Most Wonderful Time: Part III
Scrooge, The Treadmill, Churchill Square, A Final Assigned Reading from a Ghost
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“Darkness is Cheap”
To get to the home of Ebenezer Scrooge, we had to push aside the branches of an enormous, drooping shrub, which I suspected had been allowed to grow wild for the very purpose of hiding what lay beyond. We crossed a long, brick-in yard, strewn with discarded debris from the neighbouring wine merchant’s cellars—broken barrels and bottles and rusted scraps of metal whose original purpose was impossible to guess. The ghost led me inside, the front door emitting an awful groaning sound, and we ascended a stairwell lit only by a candle that had suddenly appeared in the ghost’s hand.
At the top of the stairs we turned left and quickly entered a bedroom, at the far end of which was a small fireplace, paved around the sides with tiles that illustrated various scenes from the Bible—Cain and Abel, Pharoah's daughters, Abraham, the Apostles sailing out to sea in little boats, and so on. The fire was still burning quite brightly, otherwise those Bible scenes would have been impossible for any ordinary eye to discern. As the ghost explained, Scrooge himself would never have allowed such a gloriously merry fire to burn. He preferred his house cold and dark. As Dickens explained in the original text, “Darkness is cheap.”
“You can sit there,” said the ghost, “and warm your hands.”
“OK,” I said, and acquiesced, notwithstanding my suspicion about his intentions. The London cold had been nipping at me for what seemed like hours now, and my hands had gone entirely numb. The chair next to the fire was quite comfortable, perhaps the only piece of furniture in the room designed to make life easier for the sole inhabitant. Everything else looked, well, Dickensian. The bed belonged in a museum—the mattress meagre, the springs exposed like the ribs of a cadaver picked clean by vultures. The wardrobe was home, surely, to bats. The ceiling, when I turned my head up to examine it, wore a pattern of flickering shadows that was eerily like a spider’s web.
The ghost, meanwhile, approached the side of the bed, poked it with the end of his shoe, and then decided to perch on the edge. He sighed. The abruptness with which our speedy travels around London had come to a halt made me uneasy. Why were we just sitting there? What, exactly, were we waiting for?
The silence sat on us, heavy as a hearse, and after several minutes had passed I regretted that I hadn’t asked the ghost any questions. A question would have seemed the natural and proper act for the circumstances, but as the silence bore down on us with ever greater menace, the prospect of any utterance from my mouth frightened me. Even my own breath disturbed me. The only presence in that room that seemed to have permission to speak was the fire, and it did so in increasingly hushed tones, as the flames ceased to dance and settled down and smouldered.
Finally, the ghost stood up again.
“In exactly five minutes, Scrooge will enter this house,” he announced. “The fire will be at a low point, lower than this—the merry blaze lit by the cleaning maid an hour ago will be almost fully extinguished by the passing of the lonely minutes, and Scrooge will think of storing up a reproach to eventually unleash on her, on account of her wastefulness. Just look at the huge pile of ashes in the hearth! But he won’t say anything, and Dickens won’t bother to mention even these private thoughts. Dickens, as you might know, is in a hurry to finish this text and get it to the publisher in good time so it will hit the streets of London before Christmas.”
I nodded, but more out of impatience than agreement. I pointed out to him that this was the second time he had taken us to a scene that was adjacent to the main action of the book. What was he up to?
“Am I to understand that we’re going to wait a full five minutes for Scrooge to enter?” I asked. “And how do you know Scrooge’s private thoughts beyond what is revealed in the text?”
The ghost smiled. A smile was an expression that did not suit his face. It contorted the muscles in a way that looked rather arduous for him. It would have been more accurate to call the smile a reluctant smirk.
“I belong to a realm of spirits in possession of whatever knowledge that must be conveyed to the ones we visit,” he replied.
“And what if I were to just walk out?” I asked, rising to my feet and walking briskly toward the door.
