Santa Claus
There are only two bars in Brachenrock Beach — The Beachcomber Inn and the Dock 39 Tavern.
The Beachcomber Inn is a hotel with a lounge in its lobby. A large parking lot surrounds it and it’s often full of both RVs and motorcycles. The Beachcomber Inn is close to the highway, expensive considering the lack of personality, and it’s the last chance to get any real food for another 40-miles in either direction.
The coast is steep and rocky on either side of Brachenrock Beach, and contrary to the name, there isn’t much of a beach. There are long stretches of rocks, and there are docks where the fishing trollers moor each evening. It is here that you’d find the Dock 39 Tavern.
The Dock 39 Tavern is a small, dark place with low ceilings. It smells a lot like fried food and a bit like the bait shop next door.
At The Beachcomber Inn they have a juke box that plays Smokey Robinson and the Supremes. Occasionally you hear an AC/DC song whenever one of the weekend bikers decide to act like a badass. At the Dock 39 Tavern there is a radio that lists off weather conditions or sports scores, depending on the season.
The Beachcomber Inn is where you would want to be. The Dock 39 Tavern is usually where you had to be.
It was an especially quiet December evening at the Dock 39 Tavern. There wasn’t much tourism in the winter, and the few fisherman who were still working had all gone to see what they could pull out of the ocean. Toby was the last one in the place. He sat alone at the end of the bar. His face illuminated by the glow of his laptop. A strand of Christmas lights was threaded through the old fishing net that hung above the bar. A small Santa hat was perched atop the head of the large marlin that hung on the wall near the pool table. Two empty glasses sat between Toby and the barkeep.
“You want another one, pal,” the barkeep asked.
“Yeah, I’ll do one more.”
“Same thing?”
Toby had been drinking a locally produced stout, and while good, it just wasn’t doing it for him.
“No. Let’s try something else,” he said.
The bartender stepped aside to reveal the row of tap handles, each with a unique shape and name.
“Can I try a taste of the dry hopped pale ale?” Toby said as he squinted his eyes to read the tiny print on the tap handle.
The barkeep grabbed a shot glass, tipped a small amount of beer into it, and gently slid it toward Toby.
Toby carefully poured it into his mouth, thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
“Don’t you think it’s funny that we do that?” Toby asked.
The bartender looked up from pouring the beer.
“Tasting beers,” Toby explained. “If I asked to try your fries, or if I could just have a bite of your reuben, you’d think I was crazy, but you can literally walk into any bar, ask for a taste of beer, and they’ll give it to you. That’s weird, right?”
The bartender nodded. “Yeah, that’s a little weird.”
“I think about stuff like that,” Toby said. “I bet, if you were ambitious enough, and a good actor, you could probably get a nice buzz by bar-hopping and drinking free tastes of beer.”
The barkeep smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, it’s not very honest though.”
“Oh, no,” Toby agreed, “but you have to think like that to stay ahead of the curve.”
The bartender rounded up the empty glasses from the bar and returned to Toby.
“So, what do you do?”
Toby fretted a bit. “Research.”
“Yeah? What kind of research?”
Toby widened his eyes. “Gosh, all kinds of stuff. Conspiracy theories. Myths. Stuff like that.”
“What, like Bigfoot?” the barkeep asked.
“Sure, I do some of that — Bigfoot, the Bloop, the Hum.”
“That’s got to be interesting,” the bartender said.
“Mostly,” Toby agreed. “There is no Bigfoot, by the way. Most of the stories you hear are crap. Lies. Hoaxes. But, there’s a lot of strange stuff that you never hear about.”
“Like what?”
Toby squinched his face and thought back.
“Can you talk about it, or is it like, confidential?” the bartender clarified.
“Yeah, I can talk about it, I just don’t know if you’d believe me.”
“Try me,” the bartender implored.
“Okay. Do you know why airline pilots yell corporation names when they crash?”
The bartender said nothing.
