a fable.” Sartre would wave his hand, dismissing the thought. Although doubting, Sartre had understood, even perhaps considered Ahasuerus a friend being the only that had known. This before he had introduced Sartre to Genet, whom Sartre adored thereafter, and Ahasuerus quietly took his leave.
Ahasuerus had tried to make a family long before then, but the Plague had taken his only son, and Ahasuerus did not want to make that mistake again. When he clutched onto his boy’s corpse as they dragged it onto the carriage to be taken away to the square to be burned with others, it struck Ahasuerus that he was lucky; he’d never have to watch his son’s hair shoot into a red wiry shock, or see him grow as a tree and become burly and stout, or curse other men and trip mid-stance over women, he would not live through his son’s successes and failures, and then see his son grow old and wither and die. After that, Ahasuerus felt a burden lift from his shoulders, he actually felt relieved to be unencumbered with the mandates of lineage and heritage. He had let go of the corpse as they began to beat him and he had gotten to his feet, watching the cart bump along the cobblestone, taking with it all the possible children he would ever have.
At work nobody noticed him play with the keys during his lunch break. Nobody paid any attention to him staring at the groves, rubbing both sides of each key, tapping them against the elevator walls and glass, listening to whatever sound they had made. Nobody thought it odd that his lunch reminded him of the day, almost two-thousand years ago, when there had been agony on His face and He had asked for a cup of water. Just at the moment Ahasuerus would turn his back and close his door to Him, the spear that the Roman held against His side to prod Him on caught a ray of sun in the same manner as the keys now did.
Others in his department thought the old Jew had fallen in love.
***
On the train ride home, Ahasuerus was careful not to let the keys make a sound. He often looked to his left and right, up and down, hand tightly around the keys. He had even gotten into the train car on the opposite end of the train from where he had been yesterday. This was how he had felt when he first came to New York, after he had dug himself out of the ditch back in Poland, and made his way to a camp of Allied Forces The soldiers could not speak to them, he could not find the words, and his throat was too dry, he felt that it would crack open in his mouth if he even attempted to speak. The doctors that they had taken him to were disturbed by him. They took almost as many pints of blood as the Germans had. He was an anomaly and he caused quite a stir in the camp. By nightfall, he had snuck away and boarded a ship by the end of the week.
He got off the train. He walked up the staircase. He walked up another onto the street. He reached his building and finally felt relieved; Just as he did after he had gotten his first week’s salary in America.
“Those are my keys.”
Ahasuerus turned around slowly.
A red headed little boy with dark eyes and a hand outstretched. “Give me my keys.”
“What?” he smiled. The child reminded him of his own son, and the cart that had taken him.
The boy kept his hand steady. “I have to go home.”
He kneeled down, his palms sweaty. “What keys?”
Small hand outstretched. “My father is waiting for me.”
Ahasuerus laughed, the nervous laugh that came to his throat when He, Himself had damned him to wander the earth. He could not believe it then, until decades would go by, and all that he knew eroded around him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I am supposed to have the keys”, the boy said quietly, “I know that now. I was just tired but now I know. I have to go home. Lots of people are walking around wondering why they’re beginning to spoil.” The little boy still had his hand outstretched. The boy’s eyes were very, very still. “Give me my keys. My father is waiting and so are lots of people.” The boy frowned. “They are not for you to play with.”
Ahasuerus’ lip trembled and he felt within him a long sense of regret and irony. He pulled out the keys. He looked at them. His eyes began to swell for the first time since his had broke through the press of corpses that were both impossibly hard and soft, often his fingers finding themselves caught in someone’s jaw, pulling himself upward.
“People are walking…” the boy said, hand outstretched.
He gave the boy the keys, sobbing.
The boy took the keys. The boy lowered his arm.
“I am sorry,” the boy said, “it is not my fault that you will walk until the end of days.”
“I know,” Ahasuerus said, looking at his empty fingers.
“Maybe you’ll get a chance to speak to my father again.” The boy looked at his keys. “I can only wait for you.”
He slowly stood, eyes downcast.
“Have comfort in that.” the little boy said. “Have comfort that someone will always be waiting for you.”
Ahasuerus closed his eyes and saw nothing.
“Goodbye…” said the boy.
He took a deep breath. He opened his eyes. The boy was gone.
He turned towards his building. He went to his apartment and unlocked the door. Ahasuerus went inside but didn’t turn on any of the lights. He went to his desk and sat. About an hour later, the sun began to set. Radiant yellows and oranges and reds, and eventually dark, very dark and deep, blue. The streets grew quieter, a number of apartment windows blinking out, one by one. Ahasuerus looked at the typewriter.
He could only remember the empty space of where the keys once were on the seat, in the subway, yesterday.