22:10 - Part II - Asymmetrical Pieces

Chapter 9

After Eli passed his apartment again, he approached the base of a steep hill, the northern border of Aberystwyth. Due to the scenic view of the sea and surrounding countryside, the top of this hill is a tourist site, although with few tourists. Nevertheless, during the summer months, a funicular trolley ritually carries visitors up and down it. A modest coffee shop and some children's amusements sit atop, but most of the year, it is deserted except for the occasional hikers and locals out for an ambitious stroll.

However, at night the hill is radically transformed. Brightly beaming scattered spotlights with their bursts of radiant white illuminate the hillside; nevertheless, the gaps between them are sudden smears of utter and eerie darkness. The hill emerges slashed, spooky, and cursed during the witching hour—although not malicious or threatening. Instead, like black magic or a carnival's haunted house, its ghostly presence is somewhat spellbinding and tempting. Then, at the crack of dawn, the looming danse macabre vanishes again.

By the time Eli started up the hill on this morning, it was completely mundane. The only daunting aspect was the thick and thorny undergrowth covering it. A wide, looping pathway had been cut through the brush for tourists, but Eli grew tired of breaking his stride from the winding back and forth. He had scaled the hill hundreds of times by now and knew each meter intimately. As the months passed, Eli discovered small, almost unnoticeable openings among the bushes all the way to the top and had trained his feet to step in just the right little clearings to ascend easier and faster without getting caught and scraped by thorns. He adroitly sliced upward, while the traditional path twisted and turned under him. Given his obsession, Eli was probably the only person in the town who could do this.

When he reached the top of the hill, his trajectory realigned with the common trail as Aberystwyth and the Cardigan Bay fell low behind him. Eli's body rolled smoothly along now, almost as if in cruise control, while he kept to the narrow, well-worn dirt footway along the edge of the cliffs. He glanced over the ledge with its loose soil and down at the waves smashing on the rocks far below. Every few years, an excessively daring local or tourist plummeted to his or her death. Eli's steps, though, hugged the hillside sure and solid. Simply progressing in stride was enough to keep him focused. For the next forty-five minutes Eli traced northward from one valley to the next. The descents and inclines rose and fell so viciously in some places that he was forced to adroitly slide all the way to the bottom and then work his way back up, using both his hands and feet.

It was severe going, but there was not one inch of this morning's journey that did not give back more than it took. Wales was not easy for Eli, but it was magnificent.

One last time Eli pushed up an especially sheer area of the path until it bent into a smooth downward curl, and a small village named Baldwyn was nestled against the coast beneath him. Little more than a whistle-stop, Baldwyn sits on a long narrow slice of land between the sea and a vast peat bog expanding miles inland. If Aberystwyth is an enclave of Welsh culture, then Baldwyn is its nook.

Eli breezed down the backside of the cliff and leveled out onto the village beach. After a few awkward steps across the first meters of loose stones, he jogged toward the wide stretch of solidly compressed, smooth, gray sand that was now fully exposed by the low tide. In fact, the pitch of the beach was so slight and the lap of the waves so subtle that, if not for the fresh sea froth of the spent force of the North Atlantic, the point at which shore became ocean was all but imperceptible.

Eli picked up his pace, and the beach glided beneath him. Baldwyn, too, rolled by like a lazy train going in the opposite direction. Villages like this one live by their own clocks. So much so that many Baldwyn residents don't even notice the spring or autumn time change until the following Monday morning—nor does it even matter until Monday. Contentment needs no external standard, Greenwich mean time or otherwise.