It was the time of sunshine recline, and two men drove into Sierra Leone.
“Santa Clause ain’t writing Christmas Cards no more,” the man with the hat said. “That’s why.” The man understood people, so he gave the fellow sitting next to him a quick glance to emphasize his words. “You must understand that.”
That was how the man chose to break the silence.
“Must, as you should, and you should if you don’t.” He crumpled his brow into a furrow. The newfound slope found itself smoothly parallel to the rim of his ten gallon hat, an existence in cannon with the world. The hat wasn’t a one-off thematic choice; the man had much too much intentionality running through his soul. It went along with his whole western suit. A callback to rodeos which the man was sure never existed. He turned to the man without a hat, which ended up being a good thing; no hat had something to say.
“I got in this car because you asked me to. I don’t see that it matters I understand why I did it or not. I mean, you don’t expect a man to understand love for him to feel it; he just feels it. What is love, anyways. That was a statement not a question.” He ended with a fidget.
“That’s quit the tenuous connection you got there between doing your job and love. But listen here, young-blood. I don’t have anything more complex than words, but I can perfectly relate to you what love is. That’s something. Isn’t it? Like an inverse holism. Individual words become stronger when they have a community to bounce off of.”
No hat was confused. “People don’t actually talk like that.”
About two days before, Santa Clause decided he didn’t exist. The certainty of the time and the certainty of the why are known to the best of human knowledge. Santa Clause most certainly did not have much reason to believe in himself, and Santa Clause most certainly did not have a specific time of existentialism. It could have been while brushing his teeth, when he is most careful not to look in the mirror only to see his torrent of face. It could have been while watching a Christmas special, where his existence is contested by animated children on the behalf of smug Hollywood writers trying to find themselves through art. It could have been while writing a Christmas card to Jiminy Cricket. The only matter of the situation is that Marry-Ann Clause, his spouse of four super-generations, found him sitting on the edge of his bed the following morning, despondent. His last Christmas card was his hand and it read, “I love you with the intensity the sun keeps its daily vigil, Marry-Ann.”
Mrs. Clause reacted the only way she knew. She called “Hat and No Hat.”
Having found their destination, the man with the hat parked. The men got out of the car and sat in a coffee shop.
“I’m a serious man. Do you know what that means, son? It means I take life seriously.” The first of the two picked his hat off his head as he would a berry off a bush and placed it on the table.
“If I were the hero of some kind of fictionalized piece, this would be symbolic. But I’m not, and it ain’t.” After a pause so long the air in his lungs had its own time to consider what needed to be said, he finally spoke. “It’s a similitude.”
Hat and No Hat was founded in the year twenty when the man with the hat woke up to a cry of a thousand thousand goats screaming in terror. He lived on a goat farm, so that was pretty OK, except for the part where the thousand thousand goats were screaming in terror as compared to just being a thousand thousand goats. He jumped up and sprinted right outside to see what the problem was. He came upon a horrible lizard beast with seven mouths, each of which was acquired from the devil through seven trials that cost him seven of his eight lives. As it turns out, that was how he earned the moniker “horrible.” Our friend the man with the hat had come upon El Chupacabra. The man asked the horrible lizard beast why he was eating his goats, and good ol’ Chupe, he said, “No me gusta el pollo,” and ran off into the night. Realizing that he had a gift for talking to supernaturals, the man with the hat founded Hat, a not-for-profit organization with an explicit goal of learning about “things in the world that regular folk just don’t understand.” About forty years later, he came upon no hat, and as they say, a watched pot never boils.
The man with the hat placed his hat back upon his head, stood up, and said, “We’re going to the beach.” They went.
There was the sun, clouds, hot air, and Santa waiting for them there. Santa Clause knew that people would come for him. It wasn’t off-season. He just didn’t know what would happen when somebody tried to touch him. Santa didn’t move or speak when the pair reached him. He just sat legs folded over another, hunched over with his torrent of face squished firmly against his hands. The two men sat opposite Santa, to form a perfect triangle. Santa faced exactly opposed to the ocean.
“I’m here, Santa, armed with nothing but words,” the man with the hat said, while making special care to wink at no hat. However, Santa was having none of this.
“Everybody is in limbo. This world is limbo. It’s a place to punish those who lived nobly. That is what happened to us, my dear chaps. We lived nobly in a former life, and when we died, sinless, we were sent here. Somehow I have ended up with a neat little duality to my penance. I enjoy the special privilege of having exactly as many people speculating my existence as there are doubting it. That cancels a man out, I think. Do people go when they die again? I’m not much concerned with the whereabouts of location three. Just. Just I’m not sure. You, sir. Touch me.” Santa gestured at no hat. No hat understood the importance of defining a philosophy system in pragmatic terms, so he reached out with one finger and went to poke Santa Clause right in the stomach. He collapsed right into him. There was an absence of an absence of hat; no hat fell wholly into him, body aligning with Santa’s as he fell.
The man with the hat stood up, took his hat off, and threw it alongside the curls and flows of the ocean wind, an existence concurrent with the world.
That Christmas, every single child in the world, independent of any binary alignment of belief in Santa, received a large mirror which didn’t work.