“Right? You’ve never heard of such a thing, but it’s real. All of those black box recordings that are recovered, when you listen to them, it’s always there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let me preface this by saying that these stories are really grim stuff. The people in those recordings all died.”
“Sure. I get that.”
“Okay. So, black box tapes usually start off with a lot of chatter. Long pauses between. They probably know something is going wrong. You can sense the tension in their voices. The stress is building. Then… bam. Something breaks, or the gravity of the situation is suddenly revealed. They realize what is happening, and they go crazy. There’s a lot of yelling and cursing. You can tell when they know that they’re going to die. They lose it a little. They give up. Navigators and stewardesses seem to lose it first. Copilots usually lose it before pilots, but one by one they all lose it. Then, all of a sudden, they start screaming names of businesses.”
“Like what?”
“Wal-Mart. Kroger. Target. You name it. If it’s a fortune 500 company, they start yelling it.”
The bartender wasn’t sure if Toby was pulling his leg or not, even though Toby had started by saying that he didn’t think that his story was believable.
“Why do they yell business names?” the bartender asked.
“There’s a rumor that if you die in a plane crash, and your black box recording gets played on the news, and you yell the name a corporation, that company will take care of your family for the rest of their lives. It’s like winning the lottery.”
“Are you serious?” the bartender asked. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I do. I try to figure out where these things come from. How do these stories start?”
The bartender shook his head. “That’s crazy.”
“I know, right?”
“What else?” the barkeep asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What else do you research?”
“Oh, well, all kinds of things.”
Toby took a drink of his beer and looked at his laptop screen.
“There was this thing last year. So, here’s the headline — a couple pilots say their planes were sabotaged. There was one pilot who flies a crop duster and there was a pilot who flies a firefighting plane. They were both at the same little airport in Nevada.”
“Okay,” the bartender said.
“Here’s the thing. I did some looking into it. Both of these pilots were hired by the same person, and it was some sketchy name like Mr. Smith, or Mr. Brown, or something. I don’t quite recall. I interviewed these pilots, and I learned that they were both independently hired to fly over the Burning Man festival and dump water on the crowd. Supposedly, some anti-Communist organization wanted to send the hippies a message, or something. So, first the crop duster would come in and spray the whole place down to quench any flames, and then the firefighting plane would come in immediately after and dump a whole load of water on the burning man right after he’d been lit up. The fire goes out, everything is soggy, and that would effectively ruin Burning Man.”
“That’s pretty mean,” the bartender said.
“Right, but what’s really messed up is that both the pilots aborted their flights because they each thought they were having a fuel leak. Both of the pilots reported that the smell of gas in their cabins was overwhelming. They both turned back to the airport and inspected their planes. It turns out that both aircraft weren’t loaded with water. They were loaded with jet fuel.”
“Holy shit.”
“Right? Can you imagine if, after they light the Burning Man, which is basically the biggest piece of kindling ever, then a crop duster sprayed everyone down with jet fuel, and then a plane flies by and dumps a ton of gas on the crowd? It would have been a nightmare. It would have been a massacre.”
“Who would do that?”
Toby shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what I do. I try to figure that shit out.”
“Man, that is messed up.”
“Oh, I know,” Toby agreed.
The bartender shook his head as the thought lingered in his head. He continued stacking his clean glasses under the wall of alcohol along the back of the bar. Toby took a drink of his pint, glad in his decision to try a different beer.
“So, what are you working on now?” the barkeep asked.
Toby looked up from his beer and squinted his eyes. “I’m not really doing anything right now.”
“How come?”
“Well,” Toby began, “I was working on something for a long, long time, and I finally figured it out. So, I’m kind of on a Christmas break.”
“Was it a good one?” the bartender asked.
“A good one? You mean the thing I was previously researching? Yeah, it was a good one.”
“What was it?”
The look on Toby’s face almost made the barkeep regret asking. Then Toby smiled.
