Man Out of Time
By Matt Springer
This is how men die, Paul Freemont mused on a rainy Tuesday morning.
Men die, mused Paul, as their souls drip away onto the firmly-carpeted floor of a nondescript office building. Men die, mused Paul, in cubicles.
Also, men die by gunshot, or beating, or an overdose of pills. They are smacked into gelatin by a semi truck going eighty miles per hour. They are stabbed through the heart by a two-timing woman. They drown.
Paul Freemont's ambition, then, sat firmly on the dividing line between how men die, and how men REALLY die.
He reclined in a poorly-made Office Depot desk chair. By virtue of his twenty-seven years with Intertech Ltd., he had earned a "primo spot," as his supervisor Brett was fond of saying: He had a window at his back, and that window looked out onto the parking lot.
A nice cubicle. Well-earned, even. But still a cube.
He checked the clock: 12:30 p.m. He would be late.
He logged off his computer, grabbed his car keys, and drove to Applebee's.
"Were you followed?"
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. SERIOUSLY. Were. You. Followed?"
"Nope."
Paul took a gigantic swallow from his Dr. Pepper. Across the table, Gabriel Shenk narrowed his eyes to tiny slits. Paul stifled a laugh, and then suddenly became powerfully serious.
"This isn't a game. I'm sincere."
"You think I'm not?"
Gabirel removed what appeared to be an ornate dagger from inside his trenchcoat.
"What are you, crazy?! Put that thing away."
"It's my weapon of choice," Gabriel whispered. He ran the blade across his tongue.
"Careful. You'll cut your tongue."
"It's not sharp. It's a Lord of the Rings replica letter opener. But it stabs real good."
There seems to be a threshold in the human brain beyond which the idea of continuing to exist holds no discernible interest.
It doesn't necessarily manifest as a heaving, dramatic urge to throw one's body in front of an oncoming train. It sometimes emerges as quiet resignation—a slight numb tingle in the heart, an emptying of the head.
Paul's head had emptied itself at some point between his 43rd and his 47th birthdays. This much he had discerned, in the long nights as he lay awake in the king-size bed he used to share with That Bitch Cheryl.
TBCheryl had left him on his 41st birthday (yes, literally ON his birthday) to tour Europe and parts of central Asia with the lead singer of a Led Zeppelin cover band, who she had met when they played occasional live sets at that bar in the strip mall by the bank.
At first, Paul was upset, then resigned, then idiotically hopeful. He wasn't a bad-looking guy, and he had a well-paying job and a nice house, which he carefully divested of any signs of his ex-wife's existence.
He went to singles nights. He joined church groups for fortysomethings, even though he wasn't particularly religious, or even practicing. He met women in bars in strip malls by banks.
Nothing…happened.
He grew fat. He got lonely.
His head emptied itself, and one morning, he woke up and wasn't sure—sure if he cared if he lived or died, sure if anyone else cared much either, sure if he could just end the numb, at least that would be SOMEthing.
He placed an ad, and the ad brought Gabriel.
"First, we discuss terms," Gabriel said as he gently placed the Lord of the Rings letter opener onto the Applebee's tablecloth.
"Ten grand."
"That is…unacceptable."
"It's all I've got."
"It's not enough."
"I'll get someone else."
Paul dropped a dollar onto the table for the Dr. Pepper, and rose to leave. He was halfway down the aisle, about to pivot past three old ladies and two mothers with cloying babies, when Gabriel called out.
"Fine."
"What's that?" Paul put his hand up to his ear and cupped it, a mocking pantomime of "I can't hear you."
"I said, FINE. God."
Smirking a little, Paul sat back down.
The ad had appeared in a single issue of the Treasure Chest, one of those local rags filled with coupons and advertorials and classifieds looking for play dates. It read like so: WANTED: Operative for discrete initiative. Someone unafraid to dirty hands. Pay is competitive. Contact corvette22341@yahoo.com for details, or call 40
The Chest's "editor," really a mother of three living in a ranch house with ambitions to become Central Florida's answer to Tina Brown, had accidentally omitted most of the phone number.
Paul only got one e-mail, which was almost a relief, as he had started to regret placing the ad at all, and had begun considering other options. But he didn't want other options.
See, Paul wanted to die, but he didn't want to kill himself. The mere thought made him nauseous.
He wanted someone ELSE to do it. That seemed expedient.
"How do you want to go, Mr. Bond?"
The fake name was Paul's idea; the choice of name was Gabriel's. He adopted a laughable German accent as he used it—"Meester Baahnd."
"I don't care. What sounds good to you?"
Paul was joking (sorta) but Gabriel wasn't. Frankly, Gabriel seemed incapable of joking.
