Chapter 1
The Tap
It was around the time of my 116th birthday that I first started to get suspicious.
The Perseids meteor shower was due to appear two days later, and this was a time when I was on an astronomy kick. The best viewing was supposed to peak after midnight, so at around 2AM I leapt out of bed and bounded up the stairs to the room where I kept my telescope. It was only after I came back to bed a couple hours later that my wife Annie tossed over in the sheets and sighed exasperatedly, “Where in the world do you get that kind of energy at 79?”
Annie was my third wife. She came 24 years after Janice died, and 70 after Chloe. I thought I was over the marriage thing after Janice, but I was lonely, so I lied. Since anyone who could testify as to my real age was long gone by then, it was pretty easy, other than feeling bad about starting a relationship with my soon-to-be wife with a self-serving deception. But seriously, what woman was going to marry someone who was, at the time, 110?!
In any case, after Annie went back to sleep, I lay there and mulled over what she said. My God, I thought, I really and truly am 116. (My memory is fine, by the way, even without taking any of those supplements for ‘brain health’ they try to scare old people into taking.) All things considered, I felt pretty good; somehow I didn’t have any chronic diseases, no medical problems at all, really. I still played pickup basketball at the Y then, most of the other guys literally less than half my age. The month before I’d gone on a 7 mile hike to a waterfall with a ‘Fit and 50+’ group from parks and rec. Lots of people in my (pretended) age group used a walker; I could still take stairs two at a time. I’d thought off and on about all this before, but I’d never dwelled on it. I just figured I must be an outlier, a very, very lucky person at the vast extremes of normal.
But that was the first time I thought, laying there in bed, maybe I’m different. Maybe I’m somehow supernatural, immune for some reason to the vagaries of human mortality. But how?! Why?! It scared me a little. Still does.
Anyway, that was thirty years ago. Annie has long since passed away, of course. Not being able to take living through the illness and death of another ‘lifelong companion’, I long ago decided, no more wives for me. I do have a dog, Rufus, a big black Newfoundland, 80 pounds of fur and slobber. I always liked the big guys; those little yappers old people get bug the heck out of me. He’s the eighteenth dog I’ve had over the course of my life, and, I swear, he’ll be the last too, loneliness be damned. I can’t take all the dying anymore.
This morning we took a walk, like we always do, to the dog park, where I was chided once again for having such a big dog “at my age!” (If they only knew.) I’ve been seeing the same group of ‘dog people’ for the past 10 years since moving to Salem, and now am at the point when I’ll have to move again soon. When I’ve been in a town for a while and I age up to when people think I’m getting into my 90’s (I figure I can get away with saying I’m 80 or so when I first get to a new town. I mean, I look old, but not ancient!), then I start getting unbidden calls from Adult Protective Services, who’ve been alerted by do-gooders wanting to “protect” me. I have my own house. I drive. All my family, even my grandchild, are gone. I don’t want to even think about the intrusion into my private business by public safety folks when they start digging into a personal history that dates back to the Gilded Age.
**********
My friend and neighbor Sam, like always, came to visit today. Sam is 87; he thinks he’s older than me. He says he likes being around younger people because it “keeps his mind sharp.” Even though, by my bogus identity, I’m supposed to be in my 90’s. Poor Sam.
“How was your visit with your grandson?” I asked him. Sam lives in some senior apartments down the street, where people are available to see to his “needs,” so his family, heartless parasites that they are, doesn’t visit often. He’d been pretty excited yesterday when he told me his grandson called to say he was going to visit from Portland.
“Well, now,” he said, scrunching his face up, “it was…. interesting.” He turned his walker around and sat on the seat. Seeing the confusion on my face, he went on, “For one thing, he’s not my grandson anymore. He’s, I guess, my granddaughter.” Looking as addled as I did, he tried to explain, “But, well, I guess he’s both. Somehow he can change from being one to the other….or, I guess, he, or, he tells me, I should say they, can be both at the same time.” Scratching his head, looking a little like a performing chimp, he mulled, “Or is it neither?” Sighing, he said, “Now, why would anybody want to be called ‘they’ when they’re just one person?” He mumbled distractedly, “Don’t make sense to me.”
I smiled. Naturally, I sympathized with Sam, but all this they/them and non-binary stuff, despite the assumption of present-day ‘pioneers’ who want to think they’re breaking new ground and correcting the antiquated notions of the expiring generation, is, as old people say, old hat. “Don’t you remember the 60’s, Sam?” I proposed. “All that hippy-dippy stuff, the free love and the men growing their hair down to their ass and wearing flowers?” I chuckled, trying to lighten his depression. “It’s all the same, just young people who can’t find their way in the world trying to shock us.”
He frowned. “Yeah, but he was wearing a BRA!” Trying to make light of his underlying consternation, he forced a chuckle. “I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if he’s cut his pecker off.”
Together we just shook our heads and commiserated, just a couple of old guys whose wisdom garnered by lifetimes of experience didn’t outshine the hyperenlightened brilliance of the latest iteration of cognoscenti.
Having been around decades longer, I could have told Sam stories. About the vaudeville era, when men dressed as women just for “laughs,” even while their admirers hunkered in dark corners doing all sorts of unnatural things. About sailors on ships during the war crossdressing for “entertainment” then retiring to their racks two to a bunk, after revving all their sexual tensions with what passed for naval ‘tradition.’ About women during war who bound their chests to be able to join the fight and who, between battles, would sneak off to the woods to gratify each other, able to reveal themselves only to their own kind.
But I didn’t. That would have blown my cover; no ordinary mortal, of course, could have seen all those things. I just smiled benightedly and tried to let the subject die on its own. Hell, Salem was rife with sauntering he-she’s, hair sticking out of their panty hose, women with close-shaved heads lumbering around in muscle tees and dungarees holding hands with unpretty girls, all trying to keep up with the ‘weird’ metropolis up north. It shouldn’t have been a shock to Sam, since he’d lived here all his life. But even the open-minded and enlightened don’t, deep down, necessarily want it to affect their own family.
Fortunately, Sam changed the subject himself. “Hey, did you get your Social Security check yesterday?”
Now it was my turn to cringe. “Um, not yet,” I blustered. I do get sick of lying, even though this wasn’t technically a lie. Because I never get Social Security checks.
Not surprisingly, Sam was oblivious. “I didn’t get mine either. And I thought that darned direct deposit was supposed to keep things like that from happening.”
Trying to mollify his frustration, I pondered the calendar a moment. “Hey,” I said, “remember? Monday was Juneteenth. It must have set things back a day.” I patted his arm in feigned fellowship. “We’ll probably get it tomorrow.”
Sam leaned back on his support bar, relief only half-visible in his expression. “I hope so, dammit. I got bills to pay!” He snorted. “Juneteenth! Like the guv’mint needs another day off!” Sam actually says “guv’mint.”
Sometimes I wonder why I’m friends with Sam; we don’t really have a lot in common, and to tell the truth, he bores the heck out of me. But then he says something like ‘guv’mint’ and I remember.
Because, and I really believe this, Sam is the reincarnation of Elijah Carter, a soldier I knew when we were together in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Elijah said ‘guv’mint’ all the time. And Sam’s mannerisms are eerily reminiscent of Elijah’s, his tics and intonations nearly identical. Elijah was gunned down next to me, shot right through the forehead, while our unit was patrolling in the jungle, an innocent 17 year old kid robbed of his life just as it was starting. It’s an image that’s still burned into my brain as surely as that bullet went through his. I’ve seen lots of injustice and heartache over the decades of my life, but nothing transcends the cosmic unfairness of young men and women who have been murdered in the name of some of the ridiculous causes we fight wars for.
