The Search

“So, you’ll take the job?”

My client sat across from me with a large oaken desk between us. He was a shifty, scrawny-looking fellow who looked like he hadn’t seen the outside world in many, many moons. I understand it’s a common trait for many in his profession to possess.

I nodded once, silently, and from the look in his eyes, I knew I unnerved him. That was fine by me. I unnerve most people. Makes my job easier by far. This was clearly the last place he wanted to be. Most of my clients only come to me because they’re desperate. They have no other choice. Or so they think. But there’s always another choice.

My silent demeanor didn’t seem to have my current client fully convinced of my capabilities. He shifted in his chair nervously.

“It’s just that it isn’t a common request, I know,” he began hesitantly. “Are you certain you can fulfill the requirements? Guaranteed?”

And now, I spoke.

“There are no guarantees. Not with what you’re asking me to do. But I give my word that I will attempt to do as you ask. That’s all I can guarantee.”

My client nodded shortly, and his face soured slightly.

“I came to you because I heard you were the best at tracking down individuals who don’t want to be found.”

I am. It’s true. That isn’t my arrogance talking. It’s the cold hard truth. I’ve made my career out of doing just that—finding people who don’t want to be found—and getting paid rather well to do so.

My client continued, a note of urgency in his already strained voice. “It’s just that, I’m on a deadline, see, there isn’t much time for you to do this job, understand?”

“I understand,” I told him. “That’ll cost you more.”

He opened his mouth to object, but I smiled at him, and immediately he closed his mouth meekly. I’m told my smile can do that. I wouldn’t really call it a smile, myself. It’s more the look a wolf gives the sheep before the slaughter.

Again, this office of mine was the last place most sensible folk wanted to find themselves in. Indeed, most of them only found themselves here after they’d been robbed of their senses. Or other things.

We agreed on the price for the job—a fair price, I might add, for what he was asking me to do—and I held out my hand for him to shake. My client hesitated, and I saw the indecision and near-panic in his eyes. He looked on the verge of losing his resolve and backing out, but then, he swallowed, pushed down his fear, and shook my hand.

The deal was struck. There was no going back now.

…

I didn’t take the job for the money. I stopped doing that years ago. The longer you’re in the business, the more selective you can become with what projects you take on and what ones you decline. I took this job because it intrigued me.

I’ve searched for many things and people across the years, but never anything—or anyone—quite like this before. I wasn’t even sure this was a job that could be completed. Regardless, I took it.

And once I take a job, I put my whole self into finishing it until it’s done. That mindset is good for my business and bad for cultivating relationships outside of work. That’s why I’m still all alone. Part of the reason.

I threw myself into this job as I never had before—being on a deadline made my work all the more focused and driven.

I was told that my quarry is elusive by nature. If you look for her, she knows of it and will avoid you. She is fleeting, like quicksilver. One moment you think you have her, the next she is gone, slipping through your fingers like minnows through threaded underwater nets. She can be temperamental and jealous. If you ignore her when she comes calling, you may never see her again.

At least, that’s what I’ve learned about her from other sources. I assume that’s what happened between her and my client. He scorned her when she came calling, and now that he needed her, she was nowhere to be found.

Ah well. It was no matter to me—the “why” of it all. I’ll just do my job like I always do, and that’ll be the end of it.

So, how to find someone who doesn’t want to be found? Someone elusive by nature? As I said, that’s my job. I make my living finding such folk. It’s simple really. To find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you have to find them by accident. It cannot be deliberate by any means.

How does that work, you ask? I’m not sure, to be honest with you. I can’t really say for sure. Maybe I’m lucky, or maybe something else is at work. What I do is this—I study my quarry. I learn everything there is to know about them—their likes, dislikes, their routines, and habits—all of that is useful to me.

Once I’ve learned all there is to know about them, I can put myself in their shoes. I can guess where they’ll go and what they’ll do in any given situation. More often than not, I’ll find them. Is it a perfect system? Of course not, for no system is. But this one has always worked for me.

Until now.

Everywhere I went, I seemed to be just one step behind her at every turn. Like a game of reversed cat-and-mouse, she seemed to be toying with me, even as I chased her. I went to all her usual haunts, all of the places she was known to frequent.

I ghosted through cafes with the patrons all lost in their own worlds of headphones and keyboards, but she was already gone. I visited concert halls where beautifully haunting melodies rose to the rafters, but she’d already vanished. I went to the schools, where laughing children played, and the libraries where quiet children read. Nothing.

Every place I went, I seemed to have just missed her. Still, I couldn’t just abandon my search. I had a job to do, and time was running out. I looked for her all over. I looked for her wherever people were—in the sprawling cities with people too busy to appreciate the beauty of a sunrise, and in the pasture lands, where such beauty seen so often now went unnoticed. Nothing.

