Not Fade Away

Years pass like a moving landscape outside a train or car window across your field of vision. Lately, I’ve inklings that my life is slowly disappearing like this scenery rolling by. Dissolving imperceptibly into a speck of dust floating, hanging suspended in mid-air, glowing in the light of endless darkness. My communion with the world has diminished, dwindling down to a few friends I never see anymore. We try to stay connected, but not really. Phone conversations and emails are the extent of it. Many have died along the way; others moved far away. It’s not easy to keep in touch. Don’t wait around too long for a tomb with a view on a party line telephone. Speaking with the dead on an Ouija board without a yes or no, maybe, hello and goodbye. The line for life’s gusto wraps around the corner and down the street to spark conversations with myself about the living. Yet, there are many still waiting to live. People are waiting for love. Waiting for a chance. People who need people are the neediest people; people who eat people are the hungriest people in the world. People who disappear completely forever without a trace. I feel like I’m the invisible man.

As a kid, I saw a movie called The Incredible Shrinking Man. It left an indelible impression on my psyche. Made in the late-1950s, it holds up nicely today as an example of angst and surreal messaging that addresses our place in the known universe. Where do we go with this knowledge when the big picture ends and the credits roll? This question has always bothered. Is there anything like a grand finale for entry into everlasting life in the Cosmos Club, or do we simply vanish?

Leaving no trace in the afterlife, memories are erased. Some gesture that proclaims, Hey, I was here. In the original film, a man’s exposed to insecticide spray at his local park. A few days later, he’s boating with his wife when he’s enveloped by a mysterious cloud of fog hovering just above the ocean's surface. He’s relaxing on his boat, floating carefree at sea with his wife. She goes below deck to grab cold beers. Meanwhile, he waits on deck as the vessel passes through the thick puffy cloud; it leaves an iridescent residue all over his body. As the weeks pass after the insecticide/fog exposures, he slowly shrinks. His clothes no longer fit. They hung loosely, ill-fitting, way too big, as he grew smaller.

Eventually, he becomes so tiny he must live in a dollhouse on the living room floor. His wife goes out shopping one day and absentmindedly forgets about locking out their pet cat, who, of course, attacks the mini-man inside the dollhouse. The cat chases him, knocking him into the basement, where he must try to survive with nothing but a needle, sleeping inside a matchbox. It’s not easy being a normal-sized person; imagine being so small that you eventually disappear, unseen by the naked eye. You could wave hello from a microscope slide. Lightly floating across the universe, barely visible with a telescope. There’s no comparison to anything when you get that small. Let’s get small, small enough to vanish like a cheap magic trick. The shrinking man’s attacked by a spider while trying to steal a crumb of cheese from a mousetrap. The water heater bursts, flooding the basement floor and creating a miniature tsunami, washing the little man to the floor drain as he clings to a No. 2 pencil. At the end of the movie, he’s so minuscule he fits through the basement window screen and walks into oblivion. Here is his final dialogue before he fades away:

“I was continuing to shrink, to become… what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close: the infinitesimal and the infinite. Suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet: like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if I could grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And at that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!”

I can relate to his plight, except for the God parts. I can feel his pain of existence. In the end, like him, everything that we fret over, the worries about nothing and everything  don’t matter anymore. Be happy with your life today because it’s gone tomorrow.