A gift at the last hour

The doctor made it pretty clear. He was a free man. It was the greatest gift he had ever received, the gift of life and even then as he walked out of the door at the Morningstar Rehabilitation Ranch in Exchange City, he could sense that he would make the trip back – he was always going back. He looked up and allowed the gusts to meet him, breathing in the light air which made no particular scent but in his mind it was May in the gardens. It was beautiful.

He looked over to see his friend, who was standing beside him and smiling.

“What a great day it is, Gus. A day like no other,” exalted the now free man.

“What will you do with such a gift?” asked Gus, his eyes staring intensely in to the eyes of his friend not letting go for a wink or an instance.

“Seems to me such great gifts should be paid back in full,” the man said, tipping his head to bid Gus adieu and walking down the street, who in return performed a little jig and tipped his head.

“I’m certainly checking out,” he called back, “and don’t worry, I haven’t pocketed the pills!”

“Oh good,” cried out Gus, “more for me.”

As he left, he noticed the wonderful frozen grass lying stoically like plastic Lego. It made him think of curiosities he had often held as an older child but forgot some time after he became a teen. He thought about professional wrestling and the characters that filled the inauthentic profession. He thought of storylines that did not add up nor found their finish. He thought of the way old wrestlers were young, and elder wrestlers were dead. And he soon felt an inward exit of this tired thought leaving his mind by way of his heart and out his chest.

A much more modern thought occurred as he now pondered what made man vulnerable. Was it the weakness in the knees for a good woman? Was it the drive to succeed where others have failed? Or was it the infinite fight to stay straight in a zigzag world. He couldn’t conjure up the answers as he hadn’t been able to do so as a child but he knew he could spend the rest of the day thinking about the question. It was in his nature to dwell on such black hole thoughts that tended to suck him in. He rejected this notion.

First the flight. Now it might have seemed odd for most to have planned so meticulously well that when the man left Morningstar he would actually have a plane ticket in hand but the man always knew what he was going to do, and he had repeated it many times to his doctors who very much disrespected him during his stay at the Ranch and spent quite a bit of time scrutinizing his ability to make things right. They would often say such curious things as “Try to relax Jeffery,” and “Think of something else, for that obsession is the source of your pain.” But Jeffery, yes that was his name, always remained focused on the task at hand. He would not forgo those thoughts and what was needed to be done, how simply he could pull it off just so long as he reminded himself every day that it was he who must make things right. Not the doctors. That required getting on a flight as soon as he got off the Ranch. That required movement.

“Yes but sir we land planes 99.9 per cent of the time, if not better than that. Really you should sit down, we’ll be playing the movie very soon,” Rebecca said to Jeffery.

“Really, so when you say 99.9 per cent if not better you don’t have a convincing number to quote and so you think I would be better served by your guesstimate?”

Rebecca pushed Jeffery kindly towards his seat and smiled, closing the sliding window next to his seat and leaning in to him.

“I suppose you may be correct. But I suspect this flight is not doomed,” said Rebecca.

“Quite right and I will now sit down as you like but I haven’t pocketed the peanuts. There they are sitting in your tray,” Jeffery pointed out the obscure truth.

Then the landing, which Jeffery freely admitted to the stewardess he was none too comfortable with. In no uncertain terms he spent a good twenty minutes discussing with Rebecca that the landing was much different than the departure because the plane was trying to get off the ground not drive in to it. As he knew from experience, suicide is not in the jump but in the landing.

“Sir, are you alright?” asked Rebecca in a soft panic as the plane took one of its many scoops of air towards the ground.

“I don’t think there is a problem,” said Jeffery, his eyes glancing at her face, obvious with fear.

Sitting uncomfortably in his window seat as the plane began its landing pattern, he looked over to the world below and thought how precious and innocent it looked from way up high and how it could all end so quickly for those… no it would all be well. He closed his eyes and thought of what faced him when he opened his eyes, left the plane and headed to his destination. He expected to see the flower-shaped door knocker glistening in the winter sun, the oak door still a little battered from dog scratches and general decay. The front foyer would smell like wet dog just like it would in the summer when Crispo was lying in his hamper waiting for a walk. To his left he would see that clock in a square open box clicking away the hour. And he would call out “hello” and she would say “yes” and he would say “it’s me” and she would say “I can’t believe it.” How lovely it would all be, Jeffery thought waking up to hear the tires of the plane screeching along the tarmac.

