He lowered his drink, wondering if this was a death hallucination—his oxygen-starved brain conjuring images from his subconscious. Soon, the vision would drain down a tunnel with white light at its end, where he’d reunite with his father and Mr. Fuzziwinks before that final fade to black.
“… last time I checked, we were living in the United States, and we yield to oncoming traffic, you know? But I said, ‘To hell with it,’ and I turned. And then he…”
He held his breath, waiting, but the world showed no signs of vanishing. Mashed potatoes fell off Mom’s fork an inch short of her mouth, but she bit down anyway. Joe looked into the hallway. He saw no splintered wood or dying men. The stair railing still stood intact where a carpenter had installed it over forty years ago.
He stood up, barely noticing the paper napkin falling from his lap, and approached the stairs.
“… was still honking at me and—Joe? Are you listening?”
He reached out and lightly shook the railing, confirming that it was still there—and no longer loose.
“Checking your handiwork?” Sharon said.
He turned and looked at her, still not sure if she was an angel. Sharon’s brows creased in concern as she read the confusion on his face. His stomach didn’t hurt anymore—felt just dandy, in fact, pleasantly gurgling with what must have been the beginning forkfuls of that repast on the table.
“Joe? Something wrong?”
Finally, he decided she was the real thing—but what clinched it for him and made him hyperventilate, the blinding revelation that made his heart triphammer and his palms go sweaty and weak, was the realization that this had happened before. The plane—had he blocked it out already?—the mid-air collision, followed by that crazy jump-cut to staring at the seat in front of him as the stewardess asked if he wanted a drink, that wasn’t a hallucination, couldn’t have been, because breaking his neck had been just as real and painful.
… Couldn’t have been imagined, or none of this was real either.
“Joe? Why are you crying?”
He shook his head and stumbled into the darkened den. He collapsed into the chair where he’d sat that morning. His hands shook as he sucked one fist, trying to control his breathing. He wasn’t surprised to find his fingers slicked with sweat.
Following, Sharon sat down on the couch across from him. “C’mon, honey, the house isn’t going to crash-land or anything.” She barked a laugh that sounded part nervousness and part fear. Joe could offer no reassurance. How could he, when he felt like screaming and running off?
“I… I think you may be right,” he choked out. “I think I’m going crazy.”
“Oh, honey—” she came forward and hugged him, “I shouldn’t have said that this morning. I know you’re under a lot of stress. That was unfair of me.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Just now, I don’t know, I had a vision—but it was more than that. I was upstairs, and…”
It was easier to talk now. His throat wasn’t closing up like an asthmatic’s in a burning building, and once he started, the words flooded forth. The fall down the stairs, the mid-air collision—he told her everything this time—then rehashed Mom’s vision of the skinhead and the attack out by the curb.
Sharon listened, nodding, but when he started a babbled account of Mom’s tantrum over the car advertisement, she held up a hand for him to stop. “Just a minute. I know you’re upset, but I want to point out something.”
Joe gulped and waited for her verdict. Although Sharon now sat at his feet, he felt like a child. In the kitchen, Mom called, “Joey? Where are you?”
“We’ll be back in a minute, Ruthie,” Sharon answered, and then to him: “You said you ate that rancid pizza from the refrigerator, right?”
“Yep?”
“Well, aren’t you forgetting? You threw it out this morning—right before you tightened up that stair rail.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t even think of those things.”
“Uh uh.” Sharon kneeled before him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “We had a big conversation about it all. We talked about the spoiled milk, and about your mom not taking care of herself, and—”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Yes, we did, Joe! You threw it away! If the garbage truck hadn’t come, I’d tell you to go out now and check it.”
Joe shook his head and covered his face.
“Yes, you did, Joe! And you fixed the stairs while I was grocery shopping, remember? You even said your dad’s drill looked like it hadn’t been used since the Korean War.”
Again, Joe wondered if this conversation was a near-death delusion—his anoxic brain desperately imagining a better future.
“Joe,” Sharon said, and sighed. She pulled his hands away from his face and held them. “I think this move is getting to you. You’re stressed-out, and you’re imagining things, and… I dunno, maybe we should fly your mom home with us and worry about this house next week. I could come back on my own and take care of it, and you could just—”
“No. I don’t want you flying back and forth on money we don’t have. Now stop coddling me.”
“Well what the fuck do you want?” She threw his hands down and sprang to her feet, her face livid. “I’m trying to help you here—I really am—but you’re not making it easy.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I… I think I have a problem.”
“Then maybe you need professional help.”
She snapped out that last sentence, and it hurt him almost as much as the fall down the stairs. Everything was coming apart, unraveling.…
Sharon looked at her feet and sucked her lip in and out. In a soft voice, she said, “I’m going to finish my dinner.”
Then she left the room.
✽ ✽ ✽
It took a minute, but he found his temper as well.
Rage geysered up from his gut like the rotten-tomato taste of the pizza—and he most certainly did remember that meal even if Sharon claimed he’d thrown it away. That heartless bitch, didn’t she realize what he’d been through—and what he was still going through? Wasn’t she supposed to stand by her man in times like these?
