INITIUM NOVUM: Part 1

by Casper Greysun

  Hector, was happy using the same cell phone he’s had for two years already. If Ruth were to get any wind of that second phone, she would most assuredly ask questions. If her sister were to get her hands on that phone, she would have the proof she needed back when she accused Hector of being unfaithful to her sister. Especially since both phones are part of a limited edition set, each stamp with a signature Union Square insignia, a promotional tactic for the store.

  The urge to hear her sister does not subside. She dials her sister’s number one last time. It rings once. It rings twice. It rings three times.

  “Hello,” says the voice on the other side.

  “Hello, Heather?” Ruth asks unnecessarily, as she knows it is her sister on the line. She recognizes her voice instantly.

  “Ruth?” Heather inquires, “Is that really you?”

  “Let’s get together later, it’s been too long,” Ruth suggests, choking up as she speaks to her younger sibling.

  “I’d like that. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.”

  They say bye and hang up. Although it was anything but an in-depth conversation, for Ruth, it was more than enough to make her feel like she’s found a part of herself that’s been missing for far too long. After drying her eyes, she lights a half-smoked joint, this time she does so with joy instead of the solemnity she had been trying to quell by getting high.

  CHAPTER 6:

  “I said take the West Side Highway, not the streets!” William argues.

  “You said ‘go right’ and I go right. Now you have problem,” the taxi drivers argues back in a thick, Punjabi accent.

  “No, I said ‘go right to the West Side Highway.’ Not take a right, here,” he corrects the cabbie.

  “Well, my friend, you need to speak clearer English,” the cabbie advises.

  “Oh, my English needs to be clearer, does it? How’s this? You’re a piece of shit,” Will curses at the driver.

  “No, you are the shit; you, not I,” he responds defensively, much to Will’s amusement.

  Keep irking him.

  “Bitch-ass,” Will says coolly, insulting him without the slightest effort.

  “No, you! You are the ass of a bitch!” The cabbie barks, screaming at him with ferocious intensity. Will only snickers at his weak of anger. This angers him even more.

  It was not his initial intention to pick a fight with the man. Will had only been expressing, albeit in his own tasteless fashion, his disdain for the cabbie’s decision to take the streets instead of the highway. But now, Will sets purpose to deliberately offending the man.

  “Fucking cock-sucka,” Will manages to get out in between series of chuckles.

  “I have never sucked a rooster. You are liar of a man,” he says, the essence of the insult becoming lost in his understanding of the translation.

  “Dick, man. You suck dick,” Will elaborates, shaking his head in disbelief over the fact that he actually has to explain to someone what sucking cocks mean. “Shit, man, should I draw you a diagram?”

  “No, you can keep your pornographic illustration to yourself! You are a bad man, a very bad man.”

  “Suck a cock,” Will repeats, this time in a sing-song voice.

  “You! You will suck the cock!” The cabbie screams loud enough that the pedestrians passing by give him dirty looks.

  “No, you are,” he lazily continues his side of the argument, rapidly losing interest in the squabble with the driver

  “No, You!” The cabbie says as he pulls up to the curb near Union Square. “I don’t need a passenger like you. Pay and get out.”

  “Fuck you, Aziz. Take me where I need to go, bitch,” Will demands.

  “My name is Omar. And fuck you!”

  After about two minutes of their disputing, the cabbie drops the demand for a payment so long as Will agrees to leave the vehicle. He’s not too far off from his desired location so he takes the free ride as a win for himself.

  “What a nice cabbie to give me a free ride,” he says to himself and to the air around him, half sarcastically, half sincerely. “There really aren’t enough nice people nowadays, it’s really a shame.”

  A sudden realization sees William reach into his pocket for his wallet. He looks inside and sees that it is pretty much empty. There was no way that he was going to be able to pay for that cab ride, even if he had been willing to do so. To Will, this means that seemingly all-knowing voice has yet to fail him. As more and more time elapses, Will increasingly warms up to the idea of the voice in his head. However, an important question remains: what, or rather who, is that voice? And why has it been so helpful to him?

  Pushing the questions in his mind aside, Will marches to where he feels he needs to be. When he arrives, he finds himself unsure of how to proceed. He walks into the building and directly towards the security guard. The tension is thick. Each second is slow and laborious.

  “Sir, where would I find the patients arriving in ambulances?” He asks, very politely so as to not arouse suspicion.

  The security guard does not answer right away. Instead, the guard stares at him blankly, raising the tension which fell upon Will almost instantly as he walked into the Beth Israel Hospital. After a few moments of the guard’s uncomfortably piercing gaze, Will ponders inventing a story explaining why he’s looking for the ambulatory care unit.

  Wait.

  “Sir,” the guard begins dryly as he slowly raises his arm and points a finger at the sign right behind Will. Will turns around to see what the man is pointing to. It’s a sign which illustrates the directions to the different care units within the hospital. Will thanks him, feeling a tab bit dumb that he did not notice the sign himself.

  He walks deeper into the hospital until he reaches the E.R., then the trauma center, then the I.C.U., and finally the ambulatory care unit. Both patients and hospital staff members toss curious glances at him as he peers behind curtain after curtain looking for the elderly woman from the subway.

