Telemachus Rising (13 page)

My muscles weren't holding me up.  I was floating, barely clearing the ground, suspended in midair.  With a mental lurch, I drifted forward, toward the bridge and the trail head.  The fear of freezing to death manifested as the singular thought that I had to get home by any means necessary.  There was no room for anything else.  Even so, my progress was dangerously slow.  Under different circumstances I would've had trouble crawling at such a slow pace, but slow or not, I was definitely moving.  I couldn't feel my finger tips or toes as my grind up the bridge began.  There was no certainty of any kind that I would make it another foot, let alone all the way home.  But by fits and starts I did make it another foot, and another.  Each inch of progress was its own lifetime, urging me forward with frostbite at my heels.  After an eternity, I crested the bridge.

My glacial progress was excruciating, but it was my panic at waking up covered in ice and unable to stand that made my situation seem so much worse.  I was heaving myself forward at a slow walking pace, a pace less than a quarter as fast as my warm up run to the trail, but steady enough.  My initial terror began to fade, but not my determination.   There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to freeze out there in the woods if I didn't make it back, and soon.  I was too weak.  Time lost was energy lost, and I needed all my energy just to stay warm and awake.  They say you fall asleep before you freeze to death.  A good hour passed before I made it to what should have been the turn around for my thirteen mile out-and-back.  It looked like I had run an extra mile and a half or more without even noticing.  For fuck's sake.  The sky was still as black as it was like to get, and at my halting pace I might've been more than three hours from home.  I started on the mental math for each scenario automatically.  Pace per mile versus distance, time of night...

I dropped out of the air and hit the ground with a shock.  My knee exploded in agony.  I immediately tied the collapse to my distraction.  I couldn't afford to lose my concentration like that.  My chest was heaving.  Whatever had allowed me to take to the air, it was going to take everything I had to get moving again.  But slowly, I did get moving.  For more than two hours I drifted toward home, so focused on the task at hand that I didn't even notice the sky starting to get lighter.  The trees began to thin out and the path was better worn.  Before long, I could see orange light filtering through the branches from the parking lot at the trail head.

Relief washed over me as I broke the tree line.  I welcomed the feeling of concrete under my hands in spite of the fresh pain from hitting the ground for what felt like the hundredth time since I'd first gone off road.  I don't know how I got home after that.  I was still outside when morning commuters started to appear.  No one seemed to notice me or the state I was in.  Lord knows I must've looked like hell.  The pain in my knee wasn't so bad by the time I made it back to the apartment building, but the sun was up when I finally reached for my keys in the lip of the carport.  Trying to climb the stairs was horrible - worse than staggering across the road in morning traffic – but I was barely conscious of it.  The flight through the woods had taken every last bit of mental energy I possessed.

My door key scratched around the lock before it finally sank home.  I threw my weight against the door.  I didn't bother to lock it behind me.  Shoes and socks were stubborn coming off, but it didn't even matter.  I was still freezing.  I turned on the shower and peeled off what I could while the water heated up.  I got in, and my skin tingled and itched like crazy.  I sat down and shivered as warmth started to spread through my fingers and toes.

When I woke up, I was cold again.  The shower was still running, but out of hot water.  My knee was so stiff I couldn't bend it at all.  I climbed out of the tub, dried off, and crawled back into my shitty bed.  I didn't open my eyes until the next afternoon.

I drove by the house twice before I started looking for a parking spot.  I'm sure I'd gone down the street a thousand times before, as close as it was to my parents' house, but I'd definitely never been to the address.  I was nervous about where I'd parked.  Everything I owned was in my car.  We're talking computer, television, everything.  See, I'd just moved out of my old place for the summer and my new lease didn't start for a while.  There was no room for my stuff in my parents' house, so it sat in the car.  It didn't seem safe to drive with everything packed in the way it was, so I'd been house-bound for days.  After all that close-quarters time, I was willing to take the risk.  I had to get away from my family.  It's never easy to go back once you move out, but family time had been more stressful than normal in those days.  My dad's health problems complicated everything.  My mother was doing what she could, but seemed to be wearing thin, and I was always one wrong word away from inciting my sister's wrath.  I had to get out of there for a while.  I needed to get out.  I knew I was making a mistake before I even rang the doorbell.

