Memories in Ebony

Bart Stamper

A ghost—gray hair and beard, loose-fitting black leather jacket, blue jeans and tennis shoes, dark glasses masking his eyes—glided next to me through a black granite void, through a solid rock abyss, behind a curtain of names white and floating like stoic stars etched in place, marking an unchanging midnight sky. Flanking me, the ghost mirrored my every step, stride for stride, the stars separating us as we walked side by side like familiar friends.

Occasionally, the spirit glanced over but I could not see him clearly, or beyond the dark tinted lenses which stopped all lookers from peering into his soul. He seemed pensive but unusually calm for such a potentially troubled trek, perhaps drawing strength from the quiet deadness that lay within the names. The spirit’s visage was neither bitter nor remorseful, but one of idle wonderment, and he looked at me as though he was comparing me to my former self—a once clean-shaven, agile man of nineteen years. He seemed to be pondering as we strolled. Pondering why I, unlike these thousands of others, had survived the calamity that had cast them in granite. It was a momentary ponderance without guilt or accusation. For all the guilt was gone now—a brief question mark in a story long searched out. A question that no longer demanded an answer, and no longer tortured me with its searing, white-hot flame.

We faced each other, this gray-headed spirit and I, to stare at a shared etching. Squatting down, we touched fingertips—he from within the wall, and me from without—and as our fingers met we drug them lightly down the emblazoned surface together, along one name at a time, slowly feeling each letter, absorbing its sacred beauty into our soul. It was more than remembrance—this touching. We were connecting. Talking soul to soul. Transcending death, and the erosion of time. Apologizing to a friend for the way things were. Wishing somehow to trade places—wishing to free him. Yet, knowing it could never be. Knowing that this favored star would remain permanently cast in the black granite sky, illuminated but unable to move from his appointed destiny, hung in place among thousands of other silent and stellar sentinels within the unyielding stone. His only hope of transport—the paper which I now flattened against his stone prison, and the gentle stroking of graphite across his name as I felt for the outline of each sacred letter, shading in every corner and line, forcing his identity to magically appear upon the smooth white paper. Alongside another beloved name on a shared sheet of pulp, next to another chiseled star, was as close as I could bring these lost and suspended friends together.

Once finished, the ghost rose and faced me, staring longingly and sadly into the ebony monolith, that lateral black scar carved into a hillside—and across a nation’s conscience. A light rain wet the leather notebook that protected the temporal, shadowy names of my friends from the falling moisture. Water dropped and beaded on the black leather jacket, and rolled across the curvature of the dark-tinted sunglasses that both the ghost and I wore, as it formed a sorrowful sheen over the starry sky of names between us.

Rising from the reflective wall which encapsulated us all in a solitary vision, the ghost and I turned away from each other, knowing that time would draw us together again as it always did—the ghost, my friends, and myself; trapped in different ways, yet sustained alike, by the beautiful, foreboding wall.

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