FICTION
What He Could Have Been
The intrusion of an unlived life
He would have been in the foreign service, learning the ways of other cultures, immersed in new customs, exotic languages, different kinds of people. But he would have had a family, too. His wife, educated, traveled, would have had her own career, one that he respected, that was equal to his own. She could have exceeded him and that would have been fine. The point was experience, and learning, and travel, and never being bored.
They would have had a home, perhaps a rustic cottage in upstate New York, the Hudson River Valley, or maybe out in northern California up around Sebastopol. He loved Bodega Bay. He had an affection for Hitchcock’s The Birds but it wasn’t the horror aspect. It was the community and the beauty of the coast.
He would have taken his family to live for months or years in Europe and Asia, intentionally, so the kids would be multi-lingual, which he wasn’t. It was ironic. His own mother spoke five languages. But his father had been born in New York and only spoke the native tongue. His mother was a refugee. His parents apparently were too busy to have thought about giving him those wings. Mostly, they taught him how to survive, though there weren’t many mortal challenges where he grew up, unlike in the war zones that had shaped them.
He would have had a house, perhaps sparely furnished and ergonomically tasteful in the Japanese style of unclutteredness, if the wife was okay with that. One never knows. In this case, one never will. Well, we aren’t sure of that. But the chances are astronomically low.
He would have been financially secure, having invested wisely, having bought real estate. That would have been him—a forward-thinking fellow. There would have been many kinds of friends, compatriots who lived all over the world with whom he would have skied and hiked and climbed, with or without the wife and kids. The kids are hard to discern. They would be older now, perhaps in their late 30s. They would have grown up largely healthy, for they would have been guided with a firm but loving hand. Perhaps he could have done it; his psyche may not have allowed it. We don’t know.
There would have been vacations — with wife, children, their spouses and eventually their kids, too — different types of trips for different seasons. A chalet in Switzerland, a cabin in Tahoe, stays in New Zealand or Australia in winter. Martha’s Vineyard or the Cape in any season.
When he sat in his office — the one constructed exactly the way he designed with plentiful wood and windows looking out onto the deep forest— he would remain quiet for a good long time to feel grounded. Each morning, if the weather was agreeable, he would have sat outside on the patio drinking coffee and reading the news.
There is more to it, of course, far more, but those are some of the key pieces.
It was a life that he feels now as vital and present in him but only as a potential, a latent energy, perhaps an it’s-too-late-you-shouldn’t-even-be-thinking-about-it kind of thing. A faint but relentless pulsing that will be there in the background as long as he is in the foreground.
But none of it happened.
You see, his father had moved their family away from that wonderful neighborhood that he loved, the one that nourished him, the one in which he would have thrived and grown strong and able. But it was one that his father saw as a failure. When that happened the boy was traumatized. And then his father went off and died.
The boy became scared.
The rest is a sad story, unremarkable in most ways. Quite ordinary. It was one of survival, of emotional detachment and of storminess, of decisions informed not from his deeper and truer self, but from a façade, a construct he had created in order to cope, to survive. Survival had subsumed him.
It doesn’t matter. What matters now is that the years are gone.
But here’s the thing: he knows about that other life. It’s a recent discovery. It had been much easier before. Living his life had been like being buried under a heavy weight. He was fighting, struggling for air and for sustenance, there was no way to see what the nature of the weight was. The fighting took so much energy.
Then, slowly, that other life began to resolve, like an image forming on a photo sheet in solution in a darkroom— and he saw it — at first vaguely as gossamer impressions, then it became clearer and clearer.
This all pains him. He desperately wants to know how to deal with it, for there is no hiding now. It’s the breathing tube that had ushered all this into being. Is that what did it? The Emergency Room doctor had jammed it down into his throat, it hurt so much, it had awakened something, opened this door. Yes, he should have given up motorcycle riding long ago, knowing this day would come. Or maybe for all the exhilarating time that he had — all those many years — it was worth it.
He shuts his eyes and tries to sleep despite the oppressive presence of all the monitors pinging in this dingy room with its horrid little window facing the brick tenement wall. Yet it just keeps on going … The wife, kids, house, office, trees, trips, people, all taking shape around him as though they are real.
That family especially infects him, he cannot rid himself of them, like a virus that has spread into every corner of his being. Maybe he should consult a priest, or an oracle, or a hitman, or maybe an exorcist. There is always the hope of escape. Maybe they will go away and leave him in peace. It feels almost as though that peace is at arm’s length now. The most difficult thing is that he knows that what’s happened is his fault. How could it not be? But that’s OK, he thinks.
His eyes creep open. It’s extraordinary what he sees: the line on the heart rate monitor slowing in its rising and its falling, it's pinging. Each ping takes an eternity. Time has elongated. The line slows and then slows more, and then it weakens and falters, and then it flattens.
