Forty Leap (30 page)

Before leaving, I went to see what was in Dr.
Kung’s trunk. I’m not crazy and I’m not stupid. It seemed too easy
to have found a man who wanted to help me so badly that he would
give me his car, but I was without options at the time. I thought
of Neville and how I’d stuck with him when the others hadn’t. But
in the end, I had done the same thing. I’d left him behind to die.
After all, what would the authorities do when they had him in
custody?

Dr. Kung carried a few things in his trunk,
not the least of which was a clean suit. I guess, being a doctor,
you never know when something’s going to splatter all over your
shirt. I took the suit out of the trunk and measured it up to my
body. Too big. That was fine. Too small would have been bad. There
was a rack with a spare tire, what looked like a battery, and some
bottles of fluid, but nothing else of much use. I desperately
wished for some money or a box of cookies.

After returning to the washroom to put on the
suit, I threw away my old clothes and got on the road again. I was
travelling north, knowing that Wisconsin was north and east. I had
only an inkling of the geography, but was determined to stick to
the main roads. I didn’t know how long cars could drive without a
recharge of the battery and a change of whatever fluids were
necessary. The gauges on the dashboard were no help. The battery
looked
like it had a full charge. There wasn’t anything I
could do about it regardless so I just drove. Eventually, I would
have to get rid of the car anyway. It wasn’t mine and it wouldn’t
be safe to drive it.

The land stretched out in front of me, going
from wooded to flat to metropolitan. I had only a vague idea of
where my brothers had lived, but it was all I had. I was reasonably
sure that I could find my way to Wisconsin. From there I might be
able to pick up a map or some information. I wondered if I could
trade the car in for some food and a bus ticket.

So I drove. The forests turned into plains
and the plains turned back into forests. I headed north and east,
keeping my eyes open for signs bearing familiar names. When I was
tired I would pull off to the side of the road and sleep, but never
for too long. My greatest fear was that someone would stop, maybe a
police officer. I needed to remain inconspicuous.

The battery died in the one afternoon on some
desolate highway and I wound up emptying the glove box in a frantic
search for the user’s manual. It had instructions on changing the
battery so I installed the spare. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t
easy. I was without tools and without knowledge. But it did get
done. The gauge showed full again and off I went.

Ultimately, as I knew I would, I found
Wisconsin. I crossed over the western border exhausted and hungry.
It had been three days since I’d set out from the hospital and I’d
had little to eat. Water was plentiful enough in public restrooms,
but I had been forced to dig through garbage to find something that
was remotely edible. In truth, the issue was more than a lack of
money. I couldn’t even be sure that money was still used. If it
was, I couldn’t be sure that it came in the form of paper and
coins. I hoped that Neville was faring better than I was. I thought
of Neville often. I guessed that I would never know what happened
to him. It was a big world and even bigger when measured over the
span of years, soon to be decades and then centuries. His leaps and
my leaps might take us lifetimes from each other. If he
survived.

I drove for a while in Wisconsin until I
finally found a small suburb. These areas looked no different than
they had in my time. Though the architecture of houses had changed,
morphed into sloping panels and sharp angles, there were still
groups of them together in communities. On the outskirts of those
communities were shopping centers. I pulled into one of these,
noting that it held several stores I’d never heard of and a
gigantic
Target
. I couldn’t drive anymore and was so hungry
that I was on the verge of passing out. I went into the
T
arget
, Dr. Kung’s suit hanging loosely about my frame. Some
people gave me a look but most ignored me. People, by the way, were
just people. Nothing had changed about them. Old couples walked
slowly, hand in hand. Teenagers stayed in groups and giggled at
things they saw. It was the summer so I guessed everyone was out of
school. Of course, who could really tell?

