8.06

8.06
by Justin Rulton

They come to talk to me.

They tell me things I don’t want to hear. They bring me answers to questions I don’t want to ask.

Uninvited. Like a sudden dull pain in your temple, or a tiny black insect that lands in your lemonade on a summer’s day.

They don’t frighten me. Not anymore. It’s just something that happens. Cars driving by on the street outside. TV adverts that always seem louder and even more threatening to my intelligence than the shows amongst which they jostle for attention. I don’t want to buy what they’re selling. I know what I like, and I know I’m never going to like what’s advertised on television.

It’s just something that happens.

Every evening at 8.05.

It’s not like I suffer from OCD. Not full-blown, anyway, but whenever it gets to a few minutes after eight I trudge up the stairs – still bare wood; haven’t gotten round to re-carpeting them yet – to connect my no-longer flashy smartwatch to its charger that sits on the desk. The desk that also supports the computer I try to coax into making me write more good. The watch face lights up when it clicks onto the round white disc and starts receiving its power. It always says 8.04 or 8.05 and I always wait to see the green number at the end change to 8.05 if it’s not quite there yet. Not sure why. One last look, one last notification of the exact time until I put it back on my wrist before I go to bed, a couple of hours later, just so it can track my time asleep. Not that I care. I never do anything with the information it provides after 6.15 has nudged me awake. I always wake up then, no matter what time I’d eased myself beneath the duvet.

It’s not full-blown OCD.

Then I turn to leave the dark room.

And that’s when they come to talk to me.

I don’t really ever see them, although I do have an impression of them. Just beyond the doorway you turn to the left to go along the hall towards the bathroom. The stairs begins to the right, about halfway along. We have these motion-sensitive light strips at the top of the stairs, but they don’t kick in until you’re almost at the top step so, standing in the doorway, the hall remains quite dark. It’s not that the regular lights don’t work, it’s just fun having the motion-detecting ones come on without having to do anything. Kinda like being in a music video or something.

That’s where they wait for me, standing on the stairs, at the end of the hall, outside the bathroom. The music video lights never come on, so I’m not sure whether they’ve been there long enough, standing completely still, for the lights to go off again, or whether they have somehow found a way to be invisible to them. Consequently, they’re invisible to me too although, like I said, I do have an impression of them. Like shadows in the darkness. Just the merest change in density.

I can’t say if the air gets any cooler when they come, either. We keep one of the windows in the office – which is what we call the room with the computers and the watch-charger and the desks and the books and all the different types of paper and card – ajar, even in the winter. So even when the heating is on, it’s never very warm up there. Maybe they do make the air colder. It’s hard to say, just like it’s hard to say why I kind of hope they do. It just seems as though they should. If you close your eyes and imagine standing in front of an open fridge, when the kitchen is freezing cold at 6.35 on a January morning – it’s like that.  We don’t have radiators in our kitchen. Is that a thing? I mean, do people have radiators in their kitchen? Seems weird to me. But then I’ve never been one for plug sockets in bathrooms, either.

When they do talk to me, after a few moments of what I assume is them just looking at me, making sure it is me and that I’m okay, they always start in these slow, pleasant tones like we’re friends and they’ve missed me. They never say hello, or offer any other form of greeting. They just start talking, like the conversation we were having the night before never ended. I don’t suppose they ever do end, not really. We might be talking about the squirrels that come to the garden every morning to gather the nuts I lay out for them, or maybe they’re asking me something unusual, like how come I never learned to drive and then, as I take a step along the hallway landing, the video lights come on and I go back downstairs. There’s never any sign of them leaving, going back to wherever it is they came from.

Recently, in the last two or three meetings we’ve had, they’ve started talking about time. They seem to have become rather intrigued by it, which makes me wonder if time is something they had never previously considered. Or, maybe, everything else had been a preamble and it was, in fact, the subject of time they were most interested in.

‘Today came shorter,’ one of them says. I haven’t given them names, and they’ve never offered them, either.

‘It’s winter,’ I reply. ‘The days will be getting shorter for another two or three months. Didn’t we discuss this before?’

‘Quieter. Quieter today.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘they’re digging up the street to lay cables or something, so there’ll be no traffic for a few days.’

‘How many more short days?’

‘It usually starts to get better in February’, I say, wishing we were already there. It’s so demoralising, the darkness, the cold, the decay. Waking in darkness, coming home in darkness, living in darkness.

‘How many days until February?’

Sometimes they come across like children and it makes me feel like a grown-up. Sometimes, not so much.

