The Shaper

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

The world had ceased to exist for James Kaiser Lohman. Deeply morose, his thoughts would not extend beyond the most narrow dimensions of self. He was hardly aware of the city around him. For an hour or more he had been wandering the streets, paying no attention to where he was going, scarcely paying attention to traffic when he crossed a street. Twice he had nearly been hit by cars. Even the swearing of those drivers had not penetrated his awareness.

Being hit by a car would have come almost as deliverance to Jimmy. “I’m dead already,” he had told himself the second time. “Might as well get it over with fast.” That had led to protracted thoughts of suicide… and a sense of relief, a feeling that—just maybe—he still had a little control over his life. Or whatever was left of it.

A car sped past him, the driver holding his horn down for more than a block, a Doppler scream that finally dragged Jimmy’s mind out of his somnambulistic trance. He blinked several times. The honking car was already out of sight. Jimmy thought that it must have been traveling at least sixty miles per hour.

In the middle of the city? Jimmy looked around. Remarkably, there wasn’t another moving vehicle in sight, in either direction. Nor were there any pedestrians visible, as far as he could see. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, the absence of both sorts of traffic was incredible. And the lack of parked cars along the street went beyond incredible. It was impossible, almost a violation of natural law.

“Where am I?” Jimmy asked himself softly. He couldn’t place the anonymous apartment buildings across the street. He turned. On his side of the thoroughfare there appeared to be some sort of park. A twelve-foot high hedge, dense but carefully pruned, bordered the sidewalk.

“I don’t remember ever seeing that,” Jimmy said.

The novelty held his attention. He stared. Then he started walking again, following the hedge, trying to see through it. But there were no gaps. Nothing was visible through the thick tangle of branches and small, shiny leaves. Near the next comer, though, there was an opening in the hedge. A wrought-iron gateway framed the beginning of a gravel path.

Jimmy took his hands out of his pockets for the first time in an hour and turned to the right, through the opening, and kept walking. There was high greenery on both sides of the path, equally tall and impenetrable. It’s a maze, a real honest-to-God maze, Jimmy realized after several minutes. From some chance memory, he decided that the shrubbery had to be yew. He recalled seeing a high yew maze in some old black-and-white movie, though he couldn’t put a name to the film, or associate specific actors with it.

After making several turns—and once retracing his steps after turning down a dead end in the maze—Jimmy stopped walking for a moment and simply looked around at the hedge on either side of him.

“How could I possibly have missed this for years?” he said, not the least abashed to be talking aloud to himself. There was certainly no one around to catch him at it. “I thought I knew all of the parks in town and I never even beard of this one.”

Jimmy inhaled deeply, held the breath for a long moment, then exhaled slowly, savoring the smell of the dense greenery. The scent was of nature, without the normal gagging blanket of urban pollution. There was no diesel smell of buses and trucks, no stench of garbage rotting in the open. Nor were there any of the cloying antiseptic scents of hospital and doctor’s office. Wherever the distraction had come from, it was precisely what Jimmy needed. He shook his head several times in wonder, then resumed his walk.

The lanes between the hedges were so narrow that he lost any awareness of which direction he was heading. He couldn’t make out anything of the sky but a narrow band right overhead, and the day was overcast, just enough that he couldn’t gauge direction by the Sun. Occasionally, even that narrow band of gray light disappeared. At intervals, tall, stately trees rose out of the hedge, their crowns totally blanking out the sky. Jimmy wasn’t certain what the trees were, perhaps oak. But on either side of each tree trunk, the bushes pressed close. He couldn’t see through to the next lane no matter how hard he tried. The hedge was too thick, the branches too stiff, the leaves too dense.

There were frequent turns in the maze. Twice more he had to backtrack after going down blind alleys. After twenty minutes, Jimmy started to marvel at the size of the park. In all of that time he hadn’t come to another exit. He also had not heard a single sound of traffic. For all practical purposes, the city around him might have ceased to exist.

After thirty minutes, Jimmy’s heart was beating more than a little faster than normal. His mind started to conjure atavistic fears from long-sup-pressed memories of childhood fantasies—dragons and ogres and witches, monsters under the bed and behind the closet door, creaking doors and things that went bump in the night. It was difficult enough for him to accept that he had somehow missed the existence of any park with a maze like this in a lifetime spent in the city. It was totally inconceivable that he could have missed a park as large as this one now appeared to be. There was only one park inside the city so large, and it was miles away—and it had never had a large, formal maze anywhere in its limits. The park commissioners and police would never have countenanced such a hazard to public safety.

