by Inmon, Shawn
Instead, he went to the downstairs garage and climbed into his Honda Civic. He had filled up the day before he had gotten word from Dr. Masin, so every time he climbed back into the car for the first time, it had a full tank. That pleased him every time.
He drove to Safeway and bought everything he needed to make omelets and steak dinners and returned home.
He didn’t stop to think that this simple trip to the store—an unplanned trip on a Thursday afternoon, instead of a Sunday morning—might have thrown him into a tizzy back in that first life. His life, his attitude, his everything was changing in such small increments that they slipped past even someone as observant as Charles was.
When he stepped off the elevator, he saw Moondog carrying his garbage toward the garbage chute at the end of the hall. He had to restrain himself from approaching him and apologizing again. He remembered that Moondog—the one he had put in such a terrible spot—had already forgiven him.
He unlocked his apartment door and remembered the brand of lock the hotel in New York had used. He fished a notebook out of a drawer in the kitchen and started a new To Do list.
He laid out the butter, cheese, and eggs for the omelet and set to work making his dinner. Breakfast for dinner, as Moondog called it.
After he had eaten his omelet and done the dishes, he sat on his couch, reviewing where he was and where he wanted to go.
His previous life had seemed like a series of complete disasters, but now, sitting in the safety of his couch thinking about it, he had a slightly different perspective. The outcome wasn’t ideal—Moondog sitting in jail—but the process, the adventure, hadn’t been altogether unpleasant.
Still, he knew he had a lot to do to break down what had happened in that life, where he had gone wrong, and what he needed to do to get things right the next time.
Charles spent thirteen lifetimes recovering from his trip to New York.
Some people believe we have three hearts—the one we show to the world, the one we show to those closest to us, and the one we show to no one.
In Charles’ most secret heart, he thought he might spend another 1,237 lifetimes in his recovery.
After only a baker’s dozen, though, he realized that wouldn’t be possible.
Before, when he lived essentially the same life almost endlessly, he had found comfort in his habits and the sameness of his days.
This time, he felt like he was walking through a grayish world, dragging an increasingly heavy burden of lifetimes behind him. There was no satisfaction in his many habits, only a bland essence that felt like eating tasteless pablum.
When Halloween morning arrived on the thirteenth life of that cycle—a series of lives that had not included adding anything new or having a real conversation with Moondog—he knew it was once again time for a change.
Chapter Thirty-Four
CHARLES WASN’T QUITE ready to interact with Moondog yet. It had been almost a year in his subjective time frame, but the guilt from pushing him into going on the trip still burned.
Each time he ran into Moondog—in the hallway, getting the mail, taking the garbage out—it pleased Charles to see him running around free and clear.
Even though he wasn’t ready to tackle that friendship again, Charles knew he needed to do something to breathe life back into his world.
He decided to go back to work.
He went into work that next day—a Friday—and went through his normal routine. He didn’t need to focus on his work much. He had done that same work so many times that everything in his inbox was rote to him.
He hadn’t told anyone at Graystone Insurance that he was sick for many, many lifetimes, so he decided to do that.
A few minutes before noon, Charles went to Vic Stander’s office. He got there while the young man ahead of him was apparently getting chewed out for some infraction. After Charles sat there a few minutes, the young man—whose name Charles didn’t know—once again emerged shame-faced and darted away.
I wonder what he did to get in trouble? Vic won’t tell me of course. That would be completely inappropriate.
Charles stuck his head in the door and said, “Vic? I need to talk to you.”
“Hello, Charles,” Vic said, organizing some papers into a folder. “Is it something that can wait? I’m just getting ready to go to lunch.”
“It’s important, but it will still be important in an hour. I’ll go get my lunch, too, then come back.”
Vic looked at Charles as though he was contemplating asking him if he wanted to eat lunch in the cafeteria together. He shook his head slightly and said, “That would be great. I’ll see you here in an hour, then.”
Charles used the stairs to go down to the cafeteria. Walking around in Queens had shown him that although he no longer felt the effects of his illness, he wasn’t in the kind of shape he’d like to be. On his next life, he had decided to take the stairs whenever the opportunity presented itself and kept it up. It was slightly frustrating to him that each time he died, his conditioning had to start over.
As frustrations with his ongoing situation went, it was minor.
Charles ordered the chef’s salad, because he always ordered the chef’s salad at the cafeteria on Fridays.
While he ate, he continued to work on the formula for determining the amount of traffic that flowed through JFK on an annual basis. He wondered if he could request some statistics from the airport itself. Then, he wondered whether any information would arrive before he died again in twenty-four days, or if they would arrive too late and be lost in his flow of lives.
Charles increasingly thought about the long chain of lives he was dragging along behind him. What happened to those worlds when he died? Did they die out, too, or are there more than a thousand extra worlds living on because he had been briefly born into them?
When he finally came out of his reverie and looked at the clock overhead, he saw that it was almost one o’clock. He returned his tray and plate and took the stairs back up.
