The Road to Amistad

by Ken Dickson

  “I’ll take you for a ride sometime.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” I said, hoping that ride was in my future.

  When we parted, we hugged once more, and for me at least, that last hug was more meaningful. The new Jessie was worlds different than the sad soul I’d met at the PDC. I was thankful that I’d taken that brief moment from my life to make a difference in hers and enthralled with the person she’d become.

  I stood nearby as she brought the big V8 to life and revved it for me a few times before driving off. As she shifted through the gears on her way out of the parking lot, it occurred to me that I didn’t know any women who preferred a stick shift—one more intriguing fact about her.

  On the way back to work on the 101, I thought about all the things that she had shared about her life. I suddenly realized why she was so content and why I loved being around her so much. At that instant, a familiar chill raced up my arms, back and spine, raising goose bumps as it did. I savored the feeling for every instant it lasted. I knew exactly what it was, and I was experiencing it more these days than at any other time of my life.

  ***

  Years ago, as I pumped gas into a mid-nineties Nissan King Cab pickup near downtown Tempe, a homeless man approached me. His long, straggly, dirt-impregnated gray hair perfectly matched his beard. His tattered military fatigues and boots should have been, and perhaps were, discarded years ago. At first, I paid him no attention as he commenced his hard luck story in an effort to bum money from me, but the tale was so horrible that it drew me in. It was so appalling, in fact, that I began to laugh uncontrollably. Before he finished the story, I reached for my wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

  “I’m sorry for laughing. That’s the worst hard-luck story that I’ve ever heard, and I couldn’t help myself. Thanks for making me laugh even if it was at your expense.” As I handed him the bill, I felt the chill for the first time. “That’s weird,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I just had the most wonderful chill. It ran up my arms, back and neck and gave me goose bumps.”

  “That’s a truth chill, man. When you get one of those, you better pay attention. They come straight from the big guy,” he said, pointing his index finger to the sky.

  What had given me the chill as I drove back to work on the 101 was the realization that I was no longer alone in the world. Jessie was just like me.

  Chapter 6

  FOR THE LOVE OF PUZZLES

  Nearly a year earlier, on May 26, 2011, Merry sat patiently at his desk awaiting his next patient, Jessie. Despite her myriad troubles, she’d never been late before, and it was almost a quarter after. He picked up his phone and dialed her number. It rang several times and then transferred to voicemail. “Jessie, it’s Merry. It’s about 10:15 on Thursday. We had an appointment at ten. I’m just wondering where you are. I hope that everything is okay. Give me a call as soon as you can.” She always picked up, too. This was most unusual.

  What’s in a name? Everything, if you ask Merry. Born Merriweather Edward Waters, he was named after his grandfather, who also went by the same nickname. However, Merry called him Pops. Since he was the only grandson, he spent a lot of time with Pops during his youth. He idolized him and hoped to be just like him when he grew up.

  Pops survived the Great Depression and World War Two. As an infantryman stationed in the Ardennes, Belgium, he found himself smack in the middle of one of the most critical battles of the war with German machine gun tracers shredding the misty night sky and artillery rounds felling trees right over his foxhole. Merry never tired of Pops’s stories of bravado, devotion and optimism in the face of fierce odds. He especially liked the way Pops mixed krauts, jerrys and Nazis into the brew, which made it seem like there were even more adversaries.

  Of course, it had been a long time since the war and the depression, and Pops had seen a lot since then. He had plenty of inspiring stories, each offering some kind of moral such as, “If you keep putting one boot in front of the other, you’ll get to where you aim to be soon enough.” Or, “If you want to be your best, don’t listen to the bull crap yarns in your head—they’ll trip you up every time.”

  During his childhood, other children harassed Merry about his name, but that didn’t bother him. No matter where he went, his reverence for his name and a few stories of his namesake’s remarkable escapades quickly turned hecklers into fans and had them begging for more. After a time, no one taunted him. He was Merry just as other kids were Billy or Danny.

  One crisp autumn evening when Merry was twelve, Pops took him for a ride in his blue 1960 Cadillac 60 special. The car reminded him of a spaceship, and he loved when Pops invited him to ride in it. As Pops finished a droll story that set them both laughing, a drunk broadsided them.

  Things might have turned out differently had the offending vehicle been something else. Unfortunately, it was another Cadillac—a 1974 Fleetwood Brougham, one of the largest and heaviest production cars ever built. Pops died instantly, and Merry nearly joined him countless times as he lay comatose in a hospital bed, fighting for his life for nearly two months.

  While Merry lay unmoving in his bed surrounded by lifesaving technology, all the tales that Pops had told him—a thousand metaphors that his subconscious had gobbled like candy—worked their magic, shuffling the deck of his mind and dealing him a brand new hand. Pops was long dead and buried by the time the hospital discharged him, but he lived on in Merry’s mind, and the new Merry capitalized on what Pops had taught him like the old Merry never could.