"Poison."<br> The word hung like a bad fart, and Paul focused on his shrimp basket for a moment before continuing.
"Just figure it out and do it, okay?"
"You're not much fun, Meester Baahnd."
"Right back atcha."
Paul didn't want to know when, or how, he would be murdered. He just wanted it to happen, and then…well, then, nothing. He just wanted it to happen.
So he slid a plastic Publix bag across the Applebee's table. The bag had a plain white envelope inside. The envelope contained $5,000 in small, unmarked bills.
"I wear this jacket at all times," Paul said. He held up a matted blue Members Only coat, a gift from That Bitch Cheryl for Christmas 1993. "I will keep the other $5,000 inside the pocket of this jacket. You can take it from me when the job's done."
"I like the way you think, Meester Baahnd. In another life, we might have been friends."
"I doubt it." Paul slipped on the jacket and headed for the door. Behind him, Gabriel called out for Paul's half of the tab, but Paul pretended not to hear him.
For a while, Paul sat in his car in the parking lot, crouched down low in his seat, peering out at the Applebee's door from a corner of the window. He wondered if Gabriel would try to follow him and do it now—why he wondered, and why he waited to find out, would only become clear the next morning.
That morning dawned thick and clammy. The instant Paul rose from bed, a single trickle of sweat beaded its way down the center of his back. He wanted to believe it was simply a matter of the clammy heat, the stationary fan on the ceiling above, and the ever-crapping-out air conditioner.
He showered, and as he showered, he could not resist the urge to constantly draw aside the shower curtain and glance at the bathroom door, as if he expected it to burst open at any moment. His ears strained for any hint of an unusual noise that might predict a home invasion.
He laughed to himself, though, as he tied his shoes and packed his lunch. Home invasion would be the most idiotic way to—
BANG.
A boot slammed into Paul's front door. Being cheaply manufactured from pressed wood, the door gave up quickly. A large black combat boot—along with the foot inside and attached body—were thus unable to kick the door down and enter the house with a macho swagger.
Instead, the boot entered the door by its lonesome and stayed there, trapping the foot along with it. Paul paused for a split-second, listening to Gabriel's frustrated grunts and the arrhythmic tap-tap-tapping of his free foot on the front porch.
Then Paul ran. Hard.
In the years to come, Paul would occasionally reach for a reason why his self-preservation instincts had suddenly kicked in with a vengeance, there in his house on that morning. After all, it had been his own idea to have himself assassinated. It was his choice from the beginning, to the extent that he even withdrew ten grand from his 401K under the guise of "home repairs" with which to pay a sad, pathetic loser to end his life.
The truth was, even though he couldn't think at the moment of a decent reason to keep on living, he realized under mild threat of death that a reason would probably present itself eventually. Until then, he certainly had no overwhelming motivation to die, and especially not to die in this way—clumsily murdered by the poor man's Luca Brasi, who would then reach into a jacket older than himself and score five grand for his troubling absence of morality.
What cinched the deal wasn't anything as melodramatic as a life flashing before Paul's eyes—instead, what played inside his brain was the opening credits of an episode of Dateline on some future Saturday night:
Tonight on Dateline…
He paid to die…at the hands of a college dropout obsessed with Lord of the Rings. One man's sad assassination…and the pathetic assassin that ended his life, not even worth more than ten thousand dollars.
The Letter-Opener From Hell…after this break.
He would not be the victim in THAT episode. Please, God, no. He would gladly provide a corpse for the "Cheating Casanova Gets His" episode, or even the "Selfless Samaritan Risks All" episode.
But not the "Crappy Murder Suicide Whatever" episode. Even Stone Phillips couldn't make that sound appealing.
The car was parked in the front driveway, but Paul figured he could still reach it if he crept carefully along the far side of the house. As he stepped onto the back patio, he could hear the final throes of Gabriel's battle with the door.
"Gaad…damned…stupid…boot…OUT!"
The distant sound of flesh collapsing on concrete, a low-hissed "Fuuuuck," then a muffled tumble moving through the house as Gabriel ransacked the place for Paul.
Paul was turning the ignition key in his Honda Civic when Gabriel emerged from his bedroom window and leapt down onto the hood of his car. Paul started the car, then spun it backward into the street. Gabriel, naturally, clung to the hood.
A buzzing pulsed in Paul's temples. It sped through his veins and bounced up and down his body, from toe to forehead.
Life, he suddenly realized, is REALLY for the living.
Meeting Gabriel's glance for a split-second, he floored it. Gabriel managed to stay fastened to the hood, but not for long; a half-block later, he had toppled sideways onto the street.
Paul went to work and died 42 years later, of natural causes.