What’s kept me sane, or, as folks like to say now, takes care of my ‘mental health’ (whatever that means), is the sense that I’ve met all sorts of people through the years, randomly, that I’m sure are the recreation of people who unfairly had their lives stolen from them. My second wife, Janice, was, I’m sure, really my first high school girlfriend, Susan Hossmeyer, who died of typhus right before our senior dance (even though Susan was lily-white and Janice was black.) My long-time law partner Jimmy Chao was really Han Lai, a Chinese boy I knew who was shot with his family by a bunch of nativists during the time around the birth of the KKK.
Okay, I know it sounds a little crazy, but when you’ve been around as long as I have, you can delude yourself into thinking you have extrasensory powers. Maybe it’s mindplay, but the mannerisms that some people have, their personalities, the radiance of their internal psyches, have convinced me more than once that eternal justice is reflected in their reappearance as different forms of people who were cruelly taken from life in previous times (by the way, Rufus is the psychological doppelganger for my mother.)
In any case, my thoughts drifted back to Sam and his Social Security check. How nice it would be to get a guaranteed chunk of money every month to take care of expenses, instead of having to dole it out from a hidden mountain of cash, like I had to.
For his part, Sam was still staring off into the distance, thinking uncharitable thoughts, I guess, about the ‘guv’mint.’ Just as I was trying to think of ways to cut his visit short (from painful experience I’d learned Sam could linger on my porch for hours, regaling me like all old people do with the litany of his physical ailments), Rufus nudged my hand and got up, stretching. I patted his big fluffy head and said, “What’s up, boy? You need to go for a walk?” We’d already been for a walk, of course, but….Sam.
Sam reached out to pet Rufus, saying, like he always did, “That dog looks just like a bear!” Scratching Rufus behind his ears, Sam gave no sign of imminent departure, so I forced the issue by standing up. After a few more minutes of repetitive blather, Sam finally hobbled off to his apartment. I didn’t really want to go for another walk, but Sam kept looking back at me as he rolled his walker slowly down the sidewalk. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, looking like I’d pushed him away, so I clipped Rufus’ leash on and headed out.
Rather than go back to the dog park, I figured I’d go to the library and check out some magazines. This would take me through the new subdivision that had gone up recently near my neighborhood. Populated by younger families, it might be a delightful respite from, and forgive the hypocrisy, always being around a bunch of old people.
**********
One of the nice things about living so long is realizing that, whatever look you might adopt as your ‘look,’ or whatever way you choose to present yourself to the world around you, eventually, even if you somehow fall out of favor with the fashion police, someday, you’re going to be back in style. (Or at least since petticoats and knickers stopped being a standard part of dress.)
As I walked lackadaisically down the row of near-identical houses, I was pleasantly surprised by hearing the sweetly melodic voice of Misty Berg. “Hi, Mr. Johnson,” I heard singing out suddenly from behind me. I turned to find Tricia with her husband Blake pushing a stroller coming up along the sidewalk.
On his second walk of the day, Rufus was more than happy to plunk limply down on the sidewalk when I stopped for them to catch up to me. “Awwww, he is just sooo cute!” Misty cooed enticingly. Coming closer, my heart did a little giddy flutter as they approached. What a nice-looking young couple! Trim (yes, I admit I’m a fat-ist. Isn’t everyone?), shapely, looking freshly fit and vibrantly alive! Long since relegated to the world of the wrinkled and decaying, it was nice to have a connection to people who could re-stir the provocative possibilities of long lost (even, in my case, really, really long lost) youth.
Misty knelt down to give Rufus a hug while Blake and I started to engage in idle chit-chat. Casting furtive glances down at Misty (the tank top and what we used to call ‘hot pants’ she had on seemed to have a magnetic pull on my eyeballs), I nodded to the neon pink bandage she had wrapped around her right thigh. “How’s that feeling?” I asked. “Is the burning starting to get better?”
She glanced up, still rubbing Rufus’ big head. “Oh yes, Mr. Johnson,” she sighed, a sheepish expression on your face. “Thank you so much for taking care of it.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. The techs do all the work.” Even now, as she stood and her long legs extended lithely, it broke my heart to see what looked to me like random scribblings over the rest of her, odd symbols and cartoons haphazardly arrayed, indecipherable pictographs marring her feminine beauty.
“I guess I’ll be in to see you again soon,” she said diffidently. She elbowed her husband. “I’m working on him to start cleaning himself up a bit, too,” giving him a reproachful glance.
Blake, whose arms made him resemble a Polynesian warrior, shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” he mumbled noncommittedly. “Probably. Misty says I’m gonna scare the baby.” Self-consciously he scratched his cheek, where he’d conspicuously had some talismanic design engraved, of what personal significance to him I had no idea. I mean, his family, I knew, was from Maine.
The baby, then, almost on cue, started crying. Maternal concern washed over Misty’s face, and abruptly our little interlude came to a close. Wistfully I resumed my trek to the library, reflecting on the shifting sands of what passed for style. I’d never really been one to care about such things, but the chagrin I’d felt in recent years as I watched the vogue of permanently defacing the naked beauty of human integument with unfathomable figures was, thankfully, starting to wane.
In my dotage I’d come to realize that everyone, the youthful mostly, but all types, whether they were big or little, rough-skinned or silky smooth, was, or could be, beautiful, particularly if their bodies remained virginally unembellished. To my delight, then, as expected in the fickle world of fashion, the piercing and tattooing craze seemed to be fading.
Having been around so long I knew this was coming. Besides the fact that all people, in some way and in varying degrees, have the unimpeachable desire to be ‘right,’ all humans like to set themselves apart by doing what everyone else is doing, as long as they haven’t been doing it for too long. So all the self-molestation, the riveting of ink under the skin, the piercing and the earlobe stretching, was starting to fall under popularity decline. Thank goodness.
This made me grateful in more ways than one. Because for some time I’d been looking for a way to augment my ebbing hoard of cash. What I’d thought in years past was a hefty stockpile was getting worryingly tight with the recent upsurge in the cost of, well, everything, not to mention the frustrating fact that I keep living. So, with foresight of the ages, I did something uncharacteristically risky for me; I invested in a clinic for tattoo removal.
And business was great, hopefully moving on to the crest of booming. People like Misty, who’d memorialized a past boyfriend named, oddly enough, Sylvester, with a huge image of the cartoon cat on her thigh, were flocking to erase all the wincingly permanent mirages of their prior transient whims. I feel a little guilty “cashing in” on people’s mistakes, but at least it’s for a trend I’m happy to support.
Sadly, I didn’t meet up with any more young, fresh strollers out this morning, so I trudged back from the library with my cache of magazines and came back kidding myself I was going to do some reading. Getting a glass of prune juice (Okay, yes, sometimes I need to drink prune juice), I put on my readers, and pushed back into my recliner, ready to peruse the latest issue of The Atlantic.
And, of course, promptly fell sound asleep.
**********
In the past, when I’d wake up from a sound sleep with my heart pounding and shivering in the throes of a cold sweat, it was because I’d had the bar exam dream.
