This Is Not the End

by Caleb Hildenbrandt

  #

  I lurched to the back, gripping seat backs for support as I did so. The swaying of the bus was exacerbated by the hangover I was suffering, but the unsteady sensation was more nearly a symptom of my own bewilderment.

  I had been fired. An e-mail had informed me of the fact the day previous, and the ensuing evening and night had been a blur. Mary didn’t know; Mary only knew the new car in the driveway, the house we had just bought, the ring on her finger, and the aged wines in the basement, several of which were now contributing to the cloudiness of my mind.

  I had been laid off. I went to Harold.

  He was there, as always. He looked up at me as I approached, and I wondered if he could sense bad fortune coming. My imagination suggested that he looked up at me with a glare of unwelcome, as if he had already heard and wanted no part of me.

  “Look, Harold, I need help.”

  Harold nodded.

  Good, I thought. Just what was good, I wasn’t sure, but I felt relieved by this simple act of recognition anyway.

  “I lost my job.”

  I hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. I hadn’t even meant to state bluntly that I needed his help, but a faint breeze of panic had blown me to it, as if he were a confessor who was required to grant immediate absolution, before I sank deeper in oblivion.

  “Too bad,” said Harold. “Me too.”

  I looked at him for a moment in silence, too shocked to say anything.

  “Well,” he continued, “what do you want me to do?”

  “I--I don’t know. I thought you might have some suggestion, some idea of where I could go. It wasn’t my fault, getting laid off. There was a reorg, and my number just came up. Maybe I haven’t been working as hard lately, but I just got married. Mary’s a bit of a… high-maintenance type. I…”

  I shook my head.

  “You want me to offer you a job, don’t you?” Harold held his fingers poised, motionless, over the laptop’s keyboard.

  I looked up. It hadn’t occurred to me--at least not consciously. Perhaps some dim corner of my mind had hoped that it would be that simple, some dim corner unwilling to admit to my conscious self that things were as bad as they were.

  “No. Yes.”

  Harold nodded again.

  “Siddown.”

  He pulled his cluster of bags aside and motioned for me to sit.

  “I’ve been looking for an assistant,” he said, shutting the lid to his laptop slowly. “You have any experience with paperwork?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Show up tomorrow.”

  It was fitting for a man who managed to get mail by torch-welding a slot in the side of the bus and writing “Greater Transit Authority, Rear Parking Lot, Vehicle 453” on his business cards. It made no sense, and I knew it would work.

  #

  What did he mean, he’d been looking for an assistant? I could just see the ad in the classifieds: Wanted: energetic self-starter w/ paperwrk exp. Must be able to serve in various capacities. Apply M-F on the number 13.

  For what would Harold need an assistant, anyway? He was the epitome of self-sufficiency. One could be self-reliant by retreating from civilization easily enough; Harold had done that much harder thing: achieved self-reliance among his fellow men. Nevertheless, I was there the next day, at the Main and Lovell stop, dressed for my first day on the job, as if I’d never met this man before and needed to make a good impression, as if Harold would be impressed by my pressed shirt and firmly knotted tie. Harold, who wore a paper collar as temporary as a surgeon’s gloves--and just as sterile.

  “Good. Organize these.”

  Harold thrust a stack of papers at me, and I began my new career on that thinnest thread of instruction. I wondered vaguely about how I was going to be paid. It had never occurred to me until just then. The first customer of the day was arriving, a woman clutching her jaw and describing her symptoms to Harold. She had walked straight back, with none of the hesitancy I had seen on other patrons; she was evidently return business. Harold gestured for her to sit down and open her mouth. After a cursory examination made with the help of a penlight and popsicle stick, Harold took a small dark bottle from his bag along with a package of cotton swabs. He dipped two swabs in the bottle and applied them to the inside of the woman’s mouth. Then he pulled a dental scraper and pair of needle-nosed pliers from a pouch at his side. Instructing the woman to focus on the light above his head, he went to work. After a few brief moments, he pulled out his hands and told her to look. It took a moment for the dazzle left by the fluorescent lamps to clear from her eyes, but when it did, she saw in Harold’s pliers a small pellet.

  “Nothing to it really, Mrs. Smiggins. Just a small obstruction. Tell me, did you feel any discomfort, any tugging?”

  “Oh, none at all, Mr. Blane. That anesthetic did the trick, and staring at the light, with that breathing method you taught me last time, well, I wasn’t nervous at all!”

  “Very good! Excellent! Always glad to be of help.”

  Mrs. Smiggins was already in her purse, pulling out some bills which she passed to Harold.

  “Thanks again, Mr. Blane!”

  “Any time, Talma, any time.”

  She got off of the bus and I sidled across the aisle to sit next to Harold.

  “What was in the bottle, Harold?”

  “That? Water.”

