Cryptic Messages
by Rod Raglin
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I leave the station at a run. As I approach the bakery, I see two cement trucks parked beside the building. The ramp to the rooftop parking lot is blocked by traffic cones. It looks like they’re finally going to finish the paving. More noise, and I’ve already got a headache.
I burst into the reception area sweating and dishevelled.
“Ernie,” Maureen says, “I was getting worried about you.”
The clock behind her on the wall reads ten minutes after eight.
“Sorry.” I want to get to my office, close the door and decompress.
“Everything okay?” She looks genuinely worried.
“Yes, missed the train.” There’s a bouquet on her desk. “Is it your birthday?” I ask. I like Maureen and don’t want to appear rude or worse, weird.
“I was going to ask you the same thing. They were delivered for you.” She detaches the card taped to the vase and hands it to me.
“They look nice on your desk. Is it okay to leave them there?”
“Sure. They’re beautiful.”
“Great.” I pocket the card and head toward the door to the bakery floor, the staircase to my office on the mezzanine and sanctuary.
“Aren’t you even going to look at the card to see who sent them?” she calls after me.
“I already know.”
It’s ten o’clock and there have been no further messages. Whoever, whatever, has been sending them must by now realize I’ve “got the message.” I oscillate between berating myself for overreacting to some hi-tech prank to thinking what harm will it do to take a late coffee break, walk the two blocks to the location and satisfy my curiosity?
I decide not to give in. I take my chipped mug to fill from the urn in the coffee room on the bakery floor.
“Hey, Ernie,” Rodriguez says, “heard some hot babe sent you flowers. You been holding out on us?”
The crew sitting at the tables laugh. If only it were that simple. I fill my mug and head back upstairs. They don’t know the half of it.
As soon as I enter my office, another cement truck dumps its load of cement to cover the cracked surface of the rooftop parking lot, and the thundering and shaking make my decision for me. I can’t work with this racket. I might as well check out the meeting.
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I tell Maureen. She’s on the phone and nods. The clock on the wall above and behind her reads 10:28 a.m. I’ll be right on time.
I walk smartly up Industrial past the strip mall and a diner noting their addresses. The next block is the 5400; the address, 5460, will be in the middle of the block.
I look up the street and no people are loitering on the sidewalk, there are even some parking spots available. At 5436 there’s a dry cleaner’s; 5456 is a beauty supply store; 5460 doesn’t exist. It may have, at some point, as revealed in my internet search, but now it’s a vacant lot encased in a chain-link fence.
I walk past, making note of all the addresses right to the corner. I look all around, up and down. Nothing. At least nothing unusual. Certainly, no one is waiting to meet with me.
Then I hear a crunching, creaking, crashing from back the way I came. It gets louder and louder, terrible breaking and smashing. Then silence is punctuated by car alarms. Now shouts, sirens, people running, I’m running down Industrial toward the bakery. As I approach, I can’t see the building because it’s set back from the street, but there’s the crowd gaping, staring, shouting.
I push my way to the front. The roof has collapsed. The cement truck has fallen through the mezzanine and onto the bakery floor. It’s completely buried in the debris except for its bright blue-and-red cab pointing skyward.
“Maureen!” I start to run toward the storefront that’s looking wobbly but still intact. I step through the large broken window rather than take a chance on pulling the door and having the teetering tower descend on me. Maureen isn’t there. I look behind the reception desk. No body, no blood. Maybe she got out. I hear sirens outside, girders creaking inside. Time to leave. The clock on the wall behind the desk has stopped at 10:37 a.m. precisely.
Maureen walked away without a scratch, but six of my co-workers died, including Mr. Gruber, and three were injured. Rodriguez will never walk again.
A cement truck weighs about 30,000 pounds. When it’s full of cement, you can add 40,000 pounds. At the time, the cement truck was full and preparing to unload. The roof gave way right above my office.
