For your own safety, do not talk to the man on the corner of the street.
Do not listen to what he mutters, do not take what he offers, and whatever you do, do not make eye contact with him.
It all started a long while ago when I left my home a few days ago to go to work. I locked my door, made my way down the stairs and out of the building into the dirty air and constant honking of the street I lived on. I had not gone more than a few steps when I saw him- the blind man on the corner.
He had been there for as long as I can remember. And in the same clothes too- a tattered brown shirt, tattered black pants, a pair of old black sunglasses and a shawl that might have been white at one point in time but now was stained beyond recognition with all kinds of things. He had nothing of his own except the tattered clothes on his back and a small hat that he always kept in front of him. Nobody paid any attention to him, or even dropped a few coins into his hat.
But that was the strange part. He was not a beggar, at least not in the usual sense of the word. In all the time that i had seen him, he had never begged for money or tried to do anything to earn. He just… sat there next to the bus stop looking down and occasionally rocking back and forth. I wondered a few times why he didn’t just sit inside the shade of the bus stop, but the thought disappeared as fast as they appeared. He often mumbled and muttered, but only to himself. He was always in that same intersection between the roads of my street and the neighboring one. It didn’t matter if it was summer or winter, you could always find him there, even at the most unusual times. He never wore his hat on his head, and he never kept his head up or looked anywhere but down.
I was waiting for the bus lost in my own thoughts when I noticed him muttering and mumbling away as was his routine. I called out to him, “Kaka, why don’t you come and sit in the shade? It’s very hot outside, na?” He stopped rocking and mumbling, slowly raised his head and looked at me. When he did, I realized that it was the first time that I had seen his face in its entirety. It was unexpected to say the least. Not shocking or scary, but seeing his face gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach.
He slowly removed his glasses revealing blank eyes that shifted to look at me, and in the second that followed I felt as if he was staring into my soul despite the fact that he was blind. Just then, the honk of the bus brought me back to my senses. When I turned back to him, the man on the corner was back to looking down, mumbling and rocking back and forth. Given the impatient nature of the bus drivers that passed through, I didn’t have much time to think about what had just happened, so I just hopped on the bus and started going through my notes for a presentation I had that day. The day went without any problems at the office. Another day, another piece of my mind eaten away by parasitic boredom, another set of hours logged in for overtime in the hopes of a bonus that hovered over us like the fruits of Tantalus.
It was nearly one in the morning by the time I got back to my building, but luckily it was a Friday, so I had stopped on the way to get some food from a late night restaurant that I frequented. I saw Blind Kaka just sitting there in his usual spot and mumbling away. Despite my overtime I was in a good mood, so I decided to give him some of the food I had with me. I set the parcel beside him and said “Kaka, i brought some food for you.”
I had long forgotten what had happened in the morning and had dismissed it as an overreaction on my side, but when he looked at me, the uneasy feeling in my stomach surfaced once again.
Illuminated by the streetlight he was under, Kaka’s hollowed face looked even weirder than it had in the morning. It looked as if his face was a thin fleshy mask stretched and sewn over a skull with tufts of hair wherever faults in the mask had appeared. He did not utter a word, nor did he even consider the food I had placed beside him. He just stared at me without blinking. After what felt like an hour, he took out a small object wrapped in some wrinkled old paper from the torn pocket of his shirt, scribbled something on it with a stubby pencil he took from his pants pocket, and then held it up to me as if waiting for me to take it.
I took the tiny package from his hands and tried to read what it was under the dullish light of the streetlight. It was simple enough; a few words that I really couldn’t make out unless I had proper light. When I looked up to ask Kaka what all this meant, he was gone, and the world was quiet. There’s silence, and then there’s dead silence, but this silence was like a corpse that had rotted so thoroughly that only the imprints of where its bones once laid remained. No vehicle horns beeping, no generators humming, no birds chirping, no dogs barking, nothing. Not even the faintest noise from the slight breeze that was just blowing. I looked around me to see where he had vanished, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. In fact, it was as if all life had disappeared with him, and the earth was holding its breath in anticipation of what would happen next.
I walked up and down my street to try and find someone, but to no avail. The silence in the air was so loud, I felt like my own voice was being drowned by it. The same with the streets next to mine. I wanted to call my friend but the battery dropped from one to zero and switched off just as I opened the phone app. I swore at myself for not having the foresight to charge my phone a little more at the office.
Not knowing what else to do, I started walking home. Picking up the parcel I tried to give Kaka, I made my way to my apartment and sat at my table to have my sad dinner. Funnily enough, the electricity still worked so I plugged in my phone and waited. In the meantime, I decided to look at what Kaka handed me.
It was much easier to read the note under the table light than the streetlight outside. It just said: “Open at home ”. That being done, I started to unwrap the paper from around the object that was packed into it: a small dense cube like rock with some inscriptions on it that looked very very old. Before I could turn to the unwrapped paper, I pressed a panel built into the rock by accident. I heard a faint click and I felt a sharp pain in my palm. Blood started flowing from my hand as soon as I pulled the rock away from it, revealing a sharp blade that had pierced into my palm and through the back of my hand. I tried to stop the bleeding, but I couldn’t find anything in reach.