It’s the kind that lots of people who were academically tortured youth have, where you’re enjoying life in some way, out with friends or goofing around playing some pickup game, when out of the blue you suddenly become aware that, having miraculously slipped your mind despite it being of monumental importance to your entire future, you have a big test in, say, the next hour or two. I took lots of tests during school, but the bar exam was the ultimate butt-puckerer for me; little chance I’d ‘overlook’ it to go out and throw a frisbee around. But, for however long dreams last, there I’d be, scrambling around frantically, kind of studying, but mostly throwing books and papers around in a frenzy, my parents chastising me in the background, less ambitious friends jabbering at me to “blow it off” and come with them to go get a burger, a futilely unproductive flurry that would feel like hours until I’d snap awake, gradually reorienting myself in my tousled bedsheets to the relief that, no, I don’t actually have to retake the bar exam in a couple of hours.
Nowadays, however, that nightmare has been superseded by my own version of midnight torment I call my 100th birthday dream. What’s even worse about this one is it actually happened, or at least it’s more based in reality than failing to remember the bar exam.
It usually starts with someone forcing me into a wheelchair. I’m pushing back; ‘I’m fine,’ I say, ‘I don’t even use a cane.’ But the surrounding crowd of altruists won’t hear of it; they manhandle me into the chair and start wheeling me out onto a stage. A panorama of beaming faces confronts me, a crowded audience of well-wishers and glad-handers smiling and congratulating themselves on their own benevolence, most of whom I don’t even know. The theater is festooned garishly with colorful banners and streamers. An entire marching band is thundering in the corner, the gilded Roman helmets and vivid maroon and gold of the Trojans sparkling in the floodlights, the dulcet tones of “Conquest” that I heard ad nauseum when my granddaughter was a student at USC blaring over and over. Then the audience starts wagging their fingers in the way Trojan faithful do, sort of a lazy V sign, pumping to the beat of the tune. Soon, though, their faces darken, their manner suddenly becoming threatening; in unison they drop one of their fingers and start pointing at me, rhythmically, almost accusatorially. Sitting all alone now onstage, all the other ringleaders having mysteriously vanished, there’s a moldy afghan thrown over my lap. I’m perplexed, terrified really. I’m wondering, ‘What in the world do they want from me?!’
They want me to speak, of course. They want some maudlin sermon of wisdom from the superannuated codger enlightening the inscrutable secrets of life for them. They also want validation; they went to a lot of trouble to put on this shindig, despite my telling them insistently and repeatedly that I didn’t want any such thing of the kind, and now they expect payback. Amusing personal anecdotes from another age, perhaps, or an uplifting aphorism or two, but really they want appreciation. This birthday was special, a vaunted member of their community (they love that word, community) hitting the exalted milestone of living to the century mark. How selfish of me to think I could presume to celebrate such an important landmark peacefully, on my own, reminiscing and ruminating over good times and bad, family members I’d lost (which, cruelly, was everyone by then, one of the banes of living to triple digits), maybe having a dish of ice cream with the couple of friends I had left then that had any recall of people I missed and times we shared. No, my civic duty was to make them happy, be a team player, to genuflect to the image they wanted to project, to be a living testimonial of their collective kindheartedness. I had plenty of time later to sit around and cogitate like an old fool, or at least probably a few days, maybe. Today, a hundred years of wear and tear on body and mind be damned, it was time to party.
Okay, maybe the real thing wasn’t that bad. I was living in St. George, Utah at the time, a place where a lot of retirees flocked to. They didn’t have much better to do than golf and sit around the pool groaning about their kids; the idea of throwing a big party for someone actually older than them made them feel younger, I guess.
But the total loss of control over my own affairs was terrifying. Somehow I got sandbagged into agreeing to it, and once it started it got totally out of hand. Maybe I should have been more understanding.
But….I wasn’t; I was pissed. To the horror of the ‘community,’ as the local band faded and the droning cadence of ’Speeeeech!” crescendoed, all their silly sentimental glee turned to agitated shock as I, the docile demented geezer, simply got up from the shackles of the wheelchair, and jogged (not walked) home.
In the days after, after the self-satisfaction at my memorable act of defiance faded a bit, I thought about what happened, and, oddly enough for someone that age, thought about the future. What would happen as I kept getting older? Like I’ve said, I felt pretty good; I had few if any chinks in the armor of my body’s defenses. Just the day before I’d gone to the park and used the restroom, standing next to a man I guessed was a septuagenarian at the urinals; I was in and out before he barely managed to get his stream started!
Was the sort of nightmare I’d endured at the town bandstand the kind of thing I could expect every birthday? Was I going to be hounded by local TV news crews every time I layered a new tree ring on my trunk? I was, am, a private person. Celebrity wasn’t something I ever craved, and at 100, it was downright mortifying, a prospect that was overwhelmingly repulsive.
That was when I decided. From that time on, I stopped being me.
Not long after that confrontation with the town luminaries I moved, but starting life in a new place was only the beginning. I was fortunate to have been a lawyer, so I knew a thing or two about the mechanics of creating a separate identity. Coupled with a bit of research into the ways of the witness protection program, I was able to erase all vestiges of my chronologic notoriety.
I became, essentially, another person.
It wasn’t that hard; by harsh realities of fate I had no family, no close friends or relations who could identify me. For those who think of themselves as having divine insight, you might say I was reborn.
For that to happen, of course, I had to die, at least as far as the government was concerned. That meant sacrificing my social security benefits; all my accounts I turned to cold, hard cash. That was a scary step, but it was the only way I could figure to go underground without worrying about who was going to snoop into a database of my past life.
And anyway, how many years, realistically, would I have to live like a financial recluse? I was one hundred years old, for heaven’s sake!
**********
Looking back, I think I was a little crazy still from missing all the family I’d been blessed with during my life, scars from my past still bleeding and raw.
I lost Chloe when she was just 38; she had cancer of her ovaries. We never had kids, weren’t somehow able to make that happen, even though Chloe was, at least to me, an absolute knockout physically, made me feel like all year was rutting season. But she was also my first love, my apotheosis of connubial bliss. How could she be gone?
Desperately trying to rise from the ashes before they subsumed me, I got together with Janice pretty quickly after that; I was still young and I needed to forget, despite how much I ached for Chloe, with someone totally different from my dearly departed.
If Chloe was like southern sweet tea on a hot Mississippi day, Janice was sparkling champagne! We danced, we went out to bars at all hours, even though I didn’t drink. It was the only time in my life I wasn’t a stay-at-home person. Nature intruded, of course, and we had two children, our son Jefferson and daughter Chloe (probably a misguided tribute, but it brought me comfort, at least for a while.) For a time they were the lights of our lives, utterly eclipsing our restless exuberance with the joys of responsibility for developing humans.
But dark clouds overtook us.
Even now details are too heart-wrenching for me to pore over. Jefferson somehow got swept up in a drug scene, becoming, in the parlance of the day, a dope fiend. He sired a baby girl mindlessly before overdosing, a princess of a child Janice and I adopted. Chloe was apparently nominally cursed; she was taken in a car accident with some friends who’d had too much moonshine. Where life had been mostly sunshine and moonbeams to us, suddenly the brightness of the world was heartlessly snuffed out.