* * *
There’s an investigation, of course, but no one focuses on why I wasn’t in my office at 10:37 that morning when any other Thursday that’s where I’d be. For two weeks I don’t leave my apartment. The only person I talk to is Mom. I can’t visit her because I’ve told her I’m in Dubai on business. She doesn’t mind. I keep expecting to receive more messages. Some explanation as to who and how, but most importantly why? Why save me? But there are no more messages.
Finally, I go to the trauma counselling offered by WorkSafe BC. It doesn’t help. I mean, to get the answers I want I’d first have to explain why I wasn’t at my desk when the roof collapsed. I imagine that would facilitate a very quick trip to the psych ward. I’ve combed the internet but the closest I’ve come to answers are aliens or parallel realities. Neither brings understanding nor makes me feel secure.
I need to get motivated; although the company’s insurance provided a generous severance package, their disability payments will soon run out, and I still have Mom and myself to support. My trauma counsellor suggests a support group for anxiety and depression, and I decide to give it a try.
I suppose that, at some point, a few of the members of the group had real lives: jobs, maybe even careers, relationships, and they actually enjoyed themselves. These are the ones who actively participate while most of us try to appear to be listening and not fidget.
Then there’s sullen Cullen. He sits bent over, head down, muttering. Every other meeting, he erupts, shouts profanity, something demeaning like “You’re all just a waste of air,” and storms out. I have to admit I can relate.
The only other attendee I know the name of is Florence Kincaid, not the kind of woman you give a second glance, which is probably why I’m attracted to her. She dresses to avoid notice, baggy, dowdy clothes draped on a painfully thin frame. Her mouse-brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail that exposes an unexceptional face, the lack of makeup making it even more ordinary. She constantly studies the floor even when she speaks, which is seldom and never in full sentences.
I’ve noticed the occasional furtive glance my way but when I respond with a smile, she’s back looking at the floor. Without the interaction with the people at my work, I’ve become more isolated, and even a loner like myself needs some human connection.
The group has a new facilitator who is a stickler for time, suggesting that anxious and depressed people need structure. As he wraps up the meeting, I’m watching Florence, hoping to catch her eye, though if I do, I’m not sure what I’ll do next,
“Next meeting is a week today at 7:00 p.m., precisely!” our leader declares.
Precisely! Precisely! Hearing that word accentuated out loud, the same word that defined the tone of every cryptic message I’d received, was jarring. And not only to me. Florence’s head jerks up, wild eyes search the room. Her chest is heaving. She cups shaking hands over her mouth and nose to control the hyperventilating. Our eyes meet. She doesn’t look away.
We file out of the meeting room, and I wait for her outside. “Would you like to go for coffee, Florence?”
“Yes.” She smiles, then looks at the ground. “Please call me Flo.”
At the coffee bar, she orders a small decaf. I breathe a sigh of relief since I only have five bucks and I still need bus fare to get home. I have water.
“You don’t drink coffee?” she asks.
“Not this late.”
“I have trouble sleeping, too.”
The need to know takes precedence over my shyness; besides, I’m not sure if I can muster the courage or the cash for a second date.
“I noticed your reaction at the end of the meeting, Flo, and wondered—”
She frowns and looks straight into my face, doesn’t blink, but her jaw moves like she’s grinding her teeth. The intensity of her stare is disconcerting. She’s going to think I’m crazy. Maybe, it’s enough just to have her company, we don’t need to divulge secrets.
“Precisely,” she says, never taking her eyes off mine. “He used it all the time.”
“Yes!” The tension in my chest backs off a bit. I try to hide my excitement, but what have I got to lose? “Same with mine.”
Big tears drip down her gaunt cheeks. She begins to tremble.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll go first.”
* * *
We begin meeting every Wednesday after group, but then it becomes almost every day. We go for walks or sit in coffee bars. I take my own Dr. Pepper. Sometimes we bring books or our laptops. We don’t talk much and aren’t in a rush to get to know one another. Thinking you might be crazy is tough enough to handle, I’m not sure I want to double down on it by connecting with someone who has the same problem. Just being in each other’s company, knowing what we both know lessens the anxiety.