“I found Santa Claus.”
The bartender wasn’t sure if Toby was kidding, or what that even meant.
“You found Santa Claus?”
“Yep,” Toby assured him.
“Like at the North Pole?”
“No, you’re thinking of Superman.”
“What do you mean you found Santa Claus?” the bartender repeated.
“Well, this thing that we refer to as Santa Claus isn’t just one person, it’s an amalgamation of many different people. Stories of Saint Nicholas date all the way back to fourth century Greece. When the Christians moved into Germanic Europe they then mixed in the stories of Odin and his procession through the sky during the event of Yule. It’s crazy how all these influences come together to create this vision of Santa Claus.” Toby paused. “You don’t want to hear all this.”
“No, I do,” the bartender insisted.
“Alright. Santa Claus. Most of what people know about Santa comes from stuff like the Twas the Night Before Christmas poem, or the song Santa Claus is Coming to Town, just like most of what people think they know about God comes from things like Dante’s Inferno. None of it is true.”
“Alright, but how the hell did you find Santa Claus?”
“Well, it’s a long, long boring story to start — imagine me spending hours in university libraries and conducting interviews, stuff like that. That’s usually how these things start. All of this was, more or less, a hobby at first. I thought that maybe I might write a book about it. I was just curious where all the holiday lore came from, and then I found something.”
“Santa Claus?”
“Sort of. Every story initially starts with the truth. The truth gets passed from person to person like the telephone game. The truth gets distorted and tainted and you wind up with legends and myths, but somewhere along that line there are still people who remember the truth, or something closer to it. I wanted to find those people.”
Toby took a quick sip of his beer.
“There are dozens and dozens of stories and traditions about what happens on the night before Christmas. I found a few cities in Europe that had some very unusual, very specific stories about Santa Claus. I found a person who claimed that their grandfather had once seen Santa Claus. I found another person who said that their grandfather had lived with Santa Claus. So, I kept following these leads and eventually I found myself in Turkey.
“Turkey? The country?”
“Yep. On a weird, narrow street, crowded with two and three story apartment buildings, there was a place called Kış Çayır — the Winter Meadow. It was this cute, little retirement home. There were ten residents in the place. It was very private. The average age of a tenant at Kış Çayır is 97. Impressive considering that the life expectancy in Turkey is right around 74 years. There were some strange coincidences that I wanted to investigate. So, I flew to Turkey and I tried to talk to the tenant who owned the place. It wasn’t happening. It was excuse after excuse. I wasn’t family. He had a medical condition. I needed an appointment. No luck.”
“So, what’d you do?”
“I went undercover. I got a job there. I worked in the laundry room cleaning diapers and piss stained sheets, and it was awful. Let me stress that Turkey does not have the same level of standards as the United States regarding labor. There were some rough days.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, I gradually started taking on other tasks. I worked in the kitchen and would help distribute meals to the residents in their rooms, but I still never met the guy who owned the place.”
“Santa Claus.”
“Yeah, well, David. David Davidson. That’s his name.”
“It’s not Santa Claus?”
“No, that’s just a name that people have come up with for the concept. Think of it like this. Christmas morning, when you were a kid, were there toys under the tree?”
“Yeah.”
“There were toys under my tree too. Santa Claus brought them.”
“Well, yes, but it was my parents.”
“I get that. What I’m saying is that there have always been phenomenon that we have tried to explain. We believed that when there was a lightning storm the gods must be angry and lobbing their magical spears at each other. We looked up and saw these flashes of light and crashes of thunder, and we created a mythology. We put a face on it. Same with fire and earthquakes and eclipses, but today we know now exactly why and how lightning, and all that, happens, right?”
“Sure,” the barkeep agreed.
