Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  Then Jake started shaking. It wasn’t the cancer, at least not the physiological result of it; nor was it the odd pictures on TV. It was adrenaline, a pulse of endorphins that both nourished and fed off his exterior calm. He had to sit down. Even though he had prepared himself to face his own mortality, it was so alien a sensation that his brain, spinning its wheels to find some fixture, forgot to tell his legs how to stay vertical.

  Someone noticed Jake sitting against the wall because a moment later he heard a shout, and felt strong arms patting his wrists, feeling for a pulse. An insistent and calm voice asked Jake, “Can you hear me?” He nodded, his tongue loosened. He blinked, aware that feeling had returned to his legs. He could no longer hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. He mumbled something about being okay, rose to his feet under his own power, and thanked the orderly. The orderly, a young black man, eyed him with some concern. Jake nodded, affirming his ability to remain upright, and walked toward the door. He turned, one final time, seeing the TV in the corner. It was playing an advertisement for lawn care.

  Jake began to think of arrangements, of things left undone, unsaid. He still had some time. Doc gave him two months. Three tops. No use in pretending he had a chance. This wasn't something you came back from.

  Most people didn’t think of cancer as a spectrum disease. Cancer was just cancer. Unless you knew someone who had it, or had it yourself, cancer was a vague mysterious force of malevolent nature; cellular mutation gone amok, evolution at its most unkind. Jake too had been ignorant of the array of the disease. But Jake had learned. Over the next few months, he researched. There were more than a hundred varieties of cancer, each one specific to the part of the body it targeted. After the warning signs turned into nightmare symptoms like migraines, jaundiced yellow skin, difficulty breathing, along with further weight loss, Jake realized he’d read about this cancer. He learned terms like lymphocytic and edema. Different types of cancer took on different forms, and required different treatments. Some cancer was, by and large, quite treatable. Individual tumors could be operated on. Chemotherapy and radiation were far less targeted, but with a little luck and unbounded optimism, the body could fight back, could beat the invading force; like a general marshalling an ailing army, the body was weakened but not completely indefensible.

  Fighting cancer took a couple of things: time, and the kind of cancer that wasn’t immune to treatment. With the kind you could beat back, you also were granted the time needed to muster the fight. You could gather the will to not give up, to effect treatment and engage the enemy. With the other kind, the lethal, terminal species, it worked fast, faster than the drugs and the science. It was faster than the spirit of optimism the human spirit possesses. It was a thief, robbing you of any chance to regroup, to mount that essential defense.

  Jake had run through the battery of tests and the results returned with finality. He’d listened to Dr. Silverman explain just what stage four Hodgkins lymphoma terminal cancer meant, and what he could expect. It was almost a relief.

  He may not be able to recover, but he could correct some mistakes, leave things in order. He'd have to be systematic in his restitution of certain inequities in his life. Now that he was sure of his fate, his path had become clear and unclouded.

  The first thing Jake did was quit his job. He never was in love with it. No one ever loved the insurance life, but he didn't hate it, not the way you think of insurance salesmen hating it. If there were twisted, unhappy, unfulfilled Willy Lomans in his industry, he didn’t know any, and he certainly didn’t feel like one himself. In reality, the job, no matter how trudgingly uninteresting it might be, was still just a job he did. While it consumed the majority of his life by a wide margin, it was not the avatar of his spirit. When he shook his supervisor's hand, gathered up his few desk supplies in a banker's box, and walked out the door, he felt nothing more and nothing less than he had before.

  The next few weeks were a blur. He thought he might run out of time before he'd completed everything he felt compelled to do. He thought the cancer would catch up to him, make him weak and helpless. But for all the talk of his terminal condition, he didn’t feel all that worse. More tired, maybe. Breathing was sometimes harder, his lungs rattling oddly in his chest. But he had so far resisted his condition’s ravages.

  Reconciliation was not in his blood. He had to work to make it so, because entropy was the greatest enemy of all. It worked when you stopped. It worked when you kept going. It decayed all matter, yes, but it also consumed the intangibles. Love, mercy, thankfulness; all would fade into oblivion if left untended and unnurtured.

