The Giant
If you walk to the pier, you can see where the giant hung himself. His body dangles from a crane, and people who haven’t read the local paper or listened to the radio in the past few days generally don’t point him out, since from a distance, he looks like little more than an overstuffed fishing net, dangling, shape pressed hard against the sky.
When I told Tom, he was incredulous. We were outside the Calico Cafe, and he was on break after his first shift since he had come back into town.
“Get out,” he said. “He’s talking to the president or something, I saw it on the news, he’s going to DC on the twenty third.”
“That story is like six days old,” I said around a mouthful of bagel. “He killed himself the day before yesterday. It blew my mind, too. The whole city was like, in mourning. Most stuff was closed. You really didn’t know?” Tom shook his head slowly.
“I got back from Thailand and just slept for the whole day,” he said. “And then the next day I just sorta tuned out and watched Netflix, and I didn’t really check my phone today, and nobody said anything.” He shifted his weight to one foot. “ I don’t know how that makes me feel. Sad, I guess. Did he leave… like, did he write a note? Like… why did he do it?”
Most of the city, and in fact the world was asking what Tom wanted to know. The psychologists who had been lucky enough to talk to the giant said that he had displayed no symptoms of depression, but these things were always uncertain, and besides, who really knew what was going on in a brain that massive? The president gave a speech expressing how sorrowful he was that he was never able to “shake hands with a man greater than us in more ways than we could ever understand,” and many other world leaders said they felt the same.
Some people were glad he was gone, of course: a few religious fundamentalists, the majority of the online conspiracy theorists, and several of the more paranoid politicians. But most people at least outwardly expressed grief, or bewilderment.
Surely, we had not treated him poorly. We had presented him with all we had to offer: the greatest in food, literature, music, film, art, performance, religion, philosophy. We had taken him to Everest, the Amazon Rainforest, the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, the Painted Desert, the Bolivian Salt Flats, to the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, to the Shwedagon Pagoda, the Hagia Sophia, Saint Peter’s Basilica, to Borobudur, to the Kaaba, through the streets of Prague and Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, Rio de Janeiro. He had tasted, read, observed, considered, and never once seemed displeased, taking everything in with polite astonishment.
Tom and I went our separate ways after our conversation, he back to work and I to a commemorative concert in the park - a full orchestra, playing the pieces the giant had seemed to like best. Classical and jazz were by far his favorites, although he had an affinity for metal as well; the math in it appealed to him, he said. In all cases, the longer and more complex the piece, the better.
I got there late, waylaid by an acquaintance, a woman named Anabelle who I had met five years ago. She talked about teaching her new fifth grade class, and how the school let out early when the news about the giant’s death reached the public.
“There was a little girl who always used to ask if the giant would visit our school,” she said. “When she heard he was dead, I couldn’t get her to stop crying.” I said something sympathetic, mentioning I had to go soon in the same sentence, and we began a hug that turned into a handshake.
To my surprise, the orchestra hadn’t yet started when I reached the park. They were playing a recording of the music the giant had given the city, a piece of his own composition performed on an instrument he never named. The recording was now in the Library of Congress, though it didn’t have a title.
It was slow, multiple notes across multiple octaves played at once, droning on for minutes at a time before anything new happened. Occasionally, another sound would ripple through and under the piece, buried beneath the weight of the groaning chords.
Most people had their phones out. A few were recording, but even those had the set jaws and slack eyes of believed obligation. Here and there, conversations began. My stomach hurt, and I left before the piece was over.
It took me a long time to go to sleep that night, and when I woke up, my mind was full of the giant’s music, rising and falling, slow as the growth and rot of a tree.
A month passed, full of weeks that slid by only grudgingly. I was surprised one day that it was over, and I was by the pier, walking towards where the giant hung. The city didn’t want to disturb his body, and we all understood. He had not decayed so much as petrified. His skin was a hard, pale grey, and the crows that pecked at even his eyes only dulled their beaks and croaked impatiently. Policemen had stretched caution tape some two hundred feet around the base of the crane, heads down, avoiding looking at the soles of his feet above them.
I hadn’t seen him all month, and I felt slightly guilty. Not that he had any connection to me, but the way I had walked away from the concert before his music ended continued to bother me whenever I gave it the chance.
I stopped at the caution tape, and stood for a moment. Knowing that I was only delaying things, I pulled out my phone and checked the time, which I forgot as soon as I slid it back into my pocket.
I looked up. To see the giant from where I stood, I had to tilt my neck painfully, but I thought that it somehow wouldn’t be right to step back or to stop looking.
He was wearing the clothes the city had given him to travel to D.C in, feet shod in massive leather shoes and thick black socks, suit tailored to his bulk, stitched with what must have been hundreds of yards of thread. I imagined a tailor moving a needle in and out, over and over, no end in sight, no comprehension of the finished whole. Behind the giant, the sun smoldered through clouds.
I remembered the first time I saw the giant. It was on TV, after he had arrived but before anyone had spoken to him. He was standing on the beach just outside the city. He was nude, and stood motionless, but I remember thinking I had never seen anything so alive. The
I remembered a trick the giant had done in an interview. He had been speaking with a philosopher, and it was going poorly. He was answering her questions foolishly and casually, and came across as an ill-prepared, ignorant poser. When she asked if he was familiar with her work, he replied “no.” The philosopher bristled, clearly on the verge of calling off the interview when the giant continued “but give me a moment,” pulled out a paperback edition of her latest work, a volume of eight hundred pages or so, and opened the book to the first page using the tips of his thumb and forefinger. Less than a minute later, he turned to the second, then third, fourth. He did not seem to read the pages line by line so much as engulfing them, his eyes did not scan from left to right but pulsed gently, rhythmically, until, two minutes later, he gently pinched the book shut and returned it to his pocket. He blinked, nodded.
“I apologize for that,” he said. “It wasn’t professional of me. What would you like to discuss? I understand your theory of morality condemns ignorance as the root and worst of all evils. Perhaps we could start there.” The philosopher relaxed her shoulders slightly.
“Yes, perhaps we could.”
The interview ended in another 6 minutes. The giant spoke in short sentences that entirely avoided postulating, addressing the central points of the book immediately and directly. He did not seem interested, but neither was he dismissive. He stated abstract theories like memorized facts, never unsure of himself. When he did ask questions, they were only ever clarifying, never rhetorical. He lingered a moment when the discussion ended, waiting for a question from the philosopher that he did not receive, and then left, thanking her.
I put a hand to my neck, which burned with the strain of the angle I held it at. The clouds had unraveled and the sun cast the giant into sharp relief. I squinted up at him. Three crows sat on his head, shifting from one foot to another. Although I could see his face, I couldn’t comprehend his expression, couldn’t name what he would have been feeling. I don’t believe I heard the giant ever discuss how he was feeling, and I thought that maybe that was for the best, that even if he had told us, we wouldn’t have understood.
The sun made my eyes water, and I dropped my them from his face back down to his legs. I saw that his pants were too short, and his socks didn’t cover his ankles, leaving them exposed. Hard grey skin was cracked around the nub of his anklebone. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t feel I had the right.