We took refuge in the little girl, an angelic consolation borne from tragedy. So we called her Angel, and that’s exactly what she was. Relieved of the sense that we had to bring up ‘our kids,’ offspring that needed to be perfect, we simply enjoyed her, her youthful exuberance, her guileless wonder, her radiant love of life. We got to watch her grow, to love and learn, to enjoy the time she was given on the planet to the fullest. She married a smart, caring young man, Caleb, who she met at USC. He was an engineer, whip-smart, ambitious, self-reliant to the extent that our beautiful Angel was able to be what she was, an artist, to express her inner beauty through dancing, photography, poetry.
And then from above the big fingers descended to snuff out the candle flame again.
Angel’s husband was a pilot; his family had a vacation cabin in the Sierras. They could have driven there, even, but Caleb liked to practice his flying. I had a big contract I was negotiating so I planned to drive up the next day, but Janice wanted to spend as much time in the mountains with our baby as she could.
If, in the inexplicable gyrations of fate, there’s any eternal justice in the universe, they’re spending forever together now. All it took was a sudden squall, an arbitrary circumstance that all the intelligence and dexterity Caleb had couldn’t overcome.
It felt like Jehovah’s gavel. It still does. From one sudden, baleful moment I was alone, completely isolated in the world, left to contemplate the meaning of life when everything that made it worthwhile was, in an instant, gone.
How does a person reconcile such things? I’ve never figured that out; I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. Some people can talk themselves into being assuaged by the illusion of some sort of cosmic grand plan. But I can’t.
I’ve simply lived. Suicide, tempting as it may have been, wouldn’t have solved anything. Why would I do something that would rob me of the only thing I had left?
Memories.
So I live. Annie, as I said, came later. We were pals; we filled each others’ couples cards for a while and enhanced our time on Earth for the time we had together.
And then, naturally, she went away too. And those fools wanted me to give a speech, to celebrate a non-accomplishment, to feel proud of something I didn’t do anything to achieve. To pretend I was happy when I wasn’t.
Call me a cantankerous old coot if you want. A cold fish. Donne said no man is an island, but I doubt he went through anything like I did. Most days I can bury the bitterness in the realization that the only person I’d punish by lashing out would be me. Maybe I should have reached out to those around me, trusted in human nature enough to let the enveloping kindness of mankind’s fellowship help me heal. But all I can still hear is my father from way back, proclaiming evermore his favorite life-affirming mantra: God helps those who help themselves.
Do you really have to ask why I walked off that stage? Do you really wonder why I wanted to become another entirely different person?
**********
Rufus woke me. I think he (she?) started getting nervous watching me writhing and moaning in my easy chair.
I stood up, trying achingly to shake the cobwebs. My head felt leaden, my joints cracked and popped. Slowly reentering the present, I saw the clock above the mantle and remembered that I actually had something to do. Imagine that.
I volunteer at the soup kitchen here. Not the usual kind of activity I pursue to fill my time, monopolized as it is by virtue signalers and busy-bodies. I stick with it because lots of the do-gooders are young people. It’s how I met Misty and Blake. Aside from being a source of drumming up business for the clinic, as I said, I like being around idealistic, energetic, and, yes, relatively attractive, people. The heart hasn’t stopped beating yet.
I had a little over an hour until I was due, so I ate lunch. A more socially inclined person would probably wait to eat with the dilapidated denizens of the soup kitchen, like we were encouraged to do, but that was a bit much for me.
Getting to the soup kitchen near downtown involved having to drive, which made me a little nervous, because, at the moment, I didn’t have a driver’s license. I actually haven’t had one for years, or at least a real one, staying incognito as I have from civic authorities who could snoop into my occult background. But I’ve developed contacts who can supply me with a facsimile, since the internet is fairly rife with such black market sites. And I drive like someone half my age, which is to say, like a turtle. Through the years I’ve only been pulled over once, an unfortunate event which prompted an immediate evacuation from Dayton, Ohio, where I was living at the time. Which was too bad; I actually liked Dayton.
I’d just have to be careful. After a disturbingly long interval to recycle my meal (ie.: go to the bathroom) I started heading over.
Parking was packed. Inside it was chaotic, flurries of bustling biddies dashing about helter-skelter, setting tables, preparing the meal. A couple of young men were hustling here and there, no young ladies (sigh) that I could see. I was starting to dread that I’d come and was mulling a possible exit, when one of the biddies accosted me and tied an apron around me, saying, “Thank goodness you’re here, Mr. Johnson! It’s going to be busy today; disability checks were delayed by the holiday.”
This was Claire Dunaway, who was one of the nicer matrons of the volunteer crew. She had a nice smile, and she’d practically hugged me putting on the apron, so my resistance melted. She steered me to the kitchen where I assembled sandwiches for a while, sharing duties with Ethyl Winsett, who was not so nice and had no smile at all.
Once the meal line started, I got away from Ethyl and the sandwiches and found an easy place ladling gravy over mashed potatoes as the breadline passed. After saying “Gravy?” a thousand times and ladling scoopfuls into the allotted craters, my mind started to wander. I scanned the room of the downtrodden masses, some slumping at the tables looking morose and depressed, others all hopped up on who knows what. Almost all of them I’d seen many times before. Which made me wonder if the purported purpose of providing meals to tide people over merely to help them get back on their feet wasn’t a losing proposition.
Distracted by curmudgeonly musings, I suddenly heard my name barked out; “Horace!” I looked up to see a scowling patron across the counter from me, his gray, greasy tendrils of hair draping over a moth-eaten mouldy parka, his scraggly beard peppered with bread crumbs. He looked angry. Feeling undeservedly guilty, I was going to ask him what the problem was, but the line was crowded enough that he was quickly swept onwards towards the desserts.
All at once I felt distressingly discombobulated. Horace? I haven’t gone by Horace for ages! Horace was my birth-given name, back during a time when it didn’t sound like some corny outdated throwback to the 1800’s. I’d long since opted for less unusual, less conspicuous names, such as Bill, which was my current alias.
And who was that indignant indigent? In that weird deja-vu way that I’m often subject to, he seemed hauntingly familiar, not from anytime recently, but somewhere from the murky depths of the past.
Struggling to concentrate on the mechanics of dispensing gravy while racking my memory, it struck me at once. It was Roswell James! Under his pervading coat of grime his face was the spitting image of the former senior law partner I’d had when I first started practicing. Did he have an English accent? He’d only said my name, so I couldn’t tell. Watching him walk to a table I noticed he limped, like Roswell had from an old polo accident. But mostly it was something undefined, descended from the inner instinct I’d unnervingly acquired that told me some folks were really random reincarnations from my past.
Maybe it was the nightmare I’d had earlier, but the mystery was too much for me to ignore. As the flow of patrons started to wane, I sidled over to Claire, who was supervising the food line, and asked if I could take a break. Of course, she cooed, patting my hand, which sent a disconcerting little tingle to my middle. Not going there, I had to remind myself.
I shuffled to the bathroom, not out of any sense of urinary urgency, but to collect my thoughts. Roswell was one of the tragic figures from my past. He was essentially a mentor for me in the big Cincinnati law firm I joined out of school. Intelligent to a fault, he tutored me for the bar, and guided me through the initial uncertainty of trying cases. He steered me to some of the civil rights cases that weren’t so popular with other partners, largely related to his prosecution of a local cabal who were running an abusive string of orphanages for black children in the city. Unfortunately the restless energy that characterized him was eventually explained by a raging cocaine habit, and his altruistic racial crusade ended up being a heinous cover for outsourcing some of the orphans, boys and girls alike, to a local sex ring. Not surprisingly, Roswell hung himself in prison. As shocked and dismayed as anyone, I still couldn’t forget the shrouded vestiges of his better side, the unselfish kindness he bestowed during a difficult time for me. Ever after, though, I approached people more warily, able to grant them leniency for their good qualities but with an underlying cynicism about what their true motivations might be. Probably most lawyers and social workers become like this. It’s why I changed my legal emphasis to contract law.
