The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter 2 (Jim picks a friend)
Another day passed. If I’d thought that befriending someone in the neighborhood was going to be one of my easier labors, a going-through-the-motions effort on par with pushing my pen across some pages for a questionable hour or so, I now knew differently. And my problem went beyond the so-called distancing problem that Maddy had said I might have to overcome.
Besides Rose, every other house near ours held professionals of one sort or another: the widowed Roman Catholic mother across the street (with the hard-drinking teenaged son) who went somewhere every morning nattily attired and returned every afternoon at five o’clock looking just as natty; the website designer down at the corner who sold smokables, weed and hash, mostly, as a part-time evening job (I was one of his customers, although an infrequent one); the lesbian couple with the matching Toyota Corollas in their driveway who disappeared every August to some exotic port of call; the legal secretary/chartered accountant combo a couple of doors up, sporting saucy underpants and erotic tattoos beneath their staid exteriors, I’m sure.
And, of course, Weir.
They all packed up and went somewhere for the day. I was stumped. The street was dead.
And then, as if on cue, Apricot, the monster dog from across the street, rose into view from the quasi-shade of her picket fence, stretched, and sauntered towards her porch. She ascended in slow motion, reached the summit, pirouetted, and melted into a prone position at the top of the stairs with a satisfied hmmph.
Aha. Wendell what’s-his-name … Berkshire, the short story writer and stay-at-home layabout. From what little I’d seen of him (when coming home early from dental appointments and such), his hours seemed ludicrously flexible and his appearances usually featured him gripping a broom or a rake as he roamed his wood chips.
I thought about staying where I stood to wait for him. Eventually he’d step out of his house, hoisting his coffee mug, ostensibly there for a mere snootful of air, and I could nab him when he reached for one of his cleanup instruments; but ultimately, I didn’t want to do that. How much I didn’t want to was obvious with my next action. I stepped back into the house and walked to the bookcase for his short story collection, one of Maddy’s prized literary possessions, vowing to sample his work as a conversation starter.
I’d never been a fan of the short story. For the most part they seemed contrived. The best didn’t, of course, but they were few and far between. And at the other end of the spectrum lay the pretentious tales, written by littérateurs who harbored superiority complexes cultivated in Greenwich Village writing groups and Midwest workshops.
I lowered myself into my living room chair with Berkshire’s effort, entitled As If It Matters, and flipped it over to check the back cover.
After nearly gagging on his steely-eyed dust-jacket photo, I read the lone blurb, a Stittsville Inquirer gem: “From ‘You got any spare change,’ the poignant story of an exotic male dancer, Banana Flambé, whose stage act goes horribly awry, leaving him a crisp shell of a man, living in alleyways, drinking Sterno, and questioning his core values, to ‘What’s On Television?’, a cautionary tale for the ages, Berkshire dares to examine the early twenty-first century’s moistest crannies with outstanding style and wit.”
That remained to be seen. I opened the book at random, thumbed to the start of a story, and read:
MARATHON MAN
October 10, 8:47 a.m.
Eddie Kolbin placed his right foot on the back of the sofa and bent forward at the waist. A small puff of air escaped his lips as he touched the tip of his nose to his kneecap. He held the position for a moment. His hamstring stretched tight, sending a small electrical hum from calf to buttock. He repeated the procedure with his left leg, stepped back, and touched the floor three times with the palms of his hands. His grey cotton T-shirt, turned charcoal with sweat, clung to his body. He felt limber.
He moved to the center of the living room and began a lively jig, shaking out any unworked muscles. Without breaking his rhythm, he glanced at his watch. He was on schedule. The yogurt, honey, and egg milkshake he’d forced down at breakfast half an hour earlier had changed from a leaden lump in his belly to a high-octane fuel pumping through his system; he was hitting on all cylinders. The only thing left on his agenda was to run — all 26 miles, 385 yards.
