The city had gone perfectly perfect at last, after all the long decades of social reforms and civil campaigns. They had solved hunger, poverty, and disease; they had smoothed out social inequality and tidied up the smears of old pollution. The people never asked one another, “How are you?” because the answer was a constant: “I am happy.” And so Sir Evolution slipped in quietly and erased their unused tear ducts, a trait no longer relevant for social survival. The mayor used it as the city’s slogan for some years: “The people who outlived tears.”
But even happiness has its hidden curse: it breeds boredom. The youths had always been happy, and their parents had always been happy, and happiness was always the same. The youths wanted to play a game of sorrow, and so they chased down the old men, the only relics from an age of inconsistencies and dripping heartache, and did their best to make them cry. They jeered at the men and mocked them from street to street, calling out all the worst words they knew, hunching over in exaggerated age. The old men mostly grouched back at them; one even laughed. But none of them cried.
So the youths pushed further to break the old men. They spread gossip about the men through all the local pubs and housewives; they whizzed stones to sting the men’s exposed arms. And every time the smallest old man laughed at them good-naturedly or cheerfully whistled away. Soon they found themselves centering around him, though he would clearly be the hardest to hurt, perhaps from the youthful cruelty of attacking that which is most innocent, perhaps for no more reason than because he intrigued them with his triangle grin and ready jokes. They shadowed him from his flat to the dim Italian café where he played long nights of poker, always jeering and hissing and pulling at his clothes. They broke into his flat, stole his picture albums, and smashed the china figurines that lined his windows. But the old man never cried. Sometimes he sighed and splayed his fingers in a shrug. Often he tried to reason with the children, either firmly or gently rebuking them for their disrespect. He never quite lost his smile; even when he scolded them, it lingered in a dimple tucked caddy-corner to his chin.
The smartest boy began asking around town until he learned the name of the old man’s wife, Helena, buried for twelve years now. They pressed with their clumsy thumbs on that wound as well, and the old man grew silent, his regular chuckles finally stilled, but it was a solemn sweetness rather than a rushing pain that claimed him. “My Helena,” he murmured, “the finest of all my memories.” And the dimple went on taunting the youths from the side of his face, begging to be put out. More than one boy felt a dark thought squeeze its fingers tight around his mind then: the dimple must be extinguished, and the bruises that must first come, must come.
You will be relieved to know that they never had to beat their kind old friend; he spared them the trouble and cried all on his own one day. They found him sitting on the sidewalk in front of his flat, dribbling away for no cause they could perceive. They whooped and rushed to burst the intimacy of his grief, smearing their crude fingers in the rivulets on his cheeks so they could feel each tear’s coolness and lick off its salt. “What was it, then?” a stick-shaped girl asked him. “What made you cry?”
“You did,” he said, and they smiled in cold triumph. “You’re so foolish, and who could ever teach you? How could you ever learn? You don’t know the reverence of emotion. I was waiting for you to come to me today and walk together, and I thought about all your faces and your future— how small must it be! And I thought, perhaps joy itself will die with me.”
“He’s cracked! He’s crying because he’s cracked!” a little one giggled. “We’re the happy people, not you. We never cry.”
The old man nodded and wept afresh at her words. “My poor children, where will you find your wisdom if you never know your grief? Someday you will learn— but no, you won’t. You might have learned, once, that after the blackest years have all passed, life herself for the first time comes to you—“
But who can listen to so much vague moralizing at once? The kids, of course, couldn’t, so they shouted silly rhymes over him and made a new game of painting his tears in lines down from their own eyes.
Thus the trend was decided: the youths tripped about town after that with water clumsily splashed on their cheeks and eyelashes. Sneaking a quick squirt out from the eyedropper when no one was looking was the easy part; faking tragedy when they wished to laugh at their own cleverness was much harder. They turned to the old man for dramatic inspiration; now that they knew his weak spot, they paraded their idiocy in front of him daily and earned back all the heartache they could hope for. Now it was only too easy to make him leak: they could mock one another in front of him, giggle endlessly at a joke that no one had told, or just thrash a dance to songs of bleating chaos. Then they would study the shapes his face made and imitate their director.
It was cool to cry, cool to stretch their faces long and sigh at intervals. They wrote dark poetry and turned the color of their shirts down.
Always the old man was alongside them, even when they did not seek him out to pinch his heart between their black fingernails. He followed them, though he cried as much as smiled, giving them bits of wisdom and buttered bread.
And then the old man died.
Old men tend to die, you know, and the games died too without their favorite star. He died as suddenly as he had started to cry— promptly and without reason, on a hot Thursday afternoon.
And the children, the poor children! Oh, his old poker friends were just fine, but what could tearless teenagers possibly wear to a funeral? They felt— but they knew not what they felt. They tried carrying on with their elaborate tragedies, but the shows weren’t any fun now. They tried joking instead, but no one ever laughed. They stared at one another out of dehydrated eyes. They threw rocks against brick walls and listened to them clatter to the ground. They smiled when the forecasters predicted another blue sky and the news anchor said employment was definitely up this year.
If the old man had been here to finish this story, he would have said that after many weeks of denial the youths would have wailed with anguish for their dearest friend. Some of them would have stopped eating for a while; others would nightmare themselves into insomnia. The taste would fade from all they had once loved, and their hopes would have crumbled like the clods of dirt in front of his headstone.
Then, somewhere past the harsh turning point, one by one they would awaken. Perhaps the youngest would have skipped out first and caught a dragonfly; then a girl might have hummed a lusty concerto or two. Every stop along the city would still remind them of their loss, but each moment they would walk the taut, wild freedom of choosing either mourning or rejoicing, grief or gratitude. They would cup their hands gently around the fragile leaves of someone else’s sorrow, and they would choose— oh, choose!— to relish every flick of evening light, to laugh so well and often that their laughter formed its own language. And by the time they were grandparents, they might have lived to see Sir Evolution return the tears he stole back to the newest babies’ eyes.
None of this would ever happen, though, because the old man has died.
They remembered him in an uneasy way, but they didn’t fall apart. They just found something new after a little while. They danced. They swapped trading cards. They laughed at the kid in too-formal clothes. Nothing ever touched down deep. Nothing ever hurt too much.
And the story ends with their grandchildren again, this time born into the world without an agonizing shriek, sometimes staring blankly at the hospital walls and sometimes not bothering to open their tiny desert eyes. The grandparents leaned forward into the tension, waiting for the doctors to check while the new mothers cried, “Are they stillborn? Can you tell if they’re alive?”
Backyard Apricots 