  From then on, he wanted to make a difference, particularly in an area in which he especially shined: resilience, which is how he came to have a PhD in psychology on that very subject. Nowadays, he occasionally does research, but he primarily focuses on counseling patients, proudly going by DR. MERRY, as is proclaimed in all capital letters on a brass plaque affixed to his office door. This inevitably leads to questions or jokes, but such interaction more times than not proves to be the perfect icebreaker with his patients.

  He isn’t particularly merry by any standard, just a likeable guy and a great listener to whom people feel at ease spilling their most intimate secrets. He believes that we are all human beings, regardless of our quirks, dysfunctions or disabilities.

  He never pre-plans his dealings with patients. He lets sessions flow in the direction they need to, and when he gives advice, it comes straight from his heart and only after a good deal of consideration. Intuition and synchronicities play a big part in how his therapy and his life unfold. He is keen to acknowledge supposed cues from life, which he claims subtly guide him down the narrow path of his destiny.

  Although he spends most of his time counseling the downtrodden, he secretly longs for, and works toward a world without them—a world where people no longer struggle with their demons. At night, he dreams like anyone else, but an inordinate number of his dreams end in the same fashion: with the sun breaking through clouds after a rain, lighting the wet and invigorated world below not simply with sunlight, but with a glow of promise. This is a most powerful synchronicity for him, and he remains vigilant for clues that might shed light on its meaning. As luck would have it, his first clue arrived that night.

  Merry lay fast asleep in his bed when his cell phone chimed on the edge of his nightstand. Groggily, he opened one eye and glanced at the nearby alarm clock that showed 2:00 a.m. in harsh red numbers. It was very unusual to receive a call at that hour, but he had given his number to a few patients to use in the case of an emergency. He answered.

  “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”

  He immediately recognized the caller’s voice. “Calm down, Jessie. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the PDC, I think. I don’t know, something like that. It’s horrible here. I just want to go home.”

  “The PDC, huh? The city should have bulldozed that place years ago,” he grumbled in frustration. “Tell me what happened.”
As she intermittently rambled, sniffed and cried, he listened as intently as he could, having been awoken from a deep REM sleep, but he wasn’t able to process much of the predominately one-sided conversation, broken only by the occasional “hmm” or “unh-huh” on his part. When she finally finished, he responded, “I can’t do anything until eight. In the meantime, keep calm, and if you feel in danger, call for a nurse or PA.”

  “All right.”

  Merry knew that once they moved her to an official psychiatric unit they would observe her for a minimum of seventy-two hours. He could do nothing about that, but he could pull some strings to get her out of the PDC sooner rather than later. Still tired, he was quickly fast asleep again. An hour later, the phone rang once more. He cleared his throat, rolled toward the nightstand and answered.

  “I’m sorry that I woke you earlier and for bothering you again, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay now. In fact, I’m wonderful.” It was Jessie once more, and wonderful wasn’t a word that he had ever heard her use. Something was going on. “One more thing: I finally met him. He told me that my life would be perfect. Afterward, an incredible feeling overcame me, and all my worries faded away.”

  “Met who? Who told you your life would be perfect?”

  “Caspian.” He’d heard that name several times in recent sessions with her. She seemed obsessed with him or the fantasy of him, he wasn’t quite sure which it was. “I fell asleep after that—a deep and restful sleep—and I had an amazing dream. At the end, the sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the world below with a magical glow. I awoke immediately and felt all tingly.”

  Although he’d been groggy moments before, her description of the familiar dream caused him to sit bolt upright. At that moment, he had to admit to feeling a little tingly himself.

  ***

  When Merry first met Jessie, her life was spiraling downward at a rather fast clip, and he’d made little headway changing that. After she met the mysterious Caspian, however, she somehow fixed herself without his help. She blossomed and so did everything around her. Although there was nothing left for him to do, her metamorphosis fascinated him. Consequently, he kept in touch with her even after their official sessions dwindled and then ended completely. She seemed an honest-to-God miracle to him—a crucial piece to the puzzle of resilience that he longed to solve.

  ***

  On April 30, 2012, eleven months after that late night phone call, Jessie called Merry to inform him of an intriguing new development.

  “You’ll never guess who I had lunch with today.”

  “Who?

  “Caspian.”

  “Oh?” he questioned, still uncertain whether Caspian was real or not.

  “Yes, only his real name is Ken, and now I know for certain that what I’ve felt all along is real. He’s the source of my new life. He and I are the same, and when we were together, it felt like anything was possible.”

  “Go on.”

  As he listened intently to the description of her lunch with Ken, another piece to that mysterious puzzle joined the first. When she finished, he wasted no time asking her for a favor. “Can you introduce me to Ken?”

  Chapter 7

  BUILDING STEAM

  On Tuesday morning, the day after my lunch with Jessie, I received a phone call as I sat at my desk at Nanosys working on a spreadsheet. It was Tim.

  “You want to go to Fuddruckers at 11:15?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m in a burger mood.”