In any case, after standing at the urinal for an unnaturally long time, I wandered back to the lunchroom. Steeling myself to join the diners, I grabbed a cup of the split pea soup. Scanning the crowd for my target, not easy since gray, greasy locks weren’t out of fashion in this crowd, I worked my way to his table. Uneasily addressing the elderly dowager seated next to him, I sheepishly queried whether I might sit there. Resignedly, thankfully, she silently shifted over on the bench, clearing a space next to him.
A new problem soon overtook me; how to casually initiate a conversation while holding my breath. His odious bouquet was overwhelming, a noxious combination of street filth, cigarette smoke, and human wastes. I set my soup down and blinked tears from my eyes. Rotating my head away and inhaling deeply, I turned back and plunged in, “Excuse me, I was just wondering. I was serving the gravy in the line, and you called me Horace.” Struggling to keep eye contact through blurry tears, I went on, “Why did you call me Horace?’
He turned midbite, a tendril of custard from a chocolate eclair dangling from his beard. Eyeing me suspiciously, spraying shrapnel from his eclair, he rasped, “I didn’t call you Horace, you numbskull! I called you a horse’s ass! You got gravy all over my rolls! I just put honey on them and you went and ruin’t them!” With finality he dipped his head back to his tray, back to working on the variety of pastries he had piled on his plate. He shifted away from me as if to reemphasize that the conversation was over.
Not heartbroken over that message, I promptly sat up and acquiesced to forgoing further efforts. Dutifully taking my untouched soup to the dirty dish tray, I pondered the brief exchange.
There was no English accent, that was sure. His demeanor certainly wasn’t the kindly, supportive, patriarchal manner of the Roswell I recalled. His garb was polar opposite of the sartorial flair of the British expatriate.
But I couldn’t shake it. For a brief moment I made eye contact, and the look in his eyes was unmistakable. And numbskull was one of Roswell’s favorite slanders he liked to launch at defendants or anyone he found disfavor with. And….as usual, there was something indefinable.
In a bit of a daze, I hung on for the rest of the meal service. Why, I wondered, did I have these ‘visitations?’ Was it me going batty, succumbing to senile delusions? Was it real? I felt myself to be a sober-minded person. Neither conclusion was reassuring. Was it related to being, for all intents and purposes, a freak of nature, some sort of immortal hobgoblin being punished for living a life longer than any human should be entitled to?
Finally, after another couple of hours, during the majority of which I sat down in a corner of the kitchen mutely alone while the others wiped tables and piled the dirty dishes, I untied my apron, and made my way home.
I felt drained. On the way to the parking garage, I wandered by one of the many antique malls that pepper the downtown storefronts. On the sidewalk in front of one was a motorcycle, a beautifully restored Indian leaning rakishly near the curb. There was a laminated flyer hanging from the handlebars; it said “Buy me in time for the Freedom Ride!” Bending over, I glanced at it, intrigued. Apparently a local group of bikers was going to head to Washington DC in a show of support for veterans, both living and those no longer alive.
I straightened up and stared at the bike. There were few things in life that I really wanted to do that I felt I hadn’t experienced. I never wanted to sky dive. I hadn’t felt the need to travel to every corner of the earth just to say I’d been there. But riding a motorcycle, enjoying the rebel freedom of the road, was a subliminal desire that circumstances never conspired to allow me. I didn’t need the leather, or the beer belly, or the biker babe with her arms encircling my waist. I just felt captivated by the idea of speed, freedom, and independence that a motorcycle seemed to uniquely encapsulate.
But being a dad, being a husband, and, after that, being too old, always intruded. ‘Oh, well,’ I thought. I knew I couldn’t console myself by thinking, ‘Someday.’ I’m not psychotic. But even seeing that cherry relic of a bike lifted my spirits.
**********
The psychological boost didn’t last long. As I drove home, I went through a back alley to avoid more trafficked areas where police were more likely. There I saw a huddled form splayed out on the pavement beside a restaurant dumpster. While nondescript among the homeless, the threadbare overcoat covering the unmoving heap I recognized immediately; it was Roswell’s!
Veering away and decelerating to avoid hitting him, I slowed to a crawl as I passed. Yep, it was him. His oily hair was strewn over an old pizza box. His face was covered, for some reason, by an old potato sack. The dirty bare soles of his feet were visible through his mismatched boots. Lying fetally, he was motionless.
While never fully stopping, I tried to detect whether his chest was rising and falling. At first I tried telling myself I saw movement, but I didn’t. I scanned the nearby garbage for wine bottles, or needles, some explanatory paraphernalia that would, maybe illogically, reassure me.
Eventually I got to the end of the alley, and faced the decision. Maybe I kidded myself briefly that I would get out, hold my nose and shake him, or call 911 on my phone, or try to find a policeman.
But I knew I was going to drive on. I mean, I was incognito; I had my own welfare to consider. I quickly, unmindfully buried any feeling of culpability and turned left.
On the drive and after I got home I battled all sorts of reprehensible self-judgments. As well, I juggled with immoral justifications that popped into my head, such as the relative value of different people’s lives, and whether some fates are worse than death. Eventually I ate dinner and tried to distract myself by watching an old movie, I think it was Caddyshack (I can’t even remember. Am I getting that old?), something inanely out of context to the morbidly disturbing events of the day.
**********
The next day I did something wholly uncharacteristic for me; I slept in. Not surprisingly, I hadn’t rested well, tossing fitfully, getting up more than once to pee. Though none of my established nightmare scenarios had descended, random snippets of bizarre phantasms peppered the brief intervals of actual sleep I’d had: Janice and I holding hands with black orphans leading them on a field trip to the Ohio Supreme Court, flickering images of Claire Dunaway on a deserted isle holding out a mai-tai with a come-hither leer on her face but turning into Ethyl Winsett the moment I dragged my dilapidated dory onto the beach. And those are just the ones I can remember. No wonder my brain couldn’t find refuge in slumber.
I might well have slept until noon if I hadn’t been shockingly aroused by loud pounding on my front door. My heart thundered and I shot upright to sitting, eyes bulging, holding a twisted sheet and searching for my blanket, which was haphazardly strewn on the floor. Trying to reorient, thoughts of the police catching up with me flooded into my head, though for exactly what I wasn’t sure. Rifling mentally through the possibilities, my anxiety calmed a bit hearing a youthful, though somewhat burly-sounding voice calling out from my porch, “Mr. Johnson, are you there? I need to talk to you.”
Given the latent sense of reproachful sneakiness I felt, no chance would I slink under the sheet to avoid whoever was at my door. Throwing a robe over me, I warily went out to the great room and peered through the window panels of my door, trying to see if it was someone I might know.
No. Not even anyone remotely recognizable. From what I could see, it looked like a linebacker wearing a dress was waiting for me. Prisms of pink polka dots and bright red tights refracted through the bevels of the glass. One side of the head was shaved while the other hung with dirty blonde dreadlocks. Black lipstick and heavy eyeshadow obscured my attempt to recognize who, or what, exactly this was. A medieval looking spike projected menacingly through the septum of the nose.