  So he called his friends, the ones who meant the most to him. The list was short. Entropy had taken most of them as well. He didn't tell them he was dying. He just told them he'd thought about them and wanted to say hello. None of them suspected he was really saying goodbye.

  He thought about telling Jerry Haddock, his landlord, but then, what had that greasy man ever done to deserve advance notice of his impending vacation? Ransomed him monthly for a place that was too small, and always seemed to be breaking off in pieces--a burst pipe here, a broken cabinet latch there, chipped tiles and a refrigerator that kept one half of his food too cold and the other half not quite cold enough. And Jerry'd never been good about the repairs. No. If he got his wish, Jake would die in bed, eating cereal like a champion. He’d drift off into a dream, and then Jerry would find him three weeks later. Jake thought it’d teach Jerry a lesson, leaving him with the god-awful smell. That gave Jake a brief, quiet surge of happiness.

  Then he found himself, not quite on purpose and not quite on accident either--because in this life, Jake suspected, nothing was ever either--in front of her house. Rebekah. He hadn't spoken to Rebekah in, oh, three years now. Not since he'd fallen away from his wife (and her mother), Elsie, for no outwardly apparent reason. The life they'd led together for eighteen years was a blank space in his mind. He walked out. Just left without saying goodbye, without giving a reason, and without knowing where he’d go. He had never cheated on Elsie--not once. But he’d never loved her, either. So they had put on happy faces, led social lives of some color. Their few friends never knew. Until he left, they were “that couple” who had been together forever, spoken of admiringly, because marriages didn’t last that long these days.

  Jake had left Elsie without a note, and perhaps what made the whole thing so monumentally awful, the capper of the thing, was that he took their only house key. Elsie had to install new locks on the house. Which she probably would have done anyway, but the point was clear. There was only one asshole in the situation, and Jake knew he was it.

  Then Elsie died in an accident two weeks later. Rebekah swore it happened because Elsie was crying uncontrollably as she sped through a red light and into the side of a sweet old couple’s car. The couple had also died in the collision.

  Now, Jake didn’t try to argue with Rebekah. How could she know if Else was crying or if she’d just been putting on her makeup? What difference did it make, in the end? In Rebekah’s mind he was responsible for three people's lives cut short. The weight of it didn't sink in until a few days later, at Elise’s funeral. Rebekah exploded in rage and pain, screaming in his face and cursing his name with words he didn't know she knew. Everyone had looked on, embarrassed and secretly tantalized, and she stormed away and out of his life for good.

  Now Jake was parked outside her house.

  He thought about what he would say. What could he say? He emerged from the car and walked to her door. He didn't think the news of his impending demise would have the effect of softening her view of him. She'd be glad he was checking out. She'd say things like "you deserve it" and that was if he was lucky. Odds were, she'd tell him to fuck off and slam the door in his face.

  Reconciliation with Rebekah hadn't been a priority for him before, so why now? Why make an effort to fix what was broken and in a few weeks, wouldn't even matter? He would be gone; his body already was being consumed from the insi
de out. He’d turn to dust. His memories, his dreams, they’d be gone forever. So what did a little forgiveness matter? Was he conforming to a cliche, an expectation of redress? Maybe it was unrealistic to expect catharsis in a world of terminal cancer and car accidents. Didn’t Elsie’s accident and his cancer prove that unremarkable insurance men were, in the end, no worse or better than the wives they abandoned? In the end, did it make a single quanta of difference? He was going to the same place everyone did. Soon after, in the grand scheme of it, Rebekah would follow, and then everyone else. Headed for the scrap heap of the universe.

  He didn’t know. Perhaps he owed Rebekah at least the small effort of trying. He couldn’t think of a compelling reason why, other than a Hollywood happy ending. Well, what was the harm?

