Forty Leap (3 page)

I didn’t know what to do.

Having a need to feel the air, I moved off of
the platform and made for the street. It was dark out, which was
odd for this time in August in New York. If that wasn’t enough of a
clue that something was terribly wrong, the scarcity of pedestrians
was.

I was not on the street a full minute when my
cell phone began to vibrate. Pulling it out of my pocket I saw that
I had a voicemail message. Perhaps it was me calling myself,
telling myself to wake up.

Then I noticed the time on the phone’s
screen. It was just about midnight and the date was August
19
^th
. I looked at my watch. It read close to six. But my
phone received information, time and date included, from the
network. My watch registered time based on its own existence. I had
lost two days. It wasn’t even fair to say that I had blacked out
for two days. I had not blacked out. If I had, the time on my watch
would have changed. I would have been extremely hungry and thirsty.
Any number of things about my physical appearance would have
changed. These were not blackouts. I had no idea what they were.
Perhaps I was being abducted by aliens and tested with the fabled
probes. But there was no evidence of that except time loss. And the
expanding increments of time lost were becoming truly alarming.
What hadn’t been done this past weekend that had desperately needed
doing?

Livvie!

Dialing quickly into my voicemail, I listened
to seventeen messages. The first four were from Livvie, each of
intensifying concern. That poor child had been left alone in Grand
Central Station for hours. Calls from Jeremy followed, the first
ones angry and then next ones concerned. There was even a call from
Wyatt. My mother called several times as well. Jeremy had called
her to complain about me, but she had defended my integrity. My
integrity be damned! There wasn’t even one message telling me what
had become of Livvie.

Frustrated, I dialed out Jeremy’s number.

“Hello?” came Martie’s groggy answer.

“It’s Mathew, Martie. Please let me speak to
Jeremy.”

“
Mathew!
” There was anger in that cry
and words that followed, but my brother must have wrested the phone
from her clawed fingers.

“Mathew?”

“Is Livvie okay?” I asked.

“She’s fine,” he said, but his tone betrayed
no feelings. “She’s home.”

“Thank God.”

“And no thanks to you.”

“Jeremy, I had another…spell.”

“You’re not calling them blackouts
anymore?”

“It’s not a blackout. I’ve lost time. My
watch still says it’s Friday.”

He was silent for a moment, chewing on my
story I felt. In the background, I could hear Martie huffing and
puffing, every once in a while blowing a few words my way.

“Livvie’s fine,” he said eventually. “But
you’d better explain it to her yourself. Call her tomorrow. Tonight
you should check yourself into a hospital.”

And then he hung up, leaving me with no sense
of support or even condemnation. Despite his abrupt ending of the
conversation, I had no idea how he truly felt. Check myself into a
hospital? What was that supposed to mean? Would that solve my
problems or would I just be imprisoning myself so that I couldn’t
do anyone any more harm. The worst part was that I had to be at
work in a few hours without having had the benefit of two days off.
I was suddenly exhausted, though I felt jet lagged because, for me,
it was only six in the evening. Still, I took the train back to my
apartment and went right to bed.

I awakened feeling groggy, disoriented, and
in a panic. That panic grew as I began to wonder whether or not it
had happened again. Had I gone to bed and now gotten up a month
later? I quickly checked the clocks and, because I didn’t trust
them anymore, turned on the television. The time and date confirmed
that I had remained firmly rooted during my slumber, but that I had
in fact lost an entire weekend to my enigmatic condition. I
considered calling in sick from work but rejected the idea once my
head began to clear. There would be nothing else that I could do
and I desperately needed some form of routine at that moment.

On the subway I looked over the Monday
morning crowd. Many of those people I saw every day and recognized
them. Others I saw every day and did not recognize them. They were
students and workers, parents and children. They were a melting pot
of shapes, sizes, and races. In the years that I had been working,
more and more books and newspapers had disappeared, only to be
replaced by MP3 players and PDAs. A girl frowned into a textbook.
An older lady chuckled at something that went directly into her
ears and her ears only. A man cursed loudly at no one in
particular. I wondered who they were and what problems they faced
on a daily basis. Did they have stressful jobs or sick relatives?
Did any of them lose large chunks of time at any given moment?
Could they read that on my face? Was my freakish condition apparent
to them?