He could do it. One month ago he’d run the course in two hours and forty minutes. But sometimes his mind played tricks on him; sometimes he felt he was the old Eddie Kolbin: Eddie giving a final jerk to get his size fifty-six jeans up and over his mountainous ass; Eddie getting lodged between the arms of his favorite easy chair. Even now he had to glance down at his body to verify the changes. His calf muscles bunched and stretched fluidly as he warmed up — steel-spring and whalebone. His waist was narrow, his stomach flat. His T-shirt fanned out at the chest and shoulders.
He wanted to look in a mirror for a truly objective view, but he couldn’t. Twenty-three months ago, on his first day home from the hospital, he had smashed every mirror he owned. At that time, he hadn’t wanted to look at himself. No way, not until he was ready — ready to show them all.
But he was close now. The final stages of his plan were falling into place. If he broke two hours and twenty minutes today, he would order the mirror he’d been admiring in the Sears catalogue — the full-length job with the oak trim. He’d hang it on the back of the bathroom door and see the real Eddie Kolbin every time he showered.
8:59 a.m.
The temperature was twenty-two degrees Celsius; there was no chance of rain.
Before he began, Eddie clicked the mileage on his pedometer back to zero and clipped it to the waistband of his shorts. He hated using it, but he had to. Most marathon runners had relatively straightforward routes; his was twisting, repetitive, and he would have to spend most of his time remembering his lap count if he didn’t use the gizmo. He preferred reflecting on his past as he ran.
He started at nine o’clock. Thickets of plants and flowers flanked the start of his route: azaleas, peonies, rhododendrons. They bathed him in a kaleidoscope of colors. He felt as though he could run through a brick wall. But Eddie knew he was running through something harder, more unyielding, than any wall. He was running through all the words, all the cruelness he had been subjected to in the past.
Words. They can’t hurt you, can they, Eddie-boy.
Oh, they most certainly can.
Dr. Forbes, standing at the foot of Eddie’s hospital bed, his cold, cruel stethoscope lying against his chest like a rot-detecting divining rod: “You’re a mess, Mr. Kolbin. You won’t see your twenty-eighth birthday at this rate.” Mr. Cummins, Eddie’s high school phys-ed teacher, confronting him in the change room: “Y’know, if I had my druthers, Kolbin, I wouldn’t allow a big, fat slob like you to take gym with the other guys. You’re a disgrace.” Jim Johnson, head of the accounting department, shuffling his feet as he talks to Eddie in front of the water cooler: “Eddie. I … the unit has asked me to talk to you. Big guys like you … well, there’s more of you. You have to bathe daily if…”
Words. They’d all eat their words.
The turning point in Eddie’s life had come on a sweltering summer night two years ago. He had run out of cigarettes just before a Bogart double bill was about to start on the channel nine late show. The outside air was like a blast furnace compared to the air-conditioned comfort of his apartment, but Eddie ignored the heat and headed to the store in his shuffle-flop version of a sprint. He was halfway there when the pain hit: a sledgehammer shot to the chest. Numbing jolts coursed down his left arm with the regularity of a metronome. Somehow he made it back to the apartment, clutching his Winstons weakly in his right hand. But he was in no mood for a cigarette by that time, and the Bogart double bill had lost its importance. He lay on the couch in a fetal position, sweating, praying, and aching a deep, deadly ache. At about two o’clock that morning he finally admitted to himself that he wasn’t suffering from gas pains, and he took a cab to the emergency ward at St. Michael’s.
Eddie spent two weeks in intensive care and two weeks in recovery. When he wasn’t being scanned, electrocardiogrammed, or sponge-bathed by some grimacing orderly, he sometimes had the privilege of Dr. Forbes’s company. More than once the doctor told him how deplorable he thought it was that a twenty-two-year-old man could suffer a major myocardial infarction. But Eddie didn’t have to hear the words to feel the doctor’s disgust; he could see it on his face.
Eddie had no visitors during his convalescence. Both his parents were dead; he had no other relatives, and he had no friends. But he didn’t care. His plan was starting to crystallize, and he needed time and space to put it in order.
10:00 a.m.
