Close Encounters

by Jen Michalski

  Part of him needed to resolve this situation immediately, even if it meant tailing Bob Fuller around the building until the fading hand appeared in its former glory. He turned back toward the building. No, he could not do it. He couldn’t give Bob Fuller any reason to think he liked him, to give him an opening to be chummy with him. Bob would latch on with his iron hook of a hand and not let go. Everyone knew there were Bob Fullers and David Tuckers in every company and that they went together like oil and water. He would find out tomorrow, tomorrow the matter would be resolved, and everything would move forward like it always had in its right place.

  Sara wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and it was strange for David to be in the house alone. In fact, it was seemingly strange for David to be in the house at all. He grabbed a glass of juice, knocked his shoes off and walked upstairs to the bedroom, feeling the plush Stainmaster carpet underneath his feet. He put his laptop on the bed and sat down next to it, leaning over and raising the window to let in some fresh air. He could hear a few birds, some isolated cries of children playing far off, perhaps in the next development, noises that were usually absent when David was in this room. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind blowing through the screen, imagining air particles rushing around the miniscule aluminum latticework that comprised the screen, over and under and side to side.

  “David, what are you doing here?”

  He opened his eyes to see Sara standing over him, with more surprise than concern. She was a pleasantly attractive young woman, her dark hair stylishly cut and her suit smartly tailored. Her outer shell exuded confidence even as she frowned at the sight of him.

  “Uh, I wasn’t feeling well, so I took an early day.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Oh? You should’ve called me. I would have tried to leave work early and come home.”

  “Oh, that’s OK.” He waved his hand. “Jesus, how long have I been asleep?”

  “I don’t know. It’s five-thirty now.” She began to walk out of the room. “Why don’t you get cleaned up? I’m going to start dinner.”

  Downstairs David wondered how he would have the forecasts done by tomorrow. Bruce hadn’t been expecting them until Friday at the earliest. Why did he feel compelled to make such an exorbitant offer to compensate for his breakdown this morning?

  “Are you feeling better, honey?” Sara set a plate of pasta in front of him. They had this dish often, although David could not pinpoint the last time they had it. It was a simple dish of chicken and garlic, tomatoes and onions—something Sara could put together quickly. David tried to remember what they ate last night. He was sure it was another simple dish—most of their meals operated with interchangeable parts. Some nights they had potatoes on the side instead of pasta salad, chicken instead of beef, shrimp instead of chicken, Alfredo instead of marinara.

  “Just have a lot of work tonight.” He shrugged, dipping his fork into the steaming noodles. “Bruce and I are meeting tomorrow morning to go over the forecasts.”

  “Tomorrow? I thought you had until the end of the week.”

  “I know, I know—you see, I was at the meeting this morning and Bob Fuller…”

  “Who’s Bob Fuller? Is he responsible for this?”

  “No, not at all. You remember Bob, right? I’m sure you met him at the picnic this year.”

  “I don’t know.” She twirled some of her own pasta.

  “He looks like, you know…”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know,” he laughed, and downed his glass of red. “He’s…Bob. He’s a putz. Think of what putzes look like.”

  “You still haven’t told me how he’s responsible for your having the forecasts by tomorrow.”

  “We were in our planning meeting and…I…thought I saw something unusual about Bob, and it distracted me. And Bruce asked me a question, and I couldn’t answer it, and when we were talking after the meeting, I offered to sit with him tomorrow and go over the projections.”

  “The projections you haven’t finished.”

  “It just came out—it was the least I could offer, totally tanking the meeting.”

  “The least you could offer?” She dropped her fork on her plate and sighed. “I can’t believe you did that, David. We were supposed to clean out the den tonight.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking, but it doesn’t matter now.” He stood up and dropped his napkin on his plate. “I’m sorry, I really am. We can clean out the den Saturday.”

  “I’ve got to go to the mall Saturday. We’re going to John and Christine’s party that, night, remember?”