In reply, the ghost merely laughed. It was such a grating laugh, more like a rasping cough, that I turned to make sure he wasn’t going to spit blood and collapse on the floor or some other such frightful scene that seemed entirely appropriate to that time and place, and just as I was turning, I clumsily walked into a wall. This provoked a fresh wave of mirth in the ghost, who literally doubled over and slapped his knees. I wasn’t seriously hurt—more embarrassed than anything—and I shouted at him.
“You’re a real bastard!” I thundered. “If all of the scenes you’re showing me are actually for my own good, why don’t you show a little more concern for my wellbeing?”
The ghost shot to his feet. As ever, the speed and agility of that frail old body astounded me. We were standing head to head as if about to have a scrap.
“Your wellbeing? I had you sitting in a chair warming your hands by the fire! It was you that chose to exert your wilful independence. See where that got you? Sit down again, you fool.”
I reluctantly did as I was told. It had been such a long time since I had blundered into this waking nightmare—the London of 1843—that it seemed to me now like a trap. What if I never again returned to my own place and time? As the ghost retook his perch on the edge of that rickety bed, I felt acutely aggrieved. The ghost resumed his usual antics—lecturing, bordering on hectoring—and there was really no choice but to listen, to conform to his rules, otherwise, I’d be stuck in 1843 forever, or at least, that’s what I suspected. The ghost was asking me some fairly straightforward questions, to which my answers were also straightforward. Did I know what Scrooge did for a living? No, I did not, I answered. Did I know what his business, Scrooge and Marley, was all about? No, no, I replied impatiently. I had no idea.
“Well let us consider the text,” said the ghost. “Scrooge’s business is said by Dickens to contain a counting house. This is where the bookkeeping was done, and in the case of Scrooge’s business, the bookkeeping is part of a larger function that also happens to concern money. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchitt, isn’t keeping the accounts of any external enterprises—oh, no! The business is all money, through and through.”
It seemed obvious to me that the ghost would have been quite happy to go on talking for a very long time, the lecture being his preferred mode of communication, and yet we were expecting Scrooge himself any minute, weren’t we? I asked him what exactly we were going to do when the man himself entered his room and found us there. We would disrupt the scene that was so critical to the larger book. Wouldn’t this be an instance of the “grandfather paradox,” or something similar? Weren’t we at risk of ruining, well… the entire plot of A Christmas Carol?
“You might think that,” said the ghost, “except that’s not how we spirits operate. Moreover, I have perfect timing, and we’re going to be out of here in a jiffy. The information I chiefly want to impart here is that Scrooge generates his wealth through the buying and selling of debt. He is a regular visitor to London’s Royal Exchange, where savvy traders make a fortune through commodities and financial instruments. In other words, my reluctant pupil, Scrooge is the equivalent of what you might call a Wall Street trader. Does this look like the home of a Wall Street trader?”
He made a huge gesture with his arm, unfurling it like the wing of a giant fruit bat and waving it in a slow, ceremonial sweeping motion, and just as I was saying the obvious thing—no, of course that room didn’t look like a fitting place for a Wall Street trader!—there was a blinding flash, the room vanished, and we had been transported somewhere else entirely.
The ghost laughed again. “That’s one of my favourite tricks,” he said. “Behold, we’re at Scrooge and Marley’s right now… You get the chance to stand here, and if you’re perfectly quiet—as quiet as a foot stool—you’ll get to listen in on one of the most famous scenes of English literature uninterrupted.”
So it was. I can’t tell you exactly where we were standing, because somehow we were able to watch the scene from up close and yet never once did we interfere with it and get in anyone’s way. Scrooge was in his counting house, sitting at his Napoleon bureau, upon which several impressive ledger books were unfolded, full of numbers that could only have been discerned at a very close proximity, because they had been inked by Cratchitt, the clerk, with instructions from Scrooge to be as economical as possible and fill every square inch with numbers no bigger than fleas.
In walked two portly gentlemen, each one having left his hat at the neighbouring room, that is to say, where Cratchitt worked by the heat of one coal. The gentlemen carried a good number of papers among them and were at that very moment looking at Scrooge with diplomatic expectation.
“Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge or Mr. Marley?” said the taller of the two gentlemen.
“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” said Scrooge. He shifted himself in his chair, stiffening his spine and pulling his chin up, almost a little defiantly.
What more can I say about Scrooge? He was not at all like any of the amusing film or television caricatures. His appearance provided no amusement whatsoever. His face was the most severe, dour and mirthless that I’ve ever seen. There was something quite sinister about the way he spoke, as if each word he permitted to leave his lips was followed by a breath of regret. To speak seemed to disgust him. These gentlemen were wasting his time, and even though it was clear he had never before met them in his life, he conveyed an attitude of absolute loathing for the fact of their very existence.
The conversation continued awkwardly—painfully, even. The two gentlemen were raising funds for charity, namely, for the poor and destitute. They wanted to bring the most impoverished of London a little bit of Christian cheer, and they wanted a donation from Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” replied the taller of the gentlemen.
“And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still, I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
“Both very busy, sir.”
I leaned a little closer to the ghost, who was standing off to my left, watching the scene just as intently as I was. I was compelled to interrupt. I knew how the rest would unfold: the two gentlemen would be dismissed from Scrooge’s counting house without even a penny for their efforts. Someone needed to explain to me the significance of the word “Treadmill,” falling from Scrooge’s lips with no further illuminating detail.
“Sorry, ghost, but I have no idea what is meant by the word ‘Treadmill.’”
“Ah!” said the ghost. “This is encouraging. You’re showing a bit of agency, at last. Let’s go see the infamous Treadmill!”
With no disruption to the scene still playing out in front of us, the ghost made another of his grand, swooping gestures with his arm. The nervous speech of the taller gentleman was still filling my ears when the blinding flash extinguished the room. In an instant we had arrived at another indoor scene, but in a space far colder and noisier. I heard a terrible grinding racket and, when at last my vision had returned, I saw a huge wooden wheel set into a wide recess in a stone wall. The wheel was turning and turning, powered by a row of men who were forced to keep their feet dancing up and down madly. There were two uniformed guards pacing up and down in front of the wheel, shouting merciless admonishments.
“Final hour of work, you scum!” said one. “Don’t let up, you scum!”
Each guard held a bayonet, and the more fierce looking one was constantly thrusting his toward the backs of the prisoners. It was evident that at one point he had actually used the blade because one of the men in the middle of the wheel was cut badly. There was a jagged hole in his tunic and the dark stain in the fabric was from the still-oozing blood.
“What awful place is this?” I asked.
“This is Brixton Prison,” said the ghost. “This is the Treadmill, invented by William Cubitt, who was later knighted by Queen Victoria. There were, as of last year, 109 jails across the United Kingdom with Treadmills in use. There are also Treadmills in the United States and in Britain’s colonies. This one is particularly impressive. Beneath us, underground, there is a complex system of gears and cogs and millstones employed in the task of grinding corn. These prisoners are earning their gruel.”
“Someone is going to get seriously hurt,” I said.
“It happens every day,” said the ghost. “A man will fall off. Gets his skull smashed in. Or drops dead of a heart attack. It’s merciless, the Treadmill. At Durham Prison, there’s an average of one fatality per week.”
The way he imparted this knowledge, impassively and without a trace of sentiment, scared me. He spoke as if the contents of his speech were simply matters of fact, and that I was a naïf for being shocked and dismayed. I turned away from the Treadmill. Even so, the panting and groaning of the men couldn’t be silenced. I begged the ghost to take me away. Enough of 1843, I declared. I wanted to go back to my own time, to 1998. I wasn’t sure what lessons I was supposed to bring with me… That 1998 was more humane than 1843? Sure, sure, I was convinced of it. I needed no further persuading.
Into the darkness we went, the ghost still lecturing me. “Remember, all this suffering is quite alright with Scrooge. This is the way he wants it to be—the Treadmill, the prisons, the workhouses, the Poor Law. You won’t find a more pro-establishment man than Scrooge.”
