Forty Leap (4 page)

I began to get that nervous feeling in the
pit of my stomach. The office looked the same so I couldn’t have
missed
that
much time. But, clearly I had missed enough to
raise a few eyebrows. My desk was disturbed. At least it hadn’t
been cleared out. There was, however, the definite indication that
someone had been sitting there and using my computer. As I switched
it on, I heard someone enter at the front. There were whispers and,
just as the computer finished booting and I saw the date, I
realized that it was my boss who had just arrived.

Needless to say, I was in a meeting with her
inside of ten minutes.

“Where the hell have you been?” she
asked.

What could I say? I hadn’t told anyone at
work about my problem except Morty, and I wanted it kept that way.
But now it seemed that I would have to come clean or lose my job
(which I’d probably lose anyway). It was not Wednesday, October
3rd. It was Tuesday, October 9th. I had blacked out for almost a
week. My boss was convinced I’d skipped out for a vacation to the
Caribbean, which was ridiculous.

“You never called in,” she said. “You didn’t
take any time. You didn’t answer your phone. I even asked someone
to go by your apartment, but you didn’t answer the door. I was just
about to begin interviewing.”

So I explained the situation to her, using
the term “blackout” instead of “time jumping”, which was my
suspicion. Of course, I could produce all of my medical records
(which would have been reported to my company for insurance reasons
anyway) as proof of my condition. But they were inconclusive. All
they would prove is that I had been seeking medical advice on the
condition. I could ask Morty to testify on my behalf, but I hated
to put him in the middle of it. Besides which, he didn’t
necessarily know that I was telling the truth.

“You mean to tell me,” she said in a very
snide way that I did not appreciate but would never mention, “that
you were home the whole time, passed out in bed…”

“Blacked out,” I corrected.

“Look at you, Mathew,” she said.

So I looked at me.

“If you were passed out, forgive me, blacked
out, in your bed for a week, you’d be a rotting corpse.”

She was right, of course, and I could offer
no response to her allegations but the truth. I tried very
delicately to explain that these were not simple blackouts, but
that I was being swept from one moment to another, skipping large
chunks of time in between. The explanation meant little or nothing
to her. She took it as a poorly conceived lie, but gave me credit
for originality. In the end, she chose not to fire me. As I said, I
was just the kind of employee she liked, and she hated to give that
up in favor of some young go-getter looking to move up the
corporate ladder. There was no official policy of probation in my
company, but she used that word when she described my status. One
more screw-up and I was out. To me that just meant it was a matter
of time before my job was taken away from me. To date, I could
neither anticipate nor prevent the jumps.

Morty had arrived by the time I got back to
my desk. He didn’t seem so surprised to see me so I can only assume
that he had heard I was back. But he did stare straight through me
from the time I came into view until the time I just couldn’t take
it anymore.

“It happened again?” he asked.

I nodded.

“For a week?”

I became irritated, but I had learned to
control it. For a time, we didn’t speak. I went about checking my
files and figuring out what I was supposed to do. The items on
which I had last been working were completed or mostly completed.
There were no new items, which meant they had been ferried out to
other people. If it was true that my boss was about to start
interviewing, that meant she couldn’t afford to have my position
vacant. Sure enough, as I sat trying to get my bearings, new
assignments kept popping up on my computer via the company’s
intranet. There wasn’t anything too taxing, but I was still so
disoriented that I couldn’t manage to focus.

“Where do you go?”

“I don’t go anywhere,” I snapped back at
Morty, who had done no work in thirty minutes. He just kept looking
at me. “It’s not a vacation.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he apologized. “But you
have to be somewhere, right?”

I had never really given that any thought. In
truth, it didn’t seem as if my location changed at all. When I was
supposed to pick up Livvie at the train station, I didn’t move.
When I was at the hospital, changing clothes, I didn’t move. Or, at
least, I didn’t appear to move. What if there was some other
personality inside of me that simply took over, living its own
life? And when its periods were over and done with, it returned me
to the same place as before.