  “Just water?” I asked.

  “I added a tad of Jack Daniels. Gives it an antiseptic flavour.”

  “Then how…?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen a carnival palmer?”

  “So there was nothing wrong with her?” I wasn’t really surprised, but felt a need to know for sure.

  “Well, she’ll die of a heart attack in ten or so years thanks to the layer of flab, but her teeth are fine. Lady’s the biggest crank I know. But I have couple of ’chondriacs.”

  I went back to my seat and back to sorting paperwork. After a few moments, though, I leaned over and asked,

  “What if there really was something wrong with her teeth?”

  Harold looked off in the distance for a moment.

  “She didn’t feel it when she got off, did she?”

  #

  Several weeks passed, in which I continued my role as secretary, supply officer, and errand boy; I mailed envelopes and picked up new ones at the store. When our printer broke down, Harold told me that he’d fix it; I was to get a typewriter for the mean time.

  “What model?” I asked.

  “Whatever’s out there. Uh, electric, no manuals. Just make sure it still has some ribbon.”

  It took some questioning on my part before I realised that Harold meant for me to get a typewriter second-hand.

  “You think I pay retail?” he asked, snorting.

  “Is there a Goodwill nearby?” I asked.

  “A Goodwill, a Salvation Army thrift store, and a consignment shop on Fourth. But check the dumpsters in the business district first.”

  I was skeptical. Sure enough, however, the third dumpster yielded a Smith-Corona, with a half-used ribbon, missing electrical cord, and no cover. Harold jury-rigged a cord and was typing in under five minutes.

  #

  Eating lunch out was difficult (I could not simply walk a block, eat, and walk back to find my office in the same place anymore), so I took to bag lunches. This measure of economy was further necessitated by my finances; Harold paid me, each week, reasonably well, but the lunches of two months ago now seemed extravagant, and extravagance was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.

  A certain side of this was that, as I spent more time with Harold, I learned less and less about him. And even if I could have spared the money, you can’t take your boss out to lunch, can you?

  #

  Mary still didn’t know what had happened. She was pregnant now, and too sick every evening to ask how work had been. When I came home at night, I didn’t even need to make
up stories--we just sat on the couch together, watching television, thinking our separate thoughts.

  #

  Harold occasionally had me drop off envelopes at other businesses, running in while the bus was stopped and handing over the letters to a man behind the counter. They were his tax clients, he explained. A delicatessen manager here, an import shop there--I once even dropped off files for a fruit vendor, his cart of oranges glistening in the sun. It was, in certain ways, a carefree job. One day Harold asked if I wanted to get a drink on the way home. I agreed, and three stops later we got off and walked around to the back of the bus where the bike rack held a folding tandem. I wondered if Harold was in the habit of taking passengers. I even questioned if the bike was actually Harold’s, and not one he had simple appropriated for the occasion, but as we rattled over the potholes and root-ridged asphalt, I looked down at the frame, and I could swear the clumsy welding marks at the folding mechanism screamed DIY.

  Harold took us to a bar on the edge of the north quarter. I’d never been inside--had, in fact, never known that it had existed--but immediately wondered why I hadn’t. The place was nice, with the kind of unpretentious pretension that gets a place stars in a city guide before quickly disappearing as people start to notice the stars. Harold ordered drinks at the bar, and although he seemed to know the tender, didn’t waste any small talk on him. We ordered in the middle of the bar, but once our drinks came, Harold retreated to the far end, hunched up against the muted wallpaper.

  I tried to talk about a book I’d been reading on religious drama in the twentieth century, but Harold didn’t seem interested, staring ahead with his shoulders around his ears and both hands around his tumbler. The light from the cut glass played over his knuckles much as it did on the ice cubes inside.

  “You ever stop to wonder if Kierkegaard had something there?” he asked, finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re talking about plays in church. Well, Kierkegaard thought church was a play, more or less. The problem, he said, was that people thought that God was the prompter, telling the preacher, who was like God's actor, what to say, while the people were the audience. The way it ought to be, according to dear old Søren, was for the preacher, or priest, or whatever, to be the prompter, the audience to be the actors, and God the audience.”

  This wasn’t Harold as I had gotten to know him over the past several years. He was far more talkative tonight than usual, but also more subdued, speaking almost to himself.

  “Well, it’s an old concept.” I said. “The world being a stage, we all being players, everything ultimately for God's amusement.”

  “Or glory.”

  “Or glory.” I added. “There’s bits of that idea everywhere”--I warmed to my subject--“from King Lear to Zoroastrianism to Job.”

  “The difference with Job…” Harold inhaled. “Maybe it was all a drama in God's theatre, but Job wasn’t consciously acting. In real life, on the other hand…”

  Rhetorical flourishes, even ones as small as “one the other hand,” also seemed strange when spoken in Harold’s voice. His eyes wandered around the room, to where four men had just walked in on the far side. Their looks locked on Harold.

