The shock wave takes me off my feet. I lose consciousness in the air.
#
I can hear my wife’s voice. I can feel her holding my hand. My eyes must be moving under their lids. Then she let go of my hand, called a doctor, and told him that I was waking up.
Ten minutes later, after a welcomed sip of water, the doctor left, and my wife told me that I’d been out for three days. The media are calling it a miracle.
“How is it a miracle that my car blows up, and I’m in a coma for three days?”
“The car exploded from a leaky fuel line at 1:10pm. If you had left that truck stop on the highway where you were having lunch, and started for home, which was over two more hours of driving, the car would have exploded with you in it. They still don’t know why you were following the Nissan, but they speculate it was because of the woman.”
I shook my head. “We both know why I followed that vehicle.”
“That doesn’t matter. I would never tell them about your episodes. They wouldn’t believe me anyway. But this time, you saved your own life.”
I remember, that was one of the things that came to me in the truck stop. A life would be spared, and it all felt so personal. Maybe a part of me knew I was going to die? That part that sees others’ futures must’ve seen my own, and orchestrated everything to save itself.
“What was that about the woman?” I ask. Then I realize she must have something to do with the feeling I’d had about someone
remembering
something. “Did she remember what it was she was supposed to?”
My wife takes a moment to respond. I see her eyes well up a little.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“I’m a sucker for happy endings,” she says. “You really did it this time.”
“Did what?”
“The woman traveling in the Nissan Pathfinder got hit in the head by flying debris. When she was admitted to this hospital, she told the authorities she’d forgotten her real name. It turns out she was kidnapped over
five
years ago. They rarely deal with things like this. The authorities brought in a specialist from Toronto. One of the cops told me yesterday that the woman had been subjected to years of sensory deprivation. The driver of the Nissan had convinced her he was her husband. At first, they thought she was a victim of Stockholm syndrome, where she felt sorry for her kidnapper. But then they realized she actually believed this guy was her husband.”
“Are you serious?” I feel astounded, shocked.
“The woman was reunited with her real husband and her two kids just this morning. You should have seen it. Her children are only seven and nine years old. She told them she had amnesia and…” My wife stops to wipe her nose. “She lost over five years with them. It’s such a tragedy.”
This is the biggest déjà vu mystery I’d experienced; it’s also quite scary. What's wrong with me? Will I have more of them? Another question scared me: was I supposed to die today?
My wife blows her nose and composes herself. “Please, do something for me. Act on every single feeling you get, because today, my husband is my hero.”
A déjà vu hit me in that second.
The man who kidnapped the woman was arrested and made bail this morning. He’s on his way here, to find out how I knew, and he aims to kill me. In one hour, to the minute, I see him throwing me out the hospital window and making it look like I jumped. Suicide.
I lift up off the bed, the pain in my head and back screaming for me to stay down.
“What are you doing?” my wife asks.
“We have to leave the hospital. Now. If we don’t, we’ll both die. Help me up. Do it now.”
Her face turns beet red, her composure challenged by my brusque tone. But to her credit she reaches over and helps me out of bed.
The door to my room opened. The driver of the Pathfinder steps in.
“What are you doing here?” my wife asks.
It’s too late. He’s here. He’ll grill me for the hour and then throw me out the window. My déjà vu only covers what’ll happen in an hour, not what gets me there.
I lean back onto my bed and say, “I’ll tell you how I knew.”
I feel my wife gasp. The man steps closer to my bed. He has a weapon in his hand.
“Start talking,” is all he says.
“It’s déjà vu.”
I have to convince him I can see the future. If I can do that, then I will tell him that I see him dead in one hour and the only way to escape it is to leave within five minutes before the police get here.
He lifts his gun and shoots my wife.
I have never felt the way I feel when I see the look on her face. Then she falls to the hospital floor below the side of my bed.
“I don’t care how you figured it out. I came here to kill you and your wife. After that, I will throw you out the window. It’ll look like a murder suicide.”
In all this, I cannot believe my brain is still working. “Wait,” I gasp. “If you shoot me and then throw me, they’ll know.”
“I’ll wound you so you won’t try to escape, but not bad enough to kill you. Like this.” He raised his weapon and fired.
A bullet tore into my side. I scream. He’s on me in a flash, covering my mouth, muffling my voice.
“It’ll look like you killed her, tried to shoot yourself, and then tossed yourself out the window when you failed.”
My hospital door opens and then closes. No one enters.
He turned to look at the door, and then down at the floor where my wife had fallen.
“Shit!”
He releases his grip on my face and runs. I know, immediately: my wife got away. He hits the door and slips out.
An alarm sounds throughout the floor.
I’m bleeding. Losing consciousness.
I sure hope my wife makes it. For both our sakes.
I’m out.
Don't Shoot
The knocking came again.
Jim Bower sat in his empty basement apartment and listened to the knocking in the walls. It was impossible for anyone to be behind the wall. The knocking, the noises, and the talking at all hours of the night, permeated through the wall of his apartment. The noises drove Jim to obsess over who tormented him and how they were doing it. He wanted to learn their methods. Maybe whatever was alive in the walls was evil. Or maybe they were kind and would want a companion. He just needed to figure out how to get in there.
Jim stood to his full height of six foot, three inches and removed the oversized headphones from his ears. No sound emitted from them. He wore the headphones to keep sounds out. But the knocking always seemed to get in.