“Well, there’s another phenomenon that happens. All the children around the world wake up and find toys under the tree. Somehow the toys were all distributed in one evening, and the distributor knew not only what the child wanted, but whether they deserved it. We call that phenomenon Santa Claus. We put a face on it, a jolly old man in a red suit, and we believe that this man somehow circumnavigated the globe and delivered all the toys. Likely with flying reindeer.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“You and I understand how the phenomenon of Santa Claus actually works. We know that it is millions of parents distributing the toys, but somehow that mythology started, and we continue to embrace it.”
“Sure, I get what you’re saying.”
“Just because we can explain lightning doesn’t mean lightning doesn’t exist, but that mythology is based on something. It started somewhere, got passed along like the telephone game, and grew into the legend that it is today. Santa Claus is based on David.”
“So, who is this David guy?”
“Well, I can tell you what he told me.”
“Okay.”
“It took me a long, long time to get to this guy. He wouldn’t let me in his room. I tried calling him and talking to him on the phone. I finally got through.”
“What’d you say to him?”
“I told him that I was researching the story of Santa Claus, and I had been told that he might be a good person to talk to. He said he wasn’t interested in silly kids stories. I kept after him, and eventually I told him that I thought he had something to do with Santa Claus.”
“What happened?”
“Well, after working in a Turkish retirement home for six months, and slowly trying to get closer and closer to the guy, he fired me.”
“Oh, man. That’s a bummer.”
Yeah, that was absolutely depressing.”
“So, then what.”
“I reapplied, but I used different names. When I went through old tax records for the property I found that David Davidson was the owner of the retirement home, and he had been for the last fifty years, but before that the place was owned by Fred Fredricks, and before that it was owned by Peter Peterson, and before that it was owned by Tom Thompson. I could see that there was something strange going on, so I called him on it. I started applying using the names of the previous owners.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He noticed, and I finally, after all that, got a meeting with him. I went up to his room and knocked. He said come in, and there he sat, this frail, old man with wispy, white hair, and papery skin so pale that it almost looked blue.”
***
I sat down and said, “So, you’re Santa Claus?”
He rolled his eyes at me and smacked his lips.
“What do you think?” he hissed.
“I think there’s something going on. There’s some reason that people say that people mention this place when I ask about Santa Claus, and there’s some reason that ownership of the place keeps getting bounced from fake identity to fake identity.”
“You here to bust me for tax evasion?” he snapped.
No,” I interrupted. “I’m not trying to do anything. I just want to know the truth.”
The old man smiled a smug grin and shook his head as his gaze fell to the floor. “You wouldn’t even believe me even if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Because, I’ve taken others down this road before, and you know what? They don’t come back.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. He slowly rose to his feet.
“My soul can only bear so much,” he said. “Christmas is in two weeks. You think about that. I’ll do the same.”
He forced a quick smile, motioned toward the door, and with that, he excused me.
The door to the room closed behind me. I felt as though I’d both succeeded and failed. I had found something, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I walked through the narrow, plaster lined hallway and made my way down the stairs to the small lobby at the entrance. There, next to the door was another elderly man who seemed to be waiting for me. He waved, and attempted to stand before slowly sinking back into his chair.
“You there,” he said anxiously. “Did you talk to him?”
“Excuse me?” I offered.
“Did you talk to him?” he repeated.
“Mr. Davidson? Yeah, I did,” I said.
“Did he give you his ‘my soul can only bear so much’ talk?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, he did,” I smiled.
“Listen. Let me tell you something,” he said. “I’ve heard him give that talk before, and you know what? I’ve been down that road. I’ve been down that road, and I came back.”
I looked at his ancient face, and his gleaming blue eyes.
“And, it’s worth it,” he whispered.
I returned to the strange little retirement home two weeks later — Christmas Eve. I knocked and was met at the door by another one of the elderly residents. He had long, brilliant white hair. He could have been Indian, or Asian, or maybe an Eskimo. His skin was so thoroughly weathered and saggy that it was impossible to tell, and his soft, gravelly voice offered no clue to his origin either.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Toby,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Hmmm,” he groaned. “I’m Len. What can I do for you?”