  Unsurprisingly, no one so much as attempts to stop Will from snooping around. The only resistance that he has met thus far can hardly be called resistance at all. Say what you will, but the apathy of health care workers can only be attributed to the poor state of health care in the nation. There are simply too many sick people in the world, and only a small percentage are privileged enough to never have to deal with the indifference of an underpaid nurse or a med-student-in-training in a public medical facility. The fortunate ones can afford veteran doctors and nurses who project the delusions of care, both medical and emotional, unto them. The rest end up in place like Beth Israel, or even much worse, Bellevue.

  It isn’t until Will has peered behind more than a dozen curtains that he finds his target, for lack of a better word. The old lady, whose chart reads Beverly Caine, lays on a bed in critical condition. There are tubes in her nose and a complicated looking IV machine connected to the crook of her arm. She appears sedated, as evident by the euphoric and blank look in her eyes and the drool leaking from her mouth.

  Slowly and carefully, Will approaches the lady and seats himself on a foldable chair right beside her bed. He reaches out, but draws his arm back due to timidity. Overcoming the insecurity of his softer sentiments, Will gently takes her hand in his.

  “I’m sorry. I really tried to spare you the pain of hot coffee. If I could take it all back…”

  Will’s last sentence trails off as he is reminded of the phrase which Heather said could turn time back for him. As crazy as it sounds, Will gives serious consideration to starting over, if it’s even possible.

  He finally decides to go forth with it, in hopes of saving the old lady’s life.

  No, she’ll die whether you’re to blame or not.

  For the first time since Will began to hear the voice, it speaks in a complete sentence, giving him a reason to carry on and not begin anew. The voice also adds authenticity to the gypsy’s claim that he can start over simply by uttering a phrase. Whether or not the claim is truthful is another matter
entirely. All that is important is that it is a reason in a world without reason, which happens to be reason enough for Will.

  There’s a shuffle of footsteps behind Will. The curtain separating him and Beverly from the rest of the unit is drawn back so quickly that Will has no chance to react. Literally, in the blink of an eye, a tall, slim redhead with watery eyes stands before him accompanied by a physician.

  Will lets go of the lady’s hand and prepares to answer, what he can only assume is, a series of uncomfortable and difficult questions. However, Will is wrong. Only a few question are asked and it’s the tall redhead who inquires. The doctor, on the other hand, checks on Beverly with indifference, as if he’s inspecting a motor vehicle of sorts, pulling a tube here, pressing buttons there, his actions are all very mechanical and cold.

  “Who are you?” She asks, wiping her eyes with a piece of tissue.

  Concerned church member.

  “I am member of Beverly’s church,” Will answers. “I saw her being loaded into an ambulance and I became concerned.”

  The redhead smiles at Will before taking one of his hand in her own.

  “Thank you for caring,” she says. “It makes me happy that she was in the company of a friend. I was at work when I got the call and rushed right over.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Veniero’s Bakery,” she answers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “William Freeman.”

  “Jessica Caine,” she says, extending her hand to shake his. “Will you be attending service anytime soon?”

  “Service?” Will questioningly repeats.

  “Yes, you are a member of my grandmother’s church, are you not?”

  “Yes, of course. Service, as in attending church service. Yeah, um, no.”

  “Why?” she probes, confused as to why a man who said he was a member of her grandmother’s church would not be attending service anytime soon.

  “I won’t be in church anytime soon. I’m actually having a bit of a crisis in faith at the moment,” he offers Jessica as his excuse.

  “That’s understandable. I’m not much of a believer either. My grandmother was though. And if she were conscious, she’d have a fit over our weak faith.” Tears fill the girl’s eyes as she glances over at her bed-stricken grandmother. “Grandma always used to tell me that everything that happens to us in our lives happens for a reason. I just can’t see how her falling down in the subway is reason for anything.”

  Will looks away due to the uncomfortable implications of his own underlying guilt. Jessica notices the change in his demeanor right away.

  “There’s nothing anyone could have done to prevent this,” she says, comforting Will.

  “I beg to differ,” he responds as he replays the incident over in his head.

  “Look, some piece of shit litters in the subway and my grandmother slips and falls. It isn’t anybody’s fault except the person who opted against disposing of his trash properly. As worried as I am about my grandmother, it won’t help her to play the blame game and point fingers all willy-nilly.”

  “Willy-nilly?” Will breaks his streak of solemnity in order to tease Jessica about her choice of words.

  “Yes, willy-nilly is a proper dictionary term,” she lightheartedly defends her vernacular. They share a polite chuckle together, the type strangers share when one or more of them desperately needs the moment to be funnier than it really is.

  “Listen, I should be getting out of here. I have a prior engagement that requires my attendance,” he says cryptically, referring to the imminent meeting between Laura Cohen, now in the company of police officers, and himself.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you, Will. Please come by and visit again, anytime you like. I’m sure grandma will appreciate the love.”

