Telemachus Rising (15 page)

“Didn't you go home?  What are you doing back?”

I should've kept going.  I should've just ignored them.  I really did not want to talk to these people, but pretending I couldn't hear them didn't occur to me, so I turned around and walked back toward the edge of the lawn.

“Oh – I'm fine.  I just needed to get something.”

I must've made a pretty decent scene when I got sick, because that was not a good enough answer for them.

“What?  Are you sure you're okay?  Maybe you should come inside.”

I would've been fine.  I was feeling much better, really.  The shower and the fresh air from the walk and the exercise had really sobered me up.  I was fine.  That's when someone burst out of the front door, ran toward the road, and started throwing up about three feet away from me.  It took absolutely everything I had to keep it together, and the effort was obvious.

“You need to come inside and get a drink of water.”

“No, really, I'm fine.”

“No, you need to come inside.  Maybe we can find you some bread or something.”

Another wave of nausea hit me as the other guy offered the street an excellent deal on second hand alcohol.

“Okay, maybe that's a good idea.”

Someone got me a glass of water and I sat and ate white bread until I could convince them that I really was fine.  I believed it myself.  No one asked about my shoes, or why I had come back.  They must've been drunk, too.  Eventually I either convinced them or they stopped paying attention to me.  I slipped away and very carefully, very slowly, drove my car home.  It was a short trip.  The roads weren't busy ones.  It was extremely late.  I didn't see any cars.  I knew it was a bad decision, but I didn't have any other options.  I made it home safely, no one got hurt, and everything was going to be okay.  I remember falling into my bed and it being the greatest feeling ever.  I slept like a rock.

When I woke up the next day, the sun was already high in the sky.  It must've been around noon.  I felt fine.  No hangover.  No nausea.  I was still a little tired, but no worse for wear.  I thought about everything that had happened the night before and got embarrassed all over again.  I'd have to call and apologize for my behavior, and I'd have to wash the t-shirt they loaned me.  They might throw it out, but it was the very least I could do.  I headed downstairs and found the house empty except for my sister.

“How's it going?”

“Fine.”

That wasn't much of an answer for her, but okay.

“Any big plans for today?”

“Nope.”

Something was up.

“Are you alright?  Anything wrong?”

“Oh, I'M fine.”

“Okay, what's going on?  I don't get this.”

She gave me a deadly look.  I was starting to feel a little bit anxious, but defensive, too.  I had covered my tracks pretty well, right?  She couldn't prove anything.  My car was fine, right?  I hadn't hit anything.  Had I parked across the driveway or something?  No.  Everything was fine.  I was fine.

“You don't remember last night, do you?”

Suddenly my heart was trying to claw its way out of my chest.

“I'm not sure what you mean.  I came home – it was late.  I took a shower.  I climbed into bed.”

All that was true.  I had just left out my car-retrieval side trip.  It was more than she needed to know.  I was perfectly happy to keep that embarrassing little incident to myself.

“You don't remember last night, do you.”

She sounded like she was trying to hold back her anger.  I hadn't done anything wrong, at least that she could know about.  She was crazy.  I was fine.

“I'm sorry,  I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Fine.  I'll tell you.  I'm sleeping on the couch last night...”

Oh shit.

“...when I wake up to hear a dripping sound.  At first, I don't know what it is, but it's coming from the kitchen.”

Oh thank god, that can't possibly be my fault.

“So I go into the kitchen, and what do I find?  A stream of water coming from the ceiling.”

Oh shit.

“So I go upstairs to the bathroom, where I can hear water running in the tub.  The carpet is wet.  I can't believe you didn't notice it when you came downstairs this morning.”

I kept my mouth shut.  I couldn't look away.  She was staring daggers at me.

“So I knock on the door, but you don't answer.  I call your name, but no answer.  I try the door knob, but it's locked.  I start banging on the door, but still, you won't answer.  Finally, I have to get a hair pin to pop the lock.  And what do I find?  Water.  Everywhere.  Running over the side of the tub.  And there you are, in the water, asleep, fully clothed.  Your head is lolling back and forth.  Your shoes are floating on top.  And you won't answer.  I run into the bathroom, pull you up into a sitting position, and shake you by the shoulders, until finally you open your eyes and look around.  You know what you said?”