Eddie rounded a turn and passed a large stand of dogwood. He loved this part of the course. It seemed an endless path of lush foliage, pumping pure, unfettered oxygen into the air.
He maintained an easy stride as he glanced at his pedometer: eleven miles. He was right on schedule; but then, he’d been right on schedule since the day he left the hospital. Admittedly, the first year had been hard. He had always felt hungry and tired. Not a day went by when he didn’t long for a bag of salt and vinegar chips, a piece of sweet-and-sour rye smothered in butter, or a tall, cold glass of beer. And when he walked (a mile at a time was all he could manage at the start), his heart beat against his ribcage with terrifying force.
Everything was an uncertainty in the beginning. As he got leaner, healthier, he even worried about losing his disability insurance. But he lucked out there. The doctor handling his case was young, barely out of internship, and working on government contract. After their first few meetings, Eddie knew he had two years’ insurance under wraps. He could read the fear on the doctor’s smooth face: if I send you back to work and you drop dead on me, it would not be an auspicious start to a long, illustrious career. Eddie hadn’t bothered seeing him in seven months now.
By the end of that first year, his weight had dropped to 198 and he was running 12 miles a day. His motivation kicked into overdrive then. He felt reasonably sure he could not only compete in the Big One — the Boston Marathon — within the next twelve months but challenge in it as well.
And why not? He wasn’t running for the same reasons other people ran. He was running for revenge. And when he’d completed his first marathon, fifteen months into his metamorphosis, he dreamt his sweet revenge all the way through it. He imagined he was back on his old high school track, running the course with dear Mr. Cummins, ex-world-class decathlete, enduring world-class bully. “C’mon,” Eddie had grunted, in the same gruff, needling tones Mr. Cummins had always used on him. “Pick ’em up and put ’em down, lard bucket.”
Eddie completed that first one in the very respectable time of three hours and three minutes.
11:00 a.m.
The temperature was still twenty-two degrees Celsius. Eddie glanced at his watch, then his pedometer: 22.2 miles. His shorts and shirt clung to his body, but he still felt good. He estimated his finishing time at two hours and nineteen minutes. Excellent. In the six months till Boston, he would have to pare a paltry ten minutes from his time to be in the mix.
As Eddie passed a thicket of rhododendrons, their pink and yellow tubular flowers seemed to stand up and salute. They smelled sweet to him — sweet like the smell of success. Eddie wondered if Jim Johnson and the rest of his sensitive co-workers would think he smelled when he won the whole shootin’ match later this year. Eddie figured they wouldn’t. In fact, he decided he’d pack up his running clothes (right down to the jock), unwashed, and mail it to them to take a whiff of. They’d like that. The running gear of lean, clean Eddie Kolbin, world-champion marathon runner. Yes, that would be quite a souvenir.
When he won.
Perhaps Mr. Cummins would turn to the sports pages the next day and say, “Yes, by God, I think that is the Eddie Kolbin.” And perhaps Eddie would pay Dr. Forbes a visit and see if that piece of refuse was still repulsed by his presence; perhaps all of these things would come to pass.
Eddie checked his pedometer. He was approaching twenty-three miles. He knew he would be hitting the wall very soon. It rarely varied for him. Somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-three and a half miles, his lungs would feel like punctured footballs, his leg muscles like worn elastic. He would have to run on automatic pilot for a mile or so, but he knew he could do it. He had done it before.
Then it came, in great, sweeping waves. Eddie lurched, gritted his teeth, and began to think of finish lines, adoring mobs. He could see them lined up on either side of him, cheering, screaming his name: Eddie … Eddie … Eddie…. Their upturned faces were wide-eyed with adoration.
Eddie felt no pain.
And then he felt great pain. A cold band of steel wrapped around his chest, squeezing with sickening familiarity. The scream of the crowd changed to a dull roar as he stumbled. He tried to yell “NO” but it escaped his purple lips as a mangled gasp. His arms, now numb and lifeless, flapped uselessly at his sides. His knees buckled, but through momentum and electrical impulses he managed three more steps in a staggering duck walk before sprawling face first onto the path.
