That morning I took my wife Stacy to chemo on the way to
work. She had driven herself to her first
treatment, but we quickly realized that she wouldn’t be capable of that again
and that the whole process was going to be inconvenient, messy, and much harder
than we had originally thought. This
all happened the day of her fourth treatment, and it seemed as if the whole thing would go on forever. I didn’t
know how she was getting through it; I didn’t know how I was getting
through it, and I’d already had a lot of
doubts that I ever could. I was beginning to have fantasies about jumping into
our car by myself and driving somewhere—Seattle, the South, Cincinnati—just to
see what it’d be like.
I went to pick her up on my lunch break, when the treatment
was scheduled to be over, but she was still inside. They had gotten started
late, as they frequently do, so I picked up a Time magazine and sat off by myself to wait.
I was reading an
article about terrorism and wishing I wasn’t when someone near me said “I’ve
seen you in here a few times.” I didn’t think the voice was speaking to me, but
I glanced up out of politeness and saw that it belonged to a heavyset guy in
his late sixties or early seventies. He was wearing glasses that were twenty
years out of date, shiny charcoal pants, and a powder-blue jacket over a navy
shirt with red stripes. He was sitting three chairs away from me, but I couldn’t
recall whether he had come in before or after I’d arrived. I vaguely remembered
having seen him here before, but we had never exchanged words. I didn’t really feel like doing so now.
He waited for a
few seconds, then put his index finger in the cleft of his chin, grinned
faintly, and said, “I once saw a woman face down these three guys with
guns. You believe that? Took those guns
right away from these guys during a robbery, and she was just a little thing. Pretty
too. You believe that?”
I didn’t know
what to say, so I mumbled, “Sure, it could happen.”
He waved his
hand and chuckled. “Naw, you don’t believe it.” He looked away, then looked
back at me before I could continue reading. “You wanna know how I know it was
true? I know because I was there. Now, I gotta
ask you not to repeat this to anyone, you understand. Most people who know me
know this about me, but when strangers find out something like this about you,
they sort of start to stare. Anyway,
don’t blab, but I know all this because I used to have a mean streak in me a
mile wide. Used to hit the bottle pretty good, too. I know about this little
girl because I was one of the three guys.”
“Now, I can
still read you. You want to know why I’d let this little girl take a gun from
me. I’ll tell you right now, it was all luck. I had pointed guns before, but
this thing with the girl was before I ever pulled the trigger on anyone. She
caught me and my buddies at just the right time in our lives, when we didn't really want to hurt anybody, you
understand? And she just happened to be in the
exact right position in the exact right place when we walked in so that she
could do it, and the guy behind the counter picked just the right moment to
mouth off, and a hundred other things happened or didn’t, both before and after
she came at us, so that before we knew it we were running down the street away
from the place, not only no richer than we had come in but poorer because we had
all dropped our guns.” He finally stopped and had a good laugh, and
then, incredibly, went on.
“I gotta say,
too, that at certain times in my life I’ve
had this weird sympathy for people, you know? That’s probably why I’m not the way I was anymore. I would just look at
someone I was after, and suddenly I would
root for them. Because they were the good guys, you know? I’d feel that way
even though if they won, it would mean I had lost. But I would start to root
for them anyway, and do a sort of half-assed job. Mostly
I would get done what I was trying to get done anyway, ’cause people are scared
to death of guns, but that time with that little girl was—God—she was like some
kinda force of good. I remember laughing my head off most of the way
after we left that store. As bad as I hurt from what she did to me, that was
the best I’d felt in a long time, and it wasn’t even for me. It was, I dunno, sort of like proof that the world works
the way people say it does. That the good guys
do win. Sometimes, at least.”
I put my finger
in the magazine and waited. I wasn’t sure what to say. I was vaguely
uncomfortable but fascinated at the same time. The old guy seemed sincere, and
completely in control of his faculties. He could have been lying, but if he were I couldn’t tell. And suddenly, I wasn’t
sure if I cared. This surprised me a
little bit. I had thought I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
He waved his
hand again. “I was gonna tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever saw, but
I forgot about this other thing. That thing with the girl was unlikely, you
know? It wouldn’t happen more than one time out of a thousand, but it could
happen, and so it did, and it happened to happen to me. But I once saw something
that was completely impossible. You believe that? I mean, this was something
that couldn’t happen, but it did, and right in front of me. You gotta remember, if you want me to tell you this
one, you gotta promise me that you’ll
remember that I’m telling you that this happened right in front of me. This ain’t no ‘my buddy told me’ or ‘I once
heard,’ ok, this really
happened. You gotta promise me that you’ll keep an open mind here, ’cause if you start this thing with a bad attitude it’s gonna fall completely flat.”