But I’d already shown myself; no going back now. Pushing Rufus aside, I opened the door a smidge. “Hi. Can I help you?” I asked, trying to sound as offhanded as I could.
The boy, for, to me, despite the garb and the various accouterments, my exceptionally longstanding experience with human beings in general told me, still, this was a boy, said, “Yes, Mr. Johnson. It’s my grandfather. He had a stroke.”
It took me a second to make the connection. Then I realized….this was Sam’s grandson, or….whoever (I know, be nice).
And then….Sam. Poor Sam!
Okay, sure he wasn’t my model for stimulating conversation, but he was my friend. Swirling emotions overtook me, confusion over the grandson, concern for Sam, my arousal from a disorienting night. All of it was dizzying.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, a maudlin phrase that I felt couldn’t fully reflect my sorrow. “How bad is it?” I tried to appear unruffled, searching for a spot to look at him so that it didn’t seem like I was staring stupidly. I settled on his eyes, shrouded though they were in makeup.
“Pretty bad,” he (they? No, I’m too old, I couldn’t make my brain speak that way) said morosely, a subtext of guilt suffusing his expression. “They don’t think he’s going to make it.”
The boy’s inner sadness was easily discernable, unfeigned and nearly gut-wrenching. I wondered, did his sudden appearance have anything to do with Sam having a stroke? I doubted it, but obviously the boy couldn’t reject the concurrence. At once, discordant appearances aside, I felt for him as a fellow human, the two of us commiserating together in a tragedy that touched us personally.
“He asked for you before he stopped being able to talk,” he went on. “That’s why I came over.” He looked down at the doormat. “Sorry to bother you.”
Sam’s ailment aside, I felt more sorry for the boy then. His courtesy and humility were achingly relatable. All his desperate attempts to distinguish himself socially seemed suddenly sort of silly in the context of a life-altering calamity. Seeking to console him, I thought briefly of offering a hug before reaching out my hand for him to shake. “I appreciate your coming. Sam is a good man, and you seem like a nice….person.”
He looked at my hand, and then, as if it were perhaps an unfamiliar gesture, shook it. “Thank you, Mr. Johnson. My grandfather always said nice things about you.”
He turned heel and went down the porch steps back to the street, walking awkwardly in blue satin pumps. My thoughts shifted back to Sam then. Obviously I was going to visit him, whether he’d asked for me or not.
I went back inside and got ready, bolting a muffin and coffee before heading out. Rufus shadowed me while I got dressed; I was so distracted I didn’t immediately catch the accusatory look on his dogface (believe me, it was there), wondering why his breakfast was so late (thankfully he’d mastered the doggie door, or I’d have an ‘accident’ to clean up too). Trepidation shadowed my every move, driving again, wondering what I’d find upon seeing Sam.
It was a lot for an old guy to handle, even one only as old as I pretended to be.
**********
The sepulchral whoosh of the hospital’s front doors escorted me through the entrance. The funereal quiet of the lobby seemed an appropriately dreary backdrop. My eyes swiveled across the lobby, trying to find where to ask about how I might find Sam. I settled on a friendly looking lady sitting behind a small desk off to the side.
“Excuse me,” I said softly, glancing at her name tag that said Donna below Hospital Volunteer. “Do you know where I could find a patient? Sam Ostrow?”
Smiling graciously, she glanced down to a clipboard. Sifting the pages, she murmured, “Ostrow, Ostrow,” before jabbing her finger at one of the pages and pipping merrily, “Yes, here he is.”
A pouty frown then overtook her pleasant demeanor. She smiled weakly looking up. “Mr. Ostrow is on comfort care.” Pausing a bit to give me a chance to absorb the significance of that, she slipped back to her baseline attitude of compassionate cheerfulness, chirping, “You’ll find that on the third floor. Just ask the girls if you’re allowed to visit.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled, turning towards the elevators. I wasn’t sure what exactly comfort care meant, but by the shadow that briefly obscured Donna’s seemingly perseverant perkiness it didn’t seem a good omen.
Another depressing whoosh from the elevator ushered me to comfort care. It looked like an ordinary hospital ward softened by a lot of homey domestic touches. None of the usual rush of nurses and aides reigned; the antiseptic smell of the hospital was replaced by a cloying odor of human decay masked by pumpkin spice. A ministerial silence loomed.
Uneasily I made my way to the central desk area. A doughy older Hispanic lady dressed in lavender scrubs was reading a magazine. “Pardon me,” I asked. “Would I be able to visit Sam Ostrow?”
She looked up mechanically, then typed something into the computer behind her. After reading something quickly, she glanced at a clipboard laying further down the counter. “You must be Mr. Johnson,” she said in a sweetly melodic voice. “His family hasn’t gotten here yet, but you’re welcome to visit. He’s in 311. Do you want me to come with you?”
This answered two questions for me, since I expected to meet up with a gathering of Sam’s family at the bedside. Apparently not.
She was so pleasant, so sympathetically warm-hearted to the apprehension she inherently knew I must be feeling, that I almost said yes. How nice it was that women seemed to fill a majority of these roles; no man, no matter how kindly inclined, could match the tender elegance a woman graced any situation with. How nice it might be to have her soft femininity by my side.
But no, I needed to see Sam for myself. Thanking her, I searched the room numbers and shuffled heavily to Sam’s room.
Bright sunlight permeated the room. Sam lay cradled in the pillowy softness of a large hospital bed. Approaching gingerly, the devastation of the stroke was immediately apparent; half of Sam’s face drooped limply, a small bit of drool dribbling on one side. His expression was a macabre mimic of his usually genial mien. He looked to be resting peacefully, yet his good eye was staring upward, scanning an unseen void.
Now what? His grandson said he’d stopped speaking. I hadn’t fully prepared myself for how this would work when I got here. Could he still hear me, understand me? Could he nod his head, participate in this visitation in any manner? Gratefully I wasn’t that familiar with people that had strokes before. But now, confronted with being someone who was supposed to be supportive, I didn’t want to be an awkward detriment in what looked to be his final hours.
There was a chair by the bedside, turned to look up towards his head. I padded quietly to sit there. Uneasily, I reached out to touch the hand that was resting nearby, gently placing mine over his.
Thankfully he didn’t flinch. Instead a half-smile softened his features. “Horace,” he rasped. “Is that you?”
Struggling to keep myself grounded, I sat unmoving, stunned a bit, forcing myself to keep my hand over his.
But I couldn’t have been more confused. First, he was talking; I thought the stroke had robbed him of that. And second, he called me Horace. In no way had I ever apprised Sam of any inkling of my extended existence, any suggestion of what basically amounted to a prior life. How would he know anything about me being Horace?!
To keep from rippling the waters, and also from a feeling of eerie curiosity, I simply said, “Yes Sam, it’s me.”
Sam’s hand moved then, turning over to grab mine and squeeze. His crooked face beamed a bit more brightly. “Hey, Horace,” he said scratchily after clearing a little phlegm. “Remember that time in Manila, when you got so trucked up on Mojo we almost got you a Hawaiian girl tattoo on your arm?”
Okay. Wow. Yes, I remembered. Before we were sent into the jungle our squadron bivouacked in Manila. The local drink was Mojo, an alcoholic punch so sweet it masked the strength of the booze, so it was the source of lots of young men being dragged off to tattoo parlors and whorehouses for episodes of lamentable revelry. Lots of monumental hangovers and virginal abandonments were fueled by Mojo.