I briefly consider the mathematics, then tell them, ‘Eighty-four.’

There’s quiet for several moments. Almost quiet. I’m not sure, but I think I can hear them talking amongst themselves. Very, very softly. Or perhaps I’m hearing their thoughts. Then another of them, a few steps down the stairs, asks, ‘How many for you?’

I frown at the question. I don’t know if they can see my expression. Maybe they can see in the dark. I’m just thinking about asking if they can, because that would be cool, when another says, ‘Until you die.’

Surprised, I ask, ‘What?’

‘How many days until you die? Do you know? Do you want to know?’

No, I think to myself. I don’t want to know. Unless the answer is, like, six. Then I’d want to know. I’d have a lot of stuff to do if I only had six more days.

Wouldn’t I?

Or would it all just be, in the most literal way I can imagine, a waste of time? What’s the point in doing anything at all when you only have six days? May as well just sit in front of the TV. I mean, what does one do when left with less than 150 hours? It’s not like I have any affairs to get into order. We live here, she and me. We’ve lived here for almost seven years, and what’s mine will eventually be hers. That’s it. Affairs ordered.

She never hears the voices and, when I get back downstairs, she never asks what I’ve been doing for so long, so I suppose time moves differently up here. Maybe that’s why they’re so interested in its passing. Sometimes I think about that song, the one about meeting a man on the stairs who isn’t there, but there’s more of them than just one and I know they’re there. I know they’re here.

Who was it? Bowie? Bolan? Someone else who’s name starts with ‘B’?

‘I…,’ I struggle. ‘I don’t know.’

What if they say, like, I have another twenty years? Seven and a half thousand days. One hundred and seventy-five thousand hours. Would that make a difference? Would that kind of finite number push me away from doing what we all do? We tell ourselves we still have plenty of time to accomplish all those things we’ve been meaning to do for years, but instead we just procrastinate and procrastinate. We flip channels, we flip pages, wanting to suppress ourselves with other people’s lives.

Life gets in the way, they say. Never bought that. We just have the one life and we have to make it ours, we have to fill it with all the things that make us happy. I know that, and I’m pretty sure you know that, too. Still, I’m as guilty as anyone. One day, I tell myself. One day I’ll do that, or this.

One day I will be happy.

I think it was Bowie. And it wasn’t the man who wasn’t there, it was me. But I am. I’m here, and they’re here. It feels like everyone I know is here, except her. She’s downstairs, watching television or looking at her phone.

‘We know,’ says the first. The voice is suddenly callous, a little smug. I think they’re all smiling at me. Grinning. Like an evil villain from an old silent movie. Rubbing their hands together, maybe. If they have moustaches – and perhaps they do – they could well be twisting the ends of them in some horribly overstated Machiavellian gesture.

For the first time since we all met, since they found me, suddenly I feel a chill.

It was scary in the beginning, when they first showed up. I went through all the processes; I’m imagining things, I’m going mad, I need a drink or I need to drink less, you know. But, after a while, a couple of weeks, I got used to them and now I almost, sort of look forward to seeing them again. Not that I can see them, but you get what I mean. This is the first time in a long time, though, that they’ve given me that chill. Across the shoulders, down the spine, hair pricking, mouth getting dry.

For a moment I lose my place in the conversation.

Oh, yeah. The countdown.

‘Is it a big number?’ I finally ask, and immediately feel stupid and even more unnerved. ‘No, don’t tell me.’

‘Do you want to know how many she has?’ one of them asks.

I don’t like the way such an emphasis is laid upon the word, ‘she’. It’s full of dislike and disrespect. It’s foreboding.

It’s an interesting question, though. I mean, would you like to know how long your significant other, your other half, your partner has to live? Is that something that would interest you, or is it just me being morbid? And if you have ever given it any thought, would you want he or she to go first? Or would you rather make the principal exit, stage left, so you wouldn’t have to suffer the loss, the loneliness? All that time, just for you. Just for you to do whatever you wanted to.

I consider it for a short time. I actually think I would like to know, even though I’m not sure why I should want to. What kind of person does that make me? I suppose it depends on what I would prefer; if I want to be the last man standing or if, instead, I’d rather leave her to deal. As I’m thinking I’m also nodding my head, which I suppose must have indicated to them that yes, I did want to know.

So, they can see me. I thought they probably could.

‘It’s up to you,’ the one standing – I assume – by the bathroom door tells me. I doubt he would have been crouching, or sitting, or squatting. Definitely not lying down. The voice didn’t come from anywhere that low.

