8th Part

The living are hard enough to find—how much more difficult to find the dead? The hermit wandered many places, but the young man was in none of them. When he asked, people were reticent, or had no memory, or simply ignored an old man they took for a beggar. He was often denied lodging, and once or twice he was even denied food he had every intention of paying for, but people couldn't be bothered to accept his cash beforehand; he was just a dirty vagrant with nothing to do but suck fresh blood into his stale and putrid veins.

Children ran from him as from a ghost. It wasn't so much his appearance, though he had grown wild in the forest, as his deep eyes, so much deeper than the shallow pools in everyone else's head. There were many lives in those eyes, and to look in them seemed to many to be the same as looking into insanity, or eternity. In the end insanity and eternity are equally terrifying, so you couldn't really blame them for looking away, but there was no cause for the unkindnesses heaped on him in addition.

In the city, young men mocked him, shopkeepers boarded their doors against him, and old men said rude things to him in the street. He asked everyone if they'd seen the young man, but no one wanted to talk to a crazy bearded fellow. They'd rather spit at him, or tell him to go away, or ask him where the birds were.

"What birds?" he asked once.

"The birds that nest in your beard!" was the answer, a stupid answer that its speaker nonetheless found witty and comedic. His friends laughed, too. The old man ignored them and walked on.

"Hey, greybeard!" they called behind him. "Looking for something?"

"Nothing you can help me find," he said. "You wouldn't know about Wisdom or those who seek it."

"Wisdom?!" they cried, but the hermit turned a corner and heard no more. He slept that night in the street, huddled beneath a spare coat, with no pillow and unprotected from robbers. In actuality, it was the rain that got him.

But he never gave up. Having determined to find the young man, he would do so, and nothing could turn him aside. It wasn't an obsession, it was simply a task that he meant to accomplish. No stupid teenager and no sarcastic old man could keep him from it, or even dishearten him. If the mountain was a teacher in nothing else, he'd learned from it to keep his own counsel, to remain steadfast, and never to change except slowly.

Even so, he soon grew tired of the city. It was loud, and smelled badly, and the horses there were sallow and clumsy. Women were always tempting you with their bodies, and bakers advertised unhealthy food you didn't need, and when you paid for a bed to sleep in you always got less than you expected or were promised. The hermit walked with his eyes to the ground, eating only what he had to for survival, and sleeping as often as not on the pavement or beneath trees. Once a policeman told him not to loiter, but the hermit found even the guardians of the law could be corrupted, and that money bought more than possessions.

Other men might have grown more bitter, would have retreated into cold misanthropy and glared at everyone, thinking unbrotherly thoughts. The hermit, on the other hand, knew the depths of human nature and was surprised by nothing. Why wouldn't people behave badly? The real question was why they would ever behave well.

People began to recognize him on sight, and he realized he'd been circling the streets now for a long time, looking for this young man he'd seen once, three years ago. Was he in the country? or another city, perhaps? Was he even still alive? If he was to be found, the hermit was sure he'd be found here, in this city, so it was in this city that he looked. But the young man never showed up, and the old man started to wonder whether the whole thing wasn't a dream, or a manufactured memory. He wondered if the young man had ever existed. And yet, he never stopped looking, not even when the winter came on, leaving autumn's wreckage buried under a pale blanket that looked like death, only colder.