And yet, that made no sense. That particular
personality would have to be aware of the charade in order to set
my watch back to the proper date and time and put me in the very
same clothing and make sure that I was just as tired or hungry or
that I had the same urge to go to the bathroom or not. It was too
impossible.

“I don’t think I actually do move. I’m pretty
sure I just stay in the same spot.”

“I went by your apartment over the weekend,”
Morty said. “You weren’t there.”

“I don’t think I can answer the door in the
middle of it.”

“I didn’t think so. So I went inside. You
should have your super fired. He takes bribes.”

I dismissed that last bit. “So I wasn’t in
the apartment? Anywhere?”

He shook his head. “I asked around, too. No
one had seen you leave or anything.”

An idea struck me. Again, it seemed
unreasonable, but I pulled out my credit card and dialed the
customer service number on the back. After negotiating my way
through the automatic phone service and providing nineteen pieces
of personal information, a representative was able to tell me that
my card hadn’t been used in the week during which I was missing. It
confirmed my suspicion, but didn’t provide any answers. What
did
happen to me during those times? Was I safe?

Time passed. I was very busy at work. It took
me almost a week to catch up. I had to make sure that I arrived
every morning before my boss or I got a phone call. I had to make
sure that I left late, not on time, or she would ask questions. In
the mean time, I began to feel that desperation creeping in again.
I was consumed by the idea that, at any time, I could leap forward
and not even know it. How far would I leap this time? A month? A
year? There didn’t seem to be any discernable pattern.

I spent most of my free time trying to map
out my different leaps and researching my condition on the internet
and in the library. There were some isolated incidents that could
be deemed similar, but I was skeptical.

I found one report of a slave who
consistently disappeared and would later reappear in the same
place. He had been branded a witch and sentenced to burn.

There was another about a Scottish jet pilot
whose plane had crashed. Rescuers found him bewildered and unharmed
in the wreckage. He couldn’t remember the crash and described the
whole thing as if he had simply winked out of existence and then
reappeared after the disaster.

Stories like this were all over the web and,
instead of giving me a feeling of comfort in not being alone, I
branded the lot of them crackpots and felt more alone than
ever.

My mother fell ill again. Jeremy insisted
that my recent disappearance contributed to her poor state of mind.
I didn’t necessarily disagree with him, but that didn’t change the
fact that it was totally out of my control. I tried to explain this
to him, but, despite our earlier reconciliation, a week of tending
to our mother had left him bitter all over again. The truth was
that he didn’t believe my story. I don’t know if he exactly
disbelieved
it, but he was sure of a simple explanation and
without sympathy. Surprisingly, it was Wyatt who came to my
defense. Of the two of them, Jeremy had always been the one to whom
I had turned for support. As the older of my two brothers, he had
always seemed the wiser and the more in command. But Wyatt had a
compassionate streak that was hidden behind a very quiet façade.
Despite their unbreachable closeness, Wyatt painted his reactions
to Jeremy’s behavior very carefully. He did not choose to be
Jeremy’s humble servant or yes-man under any circumstances. As my
older brother became more incensed, my younger brother showed me
more kindness. Thought I knew it was only partly a sympathetic
gesture towards me, I was desperate for the support. Wyatt didn’t
necessarily believe my story either, but he was more patient about
listening to it.

Impatient, Jeremy asked me one early November
day, “What are we going to do, Mathew?”

The question caught me off guard. To begin
with, Jeremy would never deign to ask for my suggestion on anything
so important. Here I could not discern his meaning. Did he want to
know my solution for my time hopping or was he simply rhetorically
questioning himself? Even if I had known the meaning of his
question, I would not have had an answer.

He didn’t wait for one. “If you can’t take
care of mom…”

“I can’t,” I blurted, only much later
realizing how that must have sounded. As an outsider looking in, I
would have branded myself a weasel; just some lazy slob trying to
get out of a family obligation. But from the inside it made too
much sense. How could my mother count on me for anything when I
couldn’t even count on myself?

