Missing, Presumed Dead

The crazy guy wandered the streets of the city, looking in bins and doorways and gutters, muttering all the while: “Where is it, where is it?” Outwardly respectable, his craziness was defined by his daily search which became familiar to shopkeepers, taxi drivers, police officers and down and outs – anybody who routinely inhabited the city streets recognised the crazy guy as crazy.

He stopped passers by and asked them, politely, and in a cultured voice: “Could you help me please? I’m looking for something I’ve lost.” Newcomers were taken in by him and got themselves involved in a fruitless conversation.

“What is it you’ve lost?” they would ask.

“I don’t know,” he would answer. “I only know I have lost it and would like it back.”

The newcomers would scratch their heads and ask a few more questions, all of which would be answered by, “I don’t know but…”, before they would realise they were dealing with a crazy guy and scarper pretty quickly.

The chef at the Bon Appetit, a greasepit of a restaurant, would often chat with the crazy guy. He was an amateur psychologist and wanted to get into the crazy guy’s mind. He fancied he could cure him.

“Tell me, you crazy guy,” he said to the crazy guy one Tuesday afternoon as he watched him rooting through the waste food bins in the alleyway at the back of the greasepit, “tell me what you’re looking for, day in, day out!”

“I don’t know,” said the crazy guy. “I just don’t know. Can you help me find it?”

“Tell me more,” said the chef, wiping his greasy hands on his greasy apron. He was a kindly man, in truth.

“There’s something missing,” said the crazy man,
“there’s something not here that should be here.
I feel there’s a gap, a hole, an absence of something important,
Something that hasn’t a name,
Something I might once have had, have owned,
Have possessed,
But lost along the way.
I try to see it
But there is no substance, no swirl in the mist,
No shimmer in the light as at the ocean’s edge
Far away across a hot summer’s sands.
No distant rustle, like a mouse in the undergrowth,
Like the sigh of an old man on an island of one,
Like the beat of a butterfly’s wings in what’s left of
The rain forest.
No scent borne on a breeze across the sea, redolent of
Exotic lands, of exotic people, of spicy foods.
No touch of the gentlest down upon the cheek of
A fair maiden.
No taste of the cleanness of spring water, barely more than
No taste at all
And yet still perceptible.
Although I cannot name it.
And I cannot rest.
It will not let me be.
It is as necessary as air and water and food and sight and sound.
And I can’t find it.
Can you help me find it, please?”

The chef invited him into the kitchen and gave him coffee and a cigarette.

“I can’t help you, you crazy guy,” he said. “But I know what you mean.”