I had no idea what to say.  I didn't remember any of this.  Her voice dropped an octave in a humorless impression of mine.

“Boy, that's full.”

Under other circumstances, I would've laughed out loud.  I controlled my expression instead.

“You get out of the tub, dry off, and climb into bed.”

“Wow.”

“Yep.”

“I...I'm really sorry.  I don't even know what to say.”

“Neither do I.”

“I remember climbing into bed last night, but I don't remember any of that.  I mean, I believe you, I just don't even know how to respond to that.”

“Neither do I.”

“I'm sorry.”

Her phone rang while I tried to process what she'd just told me.  I was trying to piece together some semblance of an appropriate apology, but I was at a total loss for words.  She was still on the phone.

“...Hi...Oh...What?...What happened?...Is there anything we can?...Okay.  Okay.  We'll be right there.”

She hung up.  It looked like some of the fight had gone out of her, so I went for it.

“Look, I -”

“Maybe you forgot, but dad went in for that surgery this morning.  There was a problem, so we need to go down to the hospital.”

I felt pretty guilty, but it was just routine surgery.  There was probably a scheduling mistake.  Or maybe his blood sugar was too low or something.  At least there wasn't anything serious to worry about.

“Alright.  When are we heading down there?  Does mom need to leave for work or something?”

She wouldn't look at me.  I figured she was holding the previous night against me, and I wondered how long it would take her to get over it.  It seemed unfair that she was mad at me for something I couldn't even remember.  She shuddered, and I saw her break for a second before she got it back together.

“Dad had a bad reaction to the anesthesia.  He had a heart attack on the table.  They think he might be in a coma.”

I cleaned up the toothpaste.  It took more scrubbing than I would've thought.  I mopped up the little bit of water that was still on the bathroom floor.  I folded my bedding and turned the bed itself back into a sofa.  I gathered up my mountains of homework and arranged them into neat piles.  I poured the leftover half glass of bourbon down the sink.  I threw out the rest of the bottle.  I opened the blinds and did the dishes.  

I was miserable.  Absolutely miserable.  I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself.  Not for any individual thing I'd done.  I felt like I was seeing myself from the outside for the first time in my life.  This image of who I was, the person I thought I was, was totally different from what I was finally seeing.  I had been naïve and childish.  Not only that, I had been grasping at straws.  I was a fool.  I'd made myself a fool.  I thought back over the last several months and all the mistakes I had made.  There were almost too many to bear.  What the hell had I been thinking?  I looked at my life, the things I had done, the choices I had made, and I didn't recognize myself.  How had I gotten to this point?

You know, I had made some pretty terrible decisions, but it wasn't all my fault.  I didn't put my father into the hospital.  He did that to himself.  He made the life choices that got him so sick in the first place.  He could've taken better care of himself, and he didn't.  We all had to deal with the consequences of his lifestyle.  On top of that, my mother didn't have to start dating that asshole right away either.  Fine, I guess she felt like she had to.  He wasn't even that bad, I just hated him.  And maybe that wasn't all his fault either.  As hard as losing my dad was for me, I couldn't imagine what it had been like for her.  I mean, she lost half of herself.  I was a grown man – or close enough.  I should've handled it better.

Either way, it didn't matter.  There I was.  My apartment was clean, but my life was a mess.  I sat down on the couch.  A deck of cards sat on the coffee table in front of me.  I picked it up and turned one card over at a time, really studying the designs for the first time.  Spades, clubs.  What were the odds that the next card would be a heart?  One in four?  I turned it over.  It was another club.  Instead of discarding it, I put it back on top of the deck.  What were the odds that the top card was a club now?  One in four?  One hundred percent?  If I knew the next card ahead of time, could I still assign it a probability?  I mean sure, there's supposed to be a one in four chance any given suit could come up, but I already knew it was a club.  That card had been a club from the moment it was printed.  It couldn't be a heart or a diamond because...well, it wasn't either of those and it never had been.  It was a club.  There weren't any other possibilities and it was misguided to pretend otherwise.  Probabilities only apply to the unknown.