  “Shit, kid, we gotta go!”

  Harold bolted from his stool and ran, knocking his glass to the floor on the other side of the counter as shouts erupted on the far side of the room. I risked one look back as I ran. It was impossible. The four men stood in pin-striped suits, their tommy-guns flashing fire.

  #

  I wasn’t sure if I’d see Harold when I climbed aboard the bus the next morning. When we entered the darkness the night previous, Harold had disappeared, shoes spraying loose gravel and asphalt invisibly. I had looked around for him, wandering to a streetlamp and peering out from its light cone at the outlines of unfamiliar buildings. Neither he nor the four men from the bar came into view.

  When I walked to the back of the bus, Harold was there, curled up on the seat, clutching his laptop.

  “Harold?” I said. What is the etiquette regarding waking one’s boss in the morning?

  “Huh?” Harold rolled over and sat up. “Oh. Here, I think we need to finish this stack today.”

  He pulled a sheaf of papers from his bag and handed them to me. I’ll never know why, but I took it in silence and meekly sat down and began proofing reports for a business I’d never heard of. I had planned to ask him what had happened last night, but it all seemed irrelevant now, in the face of what was in front of me.

  After a few hours, Harold looked up from his lap. He had hardly stirred from his laptop all morning, but his focus seemed more the product of paralysis than industry.

  “Hey, Phil, I need you to drop this off at the next stop.”

  He handed me a manila envelope. It was for the fruit cart. Was it just the deep shade of the stand’s umbrella, or did the dark-eyed vendor glare at me as I cheerfully handed him his financial forms? It was the shadows, I was sure, cast by the harsh sunlight.

  A few stops later, Harold had me put a package in the drop box in a wall of an office building. I must have hesitated as he put it in my hands, because he asked,

  “What? You got a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Just drop it off.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I said, breezily.

  The building was on the block at the end of the bus’s circuit. The bus would come back around in a few moments, and as I waited for it, I realized with a shock that it was the same block on which my former building stood.

  When the bus approached, a man in a long coat got on before me. He walked to the back, took a gun out of his coat pocket, and shot Harold several times in the chest. He was out the back doors and gone while people were still loading at the front. I rushed to Harold and tried to staunch the blood.

  “Call an ambulance!” I yelled. Several people pulled out cell phones and started dialing while the driver came back to where we were, standard-issue first aid kit jerked from the wall niche and swinging in his hand.

  #

  When he finally woke up, he talked. I listened as he stared at the ceiling and told me what amounted to his life story. He knew more about that city and the people in it than I had thought possible. When the police arrived, though, he clammed up. He had nothing to say about the shooting (which had, fortunately, largely gone to his upper chest and shoulders, missing organs and spine on what can only be described as fantastic luck), the shooter, or his activities. He was homeless, he told them. Yeah, he lived on the bus. Yes, he slept there. Yeah, he made money--how did they think he ate? Odd jobs. What kinds? Everything. Lots of stuff. No, he was self-employed--a member of the service industry, good sirs. No, he’s not a wise guy. Yes, sir, Officer.

  He gave advice. Where’d he get qualified? He read. He never claimed to be certified. (Never in so many words, I added to myself.) Anybody can look stuff up on the Internet. Yes, he had a laptop. The city’s coated in WiFi. It was powered off the bus. Why is that so hard to believe? Yeah, there was a plug. Okay, so he was a vandal. He was a damn tired vandal, too. Could they give him a rest?

  #

  The police eventually left, grumbling a promise to be back with statements and affidavits and summons, etc. I wondered if Harold could wrangle his legal way out of this. I wanted him to get out.

  #

  He was a philosophy student once, did I know that?

  No, Harold, I didn’t.

  Yeah, a philosophy student. They threw him out when he tried to write his master’s thesis on the Bha-Gavad Gita, the Principia Discordia, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  Are you serious, Harold?

  Yeah, he’s serious. Why is everyone second-guessing him? Next I’m going to wonder how he lived on a bus. What’s wrong with a bus? A man has a right to choose, doesn’t he? Why can’t people get it through their thick heads--

  Harold, what was
in the envelopes?

  He doesn’t want to talk about it.

  Well, I do, Harold.

  What’s the matter with me? Did I or did I not ask for a job?

  #

  There’s a long silence while Harold lies resolutely on his back, arms held at his sides, straight and rigid as the bed rails to which they are parallel.

  “I think I helped people,” he said at last. “I made them feel better.”

  “But did you care about them?” I ask.

  “What does it matter? They felt better, didn’t they, thinking I was taking care of them?”

  “Even if it was all an act?”

  “Even if it was all an act.”

  #

  We’re silent for a moment more. Then I speak.