Forty Leap

Forty Leap

Ivan Turner

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

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My name is Mathew Cristian. I can’t really
put a “how long ago” stamp on the story I’m about to tell because
the date that it started doesn’t correspond with the time it took
to reach its conclusion. A moment for me was mostly a moment. But
sometimes it was much more. Sometimes it was a lifetime.

I was thirty four years old when all of this
started, or at least when I noticed it. It was a Thursday. I was a
regular guy. Actually, I was so regular that I was irregular. I got
up every morning, went to work, went home, went to bed, and
repeated the process the next day. In between I ate meals, spoke
with family, had many
many
boring weekends, and that’s it. I
was a confirmed bachelor, not out of any sense of not wanting
companionship, but because marriage seemed so out of reach to me
that I just never even considered it.

My adventure started in the most simple of
all ways. It’s something that happens to everyone. Your alarm goes
off in the morning. Let’s say it’s six o’clock. You turn it off and
lay back down, just for a second. You
don’t
fall asleep and
you’re just laying there for a second or two. Then you look back at
the clock and it’s 6:02 or 6:03. What happened to those two or
three minutes? Who knows? Your mind wandered and your whole sense
of time became confused for just a couple of minutes. It happens to
everyone.

Unless you’re me.

Unless it wasn’t just your
sense
of
time that became confused but something far more fundamental.

The first time it happened to me, I didn’t
even notice it. I’m sure of it. It was probably just a couple of
seconds or less. I lost them. Whoosh! They were just gone.

The first time I noticed it was a whole
different matter. On that Thursday. April 12, 2007.

For one thing, I wasn’t in bed. When you’re
in bed and sleepy, things just kind of slip by you. That wasn’t the
case here. I was pouring myself a cup of coffee. It was 6:42 in the
morning. No sooner had I tipped the pot then I noticed coffee all
over the counter and all over the floor. The pot in my hand, still
tipped, was empty. It was 6:43. You don’t think too hard about the
ramifications of such an event when there’s hot coffee everywhere
and you’ve got to get to work. You just kind of put the pot back
into the machine, grab a bunch of paper towels, and start mopping.
Later on, though, the whole of it can begin to dominate your
thoughts, as it did mine. I began to wonder about what had
happened. How long does it take to empty a pot of coffee? I can
understand something like that happening if my mind began to
wander, but I couldn’t remember anything. Not reality and not
fantasy. I remember tipping the pot and I remember cleaning up the
mess.

I lost a minute.

I have,
had
, two brothers. They are,
were
, both older than I was, or I should say they were born
before I was, and they were very close to each other. Living in the
city, I didn’t get out to see them often. They were about two hours
through New Jersey and into Upstate New York. It wasn’t a bad trip,
really. I used to take the bus because I didn’t have a car. The
tickets were inexpensive and one of my brothers, usually Jeremy,
always picked me up at the depot. We weren’t friends, we were
family. And we all knew that family sticks together. I enjoyed my
afternoons with my brothers and their families. It gave me a sense
of something I had never had for myself.

About three weeks after the first incident,
on a Sunday, I took one of my day trips up to Jeremy’s for an
afternoon with the family. Though our mother usually accompanied me
on these trips, she had been feeling a little out of sorts that day
so she had sent me off on my own. That was fine with me. My
relationship with my mother was excellent. We often got together to
have dinner or watch a movie or just discuss the world affairs.
Being the only one of her sons living in the city, responsibility
for her had fallen to me, but that was okay, too. Once in a while,
though, it’s nice to have two hours to yourself just to read. For
that trip, I had chosen a Rupert Oderick novel, his first, entitled
Midshipmen
. I had read and enjoyed it in high school.

It was Wyatt who picked me up at the station
that day. I don’t know why I remember it so well or even why it’s
relevant to these pages, but details are important so I’ll write
the ones I remember. Wyatt was 18 months younger than Jeremy, to
the day, and he was four years my senior. I suppose that growing up
with them could have been a lot worse. After all, they had had four
good years together, learning to work as a team and then I came
along, a tiny invader into their lives. They could have spent our
years together at home torturing me into a psychiatrist’s couch,
but they didn’t. In truth, they spent most of their time avoiding
me, excluding me. It hurt when I was younger, but as I grew up, I
began to realize that we had little in common. It wasn’t that they
didn’t love me. They just didn’t want to play with me.

Wyatt had his son with him that day. My
nephew, Devin, was a sandy haired boy who looked a lot like his
mom. In fact, he bore little resemblance to his dad’s square
shoulders and boyish face. Devin, in fact, looked much older than
his six years. He was a spectacular conversationalist and played
Jeremy to a standstill in Chess. But he had little use for me and
he sat in the back seat glaring at me through the mirror. He didn’t
dislike me as much as he was just uncomfortable in my presence.
Despite his intelligence and his mannerisms, he was just a child
and children grow awkward when they are unsure of their situations.
I guess I made him nervous.

The day at Jeremy’s was very much like other
days. Sunday is a day of bad movies or sports, even when there’s no
football. It was late April and Jeremy was flipping through four
baseball games. Wyatt paid little attention to the television. He
sat, instead, with Olivia, Jeremy’s daughter, playing Boggle or
Scrabble. They were both avid readers and true competitors. The
outcomes of their games were rarely determined until very late and
Livvie, almost fifteen years old, won often. Every once in a while,
she would flash me a smile just to remind me that she knew I was
part of the family even if I didn’t like sports or Scrabble and no
one seemed to want to talk to me. Livvie loved me genuinely, like a
niece is supposed to love her uncle and I was grateful for it.