It was 11:03 a.m.
October 24, 10:00 a.m.
The woman standing across from Officer Donaldson was small and prim. Her iron grey hair was pulled back in a tight little bun. She clutched the front of her housecoat in a white-knuckled grip, as if she didn’t trust the buttons to do the whole job.
Everything about Mrs. Seabrooke seemed locked up tight — except her lips, Donaldson thought humorlessly.
“And how long had you known Mr. Kolbin?” he asked.
“Known?” she said. “I never knew Mr. Kolbin. I don’t think anybody knew him. He moved into the apartment across from me about three years ago. Lord, was he fat. A mountainous man. Anyway, for the first year or so, I’d see him coming home from work, usually with a 7-Eleven bag crammed full of goodies. Then nothing — neither hide nor hair of him. Well, about a year and a half ago, I started hearing strange noises coming from his apartment. Construction noises. That’s not allowed in this building, and I tell you, I had a good mind to phone management on him.” Her small hands fluttered from her housecoat, perching on her hips.
Donaldson looked up from his notepad. “Anything else, Mrs. Seabrooke?”
“Lordy, yes. After them construction noises stopped, the thump, thump, thump noises started. Two, maybe three hours a day, like he was holding a one-man hoedown in his apartment. But I still never saw him. I don’t think he ever left his place, at least not that I knew about.”
Donaldson marked down, “Never left apartment?”
“But it was the smell that really made me take notice,” Mrs. Seabrooke continued. “That and the lack of noise. I thought that perhaps he’d snuck off without paying the rent and maybe left his freezer unplugged. I had no idea that this…”
“Thank you, Mrs. Seabrooke,” Donaldson said. “That will be all for now.” He stepped back and opened the door to Kolbin’s apartment. Mrs. Seabrooke moved forward, craning her neck, trying to peek around him. Donaldson unceremoniously closed the door in her face.
The ambulance crew had Kolbin’s body on a stretcher and were now zipping up the body bag. Donaldson shook his head and stepped around them.
He moved past the knot of furniture in the middle of the living room and stepped into the pathway that ran the perimeter of the apartment. He knelt and looked at the floor covering: Astroturf. It was worn and frayed in the middle, down to the hardwood in spots, but still emerald green where it hugged the flower planters. He followed the path through the roughly constructed doorway to the bedroom. Like a big game hunter, he pulled apart some overgrown ferns in the planter before him and surveyed the scene.
The bedroom furniture was huddled together in the middle of the room, too. A bed, a dresser, and a chair.
He followed the path out of the bedroom and down the hallway. More planters — plants as far as he could see. He stepped through another rough-hewn doorway and back into the living room.
Donaldson was truly puzzled. The world lay just outside this man’s apartment, yet he’d gone to the enormous trouble of recreating it indoors.
He pulled out his notepad. Agophobia? No. Agraphobia? No, that wasn’t it, either. He licked the tip of his pen, jotted down “housewife’s syndrome,” and put the pad back in his pocket.
He would be able to look up the word back at the office, but he’d never know for sure if that was the answer. The only man who did was on his way to the morgue.
All right, then. Aside from some inconsistencies, he didn’t embarrass himself too much. It could have used another edit and it was contrived, but I had to admit, I didn’t see the ending coming.
But whether or not Berkshire stood poised at the doorway to literary success, as Maddy had claimed in the past, was a matter of opinion; if I had to assess “Marathon Man,” I’d call it average at best, Okefenokee Review fare. Actually, I wouldn’t even consider him the best writer on the street.
In any event, the fact that Berkshire was the only person home in the area during the day (aside from Rose McIntyre) settled the real issue — because I wasn’t about to canvass the neighborhood after dinner, hat in hand, asking people to get to know me better in an effort to complete my rehabilitation assignment.
I’d go ring his bell. Soon. And unless he’d taken my lack of interest in his existence these past years as a snub and told me to fuck off, I’d attempt to … to what? Become his pal? Expand my horizons?
I guess I’d just have to wait and see.
Thanks for reading.