People had seen her, of course, but she wasn’t there anymore, and she hadn’t told anyone where she was going next. I began to realize that my search was futile. I had finally met my match. It was like I was chasing after the wind. How could I ever catch the wind?

In one of those places, a place removed from society, a place that could be called beautiful had anyone noticed it, I sat down on a bench overlooking a forest that stretched out as far as the eye could see. I finally gave up my search.

This was the first job in a long time that I had decided couldn’t be done. I had attempted it, but it was an impossible task, chasing after her. I should have known. It was impossible to find her if you went looking for her with deliberate intent. It was impossible even to find her by accident.

Always, she is the one who finds you. It’s never the other way around. And when she comes calling, acknowledge her, or she will disappear just as suddenly and mysteriously as when she first arrived. Always, she is the one who finds you.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” a soft voice by my shoulder said as I sat overlooking that forest.

I turned, and there she was. Airy wisps of hair framed and obscured her face, hiding her features from me. She sat on the bench, a small thing, swinging her legs absent-mindedly as she did so. Her age was impossible to determine. It was possible, I decided, that she had been around since a little after the Beginning.

“I am,” I said shortly, and she laughed, a pleasant laugh full of mirth and amusement.

“You’ve never looked for me before,” she chided me, and I shrugged.

“I’m not looking for me,” I told her. “I’m looking for someone else.”

She made a face at that, a frown of disapproval, and tutted at me. “That’s not how it works, you know.”

“I know.”

I turned away from her, returning my gaze to the forest below. She followed my gaze and smiled softly.

“Pretty, isn’t it? I sat up here not too long ago with another—a young painter. She very nearly captured its beauty on her canvas. Now that was beauty of a different kind.”

“Thanks to you,” I grunted, and she inclined her head modestly.

“In part. I don’t do everything, you know. I like to think of what I do as more of a… collaboration with someone else.”

I nodded thoughtfully at what she said. “I don’t know much about that,” I admitted to her. “I don’t work well with others.”

She laughed at that. “Oh, I know, I know. Always so serious, always so driven and focused.”

She studied me for a moment, and I felt the weight of her searching gaze upon me. “I always thought we worked well together, you and I,” she said softly.

I looked at her, surprised. “Us? I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, that’s not true. You’ve seen me your whole life. You just haven’t noticed that it was me. A nudge here, toward the person you were looking for, a whispered hint there that made it all fit together oh so nicely. That was me.”

I paused and thought back upon my life. Slowly, it dawned on me that I had seen her before. Always on the edge of my conscious memory, there even if I wasn’t aware of her presence.

She smiled again and nodded as she saw the understanding in my eyes.

“So, what are you going to do now?” She asked me lightly, swinging her legs like a whimsical child as she sat next to me. “Are you going to try and capture me, to take me back to the person who hired you to find me?”

I grunted in non-committal and shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that, does it?” I asked her. “I have the feeling that if I tried, you’d just slip through my fingers, and I’d never see you again.”

She giggled and nodded. “Something like that,” she agreed.

“So why would I even try?”

She shrugged. “Some people try, like the person who hired you,” she said softly. “They think they can capture me and keep me all to themselves. Their hearts are greedy. They don’t want to share me with anyone else.”

She studied me more closely this time. “I guess I wanted to see what kind of person you are.”

I sat and thought about what she said to me for a moment. Then, I yawned and stretched my legs before standing. She watched me expectantly as I stood, waiting to see what I would do. Part of me wondered the same.

“Now that I know to look for you, I’ll be seeing you around from time to time, I expect,” I finally said. “Until then, I look forward to working with you again.”

For a moment, she sat still on the bench, unmoving. Then, she smiled and stood on the bench, going up on tip-toe to lightly kiss my cheek. I heard a whisper as she told me her name and added softly in my ear, “You do have a good heart. I’ll see you again.”

Then, I blinked, her whispered name still echoing in my ears; the touch of her lips still faint upon my cheek. When I opened my eyes, she was gone, and I was standing there all alone.

…

“Well?” My client demanded when I returned from my travels. “Did you find her?”

I could see the desperation in his red-rimmed eyes, the lack of sleep, and the nervous tremor in his hand.

“I didn’t find her,” I answered him truthfully. I said nothing else.

My client’s shoulders slumped defeatedly, and his despair filled the air. “It’s all over,” he mumbled. “There’s no way I’ll get my manuscript done before the deadline now. My editor is going to kill me.”

He left my office, more broken and dejected than he first came in.

I let him go, keeping in mind that he had wanted the one he sought all to himself. I thought of what such a world would look like if she weren’t free to come and go as she pleased, to visit some and not others, to arrive at the precise moment she was needed by one and then go off to help another.

Such a world would be a darker place, a world filled with jealous individuals, all selfishly seeking to possess alone what by rights belongs to all of us and to none of us at the same time.

I much prefer to live in this world—a world of beauty and creation, a world that is kinder and better. A world in which Inspiration is free.

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