The child asked, do the facade’s sing too? The faces of the buildings and the gutters too? Does the canvas spread as wide as the sirens that wail in the city night and to the broken smell of autumn in it’s glorious golden decay?

The old man, who was blind and deaf in one ear, leaned forward in his rocking chair towards the young boy. The world as symbols and objects had slowly faded from his mind. First the snow flakes of blindness, falling one by one, until a blizzard blurred the lines of what was this and what was that. Then the distinctions of sound, once as clear as black on white, became like clouds. Hues of gray bleeding into hues of gray; each indistinguishable from the next. He could not any longer cling to the idea that bound his youth. The theory of isolation. That each and every thing was isolated and separated from each other thing. As his senses progressively failed to recognize the physical world, he became increasingly aware of the spiritual aspect he had long neglected.

Every beautiful thing is a portal, he said, drawing a doorway in the air with his finger, breaking the banal structure that binds this world. That which is color and music and delight is not that which is in this world, but is light that seeps in from the cracks to the next. It is all the same light. When you can recognize this light, you will know the beauty of the whole world. It is all the same light.

And where is the next world? Asked the child, who had now stopped playing with his toy trucks and peered intently at the flaps of skin draped over the old man’s empty sockets.

The old man took a stick of charcoal and drew a circle on the ground.