Читать книгу The Hard Way Back to Heaven - Karl Dehmelt - Страница 7

Prologue:

Tuesday Morning

Present Day

In the suburb of Abington, Pennsylvania, in a place called Willow Grove, a man named Harlan McGregor sits on his front porch, waiting for the world to end. He does not know by what means the end will come; sometimes those possibilities sit next to him, leaning along the sides of his wooden chair, forcing it to creak like bones. The wind occasionally tussles his silver hair. The wrinkles upon his skin touch the coarse familiarity of the wood as if shaking hands with an old friend; his boots tap to music his ears heard long ago. Even though he wears a flannel shirt, and a cross around his neck, he feels naked. Every morning at exactly six o’clock, Harlan walks outside and sits in his chair, and he does not hear a sound except for that music he can barely recall. At times, he can almost state the name of a song, but just like everything else, it flits out of his scope and eludes his grasp.

It is Tuesday.

Harlan sits in his chair, empty handed. His eyes, once vibrant and blue, still retain a glimmer of their former glory. Harlan has made friends with Father Time. Father Time lets him ignore the chiming of the bells hanging down from the sloped ceiling of the porch. Father Time gives him a cushion against the noise of the occasional passing car, gently pushing it down the street. Faces on the edge of his memory blur, the past bubbling just under the surface; a man, a woman. If not filtered by Father Time, they would cause him unbearable pain, and he would most certainly drown.

Time allows him to look on past the simple things: the jogger, with his Labrador, who always wears the Blue-Jay jumpsuit; the bikers, their tires spinning over pavement; the distant sound of sirens whipping like bullets through the air. They all bounce off and scatter, and Harlan loses sound of them in the silence, black pebbles dropped into a pool of water so full, the bottom becomes an afterthought in the depths.

As always, Father Time passes by and greets Harlan. His fingers are long and delicate, his form cloaked by a white coat. His beard is long and mystic, and he seems to hold the secrets of the universe just behind his pearly teeth. An arcane air sits about Father Time, one of knowledge accumulated from every moment of every century now seen as the past. Harlan welcomes him wordlessly, motionlessly. Father Time always sits next to him on the porch in the mornings, and he never says a single word.

Not many people bother to pass by the houses on Harlan’s street; the major highway running through the center of the area is far enough away to not disturb the residents. Shops try to draw passing cars in as they travel through: an Italian, family owned sub shop; a mechanical garage, under new ownership as of two years ago; a fancy men’s apparel store. Sometimes cars stop, and other times they don’t. Harlan does not look for them, he does not hear them, and he never rises from his chair.

Harlan is waiting for someone.

The path from Harlan’s porch snakes to the street and the sidewalk. His yard is small, containing nothing except overgrown clusters of grass and an apple tree. It is June. The buds on the leaves are just starting to bloom into full view, and the fruit is almost ready to emerge.

Hours pass by. Those who live around Harlan rise, as they should, getting into their cars and driving away to work. Harlan worked in his younger days; he had been a mechanic long ago, retiring after 32 years in the business. Now Harlan’s question is not how many years he has lived, but how many more await him.

At 8:05, someone comes walking down the sidewalk. Instead of passing by the range of Harlan’s gaze, they catch his eye. As the person turns from the sidewalk and begins down the path to Harlan, Harlan’s eyes seem to wake. Father Time steps off the porch to take a walk. Father Time and the figure cross each other on the path from the street to the house, and as they do, Harlan blinks. His old heart skips for a split second. He cannot make out who stands before him. He just sees a silhouette with no detail. In that moment, Harlan feels himself start to move, his mind now churning. He flexes his fingers over the angles of the wooden arms of his chair, letting the movement wash over them and give them momentary change. His relaxed lungs clench, and it feels, for one solitary remnant of Father Time’s gift, that he is holding his breath for the figure walking down the path.

The figure reaches the front steps of Harlan’s porch.

“Good morning, Mr. McGregor.”

In an instant, Harlan’s limbs, fingers, and mind sit back down on the wood of the chair, itself supported by the wood of the porch, connected to the earth and every other living person. The weight of the world rolls off his back, and he no longer baits the seconds before him. The words, whatever they were, escape him, forever remaining unsaid.

Harlan looks up at the direction of the voice, the sinews of his neck leaving rust in their path as they turn.

Before Harlan stands a teenage boy. He is of medium build, wearing a black tee shirt. The sandy color of the boy’s hair is not yet dull from age. His glasses are not yet bent by the force of time. Harlan’s shoes do not compare to the boy’s black sneakers. Harlan looks at the eyes behind the glass, those green eyes observing the old man sitting on his porch. The boy wears a watch upon his left hand.

Harlan clears his throat.

“Good Morning, Nathan. How are you this fine morning?”

The boy returns Harlan’s smile. “I’m doing well; I’ve only been up for about an hour, if you couldn’t tell. How are you today?”

“I’m doing fine. Just watching the world pass me by, as we used to say.”

The boy does not laugh, but chuckles. “I’m glad to hear that. My parents asked me to say hello for them.”

Harlan smiles again, and imitates the boy’s noise.

“Tell them thank you. Is your father still enjoying his job at the station? Has he gotten any trouble lately?”

The boy’s eyes break from Harlan’s, looking down instead at the arms of Harlan’s chair.

“There’s always trouble somewhere. He’s been away a bit more, with summer just starting. He hasn’t had many issues that I know of, so I guess that’s a good thing.”

