—The Corrected—


2005 AD

“And it's 10:31pm. We have an update concerning the strange ball lightning sighted earlier today and how we believe it's connected to the storm. On that note, water levels—”

Jacob turned off the radio and unlocked the passenger side door.

“Get in! God, it's pouring.”

Paul climbed in and instantly turned around to look out through the rear window.

“So, what's up? What can I—” Jacob began.

“Drive. Please. It doesn't matter where.”

The rain pattered down on the plastic of Jacob's blinker, which now rhythmically informed no one else but the rain of Jacob's intention to rejoin the non-existent traffic.

“Fuck,” Paul finally said, angry and exhausted. He rummaged through his coat pockets to produce a soaked pack of cigarettes. “Fuck,” he repeated, this time merely exhausted. From a dashboard sticker, a bear smiled at him.

Jacob was driving very slowly. The tires of his station wagon worked their way through two fingers of rain water on the street.

“Do you know what a dog does... when it feels that it's going to die?” Paul asked, visibly shaken.

Jacob thought, staring out through the violent rain.

“I… I don't know?”

Somewhere, in an unnaturally untidy apartment, Amber called Brooke "Christie".

“It… Jacob, I…” Paul looked at the pack of cigarettes again.

The car stopped at a light. There was a constant fog of rain hovering over the windshield. The traffic light's red turned this fog into a sinister aura. Behind the windshield, Paul's mouth finally formed four words, which caused no reaction at all in Jacob's face. The light changed back to green, and Jacob accelerated again.

The rain was also coming down in torrents on the roof of a nearby church. Past a white banner, the car could be seen passing by. Paul was talking, inaudibly, while Jacob stared ahead.

Somewhere, under the arch of a doorway leading out of an apartment building, Brooke turned around, the idea of making a dramatic exit through the nightly streets washed away with the deluge outside. She broke down in tears and confessed to Amber that this was her first relationship, lesbian or otherwise. A hundred other confessions were made that night, and Brooke would only leave the house the next morning, passing a car accident sealed off by police tape and countless vans with TV station slogans on their sides.

“She has to get an abortion. It's enough that I killed myself. And…” Paul hesitated.

Jacob looked through the window. He felt a decision forming. “Jesus, Paul,” he began.

They drove past an office building. The car's headlights illuminated the whole front of the building, including a potted plant behind a fifth floor window, next to which a girl stood. She moved softly.

Suddenly, the windshield became foggy, as if someone had thrown a semitransparent plastic shroud onto it. Jacob's brain hardly registered the short cracking noise.

Thunder rolled, echoed through the streets. Jacob saw nothing. Neither did Paul.

“What the…” Jacob began anew, then drove his car into a street lamp.

10:35pm. Silence.

* * *

6:03pm

“See you tomorrow! Oh, excuse me.” Albert almost ran into the cleaning lady. In the clockwork mechanism that was the company he worked in, the smallest cogs would easily be overlooked. That was why they bought large cars, he mused for a moment; then he noticed the phonetic mix-up and laughed.

The cleaning lady shook her head, sprayed water on the leaves of a green plant and looked out of the fifth floor window. With a sigh, she tried to think of jumping out of it, but failed, instead only thinking of thinking of jumping. "Don't do anything silly now," she said to the plant. No one else heard her.

A few minutes later, she turned off the lights and closed the door behind herself. Up in the ventilation system, Jessica silently counted seconds. When she reached six hundred seventy-three, she kicked the fan in and climbed down onto a table littered with presentations, diagrams, and worn out, coffee-stained manuals. On a rope she pulled a black bag out of the tunnel overhead.

Half an hour later, she had built up a tripod by the window and mounted the rifle on it.

“This is crazy!” remarked Sara.

Jessica loaded the rifle.

“You don't really think this is going to work, do you?”

Jessica looked through the sights once more.

“You're fat and you should get a new haircut!” Sara waited for a reaction, and when none came, she dropped her arms to her sides. “I give up,” she said, and retreated into the back of Jessica's head.

Jessica pulled up a chair and checked her wristwatch.

* * *

10:48pm

Silence.

“Shit. Ow.”

Jacob freed himself from the slowly deflating airbag. He tried to open his eyes, carefully, and found that he could not. The skin of his face had suffered first degree burns.

“Paul? Are you alright?” Jacob's hands blindly felt for his friend; found a body hanging in the seatbelt; head fallen forward as if asleep; unmoving.

“Paul, say something!” Jacob's voice unsteady now, staggering between controlled pitch and panicked tone.

His hand found Paul's head, the back of it covered by hair, rain-drenched and uncombed, sticky. Jacob stopped moving.