“Go away,” he shouted at the wall. “Go away or I’ll come in after you.”
The wall knocked again. He placed the headphones on his ears to remove the noise, but they were soundproof. The knocking still got in.
“Stop it. Don’t come back. Don’t stay here. Don’t shoot.”
A sense of peace and comfort always pervaded him when he said
don’t shoot
. It’d been his axiom since he was a child. Those words had kept him alive.
Someone whispered.
“No. No whispering.” He grabbed the headphones. “La, la, la, la, la, la …” he chanted, in a quest to silence the voices.
He stopped to listen. When he heard nothing, he picked up the hammer that sat on the floor by his foot. The table beside him had magazines and books scattered on its surface. With a sweep of his arm they all fell to the floor but he barely heard them land as his headphones were doing their job.
Jim dropped the head of the hammer onto the table, tapping it in rhythm. He maintained a tempo that soothed him.
The clock on the wall said it was 4:44am. They always came in the middle of the night.
When was the last time I ate?
He couldn’t remember.
“Don’t shoot,” he whispered to the empty basement.
The wall always looked so innocent. He walked over to the wall that had turned his life into a living hell. The hammer swung in his hand like he was practicing with a baton.
Staples held up a poster of Rita Hayworth. Out of respect for a book Jim read many years ago, he’d chosen it to conceal his digging. At the bottom of the poster he’d affixed a small clip so when it was lifted out of the way it would clamp onto a hook at the top.
His phone rang. He turned around.
“I don’t have a phone.”
The ringing stopped.
Jim lifted Rita and clipped her into place. The hole was magnificent. He loved the hole he was boring into the ground. Screw what the landlord thought. He needed the hole. Whoever kept knocking on the walls in the middle of the night was in there somewhere. He’d dig until he found them. He needed to get back to work. Being a member of society was fun. It felt good to buy things. They wouldn’t put him back in the Amy Greg Asylum if he performed well in the community.
If only he could get rid of the whispering and the knocking, then he’d be okay.
His favorite World War II era, RAF Aviator goggles sat dangling from around his neck. He eased them up to cover his eyes. The hammer smacking into bits of concrete and rock maintained a muffled existence to his headphone covered ears. He shuffled the excess dirt to the floor of the apartment where he’d sweep it into a pile and remove it on garbage day.
Two weeks into digging and the hole was big enough for him to crawl in and be covered when the poster of Rita Hayworth dropped into place. He knew buried power lines and gas lines were close by, but since he was digging slowly and with the claw of a hammer, he felt he’d have ample warning before puncturing one.
An hour passed in a daze. Another pile of dirt. Another few feet gained.
The knocking started again.
Someone was at his door. He lifted the headphones off and listened.
“I know you’re in there,” someone yelled. “Open up!”
My landlord
.
If he stayed quiet long enough, the landlord would go away. To himself, under his breath, he whispered, “Don’t shoot.”
Another knock. “Come on. I need the rent money. You’re a week late.” He knocked again. “Come on Jim, I know you lost your job. Let’s talk about it or I will have to call your brother. You know how he likes to keep tabs on you.”
Yeah, and makes me do stupid things like eat and shower
, Jim thought.
No way. If you come through that door I won’t let you leave
.
I’ve got a hammer.
“I heard you in there banging something. I know you’re home.”
“Go away,” he whispered.
Waiting was hard, but he did it. Eventually, Owen the landlord, stopped knocking. Owen wasn’t his real name, but Jim couldn’t remember names very well, so Owen it was. People called Jim names all his life so it was only fair if he called people by names he liked. Others seemed to like the names they chose for him because they laughed and had fun with it.
Jim chuckled to himself a little to see how it felt after calling the landlord Owen, but he couldn’t see the humor.
He felt the urge to pee and allowed it freedom. The wetness coursed through his ragged, torn jeans. It didn’t matter. Anytime now he would find peace. As soon as he figured out how they did it, he would do it too. People made themselves invisible all the time. The books called them entities or ghosts and the only way to become invisible and move with just a thought was to die first, but Jim had an idea that he could do it without dying. The answer was buried in the wall.
The people were in the wall somewhere. They would tell him how to do it. The people who visited him in the night and whispered horrible things. The things they told him to do were scary, but he’d do it if they would explain how to be invisible. They were alive. They made noise. They traveled around. So Jim concluded they weren’t dead.
That was how he would do it. He knew he didn’t have to die to make this happen. Just keep digging. He’d find them or go crazy trying.
He tossed the hammer onto the fresh pile of dirt and dug with his hands. The process was slower but a lot quieter.
The smell was bad in the hole. He knew it had to be him because he hadn’t changed his clothes for quite a few days and he hadn’t used a toilet or the shower in that time and yet his body still voided itself. Nothing else mattered though. He’d deal with the smell as it was mixed with the richness of the moist soil.
The ground softened. His energy waned. The earth moved around him.
Jim slowed his pace until he stopped and looked back into his basement apartment. Dim light entered through the closed blinds in the small window near the ceiling. It seemed to brighten a little, beckoning him. He refused its call by unhooking Rita Hayworth and letting the poster fall into place, covering him in where he lay on the bed of dirt.
He rested his head back, closed his eyes from behind the goggles and whispered, “Don’t shoot,” before falling into a deep sleep, riddled with nightmares of death.