Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  Against my better judgment, I confided in Morty. At first, he didn’t really know how to react. None of my coworkers really knew me, but they had never known me to exhibit any kind of sense of humor and the idea of a practical joke such as this was confounding. Morty couldn’t figure out whether I was serious or making a poor attempt at pulling his leg. He found himself caught between the rock of not wanting to make light of my serious situation and the hard place of not wanting to be the butt of my joke.

  I told him that I was serious and elaborated. I told him about the other “blackouts” and made it quite clear by my telling that these were actual events. Well I can’t say that he believed me but I can’t say that he dismissed me either. He did offer that there would be very little I could do to get Livvie to accept my explanation of events unless she wanted to and it was probably best if I just lay low for a while. The advice was appreciated even if it was not quite what I wanted to hear.

  Over the next several weeks, Morty and I developed a real friendship. I stopped seeing my psychiatrist (what was the point, really?) and, with my mother doing well, found that I had a lot of free time. Morty, who was divorced, was the perfect companion for me. He was soft spoken and unassuming, yet always displayed a pleasant demeanor and good humor. His own daughter was approaching fifty years old and lived in Arizona and his ex-wife had remarried and moved to Florida. What I found out about Morty Yovanovicz was that he was a desperately lonely guy who almost succeeded at hiding it. But the best thing about him was that he was always there. If I took too long in the bathroom at work, he came to make sure I hadn’t leaped through time. Every once in a while he would call me in the middle of the night just to see if I was still moving at “normal speed” as he put it. He woke me up a couple of times, but his intentions were good and I found it difficult to feel anything but warmth toward him.

  In short, Morty helped me to relax.

  From the middle of August through the beginning of October, things seemed to be going well. I waited a week before calling Jeremy again and his anger seemed to have cooled. Livvie didn’t want to speak with me yet, but Jeremy assured me that she was starting to soften. Martie, on the other hand, had gone back to hating me and showing it. If she answered the phone when I called, she hung it up immediately. I never knew what to do in those moments, so I usually did nothing. I would always receive a call from Jeremy later on so at least she had the decency to tell him I had called.

  I didn’t visit with them. Jeremy and Wyatt came out to see me once and that was nice. We spoke mostly about our childhoods; we laughed a little. The strain on our relationship did give me the opportunity to realize how important they were in my life. I could only hope that they felt the same way. When you’re a kid, you fight with your siblings or you ignore them. Generally, siblings are apart in age and they build their own social lives. Sometimes they compete. More often than not, there is an animosity that builds between them. But if things go well, that animosity fades with maturity. No matter what our differences were, my brothers and I all came from the same place. The three of us shared something that no one else in the world possessed and that bond was surprisingly strong.

  On Wednesday morning, the 3rd of October, I got out of bed, showered, dressed, drank some coffee, and went to work. Only when I arrived did I realize that something was wrong. I had offhandedly noticed that the train was more empty than usual, but the light of day seemed right. There had been nothing to tip me off until I arrived at an empty office. Since I don’t have a key, I was forced to wait outside the door for someone to show up. That someone was Estelle Goldblatt, the company receptionist. She was due in, daily, thirty minutes before everyone else. She was more surprised to see me than she normally would have been but declined comment. In fact, she practically ignored me, opening the door and going inside without even holding it for me.

  I began to get that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. The office looked the same so I couldn’t have missed that much time. But, clearly I had missed enough to raise a few eyebrows. My desk was disturbed. At least it hadn’t been cleared out. There was, however, the definite indication that someone had been sitting there and using my computer. As I switched it on, I heard someone enter at the front. There were whispers and, just as the computer finished booting and I saw the date, I realized that it was my boss who had just arrived.

  Needless to say, I was in a meeting with her inside of ten minutes.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

  What could I say? I hadn’t told anyone at work about my problem except Morty, and I wanted it kept that way. But now it seemed that I would have to come clean or lose my job (which I’d probably lose anyway). It was not Wednesday, October 3rd. It was Tuesday, October 9th. I had blacked out for almost a week. My boss was convinced I’d skipped out for a vacation to the Caribbean, which was ridiculous.

  “You never called in,” she said. “You didn’t take any time. You didn’t answer your phone. I even asked someone to go by your apartment, but you didn’t answer the door. I was just about to begin interviewing.”

  So I explained the situation to her, using the term “blackout” instead of “time jumping”, which was my suspicion. Of course, I could produce all of my medical records (which would have been reported to my company for insurance reasons anyway) as proof of my condition. But they were inconclusive. All they would prove is that I had been seeking medical advice on the condition. I could ask Morty to testify on my behalf, but I hated to put him in the middle of it. Besides which, he didn’t necessarily know that I was telling the truth.

  “You mean to tell me,” she said in a very snide way that I did not appreciate but would never mention, “that you were home the whole time, passed out in bed…”

  “Blacked out,” I corrected.

  “Look at you, Mathew,” she said.

  So I looked at me.

