There stands a seven-story, 619-foot pagoda in Reading, Pennsylvania. This “pagoda,”—I write in scare quotes because it somehow only bears structural resemblance to a pagoda—was commissioned in 1906 and completed in 1908. William A. Witman, Sr., the commissioner, originally intended it as a luxury resort, but a pagoda is a curious contraption for turn-of-the-century Americans to use as a luxury resort. One would think those Teddys and Cecils might attempt to modernize whomever they found in such a place. The furor of racial tension in the 1940s brought many to demand the structure’s demolition, but it survived and was improved in the 1950s. Pagodas, of Asian origin—they are especially associated with Japan—are an awe to look at. They ascend towards the sky in layers that seem to presume some vanishing point. Upon crossing the threshold of a pagoda, one wonders who else passed through that membrane with a higher purpose to reach the final floor. The Pagoda stationed in Reading, Pennsylvania bears about a quarter of the enthralling and humbling feeling that emerges from similar ancient structures standing in their home country. Its gutters are lined by an obtrusive mustard-yellow and offset by an even-more mismatched brick-red rooftop that seems to masquerade as a firehouse or rural school from the 1930s. Except for the bell encased in its unappetizing walls, it is remarkable only for its ability to exist out of place.
The bell—I’ve visited the incarcerated bell and its pagoda—sits on the fifth floor. It was cast in a Buddhist temple south of Tokyo before it was called Tokyo. (The characters for the current capital city, Tokyo, give the meaning “eastern” and “capital,” thus it was not in fact Tokyo until 1868 when the Emperor regained power and moved there.) The bell is unremarkable in appearance, but not nearly at the disappointing level of the pagoda. What is memorable is its inscription foretelling the end of the world. Having only studied Japanese for a minimal number of years, I could not understand the prophecy engraved in its aging corpus. The description awkwardly standing before it in the mostly empty room simply stated that it foretold the end of the world at a time in the future. I wondered if they would change it to the past when that date came and went.
The Chinese numerical writing system that the Japanese language has borrowed is simple enough to decipher regardless of the century. Looking for a chance to deploy my language skills, I decided to examine the bell’s engraving to see whether any numerals had been forgotten. Of course, nothing was left off, and the scholars of Reading had done their due-diligence to assure that this prediction of man’s doomsday had not been forgotten. Humans, or at least those of the last six thousand years have a propensity to forecast dramatic and total endings. And, we onlookers have a dependency to at least mark down those dates on our mental calendar whether or not we believe the local soothsayer. I was satisfied that the world would not end on account of this bell’s and those Buddhists’ conjecture after my close examination of this fine, three hundred year old bell.
Exiting the room—just the same as entering it—left me with no impression. I navigated the tight and steep stairs that exhaled a decrepit wooden smell as I descended from the fifth floor. The inner walls were drab, too, pitiable. As I returned to the room that contained, or rather was contiguous to, the enthralling portal that I imagined many had stepped through before, I felt little more than the breeze that was fooled into entering this pagoda. I passed through the sad ingress of the boring pagoda to return to my hotel for the night. The cavernous entryway on the ground floor left a tingle of magnificence on my palette, but the room with that sitting bell continued to feel empty. I had never been further from Japan and so close to its symbols.
Some weeks later, I had returned to my apartment in Berkeley. The unimpressive Pagoda had left my mind and occupied no more than a few forgotten pictures on my phone’s storage that would probably be deleted when I needed a few more megabytes of space for a new app, or some extra tunes, or more meaningful pictures.
The campus that I study on is remarkable—contrary to the Pagoda in Reading, Pennsylvania. There are a number of buildings built before the Second World War. One was apparently built in 1886, but keycard doors, modern offices and iMacs made their way inside. Other structures bear features of the Roman’s architectural style: tall marble (or marble-looking) pillars, and impressive Latin lettering. A select few do not live outside current architectural styles, but take names outside of the present, like “Martin Luther King Jr Student Union.” The conglomeration of styles, centuries, and origins makes it an intriguing place to navigate each day.