“Len, I’m here to see David. He’s expecting me.”
“Hmmm,” he repeated as he slowly motioned me in through the door.
“Alright,” he whispered as he turned himself around and headed toward the stairs. “Come this way.”
He led me up the old, painted stairs to one of the small rooms that the residents occupied. Inside the cramped space were all ten of the residents. They were so old and still. Their gaunt, pale faces fixed on me as I entered the room. The man with the bright blue eyes was sitting on one end of the bed, and David Davidson sat with his arms crossed in and old recliner.
“I wondered if I’d be seeing you,” David snarled. “I’m going to need you to give us a moment.”
He motioned with his head to Len, the man who had led me up the stairs. I hadn’t been in the room for a minute before Len led me back out to another room across the hall.
“Wait here,” he said as he closed the door.
I sat on the bed. Some time passed. My watch said that it was nearly midnight. I anticipated what was to come next. I anticipated getting answers to questions that had been taking up room in my brain. Midnight came, and it passed. Then another two minutes ticked by. Nothing.
I stood, opened the door, and peered out into the dark hallway. I wanted to call out to the men, but at the same time I didn’t want to seem impatient or disrespectful. I continued waiting for another two minutes. There was no sound. Nothing.
I walked out into the hallway. The only light was what spilled from under the door. I put my ear to the door across the hall. Nothing. I opened the door and peeked in. Nothing. The room was empty. They were all gone.
For the next three months I tried to contact David Davidson, or anyone at the rest home, but I got no response. No one answered the door. Nobody picked up the phone.
I was angry, and I was frustrated, but I was not deterred.
That April I tried again. I returned to Kış Çayır, knocked on the door, and to my surprise the door opened. It was Len.
“Hello,” he whispered.
“Hi, is David here?”
“Hmmm, sure.”
I wasn’t sure whether Len remembered me. He seemed to move even more slowly than I remembered. Steadily and surely he led me up the stairs to David’s room.
Inside, I found David sitting at his small wooden desk. He turned in his chair, smiled, and motioned for me to sit.
I was annoyed, and I’m sure he could sense it.
“Hello,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and shook my head. “Where did you go?”
“We don’t allow visitors during the first few months of the year.”
“No, I mean on Christmas night. Where did you go on Christmas night?”
He smiled wider. “The boys and I stepped out.”
“I wanted to go with you. That’s why I showed up.”
“I know, and we left without you. Come back this Christmas, and we’ll do it again.”
“You’ll let me go with you?” I asked.
“No, I mean we’ll do it again — you’ll show up, and we’ll leave without you.”
I did come back that Christmas.
Just as before, I knocked at 11:40pm. Just as before, Len answered the door and led me upstairs. Again, I found the men all gathered in one of the rooms. David motioned to Len to escort me to one of the other rooms.
“No,” I protested. “ I want to go with you.”
David made a face as though he was pained. “I know what you want, but we need for you to wait in the other room.”
The other men looked on with tired, indifferent faces. David nodded as though to reassure me. The man with the blue eyes shrugged and crossed his arms.
For fear of alienating myself and undoing all the research I’d done so far, I complied, and just as before I followed Len to an adjacent room. He left and closed the door behind him.
I watched the clock. I listened at the door. The men were barely audible in the room across the hall. My watch said that it was 11:59. There was still no sign of them. I wasn’t going to let them ditch me again.
I slowly opened the door and inched my way toward the room across the hall. I could hear them speaking. It was nearly midnight when suddenly the speaking ceased. There were only a few seconds before midnight, and I opened the door.”
***
“What were they doing?” the bartender asked.
“They disappeared, right before my eyes,” Toby said.
“They disappeared?”
“Yep, it was like they turned into smoke. Vanished. All ten of them,” Toby stated.
Toby looked as baffled as the day it happened.
“How?” the barkeep asked.