  He hit the buzzer and waited. No answer. He buzzed again, and then knocked, but it was clear she was not home. He went back to the car, started it up, and then looked back. Maybe he could leave a note. But when he checked the glove box, there was no paper to write anything on, and the pen appeared to have burst.

  Parked in front of her house, motor running, Jake decided that if he was meant to fix what little they had together, it would have to happen because the Universe wanted it to happen. God damn it, the Universe had made him; It would unmake him too. So if It wanted this, It would have to put in the time. Clearly, this attempt had not worked. Perhaps it was not meant to be.

  Jake put his car in gear and drove away.

  Over the course of those first few weeks after he received the prognosis he saw very little of the news. So it was when he was standing in line to pay for his groceries, he was surprised to notice how quiet it was in the store. Only a couple people in line. All eyes were glued to the little TV above the register. Even the checkout lady, a short woman with big hair and the name Juanita on her badge, seemed distracted. She looked up every so often even as she ran items through the scanner.

  The TV had no sound, but the graphic was of a map of the United States, covered with red dots of varying sizes. Many were small, but some dots looked like lakes. One, in Texas, was the size of a dime. Half of Illinois was covered in red. The ticker running along the bottom of the screen read the following: "--scientists describe localized pockets of time disto--"

  "--How are you today?" Juanita asked him. He broke his gaze away from the screen. Juanita scanned the quart of milk he had selected. He watched the red light on the laser that told the future in dollars and cents.

  "What's going on?" Jake asked, ignoring her default statement and nodding toward the screen. “What’s, uh, what’s the story with the map?”

  "You don't know?" she responded. "It's all over the news."

  "I haven't watched the news lately," Jake said. "I've been busy. Patching up my life."

  "They don't really know what it is," she said. "That'll be two-nineteen."

  "Is this related to the sinkhole they found in Florida? Maybe a couple weeks ago?" He handed her a five.

  "Sinkhole? Mister, don't you know? They're callin' 'em time pools." She glanced back at the screen. "They don't know where they come from. They don't know what they are, exactly. They only know what happens when you get too close."

  "What happens?" he asked.

  "Time stops." She handed him his change. Her expression had changed. "Time stops," she repeated. "And you drown."

  Jake left the store and sat in his car. He stared ahead at the car parked opposite him. He wasn't consciously thinking about anything. He felt at rest.

  So, time pools. That was a new one. He'd always heard of time as a river.

  Not that it made a difference to him. He was dead either way. A part of him wondered why he wasn’t upset about that fact. Perhaps that was the insurance side of him. Jake had trained himself in the art of monotone when dealing with people and their insurance needs. Neutrality was important; as an adjustor, he didn’t care about emotional damage. He looked at numbers. He evaluated the cost by measuring the physical structures twisted by disasters and broken by accidents. So he must have walled off something within himself, and that’s what gave him this serene sense of finality. This was what gave him the ability to keep going, despite his demise lying ahead of him like a cloud of black ice on the road.

  He found himself in a bar, quite by accident, yet again, without purpose or reason. He had done his shopping. He had said his goodbyes. There was nothing left for him to do. He would not say farewell to Rebekah. The Universe had apparently deemed that final act too precious. He couldn't think of anything better than to enjoy a drink, or two if he could stand the extravagance.

  The bar was nearly empty, as bars often are at three in the afternoon. Its only inhabitants were the man behind the bar, and a dumpy girl in a dirty white poodle skirt. A tattoo ran up her arm, sinuously; spirals and knots ran in endless loops around themselves, and in a Celtic script, the word "Spirit."

  Jake eyed the TV hanging above the bar. It was still daytime talk show hour.

  "Hey, is there any news show on?" he asked the barkeep.

  "Turn it to CNN if you want," came the reply. The barkeep, who nodded toward the remote, looked as if he cared about nothing more than the glass and rag in his hand.

  "You hear about those time things?" Jake asked. The bartender eyed him, the look a cougar gives an encroaching human.

  "I hear they're some kind of pools of distorted time. You know anything about that?"

