I spend most of the day in the hospital, waiting for my exam. Every now and again a clerk calls my name, only to direct me to another waiting room. Meanwhile, I nearly finish The Wretched of the Earth, a disturbing book, with its advocacy for violence by colonized people, but it helps me understand the history behind the current turmoil in Africa.
Eventually, I am summoned from the last of the waiting rooms. As I make my way down a corridor toward the X-ray lab, I can already see the caramel-colored face of the technician, already make out her name on the badge pinned to her white coat, already hear the southern drawl in her voice.
“Enjoy that beard while you can,” she says cheerfully. “They’ll shave it off first thing.”
I lift a hand to my chin and pinch a tuft of whiskers. My smile feels as if it has been drawn on my lips from outside.
At her instruction, I pull off my boot and peel away the sock. She has me lie down on the examining table and positions the snout of the X-ray tube over my bare foot. “Now hold quite still,” she says, before disappearing behind a screen. A moment later I hear a brief hiss. She returns, repositions the foot, takes a second X-ray, and then repeats the cycle a third time. Then she escorts me to another room, where a doctor is studying the images of my ankle on a screen.
He turns when I enter, asks me to sit on the paper-covered table with my leg extended. There is a whiff of peppermint on his breath. With gloved hands, he manipulates my foot, rotating it left and right, up and down, testing the range of motion.
“How does it feel?” he asks.
Thinking of Sharon, I am tempted to give the painter’s refrain—“Hurts like hell!”—but I feel compelled to answer, “Numb.”
“No pain at all?”
I shake my head—or rather, it shakes of its own accord. I see myself as if from the outside, sitting on the table, my naked foot cradled in the doctor’s hands. It is as though I am watching a film of myself, every word and gesture already scripted.
He lets go of my foot and turns back to the ghostly X-rays on the screen. “It’s an elegant piece of surgery. This ankle should hold up better than your natural one. Nothing here to bar you from service.”
Leaving the hospital, I walk back toward the main gate. The last light is fading from the sky. I hear the sizzle of pipes overhead, the steam cooling as it circulates from building to building. At the guard shack I pause to show my papers once more, and once more I am waved through.
Near the rusting fighter jets, their engine cowlings clogged with snow, I wait for a ride. As cars and trucks pass, their headlights pick me out of the obscurity for a moment before sliding by. My thumb grows stiff as I wait for the Chevy pickup that finally stops, as I know it will. Likewise, I know beforehand that baby shoes will dangle from the rearview mirror, that the driver, a woman in her fifties, will tell me I remind her of her son, who was killed by a sniper in the Congo, and I know before I speak what I must answer. Hurtling down the tunnel bored through the darkness by the headlights, we exchange our lines, for the film will not stop.
On the bus I am granted a few minutes of freedom. These periods of lucidity occur less and less often, as the spells of foreknowledge lengthen. The view through the window might be of an alien planet, everything in shades of gray, silent and bleak and cold. The focus of my gaze shifts and I see my dim reflection in the glass—empty sockets where my eyes should be, my mouth a dark slash.
At the final stop before my own, an old woman boards the bus. As she teeters along the aisle, her bag of groceries lurching side to side, I know she will ask to share my seat, I will nod yes, and she will settle beside me with a wheeze. As I expected, her bag smells of cinnamon and garlic, and so does her black wool coat.
“No night to be alone on a bus,” she says.
“I’m almost home,” I reply. “My wife’s waiting.”
“Count your blessings. My husband died when he was about your age.” She fishes a snapshot from her purse and holds it out for me.
Reluctantly I peer at the photograph in the dim light. It shows a man in white Navy dress uniform, with a woman in a wedding gown clinging to his arm. I feel certain I have seen this image many times.
“Believe it or not, that’s me,” the old woman says, pointing to the bride.
I am startled to feel tears welling in my eyes. Hoping she won’t notice, I turn away to blink at my reflection in the window.
