by Inmon, Shawn
He went straight to his office, closed the door and hung his jacket up.
He sat at his desk and was in the process of sharpening his pencil for the day when he pitched face forward, dead.
Chapter Twenty-Two
CHARLES WATERS OPENED his eyes.
Dr. Masin was in mid-sentence when Charles interrupted him, saying, “Oh! I’m here again. How odd. I didn’t even feel sick.”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Masin said. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Oh, nothing, doctor. Please continue.”
Charles sat quietly, listening to the same speech he had heard many times before. When Dr. Masin finally wound down, Charles said, “Thank you, doctor,” and left the office.
That was exceedingly odd. I never felt unwell for even a single moment. And then, with no warning, I died.
Charles lived the next few days tentatively, waiting to see if the sickness returned to him, but it didn’t.
He treated this life as an experiment. He didn’t knock on Moondog’s door and tell him his outlandish story. He didn’t go to Vic Stander’s office and tell him he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Instead, he lived his life as though he hadn’t been diagnosed at all.
He didn’t go rockhounding in Netarts. He didn’t worry about stretching his boundaries and trying new things.
On Halloween, Charles reported to work as he did every Monday morning. He knew that he had died on Halloween the previous life, but didn’t put much stock in that. He had not died on the same day consistently over all his previous lives.
At 10:45 a.m., he pitched face-forward onto his desk, dead.
CHARLES WATERS OPENED his eyes.
Something is different.
He no longer felt sick, but his lifespan seemed to be much more predictable now.
But two instances don’t make a pattern. If things are somehow shifting, this could just be a coincidence. I’ll need to test this.
Charles patiently waited for Dr. Masin to finish what he was saying, thanked him, then left his office.
He lived the rest of this life as though nothing was wrong. Once again, he didn’t bother to speak to Moondog or Vic, or go rockhounding to see Sarah, or change anything at all.
On Halloween day, he did something very un-Charles like: he called in sick to Graystone Insurance. He wasn’t sick, or at least he didn’t feel sick, but if he was going to die, he preferred to do it at home.
At 10:45 a.m., Charles was walking across the living room of his apartment and fell to the floor like a string-cut marionette, dead before he hit the floor.
CHARLES WATERS OPENED his eyes.
He blocked out what Dr. Masin was saying, as he had memorized that speech many lifetimes earlier.
Three times is the beginning of a pattern. Still not enough evidence to be sure, however.
Charles lived this life precisely as he had the previous.
Again, on Halloween morning, he called in sick to Graystone Insurance.
Again, at 10:45 a.m., he dropped dead.
CHARLES WATERS LIVED essentially this same life 1,236 more times.
His attachment to repetition, habit, and patterns was strong.
Not all of those lives were exactly identical—it’s difficult to do anything precisely the same way more than a thousand times, let alone live a life, albeit a short one.
In one life, Charles slipped on a wet step outside Graystone Insurance and broke his ankle badly enough to require surgery. He spent the rest of that life laid up at home. In another, he was involved in a fender-bender on the way home from work. He hated to see his Honda Civic banged up, but he knew that if he waited a few days, he would die and it would once again be sitting unblemished in its parking spot, waiting for him.
There was so little variety to these lives that Charles began to believe he was living in a happy, comforting dream.
When he woke up in Dr. Masin’s office on that 1,237th additional life, Charles did some math in his head. He realized that by repeating these twenty-five days over and over so many times, he had spent double the time living his life in short cycles as he had in his original life.
He also knew that 1,237 was a prime number.
Charles liked prime numbers.
Charles had ridden the Middle Falls Metro bus home from Dr. Masin’s office so many times that it had become almost as comforting to him as his condo or his office at Graystone insurance. As he moved further away from the waking point, things diverged somewhat, but here at the beginning, the same seat was always open to him, and the same driver always announced the stops. He couldn’t have picked any of the other riders out of a police lineup, though. Even after riding with them for more than a thousand times, he had never noticed them.
During all these repetitive lives, Charles had believed he had found the solution to his dilemma. He acted as though it wasn’t happening. He had taken comfort in his own form of immortality. He began to believe he would live forever, even if he had to do it in short increments, repeated.
Still, over time—the last few hundred repetitions of his twenty-five day life span—Charles began to feel a sense of dissatisfaction. The last hundred lives, even the comforting sense of sameness felt hollow to him.
When he got back to his condo—unchanged, as always—he sat on the couch in absolute silence and thought.
He began to see this endless repetition of lives as a gift instead of the curse he had initially thought of it.
Sitting there in the fading afternoon sunshine, an epiphany washed over him.
I need to change.
A moment later, the counterpoint arrived in his brain.
I hate change.
He purposefully waited until 6:45 to start his dinner.
A small change, but change, nonetheless.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Universal Life Center
SEMOLINA AND CARRIE looked at the image showing in the pyxis. It was an image of a man sitting at a dining room table, eating a small plate of spaghetti.