  "Mmmmm." The bartender didn't seem to care. “What can I get you?”

  "Sounds pretty weird to me," Jake said, ignoring the barman’s question. "Wish there was one near here. Wouldn't mind checking one of those things out."

  "Wish there were one near here." The bartender looked up, his statement almost an interjection. His face scowled.

  "What was that?" Jake asked.

  The bartender moved closer. “You said, 'Wish there was one near here.' That's incorrect grammar. You should have said, 'I wish there were one near here.’ It's the subjunctive form of the verb that's appropriate, since you're expressing a sentiment that doesn't actually exist. And there is one near here. But they’re not letting anyone through to see it. Now, what can I get you?”

  The bartender stared at Jake’s eyes. Jake looked back, confused at the non-sequitur. He finally observed the bartender in full, seeing in his face a man who had lived hard and yet had not suffered the wear normally associated with it. It was in the eyes, though; they were hard and heavy. His short-cropped hair was peppered to mostly gray, though there were still flecks of black in it, slivers of virility still managing to hang on like Vikings to the dying coast of Finland.

  "Sorry. I never knew that." Jake said after a moment. He was taken aback and abashed at the schoolboy lecture he had just received, uninvited. This from a man who poured cheap booze for losers--except that out of context, he was one of those losers. Chastened, Jake continued, "I didn't really go to college."

  "Not many people know the intricacies of grammar, these days," the bartender replied. "It's a dying thing, like manners and telephoning." Jake was struck by the odd way the bartender had of talking. His speech was slow and unforced, unconcerned with carrying the message with any sense of speed or urgency. Jake decided he liked this guy, after all, even if he'd been somewhat petulant with that subjunctive verb nonsense.

  "Say," said Jake. "You wouldn't happen to know how to make a certain cocktail called a Bronx, would you?"

  The bartender's glance softened. "Now that's a strange drink. Not strange in taste. Just not one you hear very often from customers. Used to be quite popular. A hundred years ago, at least."

  "So you know how to make it? I tell you, I've never been able to make it myself, and no one else has ever heard of it, or if they have, they can't make it well. I rarely drink anyway, so it's not something I've ever really tasted. Not the way it's meant to be tasted, you know?"

  The bartender nodded. "You want one, then?"

  "I think I would." Jake smiled. "Last drink for me." His voice caught. Unac
countably. That wasn't what he'd intended. It had snuck up on him. The quick burning of the eyes, the sudden lump in his throat. The bartender detected it. Mercifully, he said nothing. Probably, he’d seen lots of it before. He began pouring gin into the shaker.

  "They do know what those things are." The bartender looked at Jake, as if he would know to what he was referring. Conspiratorial, almost.

  "Those things. You mean the time things?" Jake asked.

  The bartender nodded. "They know exactly what they are. They're keeping them secret."

  "What for?"

  "Government secrets. Science doesn't know what will happen when they let the word out that they're not in control. They think we'll riot. They’re probably right. Humans aren’t equipped to deal with irrational and unexplained phenomena.”

  "You think they're dangerous?"

  "They're not safe." The bartender chucked ice into the shaker, put the top on and began shaking it. He was a single native of a lonely tribe, dancing to bring the rain into the wood-laminate room. He had style.

  Jake watched the bartender pour the golden orange drink into a martini glass, whip off a garnish of peeled orange, wipe the rim, and slide it across on a cocktail napkin.

  "Bronx, made like they used to in Philadelphia, 1934."

  Jake looked into the glass, watched bubbles rising from the aerated mixture, enjoyed the gentle and unmistakable citrus tinge of orange and gin.

  "I'm dying." Jake raised the martini glass, splashing a bit on the bar. The bartender nodded, understanding.

  "For my sins, one of which is lack of dexterity."

  The bartender watched. Jake took in the Bronx with tiny sips, savoring each with quiet appreciation.

  "So what are they, exactly?" Jake asked. The drink was good. Solid flavor, a slight punch at the end with the orange and juniper hitting all the right notes.