“My landlord will charge me extra if I stain the table” was the first thing that went through my mind. I laughed despite the pain, and that helped me a bit. With little choice, I grabbed the semi-dirty paper that the rock was in and mopped up the blood on the table. I thought the paper would fall to bits after absorbing that much blood, but it stayed intact. I washed my hands and wrapped bandages around it before collapsing in bed, tired from the office hours and my blood loss.
The next day I woke up and heard the birds chirping and the vehicle horns blaring away as usual. “Just a nightmare” I told myself, looking at my uninjured palm and barely recalling the previous night’s events through half shut eyes.
I was walking into my living room when I tripped over something hard. Looking down, I saw the same rock, now a dark maroon color. My heart started beating faster as I reached for it.
It was real. It was real, and it was covered in blood. My blood.
I panicked and checked the table to see if the bloodied paper was still there or not. It was, but it wasnt bloodied at all. In fact, it looked as if my blood was absorbed into the paper and condensed into a phrase written on it in a crude cursive. I grabbed it and rushed into the bedroom to get my glasses so that I could read what it said. I crossed my fingers and hoped that it was somehow just an elaborate prank being pulled on me by some tv show. I half-expected a camera crew to pop out from outside my window with a “GOTCHA!” sign and a check for a ridiculous amount of money to compensate for my troubles.
“ My freedom comes from your imprisonment. I am sorry that my curse is now yours. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
-a tired old man ”
The red of the font was almost black from the concentration of my blood in it. I read it and reread it maybe fifty times. Nothing else written on the paper on either side of it. There was no explanation or consolation, only an apology written in my blood that seemingly passed on a curse to me.
In my confusion and panic, I ran out of my apartment in my pajamas and ran down the stairs without bothering to lock the door. I knew I would find Blind Kaka at the corner like I had everyday for the longest time. He had to have answers. He had to. What else could I do? I knew nothing apart from that note about an exchange or transfer of some sorts. I had to find Kaka at any cost. I blindly rushed onto the street, realizing at the last second that I would probably be run over by a car or bus, and that’s when I noticed it.
The silence. Deep and profound. It was like the one I experienced yesterday, but it was more numbing and tranquil than that one. It was like the silence had accepted me as its own. The world was empty like last night, but this time it was more peaceful.
I went over to Blind Kaka’s spot next to the bus stop to see if he was there. As I approached it, I saw that the spot was empty. No Kaka, no information, no revelation. Even though I knew I wouldn’t find him there, I went ahead and looked around his spot hoping to find something. I saw a small chunk missing from the ground that looked like it could hold a small cube like the one in my apartment. So I went back, scavenged through the living room to find where I had thrown it, brought it back taking a lot of care to not stab myself again, and put it in the hole in the ground. Nothing.
Once again, I had hit a dead end. But hope was not fully lost. There was one thing that I had been putting off to prevent harm to myself, but then seemed as good a time as any to test it. I carefully removed the cube and put it panel side down, then pushed it down with my hand.
I heard the click once again, and I felt the blade stab through the back of my hand again. Winching in pain, I persevered and pressed down again. I heard another faint click and the blade retracted. The blood on the ground near the cube was gone. The side of the cube had popped up revealing a chit of very old paper inside. Unfolding it revealed another note from someone which, oddly enough, had a poem written on the inside. I knew it was not Kaka because his handwriting was different on the first paper, and I thought it was much older than Kaka himself because the paper looked and felt like old papyrus like the Egyptians used to make.
“ A marked palm first to serve you a reminder, Changed eyes next that see only the savior, Time binds your life here till you find another, Pass on the mark and fade away ”
The poem was not written in english, or any language i could recognise, but i could understand it clearly. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. What was going on? What did all of this mean? Before I could set off home to try and call someone, my hand started burning. Imagine the worst pain you can, and now multiply that by a thousand. That was the pain I experienced, and I’m not ashamed to say that I passed out from the pain.
When I came to, there was a strange symbol on my palm: a circle made with 2 arrows that looped into one another. The marked palm.
I ran back home and tried to burn the paper. Maybe that would free me from whatever horrible fate befell me. I don’t think Kaka had the mark on his palm, but then again i didn’t exactly examine him too closely. The paper remained intact and my panic only grew. If the poem was correct, my eyes would change next. I was going to become blind like Kaka till I could find someone to free me. For how long? I don’t think even Kaka himself would be able to tell me that. I don’t think he was the first one or even one of the earlier ones to be affected. The irony I could clearly see was that only time would tell how much time I had to wait.
I slept in my bed awaiting the eventual blindness that came, but it never did. Neither sleep, nor blindness. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what happened that day, and I can say a few things for sure. The blindness is not dark. You cannot see the people and they cannot see you. You can only see the next person to pass on the curse to and they are the only ones who can see you. What comes after I pass it? I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to know.
It has been a long time since that day. How long? I don’t know that either. My time passes in a constant state of dusk, so I do not know if it is day or night, much less how much time has passed. i said this was all a few days but a few decades could have passed by, maybe even a century or two. In fact, I don’t even know if humans exist anymore.
I have nothing left in my life except waiting. My clothes have tattered, my bones have weakened, I have not heard my voice in a long time, and yet I still live. Is it life? I don’t know, and so I wait until that inevitable day.
All i have left to say is this:
For your own safety, Do not talk to me.
Do not listen to what I mutter, do not take what I offer, and whatever you do, do not make eye contact with me.