Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  Forty Leap

  Ivan Turner

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

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  Chapter I

  My name is Mathew Cristian. I can’t really put a “how long ago” stamp on the story I’m about to tell because the date that it started doesn’t correspond with the time it took to reach its conclusion. A moment for me was mostly a moment. But sometimes it was much more. Sometimes it was a lifetime.

  I was thirty four years old when all of this started, or at least when I noticed it. It was a Thursday. I was a regular guy. Actually, I was so regular that I was irregular. I got up every morning, went to work, went home, went to bed, and repeated the process the next day. In between I ate meals, spoke with family, had many many boring weekends, and that’s it. I was a confirmed bachelor, not out of any sense of not wanting companionship, but because marriage seemed so out of reach to me that I just never even considered it.

  My adventure started in the most simple of all ways. It’s something that happens to everyone. Your alarm goes off in the morning. Let’s say it’s six o’clock. You turn it off and lay back down, just for a second. You don’t fall asleep and you’re just laying there for a second or two. Then you look back at the clock and it’s 6:02 or 6:03. What happened to those two or three minutes? Who knows? Your mind wandered and your whole sense of time became confused for just a couple of minutes. It happens to everyone.

  Unless you’re me.

  Unless it wasn’t just your sense of time that became confused but something far more fundamental.

  The first time it happened to me, I didn’t even notice it. I’m sure of it. It was probably just a couple of seconds or less. I lost them. Whoosh! They were just gone.

  The first time I noticed it was a whole different matter. On that Thursday. April 12, 2007.

  For one thing, I wasn’t in bed. When you’re in bed and sleepy, things just kind of slip by you. That wasn’t the case here. I was pouring myself a cup of coffee. It was 6:42 in the morning. No sooner had I tipped the pot then I noticed coffee all over the counter and all over the floor. The pot in my hand, still tipped, was empty. It was 6:43. You don’t think too hard about the ramifications of such an event when there’s hot coffee everywhere and you’ve got to get to work. You just kind of put the pot back into the machine, grab a bunch of paper towels, and start mopping. Later on, though, the whole of it can begin to dominate your thoughts, as it did mine. I began to wonder about what had happened. How long does it take to empty a pot of coffee? I can understand something like that happening if my mind began to wander, but I couldn’t remember anything. Not reality and not fantasy. I remember tipping the pot and I remember cleaning up the mess.

  I lost a minute.

  I have, had, two brothers. They are, were, both older than I was, or I should say they were born before I was, and they were very close to each other. Living in the city, I didn’t get out to see them often. They were about two hours through New Jersey and into Upstate New York. It wasn’t a bad trip, really. I used to take the bus because I didn’t have a car. The tickets were inexpensive and one of my brothers, usually Jeremy, always picked me up at the depot. We weren’t friends, we were family. And we all knew that family sticks together. I enjoyed my afternoons with my brothers and their families. It gave me a sense of something I had never had for myself.

  About three weeks after the first incident, on a Sunday, I took one of my day trips up to Jeremy’s for an afternoon with the family. Though our mother usually accompanied me on these trips, she had been feeling a little out of sorts that day so she had sent me off on my own. That was fine with me. My relationship with my mother was excellent. We often got together to have dinner or watch a movie or just discuss the world affairs. Being the only one of her sons living in the city, responsibility for her had fallen to me, but that was okay, too. Once in a while, though, it’s nice to have two hours to yourself just to read. For that trip, I had chosen a Rupert Oderick novel, his first, entitled Midshipmen. I had read and enjoyed it in high school.

  It was Wyatt who picked me up at the station that day. I don’t know why I remember it so well or even why it’s relevant to these pages, but details are important so I’ll write the ones I remember. Wyatt was 18 months younger than Jeremy, to the day, and he was four years my senior. I suppose that growing up with them could have been a lot worse. After all, they had had four good years together, learning to work as a team and then I came along, a tiny invader into their lives. They could have spent our years together at home torturing me into a psychiatrist’s couch, but they didn’t. In truth, they spent most of their time avoiding me, excluding me. It hurt when I was younger, but as I grew up, I began to realize that we had little in common. It wasn’t that they didn’t love me. They just didn’t want to play with me.

  Wyatt had his son with him that day. My nephew, Devin, was a sandy haired boy who looked a lot like his mom. In fact, he bore little resemblance to his dad’s square shoulders and boyish face. Devin, in fact, looked much older than his six years. He was a spectacular conversationalist and played Jeremy to a standstill in Chess. But he had little use for me and he sat in the back seat glaring at me through the mirror. He didn’t dislike me as much as he was just uncomfortable in my presence. Despite his intelligence and his mannerisms, he was just a child and children grow awkward when they are unsure of their situations. I guess I made him nervous.