A guy I'd never seen before answered the door.  I froze for a second.  “Hello?” he asked.  My eyes darted to the numbers on the door frame.  “Heeey...” I replied.

“Oh my god, I can't believe you came!”

That's when I noticed half a dozen people inside the house just past the human door.  The one who'd spoken was the girl from work who'd invited me.  I relaxed a little and stepped inside past the door man.  “Wasn't sure I had, for a second there!”  I said.

“Oh, I know, there's no parking on the street so it's hard to tell,” she explained.  “But there are a ton of people out back!  Hey, we're just about to start the tour – wanna see?”

“Count me in.”

We made our little introductions (“- yeah, we work together.  How do you guys know each other?”) and headed upstairs.

It was only a two bedroom house, but that didn't make the tour any shorter.  “...and this is the master bath...”  I didn't have the energy to ooh and ahh like a couple of the girls she had in tow, but I raised my eyebrows and nodded on cue.  That seemed to be good enough to keep everyone happy.  As great as the story about the fight for the big bedroom was, the one I was beginning to piece together about the housemates was more interesting.  From what I could tell, they were in year two of an on-again-off-again, roller coaster relationship.  It sounded like she was the one who wanted to play house, but had sold her parents on the idea by convincing them she was actually sharing space with a girl she'd gone on spring break with.  Even ignoring how difficult it would be to keep that lie going, their living arrangement sounded borderline masochistic.  Case in point, they weren't officially together at the moment, but the most colorful part of the tour was the bright red she turned when she tried to kick a lacy set of underwear under Not-My-Boyfriend's bed without anyone noticing.

The second-to-last attraction on our tour was the basement, which wouldn't have been noteworthy except for the massive amount of furniture stacked up against the walls.  “So this is why I didn't see anything to sit on upstairs!”  Our hostess looked a little embarrassed, “Yeah, we didn't want people spilling beer all over it.”  Something about the “we” sounded a lot more like “he”.  I'd always thought of couch cleanliness as the collateral damage of a good party, but I felt kind of bad for bringing it up.  “Speaking of beer, where do you hide yours?”  I asked.

“Last stop, the kitchen!”

With one thirtieth of a case of cheap beer safely in hand, I headed out the back door to the fenced in back yard.  It was a warm night, but there was a small bonfire going.  I walked over and stood by a few guys near the fire, sipping my beer.  It sounded like I'd missed the first part of a long conversation.

“So his parents show up to graduation.  They're all proud of their son.  He had some rough years, and there were times they really didn't think he was gonna make it, right?  So there they are in the audience, all dressed up, and they're looking for their kid.  Couldn't get a hold of him earlier in the day to find out where he'd be sitting, so they're just waiting for his name to come up.  The faculty is doing some kind of crazy women-alphabetical-order, men-reverse-alphabetical-order arrangement, so it takes them a while to figure out when he's going to get called up.  But here's the thing, by the time they figure it out, they realize he must've already walked.  They missed the whole thing!  At least that's what the dad thinks.  He figures they were putting so much effort into figuring out the order, they missed the one thing they'd been waiting for.  But the mom's not having it.  She's sure they never called his name.  There's no way she would've missed her son walking after all this.  I mean, even if you forget about the past twenty-something years of his life, they just drove three hours to make the ceremony.  She's tuned in.”  The other guys were nodding.  He had all of us on the hook for this one.  It was just starting to get dark out.

“Right.  So they get through the entire graduation ceremony and it takes a while to go through the whole list, because it's one of those big department-wide or whole college things with hundreds and hundreds of names.  But they get to the end and the parents go down to look for their kid anyway.  Earlier in the week he said he was going to be there, so maybe there was a mix up and they left his name off the list or something.  Well they look everywhere and he's just not there.  Nowhere to be found.  So they go up to the dean, or whoever it is with the list and they ask about their kid.  Guy doesn't even recognize the name.  At this point they're thinking they must've had the wrong day or the wrong ceremony or something.  Wrong department's graduation.  It's gotta be some major screw up like that.  And it's actually not that unreasonable when you think about it.  They run tons of those things back to back for a couple weekends in a row.  Since they still can't get him on the phone, they decide to drive over to his apartment.  Here's where it starts to get crazy.  When they get to their kid's place, he won't answer the door.  Now they're getting really worried.  Turns out, he's a diabetic.  His mom is just sure he's in some kind of sugar coma or something.  They don't have a spare key, so they call the land lord in a total panic.  It's the weekend so they have a hell of a time even getting someone on the phone, but they convince the weekend crew it's a medical emergency and get a guy with a key over there in about an hour.”