  “If you were passed out, forgive me, blacked out, in your bed for a week, you’d be a rotting corpse.”

  She was right, of course, and I could offer no response to her allegations but the truth. I tried very delicately to explain that these were not simple blackouts, but that I was being swept from one moment to another, skipping large chunks of time in between. The explanation meant little or nothing to her. She took it as a poorly conceived lie, but gave me credit for originality. In the end, she chose not to fire me. As I said, I was just the kind of employee she liked, and she hated to give that up in favor of some young go-getter looking to move up the corporate ladder. There was no official policy of probation in my company, but she used that word when she described my status. One more screw-up and I was out. To me that just meant it was a matter of time before my job was taken away from me. To date, I could neither anticipate nor prevent the jumps.

  Morty had arrived by the time I got back to my desk. He didn’t seem so surprised to see me so I can only assume that he had heard I was back. But he did stare straight through me from the time I came into view until the time I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It happened again?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “For a week?”

  I became irritated, but I had learned to control it. For a time, we didn’t speak. I went about checking my files and figuring out what I was supposed to do. The items on which I had last been working were completed or mostly completed. There were no new items, which meant they had been ferried out to other people. If it was true that my boss was about to start interviewing, that meant she couldn’t afford to have my position vacant. Sure enough, as I sat trying to get my bearings, new assignments kept popping up on my computer via the company’s intranet. There wasn’t anything too taxing, but I was still so disoriented that I couldn’t manage to focus.

  “Where do you go?”

  “I don’t go anywhere,” I snapped back at Morty, who had done no work in thirty minutes. He just kept looking at me. “It’s not a vacation.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he apologized. “But
you have to be somewhere, right?”

  I had never really given that any thought. In truth, it didn’t seem as if my location changed at all. When I was supposed to pick up Livvie at the train station, I didn’t move. When I was at the hospital, changing clothes, I didn’t move. Or, at least, I didn’t appear to move. What if there was some other personality inside of me that simply took over, living its own life? And when its periods were over and done with, it returned me to the same place as before.

  And yet, that made no sense. That particular personality would have to be aware of the charade in order to set my watch back to the proper date and time and put me in the very same clothing and make sure that I was just as tired or hungry or that I had the same urge to go to the bathroom or not. It was too impossible.

  “I don’t think I actually do move. I’m pretty sure I just stay in the same spot.”

  “I went by your apartment over the weekend,” Morty said. “You weren’t there.”

  “I don’t think I can answer the door in the middle of it.”

  “I didn’t think so. So I went inside. You should have your super fired. He takes bribes.”

  I dismissed that last bit. “So I wasn’t in the apartment? Anywhere?”

  He shook his head. “I asked around, too. No one had seen you leave or anything.”

  An idea struck me. Again, it seemed unreasonable, but I pulled out my credit card and dialed the customer service number on the back. After negotiating my way through the automatic phone service and providing nineteen pieces of personal information, a representative was able to tell me that my card hadn’t been used in the week during which I was missing. It confirmed my suspicion, but didn’t provide any answers. What did happen to me during those times? Was I safe?

  Time passed. I was very busy at work. It took me almost a week to catch up. I had to make sure that I arrived every morning before my boss or I got a phone call. I had to make sure that I left late, not on time, or she would ask questions. In the mean time, I began to feel that desperation creeping in again. I was consumed by the idea that, at any time, I could leap forward and not even know it. How far would I leap this time? A month? A year? There didn’t seem to be any discernable pattern.

  I spent most of my free time trying to map out my different leaps and researching my condition on the internet and in the library. There were some isolated incidents that could be deemed similar, but I was skeptical.

  I found one report of a slave who consistently disappeared and would later reappear in the same place. He had been branded a witch and sentenced to burn.

  There was another about a Scottish jet pilot whose plane had crashed. Rescuers found him bewildered and unharmed in the wreckage. He couldn’t remember the crash and described the whole thing as if he had simply winked out of existence and then reappeared after the disaster.

  Stories like this were all over the web and, instead of giving me a feeling of comfort in not being alone, I branded the lot of them crackpots and felt more alone than ever.

  My mother fell ill again. Jeremy insisted that my recent disappearance contributed to her poor state of mind. I didn’t necessarily disagree with him, but that didn’t change the fact that it was totally out of my control. I tried to explain this to him, but, despite our earlier reconciliation, a week of tending to our mother had left him bitter all over again. The truth was that he didn’t believe my story. I don’t know if he exactly disbelieved it, but he was sure of a simple explanation and without sympathy. Surprisingly, it was Wyatt who came to my defense. Of the two of them, Jeremy had always been the one to whom I had turned for support. As the older of my two brothers, he had always seemed the wiser and the more in command. But Wyatt had a compassionate streak that was hidden behind a very quiet façade. Despite their unbreachable closeness, Wyatt painted his reactions to Jeremy’s behavior very carefully. He did not choose to be Jeremy’s humble servant or yes-man under any circumstances. As my older brother became more incensed, my younger brother showed me more kindness. Thought I knew it was only partly a sympathetic gesture towards me, I was desperate for the support. Wyatt didn’t necessarily believe my story either, but he was more patient about listening to it.

