Turning right onto the main drag, he aimed his aging motorcycle in the direction of the glinting spire a few blocks away. The local mall was a massive wall of glass on one side, the side facing him, and the roof peaked. It was as if a giant had chopped the building in half and slapped a glass cover on the open face. The other side looked like any other sprawling retail monstrosity. The old import bike still hummed smoothly in spite of its battered appearance. He never could afford the larger models, but the smaller one had the advantage of maneuverability. He was reminded of that when he had to swerve to avoid a heavy delivery van that darted into his lane seemingly from nowhere. He just managed to slip between its front fender and the stopped traffic in the center turning lane.
As his heart slowed from the adrenaline rush, he waited at the light for his turn to enter the sea of striped blacktop that surrounded the shopping mall. One of the few things he liked about this place was the reserved motorcycle parking not too far from the main door on the glassed side. Locking his helmet in its carrier, he shook off the remaining tingle from the near collision, smoothed his polo shirt and strode toward the entrance. Of course, the other thing he liked about this place was the great cafe they had just inside the door. His wife loved it, too. Today they had arranged to meet there for dinner.
Twenty years. Where had the time gone? Today was their twentieth anniversary, and he was in a very celebratory mood. They were nothing like the storybook couples. He was not some high school sports hero who went on to a massively successful career. He did manage to make the football team, only because there weren't many volunteers for lineman. He made the team on the basis of his unusually stocky build alone. In spite of the coach playing him to death on both offense and defense, he was never a star player. Just good enough, and reliable. Indeed, in his whole life, the one thing that mattered most to him was reliability. The old 300cc motorcycle was reliable, so he kept it. He was reliable on the various jobs he managed to land. Most reliable of all was his wonderful wife, Elise.
She, too, was no star. They met in high school, almost by accident, when he knocked her in floor as they both tried to enter the classroom door at the same time. It was the first day of the second semester. He kept apologizing as he helped right her, then pickup all her stuff. She couldn't find the heart to stay angry more than a few minutes. As it was, by the time they were ready to sit down, the only seats left were two at the front of the center rows. During the entire period he wanted to crawl under the desk and hide from what had to be the attention of the entire room. She told him later the flaming red color never left his thick neck for at least a half-hour. By force of circumstance, they ended up working together, and he could never do enough for her the entire semester. As an ordinary, Plain Jane kind of girl, she wasn't used to that. The net result was friendship, then romance. He never stopped trying to win her favor, and she never used his flaws as a weapon to hurt him.
He spotted her at their usual table, halfway across the floor space devoted to the cafe. The waitress had just poured her a fresh cup of coffee as she looked up and smiled at his approach. At that moment, no woman in the world could gotten his attention away from her. He stopped and bent over to kiss her, holding the back of her head gently with his hand.
Without warning, a hand slapped him fiercely across the left side of his face. He jerked half-upright, stunned. In one smooth motion she jumped up and shoved him hard in the hollow where his shoulder and chest muscles came together on the right side. Unprepared for any of this, the move spun him around. Tripping over a chair, he fell almost face down against the edge of the table, which tipped over the meet the tumbling chair, and he went down with crash. He lay in a tangled mess of furniture, tablecloth, condiments, and scalding coffee. From the corner of his eye, he could just see her low-heeled shoes receding smartly in the distance until they disappeared in a sea of other feet.
The pain of his body really didn't mean much to him. It was the bitter voice of his Elise, playing over and over in his mind as she had pushed him away. "What do you think I am? Some sort of hooker? Whoever you are, you have some nerve, jerk!"
He lay there in numb confusion for some time. Finally security guard came over and gently nudged a wet spot on the back of his left shoulder. "Are you okay, sir?" He stumbled to his feet. In a scene that felt oddly familiar, he apologized repeatedly as he struggled clumsily to put everything back in place. The guard asked again if he was okay, and stammered, "Yes. Yessir, I'm alright. Sorry for the mess..." The guard stopped him and suggested he might want to go home and clean himself up, and see about that cut on his forehead. Mumbling agreement thanks, he shuffled away.