“They just did,” Toby laughed. “It was the strangest thing I ever saw. They were there, and then they just melted away.”
The bartender looked uncomfortable. He stopped his work and leaned against the bar.
“But, where’d they go?”
Toby looked down at his empty glass. “Well, that will have to wait for another day.”
“What?” the barkeep stood up straight. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to drive into Seattle tomorrow and catch a plane. I should probably get some sleep.”
“Look, I’ll give you a drink on the house if you finish your story.”
Toby was flattered by the offer, and wasn’t the type to pass on a free drink.
“Really? Alright, one more, but then I really have to go,” he said.
The bartender agreed, filled a pint glass, and set it in front of Toby.
“So, again, it wasn’t until April that I got ahold of anyone at Kış Çayır. I visited David again. This time he was a bit annoyed by my persistence.”
***
“Look,” the old man said. “You don’t want to be a part of this.”
“But, I’m already a part of this,” I argued.
“He has a point,” a voice came from behind. It was the man with the blue eyes, bright as sapphires.
I could see the irritation in David’s old face. “No, he’s not.”
“David, it’s his choice. Just like it was my choice,” the blue-eyed man said. “It’s his choice.”
“No,” David barked. “You don’t know what it does to me.”
I sat quiet between the two men.
“He’s just going to keep showing up,” the blue-eyed man said.
“That’s fine! I don’t care. Show up every year!” David yelled, throwing his hands in the air.
“Why not let him help?”
“Help?” David scoffed.
“You think that you’re help?” David said to the blue-eyed man.
The man with the blue eyes maintained his composure. He exhaled a long breath and turned to me.
“If you do this, you’ll need to come back again.”
“I will,” I promised.
“You’ll need to come back every year. That’s the deal.”
David groaned and sat down at his desk.
“For how long?” I asked.
“Forever. Until you die,” the blue eyed man said.
I waited for further explanation, but he said nothing. He just stared at me with a deadly serious look.
“What happens if I’m too old to make the trip?” I asked.
David laughed, “Then you come live here.”
“What am I signing up for?” I asked.
David relaxed a bit. “Every Christmas Eve we deliver toys to the good girls and boys.”
That was it. That was the moment I knew. That was the admission. I had found Santa Claus, and right then I promised that I would return on Christmas Eve and every Christmas Eve thereafter.
I arrived at 11:30pm. I knocked at the door and was welcomed in by Len, just as I had been the year before, and the year before that. We ascended the stairs and joined the other men in the room, just as before. This time David rose to his feet.
“Gentleman, this is Toby. He’s going to join us this evening.”
His face was frozen in an indignant expression that let the room know he didn’t completely approve.
The demeanor of the men in the room changed from indifferent to curious, and even surprised. They each approached and introduced themselves.
Tyson was an impossibly thin old man with two tufts of grey hair on either side of his narrow head. Mikhail was a heavier man with a dense beard and small eyes. He sat with his cane between his knees. Robin was a wide eyed British fellow. A neatly trimmed mustache and thick glasses adorned his face. Jawid was an Afghani man whose white hair contrasted his dark complexion. Carl was British man of African descent. He had a big smile and big puffy white hair. Rudy was an old Italian man whose hair still had streaks of black through it. Len smiled a warm smile, and the blue-eyed man introduced himself as Henry.
“So, what do we do?” I asked.
“You just sit there and don’t move,” David snapped. “I’m serious.”
I watched as the men chatted, David focused on his desk. He cleared it, and prepped a single, clean sheet of paper and a pen. He centered it perfectly on the old desk, and then stood back to examine it.
“Time?” he boomed.
“11:56,” a pair of voices replied.
“Gentleman, let’s prepare.”
The old men slowly stood and moved into a rough circle. Rudy stepped aside and motioned for me to join.
“Get in the circle, everyone back-to-back, and join hands,” he whispered to me.
“Okay. Then what?”
“Then just stay very still.”
I faced away from the other men, grabbed the hand on either side of me, and waited.
