March 12

I have been keeping a journal for three weeks now. Not because I have become a man of letters. I have become a man with nowhere else to direct his attention. Music stopped being something I made and started being something I used to get through bar gigs and forgotten piano lessons. Now the instrument sits in the corner of my apartment like a piece of furniture I forgot existed. The guitar case is still closed. The piano keys haven't been struck by anything but dust.

So I walk. That is what unemployed musicians do, apparently. We walk. We walk through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and pretend that aimlessness is a philosophy rather than a symptom.

I saw him on the third day of the walking. It was at Green-Wood Cemetery, though I had not meant to go there. I had meant to go nowhere in particular, which is to say I had meant to go nowhere at all. The cemetery wall is long and black and unremarkable. I was walking along the outside of it when I saw a man stop at a gate, turn, and enter. Something about the motion of it made me follow. Not curiosity exactly. More like the feeling you get when you hear a sound in another room and you need to know if something has broken.

He was tall, maybe sixty, wearing a coat that looked like it had belonged to someone else. He moved with a strange rhythm, not fast and not slow, but deliberate in a way that made every step look like a small decision. I kept him in my peripheral vision for a block, then two, until he stopped in front of a headstone, turned his back to the street, and knelt.

He knelt on the ground in front of a grave. Not sitting. Not resting. Kneeling. Both knees down in the cold earth, hands folded loosely at his sides. He stayed there for perhaps a minute. Maybe less. Then he stood up and walked away.

I waited. I told myself I was just curious. I wanted to see if he would kneel again. He did. At every grave. Every single one. A minute there, a minute on his knees, then moving to the next. I started keeping time with my watch. Forty seconds. Fifty-five. Sixty. Exactly sixty seconds every time. He did not touch the stones. He did not speak. He knelt and he moved on.

I should have walked away. But something about that minute made me feel like I was witnessing a practice so private that noticing it was an intrusion I couldn't escape.

March 24

He was at Prospect Cemetery again. Same coat. Same pace. Same kneeling. I began to notice things about him that I hadn't at first, the way you notice the ticks of a clock only after deciding the clock is broken.

He never knelt at the same grave twice. That seems obvious but it matters. He moved through the rows with a kind of systematic grace, as if every stone required individual attention and every stone required equal distance. He did not linger. One minute. No more. His face, when I saw it from behind or in passing, was the sort of face you cannot remember. Not because it was unremarkable but because it was arranged in a way that refused to stick. Like trying to hold water in your cupped hands.

I started walking ahead of him sometimes. Watching him from the end of a path. Watching him kneel. The repetition was hypnotic. One minute of stillness and then motion. One minute of something I could not name and then the next grave, the next minute, the next silence.

He passed me once on a narrow path between two rows of old stones. He looked at me then, really looked at me, and I felt a strange sensation, like being seen through. Not through my body, but through whatever I had been trying to pretend to be. He nodded, once, and continued walking. I did not nod back. I could not remember how to nod.

April 3

I have been following him for weeks now. This is not something I planned. I am not a planner. I followed him from Green-Wood to Prospect to Calvary to Brooklyn Memorial. He went to every cemetery. Every single one. And at every cemetery, he knelt.

I began to notice other things. People would pass him and react in ways that had nothing to do with the man himself. An old woman stopped on the path when he came near, touched her chest, and looked at the sky as if checking the weather. A young man with a stroller turned sharply and walked in the opposite direction. A dog began barking, ferociously, at nothing, and its owner pulled hard on the leash and said, "Come on, let's go," with a voice that wasn't directed at the dog at all.

These were small things. The sort of things you notice and then tell yourself you imagined. But they happened too often. Every time he passed a person, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not in a way you could describe to anyone without sounding foolish. But enough.

Mrs. Chen, who runs a small flower shop near the Prospect Cemetery entrance, told me once that she never puts fresh arrangements on the graves when she knows he is coming. "He kneels," she said, and then stopped, as if kneeling itself were not enough explanation. She looked at me when she said it, the way you look at someone who has already decided something about you without your permission.

April 15

Today I understood what he does. Or what I think he does. The word understanding feels wrong. This isn't something you understand. It's something you realize, like a sentence that finishes itself in your head without your agreeing to it.