Reeling more from confusion than pain, he searched frantically in his mind for anything solid to grasp. Aimlessly, his hand passed over the paperback in his right rear pocket. It was a novel, a science fiction story this time. A voracious reader, he was seldom without a book of some sort. With his hand resting on the book, the only thought to surface was that he must have crossed a portal somewhere and ended up in a parallel universe. No, that's just fiction! Still, it was enough to give him a purpose for the moment. With deliberate care, he backtracked his path into the mall. When he stood before his motorcycle, this tattered fragment of an idea simply evaporated. He turned and sat side-saddle. His left hand aimlessly pushed fingers through his dirty blonde hair, then grabbed and stopped. He sat like this in trance for quite some time.
Abruptly, he turned and mounted the cycle, dropped his keys, then snatched them up. Almost forgetting his helmet, he started the motor. He sat for a moment, then slowly putted out of the lot the way he had come. For the next 15 minutes, he rode mechanically in the traffic, with no conscious decisions on direction of travel. When he began shaking uncontrollably, he simply pulled off the road. Taking the helmet off, he stared up at the weathered front of an old abandoned store of some kind. The sign was gone, leaving the darker hued spot it had covered. He didn't remember seeing the place before. He slid off the saddle, helmet still in his hand, and sat shaking among the weeds, trash and gravel.
The passage of time meant nothing, but in reality it wasn't that long before he came back up from the well of confusion to realize his cellphone was ringing. Suddenly he yanked it off his belt, then froze staring at it, wondering what to do next. When it chirped again, he pushed the button and help it next to his chin. "Hello?" It was a croaked whisper. The voice of Elise, unmistakable even in the tiny electronic speaker, said "hello" questioningly twice.
"Honey, where are you? Are you alright?"
He started shaking again, weeping. For the second time in a single hour, the whole universe shifted. "I'm sorry!" he bawled. He said it again a couple of times. The voice on the other end asked again, "Honey, are you alright? I waited an hour for you at the cafe but never saw you. Did we miss each other somehow?" He could only answer by bawling pitifully, heaving sobs, nearly dropping the little phone.
"Honey, what happened? Where are you? Please talk to me!"
He bleated out, "I don't know where I am! I don't know what happened. I'm sorry! Please tell me what I did wrong! I'll do anything you want."
"Oh, Honey... You haven't done anything wrong! There's just some sort of mistake. Can you tell me where you are?"
He didn't have to look around to know -- "No. I'm in a parking lot of some old store that's empty." The question distracted him a bit from his misery.
"Okay, don't hang up, Honey. I'm going on the other line for a minute. I'll be right back. Promise you'll hang on?"
"Yeah," a whisper. He was coming back from the depths. The mad universe was becoming more shadowy, less hard-edged. Now he dared look up and see if anything in his line of sight looked familiar. No, not yet. Maybe when his head cleared a little bit more.
True to her promise, Elise spoke soothingly again. "Hon, I want you to just rest. Stay there where you are for now, if you can. I'll be right there with some help. You just relax, okay?"
He couldn't say how long he waited. The breeze played with the locks of his curly hair, and he sat face in hands, elbows resting on knees. There wasn't a lot of traffic, but he never heard what there was, anyway. That is, until a couple of vehicles crunched on the gravel near him. He waited to move until he heard the voice of Elise. She was instantly bending over him, holding his face between her hands. He wept anew, half in renewed sorrow and half in joy that she was here now, touching him, treating him as she always had before when he got hurt. The terror was the last to go, and it edged back reluctantly. He had no idea what she was saying, until she repeated for the third time: "Are you alright?"
He knew she meant was he still there, inside the battered and bruised body. His polo shirt was still a mess, and the coffee stain on his back stood out faintly dark against the stripes of blue, yellow and red. There was someone else there, and they were helping him stand. She took his helmet and keys, just as a third vehicle pulled into the empty lot, that of his cousin who lived a few blocks from their house. He brought his pickup, obviously to haul away the bike, as he had graciously done a couple of times before when it broke down.
Slowly the light in his head came on, and he realized the other person helping him was an EMT. A police officer sat in a cruiser a few yards away, speaking into a radio handset. It made all the difference in the world when Elise insisted on riding with him. As the large medical van began to move, he was thankful beyond words the disaster was past.
A few days later, she was listening when he told the doctor what he believed happend to him that day. While the whole incident suddenly made sense of a sort, it nearly killed her to think he believed she would do that to him. As she wept that night alone in bed, she prayed fervently God would not prolong his recovery period.
By Ed Hurst
19 April 2008
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