There were cash registers and people were
buying things so I figured out that some form of currency was still
in use. I tried to get a closer look but couldn’t do so without
sticking out. The few customers I saw were purchasing with credit
cards or something that looked like credit cards. No cash changed
hands and, come to think of it, I never saw a register drawer open
up. Well, I wasn’t in there to shop. I started looking for a
telephone. I hoped, after all this time, that people still used
telephones. It had been fourteen years since I had spent any time
in regular society. With Jennie. With my brothers. Fourteen years
didn’t seem like such a long time, but it was. When I was born in
1974, the things of my childhood didn’t even exist yet. VCRs. Video
games. Later on, there were computers and from there everything
just exploded. The years got shorter from the standpoint of
technological advancement. Every year I skipped was a year that
made me more incompetent in ways that small children were not. What
machines had been invented that made the machines with which I was
familiar obsolete?

There were still telephones.

In fact, there were still pay telephones.

That didn’t help my money situation, but I
could still make a call and reverse the charges. Leafing through my
journal, I found the telephone number for Jeremy and Wyatt’s house.
Who knew if they still had the same telephone number? Who knew if
they still even lived there?

“Hello?”

“…you have a collect call from a Jennie
Campbell…press or say
one
to accept the charges…”

“What?”

“Jeremy, it’s me,” I said into the phone,
afraid to give my name.

I heard a beep and I guess he pressed one
because the connection cleared up automatically.

“Mathew?” He didn’t sound surprised to hear
from me, just confused.

“I’m in Wisconsin, Jeremy. I have no money
and no idea where I am. I need help.”

There was silence on the line for a minute.
“Mathew?”

“Jeremy, please.” I was on the verge of a
breakdown.

I heard some muttering in the background and
then the phone was taken from Jeremy. The next voice I heard was
Wyatt’s. “Mathew, what’s wrong?”

“Wyatt? I need help. I have a car, but I
don’t know if I can drive anymore.”

“Oh, my God!” he shouted. “Oh, my God,
Mathew
.”

I heard some questions from Jeremy in the
background. Then Wyatt said to him, “It’s Mathew, you idiot. He’s
escaped.” Jeremy made some sort of exclamation and seemed less
confused now.

“Where are you?” Wyatt asked.

I looked around. “I’m in a
Target
.” I
told him the highway I’d been on and the name of the exit I’d
used.

“Jesus, Mathew, that’s almost four hours from
here. Can you hold out that long?”

“Do I have a choice?”

He was coming right now. He gave me the
number of his portable phone but I had no way to record it so I
memorized it. He told me to wait four hours before calling the
number and then he would find me. I thanked him and hung up. With
four hours in which to do nothing, I went back to the car. Rooting
through the glove compartment, I found a pen and wrote the mobile
number in my notebook. I planned on sleeping and was sure that I
wouldn’t remember the number upon waking. Exhausted, hungry,
saddened by the events of my life, I settled down into the back
seat and went to sleep.

Someone knocking on the window awakened me
much later. It was difficult to come out of my slumber, my body so
weakened by my ordeal that I was closer to comatose than
wakefulness. There was a strange woman standing there, looking in
at me, knocking furiously now, jiggling the handle on the car door.
The woman was older than I was, probably in her mid forties. She
looked almost stricken as I roused myself and opened the door. It
was nighttime out and I knew that I had overslept. I hoped I hadn’t
missed Wyatt. Stepping out of the car, I balanced myself and
managed to stand unaided.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked me.

“Just groggy,” I mumbled. “I was waiting for
someone and fell asleep.”

“You were waiting for me, Uncle Mathew.” She
smiled a bright smile, the brightest I have ever seen, and waited
for me to react. When I did it was with tears.

She grabbed me around the neck and pulled me
tight. How could I not have seen it? How could I not have
recognized my own niece? But, of course, she was hardly the fifteen
year old girl I had known in 2007. It was thirty years later. She
was older than I at this point. There were lines on her face and
grey in her hair. She was a middle aged woman with filled out
features and mature eyes.

“Livvie, I’m so sorry,” I said, but I didn’t
know for what. Either I was apologizing for not recognizing her or
for past transgressions long since forgotten.

“No one’s called me that for a long time,”
she said lightheartedly. “Do you need anything from the car?”

