There’s the fine line in front of Vill’s head, staring into him. He’s sitting at an all night diner, laughing about it, at the fine line that follows him around, out of reach like a shadow.
Vill lives in an apartment complex, under two goth girls who blast heavy metal music and hold all-night vampire parties. When they pass each other on the front steps, the goth girls give him a knowing smile; their cigarette-yellow teeth snarling beneath black lipstick. Vill doesn’t smile back, just tucks his newspaper deeper under his arm and walks to the bus stop. He whistles a little song to walk to. The whistle gains him friendly nods by other pedestrian walkers. Vill feels a thousand miles closer to the fine line during these morning walks to the bus stop.
Far, far away from his apartment complex, at the end of the East edge of the city, he finds the gargantuan Lake Michigan separating his native Illinois from that of the wooded Michigan towns nestled across the waters. It is there at the lakefront where he trudges out into the icy cold water on sweltering summer days, trying to get closer to that fine line that is drawn somewhere in the vast blue waves. He walks out into the water with slow unexacting steps, looking down at the dust cloud explosions of sand his heavy feet create, muddling up the wet-brown sand-crests with size ten footprints. The numbing cold water creeping up his legs makes him want to squeal and spasm like hitting the funny bone, except that feeling throughout his whole body. Little by little the numb becomes normal and accepted and okay. He thinks he’s closer to the fine line this way. He thinks.
As an overworked manager of a grocery store, Vill frequently forgets to feed his goldfish in his living room. The innocent orange creatures just prance about their glass cage, not even remembering who Vill is, not knowing the hand that feeds them. Yet they exist and swim around within the fine line. Sometimes he feels the fine line crawling into his mind in the high afternoon, when every single person surrounding him seems to be busy with their dog walking or office work or vacuuming. When Vill lounges in his hammock in the backyard, looking up at the clouds swoon over the wind, he sometimes looks down at his feet so far away from him and feels that they are not his own. He feels like he’s living in a ghost of himself, an universal spirit borrowing this odd human body to experience the wonderful suffering of this world. And he looks at the tiny brown birds that fling themselves off of power-lines, their suicide attempts foiled by a natural instinct to live, to fly, to be one with the air so high and even higher. But that only happens in the noontide afternoon, when the fiery sun has reached it’s zenith in the sky and makes all the shadows of buildings, trees, people, and ants cower into hiding, into themselves.
And the fine line happens when Vill gets kicked in the face with a soccer ball. One night he was playing soccer as a goal-tender at the net. Under the bright stadium lights of a park in the evening, Vill is not paying attention to the soccer game and instead stares at the softball game going on at the other end of the park. He is focused so much on the baseball field that the roar of the soccer game is just a dim hum to his inattentive ears. Imagining a baseball hitting someone on the head and possibly killing them freaks him out. He is daydreaming about all the blood and the ambulance and the sullen air of sadness it would all cause. The wind blows a cool, refreshing breeze on his sweaty neck. Then, he gets pounded in the face by a soccer ball. The soccer ball is an unexpected hard pounding on his cheek. And as he falls to the ground, in that split second, the baseball game, the soccer field, the clouds, the Lake, the universe all disappears from his knowledge and he is toeing the fine line. But then it all rushes back; he doesn’t know whether the throbbing of his face or the embarrassing blood in his cheeks burns more. Then the game comes rushing back like a typhoon and the people crowd around looking down at him. He needs to talk to the people and assure them he’s okay and that there’s nothing to worry about. He needs to feel the anxious feeling of everyone’s attention being directed at him but wishing only that everyone would get back to the game. And when everyone did get back into the game, he forgot about the softball game and went back to goal tending. He was quite far from the fine line after getting back into the game.
That fine line cannot be painted. When he paints, he tries so hard sometimes to paint that fine line. He starts with the deep logic of it, of mixing the right colors for the right mood, a green-blue calm balanced by a fiery red-orange. He knows there are fine lines between the boundaries of the colors, but these are not THE fine line itself. He eventually blends out the boundaries out of an exasperated surrender, and during these sloppy strokes, he is experiencing the fine line within his very own bloodstream.
The fine line between past and present, between right and wrong, between happy and sad. It pervades around us like invisible, fleeting fog so fine we can’t see the shapes from the lines.