Jimmy was breathing hard. He was tired—bone tired. That was one of the symptoms that had taken him to the doctor and, after days of examinations and tests, to the deadly diagnosis.

He stood motionless for several minutes, waiting for the return of some energy. He was almost ready to sink to the pea gravel and sit right where he was, maybe even lie down. But he reasoned, “This is a park so there must be benches around here somewhere.”

While he waited for some resurgence of vigor, Jimmy considered giving up and retracing his steps. There was certainly one way out of the hedge, the gap that he had entered through. But that exit was just as certainly a half hour’s walk from where he was, even if he could find his way back without taking too many wrong turns. There had to be another way out closer than that. Maybe as near as the next turn or branching. Finally, he took a deep breath and started walking again, more slowly now.

Ten minutes later the maze finally disgorged Jimmy into a clearing that was a half block in diameter. There were a few small pine trees in the clearing, but the primary feature of the open space was a small cottage that appeared to belong in some Elizabethan village, from its whitewash and exposed beam siding right up to the thickly thatched roof.

Jimmy stopped walking and stared.

“I know this is impossible,” he muttered, shaking his head.

A tiny curl of smoke rose from a wooden chimney at one end of the house. At first, Jimmy didn’t notice the old man sitting on a bench next to the cottage’s only visible door. The man stopped what he had been doing—whittling at a chunk of wood—and lifted his head.

“Hello, young man,” he said, his voice soft but carrying easily. “Come over and have a sit-down. You look exhausted.”

“I am exhausted,” Jimmy said without thinking. He started walking toward the bench but after just three steps he stopped as abruptly as if he had walked into a wall. The old man hadn’t opened his eyes when he “looked” at him, when he spoke.

“Is something wrong?” the old man asked mildly. His eyes still did not open.

“Everything’s wrong.” Jimmy took another cautious step. He paused again, took in a deep breath and let it out, and continued toward the bench. What difference can it make? he asked himself.

“Take a load off your bones.” The old man patted the bench next to him, using the hand that held the knife, when Jimmy got to within three or four steps of him.

Jimmy stopped again. The old man not only had not opened his eyes, he didn’t have eyes. The eyelids were deeply sunken. There could be no eyeballs under them.

“Sit down, young man, before you fall down,” the old man said, his voice firmer now.

“How did you know I was there?” Jimmy asked, standing directly in front of the whittler. “You couldn’t see me.”

“Couldn’t I?” There was a laugh in the voice now. The old man tilted his head back. For all the world, he seemed to be staring directly into Jimmy’s eyes.

“Blue eyes,” the old man said. “And far too many wrinkles in your face for one so young. Sit, sit.”

Too astonished to protest any further, Jimmy sat. He felt as if he were melting, flowing onto the bench without effort, without will. The wood was rough, deeply textured. Jimmy used both hands to raise himself and adjust his position a little, worried about getting a sliver in a delicate spot.

“Something to refresh you? Lemonade perhaps? I have a fresh pitcher of homemade.”

Jimmy nodded. “I could use something.”

“I don’t have any alcohol here, I’m afraid,” the old man said, as if he had read Jimmy’s thought that he could use something stronger than lemonade.

“Lemonade is fine,” Jimmy said. Shock kept him from reacting more intensely, shock and exhaustion.

“My name is Walter,” the old man said as he set his knife and the chunk of wood he had been whittling at on the bench next to him, on the side away from Jimmy.

“I’m Jimmy Lohman.”

Walter stood, in apparent slow motion, and put his hands to his hips. He stretched backward for a moment, then sighed. “Sometimes I sit too long without moving around,” he said. “The joints stiffen up then. I’ll be right back.” He was wearing baggy tweed trousers held up by suspenders. His shirt was gray, as baggy as the trousers.

Jimmy watched closely as Walter walked into the cottage. The old man didn’t move with the slightest hesitation or sign of handicap. He went around Jimmy’s outstretched legs and turned precisely into the doorway. When he came back out, not more than two minutes later, he was carrying a metal pitcher and two tall glasses on a small three-legged table. He set the table down, took the pitcher, and poured lemonade into both of the glasses. Ice cubes clattered around in the aluminum pitcher. The glasses frosted over as the drink was poured into them.

“It might be a little tart for your taste,” Walter warned. “The older I get, the less sugar I add to my mix.”

Jimmy took a cautious sip while Walter sat. The lemonade was very sour, almost painfully so, but it tasted remarkably good for that. “It’s fine,” Jimmy said when his mouth quit puckering.

