Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  I rode the elevator up and found myself taking my time as I moved down the hallway. I thought about nothing but where I was and what I was doing. I had nowhere to be, no obligations whatsoever except to this one person in this one moment. There were no thoughts in my mind about where I would go once I left the hospital. Another person might have felt completely lost, but I was suddenly totally at peace. It was a tremendous comfort to have just this one thing to do. I passed by the nurse’s station and bid them all hello. There were a lot of them. Obviously something had changed in the medical business that allowed hospitals to actually hire enough staff. As I approached Jennie’s room I saw a young man standing outside just staring at nothing. He looked enough like her for me to deduce that he was a relative.

  “Hello,” I said to him.

  He turned, startled, and scowled at me. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to see Jennie,” I said.

  He studied me with the kind of intense gaze that strips you layer by layer.

  “I’m Mathew,” I told him, shedding my fake name.

  “I know who you are,” he said and did not sound happy about it.

  I grew tense, sensing a confrontation. “I’d like to go in, now.”

  He grew even more tense. “She don’t need to see you.”

  Some things never change. I took several deep breaths and worked very hard at calming myself. It would do no good for me to leap. I was there to see Jennie and I was determined to do so.

  “Are you her grandson?” I asked.

  “Great grandson,” he corrected.

  “What’s your name?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well, if you know who I am then you know that I am a friend of your great grandmother’s from a very long time ago. We haven’t seen each other in many years and I think it will make her happy if you let me go in and see her.”

  “Do I look like I give a (some word I didn’t catch) what you think?”

  He was not to be put off so I thought, What would Neville do? Neville would have probably shot him, but that didn’t seem the right course of action for me. I was also unarmed. However, I could meet Neville halfway. Before the young man knew what was happening, I stepped right up to him and shoved him with both of my hands. I abhor violence and confrontation, but there was nothing for it. Every decision I made came to me as a cathartic enlightenment. I thought and knew it was right so I did it. The tension had melted away. I didn’t even react to the stream of curses that followed me into the room.

  “Here, now, what’s all the noise?” she called from the bed. I could barely see her in the dim light, most of her covered up by hospital blankets. Her head was on my left and her right arm stuck out from underneath, one IV tube flowing out of the back of her hand.

  “It’s me, Jennie,” I said.

  I saw her head turn on an old and rusted neck. Her voice was weak, but still very definitely Jennie’s voice. “Mathew?”

  “It’s me,” I repeated.

  Then her great grandson grabbed me from behind and held me tight.

  “Wendell!” she shouted and we stopped our struggling. “You show him some respect!”

  “He’s a criminal, Nona,” he told her, but let go of me anyway.

  “What have I told you? Those are all lies. You keep this to yourself and go get Mathew some food.”

  Straightening myself, I looked at him. “I’m not hungry, thanks,” I said to him, although I was. I felt it was best if he didn’t have access to anything I was going to eat.

  “Well, wait outside then,” she said to him and he obeyed.

  Very much like Jennie, she did not try to explain or justify his behavior. She reached up her left hand and I crossed the foot of the bed to that side. Once there, with the window at my back I finally had a good look at a one hundred and two year old Jennie.

  And I found nothing less than the woman I loved.

  As I sat, I took her withered and papery hand in my own and kissed it affectionately. She turned her face to look at me and showed me a shadow of that smile.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t let me die alone.”

  My first instinct was to reassure her that everything would be all right. But she was a century old and in the Hospice Ward. She was going to die there and probably quite soon. We both knew it so there was no reason to deny it. What we needed to hold onto was the fact that we were being granted her last few hours or days together and that was a gift that transcended value.

  Again, I feel compelled to leave out the details of our conversations. In three days, we managed to close the gaps in our lives. I still loved her, as old as she was, as displaced as I was, I finally felt as if we had married. It’s difficult to explain but you have to understand the phrase, ‘til death do you part. That was the crux of it. We would be together until she died and that was all it took. I did not leave the hospital. No one asked me to leave. The doctors and nurses that came in to examine or discuss Jennie gave me queer looks but did not accost me. She had no other visitors save Wendell. He came every day and stayed for the entirety of visiting hours. He spoke very little to me and I sensed that his aggression went deeper than any concern about my criminal status. Jennie told me that she had raised him, then apologized for it.

  I laughed.

  Wendell was okay. He didn’t call the police. He never tried to make me leave, although he did not leave us alone except by order either. He even brought me food. Jennie told me about him, twenty years old and living with her up until recently. His father, her grandson, had died suddenly ten years before and his mother had never really been in the picture. It was a sad story, really, but one that been told since long before I was born. Anyhow, Wendell was very protective of his Nona. When she had gotten sick, he had blamed himself for leaving her alone in the house. Whoever heard of a woman of one hundred and two years living by herself? But apparently the average lifespan had jumped almost twenty years. That meant that people actually getting into their old age lived much longer than the average. Century old people were not uncommon.