He said a good deal more than this, and yet my memory of this part of my adventure is hazy, because for several minutes I was in an indeterminate, interstitial space in which I saw and felt nothing… I was as if completely disembodied, and I wondered if, in fact, I was dead—that somehow the effort to travel forward in time had failed and had left me between worlds.
When finally my eyes opened, I was back in my bed in my apartment on 105th Street, Edmonton. I had no time to appreciate the familiarity of my environment because there was a new ghost in front of me—quite unlike either of the previous two. He was no more than forty years old, perhaps even younger. He wore a black mock turtleneck sweater of the kind fancied by Steve Jobs who had the previous year returned to the helm of the company Apple. This ghost looked quite affable, and the only thing rather disturbing about the situation was the knowledge that he had evidently been sitting there for a while watching me. He had grabbed the chair from my desk for this purpose.
“Have you been waiting for me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“Do you ghosts plan out these adventures among yourselves?” I asked.
“It’s a little like that, yes… A passing of the baton from one to the next.”
“Which ghost are you? The Ghost of Christmas Present?”
“No,” said the ghost. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Future.”
“Oh… What year is it?”
“It’s still 1998,” replied the ghost. “We’ll be going to the future in a moment. I hope you have three dollars and twenty-five cents handy.”
“Why?”
“That’s the bus fare. We’re going to downtown Edmonton.”
No spectacular tricks, no flashes of light, no somersaults in space—none of that. The Ghost of Christmas Future simply walked with me down the stairs to 105th Street, where a gentle snow was starting to accumulate, and he accompanied me to the bus stop. Yet it soon became clear that in the mere act of leaving my apartment we had entered the future. The average size of motorized vehicles had suddenly increased, and a large number of them looked rather like tanks, ready for war. The hoods of the trucks were higher than my shoulders. Another thing I noticed is that most of the passersby held contraptions that had not existed in 1998. Some of them had quite sophisticated objects resembling pipes that they put between their lips and pulled upon hungrily. Others had rectangular slabs of plastic in their hands—evidently phones. I saw one teenage girl at the bus stop poking at her phone and not looking up even once until forced to do so by the arrival of the #9.
I asked the ghost what was so special about 2022? Apart from the supersizing of the vehicles, the new smoking contraptions, and the ubiquitous wireless phones, everything else seemed pretty much the same as in 1998. The ghost, sitting next to me on the very last row of seats on the bus, told me to be patient. The bus trundled onward. Until we had reached the edge of the valley, the city looked quite similar to the one I knew, and yet as soon as the land veered away from us, I caught sight of a strikingly tall, grey tower on the other side of the river, toward which we traveled with accelerating speed, crossing a brand new bridge with sensuous white arches, like the wings of a dove. Once we were in the heart of downtown, the number of evidently homeless people outside surpassed by large measure the number I was used to in 1998, and still the bus kept trundling along, past an enormous silver structure that the ghost told me was a new hockey arena. I asked him when our journey would be coming to an end and he again told me to be patient.
“The endless bus journey,” I said. “Is this Purgatory?”
The ghost said nothing, and I told myself to stop being so impolite, and also to not play so recklessly with spiritual references about which, frankly, I knew next to nothing, especially in this new realm where, it seemed, I had very little power compared to that of the ghost and his predecessors. As I was thinking, I was retreating into my own mind and paying very little attention to the northern part of that street, and so it was rather a shock when the ghost pulled the familiar yellow cord, which rang the bell, and the bus suddenly stopped, and we got off on the corner opposite my old high school.