Walter chuckled softly. He drank down half of his own drink in one long gulp, then set his glass down. He picked up his knife and the chunk of wood, then started whittling again.

“You look like a man with a world of troubles.” Walter didn’t look at Jimmy. He “stared” toward his whittling.

“Where is this place?” Jimmy asked, looking around. “I don’t see how I could possibly have missed this.”

“It’s just a place,” Walter said. “I’ll grant you, most people do miss it. You must have needed it powerfully to have wandered in.”

Jimmy stared at Walter, watching the old man’s expressionless face. “Will you tell me one thing, straight out?” Jimmy asked after a moment.

“If I can.”

“Have I already died? Is this some gateway to the afterlife?”

Walter didn’t laugh. Jimmy had more than half expected laughter, had almost hoped for it. The silence knotted his stomach until Walter spoke again.

“No, you’re not dead.”

“Then what is this place?”

Walter stopped carving and turned his face to Jimmy. “You’ll think me less than candid if I say merely that it is only my home but, in truth, it is no more than my home.”

“Then I guess I’ve gone crazy.” Jimmy took a long pull at his lemonade. Even the astringent taste didn’t sway his belief in that last statement. “The news tipped me over the edge. I couldn’t handle it.”

Walter sighed. “It’s always the same. People find this place because they need it, and then they can’t believe that it’s real.”

“How could I?” Jimmy challenged.

“That’s an answer I’ve not yet found. Will you tell me about yourself and what puts you in such a dismal mood?”

Jimmy took more than a minute to consider that request. “Why not?” he asked. “Whether I’m crazy or not, what can it hurt to talk?”

“You might even find some help in it,” Walter suggested when Jimmy paused.

“It’s simple enough. I’m dying,” Jimmy said. It hurt to say it out loud like that. He had been thinking it ever since the doctor told him what the tests had shown, but now, finally, he had actually said it. I’ve sealed my doom now, Jimmy thought, not seeing how irrational it was to think that saying the words guaranteed their truth.

“We’re all dying, from the moment we’re born,” Walter said. “What makes you feel your mortality so strongly?”

“Terminal cancer.” Jimmy let those two words hang. “Some of what the doctor said is a bit fuzzy. The shock was too much. I got hung up in the start and missed some of it, I think. A pair of inoperable tumors in my brain, growing. I was having headaches, and started to have a little trouble with my eyes. Doctors, tests, consultations, more tests. Today, the brain specialist said that I’ve got a month, six weeks, maybe two months left, at most. I start chemotherapy tomorrow, but the doctor wasn’t optimistic. There might be a temporary remission, he says. The tumor might stop growing for a while, or even shrink, but it will only be a temporary reprieve. The cancer is too far along to really hope for a complete cure, and he says it is extraordinarily aggressive, whatever that means. And he says that I’ll be in a great deal of pain before the end, and that I’ll almost certainly go blind first.”

“Did you expect him to wave a magic wand and make the disease go away?”

“Isn’t that what doctors are supposed to do? You get sick. The doctor makes you well.”

“Well, they don’t use leeches at the first sign of a fever anymore, perhaps, but doctors aren’t magicians. They can’t work miracles.”

“Miracles.” The world sounded like a curse the way that Jimmy said it.

“You’re looking for a miracle but you don’t believe in miracles,” Walter observed.

“Is that what you offer, miracles?”

“I offer neither miracles nor magic.”

“What do you offer?”

“Lemonade, a place to sit and rest, and a sympathetic ear.”

Jimmy held back a bitter reply. The anger surprised him, and how ready it was to leap out at the slightest excuse. He took another sip of lemonade and tried to control his emotions.

“I appreciate it,” he said at last. “The lemonade, the seat.” He gestured vaguely. “Perhaps I need the sympathetic ear most of all. I don’t know how to deal with this… this.” He shook his head. He couldn’t decide: this what?

“How old are you?” Walter asked.

“Twenty-seven. I won’t see twenty-eight unless somebody comes up with one of those miracles I don’t believe in. My birthday is six months away.”

Walter didn’t speak right away. He was busy at his carving again, making a series of very small cuts. Jimmy looked but couldn’t tell what the old man was trying to make. Maybe he had nothing special in mind. After perhaps five minutes, Walter spoke again.

“Are you married?”

“No.” Jimmy shook his head. “I’ve come close a couple of times, but there never seemed any rush. I thought, wait until you’re a little more secure, until you don’t have heavy money worries to sour it. Ha.”