  “I’ll clean up the den while you’re at the mall, OK? Or we can talk about it later. Right now, I’ve got to get working.”

  Upstairs David sat over his laptop. He knew that Sara would probably bring him up a cup of coffee or tea, even if she was angry with him. They had put so many things off over the years for his job, he knew one more night wouldn’t hurt them. She wasn’t going to leave him. She loved him and their lifestyle and their house and her late-model sports utility vehicle, and he could admit to himself that he was as much a trophy husband to her as he was intimate companion. Her parents adored him, her friends and coworkers told her she was lucky, lucky to have David, this image of David that she created for them in painstaking detail, detail that only needed to be reinforced by a five minute jaunt on the internet to order flowers for delivery at her work. Not that he was callous and insensitive; he knew he had been riding on the myth of himself for far too long now. He just needed a break, an opportunity, a few days off, after these projections were finished, then he could be the David that she loved and do the things she loved about him.

  The longer he spent at home on the projections the further the incident with Bob Fuller drifted from his mind and the easier he was able to write it off as his sleep-deprived imagination. Unfortunately, he was going to have to stay up and finish this, and Sara hadn’t brought him any coffee. But perhaps he had been dependent on artificial stimulants for too long. Maybe he needed a quick jog. The park was only a couple of blocks away, and if he spent an hour away from the computer total it would be enough to carry him through the night. He quickly threw on some sweats and his shoes and went downstairs to the den, where Sara was reading a magazine on the couch and eating some strawberries.

  “Sara, I’m going out for a quick jog—I need to wake up.” He kissed her on the head.

  “Why?” She looked up at him in puzzlement. “I thought you had to finish the projections—why not just get on the exercise machine?”

  “I can’t finish them if I’m not awake—and the change in scenery will do me good.” He did a few stretches in front of her.

  “Well, it’s getting dark out. Why don’t I just make you a cup of coffee?”

  “That’s a quick fix. This will be better for me. I really need the fresh air.” He leaned over and kissed her again but resisted the urge to see what she was reading. Years ago she used to buy home design magazines that promoted beautiful living, sometimes the Sunday paper. He hoped she hadn’t moved onto those women’s magazines that promised the secrets to spicing up one’s love life or how to deconstruct the inner core of man’s aloofness or how to have an affair. He decided he would make a game of it instead. When he got back from his jog he would pick up the magazine and try to decipher which articles she had read.

  Outside he jogged tepidly, pacing himself until he could trust that his muscles were still capable of the weight and impact. He lifted his legs higher, further, faster as he entered the park. The evening had begun to cloak the trees, the only contrast the semi-white lines of the soccer field and the outer tent of the ice rink. He could hear a cacophony of birds as he passed through one narrow overhang. He didn’t realize that birds sang, or talked, or whatever it was chirping, he didn’t know—at night, but he guessed it really didn’t make that much of a difference to him. The leaves rustled under the soft breeze, and they made noise too. The frequency and intensity of
the bird and the trees increased, whether in response to his presence or perhaps because his mind was blank, he couldn’t tell. It sounded like any other sound of nature, yet it was crisp and new at the same time, as if he had never really heard or listened.

  He stopped at the edge of the tennis courts, leaning against a tree to catch his breath, a knarly, old, somewhat ordinary tree. What kind of tree it was he didn’t know. It could have been pine or maple or birch, and he was none the wiser about it. In fact, he never remembered learning about trees in school or celebrating Arbor Day except in Peanuts comics, and he never really learned about birds either. In fact, he couldn’t believe how unbelievably ignorant he was of these two subjects.

  However, he felt empowered as he jogged home, whether by the runner’s high or his new intimacy with Mother Nature he wasn’t sure. He was going to look up trees tomorrow during his lunch. There had to a tree web site or something, probably thousands. An Idiot’s Guide to Forests, he chuckled to himself. Maybe this silly hallucination had been for the better, he mused. It gave him a fresh perspective.

