Laoeked1111 Habitica 01-06-2023

Prompt: FINISH THE STORY - It was a Monday morning. I was at work, sitting at my desk. Then, suddenly, the phone rang. It was boss, and he said “Come into my office right this instant!” I shrugged and thought to myself, “What did I do now?” I then went to my boss’s office, my palms sweating and my body trembling. I was very nervous, given the fact that my boss had given me a warning last week for failing to meet a deadline. I was given one more week to finish the assignment, and I was nowhere near done. When I finally arrived at my boss’s office, I asked him, “What is it now?” He then gave me a dirty look and replied…

“Sit.”

My heart sank. I was going to be here for a while.

I shrank into an office chair near the door and quickly crossed my legs and arms so that he would not see me shaking. My eyes dropped to the floor. They roamed a while over the dull yellow flowers and vines decorating the carpeted floor before discovering a bent piece of acrylic at the foot of the desk. It was a name plate, displaying in silver lettering, “A. Little.”

“You haven’t finished your report, have you, Lawrence?”

“No, Abe; I told you last week that I’d need more than a week to finish it, especially since I’m working alone on what was supposed to be a team project.”

“Isn’t Gary supposed to be helping you?”

“Gary’s in the hospital. He’s been out since Wednesday.”

He grimaced and turned from me to the window behind him. I looked around the room. His office had changed since last week. The trinkets that used to sit at the window were gone, apart from an unsolved Rubik’s cube that evidently hadn’t been touched for some time. On the walls of the room, the paintings of nonsensical corporate art had shifted around, but a picture of four boys had been left in the same spot.

The boys in that picture all had straight brown hair and ice cream dripping down their round faces. They all stared into the camera wild-eyed and with glee, the mark of youth clear in all their features. The first time I saw that picture, I assumed the boys were Abraham’s, but he corrected me – he had no children. The picture was actually of him and his brothers and was some twenty years old. The gesture had touched me then. It did not touch me now.

I was annoyed by the frankness of him being unaware of Gary’s stroke. It was true that part of my frustration stemmed from the inadvertent expansion of my responsibilities without a corresponding expansion of understanding, but that was only a minor offense. More importantly, what was this utter negligence toward us employees? Abraham Little was the most exacting, least generous manager a company had ever seen; his workers pressed hard, sacrificed much, complained little, and for what? I turned all this over in my head for a few minutes while my stomach did slow loop-the-loops and contorted in shared annoyance. This man was paid far more than Gary; one of them was currently stuck in a bed with needles in his arms, and the other was staring out the window and quite literally twiddling his thumbs.

Suddenly, he spoke. He was watching me.

“Do you have something to say, Lawrence? You’re whispering to yourself.”

I took this as a slight; it encouraged me to take a stand. Indignity would not be given free reign. It must be challenged.

“Were you even aware of Gary’s stroke?” was my clumsy blurt.

His countenance shifted, but he did not respond. He just stared. Looking at him, I made out no emotion in his eyes nor in the lines of his forehead nor in his shallow breaths. He had the most neutral expression I had ever seen: it was like he wasn’t really paying attention. My ears burned under his unremitting, unconscious stare. I continued; there was no turning back now.

“Shouldn’t you be more receptive to the suffering of someone else? How could you be so insensitive?”

At the word “suffering,” something flickered behind those glassy, motionless eyes. Nothing in his countenance changed, yet I was impressed with the idea that something called his mind back into his body. He continued to stare, but now he spoke. I braced for argument.

The argument did not come. In its stead rode four calm words, one after the other in neat procession.

“I don’t know suffering?”

Without waiting for a response, he turned toward the monitor on his left and started clicking the mouse. When he stopped, he ripped a wire out of the headphone jack and turned back toward the window, away from me.

From the speaker came a wheezing voice.

“My name is Carter Little. Today is October 10.”

A pause of a few seconds ensued. Carter seemed to be collecting his thoughts. I noted that this was evidently a recording of him; it was now May.

