A man showed up at my door the other day, selling solar systems, and told me, of all things, that he was the Father of God.

“That’s capital F, small O, capital G,” he said.  “Just like you’d expect.  And I have both pre-juggled and new solar systems for sale.” One hand tapped slowly on a bag that hung by his side, filled presumably with solar systems.

“I’m not sure..”

“Now before you go and say no, you really should hear me out.  One minute of your time, that’s all I ask.  One small, seemingly insignificant minute.  You have that to spare, surely.  One minute for the Father of God.  Sixty seconds.  My business here is nearly done already, even as you think it over.”

“I don’t know what I’d do with a solar system.” I sure couldn’t say I already had one, and I think I looked over my shoulder, as if I was looking for some place to put a solar system.  I may not have looked, though.  I’m not for sure about that.  I may have just thought about what I’d do with a solar system.  I may have just stood there, staring at the bag by the Father of God’s side.  Whatever it was I actually did, I do know that it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of the Father of God before.

“Do you have any identification?” I asked, then watched his mouth slowly transform into a smile.  Or maybe transform isn’t the right word, because I’m not quite sure how to describe the smile of the Father of God.  It sort of tapped at his face, the same soft way his fingers tapped at that bag of solar systems.

“Right here,” he said, his hand resting on the bag.  His hand moved a little, a small caress more then anything else, and something in the bag jumped.

“Everything I have is right in here.  Some of them baked up fresh just this morning,” he said.  “You really should try one.”

“Baked?”

“Sure.  Wife bakes up a fresh batch every morning.  There’s really no better smell anywhere, let me tell you, then a solar system fresh from the oven.”

“No, I’m sure there’s not,” I said, and then for some reason I’ll never even begin to understand, I stepped back and closed the door.  Just like that.  Just stepped back and closed the door on the Father of God and his bag of solar systems.  No peek inside the bag, no whiff of what a fresh solar system, baked just that morning smelled like.  No thank you and no good bye.  I felt sick to my stomach.

“Good luck with that, then,” the Father of God said through the closed door, then turned and walked away.  I imagined him stopping briefly to tap the top of the dog’s head, then head to the next house on his stop.  I sat down in my chair, staring at the blank screen in front of me, fingers resting on the keys.  Caressing, I thought.  Damn, I should have thought of that.  I really should have looked in that bag.

“One fresh solar system every morning,” I said to myself, then typed out the words:

One fresh solar system every morning.

What’s the universe going to do with a new solar system every single day, that’s what I want to know.  What’s it smell like when the oven door first opens?  What’s she look like, the Mother of God, and just how far does a man need to walk, to sell solar systems?  Could I have looked in the bag and figured it all out?  My fingers moved, and I typed:

One fresh solar system every morning seemed enough at first, but after driving that first day, Collier knew it wouldn’t be near enough.  Running took space.  A lot of space.  More then he’d ever imagined, he thought, as he pulled the van into the service station.  More gas then he’d imagined, too.  More gas, more money, more time, more everything.  Running, Collier was beginning to find out, was a little harder then he’d first imagined it’d be.

“A fresh solar system,” he said outloud.  “One with a little more money might be nice.” And something to eat, he thought, as he pulled up to the pumps.  Something to eat and a cold beer.  No fun running on an empty stomach.  But first gas, then food.

He rolled down the window, waiting for an attendant to show up.  Running, he was also finding out, took a considerable amount of sitting around doing nothing but waiting, which he’d decided, he kind of liked.  Nothing wrong with waiting.  Waiting was cheap.  Cheap and easy.  Waiting, he’d started to think, was beginning to be his favorite part of running.

It’s like that first day in the lifeboat together, and you just floating there, cold and wet, riding up and down each wave in that impossibly small space with the other survivors , staring at nothing in disbelief. 

It’s hard to talk, let alone look at each other, and for the first few hours and most of the entire first day, no one says much of anything.  What is there to say, after all?  Words can’t raise a sunken ship, and from what you’ve seen, they’ve never been much good at bringing back the dead.  And even if they could, what would be the point?  The lifeboat’s already too small, crowded to the point that you’re shocked when you find yourself thinking that maybe it would have been better if a few of the others hadn’t been quite so lucky.  Shocked more when you begin wishing they hadn’t been so lucky.  Even more when the man next to you goes limp and you think nothing at all.