Sticky was wrong, he thought. His thumb touched a hole in the back of Paul's neck.

The rain stopped abruptly. The car's driver door opened and Jacob fell out of it, backwards.

* * *

From this high up, the digital organizer looks like a toy, small and insignificant on the table below us. We begin to fall.

As we fall, Jacob's hand comes into view. We see it press the delete button on the black rectangle, which has now grown to the size of a truck in our field of vision.

The entry “Paul and Miriam Arlington” refuses to be deleted. We continue to fall. The finger presses the button once more. Meanwhile, the appliance has grown to the size of a small country for us as we continue to fall. And just as we impact on the LCD screen and our fluid is sprayed all around us, the entry disappears from the screen.

* * *

Just as Jacob wiped the tear from the display, his doorbell rang. He closed his organizer and cleaned his eyes with the sleeves of his sweater, which showed the name and the logo of the high-school he worked for. On his way to the door, he slowly realized that by deleting the Paul Arlington entry, he had also deleted…

“Miriam,” he said to the shivering figure in the soft rain outside. He pronounced it like something between an observation and a condolence. She was still wearing the black costume she had worn at the funeral that day.

“Hi, I'm sorry I didn't call I… I just wanted to ask if…,” Miriam began, and then broke out in tears. Jacob pulled her inside.

Half an hour later, they were sitting on Jacob's couch, holding long-drinks.

“It's insane, that's all. I don't think I can put it any other way. In-fucking-sane.” Miriam was drunk.

“I know what you mean, I mean, Paul, hell, I have more enemies than Paul. Than… Paul had.” Jacob, too, was drunk.

Nothing amplifies an awkward silence like the presence of a dead loved one.

“Geez, I smell like wet dog,” Miriam finally broke the silence, and then, almost ashamed of her words, swallowed them with the rest of her drink.

Her sentence had shaken Jacob awake. “There is something,” he now began, and hesitated. “Something I should tell you.”

Miriam avoided his eyes. “Is there more?” she asked, already on her way to the liquor cabinet.
“Yeah just… just serve yourself.” Jacob's forehead fell back to the support of his palms, his elbows firmly planted on his knees. There was a recent TV magazine, a basket of plastic replicas of dried fruits and flowers, scented with a chemical replication of natural scents, and his organizer, a digital replica of his social life. And what was missing from it. He got up.

Miriam took a bottle of Amaretto out of the cabinet and tried to screw it open against the sugary crust that had built up around the bottle's neck.

“Miriam…” he began, as the addressed party began pouring herself another glass of Amaretto.

“Paul,” he continued, but then lost courage. What he did not know, since Miriam had her back turned to him, was that at the exact moment he pronounced Paul's name, when he took the essence of the idea which had laid siege to their whole conversation and compressed it into sound, Miriam had closed her eyes. The sticky, sweet fluid was flowing over the glass in her hand, and from her hand dripped onto the polished stone surface of Jacob's serving table.

Jacob extended a hand, his first instinct to make Miriam lower the bottle, to spare his floor from sticky alcohol, but somewhere in the course of executing this instinct, his body decided against it. His hand halted halfway to the bottle.

Miriam poured the rest of the bottle's content over her hands and onto the table. Then she lowered the bottle and the glass, putting both down into the puddle on the stone surface below. She opened her eyes and looked at Jacob, standing next to her, his hand extended. Her right hand, which had held the glass, closed around Jacob's hand, and so they stood, as if Jacob had asked her to dance, for a minute.

“I need to,” Miriam said, with no intention at all of ever saying anything else after these three words.

“Yes,” Jacob finally agreed to nothing at all, and brought Miriam to the door. Once she was gone, he brought his hand to his mouth. He tasted the Amaretto's sweetness.

* * *

The telephone rang. Automatically, Jacob reached for the receiver.

“Jacob Lavalle, hello?”

He listened for a moment.

“Hi Paul, it's good to hear your voice as well.”

Another pause. Jacob suppressed a yawn, rubbing his closed eyes with his free hand.

“No, no, that's alright. It's just that yesterday was very rough on me, what with—”

Jacob's hand suddenly stopped moving, his eyes opened.

After a longer silence, the voice from the other side could be heard weakly through the device. Jacob sat up on the edge of his bed.

“Yes, with that,” he agreed to what the other person had said.

Jacob's lips started moving again, but his diaphragm and vocal chords did not cooperate. A few silent lip movements later, Jacob pressed his eyelids together and softly shook his head, as if to focus his thinking. His eyes, reopened, were a picture of discomfort and anguish.

“How are you doing?” he finally said. His lips closed tightly after the last word, as if they wanted to keep the sentence inside.