Her mother, on the other hand, had hated me
from the minute she set eyes upon me. Martha, Martie to her friends
and family (and even me), was a self absorbed, self deprecating
kind of person. I never quite understood what Jeremy saw in her but
I think it had to do with his compulsive tendency to try and save
the world. Martie’s attitude toward life and herself had always
prevented her from truly succeeding. She had dropped out of college
twice and never held a job for any length of time. In fact, her
only success was her marriage and family, which was questionable in
the case of my oldest nephew, Jack, who I rarely saw. I guess
Martie thought I was creepy. When Jeremy introduced us, I was a
high school junior with no friends and a propensity for staying
home on Friday and Saturday nights. I spent a lot of time on the
computer, playing and writing text adventures. I was shy and quiet
and I suppose that the curious way I looked at her made her
uncomfortable.

Wyatt’s wife, on the other hand, was a lovely
and successful woman with the unusual name of Attenda. She had
completed a Masters Degree and chosen to work with autistic
children. Many people brought their children to Attenda for an
early diagnosis and intervention. Though it was heartbreaking to
see these children suffering, her techniques had provided many of
them with levels of socialization and an outlook they might not
otherwise have had. I liked and respected Attenda very much despite
the fact that, even with all of her wonderful qualities, she also
had little use for me.

At about a quarter to two, Martie came out of
the kitchen with an arm load of finger foods and cursed because she
had forgotten her tea. Since I was closest to the kitchen, I stood
and volunteered to go get it. I could see the stricken look on
Martie’s face, but I couldn’t say whether it was because she didn’t
want any favors from me or because she didn’t want me that close to
something she was going to ingest. Either way, Jeremy was thanking
me before she could protest so off I went into the kitchen. The tea
was sitting in a steaming mug on top of the counter. I went
straight to it, picked it up and walked straight back out into the
living room.

“Jeez, Mathew, did you get lost?” Jeremy
asked.

“What?”

They were all looking at me now and Livvie
said, “You were gone like five minutes, Uncle Mathew.”

“I went straight in and came straight out,” I
protested. “If I had taken that long, the tea wouldn’t still be
this hot.”

And it was true that steam still rose from
the cup. And through that steam, I could see that the clock read
1:55 pm.

“No big deal, Mathew,” Jeremy told me, seeing
that I was becoming upset. He came over and took the tea from me,
knowing that Martie certainly wouldn’t. Nor did she drink it, I
might add. But it was a big deal. It was a very big deal. It
brought back the coffee incident of three weeks earlier. I had
dismissed that as early morning fatigue, daydreaming, whatever I
could lay my brain on, but the flimsy excuses crumbled in the wake
of this new incident.

On the way back to the bus terminal that
evening, I confided in Jeremy. He was silent while I told him and
silent for a few minutes afterward. I think he was trying to gauge
whether his brother was sick or just cracking up. He would never
have accused me of lying because lying just wasn’t something I did
and I’m not an attention grabber. Let someone else have the
spotlight. In the end, what could he say?

“Maybe you should see a doctor?”

I nodded, more to myself than to him.

“I mean,” he continued. “If you’re having
blackouts, that could be serious. Grandpa’s sister Eloise used to
have blackouts, remember?”

I didn’t.

“Well we never met her, but she died not too
long before I was born so it was still fresh in everyone’s memory
when Mom and Dad told stories around the kitchen table that I could
understand…”

He went on, as Jeremy had a tendency to do,
and I listened attentively. The most relevant portion of the story
was that our Great Aunt Eloise had blackouts and drove herself into
the trees on a frosty February day. What Jeremy didn’t say (or
didn’t know) was that Great Aunt Eloise had discovered acid and
cocaine in her declining years and they made short work of her.
This last bit I found out from my mother at a later date.

In the end, though, I decided that it was in
my best interest to consult a physician. Blackouts are no laughing
matter, especially when they are not caused by narcotics. I was
beginning to scare.

My regular doctor could see no reason for the
sudden blackouts, but he decided to err on the side of caution and
sent me for some tests. On May 2nd, about a week and a half after
my visit with my brothers, I went to a big hospital in Manhattan,
where I was given a hospital gown in a baggie and ushered into a
small changing room. I had no sooner put the baggie on the bench
and begun to unbutton my shirt when there was a knock on the door.
Still fully dressed, I turned and opened it, peeking out.

“Aren’t you changed yet?” the nurse said.

I looked at her quizzically. I thought she
was joking. “You only left a moment ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.” Then she closed
the door and left.

It took me a moment, but I realized that I’d
had another blackout. I checked my watch and it was a little past a
quarter past noon, but since I hadn’t checked it before I came in,
there was no way for me to know how long I’d been out. At that
moment, I decided to always be aware of the time.

The tests showed nothing, though the doctor
confirmed a more than twenty minute time lapse between the nurse
showing me the dressing room and then coming in to check on me.
Twenty minutes is a long blackout. It appeared they were beginning
to grow in duration and I could see that these types of long
blackouts could severely impair my life, such as it was. Over the
course of a week, I went back for more tests, but the doctors could
find no physical reason for my blackouts (and I had no more in that
time). In the interim, my mother became ill and I was forced to
juggle my job with handling her affairs and hospital visits for
tests. This created incredible demands on my time and made life
extremely difficult. It wasn’t so much that I was stretched too
thin. I could always find time for things, but I had no time to
simply relax. I was working and then going to the hospital after
work and visiting my mother after the hospital. Couple all of that
with the looming possibility of another, longer blackout and I
began to feel and react to a tremendous amount of stress.