“I’ve spent a load of time – not sure how much – thinking about how it feels to die. It seems wrong for there to be something everyone must experience but nobody can prepare for. Death is terrifying because it is the loss of Life, but ask anybody whether they fear Death and they aptly reply in the negative. It seems too distant for the attention of an insouciant mortal.”

“But I really mean a different death. True Death is simple: one day, you’re living and breathing and enjoying a game of football with your buddies, and the next day, you’re not. The kind of death I have thought about isn’t simple. At least, I don’t think so.”

A thirty second pause followed, during which several shallow breaths were audible. At this time, his older brother started turning his chair from side to side, still facing the window and away from me.

“It’s like taking care of a pet snail for several weeks before realizing that the reason the snail doesn’t eat is because it’s actually just a shell. The snail’s been dead a long time, but you don’t realize it until you actually look at it.”

Then, abruptly – “I’m dying.”

“I’m twenty-six and I’m losing my memory. It was slow at first: I’d wonder where I left my phone or why I was holding a bottle opener. I would blame these lapses on lack of sleep or being preoccupied. I didn’t notice that I was getting worse.”

“But then I would forget the name of my apartment building when getting an Uber. I would be confused when my friends came to my house with birthday presents. I would find sticky notes on my computer that I had no recollection of. At some point, I realized I wasn’t just sleep-deprived.”

“Today is a good day: I am presently lucid. It is a rare luxury to be thinking clearly and processing memory normally. I can’t remember what happens on days where I’m not so lucky, but I have some vague recollections of calling Nina a few times. Then I realize that she left me months ago. I don’t blame her; who would want to live 24/7 as somebody else’s caretaker?”

Carter wheezed.

“When I was forced to accept that my memory was fading, I went to see my doctor. I had arrived ten minutes before the appointment and got some clipboarded forms from a lady at the counter. After sitting down, I looked at the pages.”

“The first line read, ‘Name.’ That was the first time I forgot my own name. I had stared at the paper for two whole minutes before panicking and looking at my driver’s license. I found the answer, ‘Carter Little’ but the twelve letters I saw looked as foreign to me as Mandarin. At that point, I put the clipboard on the chair next to me and hurried out of the waiting room.”

“I’ve never been diagnosed with dementia, and at this point, I don’t want to be. I suppose I would rather just leave the question open. What would be the point anyway? There isn’t a cure for memory loss. I’ll never get back my childhood; my friendships; my experiences, good or bad.”

“In this way, I’m close to death. Not true Death, but his younger sister death. Soon, my memory will be gone forever, and then what am I but an empty snail’s shell? Where does my identity go? Will my soul leave for heaven or will it continue as a husk enchained to a mortal frame?”

“But enough with existential questions. I now state that the purpose of this recording, friends; family; and whoever else hears this, is to make known that though I am dying – losing myself – I am happy. I have been blessed by God to have grown up with a loving mother and father and three accomplished brothers. I have been blessed with knowing love and compassion from Nina. I have been blessed with a life full of rich experiences, triumphs, and traumas. I daresay that I’ve been blessed – not cursed – with the experience of death before Death. If you see me after I have ‘died,’ please remind me that I was happy and ought to continue to be.”

One last sigh was heard before the recording ended.

“He launches into blind fits a few times a day,” said Abe, still staring out the window and not looking at me. “I can’t imagine the bewilderment he goes through every day not knowing what his own name is. You couldn’t look at him slamming his fist into the wall over and over and believe he was really happy.”

He reflected for a minute and then quietly said, “Spend another week on the project. We’ll see where you are then.”

I got up to leave. As I opened the door, he intimated one more thing.

“I’ve been visiting Gary every day the doctors allow it – I haven’t been unaware of his stroke. Sometimes my memory takes a little slip, though.”

I left.

At ten o’clock the next morning, I walked into Abraham’s office with two documents clutched to my chest. One was the finished report. The other was my resignation.