Slowly and cautiously, we’re getting comfortable with one another, so much so I get the courage to ask, “Do you ever wonder why, Flo?”
We’ve spent the last two hours sitting without speaking; I search the weird net, she reads a book.
She closes her book and looks at the floor. “The best I can come up with, Ernie, is that fate made a mistake,” she says.
“Fate?”
“You know, how some people believe everything is predestined.”
“I know what fate is, Flo, I just don’t understand the mistake part.”
“Well, who makes the plan?” Flo starts tapping her foot on the rung of her stool. “What, if once in a while, you know, they mess up.”
I want to ask who “they” are, but I’m afraid too many questions will intimidate her, and she’ll shut down.
“If everything is predestined, then it’s all linked,” she says. “There’s a sequence, like this person will do this and the result of that action will influence something else... I mean, there are a lot of people and that’s a lot of planning.”
I think of my own life. How if my mother hadn’t gone to the eighteenth birthday party of her best friend and hadn’t drunk that third glass of wine, she would have never tumbled into bed with my father, who was the friend of her best friend’s brother, on leave and about to go back to serve his second tour of duty in Vietnam where he was killed. If just one of the events hadn’t taken place or were out of sequence, maybe two glasses of wine instead of three, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with Flo.
“Okay,” I say.
Flo looks up and gives me a rare smile. “So, what if there’s a screw-up, they find a mistake, and fate has to be reset? They need to manipulate events and they use people like us to do it.”
“Why us?”
“Because we’re innocuous, Ernie, isolated, weird, introverts, people no one’s going to listen to.”
“We don’t matter.”
“You matter to me, Ernie.” Flo raises her face. “But yes, maybe not to anyone else.”
“But how is fate reset by having me attend a non-existent meeting at the same time a cement truck falls through the roof and kills my boss and five co-workers?”
“Or summoning me to a meeting at an all-night coffee bar at the same time my dorm catches fire, and my three roommates die? I don’t know.” She’s back looking at the floor, muttering something.
“What?”
“I said, what’s the common denominator?”
“The common denominator? We didn’t die,” I say, “but why were we spared? For what purpose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you feel special, Flo?” I’m getting animated, attracting attention, but this is what I’ve been spending hundreds of hours trying to find out, this is what, and I admit it, is making me crazy.
“No.”
“Neither do I, just the opposite. Do you think you have a calling? No. Me neither.”
“Shh.”
I take a swig of Dr. Pepper, crunch the last of the Cheesies I brought. Why am I so agitated? I never thought Flo would know the answer, just share the question. Fate made a mistake? I’m more inclined to believe it’s the work of aliens.
“I’ve come to accept that I’ll never know.” She says it like it’s no big deal. It happened, it’s over, time to move on.
“Does that make you feel better?”
She reaches over and takes my hand. Hers is cold. I wonder what she’s doing.
“Sharing it with you does, Ernie.”
Then it occurs to me, could this be what it was all about?
We’re sitting in a 24-hour Denny’s. I think changing the location of where we meet makes us less conspicuous. I don’t know who’s watching, but just in case.
“I’ve been thinking, Flo, that maybe we could share an apartment, platonically, of course.”
I like Flo a lot, but I confess my dwindling resources and the idea of splitting cheaper rent is a major contributing factor to my offer.
Florence smiles. She looks happy, or at least not as glum as usual.
“I’d like that, Ernie,” she says. “But it might be better if you moved in with me.”
“What?” She’s looking at the floor, and I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.
“I’ve got more room.”
“How much more room?” Sharing anything more than a one-bedroom apartment will likely negate any savings on my rent.
“I have a house, Ernie.”
“You mean you live with your parents?”
“No, my mother died when I was a kid, and Dad passed away three years ago. The house is mine. I inherited it.”
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Rod Raglin