The high school had been almost entirely rebuilt. I recognized nothing except for the old brick walls of the theatre at the north end. Here, too, there were more homeless people. A thin fellow stumbled out of the bus shelter where I remembered we used to gather when school let out at the end of the day. The dishevelled man teetered unsteadily on his feet as if about to fall over, and then recovered his footing by gripping the concrete sides of a garbage bin, which he then abruptly vomited into. He produced a steady but lumpy trickle the colour of milky coffee. The ghost told me to stop staring. It was time to start walking, he said. And so I followed him. I followed him on a southbound journey, away from the school, back the way we had come. Again I had rather unruly thoughts about the ghost’s intentions. How pointless all this seemed. He was showing me my old school and a few new buildings and the ubiquitous homeless problem—big deal! Compared to what I’d seen in the year 392 or 1843, it was all quite unremarkable. Still we kept on walking, settling into a dutiful rhythm, and I thought of making a joke about forced marches, but I thought better of it. This will make a good story at some point, I said to myself, because this was the lens I applied to most experiences, whether unpleasant or the opposite. I’d taken to heart the notion from Graham Greene that in every writer there must be a “splinter of ice,” and there was nothing in the world that could not be mined for some subsequent narrative purpose, and it did not yet occur to me that anything that happened might have any other lasting bearing on the state of my wellbeing or, for that matter, my soul. When we came in sight of the huge hockey arena, I was more careful to examine my surroundings, and I saw a small huddle of tents outside a homeless shelter, and I saw about a dozen people in a variety of different poses. Two of them were looking closely at what appeared to be a pipe, which was being scraped out meticulously with some sharp object. Another was examining the chain on a bicycle. There was a woman sprawled out, legs splayed wide, partially propped up against the wall of an adjacent restaurant, which had its metal security screen securely fastened. I remembered the ghost’s earlier warning about staring and I wrenched my eyes away, back to the enormous arena, which resembled an alien spaceship that had just landed, and then I wrenched my eyes another few degrees toward the downtown towers, and that’s where I fixed them for a considerable span of time.
Some day, I said to myself, I want to be able to describe all this, and yet I must find new ways of writing, because the short, workmanlike sentences and one- to four-sentence paragraphs and frequent interruptions of dialogue that are constitutive of the work I produce now are too much like television without having the same impressive effects. There’s no point in writing like that. I’ve got to try harder. The whole point is to stretch the span of attention as far as it can go, as far as mine is being forced to go right now.
There we were on the periphery of Churchill Square. There was the familiar glass pyramid of City Hall and on the opposite end there was another building, totally unfamiliar to me. It resembled nothing quite so much as a military vehicle, hulking over the square with an air of disdainful menace. There were more homeless people crossing the square and huddled at the periphery. In fact, the overall impression I had of Edmonton that day was that most regular residents had stowed themselves away in their homes, and that it was only the homeless that were using the public spaces, and were it not for the company of the ghost, I would have been a little scared. I thrust my hands into my pockets and made a hard fist around the two twenty-dollar bills that I found there. I didn’t want to find myself back in 1998 deprived of my remaining reserves of cash before the January 1 pay day.
We walked toward the hulking, military style building, then stopped outside what appeared to be a small station for light rail transit. The ghost asked me to turn around and look back toward City Hall. Was anything missing? I did as I was told and swivelled my eyes this way and that, even squinting a little to show him how hard I was working to try and answer his question, but honestly, I couldn’t think of what he could possibly be referring to. Of all the ghosts, this one frustrated me the most. The Ghost of Christmas Future should have had more impressive sights to show me than this miserable, paved-over square which served only as a gathering place for the poorest and most deprived humans of the entire capital region.
“I give up,” I said.
“Think,” said the ghost. “What day is it?”
“Christmas Day?”
“Yes.”
“So….?”
I still couldn’t glean his meaning and I told him to stop playing games. I was exhausted from my time traveling. I’d scarcely had two minutes of sleep between 392 and 1843 and 2022, and for all I knew, back in my own year, it could have been eleven o’clock at night, even if here in 2022 the greying of the sky suggested that dusk was only just now creeping toward the city. Initially I was thinking these mutinous thoughts in private, but then I realized they had emerged from my mouth and that I sound like a self-pitying imbecile. I had to suddenly stop myself. There was a man with only one leg who was at that very moment wheeling himself toward us. The suffering that was etched into that man’s face—how deep it was. And here was I complaining about lack of sleep? Lord, save a poor wretch like me who never stopped to think how good he had it.
