How do you know when it's the end of the world?
For me, it was that damn bell tolling off in the distance. It started one Sunday, late morning. I was in my living room, ostensibly watching a rerun in the background, but actually zoning out in "la la land," as a childhood acquaintance had so dubbed it long ago, and contemplating the beauty of the cultivated plants in my apartment, perfectly at ease and content. This was my heaven, this spot I'd built for myself. Smack in the middle and yet far away from the world: my oasis.
The bell started just before eleven, I think. In the aftermath, the early details get a little fuzzy, a little uncertain. I'm under the strong impression that feelings trump memory, because I can't stick a pin in the details, but what I am sure of is the certain difference between how I felt before the bells and after. Before I was swimming in a state of calm. I was blissful. I had the uneven tempo of an afternoon errand rippling at my outer reaches and beside and around that, me, in all my glory and freedom.
Maybe you don't know what it's like to be homeless. Hell, I guess I don't either, really. Not the real homeless for nasty, tethering weeks and months and years on end with not a single roof to shelter me. I'd talked with people about that, people who knew nothing of it and people who knew more and more of it, and I have always been lucky not to count myself among the most unfortunate. Still, I knew what it was to be without a home. Spiritually, metaphorically and literally, too. If you've never been without a home, maybe it's hard to imagine the overwhelming relief that having a space of one's own brings. Knowing that security. Decorating the space with your personality in small and overarching ways. Burrowing yourself down into the space and nestling, well and truly, knowing you won't have to oust yourself, that someone else won't oust you, come what may. Anyway, I was enjoying that, all of it, the whole feeling to the back of my brain and down into my elbows and lungs. It took a while to realize that the bell had been tolling for a while.
Bells are meant to call attention. Sometimes they're soft, especially the regular ones, so the forced-to-frequency-listeners are never tempted to at last burn down the bell's tower and with it that plaguing noise of the community. Even the soft ones, however, know that purpose of calling to arms. Of alerting a people to take notice, or gather, or pray. The bell may have been tolling across the distance for eight minutes, or three. It was an unusual sound to hear on a Sunday morning, and perhaps it went on sounding for ten minutes or more before I first heard it, well and truly, but I would be surprised to learn that that's the case. Despite emotions being what they are, even, I'd be surprised.
When I tuned in to the bell, I muted the television. It collapsed and reformed into rotating scenes of scenic places, the Apple background to life, but I paid it no mind. My attention was now half lost in my own mental musings, half distantly focused on a bell that had been repeating, I thought, for some time. It rang clearer with the T.V. off, with only the further rumblings of the freeway to compete. It sounded hollow and full both. It was beautiful, I thought, in its unusual arrival. How lovely to have a bell in the distance on a summer's morning. I wondered if there was a wedding, or a fair, or a parade, even, of such monumental score that the rights of an oft-unused and historic bell had been roped into the occasion. I thought it quaint and lovely that such a thing should happen here, in this city of glitz and steel and new dreams. It felt rounding to have a bit of the old world reminder.
It kept tolling. At about 11:02 it stopped for about twenty seconds, maybe only ten, and I recall the light floating pleasure I'd felt at the morning's event. I thought I'd reflect on the sound it had made for a moment, and had done so, being just at the point of turning back on the rerun and becoming once again dizzily, happily lost in my thoughts, when the bell picked up again. That same measured, unhurried pace of before. My finger hovered over the remote and, as the bell continued to toll, I withdrew my arm and then the rest of me back into the couch, and I listened. I looked through the gauzy curtain at the gray light outside. The bell sounded. The initial muffled ringing and then the beats of reverberation and thickening silence. One and two and three and four and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and three and four and five and six and four and five and six and I counted out and tried to wrap my mind, solidifying now from its cloudy, dreamy state, around why a bell would be tolling so long and, now, jaggedly in our millennium city on a Sunday morning.
I didn't have traditional television, I couldn't just "switch on the news," but when the bell kept tolling for a full seven additional minutes I opened up my laptop and browsed the news sources I trusted. I didn't see any big events. I checked the local news, same business. I kept on listening to the bell. I slipped on my flats and went out, still pajama-clad, to the balcony and looked off into the distance for a fire or a crowd or anything amiss, but there was just the tolling, the sound echoing out from the distance. My neighbors weren't home, I didn't think. In any case, no one else came out to their balcony.
[to be continued]