“Shit, what happened?”

“Okay, so the mom is totally losing her shit at this point.  They finally get the door open, and there their son is.  He's just laying there.  Stone cold dead.”

“Oh shit, she was right.”

“No – she wasn't – she was wrong.  She was totally wrong.  I mean, they didn't think so right away, but once they got over the initial shock, I mean, after the funeral arrangements and everything, when they started cleaning the place up, they found a note.  Turns out, not only was he not graduating that day, he'd never even been admitted to the university.”

“Oh my god!”

“True story.  He never even got in.  He didn't get into a single school he applied to back in high school, but he was too ashamed to admit it.  His parents were so happy when he told them he was going to college, he kept it up.  Lied about it for years.  Can you even imagine what that would take?”

“I actually heard one like that!  This one is true too, swear to god.  Only it wasn't a student, it was a professor.”

“What?!”

“Well it wasn't exactly the same, but it was the same idea.  Anyway, there was a professor here who was this great guy.  Everybody loved him, students, faculty, administration.  He was from some small town in England.  He had all these little anecdotes about what it was like growing up over there.  So since he was actually from the UK, he always accompanied this study abroad trip that went to England each summer.  It was the perfect setup.  He knew the people and the places, and he made an awesome travel guide for anybody who wanted some local perspective.  Guy lived a pretty amazing life.  In a way, it kind of seemed fitting when he died on the trip a few summers ago.”

“Man, that must've been a total mess.  How would you even deal with that?”

“Obviously it was a disaster.  It totally derailed the rest of the trip for everyone involved.  That sounds sort of petty, considering, but just try to imagine it.  The one good thing about it, you know, the silver lining, was that at least they wouldn't have to try to ship the body back internationally, because how the fuck do you even do that if you're not family?  See that was the problem.  For all this guy's stories about where he came from, he NEVER talked about family.  When ever people would ask, he'd immediately change the subject.  Eventually, people learned not to ask.  Anyway, they tried everything they could think of, but they couldn't track down any family, whatsoever.  Not a single person.”

“So what'd they wind up doing?”

“They brought the body back.  He didn't have much money or anything, but the only contacts and records they could find were all back in the states.  His closest friends and colleagues helped make the funeral arrangements.  Gave him a nice send off, did the whole thing.  But are you ready for this?  This guy no one's ever met shows up to the service.  Claims he's the professor's brother.  Only get this – he's not from England.  He's from New Jersey.”

“You've got to be kidding me.”

“New-Fucking-Jersey.  I shit you not.  This old guy who led everybody around the UK was born and raised in New-Fucking-Jersey.  Turns out he grew up in an abusive home and hated everything about his life as a kid.  So what did he do?  He invented a new one.  No one ever suspected a thing.  He did it sometime while he was in college and no one ever checked up on him.  I mean, to be fair, this was before the internet.  But since all the old paper sources from his work as a professional got grandfathered into the digital system, no one found the inconsistencies until after he was dead.”

“Wow.”

“That's crazy.”

“I know, right?”

“I need another beer,” I spoke up.

“Good call.”

A couple of the guys wandered toward the kitchen after me.  We made some small talk, but in my head I kept coming back to those stories.  The guy who told the second one was right.  They were really similar in some ways, and some of my feelings were the same for both.  But while the first story kind of made me sad, the second one made me feel...what...proud?  There was something satisfying about it.  I sat by the fire and slowly drained my beer.  The alcohol and the company loosened me up and got me talking some more.  Before I knew it, I was holding another empty can.  I stood up with stiff knees.  My legs had a pleasant soreness from the day's interval workout followed by all that sitting by the fire.  I looked around as I turned back to the house.  Somehow it'd gotten totally dark out without my noticing.  Not only that, but the back yard was packed with people.  The light from the fire must've kept my eyes from adjusting to everything else around me.