He listened intently, for a moment. Then he woke up.

* * *

Miriam's face. Her eyes white marble with red veins, hollow pupils gaping in their middle.

“If I stood in front of any other group of people, I would feel the need to summarize Paul's life. I would feel the need to tell you what an incredible, unrealistic character he was. How he was romantic like the most inconceivable male protagonist of a Hollywood romance. Only that he was real, a man made of flesh and blood, and…”

An old man raised a handkerchief to his face and failed to stifle a sob.

“I don't need to tell you any of these things. You know all of them. Paul wore no masks, lied to no one; he was wonderful.”

Jacob looked at the exit of the chapel. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to tuck his tail between his legs and flee, but blew his nose instead.

“Most of you also know, meanwhile, of my medical state, both the good and the bad news. I want to use this opportunity to make it known that I will have the child; I will have Patrick. All that Paul could not be, all he was meant to be, will live on…”

* * *

2006 AD

“… in our son.”

A professor, clad in black, lowered his fist from his mouth again, deciding against clearing his throat or coughing or, maybe, biting his fist.

“Thus it is important that Patrick have a mother. You all know me; you know that passion drives me in whatever I do. I will either do something right, or not at all.”

Miriam lowered her eyes and continued a little softer.

“I do not reproach any one of you; you've all been perfectly polite to me. Maybe that was the problem. These last months I feel like I've crossed over from researcher to guinea pig. I know how ridiculous it sounds.”

One of Miriam's hands made a fist on the table in front of her, and she lifted her eyes once more.

“My son will have a mother, for as long as life lets me be this mother. And I will be nothing else. I thank you all for… for everything.”

Putting down her pen on the table in front of her, she turned around and walked out of the lecture hall, which now filled with slow and careful applause.

Life would give her fifteen years.

* * *

2009 AD

“Do you think they use squirrels to make brown colour?” Patrick asked.

“Squirrels? Awww! That is terrible!” answered the little girl. She dropped the colourful ball she had been playing with. “Why do they use squirrels?”

“I don't know if they use squirrels! I just think, you know, they must make the colour out of something. And it's the colour that squirrels have.”

“Do squirrels smell like this?” she asked.

“I don't know! But if they do, I want a squirrel,” Patrick answered.

“I want an elephant.”

“Elephants are strange.”

* * *

2020 AD

“But mum, you said it's not polite to stare.”

“It's impolite to stare at people, yes.”

“But there are people in this painting!”

“Patrick, why don't you go have a look at the other paintings and give me another moment here.” Miriam continued to stare at the painting in front of her.

“You've already had half an hour worth of moments! But, fine, I think there's a spot on the wall over there I haven't memorized yet.”

In turning away, Patrick caused his coat to brush against the plaque hanging by the painting. It fell down with a metallic sound. Just at that moment, a man in a brown museum uniform passed by and bent over to pick up the little label.

“Hi!” said Patrick.

“Hello young man,” replied the museum warden and tried to return to his chair.

“Tell me what the following numbers have in common!”

And in this manner, Miguel Cartier learnt about the Fibonacci series of numbers, a subset of which he would begin to play regularly in the lottery.











* * *

Patrick bought frozen food. The shopping cart was full of fruits and salads. “Those are good for you,” mumbled Patrick. On the way out, a florist.

“A bouquet of tulips. Purple.”

Throughout the whole mall, only Patrick wore all black. Outside, a crowd of umbrellas.

It poured.

It was 2021 AD.

* * *

Paul and Miriam Arlington
* 12.3.1979  *15.4.1980
   + 6.4.2005   + 26.11.2021

Thirteen tulips on the ground, one tulip in Patrick's hand. He walks out of the cemetery.

Jessica sits on the bench of the bus stop, drawing. Patrick sits down next to her.

“Hi,” he says.

“Do you often steal flowers from the dead?” she asks.

“Nope. This was my first time. Do you want to share it with me?” With this, Patrick holds out the single tulip to Jessica. She closes her notebook and smiles at him.

“You know, you're not a team player. If this was a rose, I could take it and prick my finger, thus continuing your innuendo with my blood.”

“That reminds me of a poem.” Patrick clears his throat. Inhales. Gesticulates dramatically with the flower. Recites:

“Violets are violent, roses are blue,
10pm Saturday, Kelly's pub, me and you?”

The newspaper displayed on the semitransparent wall behind them tells us about Miguel Cartier who won six million Euro.

Jessica laughs, accepts.

* * *

“Did you know you can't lie when you look a butterfly into the eyes?” Patrick asked.