The taxi. He was a little taken aback by the smell, which seemed absent of the musky scent from taxis he used to take before his enrolment at the Morningstar. He began shifting a little around the back seat, massaging his closely chopped mane. He could feel each bristle flood against the webbing between his fingers. The sensitivity had him a bit discombobulated.

“Yes, sir. Where to?” Aqbal Amenjuwari asked exasperated by some sort of inconvenient wait.

“Uh, well of course to 343 is the number but the street… the steet…” Jeffery could recall the shape of the street where the little white bungalow stood, how it bent longingly away from the rest of the city and seemed to be cold towards the habitants who did not belong there. It was not a beautiful street laid with tall oak trees and lined with pleasant sidewalks with decent people. Instead he remembered an ugly street lined with pop cans and condoms and with a jigsaw puzzle sidewalk which fairly nefarious people used to grumble about making their way to the bus stop. But he wished it better and so in some spot in his brain it was so.

“Yes, sir?”

“Well, take me to Elba Cemetery,” Jeffery said irritably with knowledge that this was the way forward even though he hated to be stuck on any significant shift in his plan. Elba was the only place he could remember.

Elba Cemetary. Nothing is ever static. Bodies move, even in a cemetery and this was absolutely astonishing to Jeffery even though his doctors had warned him not to expect anything to be the same, that things would be evolutionary. How could anything remain as they were before the Ranch? Man became rot, rot became dust, dust became wind, and wind became life.

A gentle breeze did brush swiftly against Jeffery’s face as he sat against the hard, cold headstone of one William Swift. The headstone read:

Here lies the author of his own demise – ‘twas an author of lesser merit. 1927-1969

Jeffery ran his hard hands across the granite, each rock feeling powerful in his palm, the curvatures of the literary indents felt smooth to his coarse index and under the spell of the cemetery creep he felt quite at ease.

The tree. It stood no more than five feet from Swift’s grave and though it seemed absurd at the time that Jeffery would walk there and dig with his bare hands, it was exactly what he did, feeling an innate sense of obligation to do so. He began to pull at the loosened root, unconsciously digging after it had been pulled until his tired arms made contact with a wooden box. He opened it briefly and then shut it.

Taxi Cab. Aqbal was waiting patiently, he was a saint if not an angel to wait for Jeffery as he made his way around Elba. The driver said nothing of Jeffery’s dark arms and stained pants, only was he ready to go and where that place was that he would like to go.

“To the airport,” said Jeffery.

“Sir? I do not mean to question and it likely is not my business, but what are you doing flying to this city to dig in a cemetery only to pull out a small wooden box and then return to the airport. I am very curious…”

“I can see that,” said Jeffery, rubbing his face slowly with his right hand, unbothered by the smudging mess on his face.

“… tell me, sir, for curiosity sake, please good sir, can you quench my thirst for knowledge. Is it money, good sir?”

“No, no. Money is a cowboy, my good man – it rides us like horses, robs banks as it pleases and always disappears at night,” said Jeffery, grinning with a hint of unhappiness about Aqbal’s inquisition. “No, the contents inside are more valuable than that my good man.”

Aqbal seemed to have lost his zeal for the box after the answer and drove Jeffery back to the airport in silence.