  Her life, she told me, had been a full and happy one. She had married, though she wouldn’t give me any details. While she spoke fondly of her life with her husband, there was sadness there, too. Of course, he was gone. All she would say was that he had been gone many years. Aside from Wendell’s father, her children were still alive and about in the world. That they had not come to see her was a curiosity to me, but she dismissed it. The world is different, now, she said, but it seemed cruel. I thought of my own mother, dying in her bed, wondering where her youngest son was. Meanwhile I was trapped in time with no idea of her illness and impending death. Was my time with Jennie God’s way of repaying me? Did He even care enough to do something like that?

  I was three days by Jennie’s side. I spoke with her and watched her sleep. I helped her eat and wash. I was truly her caregiver and glad of the opportunity. Then, on the third day, while she was taking an afternoon nap, her lifeline went flat and the silent alarms sounded at the nurse’s station.

  No one came.

  She didn’t want to be brought back.

  I stared at the readout for a moment, then at the woman to make sure that the machines were not lying. They were not. Lifting her still warm hand, I pressed it to my face and began to sob, apologizing to her with every breath I could find. Though I may travel through many centuries, even millennia, there will never be another Jennie.

  I sat there for quite a while and still no one came. Perhaps they left me alone out of respect, this poor soul crying over a very old woman. Perhaps they were just afraid of me. The Forty Leaper.

  Finally, I detected a presence. I placed Jennie’s now cold hand down on her bed side and looked once again at her peaceful face.

  Goodbye, love.

  Expecting to see Wendell, I looked up and had a surprise. The man standing there was in a uniform of some type. I guessed he was military by the rank insignia and the sidearm.


  “Mr. Cristian?”

  I wasn’t surprised that he knew my name or even that he knew where to find me. I had been in that hospital for three days. Hundreds of people had seen me and any one of them could have recognized me. Maybe even Wendell, who I never saw again, had finally turned me in.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sergeant Archibald Wilkes, sir. Would you please accompany us, sir?”

  I looked past him to where the door of the room stood open. I could see shadows and the toe of a boot. More soldiers. What would there be? Two? Four? Five?

  “No.”

  To his credit, he didn’t give any reaction. “Sir, I am under orders.” Sergeant Wilkes had a mid-western accent. I had gotten used to it when I had lived with my brothers so it almost sounded natural to me. “I would appreciate your cooperation.”

  “I don’t feel like cooperating.”

  This time he blinked. “With all due respect to you and your grief, sir, I’m confident that my people and I are capable of handling any resistance we might encounter.”

  I was sure of that. I was no fighter and in no mood to fight. The one thing, however, that they could not counter was my ability to leap. It’s funny that I thought of it as an ability in that instant. It wasn’t a disease or a curse or a burden. It was something I could do almost at will. All I needed was the proper dose of adrenaline and, whoosh, I’d be off through time. Sure, I had no idea how far ahead I would go; it would exceed fifty eight years certainly. But that didn’t matter anymore. For the first time, I was leaving absolutely nothing behind. I was completely free of the bindings of my old life. My brothers were gone. Jennie was gone. The people I had met, even those who had helped me, meant nothing to me. If there was a debt I owed to Dr. Kung, then it was a debt that would forever go unpaid.

  Now I just needed to get excited.

  Standing, I walked around the other side of the bed and made as if to submit myself to the sergeant. He led me out of the room and into the hallway where there were three other soldiers. Aside from the fact that one was a woman, they all seemed identical. They wore the same type of uniform as Wilkes, with a lesser insignia. They all had close cropped haircuts and did not speak. In this far future, I could almost believe that they had been genetically engineered as soldiers, but that was science fiction. Clothing styles could change and cars could change, but people stayed the same. Society stayed virtually the same. In fact, almost ninety years after my humble beginnings as a Forty Leaper, I was astonished at how little had changed. Despite not knowing how to use money or the trolley system, I found it very easy to blend into this society the same way I had always blended into my own. If only it weren’t for my very recognizable face.

  Musings were unproductive. I needed to get angry. But Jennie’s death had left me without emotion. I truly didn’t care that this Gomer Pyle freak was arresting me. I wasn’t worried at all about what might happen to me. Apparently, Jennie’s death had freed me from more than obligations to other people. That I even considered escape was simply a reflex of the rational mind. I knew that if I didn’t I would regret it. I was no longer a scientific curiosity. I was a criminal. Who knew how they would treat me? And yet I couldn’t put an emotion to that rationale. No matter how much I thought about it, it was still overshadowed by the loss I had suffered.

  So I focused on that loss. What loss was it really? How long had Jennie and I had together in her one hundred and two years of life. She had been just a child when we met. And then we had been in love for just a brief time. And now I had been with her in her last moments. So little time, yet so much shared. Cheated is what we were. I reviewed my earlier thoughts. Leaping had brought me into contact with her, shown me something that I would never have sought in my old life. And yet it had also taken this gift from me as quickly as it was given. Was leaping a curse or a blessing? Did it mean more that I had been given the gift in the first place? Or that it had been just a taste of something that was now gone forever?

  I became frustrated with the concepts.