  Impatient, Jeremy asked me one early November day, “What are we going to do, Mathew?”

  The question caught me off guard. To begin with, Jeremy would never deign to ask for my suggestion on anything so important. Here I could not discern his meaning. Did he want to know my solution for my time hopping or was he simply rhetorically questioning himself? Even if I had known the meaning of his question, I would not have had an answer.

  He didn’t wait for one. “If you can’t take care of mom…”

  “I can’t,” I blurted, only much later realizing how that must have sounded. As an outsider looking in, I would have branded myself a weasel; just some lazy slob trying to get out of a family obligation. But from the inside it made too much sense. How could my mother count on me for anything when I couldn’t even count on myself?

  Jeremy was silent after that and the conversation ended without resolution. Wyatt called me a short time later to find out what had been said, but the transcript gave him no insight.

  “Mom will be okay,” he told me. “You’re not her only son.”

  I didn’t know how to interpret that statement either, but I was at a point of defensiveness so that my reaction was not relief but anger. I had never implied that I was her only son and I had never asked for the job of sole caregiver. It had been thrust upon me as a virtue of not having built a family of my own. On those rare occasions when I had been forced to ask for help, Jeremy’s stuttering replies had always led me to tell him not to worry about it. I would handle it. Only now I couldn’t handle it.

  But I could say none of this to Wyatt. Though my control of my internal thoughts and emotions seemed to be withering away in the face of my condition, my external reactions were intact.

  For the moment.

  The night before I jumped again, I had dinner with Morty. I had come into work agitated because of an argument I’d had with my mother the night before. That morning, Jeremy had called me, furious, wanting to know why I had upset her. The truth is I can’t even remember what the argument was about. It was silly, as they all are, but I was on edge. Instead of the passage of normal time easing me into a state of comfort, I was becoming more and more panicked. Earlier on, I had the reassurance of having just leaped, meaning that I wouldn’t leap again right away simply because I had never done so. But now it had been weeks and I knew that my time was soon to come. That morning, I was the picture of the caffeinated man. There was enough adrenaline in my body to power a city.

  So Morty offered to take me out to dinner.

  “Have a meal with someone who doesn’t bother to judge you,” he said, and it sounded like a good idea.

  And it was. Dinner with Morty was relaxing and fun. I was able to unwind and laugh a bit. But when I got home, there was a message from Jeremy and another from Wyatt. Even Wyatt sounded impatient. I called neither of them back, choosing instead to toss and turn for hours before exhaustion was finally the victor over agitation and I slept.

  The next day began like any other day. I got up, showered, had some coffee, and went off to work. Morty could see by the look on my face that our dinner together hadn’t had a lasting effect. He described my expression as the penultimate step to resolution. It was as if I were a terminally ill person who was just about ready to accept my fate. In truth, acceptance was the furthest thing from my mind. What I needed was the ability to sort this thing out. At about a quarter to four, the light on my phone went on. This was odd because I rarely received phone calls.

  “This is Mathew Cristian,” I said into the receiver.

  “Uncle Mathew? It’s Livvie.”

  I was too stunned to respond. I just sat there, the phone to my ear, Morty staring at me from across the aisle.

  “Uncle Mathew?”

  “I’m here, sorry.”

 
; “I didn’t mean to call you at work, but your cell phone’s off.”

  It wasn’t off; the battery was dead. In the wake of my stress, I had forgotten to charge it. I told her it was good to hear from her.

  “Mom and Dad have been arguing a lot.”

  Again, I didn’t know how to respond so I just didn’t. Arguments between Martie and Jeremy were rare. Even when Martie was up in arms about something, Jeremy usually gave her some space and yessed her until she felt better.

  “Sometimes they argue about Grandma,” Livvie continue. “But mostly it’s about you. Uncle Wyatt’s been here a few times also, but he doesn’t have much to say. Can I ask you a question?”

  I nodded, then realized how foolish that was and said, “Yes.”

  “Is it true? What you say has been happening to you, is it happening?”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “Because Dad says you’re just trying to escape from your life, like your life’s not good enough or something. Mom thinks you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  “What does Wyatt think?” I asked, not positive that I wanted to know the answer.

  “I’m not really sure. Like I said, he doesn’t say much. I think he agrees with Dad, but he feels sorry for you while Dad’s just angry.”

  That was consistent with their behavior. “What do you think?”

  “I think I believe you. I talked about it with Jack.”

  Jack, my oldest nephew, lived in and out of the house with his family depending on his job or school situation. He was rapidly approaching twenty years old and had never yet been able to stick with one thing for more than a couple of months. Toward me he was either abrasive or silent. I suspected there was drug use. Martie did not speak of him often, but when she did there was this gleam in her eye. He was her first born and he could do no wrong.