I waited until lunchtime and then started
making my phone calls. The first was to my mother to let her know
that I was alive and well. She asked what had happened and I gave
her the story in vague terms. I did not confide in her my true
fears, but instead told her that it was likely due to stress at
work and it would pass. The latter was a desperate hope. The
former, an outright lie.

Next I called Jeremy’s house and asked to
speak with Livvie. Jeremy was always home in the summer. I don’t
know how he pulled it off, but he had more days off in the two
months of summer than I got all year round. He told me she was out,
but I knew that he was lying and I pressed him. I think that alone
is what swayed him. I never pressed Jeremy on anything. I never
pressed
anyone
on anything. But Livvie was important to me,
maybe the most important person in the world. I couldn’t let her
think that I had simply abandoned her. Even if she thought I was
going insane, it would be better than her hating me.

She was cold when she took the phone.

“Livvie, I need to explain what
happened.”

“Do you have any idea how I felt?” she asked
me accusingly.

“No,” I answered. “But I know that I would
never put you in that position intentionally.”

“Mom told me I shouldn’t listen to your
‘cockamamie story’.”

I felt rage. Did Martie hate me so much that
she would sabotage my relationship with Livvie? Apparently so.
Apparently, she was seizing this opportunity and squeezing every
last drop out of its fruit. “Your mother’s always hated me. You
know that, don’t you?”

She was silent for a time, probably gauging
how to respond. It was hard for me to remember that I was talking
to a fifteen year old girl. Livvie was so smart and, often times,
seemed so much like an adult that if you didn’t have her right in
front of you, you couldn’t always tell.

“I’m sorry, Livvie,” I told her finally. “I
don’t want to put you in between me and your mother and I’m sure
she doesn’t either. I just called because I want you to know that
you are the most important person in the world to me. If I had a
daughter, I would want her to be you. I couldn’t stand it if I
thought you hated me or thought I would do something to hurt you.
And I know my story sounds cockamamie, like your mother says, but
it’s the truth. And…”

“No more, Uncle Mathew. Please…”

“You need to hear this, Livvie.” There was a
desperate tone in my voice and I knew later that it wasn’t she who
needed to hear it, but me who needed to say it. “I’m not sick and
I’m not crazy. And I’m not blacking out, like your parents may have
told you. I thought it was blackouts, but it’s not. I’m literally
disappearing and each time I do, it gets longer and longer. I don’t
change. I don’t age and I don’t move. I just reappear a minute or
an hour or a day later. This time it was two days and the next time
it may be two weeks or two years. And one day, one day, Livvie, I
won’t come back. So I need to know that
you
know that I love
you more than any other person on this planet. Can you tell me that
you know that, Livvie?”

She was silent again and I knew that I had
crossed the line. I waited a few seconds to see if she would
respond, but she didn’t so I asked her to put her father on the
phone.

“What the hell did you say to her,
Mathew?”

“I just told her that I love her.”

“She looks like you smacked her in the face
with a fish.”

“I’m sorry. Just tell her I’m sorry, Jeremy.
Okay?”

But I hung up before he could respond and he
didn’t try to call me back. After that, I went back to work and did
almost nothing for the remainder of the day. The man in the next
cubicle, Morty Yovanovicz, took notice of my catatonic appearance
and commented on it.

Morty was a nice old guy, a couple of years
from retirement. He was friendly if not my friend, but today he had
a look of genuine concern on his face. He tried to tell me that
things were sometimes good and sometimes bad and it was always
worth it to weather the bad times so that we could enjoy the good
ones. If only he knew my problems. When he invited me to have
dinner with him, I accepted.