Inside the airport. The buzz around the airport stripped Jeffery of his humour, frustrating and distracting as no other environment could. Standing in the check through, his mind opened to the possibility that he might be stuck there for hours, if not years – a silly extension yes, but not unheard of. In the Ranch he had heard from one of the inhabitants a story of a man who was left in the airport for three years, stuck in some sort of immigration limbo. At first, Jeffery was told, the man was just glad to be anywhere but where he came from. Watching people come and go, forced to sleep on the hard airport foam chairs, and eating gut wrenching food, Limbo Man had adjusted well. Soon, the airport management felt it could no longer support the man living there for free and they quickly put him to work cleaning toilets. To some it might have been indignant, but to Limbo Man it was the exact opposite, he felt he had become an extension of the airport family, glad to exist rather than sitting around as just another plastic plant in the waiting area. While most staff members enjoyed his company, and he worked hard, the fact that he worked without a union card immediately made Limbo Man an enemy of the workers union who took a hard line with management that he should be included in the union or be turfed from his job. When told he did not receive a cent for the work he did and hence could not make union dues, the union became outraged and soon ran to the newspapers telling a story of a man who had become a slave to the airport because of his immigration situation rather than a contributor in spite of it. Many workers ran to his side, while others called him a menace, and soon the airport staff was torn in two. However they clawed and mashed and screamed at each other, soon the staff was so involved in the fighting itself that they were not able to determine exactly why they were fighting in the first place. Politicians, lawyers and journalists and all sorts of society big wigs got involved and eventually the man, too, forgot why he was there. He had begun to feel very small in the airport. When the time came for investigators to ask why he was claiming refugee status, he said buoyantly that he wasn’t and gladly returned to whence he came.

Jeffery was not certain who had told him the story but it seemed to him that someone had told him this was authentic, and it was likely that whoever had told him about the story of Limbo Man was indeed far less important than the story itself.

“You are going to have to take those off, sir,” the security man said pointing at Jeffery’s shoes.

Shaking his head he removed his shoes, while his bag passed through the scanner box. The conveyer belt stopped at his bag, examining it thoroughly. Having pleased the hippopotamus of a man who always stood after the security scanner, Jeffery walked over to the end of the conveyer belt hoping that his bag would be returned without incident but as it came to him another hippo, this time a woman, asked for him to open the bag.

“What for?”

“The bag, sir… now the box.”

“But you cannot see inside. It is impossible, only the person who the box is meant for can see inside.”

“That is ridiculous sir. I insist you open that box or I will call for help,” the hippo woman said as if unsurprised by the argument or the circumstance they were in.

Jeffery pleaded further that the insides were not his to share and that if he was able to pass through without further interrogation, it would be best for all involved.

The female hippo looked over to the male hippo and both nodded their heads in sequence as if it were an animalistic language told only in body movements and grunts. Jeffery, feeling lost in this jungle of thought, began to fear that he would gladly rather return to Elba and spend time with the unknown authors rather than face further persecution. He was sure glad they were herbivores.

A larger man, the build of an Indian Elephant, powerfully walked over to where the hippo woman stood, shaking his head listening to her explanation and then slowly opening the bag himself.

Looking at Jeffery, he thrusted his hands in to Jeffery’s bag searching for the box, then pulling it out presented it to both Jeffery and the hippo lady and then slowly lifted the lid.

“Uh well, you really shouldn’t,” warned Jeffery.

“Uh well, I… my god. Here,” said the Elephant, placing the box back in Jeffery’s hands.

Jeffery nodded his head and moved on to the gate.

The flight part 2. No Rebecca and no calming influence at all. The plane dipped and dived ostensibly to avoid turbulence. Jeffery did not question this at all. He only sat back and listened to the plane struggle, cherishing the thoughts of opening the box.

The stop. Off the plane and in to a cab.

“Hey buddy, where to?”

Jeffery said calmly 343 Westview Lane. The road curved just like he remembered and the doorknocker was the same flower but there was no sun. There was no Crispo. He knocked three times on the door. At first there was nothing. Then Jeffery heard faint footsteps that grew louder until they approached the door. But no barking. No Crispo.

The door swung gently open. A round, vacant face opened the door. Jeffery could not understand. What was going on.

The hippo security guard responded: “it’s you boyo.”

Aqbal responded: “it’s definitely you boyo.”

Rebecca whispered in Jeffery’s ears: “it’s time to go home.”

“But I haven’t shown her the contents of my box.”

A man in a white lab coat stepped in where the vacant face person had stood. He spoke with a thick Swedish accent that calmed Jeffery even as he approached.

“The pills have not worked yet. We must have gotten the chemical balance wrong. Airplanes? A box? We can’t have them thinking they can fly out of here.”