Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  So they did. Or, rather, Winslow did.

  “Um…you are aware that Mr. Yovanovicz is deceased?”

  “I’m aware,” I said sadly, under my breath. Morty’s death seemed far away. Even though, by my reckoning, I had seen him just two days before, the interruption of my schedule and the loss of my mother had detached me from reality. All of the people I knew and all of the things I normally did seemed surreal.

  Li asked, “Can you account for your whereabouts on December 17th, about six o’clock in the evening?”

  The question caught me off guard and I hesitated, trying to figure out what I had been doing on that date. It took only a moment for me to realize that I had missed it completely, but the hesitation was noticeable and branded me a liar once again.

  “I wasn’t anywhere,” I said. “I told you that.”

  Li continued, “Of course you did. Can anyone corroborate that for you?”

  I looked at him as if expecting him to suddenly understand what I was trying to say before realizing that he understood completely and was simply ignoring my answers. “What’s so special about the 17th?”

  Winslow said not unkindly, “That was the day Mr. Yovanovicz was killed.”

  I looked directly at Li. “Do you think I was driving the bus?”

  “Of course not,” Li said without any hint of emotion. “The bus driver’s interview is on record. Witnesses, however, claim that Mr. Yovanovicz ‘looked like he was pushed’.”

  Now I sat down. Just the thought of someone actually pushing sweet old Morty in front of a bus made me sick to my stomach. I stumbled through them to the sofa and sat heavily. The fact that Li was implying that I had been the one to push Morty dissolved into the ether. It was irrelevant at that time.

  “Are you sure Mr. Yovanovicz was the only one who knew about your episodes?”

  I nodded. “He was the only one who didn’t think I was crazy.”

  “Is that why you were seeing Doctor Helena Mason?” My psychiatrist.

  I nodded in answer to his question. It seemed that I was to be cursed with endless nodding.

  “And when was your last visit with Dr. Mason?” Li had taken over the interview completely now. Winslow simply remained in the background, looking sympathetic.

  This time I got to shake my head. I didn’t really remember. It had been a few weeks, not counting the time I had missed. That made a couple of months at least. I told him so.

  “Can you account for your whereabouts on the 21st of December?”

  I just looked up at him, stupefied by his total disregard for me. “No. I can’t. I skipped it.”

  He must have found that an interesting choice of words because his eyebrows actually went up an eighth of an inch.

  Winslow, seeing an opportunity, stepped in. “That was the day that Dr. Mason was killed.”

  “What?! How?”

  “Auto accident,” said Winslow.

  “She was forced off the road,” Li added, looking at his partner. “Not much of an accident.”

  In what seemed an all too familiar gesture of disbelief, I buried my face in my hands. And yet it wasn’t really disbelief. I was growing accustomed to the notion that the world was always changing. It changed around us all day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. But I was missing the gradual progression of those changes. A person could die one day and give you the shock of your life. Multiply that by three over five weeks and you’ll have the fragile emotional state that was becoming my uncomfortable second skin.

  “Mr. Cristian, are you planning to ‘skip’ anymore time in the near future?”

  I looked up at Li, looked him directly in the eye. I had lost all inhibition. “You’re an asshole.”

  He didn’t respond. He simply found the door and left, Winslow now standing awkwardly by himself in my living room. With little grace, he fished a card out of his coat and dropped it on the coffee table. “Take care of yourself, Mr. Cristian.” And then he was gone, too.

  It’s funny sometimes, how things work out. Losing my job put me into some financial stress. But with my mother passing, I was due a decent inheritance. Not a fortune by any stretch, but a few thousand dollars after splitting the whole thing with my brothers. I was very surprised when the check arrived in the mail a month later. In all of that time, my brothers and I had not spoken. I had twice tried to call Wyatt and once to call Jeremy. I did not even hear from Livvie.

  I missed them.

  Without them, and without my mother, and without Morty, I was very alone. I spent the first week in my apartment wishing for a leap. What else could I do? I was hoping to leap far into the future so that I could start a brand new life in a brand new world. But that was a fantasy, really. Even if I had the power to leap, I still did not have the power to stop it. My brand new life would end the next time I leaped and left that brand new world behind for an even newer one. Thus, my thoughts turned to suicide. I suppose it was just a simple step in the progression. As my life fell apart around me, I began to wonder what I was living for. It was a notion I soon dismissed, though. I did not want to die. I wanted still what I had always wanted. I wanted to find a comfortable and happy life.

  I ate sparsely and slept long hours. I watched a lot of television and spent more and more time running into dead ends on the internet. I learned a lot though. I learned what it’s like to live in the poorest regions in Africa. I learned about the crisis in the Middle East and sectarian genocide. I learned about a dog in Wisconsin that had saved an entire family from a burning house.

  You can learn a lot in a week.

  You can also become extremely bored.

