25th
Second Chance Part 3
Jess’s appointment was for 7:30 and they arrived fifteen minutes early. The parking lot was almost as deserted as the street filling a mere five percent of its two-hundred-slot capacity. The small group of present vehicles was isolated to one corner of the lot and Ben parked away from them. Their destination was an annex to the left of the hospital.
As they approached the generic glass doorway, Ben finally took Jess’s hand but it was more subconscious than intentional, a habit as simple as the swinging of one’s arms while walking. Her fingers were algid and emotionless and they remained corpse-like as Ben slid his own between them. For the second time that day he considered praying. He just wanted someone to tell him what to do. Was he supposed to kiss her? If he told her that everything would be alright would she believe him? Could she trust him with such a task? He wished that he could get something from her face but whatever she was feeling had surpassed physical manifestation before even the stars had hidden behind the sun. He watched her shoulder in its stiff/confident/apathetic rhythm and anywhere else it would have fit on someone easing towards a convenience store and Ben wondered whether an achievement of apathy would require the sacrifice of everything she felt and that they were entering the building with something that now existed solely in the physical. And this thing that they were so eager to be rid of was now disdained because it was a reminder of something felt that had eventually brought them to this moment. Jess’s hair resembled an abstruse swaying curtain that had a voice in the breeze created by her passage that told Ben that he had lost her and that she’d never admit it and he’d be forever trapped in the desperation of a cozened life.
The automatic doors muttered robotically as they slid along their felted path, tripped by electrical currents. There was a thing black mat lining the pre-lobby chamber and Ben wiped his feet even though they weren’t soiled because he thought it might pass the time. It gave Jess’ hand a chance to escape and she found a seat against the wall. Ben greeted the receptionist and Jess watched him nervously lean against her desk while the stranger typed and when he turned to look at her and, despite the fact that a teary film blurred her vision, she could discern every detail in his face. Jess saw the concern and the wisdom and the love impressively glued together with his passionate strength and she psychosomatically felt the fetus kick in panic because his gratitude and love were suffocating it and the growing tumor in her throat threatened to suffocate her at the same time. Despite her desire to mirror Ben’s comfort and to reassure him that nothing between them was changing, Jess remained completely still. She knew that showing a single feeling would be like attempting to let only some air out of a rubber balloon using a sewing needle and that everything else would escape and she would collapse. But after, after it was outside of her and after it had been buried in a red bin of medical waste and she could return, she would return to Ben and she would finally be able to weep at the beauty of his relief and they would share that passionate strength that glued everything together.
At 7:28, a nurse practitioner emerged from the double-doors to the right of the reception desk. She was short and wore glasses with thin black rims. She smiled with a generosity and comprehension that surprised Jess because she had forgotten that she was in a hospital and not the bathroom of her prom. As Jess responded to her softly timbred name, Ben was sure that she was going to walk through those doors without saying anything, without acknowledging that she was not alone and Ben felt a sudden urge to fill a gas tank. And for the first time since he had found Jess he wished that she had never existed. He resolved to find that apathy inside of himself. But Jess was only halfway across the room before she came to Ben and embraced him for the first time that morning.
“I love you,” Jess whispered and Ben choked, his villainous pride bursting forth through every exit, creating hundreds of new ones to accommodate the unprecedented exodus leaving him at the very floor of humility. Ben could only return,
“I didn’t know… I couldn’t see… Jess… I don’t know what can I…” She stilled his lips with a finger and said,
“Ben, you turned a stupid blind date into true love. No matter what.” And she returned to the patient nurse and Ben wanted to respond but he was paralyzed and so he watched the curtains sway and he fought the tenacity of his paralysis but was unable to recite the words that screamed in his head: ‘I will be right here when it’s over. Come back to me Jess.’
When the doors’ rubber linings whispered to each other and his girl and his baby had vanished Ben was finally released of his paralysis. The receptionist informed him that he was free to wait until the procedure was through; he would be led to Jess could sit with her until she was fit to leave. There were magazines, mostly designed for a female audience, which reminded Ben of how insignificant he was in this whole event, and there was another room where he could watch a ten minute documentary on preventative medicine and financially responsible operations that could prevent reproduction. But when Ben looked from the table of magazines to the receptionist, he could see his own eyes in her face and he could see Jess’s nose beneath them and his father’s ears to both sides and his mother’s mouth and Ben fled without a response.
As Ben was leaving the building he passed by a girl who looked like she was too young to purchase alcohol and was skinny enough to be an anorexic ten-year-old with a pillow. She walked with her head down and arms crossed but as they passed, her eyes met Ben’s and they demanded encouragement and compassion and answers. She walked rigid, like Jess, alone, and both of her wrists were wrapped in fresh white gauze and Ben felt an overwhelming impulse to fuck her in the back seat of Jess’s van. Thrusting his hands further into his coat pockets, Ben hastened past.