“A Chinese missile blew up his ship in the Indian Ocean,” the old woman continues. “Where is the war now? I can’t keep track. It’s been going on since before I was born. Took my father, both my brothers, and my husband.”
I want to ease the hurt I hear in her voice, but I can’t speak. So I put on my knit hat and gloves in preparation for my stop.
She lays a hand on my forearm. “Here, let me give you a pomegranate for your wife.”
“That’s kind of you, but really—”
“It’s full of vitamin C,” she says, drawing the plump red fruit from her grocery bag.
“For good health, then,” I say, accepting the pomegranate and stuffing it in my coat pocket.
As she turns in the seat to let me slip by, she adds quietly, “It also brings fertility.”
I mutter thanks and hurry down the aisle. From the sidewalk, I watch the bus drag its rectangles of light into the darkness.
The snow on our street sounds brittle under my boots. My breath fumes, glistening with daggers of ice. The winter’s chill will not let go, nor will the sense of déjà vu. I can read the script but cannot change it. Our front door opens without my key, and I am upset with Sharon for leaving it unlocked. I take off my hat and gloves and boots in the hall before going to the kitchen, where I know she is sitting at the table over a mug of tea.
She flashes me an anxious look. “What did the doctor say?”
“I’m fit for war.”
Her lips crimp tight.
I shrug free of my coat, drape it over a chair back, and lift the pomegranate from the pocket. “A woman on the bus gave me this,” I say, offering the fruit.
Reaching out hesitantly, Sharon cups it in her palm. “A woman on the bus?”
“An elderly lady, returning from the grocery store.”
“Why would she give you a pomegranate?”
“She said it brings fertility.”
“Did you tell her I’m pregnant?”
“Of course not.”
“How odd.” Slowly a smile breaks over Sharon’s face. “How lovely.”
Before she has a chance to ask, I fetch a bowl and knife and spoon, and set them before her. She slices the pomegranate and spoons out a mouthful of seeds, each one coated with ruby pulp. Her lips take on the color of the juice as I tell her about my sense of prevision, how it began as brief episodes and eventually became an unbroken awareness.
“Even now?” she asks. “You know what’s going to happen next?”
“Yes. Each moment is already laid out. I see the two of us here at the table, watch you lift the spoon, hear our voices, as if we’re speaking lines in an old film.”
“Well, get up and dance. Stand on your head. Do something crazy to snap the illusion.”
“I’ve tried. But every time I think I’m doing something truly free, I realize it’s what I’m required to do.”
“Required by whom?”
“By whoever wrote the script.”
Although Sharon faces me across the table, her chestnut eyes don’t look straight at me. All day other people have focused their gaze a few degrees away from where I imagine myself to be, as if I really am split in two, and my second self is drawing their attention.
There is caution in her voice as she says, “Gordon, this is a textbook case of paranoia. Don’t you see? For months now you’ve been feeling caught up in the military machine . . .”
“I am caught up.”
“But it’s not a machine. It’s just a big bureaucracy. It’s not running your life.”
I realize I should try to reassure her. But I f
eel compelled to insist, “Something is running my life. I’ve lived this day before. Maybe many times. In fact, this may be the only day I’ve ever lived.”
“That’s nonsense. Think about other days. Remember our wedding . . .”
“What if those memories are the illusion? What if they’re planted in our minds to hide the fact that we’re doomed to keep repeating this one day?”
Her gaze rakes across me, then swivels away. “You’ve been under stress—”
Unable to stop, I push on. “Sleep makes us forget today, so we can wake up and live it again as if it were new. But I’ve seen through the scam. I know I’ve lived this day before.”
“You need to rest,” she says carefully. “Let’s go to bed.”
“I tell you, I know!” I slam the table, scattering pomegranate seeds. One version of me looks on, appalled, as the other self pushes back from the table, upsetting the chair, then jerks his arm free from Sharon’s grip and grabs his coat and lurches away.
