Vantage Point

"What's that?" A small boy pointed up at something.
Wallace pulled his hands from his pockets and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun. "I don't get it."
I looked up. "Get what?"
"If you throw a ball out the window of a train, why does the scenery move to the east while the ball goes straight ahead?"
I was reading the newspaper from four days ago at the time, an article entitled "Message In Bottle is Warning to Leave Mainland." I put the paper down on the bench and looked at his face. It was blotchy from his high blood pressure medicine. His face was lined and taut and wired, like a tennis racket, and there was a slight tremor around the eyelids. His eyes reflected the blue sky. "It doesn't always do that."
"It does if you are always on that train." The boy ran out into the street, his mother chasing behind him. "That kid could be standing still for all you know."
I looked back at Wallace, "But you aren't -"
"But if you were the scenery, not only is the ball moving to the west, but the man on the train looks like he intends to do you some damage."
I leaned forward. "This is a physics lesson, not a bedtime story."
Wallace pulled a tuna sandwich out of his pocket and unwrapped it. "Right, and you might think that the only scenery the man dislikes is moving to the east." Tuna was falling from the sandwich onto the pavement. He looked over at me and lowered his eyebrows. "But it's not."
"What?"
"Not from where I am sitting." He bit into the sandwich.
There were several starlings picking about in the grass; it looked like they were eating bread crumbs. One bird approached the bench and picked at the tuna on the pavement. Two other birds flew in and assaulted the first and a fourth bird stole away with the tuna. Wallace pointed at the birds. "When he lies asleep, and in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’ Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him, to keep his anger still in motion."
"What?"
"From Henry IV." He crumpled the wrapper. "Hotspur has a starling speak in the king's ears to drive him mad." He looks at the birds. "One hundred years ago, Romantics brought them here to recreate Shakespeare's world. Five hundred years ago the sun blazed a trail across the heavens, settling in the sea at night. Six hundred years ago the earth poured men off the edge and into outer space. A thousand years ago we offered up maidens to the gods of harvest. Now, the universe revolves around the self. The earth disgorges us like spoiled food. We offer up our children to the gods of war. And we can walk on the backs of starlings from here to the British Isles."
"Stop! We we have come so far since then. I mean, look at what we have done since then, the scientific advances -" Thousands of starlings exploded from an elm tree across the street. "Man, they are loud enough -"
"We haven't moved an inch."
"I couldn't hear you-"
"That's all you can hear. What else could you say?" He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. "My head spins, like a car on ice, like a plane in a dive, like a boat in a whirlpool, like a - "
"Like a ball thrown from a train?"
"No." He looked up. His forehead was sweating. "Don't you get it? I feel like I am moving to the east, faster and faster, every minute another notch up in speed. This won't stop." He looked at his watch. "Slow, it's falling behind again."
I looked at the sidewalk. "You are going mad."
"But you're the one standing still."
Just then, the boy pointed up at the sky.