I must have been desperate for human
companionship. It’s not that Morty was hard to get along with. It’s
just that I was never the social type. When I was younger, I was
too intimidated to make many close friends. As I got older I found
that what had started out as timidity evolved into disinterest. I
set my own routines and settled myself into them like a comfortable
chair. I did not like to have to get up. But now my condition was
causing increasing interruptions in my schedule and was beginning
to have dire effects on my life. I had long since learned to live
with the bad blood between Martie and me. In fact, it had grown
into an accepted and acceptable factor of my life. I don’t know
what I would have done had she started to like me. But fighting
with Livvie I couldn’t handle. I needed to find a way to get
through to her.

Against my better judgment, I confided in
Morty. At first, he didn’t really know how to react. None of my
coworkers really
knew
me, but they had never known me to
exhibit any kind of sense of humor and the idea of a practical joke
such as this was confounding. Morty couldn’t figure out whether I
was serious or making a poor attempt at pulling his leg. He found
himself caught between the rock of not wanting to make light of my
serious situation and the hard place of not wanting to be the butt
of my joke.

I told him that I was serious and elaborated.
I told him about the other “blackouts” and made it quite clear by
my telling that these were actual events. Well I can’t say that he
believed me but I can’t say that he dismissed me either. He did
offer that there would be very little I could do to get Livvie to
accept my explanation of events unless she wanted to and it was
probably best if I just lay low for a while. The advice was
appreciated even if it was not quite what I wanted to hear.

Over the next several weeks, Morty and I
developed a real friendship. I stopped seeing my psychiatrist (what
was the point, really?) and, with my mother doing well, found that
I had a lot of free time. Morty, who was divorced, was the perfect
companion for me. He was soft spoken and unassuming, yet always
displayed a pleasant demeanor and good humor. His own daughter was
approaching fifty years old and lived in Arizona and his ex-wife
had remarried and moved to Florida. What I found out about Morty
Yovanovicz was that he was a desperately lonely guy who almost
succeeded at hiding it. But the best thing about him was that he
was always there. If I took too long in the bathroom at work, he
came to make sure I hadn’t leaped through time. Every once in a
while he would call me in the middle of the night just to see if I
was still moving at “normal speed” as he put it. He woke me up a
couple of times, but his intentions were good and I found it
difficult to feel anything but warmth toward him.

In short, Morty helped me to relax.

From the middle of August through the
beginning of October, things seemed to be going well. I waited a
week before calling Jeremy again and his anger seemed to have
cooled. Livvie didn’t want to speak with me yet, but Jeremy assured
me that she was starting to soften. Martie, on the other hand, had
gone back to hating me and showing it. If she answered the phone
when I called, she hung it up immediately. I never knew what to do
in those moments, so I usually did nothing. I would always receive
a call from Jeremy later on so at least she had the decency to tell
him I had called.

I didn’t visit with them. Jeremy and Wyatt
came out to see me once and that was nice. We spoke mostly about
our childhoods; we laughed a little. The strain on our relationship
did give me the opportunity to realize how important they were in
my life. I could only hope that they felt the same way. When you’re
a kid, you fight with your siblings or you ignore them. Generally,
siblings are apart in age and they build their own social lives.
Sometimes they compete. More often than not, there is an animosity
that builds between them. But if things go well, that animosity
fades with maturity. No matter what our differences were, my
brothers and I all came from the same place. The three of us shared
something that no one else in the world possessed and that bond was
surprisingly strong.

On Wednesday morning, the 3rd of October, I
got out of bed, showered, dressed, drank some coffee, and went to
work. Only when I arrived did I realize that something was wrong. I
had offhandedly noticed that the train was more empty than usual,
but the light of day seemed right. There had been nothing to tip me
off until I arrived at an empty office. Since I don’t have a key, I
was forced to wait outside the door for someone to show up. That
someone was Estelle Goldblatt, the company receptionist. She was
due in, daily, thirty minutes before everyone else. She was more
surprised to see me than she normally would have been but declined
comment. In fact, she practically ignored me, opening the door and
going inside without even holding it for me.