Jessica laughed, stepped up to him, and, holding his arm, asked:

“Then tell me! Will I always and forever and ever be your girl? Quick, before it looks away!”

“Jessica darling, I don't want to upset you, but this is an ex-butterfly.” Patrick pointed at the insect impaled against the cardboard backdrop with a miniature spear.

“It only works if the butterfly is looking back at you.”

They resumed their walk through the museum.

“How do you come up with these things?” Jessica asked with all the honest wonder and curiosity she had.

“He told me,” said Patrick, pointing at a stuffed polar bear which stood prepared to attack, one paw lifted. “I come here at night, and I ask him, Paul, there's this ridiculously gorgeous girl that I am absolutely enamoured with, what can I possibly say to make her love me even more?”

“Paul the polar bear? That's inspired.”

“No, Paul my father.” Without transition, Patrick's face had turned from playful to absolutely serious. Jessica reflected for a moment on how it both scared and amazed her when he did that. He continued.

“I come here and in the silence of the museum I ask my father what he would have done. And I do that. You would have loved Paul, Jessica. If but half of what my mother used to say is true, he was a picture-perfect gentleman. Always funny, friendly, reliable; Jesus would turn green with envy were he to meet the Paul that lived in my mother's mind.”

“And Paul would tell you, again and again, how proud he was of you.” Jessica kissed Patrick before he could come up with a witty reply.

They entered the section with extinct animals.

“To answer your question: no, you will not. I don't know how much longer I have here, and I do know I will have you by my side for as long as I have. But then I can no longer hold you. I can no longer hold anything, then. And I must not. You must not be held by the spectre of my absence. You must not forfeit what destiny holds for you, just for a silly boy you once knew for a year or two. Remember me, remember what I said. And when you see a butterfly, or a violent violet, you'll laugh for a moment, or you'll cry for an instant, but either way you'll be happy.”

* * *

“Titanic 2? You've got to be kidding me!”

“Hey, the first ended in a cliffhanger. I've got to see how it goes on.”

“Cliffhanger?”

“Hell of a cliffhanger!”

“He died and she turned 93! That's not a cliffhanger, that's a dead end.”

“Love conquers all; even death and old age.”

The ticket lady had been watching them silently and now handed Patrick the two tickets. Their fingers accidentally met for a second and she smiled.

Jessica smiled.

And then froze as she looked the ticket lady in the eyes. Patrick started walking upstairs.

“Do I know you?” Jessica asked.

“Go; our boy is waiting.”

* * *

“I work in a hospital. I've never really liked my job, you know. Of course, someone's got to do it; someone's got to be there for those people when they need you. But sometimes I'd prefer to spend more time with this person or less time with that one. I don't get a say in that; I am told where to go, what to do.

"Things in a hospital are terribly unfair. You have young lives, hopeful, beautiful, extinguished for no good reason. You have old people and you look into their faces and you know that they have decided to move on years ago and are now beyond even the strength to communicate their decision. And so they wait. And much as I'd like to be there for them, I can't. Not unless I'm told to.

"For some people, I am the last thing they see in this life. And some of them go willingly; I see them smile and with their own smile fade, and they are happy. Others, others they scream at me, as if I was their murderer, grab my clothes and drag me down to their beds, claw at me. They don't want to leave, but there's nothing I can do for them.

"The worst cases are those who suppress their screams. They scream loudest, in my mind. They look at me and they understand that… that this was it, and they are composed and quiet not because they believe in an afterlife, but because even as I am at their bed, they cling to their own dignity.

"When I came to pick up a young boy named Patrick, he looked at me and knew me. He cried, and I know he wanted to wipe off the tears, but he didn't have the strength anymore.

"'How did I do?' he asked me. What do you say to something like that? How do you explain to them that it doesn't matter how they did?

"'You did fine', I said.”

* * *

“It is a beautiful kind of irony; the 20th century's enlightenment was the gradual removal of religion from our lives. We now understand nature to the extent that we know what the priests say cannot even be close to the truth, we thought. We have rockets and satellites, and there's no God in space, we said.”

Metareligion and the Afterlife 101.

“Until science told us that the priests were right from the get-go.”

Jessica stared at the professor with an empty look in her eyes.

“We all will die; science has not been able to change that fact.”

Someone had scribbled song lyrics on the table in front of her:

What do I care about you
When all must die?
What does your face mean to me
When all my eyes can seize must die?

“But when we die, we go someplace. So much is rather certain now. Our science offers no explanations, so far, only observations. There will be one question you could echo all throughout this course: why?”

Jessica touched the writing on the surface in front of her.

The blackboard expanded and filled the width of her vision.

Black.

Everything.

Stop.