At that, he stopped
and waited for my answer, even though we didn’t know each others’ names and I
had said less than a dozen words in our entire conversation. This was my last chance to get rid of him, but
instead I closed the magazine, tossed it on the table, and said “Yeah, ok. I
promise.”
He grinned. “Well, ok then.” And then he fell silent. He
tapped his chin for a few seconds, and then fiddled a bit with his glasses. Then
he got up and walked away.
I couldn’t help but laugh. I
kept it to myself as much as possible, but I sat there in that waiting room, a
sad, lonely man in a conservative suit, and snickered into my hand until tears
rolled down my cheeks. I had to take off my glasses to wipe them
away. When I finally had myself under
control, I retrieved my magazine and tried to continue to read. I quickly found
that I couldn’t keep my mind on the article. I kept thinking about the old man.
His story had piqued my curiosity, and the man himself had me doing mental calisthenics.
Who started conversations with strange men in the chemo waiting room? And who
did it the way he did? And of those, who
would either lie this way or give out information that personal and damning? And,
after all of that, who would get up and leave right in the middle of the
conversation?
I finally gave up on the reading and got up to put the
magazine back. I was going to spend the rest of my wait processing this guy,
trying to figure him out. It beat terrorism, disease, and financial ruin.
As I was sitting back down, though, I saw him again. He
walked across the waiting room and started talking again even before he was fully seated. “I can’t tell you not to get
old because you can’t much help it, but I will tell you to take care of your
kidneys when you do. Most important part of your
body, the kidneys. Next to your heart and brain, I guess. And the lungs,
and maybe the stomach. But the kidneys are right up there, and when they don’t
work right you just can’t be yourself anymore.” He chuckled and rolled his
eyes.
I felt like I should reply, but before I could think of anything to say he was off again. “Anyway, so once about twenty years ago I was
after this guy. I had just gotten out, you know
from where, and I wanted him for, well, I guess I won’t give you details since
we’re not best friends yet” he grinned at me again “but I wanted him and bad.
So I asked around, and it took me a while, but I found out where he lived, and
where he hung out, and I went to his place and I waited. I didn’t have to wait
long. He came out before I was ready, so
I followed along and he went into a bar.”
“Now, this guy didn’t know my
face too well, and it had been a long time since he had seen me at all, so I
went inside too and took seat at the other end of the bar and had a drink
myself. He went to the men’s room once or twice, but he wasn’t in there
long. Had good kidneys, I guess. Anyway,
he never tried anything sneaky, never tried to slip out or anything, and never
looked twice at me. If he’d done any of those things, I might have put the
whole thing off, but since he seemed pretty oblivious I decided that tonight
was the night.”
“Now, I don’t know you. I
don’t know what you’re into, so maybe this is all stuff you know, but if you
never been in a situation like this you’ll need to know that on TV and in the
movies they get this stuff all wrong. Guys like me, if we’re successful,
we never talk to guys we catch up with,
or take them places to cover up.” He chuckled.
“They don’t call it kidnapping because you only do it to kids: they call
it that because you have to be as stupid or inexperienced as a ten-year-old to
try something that complicated. Anyway, what I was gonna do was lay up for this guy and take my opportunity if it ever
came. If not, I’d wait for another night.”
“So I got ahead of him and stepped into an alley, but when
he walked by there were a couple of other people on the street, so I held off. I
thought about it for a while, and then
decided that I could try his place and have some relative privacy. He lived in
a little apartment building, and it was kinda
shabby so I thought that security would be pretty bad. If I could get in, I
could find some way into the apartment without leaving too much evidence and
take care of business, so I left the alley and walked to the building.”
“Before I could try the front door, I spotted him up on the
roof. He was just standing there, leaning on the low wall that ran around the
building and staring off into space. I kept walking so he wouldn’t spot me and
then circled around to the back of the building. There was a door off a small
parking lot, and it was open, so I walked in like I belonged and hiked up six
floors to the door to the roof. He had somehow or another bypassed the fire
alarm on the door and had stuck a piece of brick
in it so he wouldn’t get locked out. I looked through the crack and saw him,
still standing in the same place. He was
shaking a little bit, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might be crying.”