  I got another job. It was at a K-Mart bordering Union Square. I needed the income because I was afraid of using my mother’s money, but I really just needed a schedule. I put the inheritance into a self-managing account that would earn some interest as it sat. It was a semi-liquid account. I couldn’t tell if it would be enough but I figured it would be there whenever I was. I could get retail or labor jobs at the drop of a hat, but I would probably lose each one. Whenever I disappeared (or, actually, reappeared), I would need money until I started earning some. That’s where the account would come in. Maybe it wasn’t much of a plan, but I had never been much of a planner.

  The days and weeks blended into one another. There was very little for me to do, even less than before. At least I wasn’t confined to a 5 day work schedule. I found myself asking for and taking more hours at the store. My days off were dark and dreary. It was the dead of winter. The cold crept out of the physical and into the emotional. Night fell early and the internet and television were poor company, even for someone who had grown accustomed to poor and no company. I tried just once to give a call to Livvie, but she did not pick up her cell phone and I did not leave a voice message.

  The worst of February went by in the middle of the month and the weather began to brighten as March approached. It did a little bit to ease my spirits, but not much. There was no follow up from the police department, indicating that they had lost interest in me. I went to visit my mother’s grave six times, each time praying that she would reach down from Heaven and bring me a solution to my problem. I wondered then if an end to the leaping would be an end to the problem. After all it had cost me I began to think it was all I had left.

  On March 6th, at the end of a shift, I folded my K-Mart vest and stuck it into my K-Mart locker. Before I went, I felt like something sweet so I bought a candy bar with nuts and nougat. Sticking it into my pocket, I made for the exit. One of the checkout ladies, an older woman named Estelle (just like the receptionist at my old job), told me to button up because it was cold. She flashed me a kindly smile and I flashed her back my best imitation. I had seen her a few times while working. With all of the hours I worked, I had seen just about everyone that worked there. I was well regarded as the best employee and the worst company. As I stepped through the door and into the street, the world around me changed. The change was so fluid and sudden that I might not eve
n have noticed it if the scenery wasn’t so different. To begin with, it was warm. I immediately became uncomfortable inside of my coat. The dark air smelled of soot and garbage and something foul that I couldn’t put my finger on. The pavement beneath my feet was not smooth and lined, but broken and crumbled. I stepped into the night and my foot twisted on a loose block of concrete and I went down. Silence was all around. I pulled myself to my feet, relieved that I was uninjured, and took in my surroundings.

  It was awful.

  I noticed first the jungle jim in the park across the street. It was split in two, each piece bent away from the other as if a pile driver had come down on top of it and never stopped moving. The two parts were mangled and bent, melted. There had been trees in the park, too, but they were virtually gone. All that remained were burnt husks and piles of ash. Great chunks of the ground had come up from beneath to form concrete mountains the height of buses. And there were buses. And cars. Some were still on their decaying wheels while others lay on their backs like dying beetles. Everything was covered with this layer of black soot. Some of it had been streaked and there were finger writings in large patches. The buildings, too, were soiled as far up as I could see. While they still stood, great portions of them were severely damaged and there wasn’t an unbroken window in view.

  There were bodies, too.

  Some were scorched beyond recognition, the flesh gone and the bones fused. Others were just old and decaying. Many showed signs of desecration. Not all of these people had been killed by whatever had caused this destruction. Just standing where I was, on the threshold of what had once been my place of work, I could identify people who had been shot, people who had been burned, people who had been bludgeoned. There was all manner of death around me.

  I thought I must truly have died and gone to hell.

  I thought this must be the culmination of my condition, to have been transported to a place that simply could not exist on Earth.

  And then I knew that New York as I had known it had ceased to exist between March 6th, 2008 at around 6:00 pm and the time in which I stood at the moment. My concerns about where and how I would be able to live as I missed weeks and months of time were of no consequence now. Surely my apartment was buried under a heap of rubble. Surely my accounts were no longer viable. New York was gone. Perhaps the United States or even the world was gone as well.

  Jeremy.

  Wyatt.

  Livvie…

  Maybe Morty and my mother had been lucky to miss this.

  Maybe I had been lucky, too.

  Looking back at the entrance to K-Mart, I debated going back inside. I cannot deny a morose interest in seeing if I could identify any of the people inside. But my better and weaker nature provided ample resistance. The anonymous death around me was more than enough. I could not fathom seeing a familiar face on a ruined body.

  In a last desperate attempt to make contact with someone, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket. There was no signal of course, but the date and time were printed on the glowing display. It was June 2nd, 2009. It was four in the morning. For a moment, the date didn’t even faze me as I realized that its simple existence meant the cell satellite was still functioning. At least I knew there was civilization somewhere. As my harried psyche absorbed that bit of information I took in yet another bit. It was 2009. Not only had I skipped from Spring to Summer. I had skipped the entire year in between. For almost ten minutes, I stood in the devastation of Union Square, looking from my cell phone to the world around me, to the simplicity of the unchanged sky.

  4:01.

  4:02

  4:03

  …

  For me it was six in the evening. In a few hours, when the morning was middle aged, I would be ready to get some sleep.

  But there would be no place to lay my head.

  I spent the dark hours wandering, shifting my coat from arm to arm. I wanted desperately to be rid of it, but couldn’t bring myself to discard it. At first, I headed north toward my apartment. I must have walked twenty blocks before I remembered that it was likely not to have been my apartment any more. Additionally, I realized that I just didn’t want to see it. Not really. After all, how would I react to the broken and burned body of my super if I were to see it?