“Goddammit. Goddamn all of it!”
He stormed out of the house, making sure to slam the door good and hard behind him.
He didn’t know where he was going and didn’t care. Anyplace was better than that house, where if he stayed a moment longer he’d do something he’d regret. It wasn’t an accident he’d made physical education his career, after all. He was a physical man, used to solving problems with brute strength and anger. As a youngster, he’d excelled in soccer and weightlifting, and later football and wrestling. He’d enjoyed woodshop and auto repair—anything he could mold and understand with his hands and body. He might have been a fine carpenter, mechanic, or professional athlete. But he’d also been a hothead with an inability to focus, his parents’ psychological problems manifesting in him as attention-deficit disorder (although they’d just called it “hyperactivity” then), and a tendency to break things when he became angry or frustrated. In fact, it got so bad when he hit puberty that his parents sent him to live with Uncle Knox for a summer in the Arizona desert, where he spent twelve-hour days digging irrigation ditches and mulching flowerbeds, busting his ass so hard that he was too tired to break things.
Sure, he’d eventually matured and overcome his learning disabilities, found a good profession out west and a good woman, and replaced his temper problems with blinding bouts of aerophobia—but occasionally the old Joe Merrill surfaced, and when he did…
“God DAMN it!”
The row of empty garbage cans flew into the street, airborne by his kick.
He sighed. Then he picked them up and set them back onto the curb to be hauled in later.
He walked down the darkened street with his hands in his pockets, glancing at the neighbor’s windows. Most glowed with their curtains closed. How many of those people had contemplated death today, even if for
an instant? Probably quite a few. And how many of them worried that they were going crazy, like he was?
I am not crazy. I experienced it. It was real.
He ground his teeth. He looked up, wishing he could float away.
Stars. Millions of them out tonight—or at least he knew there were, based on the hundred he could see through the D.C.-area pollution. Still, the smog wasn’t as bad as L.A.’s, so it might as well have been a million. A million stars with a million worlds, and on them maybe a billion poor shmucks like him, slogging through their versions of life, brushing against the borders of death while on their merry way to a death that was certain anyway. The thought chilled him, helped by the fact that he’d forgotten his jacket.
He looked back to his surroundings and realized he didn’t know where the hell he was.
It’d been decades since he’d lived in Burke, and entire neighborhoods had grown where there was once forest. He might as well have been strolling on one of those alien worlds he’d imagined. Somewhere a while back, he’d turned into a townhome development built after his departure, made another turn onto a side street of cramped ranch-style houses, and lost his way.
Just like Mom. He remembered last week’s call from the police. They’d reporting finding Mom walking down the highway with no memory of getting there. Early-onset Alzheimer’s was inheritable, wasn’t it?
“Great. Just great.”
Joe was a big man, capable of defending himself, and Burke wasn’t exactly a hotbed of gang activity like the area where he taught, but being attacked in front of Mom’s house had unnerved him. He’d be glad to get away from these unfamiliar streets and dark houses. He retraced his steps.
—And tensed when he thought he saw the skinhead crouching behind an SUV. But it was just a shadow.
He sighed. A million worlds with a million shadows.… He’d never studied quantum physics, but he’d watched enough TV to learn about parallel worlds, the theory that whenever we make a choice—eat the pizza or throw it away, go this way or that—the road not taken becomes a separate universe, an offshoot reality in a growing tree of realities, sprouting branches that exponentially bristle with evermore branches. Was that what was happening to him? Was he bouncing among parallel realities like a basketball on the bleachers? Alzheimer’s would be preferable.
He hurried faster, not seeing anything familiar. A dog in a yard barked its lungs out at him.
He started to run.
✽ ✽ ✽
Eventually, he emerged onto a street that he remembered from childhood. Cross-eyed Adam Bonn with his mammoth collection of board games used to live in that crumbling brick house on the corner.
Joe found his way home, feeling foolish. Not once did he see a gang member, rabid dog, airplane hurtling out of the heavens, or any one of those things that until now he hadn’t realized terrified the absolute piss out of him. What kind of a pathetic, sniveling old man have I become?
He entered Mom’s house to find the kitchen spic and span, as if the dinner had never happened—and for a moment he worried that he’d stepped into an alternate reality where it hadn’t. The real Joe Merrill was safely back in L.A., frowning at the twenty dollar balance in his checkbook, while his mother, who’d never had Alzheimer’s, was crawling into bed with his father, who was still alive.
The only lights on were in the TV room. He glanced in. Sharon and Mom were watching the idiot box and its sitcom idiocies. (College football was of course another matter.)
“Joe?” Sharon said.
“Yeah.” He was surprised at how flat and tired his voice sounded. He opened the fridge, hoping for a beer. Instead, he found a plate wrapped in tin foil.
“I left your dinner in the fridge.”
“I see it.” He closed the door, not hungry.
Mom chimed in, sounding for once like her old self: “I ate me some pizza this week. Might be a slice left.”
Frowning, Joe trudged upstairs to the bedroom. Along the way, he jiggled the stair railing. Yes, it was still real and still rock-solid. Dad’s power drill in its carrying case waited at the top of the stairs to be put away. He also noticed that the other Joe—the one who’d not gotten sick from the pizza and fallen to his death—had slid the attic panel back into place and neatly propped the stepladder against the wall.