Even though it had been but ten minutes, the world seemed to have filled considerably. The parking lot had once again become a living organism with vesicles of people docking and undocking, surrounded by pedestrians that crossed the open spaces like nonspecific hormones. At the bus stop, people departed the vector in a curved line like DNA threading from an anchored phage. They carried dead facial expressions and dead briefcases made of dead skin containing dead trees and dead pigs wrapped in dead lettuce and dead wheat. Ben wondered how many of them had ever considered abortion. An elderly man stumbled and almost fell from the lowest step as he crossed from bus to pavement but no one seemed to care. It reminded Ben of a piece that he had recently watched on television about another stumbling old man. When his wife had succumbed to the fatality of Alzheimer’s disease, an eighty-year-old man decided that his retirement from forty years on the police force was no longer going to suffice. He carjacked a 2002 Solara with a gun that wasn’t loaded but in fact had been hastily detached from a plaque that read ‘for forty years of service and honor’ and if the driver had looked close enough he would’ve seen bits of wood still glued to its surface.
But instead of relinquishing his vehicle, the driver panicked and applied full power to the engine. The old man watched in both wonder and subtle sexual agitation as the Solara ran through a red light and was torn in two by an oncoming greyhound which subsequently rolled six times, spewing passengers like bits of undigested vomit. The simultaneous murder of thirteen people turned out to be just what the old man needed to be assured that he had outlived his wife for a reason.
As the old man caught his balance with the bus’s doorframe, Ben wondered how many of the people dispersing from that spot had ever considered homicide. And he wondered if they too had trouble understanding what it means when thirteen people die in order to sooth someone who doesn’t want to grow old. But Ben knew that they couldn’t know what it meant to fear old age because it was only the elderly who ever grew old.
It was the future within that any of these people fretted upon rather than the future without. What harried these people was whether they would ever catch up on rent, whether their father would succumb to his cancer, whether their car was going to make it to work on an empty tank of gas, wondering if the coincidental similarity between the reading of their odometer and their lottery picks was the sign that God had been preparing them for, whether the war in Israel foreshadowed the end of the world, whether old men were all going to start carrying guns because growing old wasn’t fair. And as Ben shuffled uphill against the crowd he was uncomfortably aware of the other whethers that existed within contemplating, dreaming, wishing, wanting, praying, needing, loving, growing, coping, and being. The whether a child would make them happier and the whether a permanent spiritual shift had occurred in that waiting room, and the whether love could survive anything that human beings could attack it with and if it would ever forgive them for it. The force of the unemotional downstream rapids almost caused Ben to change direction, to join their rapids and walk back towards the annex. Because he’d rather worry about whether the chilly air would cause his fresh shaven jaw to rash and if the graphs came out right on the poster at Kinkos than wonder if it was actually possible to love someone for an entire lifetime and if a father took it seriously when his son told him that he hated him for being grounded. And Ben was envious of all the people who never realized that love scarred much deeper than hate.
Ben walked two blocks to a coffee house. He ordered a black house blend and a maple frosted doughnut for Jess. The girl behind the counter accepted his order with a friendly smile and the only thing that Ben could offer in return was a five dollar bill. He sat next to a large window that’s view was largely taken up by a neighboring CD trade. It was the first time Ben had ever seen the store before 10 a.m. and it looked like an entirely different building without the teenagers lining the benches in front with coffee and cigarettes and headphones dangling from their napes.
Several months before he had become a father, Ben bought a used Richard Marx CD inside that store for two dollars and the store clerk was surprised to sell it because the store was having trouble selling CDs but Ben and Jess still listened to CDs the day they left the football game for their first concert and his dashboard CD player hadn’t yet been replaced by a GPS-MP3 player. That day he bought the used CD was no socially imposed event such as an anniversary of birth or love but rather a special event that existed because of itself. That morning Ben had woken next to Jess and the breeze through the open window was thickened with sunlight and it rippled the white sheet from her shoulder and the bone’s anterior bump was blended perfectly into her triceps and Ben looked at Jess and his heart began to choke him as it thrashed and wriggled, attempting to pump blood that fought to stay still and just watch.
The same breeze-born wind kept pestering Jess’s hair, blowing it around like a curtain lining an open window and every time she brushed it out of her face it was replenished fast enough to defeat her. Ben ran ahead to the Corvette because the trees above were waving frantically to him as if to say,
‘We’re not sure how long we can hold it together. Hurry up Ben.’
