True Heroes (27 page)

              “What’s your writing one?”

              “Apollo Tadzio.”

              Kain internally cursed at the realization that he’d never remember that. Even with that, he sighed a fit of laughter. “What in the world happened to you? When my father did talk about you he said you were a prodigy, a piece de résistance that would show the world the light of God. Years kept on, though, and he eventually talked less and less about you.”

              “Follow me. I have a likely explanation for that.” He pushed off the tree and wandered back towards the building while talking over his shoulder to an approaching Kain. “None of those were my first heroic act. My real first one was…careless. I started questioning everything after what I thought was a failure. This was back in high school; the beginning of exam week senior year. The year that mattered so much. I careened out of control.”

              “You failed your exams over a mistake?”

              “No, nothing so dramatic or exciting. I went through the motions, which was enough to walk away from that week with all A’s, and made it to graduation without talking too much to anyone. My girlfriend at the time was Carol: a walking prism of sunshine. She had been keeping me above water that entire week, but I asked too much of her. My mind has replayed this same image for twenty years in a somewhat masochistic way: her hands with skin nearly tearing from the bone adjusting my uncouth attire. I remember her caring. She cared so much and scolded me for not caring with her. I told her I cared, but she didn’t believe me. Something about that statement opened a black hole for her. She realized then that there was something inside me that didn’t care about the things I used to, about the little things. I will always remember her red nail polished chipping a little as she backhanded me across the face, and further as she threw her camera into a small lake. The next day was an incredibly awkward Valedictorian speech given by me with Carol not present, of course. The speech…gave me a chance to vent. To say what I really needed to say. I gave it in sunglasses, and boy was I smooth about it. I got to the podium and gave a short, sweet, perfect speech into the microphone, pulling out a pair of black aviators before they even mentioned my name. I didn’t even need to sell it; my entire speech was flat and toneless enough to genuinely make the entire audience nervous.”

              They re-entered the building from a new doorway half the surrounding yard away from the original. The door sported a fire alarm warning, but no alarms sounded as they went through and into a hall of equally distanced doors with thick, fenced glass covering them. They walked down the middle, Kain quickly realizing the rooms on either side were patient rooms. Every door had a grid number and smaller text revealing the chief problem with the dwellings dweller. Schizophrenia, dementia, paraphrenia; nearly every room had a new mental disease to the right of the clear door. The end of the hallway came fast with Caleb taking a left turn into the last room. The clear door opened easily—duct tape over the lock—into a cubic room with a bed, night stand, filing cabinet, and about a hundred papers lying on the ground. “What’s with all the papers?”

              “They let the patients wander the halls every day at nine, one, and four, and they love souvenirs from open rooms. It’s all blank paper to distract them from the real goodies here.” Caleb leaned down and opened the top drawer of a two-story filing cabinet, grabbing a manila folder from the top and quickly hopping back over the blank pages. “Your daddy was the second person I told about all this. The first was another old friend of mine: a doctor who had been watching me since birth. In that way, my networking was pure genius: a physician looking after my life-life and your dad, a preacher, looking after my after-life. Your dad, however, saw all the emotional turmoil I was putting myself through as an insult to all the years he’d put in with me. So, he gave up when I put myself here. That’s why I expected him to send someone else one day.” They both exited the room slowly. “Anyways, next question.”

              Kain looked down to the speckled tile. “That doesn’t add up. My dad has only given up on a few people in his life, and none of them with the title of ‘prodigy.’” He let his leashed thoughts drag him on until they came to a conclusion. “Is that why you’re here?”

              “It’s not the reason.”

              “How’d you do it?”

              “I tried every way I could think of. The electrical cord snapped before my neck did, the bullet bounced into a wall, water couldn’t fill my lungs fast enough, and a car accident barely left a scratch on me.”

              “How in the hell did you not kill yourself after all those attempts?”

              “I suck at suicide too, I guess.” Caleb’s eyes suddenly dropped and his tone became empty. “If you want to know why I’m here, go to the first doorway on the right past the door we came in. Walk in, look left, and look at the person sitting about three feet away from the doorway…wait, never mind. She’s coming to us.”

              He looked up and blankly stared the direction he’d just described. Kain followed with his eyes as a hunched woman shuffled her way into the hallway on faded slippers. A tied purple robe covered a back hunched from years of therapy and had a popped collar barely covering the chin of a crinkled face. She was horribly aged; the skin clearly lost to the ravages of sun and surf with a frown that glowered at them. Her nose drooped along with her cheeks; her skin was so mundane a color that Kain nearly couldn’t distinguish it from the grey wall behind her while her eyes seemed fixed and enflamed staring past Kain. The hairs left on her head had grey encroaching from the roots on the tinted reaches of each hair, the color backing against the cliff above her slumped shoulders and surely realizing the battle was lost. Wrinkles absolutely devastated her face, the trenches deep enough to possibly see the sinew of what she was truly made.

              Kain’s study ended, and yet the woman’s eyes kept their scowl and—her lips quivering slightly, blonde eyebrows nearly crossed in her concentrated gawk—fixated behind him. He turned slightly, seeing Caleb returning her stare with tears on the edges of his eyes. “Who is that?”