My apartment faces east into the hills, and aside from a few power lines, is a relatively tranquil location to watch the hillside grate the evening fog into thin slices that slide into the eastern valleys. This roomy apartment overlooks a cross walk with faded and cracked stripes that connect the four corners of the intersection. The streetlights radiate a mostly white color, neither the new helio-something-or-other blue lights nor the piss yellow lights of Los Angeles. The crosswalk buttons emit a short and high pitched beeping noise when pressed. At night, the cars that drive by reflect the color of the traffic lights if their car’s paint job is lustrous enough. Sometimes cars drive by that resemble the traffic lights metal shell—rusty and scratchy looking. While the colors and noises of this intersection and my apartment’s walls change often, I’ve grown used to the constant noise and shifting. It doesn’t bother me like when I moved in; the intersection no longer colors my mood.
When I ached the worst, I would stare at the intersection and the hills until the fog rolled in, the sun sank, and the traffic signals lit up my shattered face. That slow change brought me a respite. I used to imagine how the hills’ colors would change if a hydrogen bomb ended the world by falling on the city across the bay—my world, I mean. The reaction to a bombed-out San Francisco might produce the end of the world anyways. Another window faces north, but if I were facing out to the East, an angle of sun from the West could find its way through the Northern window to my back.
If it were in the early evening, I might see the fog again—it would cheer me up for a moment—before the heat wave of that powerful weapon evaporated the fog. For that time of the day, the hills would appear bright and unsoiled. The light from the death-giving device provides my vision clarity and range. I can see the trees lining the hiking trails as they light up like candles, quickly blacken and are shucked aside with the force of the blast. The lively colored houses on the hillside tremble in anticipation of the shockwave and firestorm. Everything is bright, and a bit yellow-orange, like the piss colored lights of Los Angeles. Even the whitish-blue lights of my intersection suddenly exclaim Los Angeles. Each traffic light is not green, yellow, or red, but the color of Los Angeles.
Several drivers exit their car to point their noses towards the flash of the city. I stare at their glowing faces. In anticipation of their mortality, the color has left several of theirs, and mine too. The hills only glow as unfocused embers in the background. The intersection has little light besides the alarmed drivers’ headlights and interior lights that usually expose the clothes thrown in the back, a cluttering of stray food wrappers, and the general dust sitting on the dash. I wish the color would come back, but the blast is about to sweep me away, pass through the west end of my apartment to propel me out my window and vaporize my body before I’ve touched the ground.
There were several nights like that, in which I passively imagined destruction as I observed traffic pass by. More often than not I would carry these dreams from my swiveling office chair to my warm bed. My body was usually set on convection so the warm blood would circulate quickly and burn my feet up. It’s impossible to sleep with hot, fidgety feet. They do their best to slip out from under my sheets and duvet to breathe the still air in my room. It’s no use anyway. But here, as a twelve o’clock bedtime turned to a two-in-the-morning ache to fall asleep, I dreamt of a bomb blast, again and again.
Recently, things have been different. The 28th of March isn’t so unbearable, and even on a Monday too. I usually cycle to the library on Mondays because I’m one of the lucky ones without class on Monday. I’ve been studying newspapers published in Los Angeles during the 1930s. The newspapers are housed in long curled microfilm rolls. Microfilm looks a lot like movie film, but much thicker and sturdier so it can slide under glass and be magnified. Looking at microfilm requires the user to slowly unspool the film into an empty spool at the other side of the viewing glass. Page by page, the film, clamped between two panels of glass, reaches equilibrium between the two spools, before shifting to the previously empty spool. It's a tedious but rewarding process that leaves my eyes liquid-like, and my face pale and droopy.
The library contains a vast vaulted ceiling, spreading emptiness above; the color of the atmosphere seems to drain the life from the students.
My bike is locked in a shed beside the parking lot to our apartment complex. Its “partly cloudy” with winds “light and variable” as my Weather Channel app usually says. Like every morning, my headphones are blaring while I walk to the shed. The pavement transitions from white concrete to black asphalt speckled with a handicap sign and several apartment number markings. I walk this same path to the shed each day, mostly concerned with what songs will fill my head on the way to school. The asphalt slides under my sleepy feet and worn out shoes. Jamming my hands into my pocket, the keys’ sharp edges scrape my hands a bit more than I expected. Although our landlord refers to this little DIY shed as the “bike shed,” I refer to it as the “spider shed.” The carcasses and abandoned webs of spiders are everywhere in this wooden thing—thankfully they’re mostly daddy long legs. Today, there is one hanging from the ceiling right in front of where I lock my bike. I shiver a bit and let out a yelp of annoyance and disgust. Hopefully no one heard that embarrassing noise. Crouching below its range I fiddle with my lock, shove it in my backpack left unzipped, and scuttle out. Its nonsensical how much people are afraid of spiders despite how harmless they are. Maybe the sensation of eight legs scraping across your body, pretending to be hair, is what gets people.