“Maybe I made a mistake by taking all the pain away. He has lost all momentum and is endlessly repeating the same life,” Carrie said.
“I don’t think it was a mistake. He never would have gotten anywhere, being constantly weighed down by his illness.”
“It doesn’t look like he’s getting anywhere this way, either. How many lives has he repeated?”
Semolina blushed slightly. “Should I be keeping track of that? I have no idea, but it has to be more than a thousand. What’s worse, though, is that his emotions are so tamped down.”
Semolina pointed to the frame that surrounded the image. It was a pale tan.
“He’s using massive resources then, and not feeding the machine at all,” Carrie noted. “This isn’t ideal.”
“Should we interfere more? Bring the pain of the illness back to him, at least temporarily?”
Carrie looked up, into the infinite star field that served as the ceiling of the Universal Life Center.
“No. He is on a path. We need to let him figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN CHARLES FINISHED dinner—still chewing each bite thirty-seven times—he did something he had not done for the equivalent of eighty-five years.
He knocked on Moondog’s door.
Moondog did not know that he had been abandoned by his erstwhile friend for nearly a century, of course. From his perspective, this was the first time Charles had come calling.
“Hello, Charles. Everything okay?”
“That’s a value judgment I am not prepared to make. Would it be all right if I came in and you made me some of that tea you used to make me? The one you get from Thailand, I think? It’s been so many years since I’ve talked to you, I can’t remember for sure.”
The impossibilities in that statement made Moondog squint and turn his head slightly, taking in Charles from a different angle. Still, he opened the door wide and said, “Of course. Yes, Thailand. That oolong tea i
s special. Come in, sit down, I’ll put the water on.”
Moondog filled the teapot and put it on the stove with a whoosh of blue flame. As he went about the ritual of preparing the tea, he cast occasional glances at Charles.
Finally, he said, “While the water’s heating, I have a few questions for you. You said I’ve made this tea for you before, but you’ve never been in my condo before. Also, you said it had been so many years since you had talked to me, but I talked to you in the elevator riding up from the lobby just the other day.”
“Both of our perspectives are correct to us, but when they run into each other like this, it’s a mess. I’ll explain.”
The teapot whistled and Moondog poured loose tea into the tea balls and dropped them in the cups of hot water, bobbing them up and down. “And here I thought this was going to be just another boring Thursday night getting stoned and listening to music. Hang on before you start. I want to get all this from the beginning.”
A minute later, Moondog emerged from the kitchen with two mugs and set them both on cork coasters. He sat cross-legged, swami-style on the couch.
“Ready.”
Charles did a little math in his head, confirming his numbers. “From your perspective, you spoke to me the other day in the elevator. From mine, I haven’t spoken to you other than in passing in more than eighty-five years. Even so, there was a time when we were friends.”
Moondog nodded, as though he could accept that at face value. A moment later though, he shook his head and said, “How’s that?”
“A long time ago, I died of cancer. I didn’t stay dead, though. I didn’t go on to whatever is next. I always thought what was next would be the infinite void. Instead, I woke up in my life, but back a few days from when I had died. At first, my lives were short. The cancer was so painful and really all I could do was undergo palliative care and die again and again. I was scared and lonely. One night, I knocked on your door and told you what was happening. You made me tea and listened to me and didn’t judge me. You even loaned me books that you thought might help me.” Charles nodded at the bookshelf in the corner.
“So then, why haven’t you come and seen me for so long?”
“Something happened. After twenty-seven lives, when I woke up, I didn’t feel sick any more. I thought whatever I was going through was over, that maybe I could live out my normal life. It wasn’t over, though. I was still sick; I just didn’t feel that way. I died on Halloween morning at 10:45. Since then, I’ve died on that same morning more than a thousand times.”
Moondog took a long drink of his tea. He retrieved a cookie tin, opened it, and began rolling a cigarette. Or a joint. Charles couldn’t be sure.
“First, that’s a mind-boggling number, when you apply it to living a life. But, putting that aside for a moment, that still doesn’t explain why you stopped coming to me for help.”
“Before you, I’d never had a friend. I didn’t need one. When I didn’t feel sick any more, I thought again that I didn’t need one.”
“So, these thousand lives—”
“—1,236 lives.”
“—okay, in these 1,236 lives, what did you do?”
“I lived my life. I went to work. I worked on my equations. I kept to my patterns. I like consistency.”
“You essentially lived the same month over and over? That means that you watched the same television shows, saw the same weather, did the same work that many times?” Moondog’s eyes were wide with surprise.
“I like consistency.”
“There’s consistency, then there’s insanity. I think this borders much closer to that.”
“That’s why I’m here. When I opened my eyes in Dr. Masin’s office again this afternoon, I realized I was being self-indulgent and childish. My mother would not be proud of me, and I hate to think about that.”
“So here you are,” Moondog mused. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I need to change things, I suppose. I only have twenty-five days to live, but apparently I have an endless supply of those twenty-five days. If I didn’t, I think I would have run out of them by now.”