I looked at it and shook my head. It was time
to say goodbye to it. That it had gotten me so far was a minor
miracle. I had driven hundreds of miles in it. I knew that I owed
Dr. Lewis Kung a tremendous debt. Neither of us could have known
the result of my flight, but now I was standing in front of my
niece and I felt rescued. And I had Dr. Kung to thank.

Livvie, because I could not think of her in
any other way, led me across the lot to where my brother’s car sat
parked. She called him on her portable phone and I soon saw him
walking out of
Target
and coming toward us. Wyatt was
approaching seventy years old, but didn’t look it by my standards.
In fact, despite some weight gain and a head of grey hair, I would
have bet that he was in better shape than I was. He flashed a huge
grin when he noticed me and quickened his pace. Maybe they had
finally discovered the fountain of youth because he didn’t look or
act like a man of seventy.

Grabbing me up in a huge hug, he said, “You
look terrible, Mathew.”

I nodded, scratching at the mangled growth of
beard on my face.

"Let’s get you something to eat.”

Wyatt, Livvie, and I sat down in a chain
restaurant moments later and ordered some dinner. They ate light
and I followed suit. For them it was late, but for me it was a
matter of survival. A starving man wants to fill his belly but
forgets how little it takes to do that. I had read once that
victims of famine, when rescued, were given only small portions of
food at first. I wasn’t starved, only half starved, but I wanted to
be cautious with a digestive system that was all too out of
practice.

We spoke over dinner. I was much more
interested in learning about their lives than telling them about
mine. They seemed eager to fill me in.

Livvie’s was a story of success. In
California, she had launched a career as a newspaper journalist and
eventually moved into television news. She was never on camera, but
was a writer. At thirty years old, she had met and married Robert
Simmons. I had met him via the webcam thirteen years before. I had
also met the two children, now seventeen and thirteen years old.
There was a third, now nine years old, and they had named her Lula,
which was my mother’s name. They had stopped there and taken their
family to Wisconsin to be with her parents. Robert had no family,
his parents gone and no brothers or sisters to speak of. They lived
close to Wyatt and Jeremy and Wyatt had known that she would want
to make the drive with him to pick me up.

Wyatt’s story was saddening. Devin was a high
ranking police officer in New York and he rarely came out to see
his father. Attenda had died several years before from a
particularly aggressive form of cancer. The time between the
discovery of the cancer and her death had been less than two weeks.
Upon her diagnosis, she had been advised that fighting it would
only make the time she had left more miserable. So she and Wyatt
had flown to New York to see Devin, stayed for a time while
planning a trip overseas. They never left for that trip, though.
Attenda had grown too weak and complications had eventually taken
her life in a New York hospital. Wyatt had flown back to Wisconsin
alone.

We finished dinner and headed out to the car.
On the way, it occurred to me to ask if they had heard from Jennie
over the past few years. Livvie and Wyatt looked at each other. I
thought there was pity in that look, but there was also a silent
agreement. They shook their heads.

Livvie took the wheel, with Wyatt riding
shotgun. I slid into the back and lay down. I felt very tired, even
more so with a full stomach. I watched the starlit sky through the
window as we pulled out of the lot, drove to the highway, and then
began to pick up speed. The last thing I noted before falling
asleep was that we seemed to be going much faster than I had while
driving out from the hospital to Wisconsin. Maybe the speed limits
had changed. I wondered just how far you could get in four hours
going at this speed.

I dreamt of Jennie and of Neville. In the
dream, Jennie was just a girl again, ragged and dirty and fresh
from the streets of New York. Neville was working for the United
Arab Nation and he laughed at me as I fought and fought to find my
way to her. Every time I seemed to reach her, he was there to stall
me while Samud stepped in and pulled her further away. Ultimately,
it was Igor Grundel who stepped in as my rescuer, knocking Neville
aside and wrapping his hands around the throat of Samud. But it was
too late. Jennie had gone, whisked away through time where another
Mathew Cristian could fight the same futile fight.