I was sitting on a bench in front of the old chapel at Calvary. A man was sitting next to me. Old, maybe seventy, wearing a scarf though it was warm. He was breathing in a way that caught. Not the breathing of someone who is simply out of shape. The breathing of someone whose lungs are negotiating with gravity.

Elias came walking down the path. I saw him before the old man beside me did. I sat up straighter. I wanted to say something. I wanted to say, "He is coming." But I didn't say anything. I am not that kind of person. I don't say things like that.

The old man started to cough as Elias drew near. Not a cough. Something deeper. His hand went to his chest. He slumped forward, then sideways, onto the ground. I stood up. I didn't think. I moved. Someone called 911. Someone else fanned the old man's face. Someone said his name. I don't know his name. I know only that Elias was standing over him when the ambulance arrived, and he was kneeling, and it was one minute, and he was looking at me.

That is the thing I cannot shake. When the old man was on the ground, when the people were shouting and moving around him, Elias was still kneeling. He wasn't looking at the man dying on the ground. He was looking at me. His expression was not pity. It wasn't fear. It was something I have never been able to name, and I am writing this now and I still don't have a word for it. He knelt there until the ambulance loaded the stretcher. He knelt for exactly one minute. Then he stood and walked away.

I don't know if he causes it. I don't know if he witnesses it. I don't know anything except the fact that he was there, and the man was dying, and Elias had been approaching him before the first symptom appeared. I saw the old man's eyes move, just before Elias arrived. They moved toward the path, toward Elias's direction, and something in the face of that old man changed. Not pain. Recognition, maybe. Or anticipation.

April 28

It is snowing now. The kind of snow that doesn't announce itself but just appears, quietly, as if the sky has decided to forget everything it was holding. I walked past Green-Wood this morning because I couldn't sleep. The cemetery is white and still and the headstones look like teeth in a mouth that has forgotten how to speak.

I saw him at the far end of a path. I recognized the coat before I recognized him. The shape was right but the details were wrong. I was certain of his height and then it was uncertain. I was certain of his face and then the face was something I could not reach, like a word on the tip of your tongue that you can hear yourself forgetting.

I followed him. Or tried to. He turned a corner and I lost him for a moment, and when I found him again, he was already kneeling. One minute. Always one minute. But when I looked at him, really looked at him, I noticed that I could not describe his hands. Not the color, not the size. I knew he had hands. I knew they were folded at his sides when he knelt. But I could not see them in my mind. I could remember kneeling but not his hands while he did it.

May 5

This is what I am writing about. This is what the journal is for, because talking to anyone would require me to describe things I cannot describe, and talking to myself requires a page.

I saw him yesterday. Or maybe I didn't. I am uncertain about yesterday. I know I was walking. I know I was near Prospect. I know I saw a man in a coat that looked like it belonged to someone else, and he stopped, and he knelt, and when I tried to hold his face in my memory, it slid away.

I can remember the concept of Elias. I know his name. I know he kneels. I know he walks from cemetery to cemetery and he does this thing with graves that I cannot name. But I cannot remember what he looks like. I cannot remember the color of his hair. I cannot remember if his coat was brown or gray. I cannot remember the shape of his face.

I have written his name on this page thirty times today. Each time I write it, the name looks like a word in a language I am learning, not a word I have always known. Elias. Elias. Elias. The letters are the same. The sound is the same. But the person behind the letters is dissolving, like ink in water.

May 12

The snow is gone now. The cemeteries are green again. I go to them anyway. I walk the paths and I look for the coat and the tall frame and the motion that is neither fast nor slow but deliberate in a way that makes every step look like a small decision.

I saw him last week. Three times. Each time the same thing: I see him coming and I know him, and then I don't. I know his name is Elias. I know he kneels. I know something about him that I cannot express in words. But when he passes, the details fall away. His face becomes a blank space. His voice, which I have never heard, becomes silence.

Mrs. Chen saw me looking and said, "You stopped seeing him." I didn't ask what she meant. She didn't explain. She went back to arranging flowers.

I think Elias is a witness. I think he is a witness to something I cannot name. Not death exactly. Something before death. Something that exists in the space between the moment someone is still alive and the moment someone is not. He kneels in that space. He spends one minute there, no more, and then he moves on.

But now he is fading from me. I can remember the idea of him. I cannot remember the man. I don't know if this is memory failing. I don't know if this is what happens when something is truly beyond language. I don't know anything except that I write this journal to keep something I am losing, and the losing is happening faster than the writing.