Purgatorium (48 page)

I wait, expecting the worst would happen by leaving the waitress alone with him. I look over to her and notice that she seems scared for me.

“Don’t you worry. It’s like I am going to put you through a trance but instead of music, I will use only my words. What fun!”

She nods to me, letting me know she will be safe. I tie the blindfold over my eyes. Everything is black.

“Now, listen very carefully,” Sealtiel continues. “When you see the person you want to mirror. Focus on that specific person. You should already feel at peace with you being inside your dream so all you really have to do is open your mind to the possibility of looking like someone else. Alrighty?! Good luck!”

“You are training for a marathon. Currently, you can run 12 miles. You increase the distance you run on your long-run day by 7/10 mile each week. In how many more weeks will you be able to run 26 miles?

I concentrate intensely. I hope I will be able to find the answer to the seemingly impossible question Sealtiel asked if I can just think hard enough. After waiting about 30 seconds,
Sealtiel
repeats the question. After another 30 seconds, he repeats it again.

Everything is dark. It is nighttime. I look up to the mirror and realize I must be around 8-years-old. I look down to see that I am sitting on my bed. My thoughts and body all of a sudden become numb. I feel myself just being a spectator to my surroundings. I can hear only the sounds of my father in the hallway outside my bedroom. His footsteps are heavy, boots still on. He paces back and forth like a restless animal. I hear him getting closer to my door. Then, the door opens.

“Son?” my father asks. He comes in and sits at the end of my bed. My legs twitch, knowing he must have found out what I did.

“Yes?” I reply, steadying my voice to make sure my father can hear no fear in it. He values strength, steadfastness. Only appearing to be these things will forestall my father’s rage.

“Are you ready?” I nod as my father sits closer, beside me. He still smells like the outdoors, like a man in the midst of his daily routine. He takes a black rag from his pocket and covers my eyes with it. He tightens it to the back of my head.

“Give your answer,” my father says, voice gruff. “In years and round them to the thousandth place.” Sometimes, I would buckle under the pressure.

“I don’t understand,” I stammer, suddenly overcome with claustrophobia. “Why am I wearing the blindfold?”

“Got to block everything out, son. Focus on the problem at hand.”

I have heard this explanation before. My great-grandfather had learned the technique of sensory deprivation during the Second World War, while out on a mission to uncover prisoners from war camps. The old man had been through hell, fighting off the Japanese, as well as a case of malaria in the Philippines.

He had studied the map of the entire island chain day and night until he could picture it in his head blindfolded. The situation was dire, and the only way he could manifest clarity of vision was to cover his eyes and memorize every inch of it. This way, no matter what happened to him, he could find his way out.

“You know what happened to him?” my father asks.

I know the story well. I have heard it a hundred times, perhaps more. My great-grandfather had been captured three weeks into his mission, but managed to get free after a month by stealing an old revolutionary war flintlock pistol from inside one of the enemy’s bunkers and making a bullet out of a lead spoon he also would snag.

On the day of his escape, he was so weak from lack of food and sleep that he had to tape his pistol around his hand so to not accidentally drop it. Also, he taped a self-made sharp poker stick around his other hand for defense against any close up attacks.

Waiting in his cell one night, a guard comes walking out, getting every prisoner ready for shift duty. Once his gate was unlocked, my great-grandfather aimed his pistol towards the guard and fired. Without hesitation he used his sharp poker to jab at the guard’s throat, killing him instantly. He then fled quickly out of the bunker. After that, he roamed the dank, dark rainforest for miles upon miles and suddenly he came across a waterfall.”

My father gets closer to me.

“And because he knew that map so well,” my father repeats to me, “he could find his way from the waterfall back to the holding site. After a few days passed, he went back to that holding site and he did not come home alone. He brought back forty U.S. marines with him. Saved over one hundred and fifty-three soldiers.”

I had seen my great-grandfather in photos, holding his flintlock pistol in the air. My father looked like my great-grandfather. That photo is all I can see in my mind’s eye.

“He got a five star Medal of Honor,” my father continues. I know my father has the medal in his pocket and is probably touching it as we speak; it is always there.

“What is all this about?” I say, pulling the blindfold off my head. My father has picked up my math test from beside the bed. He slams it onto the ground. I hear my mother stop washing dishes in the kitchen. Everything in the house is still.

“Your teacher called me today,” my father says. “Said you’d been cheating on your math test today.” I can hear my
mother
resume cleaning the dishes.

“I didn’t,” I insist. “I swear.”

“I told your teacher my son is not a cheater,” my father says, standing beside me, looming over me. “Told him my son studies every single night and that he would come to me if he needed extra help. Then you know what happened?”

I shake my head.

“Called me in, wanted to show me the test. Wanted to let me compare for myself two different exams: yours and the boy’s beside you. Know what I saw?”

I hear the water turn off downstairs. “No,” I say.

“On his test, all the questions showed his work, the formulas. While on yours? Well, yours had nothing but the answers.” My father folds his brawny arms, lips turned up. “No work!”

I can hear my
mother
lightly tiptoeing down the hallway towards my door.

“I told him you were an honest kid, so he gave me a chance to prove as much. I took one of them questions, brought it home, and asked you just now.”

“Is everything all right?” My
mother
’s voice is tender but frightened.

“You could tell me if you ever needed anything, son!” my father roars. “But you chose to steal the answers instead!”

“Are you okay in there?” my mother says, gently but slightly louder.