  As he jogged by the bus stop, an old peasant woman from one of the old European neighborhoods on the East Side plodded off the bus. She looked up at him over her hunchback as he stopped dead in his tracks. Her right arm—her right arm was there, but it wasn’t. Like Bob Fuller’s. Like Bob Fuller’s hand wasn’t.

  She struggled to juggle her packages, and David extended his arms in service. She ignored him, but he felt compelled to follow her, make sure she was safe. The old woman didn’t say anything to him, only wheezed and puffed noisily as they walked the few blocks to her city-subsidized, diocese-run senior apartment. He had been over this way for dinner a few times at the historic seaport restaurants but hadn’t paid much attention to the surrounding neighborhood. The smell of soft, wet wood and mold permeated the air heavily, and the rowhouses, although dilapidated with age, were clean and honest. The old woman motioned him into a dark, bare lobby, decorated modestly with the forms of other residents who sat on old couches staring into space. They took the elevator to her fourth-floor efficiency, where the smell of mothballs pierced his nose so sharply he sneezed. David placed the bag on the table and stood idly, hands by his sides, as she pulled out cans of soup, bread, some vegetables, and a few cuts of meat from the refrigerator and various cabinets of her kitchenette.

  “You eat?” she asked from the sink, where she tossed one of the bloody packages recently emptied of meat.

  “Yes, I did, thank you.” He took a step backward to the door. “Do you think you’ll need anything else?”

  She seemed not to have heard him, instead pulling a large cutting knife out of the drawer. He sat down at the table and looked around. There were boxes of old newspapers by the door and on the other chair of the dining set, their purpose and destination unbeknownst to him. A drawer of a beat-up single cabinet lay open slightly, revealing loose Band-Aids, hairpins, swatches of fabric, combs, inner soles for shoes, ace bandages, and hearing aid batteries. The humbleness, perhaps sincerity, of her possessions comforted him, as did the bright fluorescent lighting that left no corner of the apartment unearthed. She put what looked like a serving of veal, some brussel sprouts, and a few tomato slices in front of him, along with a cup of coffee. He ate quickly as she ate methodically, the wrinkles on her face swirling circularly as she chewed, her yellowly blue eyes staring off ever so often to thoughts unknown. After they finished he washed the worn, mismatched dishes and put them carefully in the drainer.

  “Well, see you sometime. Thanks,” he said at the door to her apartment before turning to leave. She did not answer or look at him, and David wondered whether he were suddenly an apparition of some sort.

  Once outside he began to run again, feeling the breeze lightly against his temples. Perhaps it was the fatigue, or the shock, but he felt as if the houses around him were closing inward, pushing the available air out of his lungs faster than he could get it in. He dropped to the curb and hung his head between his legs, feeling the vomit come up against the top of his throat. He relaxed and let the heaving take over his body, feeling the warmth and acidity escape in a redemptive purge. He looked up again into the cool, inky night and noticed several residents, older like his new friend from the apartment building, leaning out of their doors, their faces scrunched in suspicion at his indiscretion. He opened his mouth, ready to atone and explain the turn of events in his life when, just as quickly, their doors flapped shut, like dominoes, up the street.

  “Mr. Tucker, your insurance card.” The receptionist held up his card at the front desk. David stood up and retrieved it. The waiting room was quite crowded for a weekday. Men and women of various ages flipped through old magazines or read the free optical literature distributed on the end tables. David studied each patient, ensuring all his or her limbs were intact and solid. Normally he brought his laptop to doctor’s appointments to catch up on e-mail and such, could he could not concentrate much these days. Instead, he studied those around him and the details he had never noticed before, like the wallpaper and the tacky office art of fishing docks and flower arrangements. Did people really like this kind of stuff? He wondered. Perhaps if the office were filled with the blurred, solid colors of Rothko knockoffs, his ophthalmologist would get more business. David chuckled aloud as a man, presumably in his sixties looked up from a copy of Field and Stream. David wondered what the man was here for. Unfortunately, David was not particularly imaginative in the world of speculation, so he was thankful when the receptionist asked him a take a seat in one of the examination rooms.