“I stood there for a few minutes and weighed my options. I
didn’t really care how he went over the
wall. He could do it under his own power
for all I cared, I just wanted him to go. The brick in the door made me think
he wasn’t serious about jumping, but maybe he was debating the issue and wanted
to be safe in case he decided against doing it. Either way, I figured that him
going over the side would be the best way to get it done, especially if anyone
knew he was sad or depressed. The problem
was, he might not do it, and if he didn’t, I’d have to take care of it some
other way, some way that was more obvious. I decided, just like that, to give
him some help. The possible negatives of waiting
to see if he did it himself outweighed the positives, if you can tell what I
mean, so I backed up a bit, went through the door at a dead run, and hit him
with my shoulder at full speed.”
“Now, I’m a big guy—partly ‘cause of the kidneys, you
know—but this was all muscle back then. I thought I’d hit the little guy, and he’d go flying, out over the street, just like he jumped hard. When
I opened the door, though, he turned around and took a step forward a lot
faster than I thought he would. Okay now, don’t
worry, he went over the side, but instead of flying out there like I thought he
would, his legs hit that low brick wall and he flipped and dropped out of sight
straight down the side of the building, head first.”
“Now, this is the important part, the impossible part. I
know I’m an old guy, and a little long-winded, but this is the part you really want to pay attention to, got it?”
He stopped and waited while I nodded. I was leaning a bit
forward in my chair, and my fists and jaw
were clamped shut. I felt a lot of things, all the possible reactions to his
story that I could imagine, some of them contradictory. But mostly, I just
wanted him to finish the story, to get to the point. I was petrified that he’d get up and walk away again.
He didn’t. “I followed through with the blow and ended up
leaning on the wall, pretty much the way the guy himself had been before I came
in, and I saw the whole thing. I’m tellin’
you; none of this really could have happened, except that it did. It was the
damnedest thing I ever saw.”
“This little guy, he fell two stories face first, and then
he grabbed a window sill with his hands and stopped himself.”
“Now, you got to understand how impossible that is, and it ain’t even the impossible part of this story. We’ll
get to that, but for now let’s focus on this. This guy was surprised and
probably hurt, going down the side of a brick building face first. Now, if we
weren’t somewhere public, I’d ask you to put your arms out, but for the sake of
a little discretion, here, I won’t. Just imagine it, though…you’re going face
first toward the ground, arms up above your head. The first thing to hit
anything, anything like, say, a cement windowsill, would be your palms. Now,
how are you going to hang onto this thing with your palms on top and your
fingers curled underneath as you keep falling,
and your head and feet switch places? Huh? I dunno,
either. An acrobat or a stuntman might be able to, I guess, but this guy wasn’t
either one. He must’a been the luckiest guy alive, even though he was just
barely still alive, and not for long. I thought
he was going to hang on for a few seconds or a minute or two but he was going
to lose his grip, and he was going to fall, and even though it was four stories
instead of six, he was going to die.
The only problem was, I thought, that he might hang on long enough for
someone to see him or, even worse, for whoever lived in that apartment to open the window and pull him in. He hadn’t had
a good look at me yet, and I pulled back so he wouldn’t, but I didn’t want him
to get out of this. He’d have his back up, you know, and it would be a lot
harder to get him later. So I went back to the door, kicked off a shoe and used
it as a doorstop, got the piece of brick, and dropped it on him.”
“It hit him, square in the face, and I ducked back behind
the wall and waited for the thud. He didn’t let go, though. After a few seconds,
I walked toward the corner of the building and looked over the edge so he wouldn’t see me. He was still
clinging there; feet scrabbling against the brick and blood dribbling onto his
shirt. I looked around the roof, but I didn’t see anything else to drop. I
didn’t know what to do. His grip looked as good as it ever had, and as time
went by I knew it was more and more likely that somebody would see him. I
thought about the gun in my pocket but
didn’t want to lose my chance that everyone would think it was suicide or an
accident. I was at a complete loss.”
“Then the guy just fell. One second he was holding on, and
the next second he was halfway to the street. I started to feel relieved, and I
watched him fall, watched his coat billow up around him, and his hands wave around, feeling for something else to
grab. It was
done, there was no question in my mind, you know? No question. But I’m careful, so I waited until
he was all the way down before I took my eyes off him. Just to be sure.”
“He hit the sidewalk feet first, bent his legs, and stood
up. You believe that? Then he ran his
hands up and down his whole body, and just walked off. Walked fast, but he
didn’t even look back up at me, just went around the corner and disappeared. And
he didn’t even break a bone. You believe that?”