What was death? Another person’s dream?
Well, if anything would kill him, it would be this damned introspection. His head felt like his heavyweight varsity champ had given him a piledriver. He lay down on the bed fully clothed and turned toward the wall.
Sharon came in sometime later. She spooned up behind him.
“Do you want to talk?” she said.
Joe took a deep breath and considered it. “No.”
Sharon hesitated, then rolled to face the other way.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sometime in the dead of the night, Joe came partially awake to hear Sharon crying. He tried to come fully awake, knowing they should talk, but the heavyweight wrestler who’d given him the piledriver kept him pinned to unconsciousness.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow.…
✽ ✽ ✽
The next morning, he woke up before everyone else and let his grumbling stomach lead him to the refrigerator. He wondered when the last time was he’d eaten properly, then decided it was best not to think about it.
Later, after two oranges, a bagel, three cups of coffee, and a generous dollop of stop eating like a pig, you’re not a college athlete anymore, he decided it was time to get back to living and stop worrying about dying. Whatever had happened, it was past, and the important thing was that he was here now and alive, and his family needed him. Best to just focus on that—which suited him fine, because the things requiring his attention were all physical.
Like that stair railing. He refused to believe that he’d tightened it yesterday and didn’t remember doing it.
After rousing his wife and mother and finding Mom’s misplaced dentures for her, he hooked up Dad’s old power drill and tested it. It was, in fact, old—with a fraying cord, blocky appearance and no corporate logos—and he could indeed imagine himself joking that it hadn’t been used since the Korean War, just as Sharon had said. Fitting it with a Phillip’s head bit, he set to work tightening every screw in sight, and within minutes the drill was almost too hot to touch.
Except that the whole job proved unnecessary. Sharon was right; someone had already done it. New galvanized screws gleamed from the railing’s joints. Specks of sawdust still hung from a few of the holes.
“Good morning,” Sharon said.
Joe looked up to see her at the top of the stairs. Her face was drawn, as if she’d lain awake all night.
“I, uh, just wanted to doublecheck it,” he said.
Sharon nodded, then passed him on her way to the kitchen.
He watched her go, debating how to broach the subject of the previous night. I didn’t mean to throw a tantrum like that, he wanted to say. But maybe it was best to let it drop.
He felt like a fool, kneeling there on the stairs, tightening screws that were already tight, so he went to work on the squeaky bathroom door. Afterward, he adjusted the linen closet’s door.
These two projects took him another half hour, and he would have happily re-hung every door in the house if he didn’t force himself to stop. The women were finished eating breakfast by that time, and Sharon was assembling cardboard boxes in the living room. Satisfied, Joe left the drill upstairs by the stepladder, thinking he could use it to penetrate the trunk in the attic.
“Joe?”
Sharon was standing on the stairs when he rounded the corner on his way down. She glanced up at him, then gently tested the railing. It didn’t budge a millimeter. “No way you’re falling through that now, huh.”
Joe wiped sweat off his stubbly chin and descended to her. Time to pay the piper. Apologizing was never one of his strong suits, but he seemed to be doing an awful lot of it these days.
“Sharon,
I’m… well, I just wanted to say—”
“I’m sorry, too.” She stood a step below him and hugged his waist. Joe wished she was laying her head against a firm wall of muscle and not his has-been pillow. “I was wrong,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what you’re going through, and I shouldn’t have called you a schizo.”
Joe caressed her head for a moment and listened to Mom laugh along with a Wheel Of Fortune rerun. “Let me ask you something.”
She leaned back so they made eye contact—and Joe paused to kiss her.
She smiled and leaned close. “Was that your question?”
“No, that was a statement.” He kissed her again, this time wider and with a trace of tongue.
“Hmm. I like this speechifying.”
He pulled back. “But still, I do have a question. Do you really think I’m crazy, or do you believe me?”
Her smile dropped. “Well, I—”
The phone rang. She blinked rapidly, looking everywhere but his face. “I just think that, you know, that—”
The phone kept ringing, insistent. Joe remembered his parents had never owned an answering machine. (“I already get enough bad news,” Mom had once said, a statement that still puzzled him.) He held up a hand for Sharon to stop, thinking the interruption might be for the best.
He went back upstairs and answered the phone in the bedroom.
The caller identified himself as Dr. Jonathan Reitan. “I would have returned your call earlier, but I was at a conference in New York. Just got back.”
Joe pictured it: a short, grayhaired man with a goatee and a pipe, surrounded by more grayhaired men with goatees and pipes. He instantly disliked him.
“I’ll try not to keep you,” Joe said, then admonished himself not to be rude. “It’s just that I’ve taken over care of my mother—my father died recently—and she’ll be moving into a retirement home in California next week.”
“Uh hmm,” Reitan answered, which irritated him further. Not even a how is your mother doing or I’m sorry to hear about that. Just a psychiatrist’s uh hmm, like Joe was a patient delivering a monologue about childhood traumas.
Dominoes in Time Page 25