“Gordon, you’re not going out.”
“I have to.”
She follows me into the hall and crosses arms over her breast, shivering. “Sweetheart, you’re scaring me.”
I should take her in my arms, this woman I adore, and I should whisper in her ear a prayer for our coming child. But I cannot. I knot the laces in my boots, swing the door open, and step outside.
“Please don’t go,” Sharon cries after me.
“I have to.”
The door slams.
I blunder forward into the night. Snow is falling, large flakes that sway as they tumble. I tilt my face up to feel them settle on my cheeks, but they make no impression. My feet convey nothing about the ground I walk over, my ears capture no sounds, my nose discovers no smells. My whole body is numb, as if all of me, and not just the artificial ankle, were made of metal and plastic. Only my eyes keep me bound to the world.
I must do something crazy, as Sharon says. For her sake, for the baby’s. So I step into the street just as a snowplow turns the corner and heads my way. In the glare of the truck’s headlights, I cannot make out the driver, cannot tell if he sees me.
Should I stand here, or should I leap aside?
At the last moment I leap aside. Without slowing, the truck rumbles on, spewing snow. My heart thuds. My senses revive. Did I choose to live, or was the choice made for me?
I must go back indoors to comfort Sharon. I will hold her until she sleeps, then I can sleep, forgetting this day, so tomorrow will come as a surprise.
I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me.
The First Journey of Jason Moss
One October day, an accountant from Buddha, Indiana, decided the time had come for him to travel around the earth. Although Jason Moss had always felt a passion for women, as a man might have a passion for bowling or pies, a profound shyness had kept him a bachelor, and so he had no need of explaining his journey to any wife or child. No goodbyes were needed for his kinfolk either. They all lived elsewhere, mostly in trailers on the coasts of Oregon and Maine, where they hunted mushrooms and carved figurines out of tree roots. Every Christmas they would write to him—Box 12, Buddha, Indiana—and send him photographs of a woodstove they had built from an oil drum, or a packet of seeds for growing foot-long cucumbers, or a newspaper clipping about the extinction of Siberian weasels. He would answer these letters promptly, saying that business was good, the weather bad, and his life ticking on as usual.
And so things had kept ticking along until his forty-seventh birthday, which fell in the middle of apple season. To mark the day, Jason always drove out to Burley’s Orchard, where he picked two bushels of Granny Smiths, enough to keep him in fruit until spring brought rhubarb. On this particular birthday, after his baskets were full, he was standing tiptoe on the highest rung and reaching for one final apple when the ladder slipped. During the split second of his fall, he remembered the last glimpse of his father waving from the door of a boxcar, remembered helping his mother drag home from an auction a tombstone bearing the family name, and he realized he was utterly sick of adding up columns of numbers, sick of hearing doors slam in his rooming house, sick of living womanless in Buddha, and he vowed that if he survived the landing he would set out on a journey and not stop until he had circled the planet.
Jason hit the ground without breaking a bone.
That night he reviewed his catalogs of backpacking gear. Since he had been poring over the various editions of these catalogs for years, he already knew which items to order. As many things as possible should be green, because that struck him as the proper color for traveling: a green rucksack and sleeping bag, green tent, green shirts and trousers and waterproof jacket, a slouch hat of green felt, and green nylon laces for his boots. Along with the order for boots he enclosed a sheet of paper on which he had carefully outlined his stockinged foot.
Packages arrived for him all winter.
“Setting up a store?” the deliveryman asked.
“Just some things I’ve been needing,” Jason replied.
When all the gear had been delivered he practiced stuffing it in the rucksack. The loaded pack weighed forty pounds, one-quarter as much as Jason himself. Dressed in green and propped on the walking-stick, which blossomed into an umbrella at the flick of a button, he posed before the bathroom mirror. Hardly an imposing figure, he knew. Skinny, bespectacled, a clerical sag in the spine. No one could mistake him for a voyageur. But he had never much cared what other people thought of him.
