Will Wonders Ever Cease?

One might think it a rather dismal thing, or even quite miserable to live the way that Lester lived. The daylight only barely trickling down through the small and dirty window to his corner in a basement, beneath the squalor of the streets in a neighborhood mostly abandoned. To say that Lester gave little thought to the eccentricity of his poverty would be an under-statement. For Lester had arrived at his own private utopia. He seemed at home, somehow with cobwebs, mice, and dank, musty darkness. He was not altogether free of longings, but what few he had were easily satisfied. Mostly, he seemed pre-occupied with a thing he called 'his last perplexing puzzle'. He spent a lot of time pondering the question of 'Will Wonders Ever Cease?". He made daily notes on this subject, and was even working on a novel by the same name.

It was his daily habit to sit upon his neatly folded moth-eaten blanket and lift the lid of the thin pulpwood produce box that was his desk, and leaf through his notes. He had lots of notes. Torn pieces of cardboard and crumpled pieces of paper he had garnered in his wanderings through the neighborhood's alleys were now filled with scribbled words. And when considered in their proper order, these papers and boards comprised his work in progress. He picked up a piece of broken pencil and gnawed away the wood to find the necessary lead to make the words today required. He flattened a crumpled piece of computer paper and pondered for a moment the long sequences of numbers that ran the length of the page. He knew they must mean something, but for all practical purposes they were a cryptic dead language of some kind since they were by now long separated from any other pages that might possibly explain them. He turned the paper over and laid it on his box top and noted it as page 369 of his on-going story about wonders and whether or not they will ever cease. He paused a moment to think about where he had left off in the unfolding predicament of his central protagonist.

While the protagonist's name was also Lester, he had added a footnote many pages ago, that any resemblance of the Lester in the story and himself, or anybody else named Lester was purely coincidental. With a quick lick of his tongue across the pencil lead, he began to write.

Page Three Hundred and Sixty Nine

"As you may recall, Lester was a peculiar man in a peculiar situation. It had been years now since he had become just one of the many unclaimed lost objects piled about in the disarray of the city library's lost and found department. With little to do, he mostly sat on a shelf and talked to himself. Will my parents ever find me? Will they even remember where they left me? Maybe I am to blame. Maybe I wandered too far. How many days have I been here now? There's no telling. In fact, of all the days that must have passed by now, I can only remember two. There was that day I realized that I didn't love the world enough. And then, there was that day I realized I loved the world too much. Two days. Both of them mistakes I made. I have a lot of sympathy for zombies. They live like me. Neither here, nor there. Caught in some crack between two days. Some times I think I think too much. Even thinking about thinking. If you think too many things, too much of the time that's how you fall through the crack. I should try to remember that thought, so I can think about it more later. Maybe that guy that lives in the basement, writing down my every thought, will make a note of it.

The librarian almost hit me a few minutes ago with a large shopping bag full of beach towels that some absent-minded patron must have left unattended in the stacks. This kind of thing happens frequently. What can I make of that? I am at a loss for words. Maybe that's a good thing. Once I asked this guy that I thought knew a lot of stuff, a whole bunch of questions. He just shrugged his shoulders in answer to each one. To this day he remains my mentor. More and more, I am like him. I say less and less. I shrug more. It doesn't mean I am indifferent. It just means, 'What the hell do I know?'. What's real? Shrug. What matters? Shrug. Does reality matter? Shrug. Is matter real? Shrug. What the hell do I know? Shrug."

Lester carefully placed page 369 into his box of papers, and leaned wearily back onto the floor. He pulled his blanket around him. He was so tired. He found himself chuckling at some proverb he had heard once. "Rome wasn't built in a day." Is that supposed to be some sort of wisdom? Any fool knows that! He shrugged, and fell asleep.