My life was like that deck of cards.  At the end of the last summer, I was drawing from the top of the stack.  I had all these cards just waiting to be dealt.  Life was full of possibilities.  I didn't think it was going to be the greatest year of my life or anything, but there were possibilities.  I was healthy.  There were places I wanted to go, things I wanted to do.  Then someone started dealing the cards.  I had no idea back then.  I was totally blind to it, and maybe that was for the best.  That deck was stacked, one low card after another.  I just didn't know it.  I didn't know what was coming.  I kept thinking things were going to get better, that things had to work out.  Then I'd turn the next low card.

Could things have gone any other way?  Did I ever have a chance?  I mean, the next card in the deck is the next card in the deck.  It doesn't change just because you don't know what it is.  I didn't know my dad was going to die, but he did.  I didn't have any say in that.  Nothing I could've done would've made any difference at that point.  Sitting there on the couch, how far had I made it through the deck?  How many bad cards could be left?  How many more hits could I possibly take?  Maybe life couldn't get much worse, but that didn't mean it was going to get any better.

Then again, maybe the card analogy was a load of crap.  Maybe the year I had lived was just one reality out of millions.  Maybe there are other time lines.  Maybe there are worlds where the card at the top of my deck wasn't a club after all.  Maybe there was a happier me somewhere else.  Maybe reality itself isn't as fixed as it seems to be.  Maybe the future is flexible.  Maybe the past is flexible, too.

Let's say the time line is fixed.  The past, the present, the future, they're all just moments frozen in time.  The past once existed, but it continues to exist.  It's still there, fixed in the time line.  We just can't get to it.  The future already exists.  The events that are going to happen are already a reality, we just aren't aware of them yet.  There's some comfort to that idea.  It takes away some of the responsibility.  If the events that are going to happen are going to happen with or without your consent, if they have already happened in a sense, then all you have to worry about is how you respond to them.  Then, too, the present is never really lost as it passes into memory.  It just joins all the other moments of the past, which never fade or cease to exist.  All of history, all of time, remains, untarnished.  The house you grew up in.  The people you loved.  The moments you never wanted to end.  They're out there, somewhere.  But then, they're out there next your mistakes.  Your moments of weakness.  Your moments of pain.  Shame.  Those things never lose their vitality either.  If that's the case, then life is like a gallery and we're on a moving sidewalk.

What about the alternative?  What if there is no fixed future?  What if our choices alter the time line itself?  What if every decision causes a fork, a branch that leads off into eternity?  There could be thousands and thousands of parallel time lines.  One where you said what you wanted to say.  One where you didn't say the thing you wish you hadn't.  One where the world plays by a different set of rules.  One where you can bend the laws of physics.  One where dreams and reality aren't so different.  Who says that's not the world we live in?  How little of our world do we really see?  How few people do we ever meet?  How little of our lives do we even remember?  Who's to say life isn't full of forgotten miracles, incredible moments that we simply fail to process and recall?  We remember little enough, who's to say which time line represents the past?  It's a sad thought, that the past is gone forever, but what if we really do get to determine the future?

I dropped the deck of cards.  There was no way to know, no way to tell.  But then, did it matter?  All we have in life is our memory.  We are our memories.  Our memories are what shape us and guide our decisions.  Whether the past is fixed or fading away, we only have our memories of it.  We can try to forget things.  We can choose to misremember.  We can focus on the good and choose not to dwell on the bad.  But that doesn't change the past, does it?  The reality we retain in our own memories has no influence on anyone else's reality, anyone else's recollection.  Whether the future is on rails, or splits into a million different paths, all we can do is live it.  We don't control the arrow of time.  We don't know what the future will bring whether it's fixed or free.  The whole thing is out of our hands.

When I thought back, I saw a difficult year.  I saw months and months of mistake after mistake.  I had been trying.  I had been trying hard.  I was trying to stay positive.  I was trying to stay happy.  I was trying to hang on to the things I knew and understood and thought I wanted.  I had created an image of myself.  An image of my life.  An image of the world I lived in.  I insisted on it.  I insisted that I live as the person I saw in my own head, in the world as I'd envisioned it.  I lived by the rules I had created for myself.  I treated other people in ways that reflected the roles I had given them in my own little universe.  Where had that gotten me?