“Time?”
“11:59.”
“Be careful gentleman. Be very, very careful,” David said.
Then I started to feel sick. It was as though I was falling; that icky feeling of losing my stomach ran completely through me. My eyes began to play tricks on me. The lights were fading, or my vision was fading. Things that were blue took on more red tones, and things that were red blurred into the blues. I felt like I was going to pass out. My head and my sinuses swelled, and ached with a sudden pressure. My ears felt like they needed to pop. It was as though I was changing elevation and I forced a yawn. Then the colors returned, but they were all wrong, and they became brighter and brighter until everything was bathed in a stark white light.
“Let go! Now, let go!” a voice called out, and I felt the hands that I had been clinging to slip away. Then nothing. I felt nothing.
It was just the room, and a strange, unnatural quiet. I took a breath just to be sure that I hadn’t gone deaf. Then there was a sound in the absolute field of silence. I turned my head and found a young man with wavy brown hair and a sort beard staring at me.
“Don’t move,” he said.
The others, too, all replaced by young men.
“Don’t move,” he repeated, and then I recognized the young man’s brilliant blue eyes. It was Henry, but he looked as though he was thirty years old. Len, now had sharp Chinese features and black hair. David stood straight and tall. His hair was dark, straight, and long, parted in the middle. The brown locks framed his face, young and intense. His deep brown eyes were fixed on me.
“Do not move,” he commanded.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
David looked as though he hadn’t even heard me and continued talking.
“Do not touch anything. Do not sit, do not jump, do not touch anyone else, do not slip, do not fall, do not hit anything — do you understand?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do not touch anything, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, now, I want you to take a single step toward me, and before you do, I want you to know that it is going to hurt like Hell.”
“It’s going to hurt pretty bad,” Henry assured me.
“When you take that step, and when it hurts, do not fall, do not sit, do not touch anyone else — got it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Okay,” David said. “Do it.”
I lifted my foot and took a small step toward David. A noticeable pain shot up through my leg, into my knee, and my hip. The sole of my foot felt like I had stepped barefoot onto gravel. It wasn’t the worst pain I’d felt, and it was by no means intolerable, but it was unpleasant and surprising.
“Ow, okay. Why does that hurt so much?”
“Look at this,” Henry motioned as he pushed a pillow off the bed.
The pillow slid off the edge of the mattress and then hung in the air. Levitating. I watched and saw that it was in fact moving, but so slowly that it was nearly undetectable. The pillow continued to float through the air on its way to the floor. Everything was frozen in time. The clock hadn’t advanced. The air hadn’t moved. Everything was crawling at a snails pace.
“What is happening?” I asked.
David motioned to Rudy as he turned toward his desk and examined the piece of paper centered on it. Rudy had a thick head of jet-black hair.
The paper on the desk was no longer blank. It was full of writing. David studied it and made expressions that varied from joy to disdain.
“We have to go to America,” he announced.
The room let out a collective groan.
“And, Asia.”
David continued running down the list.
“No Australia. No Africa.”
“Thank God,” one of the men sighed.
David grabbed a pen and began taking notes. Rudy and Tyson stood close and the three began to formulate the route for the evening.
I sat on the bed and felt the shock in my spine and his kidneys.
“Crap, why does that hurt like that?” I asked.
Carl sat on the bed next to me. His hair stood tall in a grand afro. His face was full of youth and color. “We have a lot to do tonight — a lot of places to visit. So, it’s not that things are moving slow. It’s that we are moving very fast.”
“We’re moving fast?” I questioned.
“Very fast. For us, a second feels like a minute,” Henry said.
“Yeah, it’s almost exactly a 60:1 ratio,” Carl added.
“So, if you were to tap me on the shoulder,” Henry began.
“You would put your finger straight through him like a bullet, and probably shatter your hand into a dozen pieces,” Carl finished.
“So don’t touch anything,” Henry repeated pointing his finger at me to emphasize his words.