He got to Vic’s office just behind Vic himself.
“Perfect timing, Charles. Come on in and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I’m dying, Vic. I’ve got stage four pancreatic cancer.”
Charles almost said, ‘I’m going to die on Halloween morning at 10:45 a.m.’ but he caught himself.
“My doctor says I have around thirty days to live.”
“My God, Charles, why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You were leaving for lunch. I didn’t want to hold you up.”
Vic shook his head. “What can we do to help, Charles?”
“Not much, really. I’d like to keep working right up until I can’t any more. I would like to put in for Halloween day off, though. I know I’m going to be tied up that day.”
This was the closest Charles had ever come to making a joke.
Vic Stander did not laugh.
“I also thought I could help you get everything ready to transition my work to the rest of the team.”
“Of course, Charles, but isn’t there something you’d like to do away from work? Spend time with family and friends? Maybe travel?”
“No, I’ve traveled before. I didn’t like it.”
Stunned, Vic nodded and took a notebook out of his drawer and wrote a note so he had something to do with his hands.
Charles stood up and said, “That’s all I needed then. I’ll be back in on Monday, like normal.”
THAT WEEKEND, CHARLES did not go rockhounding. He stopped at the used bookstore on the way home from work that Friday and stocked up on new books he hadn’t read before. He practiced making omelets and broiling steaks. He promised himself that the next time he involved Moondog in his life, he would add a third item he could cook. He knew that if he ever mastered seven different meals, then he would be able to assign each one to a given day and find the consistency he craved.
The following Monday, Charles noticed that people were once again staring at him when he arrived at Graystone I
nsurance.
He avoided the stares at the elevator, though, by taking the stairs.
He went through the motions of completing work he had long-since memorized, but did not find the comfort he had in the past.
Midafternoon, Charles heard a knock on his door. As was his habit, instead of simply saying, ‘Come in,” he stood and opened the door himself.
Alice Harkins stood outside the door and said, “Charles, I’m so sorry to hear the news about your illness. Can I come in for a moment?”
Charles fought a battle within himself for several seconds, then opened the door wider. He said, “Yes, come in,” as he retreated behind his desk.
Alice stepped in and looked for a chair on the side of the desk opposite where Charles sat. There was none. She stepped into where a chair might normally have been.
“As I said, I’m so sorry to hear that you are so sick.”
Charles shrugged. “I’ve grown used to the idea of dying.”
Alice opened her mouth to respond and realized she didn’t have a response for that. She gathered herself, then said, “Anyway, we’ve all gotten together to have a little party for you, to show how much we appreciate and care about you. Will you be in either this Friday or next Monday? Monday would be better for us, because we want to get you a cake and that will give us enough time to get one made, but I didn’t know if you might have a doctor’s appointment then.”
Charles picked up the pencil he had been writing with and put it in the sharpener on the corner of his desk. The machine whirred and whirred until he took the pencil out and examined the sharpened lead.
“I’ll be in both Friday and Monday.”
“Wonderful!” Alice said. She might have been planning a regular party and not a We’re-sorry-you’re-dying party. “If it’s all right then, we’ll have it in the cafeteria at lunchtime on Monday. So, what’s your favorite cake?”
Charles started to say that he didn’t like cake, but changed his mind. “What’s your favorite cake, Alice?”
Her face lit up as though she was eating cake at that moment. “Oooh, I love just about any cake. Black Forest Cake, white cake with coffee icing, double chocolate cake.” She glanced down at her slightly round figure and said, “I guess you can tell I’m not the kind of girl who starves herself.”
Charles had only noticed the extra pounds on Alice in the way he noticed everyone—by the impact that weight would likely have on her lifespan.
“I guess if I had to pick one, though, it would be German Chocolate. That’s so good.”
“Let’s do that one, then.”
“Really? You know you don’t have to pick my favorite, Charles. Well. All right, then. What would you like to drink? We’ll have coffee and tea, of course, but what else would you like?”
“Water.”
“Water. Of course. Don’t worry yourself about anything else, then. Jan and I will take care of everything.”
Charles nodded. He couldn’t imagine worrying about something like this.
Chapter Thirty-Five
IN FACT, CHARLES DIDN’T give another moment’s thought to the party for the next week.
The following Monday, he was sitting at his desk, going over the information about bicycling and its impact on your lifespan for more than the thousandth time. Each time he went over it, he found a new angle, a new way of looking at the same old information. This made him wonder how much he had missed on all the previous work he had done, where he only went over each piece of information four or five times.
A few minutes before noon, Alice knocked on his door.
“Charles? We’re ready for you. Are you ready to come down?”
Charles glanced up from his spreadsheets and cricked his neck left, then right. He took a deep breath and nodded to her through the glass.
“I’ll be right down,” Charles said, counting on Alice’s abilities as a lip reader to understand him through the closed door.
He folded up the sheets, put them in their proper folders then retrieved his jacket off the hook on his door.