All winter he studied maps, planning his route. Wherever there was land he would hitch rides or walk, and when he reached the edge of a continent he would sail. About the walking he felt no qualms, because every weekend he ambled through the woods near town. His legs were bony, perhaps, and bowed, yet quite sturdy. Sailing might present more of a challenge, for Jason had never set foot in any craft larger than the canoes he paddled on Syrup Creek. He had visited Lake Michigan, which was too wide to see across, and had watched cargo ships docking in Chicago, but such experience would hardly prepare him for crossing the sea. Prepared or not, he felt certain he would find a way, once he set out, to keep going.
Of course he could not set out immediately, not even when the last of the hiking equipment arrived with the warm weather in April. First he had to inform his clients that he would no longer be able to keep track of their money. Breaking the news to his landlady, who hated changes, took a week.
“That’s a cockamamie idea if I ever heard one,” she railed at him. But eventually she grew reconciled to the scheme, and advised him to rub alcohol on the soles of his feet, which would toughen them, and always to wear wool socks.
There were forms to fill out at the insurance company and post office. His savings, which after decades of shrewd living were substantial, had to be invested in such a way that even five years from now, even in Tasmania, he would be able to pay for whatever he needed. Delivering his clothes to the Salvation Army kept him busy for an afternoon. He had to find homes for thirty-four house-plants, including some finicky African violets and a rambunctious aloe that had won a red ribbon at the county fair.
Having at last cut himself free of people and having reduced his possessions to what could be carried in his pack, he still had to decide in which direction to begin his trip, whether east or west. If west into the prevailing winds, he could be guided by the sounds and smells of things. In Illinois he might sniff the pigs of Iowa. In Utah he might hear the purr of rain on the Sierras. Ever since Marco Polo revealed how long and toilsome were the eastern routes, the great explorers had journeyed west, Hudson and La Salle and Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, the men whose travels Jason had studied since childhood. But if he set out eastward, he would not have to squint into the afternoon sun. Most days the wind would be at his back, helping him along, and his steps would be aligned with the spinning of the earth.
In the
end he chose sunrise over sunset and headed east. He was accompanied to the edge of town by his Vietnamese laundress, his Argentine barber, several former clients asking final questions about their money, a boy whom he had once helped with algebra, and by the landlady, who presented him with a handsome pair of green wool socks. “Remember,” she said, “there’s always a home for you in Buddha. And rub your feet with alcohol.”
Jason hoisted the walking stick to wave back at them. Then he faced the rising sun and took his first true step.
Each of these steps was, on average, thirty inches long, which meant 2,112 paces to the mile. At three miles per hour, eight hours a day, every week he would take 354,816 steps and cover 168 miles. In just under six weeks he would lift each boot a million times. If he maintained the same pace on the oceans as on land, he would circle the earth in a thousand days. The land portion of this circumambulation would require 16,727,040 steps, assuming he walked the whole way.
With these numbers buzzing in his head, Jason made his way down the Cincinnati highway. His calculations were soon in need of revising, however, for within an hour he accepted a ride in a chicken truck. On its side was painted BUDDHA’S BETTER BROILERS. The chickens were so crammed in their cages that a deaf person seeing the truck from a distance might have thought it was loaded with snow. A person with good working ears could have made no mistake. Jason heaved his rucksack onto the seat and climbed in. The driver was a bear-shaped woman with skin the color of wheat bread and eyes that made him think of pirates.
“Where you headed, bowlegs?” she roared above the noise of the chickens.
“Around the world,” Jason shouted back.
“Lucky dog. Wish I was. But I’ve got to come on home after dumping these squawkers in Cincy. Listen to them. You ever hear such a racket? It’s all I hear seven blessed days a week. Chickens! As dumb as an animal can get without expiring. Shoot, if I didn’t have the four kids I’d buy me a backpack and go with you.” She glared across at him. “Say, you married?”
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