The door slams behind me, leaving behind any revelations of tarantulas and daddy long legs until later that afternoon. My hands instinctively glide to my right pant leg to cuff them before straddling the road bike. Only once have my pant legs been caught in the chain or free wheel, but once or twice is enough for someone to change a habit, isn’t it? I struggle to find balance as my bike was stuck in a high gear from last night’s ride home. Fifth, fourth, third gear feels apt right now. My pant leg is cuffed, head phones are anchored to my ear drums, phone in the back pocket to avoid fraying the head phones wires, wallet stationed behind my left buttock, keys crunched in my right pocket.
Everything is in its right place, even if the Pagoda in Reading isn’t.
My normal commute on Mondays takes me through the heart of campus where students offer you their club’s libations and paper handouts. On a sunny day you can find any number of professional “fraternities,” special interest groups ranging from ethnic to beer brewing, and the more scarce religious and even scarcer Republican clubs. It’s usually a nuisance to drag myself through the proud gauntlet of these self-described “leaders” handing out notifications about their club’s game night or fourth meeting. Even while walking my bike, with sunglasses shading my loathsome gaze, and headphones mostly disconnecting me from my fellow student’s world, someone always tries to break through. It’s just easier to ignore with those shields from the world. Occasionally an older man stands near these trinket college club booths with his own materials to peddle. He waits for students after the parallel rows of booths open up into a four-way intersection of traffic coming from North, South, East and West. A manhole with the college’s seal and motto sinks below him, sort of anchoring him. A gate that opens up to deeper realms of the campus flanks him. He wears sunglasses in the same way I do—to distort, rearrange, and provide a barrier. The curled and grey beard probably assists in that pursuit. The skin attached to his body seems to crinkle more than his voice presumes when barking at a passerby. He yells “Yashua! Elohanu!”—and tries to float papers into curious or unnerved college students. His shirt, like his flier, contains enough Hebrew to confuse most people into wondering whether English or Hebrew is the primary language of communication on the flier.
Yashua guy, as I refer to him, always portends the end of the world. Today he sat in my path like a boulder radiating sound. To get close seemed to invite physical assault. Even so, with a smirk stuck to my face, I passed close by and grabbed his latest creation about the end of the world. These forecasters, portenders, and conjecturers are categorically wrong for their predictive abilities, but if someone lives long enough and guesses enough, they’ll probably find truth somewhere along the way. I shoved the 8.5” by 11” piece of paper, checkered by words, dates, and calculations, into my coat’s breast pocket and continued on. I was mystified to have a forecast for the world’s end this close to my heart.
The crinkled paper in my breast pocket had been flattened enough by my regular movements to quit emitting noise and slowly drip from my consciousness. Daylights savings, having begun recently, made my commute home warm and sweaty. The sky to the West did not glow with the cosmic rays bending and contorting through the atmosphere. The sun was in fact still high enough into the sky to bequeath a characteristic yellow-orange hue of late afternoon to the cities below. After arriving to my apartment’s bedroom, I noticed the color of the hanging sun reverberating off of the hills into my private realm.
I deposited my backpack on my floor. Despite the absence of my backpack, my back still held warmth like a phantom limb. The mundane day had somehow exhausted me in every way. I thought that if I should find something to laugh at. My laptop’s top-heavy lid resisted before springing up and slouching back. The internet was regurgitation, as it usually is.
My room suddenly seemed dimmer. The world looked black and white despite the oranges and yellows assaulting the back of my neck as I leaned in my rotating chair. I recalled Yashua guy’s notice and thought the delusions and fearful remonstrance of someone else might cheer me up.
The flier of warnings was crushed and folded so that a few rips appeared along crease lines. It fit best in my wastepaper basket. Still, folding up the prophecy in that way seemed somehow irreverent. I found the edges folded last and delicately lifted them to reverse its crumpling and avoid more ripping. I was not concerned enough to flatten the paper on the edge of my desk by scraping it end to end on the corner—my feet were neatly propped upon my windowsill’s edge at an angle that allowed me to comfortably lean back. Again the Hebrew and English jumped into my eyes. There were mixtures of capitalized text that seemed to be yelling at me, run-on sentences, and a nastily slim line-height that pressed the paragraphs together. Yashua guy sure had no understanding of aesthetically pleasing presentation.