Even now, I don’t know
why, but I did. Completely.
“Like I said,” he went on “impossible. But it happened, and
there was nothing I didn’t see. I know because I asked the guy myself, when I
caught up with him a couple weeks later. I
did everything I just got done telling you I didn’t do. I caught the guy, I
stuffed him in my trunk, just like on TV, and I took him someplace safe and I
asked him about the whole thing. His take on it was the same as mine. He didn’t
know how any of it had happened, didn’t know how he was able to hold onto that
ledge, had no idea why he walked away from that fall. I won’t tell you what
happened to that guy, so don’t ask me, but I will tell you that he was no Superman.
I know for a fact he was as vulnerable to
being hurt as anyone else.”
“I still think about that guy, to this day, when my brain
gets bored and I need something to think about.
You believe that? I never changed my ways because of this guy, and I never really even felt bad about any of it. But, when
I get bored, instead of doing crossword puzzles like some of the other old
codgers, I try to figure out how all this happened. And after twenty years and
some, I still got no idea. Well, I gotta
get going. Nice talking to you.” He stood up then and abruptly walked away, and
I never knew if he heard my protests and ignored them, or was far enough away
and deaf enough that he thought I just let him go.
A few minutes later,
the receptionist took me into the chemo suite with Stacy. She sat in a huge overstuffed chair in the middle of a
carpeted room that looked more like a motel suite than a patient room in a
hospital: it was clean and comfortable but completely anonymous and without the
bed. I thought Stacy would be watching TV or sleeping as the drugs
dripped into the Mediport the doctors had installed in her chest, but she was
just sitting there, eyes wide open. She waved to me weakly as I came in. She
didn’t even force a smile.
I sat on the other
soft chair without saying anything. I wasn’t sure if I felt better or not. I
couldn’t think of anything to say to her,
but for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel bad about that. I got lost
in my thoughts for a while, then turned to my wife.
She was still staring at the wall, and the look on her face
scared me a little. Softly, I asked, “What are you thinking about?”
She looked at me, took a breath, and said “Nothing.”
I sat back in my chair, looked away. We said little else
until the treatment was done.
Then, in the car as we were driving home, I started feeling
strange. I felt pressure inside my chest as
if it was swelling. My breathing stayed calm, but my forehead felt hot, almost
feverish. I thought about turning around and going back to the hospital, but
none of my symptoms were unpleasant. They were more like excitement than
anything else. If I were going to have a heart attack or something, I decided,
maybe it would be for the best if I had it on the freeway, anyway. This thought should have depressed me, made
me feel guilty, but for some reason, I didn’t feel any of those things. Instead,
I grinned.
I hadn’t been aware that Stacy was looking at me until she
asked what I was smiling at. I launched into the story of the guy in the waiting
room, and not long into it I realized that I was enjoying myself, that I had
been waiting to tell Stacy about him since he finished his story and left me so
abruptly. My wife, I remembered then, was a great listener.
I started to play the old guy up, to make him even more
ridiculous than he was, and I even got a weak laugh or two out of my wife. She really got into the story and asked me a few questions as I told it. She was as fascinated by him as I was, and when we got
to the house we sat in the driveway for almost fifteen minutes, speculating
about the guy, the stories, and what it all might mean. Sitting there in
the car, unwilling to stop talking to each other, it felt like things were okay.
It felt like I had her back, even though I hadn’t realized that I’d been
thinking of her as being gone.
My wife went back inside then, and I drove back to work. I
swore, but not very loudly, and then snapped off the radio so I could better
imagine what the old guy from the waiting room would do if he got cut off. I
decided that he might have done something drastic in his younger years, but I
couldn’t imagine him even getting upset as he was now, so I didn’t get upset
either. Instead, I sat back in my seat and watched the big vehicle weave its
way through traffic, wondering the whole time who might be inside.
©2015 Tom Irish
TOM IRISH is a writer, teacher, and father who lives in Davenport, Iowa. His story, “Martin Lenk,” was featured in Mystery Times 2013, published by Buddhapuss Ink LLC. He has also been published in CALLIOPE magazine, The Mochila Review, and at thewritegallery.com
READERS: We hope you enjoyed this week's edition of our #WW Writer Wednesday Series and that we'll see you again next week when our guest is Georgia Ruth who will be talking about the problem of the “Squishy Middle” of a story. Until then, Butt in chair, WRITE!
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