Suddenly the man in the wheelchair addressed me directly. My fear came back immediately, even though he was in a chair and had only one leg. How ridiculous! I thought he was going to ask for money and I had just forty dollars and the thought of coughing up even a dollar coin was painful to me.
But he didn’t ask for money.
“The tree, the lovely tree, it isn’t there this year—those fools didn’t give us one,” he said, and shook his head sadly.
He wheeled himself around so that he was now facing the same direction as I was. We were all looking at City Hall.
I finally understood what the ghost had been asking me. The Christmas Tree was gone. Every year it had stood there, stretching up to almost half the height of that pyramid, adorned with lights—the lights that, had they been on at that moment, would have been revealing themselves in the gathering dusk like stars in the night sky. I asked the man in the wheelchair why there was no Christmas Tree and he reached down in his lap for a newspaper and handed it over to me. “Read!” he said. The newspaper was beaten up and smelled of dampness. I was able to dispatch the news story quite quickly. There was a quote attributed to the executive director of the Downtown Business Association that explained the tree’s disappearance succinctly. “We’ve been doing the tree on the square for many, many years and we found it’s a great draw. Families go to the tree, and then they leave. And it’s not really a great way to activate our businesses, to draw people in to shop and dine and see what downtown actually has to offer.”
The ghost and the man in the wheelchair were watching me closely and I hurried to the end of the story to see if there were any other important details. There was nothing much except for several quotes from people on either side of the debate: those who agreed with the decision and those who were very disappointed by it.
“So no tree at all?” I said.
“Nope,” said the man in the wheelchair. “This year they had all their fun at Rice Howard Way but there was no tree. People came, brought their kids, drank some hot chocolate, there were some carollers, and then everyone went away again. And here we are in the square with no tree to look at, just the empty cement.”
I was suddenly so sad that I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t do such a thing in front of the ghost and the man in the wheelchair. My eyes were moist but I blinked carefully and then glanced at the sky and I saw the first of the heavenly lights come out, and then I wanted to cry again. So great was my need to cry that I begged the ghost to let me go home. “Take me back to 1998,” I said. “I’m not sure I can quite take it. It’s too much. Too much. Of all the years, sorry, 2022 was the hardest to take.”
The man in the wheelchair looked at me as one would at any raving lunatic.
“I’m sorry,” said the ghost. “You’re here now, this is your reality.”
“That’s unfair,” I said. ‘I’m totally unprepared for it. I’ve skipped twenty-four years during which I might have prepared myself better.”
“And what would you have done?” asked the ghost.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I would have done something….”
The ghost shrugged his shoulders and then put his hand into his coat and pulled out a container of Tic Tacs and offered one to me and to the man in the wheelchair. Suddenly it occurred to me there was one thing I could do to stop feeling so sad and helpless about everything. I pulled out my two twenty-dollar bills and, rather awkwardly, I stepped toward the man in the wheelchair and asked if he needed them.
“No son,” he said. “No, that’s quite alright. What I want is a hot coffee.”
“I’ll get you one,” I offered.
The man laughed. “Ha! Good luck at this hour… on this day. I tell you: there’s nothing for us. No tree. No coffee. No love.”
I turned to the ghost and asked him what was I supposed to do? It was a hopeless situation, and now there were more homeless people coming toward us, having spotted me brandishing my forty dollars, and they didn’t all look quite so wise and magnanimous as the man in the wheelchair. Some of them looked quite prepared to take the money by force. Forty dollars! It was probably the greatest fortune that anyone in Churchill Square possessed at that very strange hour.
“Please,” I said to the ghost. “Surely now you’ll take me home. Something bad is going to happen.”
The ghost told me I could go back to 1998 on one condition.