  No. Not for me. I decided again to allow the corpses to remain faceless.

  The city around me was quiet but not dead. I could hear shouts in the distance and smell the smoke of fires wisping their way up out of the subway tunnels. Though I was desperate for human contact, I could not fathom venturing into those depths. Though it hadn’t happened in years, the old subway cars used to lose their lights once in a while. It would only happen for a moment, but the riders would be enclosed in the darkness with nothing but the smoldering yellow of the track lights as illumination. During those times, people would let out exasperated sighs and businessmen would look up from their papers, perturbed at the interruption of their reading. Then the lights would come back on and everything would return to normal. But that would not be so now. I knew that those tunnels would be black as pitch with just those fires to cast terrifying shadows.

  Again, not for me.

  The dawn light left me feeling alone and exposed. If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to name a possible danger, and yet I had a terrible sense of dread. I felt the need to be indoors so I took to one of the west side apartment buildings. By then I had reached upper midtown, my walk having become more manic and less touristy. The lobby of the building was, thankfully, devoid of bodies. The security doors had been blasted off of their hinges and a single elevator directly opposite them was missing, the doors open to a gaping hole. I bypassed it and went for the stairs. Though that door, too, had fallen off, the stairs themselves were in a fair state. I was able to walk up the flights with little caution. Instinctively, I went up three flights, as if this was my building and I was going to my apartment. There were actually several doors that were closed and looked very normal, but I left them alone. I chose instead, an open door, letting myself slowly into the foyer.

  Though the damage was extensive, I could still see remnants of its last occupation. The living room was narrow with two bookshelves flanking a TV stand. The TV was gone. The last vestiges of a brown and orange throw rug and a brown couch were littered about the room along with other debris. There was also a window that led to a fire escape, but it was broken. Letting myself into the bathroom, I saw cracked tile, gouged walls, and a toilet empty of water. Still, it had been several hours, and one year, since I’d had the opportunity to use the bathroom and old habits die hard. When I was finished, old habits prevailed as I tried to flush, but there was just an empty click. I left the bathroom, pulling the door shut (or as shut as it would shut) behind me. At last, I made my way to the bedroom. The furniture was in the same style as the living room, but what really caught my attention was the full sized bed and mattress that was dirty, but intact. There were no clean sheets or blankets. In fact, there were no sheets or blankets at all. The apartment had been cleaned out. I assumed by scavengers.

  With nothing else for it and the low after an adrenaline high crushing my bones and muscles with fatigue, I lay my coat over the dirty mattress, crawled onto the bed, and fell quickly asleep.

  I was awakened by the sound of helicopter blades in the distance. Upon opening my eyes, I was so disoriented that panic set in quickly. Where was I? Who was I? Frozen in fear, I could do nothing but lay there and listen to the roto roto roto of the chopper. It was getting closer.

  As the memories came back, I began to relax a little. Truthfully, reality was not much comfort, but at least it was grounded. I rolled over, having taken my most comfortable position of sleeping on my stomach, and stared at the ceiling. The light had gone mostly from the room, day having faded into night. But there was light, a foreign light penetrating from the street below. Startled at this realization, I sat up and looked around. I was alone. It wasn’t the helicopter, which still sounded far off, but a source, or several so
urces, from down below. The beams flashed through the broken window and bounced off the ceiling, temporarily illuminating the alien room.

  Instinctively, I went to the window and looked out. It never occurred to me that this might be a bad idea. I just naturally assumed that whoever it was outside could help me. Down below was a unit of soldiers accompanied by three military vehicles. But I could see immediately that these were not American soldiers. The vehicles displayed a flag that I did not recognize and their uniforms were an urban grey. I caught a few spoken words, but none of them made any sense. Instinctively, I dropped back down under the window ledge.

  “Did they see you?”

  Startled, I turned to see a young girl crouching by the bedroom door. She was wearing dusty blue jeans and a tied off blouse with the sleeves ripped off. The jeans didn’t look like they quite fit her. In fact, I was sure they were cut for a man. Her hair was tied back revealing a deep scar along her forehead and her skin was the color of chocolate powder. Beneath the grime and bruises, I couldn’t tell much about her. She had a furtive look in her eyes that was set in odd juxtaposition with a pleading. She was a child, really, lost in this metropolitan Armageddon. I don’t think she knew whether to trust me or to run.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well that was a stupid thing to do.” The venom in her voice was clear and caught me off guard. She had that New York inner city teen accent and used expressions that I didn’t understand nor do I remember well enough to transcribe. The accent made her accusation all the more forceful.

  “I… didn’t realize.”

  “You didn’t realize? There hasn’t been an American unit through here in weeks.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The light began to fade from the room as the soldiers, apparently unaware of our presence, moved on. As they went, we just sat there staring at each other, she and I. She was sizing me up, I suppose. I couldn’t imagine what she must have been through and I suppose she couldn’t figure out who or what I was.