Harlan’s right hand, the fingers permanently hardened from their years of use, contains two rings. One is a silver band. The other is gold, with a blue sapphire set in the center. Three rows of miniscule diamonds, with three stones set in each, adorn either side of the sapphire. Even under the awning of the porch, the sun still reflects off the gems. For each beam of light that passes Harlan by, with each taillight glinting in the sun, he still holds the rays which come from that ring on his pinkie finger.

A silence descends. Harlan sighs.

“Nathan,” Harlan says.

“Yes, Mr. McGregor?” Nathan jumps a tad. He’s been staring at the ring on Harlan’s hand.

“Would you mind having a seat for a moment?” Harlan looks up at the boy and grins, warm and inviting as a grandfather. An empty chair sits directly to Harlan’s right.

Nathan walks up the stairs, coming out of the sun, and sits down in the chair next to Harlan. Today marks his fourth visit to the property, and the first time Harlan has asked him to sit.

“Nathan, how many times have you been here to cut the grass?” Harlan asks, casting his gaze to the street. A blue Jaguar, a mid-2000s model, drives up the road, around the bend, and out of sight.

“Four, including today.”

“Four.” Harlan mouths the number, inspecting it like the contents of a car hood.

“Did I ever tell you about that tree there?” Harlan asks, gesturing towards the apple tree. He knows the answer.

Nathan frowns. “I don’t believe so.”

It’s a small tree, dwarfed by the others in yards around the neighborhood. Each branch sticks out. The wood is soft, but sturdy, to bend but not break in a strong wind, even after storms. Harlan walks out and checks on that tree every morning, and the damned little brave thing never wanders off.

“A long time ago,” Harlan says. “I planted that tree. It must’ve been at least thirty years by now. It grew from this little shrub into what it looks like today. Really, it stopped changing about fifteen years ago. I’d say that for as long as I’ve had that tree, it’s always dropped these apples, Nathan. They are still some darn good apples if you get them at the right time.” Harlan laughs, a genuine sound seemingly trapped inside of him for weeks. Nathan smiles in appeasement.

Harlan rises. The muscles that had worked for him his entire life work once more, leaving the chair. Usually, Harlan is inside again by 10 to make breakfast and clean the house. There is no use in waiting when he knows nobody will show up. As he stands, he is resolved: he and Nathan will still be standing out front, so he can continue to wait as he’s outside.

Harlan walks down the steps that connect to the path cutting through the middle of the yard, carefully placing each foot up and down. His feet remember not to trip over the ground. He had done it once before, and it had hurt him a great deal, a nice fracture in his hip.

Walking over to the apple tree, Harlan suddenly feels small. He’s around six feet tall when not slouching, but the apple tree is at least twice his height from base to tip. The branches reach down to shake Harlan’s hand, their particular wood swaying gently in the breeze of the morning. Small budding flowers have appeared on the tree, waiting for the apples to follow. Little spheres are forming in anticipation.

Harlan reaches his right hand up to one of the branches. He plucks one of the flowers from the stick fingers, greeting it in a way he hadn’t in years. It releases from the tree effortlessly, with the smallest tug separating it from the mother branch.

Nathan walks up beside him. Nathan sees a look of wonder on the old man’s face. He does not see Harlan smile—truly smile—often. His mood is usually jovial, but to see the emotion of the old man’s face turned into such wonderment at something so small as a tree strikes Nathan as peculiar.

Harlan turns, the small flower in hand. He holds it in front of his face.

“My grandson used to love these things. He’d pluck them off and bring them to me when he was real young. When he was able to reach them, the lowest of the low hangers, and pluck them off, you should have seen the look on his face.” Harlan laughs.

“I didn’t know you had a grandson.” Nathan says. The old man had never talked about his personal life before.

“Yes, I do.” Harlan says, letting the leaf float towards the ground as he turns back to the tree. “He’s about your age. You’re a senior?”

“I’m a Junior, actually. Next year will be my Senior year.

“I see. Alex just graduated high school. He lives about forty minutes away from here, in a small town.” Harlan’s smile dissipates, and the leaf falls to the ground on the calming pillow of gravity.

It lands on the grass gently, finally at rest.

The chimes on the porch trill.

“That was a long, long time ago.” Harlan says.

Harlan hears the laughter of a boy. It starts softly, but soon echoes towards him through time, air, space, and light. It carries a name with it on the breeze: Alex. Harlan catches the thought for once, not letting it escape or slide away from him like the song. He can hear the song playing too, emitting the notes of time and the bars of a different life. They dance and pirouette around the yard, closing in just as the hypothetical ends of the world have done on the porch before for Harlan. These are benevolent, these specters. Light, love, freedom, youth; all words accompanying the sound of laughter. Harlan looks at the top of the tree, how it seems to bend willingly, not afraid to lose its original form, for change is gorgeous.

However, as the good things come, Harlan suddenly feels a chill. It is a warm morning, but Harlan is cold. It dilutes the laughter of the boy, and a smell seems to drift from the house. Ghosts are now all around him, smiling at him, staring at him. Harlan has waited so, so long. And he will keep waiting, until it’s Tuesday afternoon again.

Distinctly, Harlan hears a voice say, “May 19.”

“Mr. Harlan?”

Harlan does not hear Nathan. Instead, the faces Father Time so graciously blurred sharpen in his mind’s eye.

One name escapes his mouth, as the memories crash down like discordant music:

“Michael.”