“Have you ever thought about traveling? Seeing the world? Do you have a passport?”
“No. I never wanted to travel internationally. Or domestically.” Charles blew on his tea, took a sip, and a small smile of recognition touched his lips. “I never wanted to travel anywhere, actually.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said that I can relate to. I don’t leave the apartment often myself.”
“I know. The first time I came to see you like this, you told me that. Still, you went rockhounding with me. You didn’t enjoy it though, so I never asked you to go back with me for any of my other lives.”
“Thank you. For my past selves, I appreciate that. Well, not having a passport leaves out a big chunk of the world. It normally takes six weeks to get one, but if you pay extra, they’ll expedite it for you. Still, it takes about three weeks. You won’t be able to apply until Monday, so by the time it arrived; it would be just about Halloween.”
“That’s okay. I can’t imagine where I would want to go, anyway.”
“Rome? Paris? The African Veldt? Machu Picchu?”
“No.”
“Okay. Doesn’t matter anyway, they are all out of reach because of the passport issue. How about here in the states? What interests you?”
“Numbers. Equations.”
“Not a lot of spots specialize in that. How about history? Gettysburg, maybe, or Washington D.C.?”
“Not really.”
“You are a tough nut to crack.”
“That is why I’ve lived the same life 1,236 times.”
“Let’s explore some of the ways you are overly-habitual. Maybe we can start with these. I’ve seen the routine you go through when you lock your doors.”
“That’s just good safety. I’m not changing that.”
“What else do you do over and over?”
“I eat the same seven meals each week. The same thing on the same night.”
“As in, Taco Tuesday?”
“I don’t eat tacos. They don’t come in microwavable meals.”
“Hold on, you mean you eat the same seven TV dinners every week?”
“They’ve come a long way, you know. They are much better than they were in the sixties.”
“We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that. You should go out to eat, or learn to cook. You’ve got plenty of time. If you learn one new dish every life, soon you would be a master chef. I’m not the greatest chef in the world, but I do all right for myself. Why don’t you come over once or twice a week and I’ll teach you how to make a few simple dishes. It’ll save wear and tear on your microwave.”
“I’ve had the same microwave since I moved in. It’s never broken down. I don’t think I need to worry about wear and tear on it.”
“I need to make a mental note about how literal you are. Listen, why don’t you come over tomorrow and I’ll show you a few basics.”
“I like my meals that I eat now.”
“And I’ll bet you didn’t want to try my oolong tea when I first made it for you. Now look at you—drinking it like a pro.”
Charles contemplated that for a moment. “What time do you eat?”
“I sleep during the day, so I usually eat breakfast around 6:00.”
“I eat dinner at 6:30.”
Moondog laughed and held his hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine. Come over around 6:00 tomorrow and we can cook together.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
CHARLES KNOCKED ON Moondog’s door at precisely 6:00 the next evening.
Moondog answered wearing a tall white chef’s hat.
Charles didn’t get the joke.
Moondog doffed the hat and set it on the kitchen counter. “Come on in, Charles, and welcome to your first culinary lesson.”
Charles removed a small notebook from his back pocket and said, “I’m ready.”
Moondo
g’s eyes twinkled a bit at the sight of the notebook, but he didn’t say a word.
“Tonight, we’re going to tackle one of my basic food group staples—the omelet.”
Charles held up his hand. “That’s for breakfast. We should be cooking dinner.”
“The omelet is one of the world’s most perfect foods. It can be served anytime. Soon you will learn the magic behind the three words, ‘breakfast for dinner.’ Are you ready?”
Charles nodded.
“A few things to make note of. Prepare everything in advance. Omelets cook quickly, so you don’t want to be grating cheese or chopping onions while the eggs are cooking. Also, don’t turn the heat up too high. I prefer a little less than half heat.”
Moondog set three eggs on the cutting board next to some shredded cheese, then one by one, cracked them into the bowl. The way he did it—one handed without looking—told Charles that he had cracked many dozens of them before.
“Now, some people add a little milk at this point, but I don’t like what that does to the texture, so I just add a few tablespoons of water. Not margarine. Never margarine. Then, salt and pepper to flavor. I use about a quarter teaspoon of salt and a pinch of pepper, because that’s how I like it. Finally, there’s a secret ingredient that you can add or not.”
Moondog reached behind him into the refrigerator and pulled out a glass jar of French’s mustard. “You can’t use too much of this, or it overwhelms everything. But if you use just a bit, it adds a robust flavor and no one will ever know what it is.” He spooned a small bit into the eggs in the bowl.
Charles occupied himself taking notes.
Moondog pulled a small whisk out of a side drawer and smoothly blended what was in the bowl.
He pointed to a small pan on the stove. “Here’s another area where some people go wrong—they use too big a pan. That makes it much harder. A little seven-inch pan like this is perfect. He knifed a fat pat of butter off a dish on the counter and dropped it on the pan, then whooshed the gas up to half heat.