  The day at Jeremy’s was very much like other days. Sunday is a day of bad movies or sports, even when there’s no football. It was late April and Jeremy was flipping through four baseball games. Wyatt paid little attention to the television. He sat, instead, with Olivia, Jeremy’s daughter, playing Boggle or Scrabble. They were both avid readers and true competitors. The outcomes of their games were rarely determined until very late and Livvie, almost fifteen years old, won often. Every once in a while, she would flash me a smile just to remind me that she knew I was part of the family even if I didn’t like sports or Scrabble and no one seemed to want to talk to me. Livvie loved me genuinely, like a niece is supposed to love her uncle and I was grateful for it.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had hated me from the minute she set eyes upon me. Martha, Martie to her friends and family (and even me), was a self absorbed, self deprecating kind of person. I never quite understood what Jeremy saw in her but I think it had to do with his compulsive tendency to try and save the world. Martie’s attitude toward life and herself had always prevented her from truly succeeding. She had dropped out of college twice and never held a job for any length of time. In fact, her only success was her marriage and family, which was questionable in the case of my oldest nephew, Jack, who I rarely saw. I guess Martie thought I was creepy. When Jeremy introduced us, I was a high school junior with no friends and a propensity for staying home on Friday and Saturday nights. I spent a lot of time on the computer, playing and writing text adventures. I was shy and quiet and I suppose that the curious way I looked at her made her uncomfortable.

  Wyatt’s wife, on the other hand, was a lovely and successful woman with the unusual name of Attenda. She had completed a Masters Degree and chosen to work with autistic children. Many people brought their children to Attenda for an early diagnosis and intervention. Though it was heartbreaking to see these children suffering, her techniques had provided many of them
with levels of socialization and an outlook they might not otherwise have had. I liked and respected Attenda very much despite the fact that, even with all of her wonderful qualities, she also had little use for me.

  At about a quarter to two, Martie came out of the kitchen with an arm load of finger foods and cursed because she had forgotten her tea. Since I was closest to the kitchen, I stood and volunteered to go get it. I could see the stricken look on Martie’s face, but I couldn’t say whether it was because she didn’t want any favors from me or because she didn’t want me that close to something she was going to ingest. Either way, Jeremy was thanking me before she could protest so off I went into the kitchen. The tea was sitting in a steaming mug on top of the counter. I went straight to it, picked it up and walked straight back out into the living room.

  “Jeez, Mathew, did you get lost?” Jeremy asked.

  “What?”

  They were all looking at me now and Livvie said, “You were gone like five minutes, Uncle Mathew.”

  “I went straight in and came straight out,” I protested. “If I had taken that long, the tea wouldn’t still be this hot.”

  And it was true that steam still rose from the cup. And through that steam, I could see that the clock read 1:55 pm.

  “No big deal, Mathew,” Jeremy told me, seeing that I was becoming upset. He came over and took the tea from me, knowing that Martie certainly wouldn’t. Nor did she drink it, I might add. But it was a big deal. It was a very big deal. It brought back the coffee incident of three weeks earlier. I had dismissed that as early morning fatigue, daydreaming, whatever I could lay my brain on, but the flimsy excuses crumbled in the wake of this new incident.

  On the way back to the bus terminal that evening, I confided in Jeremy. He was silent while I told him and silent for a few minutes afterward. I think he was trying to gauge whether his brother was sick or just cracking up. He would never have accused me of lying because lying just wasn’t something I did and I’m not an attention grabber. Let someone else have the spotlight. In the end, what could he say?

  “Maybe you should see a doctor?”

  I nodded, more to myself than to him.

  “I mean,” he continued. “If you’re having blackouts, that could be serious. Grandpa’s sister Eloise used to have blackouts, remember?”

  I didn’t.

  “Well we never met her, but she died not too long before I was born so it was still fresh in everyone’s memory when Mom and Dad told stories around the kitchen table that I could understand…”

  He went on, as Jeremy had a tendency to do, and I listened attentively. The most relevant portion of the story was that our Great Aunt Eloise had blackouts and drove herself into the trees on a frosty February day. What Jeremy didn’t say (or didn’t know) was that Great Aunt Eloise had discovered acid and cocaine in her declining years and they made short work of her. This last bit I found out from my mother at a later date.

  In the end, though, I decided that it was in my best interest to consult a physician. Blackouts are no laughing matter, especially when they are not caused by narcotics. I was beginning to scare.

  My regular doctor could see no reason for the sudden blackouts, but he decided to err on the side of caution and sent me for some tests. On May 2nd, about a week and a half after my visit with my brothers, I went to a big hospital in Manhattan, where I was given a hospital gown in a baggie and ushered into a small changing room. I had no sooner put the baggie on the bench and begun to unbutton my shirt when there was a knock on the door. Still fully dressed, I turned and opened it, peeking out.

  “Aren’t you changed yet?” the nurse said.

  I looked at her quizzically. I thought she was joking. “You only left a moment ago.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.” Then she closed the door and left.

  It took me a moment, but I realized that I’d had another blackout. I checked my watch and it was a little past a quarter past noon, but since I hadn’t checked it before I came in, there was no way for me to know how long I’d been out. At that moment, I decided to always be aware of the time.