  I’ve known Tim for more than two decades, and aside from thinning hair, he’d hardly aged a bit. An avid tennis player with a crazy long reach, he was just as fit now as he was when I first met him. Back then, we hired on at a medical electronics firm around the same time. As the years passed, we became friends.

  In 1997, he and I left that company, along with two other engineers, and started our own venture: ATR. For nine months, we worked like dogs in a room furnished with only a few folding tables and chairs, developing applications for a low-end integrated circuit tester called the ASL1000 that ran on DOS, the predecessor to Microsoft Windows. During that time, we became like brothers. That venture fizzled, but not before spawning opportunities for both of us with TMT, the manufacturer of the tester.

  The first few years at TMT took us on a wild ride demonstrating applications and teaching classes to customers around the world. It was a crazy time of little sleep, huge bonuses and lavish raises. Credence Systems purchased TMT in 2000. As Credence absorbed upstart TMT, the entrepreneurial spirit of the new division waned, leading to an exodus of former thrill seekers, one of whom was Tim.

  It wasn’t until July 2010, after several job changes due to the tumultuous economy of the late 2000s that I landed a job working with Tim again at Nanosys. God must have been watching over me to reunite Tim and me at that time. Not long after that, my life turned upside down. As I tried to make sense of the chaos of that time, bouncing theory after theory off Tim, he listened with unfailing patience. Together, we reassembled the pieces of my broken life. I don’t know how he stuck with me through all of that.

  ***

  Tim had barely said a word while we drove in his silver Malibu. As we left the vehicle and walked toward Fuddruckers, I asked him why. “You’re awfully quiet today. What’s up?”

  “You know how I always listen to your theories?”

  “Yeah. I appreciate that, by the way.”

  “I hate to admit it, but I always thought they were bullshit.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “But all of a sudden, they’re starting to make sense.”

  “What?”

  “I never thought I’d admit this to you or anyone else, for that matter, but I think my negative emotions are gone.”

  I was flabbergasted. It took massive trauma, sleep deprivation and mania for me to experience that. My reward was utter pandemonium. I was lucky to ever make heads or tails of it. If he was indeed experiencing what I had, I could only imagine what was going through his mind.

  We ordered lunch, took a seat at a table while we waited for our food and continued the conversation.

  “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. I just woke up feeling different a few days ago, like someone turned down the volume in my head. You can hear a pin drop in there, now. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it’s what you’ve been talking about all along. I can understand why you thought it was a miracle—it really does seem that way. The great thing is that without all the negative thoughts, I can focus on the positives of life. That sheds a whole new light on things.”

  “Exactly. Have you told Mary?”

  “We talked a bit, but it caused problems right away. It seemed perfectly logical to me, but the more I tried to explain it to her, the more wild-eyed she got. When I tried a different angle, it only seemed to make things worse. I guess the stories I told her about you are still fresh in her mind.”

  “You wouldn’t try to explain to her how a Fourier transform works, would you?”

  “No way.”

  “This is even more complicated. You’ve listened to me for over a year, and it didn’t make a lick of difference. Mary isn’t going to get it overnight, if she gets it at all. I’d keep this between you and me, or she’ll end up committing you before you know it.”

  “I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “Involving her will make both of your lives miserable. Trust me. I’ve been round and round with Beth many times and gotten nowhere.”

  “Okay, I see your point. Look, I know that you probably told me a dozen times, but can you describe again what it was like for you to go through this?”

  “My situation was different because of the meds and sleep deprivation, but I can relate to turning down the volume. With all my racing thoughts back then, I felt overwhelmed. I had to do something. I tried an idea, and it worked. It stopped the racing thoughts completely and left me in the same state t
hat you are experiencing. However, it was so outrageous going from a million miles an hour to a dead stop that I jumped to all kinds of conclusions. I even imagined I was like Jesus or Buddha. It didn’t last, though. Once they put me on lithium, it was over.”

  “Will I have to take lithium?”

  “You don’t seem manic to me. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “So, this ended when your mania ended?”

  “No, it ended when they put me on lithium. I don’t think it has anything to do with mania. When they took me off it, I went right back to being this way. I never told anyone because I didn’t want to be forced to take drugs or be sent to a psych ward again.”

  “You seem all right to me. Do I seem any different to you?”

  “Not aside from this conversation. The way you perceive the world may be different, but no one will notice unless you talk about it. If you do, all bets are off. You’ll write your own ticket to Gracewood.”

  He looked concerned.

  “On the other hand, chicks will go nuts for the new you. You’ll have one hanging off each arm before you know it,” I joked to lighten the mood.

  “Ha! You’re full of it. I don’t see any babes hanging off your arms.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Besides, Beth would boot you out in a heartbeat if there were.”

  “Good point. I’ll have to figure out a way to break it to her gently.”

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “My point is: there’s more upside than downside to this.”

  “I guess I’ll find out.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be around if you need me. Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Do you think that it makes any sense to have a Blue Ray disc player if I’ve only got a forty-two-inch television?”

  “That’s what I like about you. You always find a way to keep the conversation going, even if it’s by changing the subject completely. Why do you ask?”