Jeremy was silent after that and the
conversation ended without resolution. Wyatt called me a short time
later to find out what had been said, but the transcript gave him
no insight.

“Mom will be okay,” he told me. “You’re not
her only son.”

I didn’t know how to interpret that statement
either, but I was at a point of defensiveness so that my reaction
was not relief but anger. I had never implied that I was her only
son and I had never asked for the job of sole caregiver. It had
been thrust upon me as a virtue of not having built a family of my
own. On those rare occasions when I had been forced to ask for
help, Jeremy’s stuttering replies had always led me to tell him not
to worry about it. I would handle it. Only now I couldn’t handle
it.

But I could say none of this to Wyatt. Though
my control of my internal thoughts and emotions seemed to be
withering away in the face of my condition, my external reactions
were intact.

For the moment.

The night before I jumped again, I had dinner
with Morty. I had come into work agitated because of an argument
I’d had with my mother the night before. That morning, Jeremy had
called me, furious, wanting to know why I had upset her. The truth
is I can’t even remember what the argument was about. It was silly,
as they all are, but I was on edge. Instead of the passage of
normal time easing me into a state of comfort, I was becoming more
and more panicked. Earlier on, I had the reassurance of having just
leaped, meaning that I wouldn’t leap again right away simply
because I had never done so. But now it had been weeks and I knew
that my time was soon to come. That morning, I was the picture of
the caffeinated man. There was enough adrenaline in my body to
power a city.

So Morty offered to take me out to
dinner.

“Have a meal with someone who doesn’t bother
to judge you,” he said, and it sounded like a good idea.

And it was. Dinner with Morty was relaxing
and fun. I was able to unwind and laugh a bit. But when I got home,
there was a message from Jeremy and another from Wyatt. Even Wyatt
sounded impatient. I called neither of them back, choosing instead
to toss and turn for hours before exhaustion was finally the victor
over agitation and I slept.

The next day began like any other day. I got
up, showered, had some coffee, and went off to work. Morty could
see by the look on my face that our dinner together hadn’t had a
lasting effect. He described my expression as the penultimate step
to resolution. It was as if I were a terminally ill person who was
just about ready to accept my fate. In truth, acceptance was the
furthest thing from my mind. What I needed was the ability to sort
this thing out. At about a quarter to four, the light on my phone
went on. This was odd because I rarely received phone calls.

“This is Mathew Cristian,” I said into the
receiver.

“Uncle Mathew? It’s Livvie.”

I was too stunned to respond. I just sat
there, the phone to my ear, Morty staring at me from across the
aisle.

“Uncle Mathew?”

“I’m here, sorry.”

“I didn’t mean to call you at work, but your
cell phone’s off.”

It wasn’t off; the battery was dead. In the
wake of my stress, I had forgotten to charge it. I told her it was
good to hear from her.

“Mom and Dad have been arguing a lot.”

Again, I didn’t know how to respond so I just
didn’t. Arguments between Martie and Jeremy were rare. Even when
Martie was up in arms about something, Jeremy usually gave her some
space and yessed her until she felt better.

“Sometimes they argue about Grandma,” Livvie
continue. “But mostly it’s about you. Uncle Wyatt’s been here a few
times also, but he doesn’t have much to say. Can I ask you a
question?”

I nodded, then realized how foolish that was
and said, “Yes.”

“Is it true? What you say has been happening
to you, is it happening?”

“It’s true,” I said.

“Because Dad says you’re just trying to
escape from your life, like your life’s not good enough or
something. Mom thinks you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

“What does Wyatt think?” I asked, not
positive that I wanted to know the answer.

“I’m not really sure. Like I said, he doesn’t
say much. I think he agrees with Dad, but he feels sorry for you
while Dad’s just angry.”