“What do we do then?” I asked.
“David, Tyson, and Rudy will look at the list and figure out where we need to go.”
“Do we deliver toys to everyone?” I asked.
“No, not everyone. Just a few people,” Carl said. “They’re all over the world though.”
“But, how do you do that if you can’t walk or touch anything?” I asked.
“It’s not that we can’t walk or touch anything. It’s just that it hurts really, really badly, and we have to be really careful,” Henry smiled.
I noticed that some of the men who had been handling the items on the desk had cut or puncture wounds on their hands already.
“How many toys do we deliver?” I asked.
“It’s usually not toys. I mean, sometimes it is, but it’s usually other stuff, but to answer your question — 73. We always have 73 stops,” Henry said.
“Why 73?”
“That’s just the way it is. There’s always 73 names on the list,” Henry said.
“How long do we have to deliver these things? I asked.
“All night,” Carl said.
“24 hours. Midnight works its way all the way around the world, and so we’ve only got 24 hours,” Henry explained.
“But, time feels like it’s moving super slow, so we actually have a lot of time,” Carl said.
I did the simple math in my head. A 60 to 1 ratio. 24 hours feels 1440 hours. 1440 divided by 24 is 60.
“60 days?” I gasped.
Henry looked at me with a blank stare and nodded.
“Two months of this?” I asked.
“Yeah, so be careful,” Henry said pointing his finger.
“There was a guy named Ronald who used to come with us,” Carl whispered. “He tripped over an ottoman one night and fell. It was like he jumped off of a building. He splattered like a melon.”
He punctuated the story by splaying his hands out and making a splashing sound.
“So, be careful,” Henry said. “Don’t rush. We have plenty of time.”
***
The bartender stared, unflinching. “Are you serious?”
“I’m completely serious,” Toby said.
“So, you delivered toys to everyone?” he mocked.
“No. Not everyone. Just the 73 names on the list.”
“What did you deliver?” the barkeep asked.
“All kinds of things. A lost pet. An umbrella. A note. All kinds of things.”
“That’s weird,” he laughed.
“Yeah. I asked, and no one knew why, but we suspected that maybe these were things that these people really needed. I don’t know,” Toby admitted.
“Who were these people?” the barkeep asked.
“All sorts of folks. Just regular people. Most of them were in Europe, but we did have to go into Asia and over to America.”
The bartender scoffed and shook his head.
“The ocean is a lot calmer when it’s in slow motion,” Toby said.
“Okay, so where did the list come from?”
“It was written on the piece of paper that David had put on the desk.”
“Right, but who wrote it?”
“God, I think.”
The bartender looked a little terrified.
“When we were in the boat heading from Spain over to America I asked David how this all started. He told me that he was born in a village south of Jerusalem. His mother died when he was very young and his father was very cruel, so David ran away and was left to fend for himself. He spent his days begging and stealing to survive. This was his life for many years. Then, one day, he was caught robbing a shopkeeper. He was sentenced to death.”
“For stealing?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah, and they crucified him.”
“What? Where was this?”
“In Jerusalem. He sat on the cross for a day, agonizing in the sun, and then another man was crucified next to him. It was Jesus.”
The bartender stopped cleaning.
“David said that he talked to Jesus, and Jesus said that David would have a place in heaven, but to make up for his sins he needed to do the lord’s work once per year until the end of time.”
“No way,” the barkeep said. “There’s no way.”
“That’s just what he told me.”
“And, you believe him?”
Toby looked up from his beer with a perfectly serious expression. “I saw a single night take two months to pass, and I sailed across a slow-motion ocean. So, yes, I believe him. I think I’d believe anything that he told me.”
The bartender blinked his eyes and took a deep breath. He had no words.
Toby stood and tipped the last of his beer back into his mouth, “I’ve got to get some sleep. It’s a long plane ride to Turkey. Thanks for the drink.”