The flier cited the New Testament and Old Testament in some perversion of the MLA format. Citations included both parentheses with multiple bible verses and brackets with more bible verses. I read the flier without concern for linearity, and recursively, jumping backwards to begin again when something more pressing crept into my thoughts.
I neglected to read the title of the flier at first. It read in all caps:
THE SKY WILL FILL WITH FIRE AND THE BELL WILL TOLL.”
I giggled and my feet slipped from their resting position. Wouldn’t a soothsayer expand the range of his prediction to, say a month, to avoid loss of credibility? But if someone changes their rules of being wrong, they never need to bear that mistake for more than a few moments. Moons and oceans would take different names, mathematical proofs and planetary calculations would find their missing variable until they fit the prophecy of the soothsayer’s slaughtered goat, or more likely his store-bought lamb chops. Yashua guy did seem to be sure of himself in this instance though. Don't they always?
Reading onwards and backwards in recursion and discursion, my eyes fell on a nauseatingly curious excerpt. His flier noted that other cultures in separate times and places had predicted this finale, too. Of course the Mayans and Aztecs made an appearance—a sky burial always interested me. The Phoenicians, Atlantans, Romans, Visigoths, Mongols, Siberians, Aleutians, Zulu, Ancient Egyptians, and more took their place among the citations. (Again, with flexible rules, answers are always within grasp). What distorted my vision like lightning streaking across my cornea was the citation of a Japanese prophecy—a Buddhist sect that staked their claim on a Japanese bell that now was interred in Reading, Pennsylvania atop the seven-story pagoda.
It was a simple footnote typed in normal capitalization. This time he wasn’t yelling at his reader.
How many others could be in this town that had been to that forgettable pagoda? He couldn’t have gone. The specificity ate me up with a pure and untamed fear. I felt the need to spin around and discover the magnificent bad guy in my doorway. I felt that someone, some being, had reached inside my mind to place that footnote. It was a fortuitous coincidence for the growth of Yashua guy’s following. Maybe I was his next follower because of that footnote—whether he had bent the rules to arrive at that answer or not.
I dropped my feet to the floor as if all the blood had fled my body and the toes needed to scrounge it up before sinking into the carpet. I dragged them across the floor, swiveling in my suddenly plastic-smelling chair. All of my senses tingled and irked with sensitivity. My sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste opened up as each received magnified pings. The windowsill that my feet had peacefully rested on moments earlier felt dirty and wet, while, beneath my now drooped skull and pressed palms, dust latched onto my body. My arms quivered and rattled against my rib cage.
Discursion replaced linearity in every sense. I thought I had overcome my physiological reactions. The lightning that had streaked across my glassy eyes towards my pupil flickered in each direction and produced patches of darkness. My sight vanished in whole spots. The veins in my feet pulsed and throbbed with distressing warmth. Sweat gathered in pockets on my upper back, but there seemed to be no blood or warmth in my forearms. The four walls of the room lost their corners and edges. The neat geometry of squares of paper on my desk bulged and squeezed into ovals and bled onto the carpet.
Through kaleidoscopic and disconnected retina, I gathered that traffic below my apartment had stopped. The humans in their cars trained their eyes on something in the distance that could be seen from the intersection. Westward. My teeth might as well have been ground down to the nerves.
The hills glowed a deathly red like a gasoline fire. The pores populating my face felt like they were trying to expel every impurity with a combination of scissors and rubbing alcohol. It felt like penance for my face to burn with such furor. The screen covering my window disintegrated as the plastic frame bounced, melted, and stuck to the glass window. The traffic lights flickered out while their rusted facades turned darker shades of forgetfulness.
The warmth on the back of my neck became comfortable despite the liquid evaporating so swiftly. The bones in my arms and legs became rubbery and I dropped from my nearly crouched position on the windowsill. The space between my knuckles seemed to elongate and trail off like the vanishing point of that damned pagoda.
I yelled at Yashua guy with a dying voice. The shame of that dream poured onto me from the melting ceiling. The beauty in the Pagoda in Reading was finally clear. I heard the bell ring and crack with prophecy for the first and last time.