I now wonder if I agreed to his condition merely to save my skin—so eager was I to leave Churchill Square. The condition was that I go immediately to my copy of A Christmas Carol, to page 83, the scene that occurs after Tiny Tim has been carried to the wash house by his sister Martha, leaving Bob Cratchitt in conversation with his wife. I promised to do exactly that. And already the square was starting to fade from view. The people that had been coming toward me had stopped and were now turning to each other, confused. The ghost continued talking, and I heard him, even though I could no longer see him. I was again in some sort of nowhere place, neither in 2022 nor in 1998. “You will read that the wife inquires of Bob how Tiny Tim behaved in church,” explained the ghost. “Cratchitt will reply that Tiny Tim was as good as gold. He tells his wife that Tiny Tim gets thoughtful in church, sitting by himself so much, and he thinks the strangest things, and so on…. Read that part.” I again promised that I would. Still the ghost kept talking. “And you’re going to think of a lot of other things: of how the tree disappeared from Churchill Square, and how sad it was, and then you’ll remember the madness of Saturnalia, the wildness of that German forest, and the chaos and rampant criminality of Victorian London, and you’ll eventually go back even further into the chronology of this day—this strangest of all your Christmas days—to the screening of the Prince of Egypt, and you will think of how the Israelites were captives in Egypt, and there is perhaps no greater suffering for any human than to be held in bondage by others. Yet in 2022 or 1998, the far greater likelihood is that a fortunate person like you would put himself willingly into bondage through addiction or vice or some great obsession, like becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or being beautiful, or… writing, for that matter—some great obsession that seems to justify almost anything, even chosing solitude right?”
The ghost was correct. Wasn’t that how I had explained my solitude to myself that day? It wasn’t really about forfeiting the earnings from the knife store, which I didn’t really need anyway. My choice was motivated by a desire to be different. It was a desire to have an experience about which I could write afterwards. It was a desire to be away from others for a full day and to have only my own thoughts for company.
“Remember,” said the ghost, "there was a man in that square who desired nothing more than the quiet contemplation of the Christmas Tree. And if you use your solitude for contemplation of such matters, it won’t be wasted.”
And then, finally, I was in my bed. It was Christmas Day, and yet when I looked at my clock, it was eight-thirty in the morning. It was the final time traveling trick, courtesy of the ghosts. I had a second chance to live the day the way as it was meant to be lived.
The End
Notes
There are a few straggling items from Part III to address, notably the images, which I enclosed without captions or sources. Apologies. The first image was of St. Boniface holding an axe to chop down the oak tree, sacred to pagan Germans. The website where I originally took the image appears to be offline or undergoing maintenance or being hacked, or something. However, I found an identical image embedded in the video at the follow webpage, which I hope will be more reliable— “Are the origins of the Christmas tree Catholic?”
https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/8268/are-the-origins-of-the-christmas-tree-catholic-
The second image in Part II is an illustration by Gustave Doré. The caption that should have gone with it is: “Wood engraving from 'London: a pilgrimage', by Gustave Dore, 1872. Signed in the block blc: Over London - by Rail. Depicting [East End] tenements, washing in back gardens, chimney pots, railway in distance.” See more here:
Book
A Christmas Carol in Prose: A Ghost Story of Christmas, Charles Dickens. Chapman and Hall of London, 1843. Electronic edition by Top Five Books, 2011.
Images
An Interior View of a Jamaica House of Correction, Published in Phillippo, James Mursell, 1798-1879. Jamaica: Its Past And Present State. 1843
J. Snow, Publisher - http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1297
Philanthropists and Scrooge
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/eytinge/28.html
Articles
“Prison Treadmills,” No Tech Magazine
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2009/05/prison-treadmills.html
“Treadmills Were Meant to Be Atonement Machines, JSTOR Daily”
https://daily.jstor.org/treadmills-were-meant-to-be-atonement-machines/
“‘There is no tree’: A different look to downtown Edmonton’s Holiday Light Up,” Global News
https://globalnews.ca/news/9282496/downtown-edmonton-holiday-light-up-no-christmas-tree/
“Graham Greene” An Essay