“You made a liar out of me, son. A liar.”

“Hello?” my
mother
shouts. “Can you
please tell me if everything is going all right in there?”

I swallow hard. I can picture my father’s unforgiving glare, the sort of look one gives a mortal enemy.

“Everything is fine!” my father yells back.

“Really? Because I hear shouting,” she says. She knows something is wrong, I think.

“Yes, it is!” My father shouts back. I hear him walk over to my door and slam it shut.

40 Minutes

Feeling the chill, I open my eyes.

I hear Sealtiel speak through the darkness, “Now what is your desire?”

I remove my blindfold, look in the bar mirror, and see I look only like myself and not at all like my father. I look over at
Sealtiel
standing beside the waitress, looking disappointed at me. He shakes his head and sighs, seeing his breath in the cooling air. Reapers shriek in the distance.

“Times up!”
Sealtiel
says, looking at the waitress. “And so close, too! It’s a shame you couldn’t manage it this time. I rather thought you might, despite all of your abysmal failures in previous trials.”

I look at the knife sticking up from the bar. He picks it up and hands it to me. I look at the terrified waitress.

“To make things easier for you, you should know that she,” Sealtiel points at the waitress, “was there when you got reaped the last time. Kind of odd how she made it out with her memories intact and you didn’t.” Sealtiel turns to the waitress. “Tell him!”

I look at her. Scared, she blurts out, “It’s true, but I can explain!”
Sealtiel
slaps her across the face. She sobs.

“Explain
what
? How you led him to the roof and, just when he was close to getting out, with just one
hourglass
left to break, you gave him up to the reapers?” Sealtiel looks at me, then back at the waitress. “He trusted you before, it’s true. But can you really trust a lost soul? Or better yet a
demon
in disguise?”

The mere shock of this new development turns my emotions inside out. Thoughts of her being my demon hadn’t crossed me until now. Who really is this woman to me?

I look at
Sealtiel
and suddenly see my father staring back at me. I feel like a failure again. I can’t stand that I am never good enough.

“What’s it going to be?”
Sealtiel
asks in my father’s voice. “Live or die?”

I look to her and my mind begins to race. Suddenly, as if something just clicked inside of me, I think,
I don’t want to end up like her.
I look at Sealtiel defiantly. I drop the knife on the floor next to my stool.
Sealtiel
pets the waitress’ head, smiling at her now. She looks at me as if she was surprised.

“Are you suggesting she deserves a second chance?”

I nod.

“Do you not think it’s a coincidence that her room number is 5? Just like the five lettered word you need to find? Maybe she is your answer. Maybe she is your demon in disguise. Or maybe you can’t see the truth because you desire her? Is that it?”

I am stunned by the question.

Sealtiel walks over and
picks up the knife, putting it away. He then sits back down next to the waitress, still smiling. “Lost souls don’t get second chances!” He pulls the waitress by her hair around the end of the bar, pulls her head back, and then smashes it into the bar mirror. She falls to the floor, her eyes rolled back. Blood drips down the mirror.

Though horrified, I am jealous of her—not feeling the pain I feel in my heart. Almost as if she were free from this place.

“I promise you this and only this, anytime between now and the last day, you will have to pull the trigger on her. If you don’t, she will turn the crosshairs around and unlike you, she will fire,” he says.

Sealtiel turns to me, his smile never having left his face.
He whistles and skips gleefully past me, down the stairs, and outside.

I look back to the girl, wanting to know what she is. If she did give me up then I want answers. Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow I will get to the bottom of it. I hurry to look at the hourglass reflecting off the silver cover. The hourglass seems to be almost at forty-two minutes. I can’t miss the train!

I run out, down the stairs, out the door, and into the subway.

I run through the subway station and slip in inside the subway car. I sit,
watch
ing the
hourglass
reflection in the subway window. I try to not think about what just happened, but can’t. The fact that the waitress will be alive again tomorrow doesn’t calm me. I look up and see
Sealtiel
standing there.

He takes off my watch from his wrist and shows me the back engraving.

It reads: “I believe in you.”

“That was Madi’s desire for you. What are you worth? It was a statement of love and understanding. An understanding that through all your hardships and abuse, she was gonna be there for you. That is courage and strength beyond compare. She shows you her value! So what are you worth?! From what I just witnessed, nothing.”

What am I worth? What are you worth?! How have you even helped me?!

“Help yourself!” He throws out money from his pockets to my face. “My worth isn’t shown on green paper; my worth is how I choose to see myself. That is my self-worth. That is belief in myself. I also believe in you. Now why don’t you?!”

How can I believe in myself if I don’t even know who I am?!

“That’s a crutch. That’s a lie unto yourself to make you feel helpless. Another word for that is lazy. You doing nothing is lazy. You giving up in the middle of a race is lazy. You cheating on your wife is lazy! You being too afraid to do what you love is lazy! If you make yourself out to be worthless, then that is all you will ever be. Worthless!”

He takes out a bottle of Macallan, which he had placed on a seat. “Let’s have another toast.” He twists the cork out, pours a glass, and raises it to me

“To the man with no self-worth.”

I get angry, brushing the glass out of his hands, almost hitting the hourglass window. This brings a shock to Sealtiel’s face. As he is distracted, I raise my hands and grab on to his nicely pressed dress suit.

“When will you realize that your life is perfect? Anyone would be grateful to have it! Do you not understand your own value? Your self-worth is something to desire. To my dissatisfaction, you plainly don’t see it!”