When he opened the door, he found Alice still standing there, waiting for him.
“I thought I’d escort you down.”
“As long as we can take the stairs.”
“Is that best for you in your condition?”
“It won’t matter one way or the other. It will all be over soon.”
Alice had no answer to that and so walked silently alongside him along the hall and down the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, they turned left into the lunchroom. It looked exactly like the lunchroom always looked, aside from one table set aside with streamers, confetti sprinkled about and a giant sheet.
What was different, though, was that it seemed like every person in the company, from the night janitors up to Mr. Graystone himself, was there. Typically, the cafeteria was sparsely attended as most walked to other food options. Today, it was stuffed with people and they all turned their attention to Charles.
The moment he stepped in, the whole company burst into He’s a Jolly Good Fellow—a song Charles had never actually heard sung before.
This was the first time in all of Charles’ lifetimes he had ever been called jolly by anyone.
He had no idea how to respond, so he did what he always did—he didn’t respond at all.
Alice put a hand against his back and guided him the rest of the way into the room. People who Charles barely knew smiled and patted him on the back. Gently, though, as everyone knew that although he didn’t show it, Charles had to be suffering. He was, after all, dying.
Alice led Charles to the table in the middle of the room where Mr. Graystone was holding court. The great man stepped forward to shake Charles’ hand. He leaned forward and confidentially said, “So sorry to hear about this, Charles. You’ve done so much for us. Let Mrs. Graystone and I know if there’s anything we can do for you.”
Graystone retreated to the table with the cake and punch and lifted up a fine wooden plaque. Engraved on the gold overlay were the words, “For Twenty-Two Years of Exemplary Service to Graystone Insurance.”
Graystone held up his other hand to quiet the room, then said, “Everyone here knows Charles. I pulled his employment history today and saw that he has never missed a single day of work. The United States Post Office and their neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night motto has nothing on our Charles.”
While Mr. Graystone went on, Charles stopped listening and tried to remember if anyone had ever referred to him as ‘our’ Charles before. He couldn’t think of a time.
Charles looked up and saw that Graystone had stopped speaking and was holding out the plaque to him. Everyone in the room was applauding him and someone in the back yelled “Speech!”
Charles had never given a speech.
He accepted the plaque, cradled it to him and cleared his throat.
The room fell silent.
“Let’s eat cake,” Charles said.
For another moment, silence reigned. Then applause started at the back of the room and spread to the front. A few people chanted, ‘Cake, cake, cake.”
Alice stepped forward and raised the cake knife like a weapon of war before cutting into it.
Some people escaped immediately back to their desks, or scampered out the front door, still hoping to catch the lunch special at the deli down the street. If possible, Charles would have been one of those retreating to his desk, but Alice held him firmly by the elbow and didn’t let go.
Most people stayed, though, getting cake and punch and lining up to say a few words to Charles.
When someone said, “You’ve been a rock here, Charles,” or “I don’t know how we’ll manage without you, Charles,” the man himself remained stoic and, to all outside views, untouched.
Every time someone said something exceedingly kind, though, Alice nodded, pouted her lip out as if to say, Isn’t that the truth, and gave off the emotion that Charles could not.
When the better part o
f an hour had passed, the crowd petered out. The cake was demolished, with only one corner left untouched.
Alice looked around at the quickly-emptying room and said, “That was nice, wasn’t it Charles?”
Charles honestly didn’t know if it was nice or not. He had never experienced anything like it. But, for once, he recognized the social cue.
“It was. Thank you, Alice, for putting it together for me.”
“Oh, Charles,” she said, obviously pleased. “It’s absolutely the least I can do. I brought some Tupperware containers, because I knew we’d have some leftovers. I noticed you were so busy being the center of attention; you didn’t even get to try a bite. Let me pack one up for you.”
Charles’ first instinct was to pass, but at the last moment he said, “Thank you again.”
He accepted the Tupperware container with three big slices of cake sealed inside. He noticed both the lid and the container had Alice’s name written on them.
That night, Charles took the cake next door and knocked on Moondog’s door.
As he always was, Moondog looked slightly surprised to see Charles appearing out of the blue.
“There was a party at work today,” Charles said with no preamble. “We had cake left over and I thought you might like it.”
“That’s very neighborly, Charles. Would you like to come in and have a piece with me? I could brew us some tea.”
“No, that’s fine. I just didn’t want the cake to go to waste. When you’re done with it, you can return the container to me.”
Charles spent the next eleven days living his most basic life.
At 10:45 on Halloween morning, he died.
Chapter Thirty-Six
CHARLES WATERS OPENED his eyes.
Dr. Masin was talking.
The people, the car alarm, the distracted Jaguar driver all happened according to schedule.
He found his normal seat on the bus and rode home to start another life.
It was all according to plan, until it wasn’t.
He walked up the back stairs to his condo—starting over on his conditioning routine once again. He passed Moondog in the hallway and said hello. He planned on talking to Moondog again in this life. He found that he missed him.