“You have family, or someone special?”

“Family,” Jimmy allowed. “I dread telling them. Listening to them carry on will be even harder than hearing what the doctor told me. Someone special? Not now, not anymore. Never again.”

“Don’t pen yourself in with absolutes. Those thoughts can become as real as iron bars.”

“Sure, everybody’s going to want to fall over me. I have a disease! Maybe it’s not AIDS or leprosy or the plague, but it doesn’t make that much difference. I’m sick. I’m dying. I might as well ring a bell and yell ‘Unclean,’ every time someone gets close, the way lepers had to back in the Middle Ages.”

“You have a crystal ball? I used to, but threw it away. I couldn’t see any future in it.” Walter laughed at his own joke. Jimmy only snorted.

“I’ve heard that one before,” Jimmy said. “But some things you don’t need a crystal ball for.”

“And they tend to lie when you least expect it anyway,” Walter said evenly.

“What the hell are you?” Jimmy asked. “Who are you? You didn’t answer any questions.”

“I’m no more than what I appear to be.”

“I don’t even understand that much. You appear to be an old man who can see without eyes. You’ve got a primitive cottage in the middle of a strange maze in a large park that doesn’t exist in this city. But it does. Or I have gone crazy, the way I thought.”

“You haven’t gone crazy, if I’m any judge.”

“Are you?” Jimmy pounced quickly with that question.

“I judge no one and nothing,” Walter said.

“See, you’re still not giving me any straight answers. Why are you torturing me?”

“Am I?” Walter sighed. “Perhaps I am, in a way. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to add to your burdens.”

“I’ve told you about me. Won’t you tell me about you?”

Walter hesitated before he nodded. “Some folks used to call me a wizard, though I’ve never claimed that for myself. I do have a job or work, of sorts.” He chuckled, soft and short. “I offer a place to rest, such refreshment as I can, and an ear to those who need to talk about their troubles. When I can help, I do. This place”—he gestured around him—“is wherever it needs to be, wherever my modest services are required. I don’t suppose it really exists in the world. But then, perhaps it does. Who am I to judge? I never leave my garden here.”

“A wizard is just what I need now,” Jimmy said. “Someone to do some abracadabra and take the tumors out of my head.”

“I told you, others have called me wizard, now and then. I have never claimed to be one myself. I’m not. I don’t have any magic or miracles to offer you. I told you that before. And I don’t know if anyone has the magic you need.”

“No magic, no cure,” Jimmy said. “Just the death sentence the doctor gave me.”

“I said that I don’t know if anyone has the magic you need,” Walter said. “But I also don’t know that no one has it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Precisely what I said. I don’t know the answer, the solution. I don’t know if the magic exists. Most likely, it does not. But there is a small but finite chance that it does. And, if it does, I do know where you have to look for it.”

“Where?” Jimmy asked.

“Within yourself. I can’t give you a magic, a miracle. If one exists, it exists in here, and here.” Walter reached over and tapped Jimmy first on the head, and then on the chest. “It may exist. Or not. But if it does, you won’t find it unless you look, unless you give yourself a chance. And until you can accept the possibility of failure, you cannot succeed. The doctors say you are dying. You’ve gone from denial to anger, from ‘This can’t be happening to me,’ to ‘This shouldn’t be happening to me.’ That blinds you. That takes your eyes away.”

“Should I wear a tall, pointed hat and start chanting mumbo-jumbo? And what took your eyes away?”

Walter stared eyelessly until Jimmy looked down, away from him.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

“You don’t deserve what you’re doing to yourself. Me, I see well enough, even without eyes, as you have noticed.”

“What does it matter? I’m as good as dead already. No, not ‘as good as.’ Dead might be better. Then I wouldn’t have all of the suffering left to go through.”

“If you really believed that, you never would have found your way through my maze.”

Jimmy looked across the clearing, at the opening in the hedge. “The maze,” he said. “I almost forgot that. There is magic here. You as much as said so. You said that this place appears wherever it’s needed.”

“If you call that a magic, I won’t argue the term.”

“If you have that magic, then why can’t you cure me?”

“The magic is not mine. I have no magic of my own.”

“You said that people have called you a wizard. They must have had some reason.”

“I cannot answer for what reasons they might have thought they had. I have not lied to you, young man. I do not lie, ever. If there is magic to be found, you must find it within yourself. But you must do the seeking. If you refuse to look for it, it will never come calling.”