Your mind begins to change, taking on thoughts of its own that you keep to yourself.  Frightening things.  Unimaginable things.  Things, however, that have been inside you all along, but that you’ve always ignored.  A lifetime of looking the other way.  Pretending.  But now there’s no such luxury.  Water everywhere you look.  Water and desperate people.

It’s instinct that may have gotten you to the lifeboat, but it’s survival that keeps you in it, and it’s survival that begins to take over your mind, pushing everything useless, everything weak, far to the back of your thoughts, out of the way.  Survival that opens your eyes, and on that first day in the lifeboat, survival reminds you of something you’ve known but seldom acknowledged - there is no room for weakness, just as there is no room for the dead. 

So on the morning of the second day you speak, convincing the others what must be done, your job made easier by the fact that no one knows the man.  Death has always been better if it’s a stranger.  Letting go always easier.  Hands take hold of the body and lower it into the water.  The boat rises, the body sinks, and you look away.

Well, I made it to the coffeeshop and pounded out roughly half of today’s recommended daily allowance.  I was thrown completely off balance when I stopped at an abandoned house that I’ve been meaning to look at for the last year or so.  The place hasn’t been deserted too long, less then two years I’m almost sure of.  I know in some parts of the country this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but around here, I tend to think of these places as few and far between.  Old farm houses that once sat outside the reach of the city, swallowed up, then slowly neglected over the years by secret people inside who can’t or refuse for whatever reason to maintain the property.  Rain, decay, mold, and just pure and simple age, all combining to take the place down.  The owner dies or disappears.  Windows become broken.  Doors hang open.  And then the curious, eventually, find their way in.

I guess I don’t think too highly of the curious these days, considering my surprise when I arrive and find that not too much has been vandalized.  No spray paint on the walls.  No graffiti of any sort that I could find.  But the real surprise, the real treasure, are the things that somehow end up left behind.  The things of no apparent value, but to me, might be the only clues left of what really went on in someone’s mind.

What went on in Kenneth’s mind all those years?  That was his name, Kenneth.  Enough mail lying around to prove that.  Name still on the mailbox.  Photo albums, ruined by rain, piled on the kitchen counter.  Handwritten notes tell me that Kenneth was a crafter, and pile after pile of small, rectangular papers tell me something about Kenneth’s fixation with scraps of paper that I cannot begin to understand.  And then the clippings of the women.  Women’s faces and bodies.  Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, paperclipped together in small groups of seven to ten, scattered all throughout the house.  In drawers in the kitchen, in cabinets and on the floor.  Upstairs, more clippings, paperclipped together in the same curious fashion, lying in every room and every closet I look in.

Whatever Kenneth was, I know that my idea of him will become the newest character in The Hermit’s Door.  He will become a friend of the hermit.  One of the visitors who shows up to talk with the hermit.  It is the fate of the dead or missing to become what we make of them.  They are as full of surprises as we allow them to be.  I turn over the scrap of paper that has written on it: deliver their soul from death, only to find another note, written in Kenneth’s crisp, distinctive printing.  Bottle Cap, Going Down.

I take some pictures, but my battery goes dead before I can get very far.  And then, in the coffeeshop, I have trouble actually writing about this new character of mine because of how fresh the whole experience of the house is.  Part of me wishes I could collect all the clues and spread them out back at home, thinking of what made this man tick.  What was he thinking?  What did it all mean to him?  Who were his people, or did he have any left?

I didn’t know where to start, so I just jumped.

Today’s excerpt from The Hermit’s Door.

The hermit couldn’t remember when he’d met Kenneth, or even where for that matter.  It couldn’t have been that long ago, two years, maybe three.  Or was it five?  The years had starting blending together more and more lately, and he was finding it hard to accurately remember the time frames for just about everything.  The order of the wives, for instance, he would be able to tell someone if they’d asked, but not the years.  The when of the wives had become a mystery, and sometimes even the where of them.  Kenneth, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything, and was, in fact, one of the very reasons he liked Kenneth.  A seemingly bottomless pit of memory.  Not something that he’d want for himself, he knew, but if he was going to have to sit around with someone, memory was a trait he enjoyed, even if he didn’t have much of one himself.  Memory has a way of turning people into talkers, much the same way being alone turns people into listeners, so once a week for an hour or two, Kenneth and the hermit made good companions.