‘What do you mean?’

It’s a weak response, but I’m caught a little off guard by that one.

‘It’s up to you,’ he says again.

‘How can it be up to me?’ I ask. Still not a great reply. I should have told them no, of course it’s not up to me, I don’t even want to think about it. But I do, and I am.

The hallway falls silent again, and I find myself thinking about being alone as the spring finally arrives. About being without her. The sun warming the air, the flowers beginning to bloom, life starting up again, full of optimism and promise. We’ve been together for so long – ten years, three and a half thousand days, eighty-seven thousand hours – that I can barely remember what it was like not seeing her every day. I do remember those first few weeks, though. Wanting to see her. Waiting to see her. Impatient. Heart beating faster. Thinking about her when she wasn’t with me. Passion. Intensity. Excitement. New things, new experiences, new emotions. The scent, the touch, the taste. When we were first together it had been, quite literally, sensational.

That was ten years ago though, and every springtime must eventually meets its autumn.

No, I don’t mean that. I love her still. It’s just not in the same way. I love my favourite songs and always like to hear them, even if that initial, immediate explosion of fervid joy I experienced the first few times I heard them has now passed. Even though I know every word, every note, every beat. I still love them. They’re a part of me, and have helped shape me into what I am now.

And what am I now? Someone wondering how many more days she would live. That’s not who I want to be. Is it?

I think of spring again, the spring that’s just a few months away, the spring that will make everything better again.

‘It could be thirty years,’ one of them interrupts. ‘Forty. Or it could be…’

‘Five minutes,’ says another. ‘Ten minutes. Of course, you would have to dispose.’

‘What?’ I look dead ahead. Shocked.

‘An hour,’ the first says. ‘Need to plan.’

They all make sounds that suggest they’re nodding and agreeing with themselves. I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if that’s because I still don’t fully understand what they mean, or whether I understand all too well and there’s something in the idea that doesn’t repulse me.

‘Who?’ I ask. ‘Plan?’

‘Not like putting the rubbish in the bin,’ one of them says.

‘Not like taking old carpets to the dump,’ says another.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, although now I think I know exactly what they mean.

‘Forty years,’ the one near the bathroom says, somehow making the words hang like a sentence from a judge.

‘Or an hour,’ says another.

It goes quiet again, until one says, ‘You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?’

I shake my head.

‘Yes, you are. Thinking about freedom, about new things all over again. Pros and cons. Ifs and buts.’

‘If,’ the one at the top of the stairs begins, ‘the one question you can’t ignore is that of whether you would be caught…’

‘You won’t be caught,’ the one just behind him finishes.

‘You won’t be caught,’ the one at the top of the stairs repeats. ‘It will be so easy, so simple.’

I lower my head and close my eyes. It feels as though I’ve already made the decision, that I’ve already given in to the idea that my whole life is about to change, that something I’d never even remotely considered ever before, that I thought I would never be capable of doing, is now something that has to happen. Predisposed. Fated. From nowhere, suddenly everything seems so clear, so obvious.

All you need to do is go downstairs, take that huge knife from the block in the kitchen and open up the future.

I don’t even know if that was one of them speaking, or if it was inside my head.

I move towards the stairs but, oddly, the music video lights don’t come on. Bracing myself, expecting to feel them against my body as I move past them, I place my foot on the step, feel for the rail and…

Was that a touch? A small, gentle force at the base of my spine?

I can’t feel the rail, don’t find the next step.

And then there is nothing. Blackness. I can no longer feel myself, cannot sense that I am anything at all. I have no body, no arms, no legs. I am nothing.

What has become of me? What have I become?

The people on the stairs have gone. Gone from the hallway forever. I know this, even though I can’t say how I know. Then an unfamiliar address comes into my mind, and I become aware that I must go there tomorrow. They will be waiting for me. The conversation will begin again, but this time I shall be standing with them, telling someone else something they don’t want to hear, providing answers to questions they don’t want to ask.

She is still downstairs, sitting on the sofa, watching television and scrolling through her phone. I see her once more before I finally depart, but she doesn’t notice me. Soon she’ll come to see where I am. To see what she has inherited. To begin days of questions and loneliness and darkness and decay. But then, I am given to understand, she will finally be happy. She will have her spring, and she will bloom once more.

The watch on the charger lights up, the last green number transforming.

8.06.

Fiction © Copyright  Justin Rulton
Image by B. Hunter