But, again, how would Sam know about all that? I was utterly befuddled. Did having a stroke give some people psychic powers? Was it some sort of supernormal clairvoyant hallucination that allowed him to pierce the crannies of my cranial vault and reilluminate dusty corners of my memory? Unless……
Feeling a bit silly, I cast my line. “Yeah, Elijah, I remember.” Then I waited, seeing if Sam’s face was going to magically metamorphosize into the boy I saw shot down next to me ages ago in the Philippines.
It didn’t. “Hell,” Sam garbled, his speech somewhat affected by the stroke, “I’m not Elijah now.” Then his face clouded a tad. “But for some reason I can remember.”
Nothing about this was making sense to me. We both sat there together, the air of puzzlement misted through the sunbeams. Sam now seemed almost as confused as I was.
“I guess I musta been Elijah before,” he said. “But you’re still Horace! How the hell’d that happen, you reckon?!”
As if confessing, I just mumbled, “I don’t know, Sam.”
Smiling a little, a smirk of transcendent knowing spreading across his half-face, he said mysteriously, “I guess you just never felt The Tap.”
**********
There were a thousand questions I could have asked at that point, but I started with the obvious. “What’s the tap, Sam?”
Staring up to the infinite Sam’s face radiated a beatific glow. “The Tap is what you feel just before you die.”
He sighed. And paused, leaving me to wonder if he was going to die right then and leave me hanging.
But no. “The Tap is what tells you everything is going to be okay.” Sigh again. “That there’s something else out there for you…..you know, when you’re done being you.”
Considering myself an analytical person, this was all a little cryptic for me. “What do you mean, Sam?”
A bit less airily, his face contorted in his effort to explain. “Oh, you still don’t want to go; if you’re suffering, or if you have pain, you still feel it. But you’re not as scairt, not afraid of not knowing. You know something else is coming.”
My thoughts drifted to my first wife Chloe. “Does everyone feel the tap, Sam?”
“Oh, yeah,” he rasped immediately. “All those little kids that get shot in their school, or some young couple killed by a drunk driver….they all feel The Tap. You know, just before.” Dreamily, he said, “Time just kinda stands still a moment, gives you a chance to, well, I guess, ….see.” He smiled at the ceiling. “Makes the Universe seem a little more fair, don’t it?”
It seemed so nice the way Sam explained it, even though I didn’t really understand or believe anything he was saying, that I mumbled, “Yes, it does, Sam.”
Yet here he was, talking, alluding back to a time he had no business knowing. I couldn’t just dismiss all this as the senseless blather of someone in the throes of death. “What do you mean by ‘there’s something else out there for you’, Sam?”
His half features scrunched in the effort to explain. “It’s kinda like what them Hindoos say, I guess. The Tap lets you know you’ll come back. That you got a spirit that’s gonna survive, and that they’ll find a place for you.”
This was hardly clarifying for me. I’ve always been pretty uncomfortable in the metaphysical realm, had always avoided pretending I had any insight into things it seemed people were never meant to know. Living as long as I had, I figured I’d gotten more than my fair shake at life; I had no business worrying or complaining about what might come next.
But, of course, this was all irresistibly intriguing. Even alluring. After such an unnaturally long number of years, I’d pretty much seen and done everything there was to see and do in life. Life was, truth be told, sometimes kind of tedious at this point for me. It seemed exciting to get a chance to be or do some different things. To wipe the slate clean and start over again.
Just then, though, Sam’s face contorted again. “I don’t get it, though,” he said. “For some reason I’m stuck.”
Involuntarily I squeezed his hand. “What do you mean ‘stuck,’ Sam?”
Seemingly perturbed, he inhaled deeply. “I mean, I felt it a little bit ago, laying here. You know…..The Tap. Usually you just go to the next place. Nothing tells you anything about how the whole system works. You don’t remember what you were before. You don’t get any clue about becoming somebody or something else.”
Raising his voice a little he went on, “Now don’t get me wrong. It matters what you were before, if you was nice or if you were a real jerk. Now that I’m stuck, I get that now.” With apparent finality he whispered, “But usually you don’t know.”
Then for the first time he turned his head towards me, and nodded knowingly. “I guess they’re just waiting for the right place for me.”
While I was sorting through the options of how to get him to help me, somehow, to understand all this, the smile came back to his face. “Whoo boy, does it matter! Like all them GI’s, like me, who get shot, or die when they’re just pups, they all get to come back. As people! They get themselves a great life next time, a gorgeous wife, great kids. Just like I did! But, like, say, the Nazi’s, or them guys who shoot up a school or a church; they come back as flies, time after time, eating dogshit, getting squashed by rolled up newspapers, coming back as flies again every time.” He chuckled then. “Hitler, boy! He’s down at the bottom of the ocean, where there ain’t no light, no oxygen, colder’n hell, stuck eating dead whales and all the nasty crap down there. Every time he dies he comes back the same again!”
Beaming with satisfaction, Sam settled his head into the pillow then. His voice calmed, he mused, “Seeing as how I just got The Tap, I wonder what I’m going to come back as now?” Smiling more brightly, as if he were a child, he gushed, “I hope I get me a turtle.” He sighed. “I always wanted to be a turtle.”
At that point I felt maybe a thousand emotions, sad that Sam had gotten The Tap, but happy that some sort of system of everlasting reward and punishment was out there, maybe, that hopefully applied to all the people I thought I’d lost in my life.
And yet, so much remained unsettled. I let go of Sam’s hand and asked him, “Why do you think I’ve never felt the tap, Sam?”
He turned back to the ceiling, as if the answer to that might be in the sky. “That’s a good question,” he began. Moving his jaws as if in a gnawing motion, he postulated, “Maybe it’s that you just don’t care enough, Bill.”
**********
Later, after Sam died, I wandered to the big park with the rose garden across the street, sitting alone at a picnic bench in the shadow of a huge stately oak tree. And thought.
Mostly I brooded about the second to last thing Sam said before he passed. “Sometimes, Bill,” he declared from the depths of his newfound empyrean wisdom, “you just gotta put yourself on the line. You gotta care enough about the lives of the people around you to risk giving up your own.”
He smiled at me then, warm despite his facial deformity, as if to soften the passed judgment. “By the way,” he said, “that guy was dead laying there. There wasn’t anything you could have done.” Then came a big expiring breath. And Sam was no more.
Slumped under the oak, of all the whirlwind of emotions I felt, mostly I felt cheated. I hadn’t even had a chance to respond to what felt to me to be a divine proclamation of guilt.
Wasn’t I there when you, or the person you were last time, got shot? Wasn’t my butt ‘on the line’ then?
But tendrils of shame beleaguered my protest. I wasn’t a combatant in the war, like Sam, or Elijah; I was a medic. My family had concocted a whole scheme about our being Quakers (we weren’t), just to keep me out of the trenches. Lessons of the horror of battle we had been taught in school about the Civil War had given me second thoughts, after I’d gotten caught up in the fury to enlist with a group of my friends who all wanted to be war heroes like Teddy. I begged my father, who was a board member for the local recruitment center, to help me undo my enlistment. It had gone too far by then, but he was able to amend my file to conjure the fallacy that I was religiously prohibited from inflicting bloodshed. The need for soldiers was too great after the Filipino uprising to avoid going overseas, but as a medic I was insulated from the most dangerous service. I only happened to see Elijah get shot when I had to dash to the front to recover another soldier, who, luckily for me at least, had also already died. Terrified by that one brief encounter with death, when I raced back behind the lines, I purposefully stepped on the bayonet of another fallen GI, self-mutilating a small part of myself to save the whole.