“Do you ever get lonely?” Kenneth asked.  “For a woman, I mean.  Don’t you ever start missing it?”

“I don’t know, Kenneth.  I imagine I do sometimes, but it’s hard to put a finger on when.  What about you?  You’ve been alone awhile, haven’t you?”

The hermit had heard very few questions in his lifetime actually searching for information.  People wanted to talk about themselves, to explore that thing that they felt missing.  Questions were an easy way to introduce a topic, to begin a conversation about something that maybe a person felt uncomfortable about beginning.  Kenneth, for instance, wanted to talk about loneliness.  His own loneliness.  Not an easy thing for a man to bring up.  About himself or anyone for that matter.  Kenneth was trying to open a door that otherwise he might leave closed.

“Sometimes I think back,” the hermit said.  “Before this.  Before I was alone.”

Thinking back was obviously something Kenneth was familiar with.  Even now, the hermit noticed, Kenneth’s eyes shifted slightly to the left as something came to mind, and that, the hermit thought, was the real question.  What vague image was it that Kenneth saw, trying hard to hang onto as his life moved further and further away from the moment?  Or was it something he couldn’t see, something so fuzzy and out of focus that the very idea of it, hanging there in his mind, was enough to drive him mad?  Enough to drive questions out of him?  Hard questions for him to ask.  Questions impossible, of course, for the hermit to answer.

“I think about my father’s berry farm sometimes,” Kenneth said.  “I remember it the way it was when I was a boy.  The stains on the Mexican’s hands and the front of their shirts and pants, red and purple, and the little Mexican kids, smaller even then me, there with their parents, helping to carry the berries sometimes.  Sometimes we’d play but mostly they kept to themselves and I kept to myself.  Now that I think about it, I think my dad wanted it that way, more then anyone else.  I think it might have been him that kept me from playing with the Mexican kids.  I don’t know.”

“It’s hard to say what’s on anyone’s mind.”

“It is.”

Kenneth found himself thinking of the newspaper clippings he kept.  Pictures, cut from newspaper articles and advertisements, sometimes from magazines, occasionally from something that might arrive in the mail, all clipped together in small piles of six or seven and hidden throughout the house.  Pictures of women’s faces, put together in groups that made some sort of sense to Kenneth, but not so much that he would have been able to explain if asked.  The pictures were his secret, and sitting there talking with the hermit, there was something comforting knowing that they were there, waiting for him to come home.  The idea of the pictures was a long way from the idea of life on his father’s berry farm, but wasn’t something that crossed Kenneth’s mind.  He wouldn’t have made any connection between the two.

The hermit, had he known about the pictures of the women, wouldn’t have been that surprised.  Comfort, he might have told Kenneth, always has had a curious way of manifesting itself in people.  There’s no explaining the things that comfort us.  Like trying to pinpoint where a raindrop came from.  Somewhere out there, he might have said, pointing out into the sky.  Comfort for people comes from somewhere out there.

“It’s easy to be lonely for childhood,” the hermit said.  “I think everyone’s lonely for something simple.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Maybe, maybe not.  I just can’t remember ever meeting someone lonely for more difficult times.”

I venture out into public, showered, but not shaved.  A modern hermit, I tell the other NaNoers.  That’s right!  I’m at the first NaNo meeting, where we’ve circled the tables for a round of introductions and story idea exchanges.  I tell them about The Hermit’s Door, withholding important details, of course.  (You never know where a plagiarist might be hiding!  One girl rubs her chin, eyeing my new beard.  Highly suspicious!)

We’re all wasting time instead of writing.  Food’s on the back table.  Just now, the room has gone silent.

I imagine everyone is trying there hardest to steal my story idea from my head.  I drink some more cream soda, hoping the gas will throw them off.