  Wilkes motioned me toward the elevators and his soldiers fell into step around me. Even in my grief, there could be no peace. And that grief extended beyond a simple death. The loss was of more than just a person, which is bad enough. It was a loss of opportunity. The opportunity to share my life with another person. The opportunity to experience something special. I became enraged by the injustice of it all. I wanted to lash out at anyone and everyone around me.

  I felt tiny spasms in my muscles.

  As we got to the elevator and one of the men pushed the down button I knew that I had reached the end. I bolted from them, taking them completely by surprise. The woman reached out for me, but she was way behind and I disappeared into the stairs. Behind me, I could hear them shedding their confusions, Wilkes giving them orders. The chase was on and with it came the rush of excitement. I knew I had to keep moving. If I leaped a hundred years, they would still be after me. My only chance was to move as fast as I could so that I would be far away from the spot from where I leaped. I plunged down the stairs, hearing them behind me. Through my mind coursed thoughts of Jennie and frustration at having been in this predicament. They were accompanied by frustration at having to run again and fear of what might become of me. It was as if every emotion now finally had released. I laughed with tears in my eyes.

  I came into the lobby with my body on fire and I knew that the leap was imminent. There, by the door, were several more uniformed people. They saw me and shouted, pointing. I braked and spun, back the way I had come, past the elevators and down in the other direction. There was a short dark hallway…

  …and then I crashed through the time barrier and bowled over a simple janitor with his bucket of water. Who knew what year it was? With all of the high paying, high profile jobs that came and went over the years, humanity would always need someone to mop the floors. Had I had time to reflect on this, it might have made me happy.

  “Stay down!” someone shouted. It sounded more like a warning than an order so I was inclined to obey. But the janitor had other plans. He struggled against me, the two of us sloshing in a puddle of water. I rolled free of him, trying to get my bearings. All I could see was a spectacular white and green tiled floor and the feet of numerous people both sitting and walking.

  Then there was more shouting. “FLP! Everyone stand clear!”

  Whatever was happening, it certainly had everything to do with me. It would have had to, right? There was the inevitable sound of gunfire. It was just one shot at first, followed by a strangled cry. I had time to wonder about the nature of gunfire. How many years since my birth? One hundred and twenty plus this latest leap. So two hundred was a safe bet. And yet guns sounded just the same. It’s funny but before Forty Leaping, I’d never actually heard the sound of gunfire. When you grow up in New York (or at least, if you grew up in New York in the seventies and eighties) everyone seems to think that drugs and guns are a natural part of everyday life. But I took the train at all times of the day and night and I’d walked the streets both crowded and empty. There had never been any trouble for me. I know it happened. People were robbed. People were killed. It was terrible. But it was not a part of the average person’s life. Leaping had introduced me into the world of guns and violence. Leaping had set me on a path of terrible adventure.

  What was my point?

  Oh yes. In all that time, they hadn’t yet invented a quieter way of killing people. I guess gunpowder was just perfection.

  Someone grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet. I looked up to see an older man with an unruly mop of salt and pepper hair flopping all over his head. I don’t imagine it was particularly advantageous in a gunfight. He also wore a long coat with a belt that hung unused around his waist.

  “Get behind me,” he instructed in what was unmistakably a British accent.

  In his left hand was the gun, also easily identifiable despite centuries of use. He looked out ahead of me and scanned the crowd. I did the same.

&nb
sp; I was still in the hospital. It was the same hospital but it looked like the Emergency Room rather than the lobby. People were still doing their best to get out of the way. They scrambled for the exits while nurses, doctors, orderlies, and one poor janitor, tried to gain control of the situation. It was difficult for everyone to move through the maze of chairs. We were on the far side of the room, away from the exit. A short corridor stretched out behind us and there was a lady inside. I didn’t get a good look at her at that time but it was clear that she was a companion of the Englishman’s. Way out, curled up under one of the chairs, was a young man bleeding from a gunshot wound. The Englishman paid him no attention, but I surmised that it had been his or the woman’s weapon that had caused the young man’s wound.

  Slowly, we began to retreat into the corridor, the woman covering our backs, the man keeping his gaze and his arm steady toward the front. I had half a notion to break away from these people, tired of being swept up in the maelstrom of hate that seemed to accompany each of my new leaps. I wanted to be free and alone. I wanted to be anonymous. But I was suddenly awash in a great fatigue. The physical impact of this last leap was extraordinary. My knees buckled, but I managed to steady myself on the wall. The man seemed to take no observance of my struggle but asked if I could go on. I assured him I could. The woman pushed a canteen at me and I took it.

  “Drink,” she ordered so I did. A cool clear liquid flowed down my throat. It was tasteless and refreshing.

  “It’s water,” I said.

  “What did you expect?” She took the canteen back.

  The Englishman stopped suddenly, tensed. All of his focus was on the rapidly thinning crowd ahead of me. It had been several minutes since my leap and the tension was building with the prospect of more action. For me, this was an uncomfortable feeling. Despite the refreshment the water had provided, I still didn’t feel strong enough to handle either a fight or a flight.