Anyway, I mulled, there have been plenty of other times I’ve put myself on the line for the sake of the souls who enriched my life. Plenty of times I ‘cared.’ Pondering this, seeking self-pitying solace, basking in the cool shade of the arboreal patriarch and listening to the soft rustle of the leaves, my mind unwittingly struggled.
I wasn’t there when Chloe died. I was out of town for a case.
I never knew how or when my son died. I just let him drift, and assumed he’d overdosed until the authorities confirmed it for me long after I’d given him up for dead. I could have tried to intervene; for years, before I’d pushed it to the back of my mind, I debated with myself that maybe I should have scoured skid row, plunged into the dark streets where the addicts prowled, despite the danger it might have entailed, taking definitive fatherly action to save my son. But my own father’s mantra that echoed evermore in my head justified my passivity, and I let him go.
I knew my daughter Chloe was caught up with a free-swinging crowd. It was the 20’s, the Jazz era, a time of speakeasies and flappers. Permissiveness was vogue, discipline was passe. Parents stopped being parents then; prevailing wisdom said we should live our own lives, primarily in pursuit of illegal booze and sexual freedom. Janice always lamented afterward that we didn’t ground our daughter, keep her chained in the house like it was some sort of convent. But all I could remember later was thinking about what my coworkers would have thought about that.
I could have told Annie the truth before we were married.
I knew Caleb was a beginner as a pilot; I knew he probably didn’t have enough experience to handle much beyond a routine flight, not something, for instance, like a trip into the mountains. I could have put my foot down, even though he was a grown man and my family was all for having an adventure. And even if I didn’t know anything about flying, I could have just been there with them. I could have stayed with my loved ones. It was a holiday weekend; no one expected me to finish that contract right away.
I could have put myself on the line, just for the sake of being together, of spending a little more of what I believed back then was my limited time on Earth to be with my beautiful Angel.
But I didn’t. I didn’t do any of those things.
God helps those who help themselves.
**********
The cloud of self-recrimination turned the afternoon cold. Somberly, I made my way back to the car, getting ready to drive home.
But for some reason the mechanics of the drive failed me. Instead of turning left in the direction of my home, I got myself stuck in the mandatory right turn lane, which steered me towards downtown.
Looking for distraction, maybe, a shift in the sullen mood of death and dishonor that had descended, suddenly it hit me.
The Freedom Ride.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t death-defying, but for a guy as old as I am, it certainly felt like throwing caution to the wind.
The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. Here was a chance to ‘care,’ to put myself out there for something besides myself. I’d always felt awe for veterans, who by definition put themselves on the line for causes larger than themselves.
And the bike! That old Indian was the very personification of rebellious disregard for safety. The low rumble of the engine, the roar of the throttle, would speak volumes to everyone on the road that here was a guy who didn’t care about risk, who craved freedom over security.
As I made my way to the antique mall where the bike had been parked, distracted by bravado, I cringingly remembered a critical logistical hurdle: Rufus!
I couldn’t just abandon Rufus. He was a dog, sure, but the last thing I was going to do in the mindset of recent events was to think of selfishly dumping my only claim to what I could call family.
But after visiting the vendor who sold me the bike, he reassured me that I could get a sidecar, or maybe hitch a little trailer to the back, to bring my canine pal along. Lots of bikers, especially older ones, found ways to bring their pets with them, he said. He told me funny stories about how many doodles and French bulldogs had invaded Sturgis last year.
So I was all set. I paid the man, and made arrangements to pick the bike up sometime later at a storage facility he would move it to. He gave me a flier for the Freedom Ride, with information about how to sign up and what the ride would entail.
From the depths of culpability and depression, I was near giddy driving home. I had a purpose, and a deliverance, a way to atone for whatever celestial sins I’d committed over the long, long course of my lifetime.
That night I slept great, no dreams or visitations to haunt me. I even let Rufus nestle into the big comforter at the foot of my bed, something I never had allowed before.
Tomorrow, for the first time in a long, long, mundane lifespan, would be a new day.
**********
The next morning was warm, steamy heat permeating throughout the house despite the ceiling fans I’d left whirring all night. I got up early as usual, taking my coffee to the front porch, settling into the cushioned Adirondack chair I always sit in and, ostensibly, readying myself to read.
But the sun was just breaching the horizon behind the neat little cottages across the street, filtering an azure-tangerine glow through the towering firs, contrasting artistically with their rich, dark green foliage. Droplets of color from blossomed tulips and scattered rhododendrons variegated the palette of the dawning scene like gems. Morning dew glittered over all as the light evolved, dappling the grass with tiny rainbows and radiating a pleasant coolness to the stifling warmth. Through gaps in the foreground, snippets of snow-covered Cascades pierced the distant horizon, testimony to proximate geologic grandeur. Unseen behind me I envisioned fog blanketing the nearby coast, permeated with a salty tang, a muted soundtrack of squawking seagulls and encroaching rollers rumbling through sea rocks and driftwood.
And I thought to myself: is this the punishment for all my transgressions?
Maybe the best thing about age is the appreciation for the sublime that comes naturally, the ability to see the beauty in the mundane. During my time in Oregon I’ve been intrigued by the popularity of hiking as a pursuit for young people, the need to outdo each other in pursuit of the perfect scenic checklist they can document for their friends online. Given the hassle involved in reaching evermore out of reach sites to out-compete their fellow hikers, I’ve learned to appreciate the simplicity of just walking around my neighborhood, or taking a stroll downtown, or to a park, or by the river. I can sit outside and hear birds chirping, crows cawing, the wind whispering through trees, and I’m charmed. A shimmering reflection in a rain puddle is captivating. I feel sorry for the people around me with their ear buds in, listening probably to some inane podcast about mindfulness, or those tracking their steps on an app while chattering on speaker with someone during their walk in the park. I mean, it’s a walk in the park; what more do you want?
Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking of Sam as I was sitting there. I was so used to seeing him hobbling up the sidewalk, popping in for what he’d call a ‘bull session.’ And now I’d never see that again. I dreamt an image of a stony-faced turtle cruising the currents, pecking at seagrass, hovering majestically over an oceanic panorama. I hoped, if he had to be hatched, that he’d be the one in a million who made it on his scurrying dash for the water.
Thinking of Sam, though, brought back the guilt of his inadvertent condemnation. Apparently living to a superhuman age and being blessed with this, submersion in a natural world that could be nothing short of Eden, was the sentence for not ‘caring.’ For not putting myself ‘on the line.’
And all the bitterness of feeling accused left me then; all I felt was confused.
Was I really that bad? Wasn’t losing the people I loved punishment enough?
Even if I knew they could come back to the most idyllic existence possible, I felt little comfort in that. I wanted them, the ones I loved. Imagining Angel as a river otter gamboling through the ripples and tumbling playfully with her mates didn’t make me feel better.
And then, relaxing in my chair, deliberating great concepts of beauty and guilt and eternal punishment and reward, I felt it.
And I knew then I was never, ever going to pick up that bike.