  Will turns and begins to head out of the opening in the curtain when he’s interrupted by Jessica’s phone going off. For some odd reason, this catches his complete and undivided attention. He steals a glimpse of the phone’s home screen just as Jessica is about to answer it. The name of the contact calling her is Hector S. Will doesn’t know why he’s interested in her personal business, but a gut instinct tells him that he should be paying attention.

  The doctor also takes a look at the ringing phone. Apparently, the phone is enough to get him to talk to us, but the injured, senior lady isn’t.

  “Hey, I have one of those. My boyfriend too,” he adds, revealing that he’s gay, a tidbit of information which flies over Will and Jessica’s heads as they are a bit too preoccupied with their current situations to care. “Anyway, great sale recently, two for the price of one. I brought my lovey-dovey one to match the one I got myself. Now, we’re phone mates.”

  Will looks at the doctor, confused as to why he believes that either himself or Jessica are interested in hearing about the cell phones he purchased for himself and his lover. Although he is very tempted, Will does not voice his opinion on the matter. Instead, he disregards it, brushing it aside, away from the focal center of his thoughts. The task proves to be more difficult than Will had anticipated as the doctor continues his impulsive and unprovoked dialogue.

  “Got it just a few blocks away at Union Square. The sales person was incompetent and immature, but the manager was very helpful. Very heavy too. I wanted to tell him that he should exercise more and go on a diet, but I didn’t want to be rude.” The doctor reaches into his lab coat’s pocket and pulls out a syringe and vial, preparing it so that he can administer a dose of the substance to Beverly. “Besides, he had just given me a deal on the accidental handling insurance.” He inserts the syringe into the vial and extracts the substance. Then, holding the loaded syringe in his mouth sideways, like one would if they were chewing on a pencil, he cleans a small segment of Beverly’s arm, near the crook of the free elbow, with an alcohol pad before thoughtlessly thrusting the point through the old lady’s arm flesh multiple times until he finds the vein. “You know, in case I drop my phone because I’m such a klutz sometimes. I mean, like, majorly clumsy.”

  When Jessica answers the phone. She greets the caller very warmly before telling him where she’s at. As Jessica is beginning to explain the events – as she thusly understands them, of course – which led her to Beth Israel, the voice instructs Will to do something completely off the wall. Upon hearing the instructions, Will’s initial reluctance quickly concedes to the voice’s command. Generally, when the word “eventually” is used, it is in regards to an elapsing period of time which is of considerable length. Will “eventually” performs the action, but his eventuality transpires in a mere moment – as actions such as these are quick, unthinking, unflinching, snap decisions – lasting the span of a few seconds. His reasoning for going through with it: the voice has yet to lead him astray.

  CHAPTER 7:

  Some days are just not right for some people. Some days are just wrong, not dead wrong, but wrong and long. Some days just begin and continue badly.

  Upon waking, Milton Woodsmith had an aching pain in his lower back. His large and robust torso, always so difficult to move, needed to gain momentum from the swing of his legs in order to rise from his bed. The pain in his back, from his lumbar to his hamstrings, was too intense for him to have arisen in any other fashion. To make matters worse, upon standing, he lost balance and stumbled into his nightstand, shattering his wife’s antique, porcelain, bed lamp. When his wife screams at him, he attempts to guilt her by claiming he could have been injured.

  “You’re too fat for the injury to be anything but superficial anyway,” she had shouted at him.

  That is how Milton Woodsmith’s day began, with pain, both physical and emotional. At that point, his day was still pretty much average, as his large, unhealthy body usually has its fair shares of aches and pains. Also, his wife, while being the sweetest person most people know, is a bitch to him, at least about his weight. In her defense, she’s tried the sweet approach. She was understanding and encouraged him to exercise more, back whe
n he still had his weight management issues in control. As it stands today, that control has long been dead, as is her patience with his self-inflicted poor health. It’s a true wonder that, despite her disgust with his lifestyle, Megan Woodsmith still loves her morbidly obese husband. For this reason, she had confiscated his car keys forcing Milton to walk to any destination he is required to be present at, with the exception of possible emergencies. Of course he agreed to the terms, Milton had no other choice but to agree. Unfortunately and unbeknownst to Megan, he takes public transportation and taxis when he’s out and about.

  “That lamp had been in my family for generations, you fat shit!” She added as Milton left the bedroom, trying to avoid any further backlash from his wife.

  It wasn’t long after he sat on the living room couch that Megan’s fury spread to the rest of the apartment. “Look at you, I bet you’re hungry too.” At this insult he rose – one hand on his lower back for support – from the couch, which he had parked at as a pit-stop between the bedroom and toilet. His groans and grunts of pain as he lifts his big body off of the couch cushion prompts yet another insult. “Let me guess, you hurt your back lifting that heavy ass of yours, huh?” It was then he realized that he would need to leave the apartment as quickly as possible just not to suffer his wife’s bad mood. So he dressed himself and left, but not before snagging a thermo mug full of coffee spiked with a copious amount of French vanilla flavored creamer and three glazed doughnuts in a large zip-lock bag. He taste tested his coffee before closing the thermo mug. His wife, spotting this gluttonous behavior, spewed her last insult for the morning at him.