              Caleb was ready to tell, answering immediately. “She always had a stress problem; she never wanted me to know about it but she did. Her ‘pills’ that she took were for anxiety. It took me a while but I found out she was on a drug that increased her vision. Basically increased blood flow to the neurons and made the world skewed and bigger. See, she was afraid of tight spaces, and her brilliant doctor decided to give her a life-time supply of this drug to always make the world seem big no matter where she was. He never told her that the possible side-effects included dementia and mental illness. She overloaded her brain a day after my graduation and they had to induce shock-therapy almost immediately.”

              “Oh my god, that’s Carol?”

              Caleb pushed aside the question. “Whoever did the therapy decided to let her know that I was the one that triggered the breakdown. That was her last real memory before they juiced her. Now, since my face never changes, I’m the only one she remembers, day in and day out, and the only thing she remembers about me is that she hates me in every way possible.” His gaze drifted to the floor as a tear slipped off the rim and his grip on the folder tightened. “Imagine waking up knowing that hatred was the only thing keeping you warm, and imagine knowing that the only person that still cared about you went insane because of you.”

              “You’re here for her. Why?”

              “I swore I’d never leave her side. Even if she hates me, I won’t leave her side as long as she’s alive.”

              “But why?”

              “Because I swore to her I wouldn’t.” Caleb looked up with red eyes, and seemed human. That gravity tore at Kain’s insides as Caleb struggled to stand, suddenly looking as if he felt his age. He pushed off the wall then and walked quickly to the door, staying opposite the side Carol was standing. Kain followed him, carefully avoiding her line of sight.

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              “I’ll just grab a number five with egg rolls and the spiciest sauce you’ve got.”

              Kain smiled at Caleb. “Brave man.”

              “I live life on the edge, what can I say?” He pulled out his wallet, but was stopped by Kain. “Trust me, I’ve got plenty of money to waste.”

              The young man dropped his hand and leaned against the counter while Caleb quickly paid with small bills. “I was expecting hundreds.”

              A smile flew between Kain and the cashier as his change fell gently to his hand. They both walked over to a rounded bench and sat. “Best to be inconspicuous, I find. Hundreds being thrown around here would be like attaching a homing beacon to my back.” Caleb’s head lowered, causing his sunglasses to slide a little off the bridge of his nose. Kain’s eyes darted from one staring person to another, all of them marching the spectrum between glance and gawk at the man across from him. “They do that everywhere I go.”

              “You notice it?”

              “How can I not?”

              “Man, that doesn’t freak you out? Do you know why they do?”

              He pushed the glasses back against his skull before crossing his fingers and legs. “There’s a little something I have inside of me that you can probably feel too. Apparently, it’s always coming out through my pores and always surrounding me. In a dark room, it’s easier to feel. In any room. They all look at me like an elephant sitting here talking to you instead of a man.”

              The psychologist let his mind decode anything Caleb gave him. “You don’t appreciate them at all. You don’t even like them do you?”

              Caleb leaned forward while twitching up a side of his face. “It’s not about liking them really.” He leaned his face down and let the glasses fall to the table. “One-hundred-and-seven people died within a thirty minute radius of my house from accident or murder when I was eighteen and nineteen.”

              “So?”

              “So they look at me like I’m the one that could ward off this or that. They look at me as a protector, but when I had my chance to protect, I spent it thinking and oscillating between options, and now I’m not even sure how I’d go about it. Nothing lines up. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with that? Doesn’t there just feel like that’s not how things should be?”

              “Number fourteen!”

              Caleb scooped up his glasses as he stood and half-smiled. Kain followed him to the car and moved to the driver’s seat. “You haven’t let anybody down.”

              “That might be the worst part of it all: nobody sees how wrong it is. Nobody at all.”

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              The two moving wooden sticks swirled around noodles and an unhealthy, unsavory sauce. All of the chicken and rice lay hidden beneath the wig of a witch in the soggy, white container. Kain stirred at the mixture and marveled across the table at the way Caleb could control the staff. One of the younger nurses had gotten them a quiet area in the garden, where Kain was becoming repulsed by his aging food, and a few orderlies had gone straight to Carol’s room to make her comfortable at his request. Now, he was smiling wide and laughing heartily with a pregnant nurse. ‘You were hungry when you got here so you should be twice as hungry now. There’s something unsettling about this guy. He’s too normal. He doesn’t have the docile absence of mind behind those eyes; his are always attentively grabbing at the outside world with those blue irises….’

              The woman walked away with her cheeks in a red flush and Caleb resetting his expression to neutral as he looked back down to his cooling food. His chop sticks danced as Kain’s had while he turned his head to the side. “If you’d like to continue your questions you’re more than welcome. While your pity is flattering, it’s not needed.”

              Kain shook his head. “No, no it isn’t pity I’m just kind of lost in my own thoughts. Lots of different thoughts.”

              Caleb took a bite. “Mind taking you in different directions?”

              “Yeah. Like the end of my time without a ‘doctor’ in front of my name, then there’s the end you were talking about between you and Carol, and the end of me not being a father. It’s the end of a lot of things soon.”

              Caleb slurped a noodle into his mouth. “The end of anything is the beginning of something else. That’s what they say isn’t it? You’re looking at this all wrong. Ha, matter of fact, you’re looking at things a lot like I used to.”

              The wind blew through the lone tree about three feet from their metallic table. “What do you mean?”

              “I always thought I should go forward hard and fast while acquiring everything I could until I ended, but every end continued into a new end blah, blah, blah; I realized the beginnings are the truly cherished parts. Use these minor ends to create the beginning to something better and slower until you find yourself just enjoying life all together.”

              “What about the middle?”