  The tests showed nothing, though the doctor confirmed a more than twenty minute time lapse between the nurse showing me the dressing room and then coming in to check on me. Twenty minutes is a long blackout. It appeared they were beginning to grow in duration and I could see that these types of long blackouts could severely impair my life, such as it was. Over the course of a week, I went back for more tests, but the doctors could find no physical reason for my blackouts (and I had no more in that time). In the interim, my mother became ill and I was forced to juggle my job with handling her affairs and hospital visits for tests. This created incredible demands on my time and made life extremely difficult. It wasn’t so much that I was stretched too thin. I could always find time for things, but I had no time to simply relax. I was working and then going to the hospital after work and visiting my mother after the hospital. Couple all of that with the looming possibility of another, longer blackout and I began to feel and react to a tremendous amount of stress.

  At one point, I got into an argument with one of my co-workers. To begin with, I never got into arguments with anyone. There was a situation once, when I first started working with the company, where a co-worker, Denise something or other, was stealing things from my desk. It wasn’t much, just little things, but it was done in the spirit of antagonism. She was just a mean old lady, a couple of years from retirement and she had chosen me as a victim because she had pegged me as someone who would not fight back. And she was right. I endured her torture for two years until the day of her retirement. On her last day, she dumped a box of my stuff (pens, pencils, some loose change, some really old chocolate bars, etc…) onto my desk and thanked me for entertaining her for the last two years of her career.

  The doctors now suggested I see a psychiatrist.

  Well, I did just that. I couldn’t afford not to get the root of the problem. Even a man who does and has nothing feels that his life and his time are important. As did I.

  We tried several things, the psychiatrist and I. We tried to find a pattern among my blackouts. Maybe they were caused by stress, maybe by some combination of the foods I was eating, the television I was watching, the radio to which I listened. Eventually, we tried hypnotherapy, but it was too difficult to focus in on periods of such a short time. Even a twenty minute period was difficult, but it was where we had the most success. The doctor actually regressed me to my visit to the hospital, had me accept the baggie, had me walk into the dressing room, had me place the baggie on the bench, and then (poof!) the nurse knocks on the door and I answer it. There was no gap between the two events, just as it had appeared to me at the time. Somehow, I had lost twenty minutes and my subconscious hadn’t even bothered to take note of it.

  Spooky.

  Going back to the argument with the co-worker. His name was Ralph Tennest. It was a Monday, which was bad enough. My weekends were generally choked with catch-up work concerning my mother’s affairs. Mondays at work were hard and stressful. I had a hospital appointment that evening, which was a constant source of aggravation. Afterwards, I would have to head to my mother’s apartment and see to a left over piece of business that I couldn’t manage the day before. At around 11:00 pm that night, I would wander home and collapse into bed only to have to get up several hours later and go to work again. The chaos of my life was beginning to close in around me.

  Ralph was a decent guy, not particularly friendly, but with a good enough head on his shoulders and a kindness that was deeper than the exterior. He and I rarely spoke as I rarely spoke with anyone, but I didn’t dislike him and I don’t believe he disliked me. It was getting on toward the end of the day and I had been finding the ends of work days to be the most stressful times of day. Work itself was constant and regimented. It provided comfort where the rest of my life caused discontinuity and discontent. As work came to an end and I knew I would have to face the rest of my responsibilities,
I would become increasingly irritable. I knew this about myself, even then, but that didn’t help me to control it. Ralph, walking past, stumbled over a lip in the carpet and knocked against the cubicle. I had a picture of my brothers and their families in a small frame leaning up against the cubicle wall and it was knocked aside and fell to the carpet. It didn’t break. It was no big deal. Ralph even grunted an apology. But I snapped at him anyway. I can’t even write the words I said because I don’t remember them (which is uncharacteristic for me), but I do remember the look on his face. It was this morphing expression that was born as shock, first from the insult itself and then from the source. Finally, it turned to anger, to which I responded with anger. We exchanged words, drawing the attention of some of the other people around. Eventually, though, he simply dismissed me and walked away, grumbling about how I choose to use my words. It was ultimately humiliating and I could feel my cheeks redden and my blood boiling. I sat like a statue until the last of my colleagues had looked away and then I bent down to pick up the picture.

  It was no big deal. I was already more calm by the time I had straightened up and replaced the picture. The office had become eerily quiet and I stretched up to peer over the sides of my cubicle. The place was deserted.

  In a panic, I sat down heavily and looked at the clock. It was 7:21 pm. I’d lost three hours. Three hours of my life was gone.

  “Mathew?”

  I turned quickly to see my boss standing beside me, a file folder in her hand, a look of confusion on her face.

  “I thought you’d gone,” she said.

  “I…no…” How could she not see the utter confusion mirrored on my face? How could she not know?

  “Well, we all thought you’d taken off after your argument with Ralph.”

  No, I was just blacked out under my desk for three hours. “No. It was my fault anyway. I should apologize to him.”