“If, if, if.” Jimmy shook his head and stood up. “I don’t know what to make of all this. I guess I’m not thinking straight. I haven’t been. Maybe you’re just a hallucination brought on by the tumors, or the pain pills, or something. If.…” He squeezed his eyes tightly shut for an instant in response to a sudden pain behind them. “In any case,” he said when the flare receded a little, “if you’re just a figment of my imagination, you’re still better than the nightmare the doctor laid on me. If you’re what you claim to be…”

Jimmy was unable to finish that. He had no idea what more to say.

Walter stood and stepped close to Jimmy. “I do not offer false hope to fight real fear. But neither do I offer despair.”

“Thanks for the lemonade… and everything. Now, if I can just find my way out of this maze, I’d better be going. Before I decide that I don’t want to leave at all.”

“Alas that I cannot offer to let you stay. Even that magic is denied me. But you cannot lose your way leaving my garden. You can only lose your way afterward.”

Jimmy turned toward the opening in the hedge. Walter put a hand on his arm.

“A second, please. I have no magic to give you, but you would make me feel better if you took this with you.” He took Jimmy’s hand and pressed the piece of wood he had been carving into it. “If nothing else, perhaps it will help you to believe that this garden was no dream.”

“Thank you, again.” Jimmy started to raise his hand to look at the carving but stopped when the old man, and the cottage, disappeared.

Jimmy looked around. There was no park, no maze. He was standing on the sidewalk, near the entrance to his apartment building. Traffic moved on the street, people moved on the sidewalk. And parked cars separated them.

A fit of shivering came over Jimmy despite the heat of the day. Finally, he looked down at his hand again. He still had the piece of wood. He lifted it closer, and saw himself. The eyeless old man had carved a perfect likeness.

Blue eyes looked up at Jimmy. The statue blinked, and one eye remained closed. Jimmy squeezed the wood until the statue seemed to inhale.

“So I’ll look for the magic myself,” Jimmy whispered. “What have I got left to lose?”

The statue’s eye opened again.

The prick of a needle in his arm caused Jimmy to flinch. The world started to go fuzzy around him. He widened his stance and spread his arms to improve his balance as vertigo attacked. Around him, the day darkened and the scene faded to black. He was not entirely unaccustomed to the disorientation, though while it lasted his mind could not gather a quorum for coherent thought. He tried to massage the spot on his left arm where he had felt the bite of a needle, but his right hand refused to obey commands. Then there was the sensation of weight being removed from his head, a lightness that made him feel as if he might float away.

His eyes watered. His mouth was dry. A groan managed to escape his cracking lips.

“Take it easy. You’ll feel better in a moment,” a distant voice said. Coming out of the limbo, it might have been the voice of God.

Slowly, Jimmy’s vision started to clear, and he saw a bookcase filled with books. Then he saw the doctor, the therapist, hovering over him. Jimmy blinked several times, then turned his head each way. The computer was on the table at his left, the virtual reality headset sitting next to it.

“Just take it easy, Jimmy,” Dr. Carlson—Dr. Walter Carlson—said. “Give the drugs a moment more to wear off. I gave you the stimulant to help.”

Jimmy closed his eyes again as real reality flooded back into his head. Narcoanalysis in Neverland.

“Why couldn’t you leave me there?” he asked in a whisper. Though he was unaware of them, tears started running freely down his face. “I could handle it there.”

“You’re doing fine, Jimmy. We’ll talk again this afternoon, after you’ve had a little time to rest.”

Dr. Carlson pushed a button that Jimmy could not see. Almost immediately, an orderly came in to push Jimmy’s wheelchair back to his room in the hospice. But as the chair started to roll through the doorway, Jimmy suddenly stuck a hand against the jamb, causing the orderly to stop.

Jimmy looked down into his other hand, the right hand, and stared at the head of the small wooden statue he was clutching.

“No, it did happen. It was real,” he whispered, so softly that not even the orderly heard the words.

He did not open the hand, but moved it up to his chest over his heart. He let go of the doorjamb so that he could resume his ride back to his room.

Dr. Walter Carlson, MD, Ph.D.—psychiatrist—closed the door. A moment later, Father Walter Carlson—priest—knelt behind his desk and crossed himself. In his left hand he held his rosary and a duplicate of the wooden statue that he had given Jimmy Lohman, the statue the young man held tight against his breast—a statue of St. Jude.

After a prayer and a moment of contemplative meditation, Father Walter looked at the statue. “I have to use all of the tools that have been given me,” he whispered.