  “So, Mr. Tucker, how are you?” The doctor briefly shook David’s hand before sliding a stool toward himself. “You say you’re having some visual disturbances?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly how to characterize them,” he answered. “I mean, I see fine for the most part. But about a week ago I noticed that some things looked faded.”

  “A general fading in color or clarity?”

  “No…only certain, specific things.”

  “Edges of things blurry?” He shone a penlight into one of David’s eyes.

  “No, very specific things, like…objects fading, but everything else around them remaining very clear.”

  “Hmm, well, you tell me more, and I’ll eliminate what you don’t have, and hopefully we’ll work together to find out what you do have, OK?” He smiled and went to his bench to pick up his tools.

  “What’s that for?” David asked as the doctor dabbed a stained chemical on a piece of paper

  “I’m going to give you what we call the slit-lamp test. You’ve probably had this before.” The doctor touched the strip of orange paper to his eyes. “Now, I’m just placing a dye in your eye to help me see a little better what’s going on. Then I’m going to shine a light there to see whether I can find any abnormalities. Now, when did you say your visual disturbances began?”

  “Um, about a week ago.”

  “Did anything peculiar happen around that time—any accidents or strange headaches or pains in the eye?”

  “No…I mean, I’ve been a little stressed out lately, but no more than usual.”

  “Do you ever get migraines?”

  “No.”

  “Have you experienced a lot of floaters lately? Sometimes when people experience an increase of floaters they may see areas of blurriness caused by the floater moving across the visual plane.”

  “No, I haven’t really noticed, but…the objects are very specific. There aren’t areas, there are objects.”

  “OK, everything looks good here.” The ophthalmologist swung the machine away and pushed another one in front of David. “Let’s check out your tonometry.”

  David sat his chin on the plastic chin rest and looked down the barrel of the machine while the ophthalmologist shot air into his eyeballs. David wondered whether the doctor was really listening or whether he was just going through his internal list of symptoms plaguing adult professionals. Perhaps he wasn’t explaining it wel
l enough.

  “Well.” The doctor pushed the machine away and put his heels on the rung of his stool, clasping his hands in front of him. “Your eyes look very good, Mr. Tucker. I saw no evidence of abrasions, pressure changes, inherent defects, or tumors. Can you give me any more information about the problem you’re having with your vision?”

  “Well, it may have been more of a hallucination, I don’t know. You see…I was at a meeting and it looked as if a coworker’s hand was…transparent. Maybe I just need to get more sleep.”

  “Could be.” He scratched his ear. “Fatigue can cause all sorts of visual disturbances, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But there are a few other areas I would check out as well. I would go to your regular doctor and have a diabetes test, and you might want to consider making an appointment with a neurologist if your disturbances become more exaggerated and you’ve exhausted the possibility, so to speak, of fatigue or sleep deprivation.”

  “OK, thanks.” David stood up wearily. He did not feel like going into work today. Maybe he would call in. But he couldn’t. There was the chance that Bob might be back today, Bob who had been out sick much of the week. He needed to know—maybe Bob was fine and this trip to the ophthalmologist had been a complete waste. He drove to work, feeling sick and out of sorts. No one would understand what he was going through. Not that he would tell anyone. He didn’t have any friends at work, unless one considered small talk and light, jocular camaraderie friendship. He certainly wouldn’t tell his real friends. He couldn’t remember the last time he talked to them about anything. Guys talked to their girlfriends or wives, and he if told anyone, he would tell Sara. But not yet. It was not that he didn’t trust her; it was that voicing his fears, his confusion, would make them real, and right now this was not real. It was an annoyance, it was an inconvenience, but right now it was not real.