The Man Who Remembered the Future

He sat there in his one bedroom apartment, thinking back over a life misspent. He started to list the mistakes he had made and realized it was a good thing he was retired with nothing to do. He couldn’t decide how to start.

                Certainly one of the most obvious to most people would have been his nearly twenty years of alcoholism. It had started in his thirties just before his wife gave up on their marriage and left him. They had been growing apart for years and to be fair she had left in part because there was little left to keep her there.

 A typical night would see him come in the house and get a drink. By the time he sat down to dinner he was on his third. She would give up and go to bed as he fell asleep in his chair. This became a nightly occurrence. Most mornings he would wake up still in the chair and have to rush to get cleaned up and make it to work.

After she left, the drinking began to take over his life. He started to have a drink with lunch and then after a while he simply drank his lunch. That led to bouts of napping in his office which led to missed appointments. It didn’t take long for his superiors to realize his problem was affecting his ability to work. He was given an ultimatum; either give up his drinking, or they would let him go. After three tries he was shown the door. 

That insurance job had been his first since leaving college. He had worked there for nearly twenty years and now had a skill base that didn’t translate well to other professions. For the next six months he went around to every other insurance firm in the tri-state region, with no luck. As soon as the interviewer checked back with his previous employers they decided that his drinking would be too great a risk, and turned him down for a job.

With his savings nearly depleted, and his house gone he became disparate. He gave up on insurance and move on to regular sales jobs.  He moved through jobs selling telephone contracts, media packages, window replacements, and carpeting in less than two years. He would average about four months on the job before his sales managers realized he was spending most of his time in bars instead of reaching out to customers.

That got him into retail store management and then clerking. He was in his fifties and there was nothing good in his future. He managed to hold on to each job just long enough to cause his drinking to overcome his means of employment. Finally he found himself working the night shift at a twenty-four hour Gas & Go. He would have lost that job too, but the owner was a recovering alcoholic who refused to let him go. That man dragged him to meetings, and sessions at the free clinic for doses of Antabuse.

It was a long haul but after nearly six months he was free of his dependency. His job performance record ensured that he wasn’t going to move out and up to another job. So he remained at the Gas & Go manager’s job until he retired four months ago. Now at sixty-eight he found that he had little left in his life except that job. He started to go to the library and realized that he still enjoyed reading. That led to one of the librarians recommending he come to a night course offered at the library in spiritualism. He found it interesting, and now he was trying to meditate. At first it was difficult to shut off the rest of the world. He would drift into thinking about how he went wrong and that would spiral into depression. When he spoke to the instructor, he was told to concentrate on one single thing and not allow the wave of frustration wash over his peace of mind.

He had been focusing on events in his previous drinking life for the past week. Difficult at first but then he was able to work his way back over the years and see how it had taken over his life. It wasn’t a difficult journey, but it was painful one. 

Tonight he was at that point where he saw the beginning of the downward spiral. It wasn’t that he didn’t realize how it had started. He just didn’t want to go there. He was back to that night his daughter died. The two of them had gone out to an action movie. He was there for the special effects, and she was there because the hero was a twenty something power house that even he had to admit was really built. After the movie she said she had to get home to finish a report for school but he insisted that they stop for ice cream.

It didn’t take much to convince her. The movies and ice cream was their special thing. His wife was lactose intolerant and couldn’t eat ice cream. Plus, she claimed the action flicks were boring and all had the same plot so she had the father-daughter team go by themselves. That night they had each decided to have hot fudge Sundays and laughed their way through the entire time it took to eat them.

They were still laughing as they left the ice cream parlor. There were two ways out of the parking lot. He chose the one that led on to the main street home so that they could get home quicker and she could get to work on her paper that he had delayed. As they pulled out, a drunk driver ran the red light next to the drive way and slammed into their car.  Their car spun around several times and ended up hitting a light pole. He was shaken by the impact, but managed to get his seatbelt off and looked over at his daughter. She had taken the brunt of the collision and seemed a little groggy.

He got out of the car and went around to her side of the car. He couldn’t open the door because it was jammed against a light pole. He ran back to his side of the car to pull her through his door but as he opened the door the car exploded and he was thrown ten feet away. He got up but the car was engulfed in flames. He could barely see through the flames. He tried to get back into the car but couldn’t get past the flames.

He had severe burns on his hands and chest, but his daughter had died in the inferno. He blamed himself and eventually so did his wife. That accident had started it all.

He sat there and started screaming as he saw his daughter in that car again. Then he started to cry. It seemed as if he had cried the whole night, and maybe he had. He woke up still sitting on the floor on that pillow he had gotten for his meditation. The pain was still there but it seemed a bit less intense.

He talked to the instructor about his experience and was told to wait to try that moment again. Try something less painful he was told. That night he decided to focus on something he had done after the accident. It was related, but not directly. He had always worn a Saint Christopher medal that he had been given as a child. Saint Christopher was the patron saint of travelers and was supposed to protect them. He remembered that after the accident he had ripped off the medal and threw it into the river.

As he sat there he went through the exercise to clear his mind, and practiced his cleansing breaths. Then he started to go back to that night when he threw away the medal. He was walking over a bridge that crossed the river and he remembered thinking about how Saint Christopher would protect him from falling over the bridge. That thought had triggered his rage at how the saint had failed to protect his daughter.

He was there. He could feel the slight breeze that was cooling the night after a hot summer day. The river was still in the throes of white water from the storm the previous night and he could hear the water coursing through the confines of the enclosed run that the town had built to prevent flooding. He was there again and was looking down at the water as the thought about the saint came to mind. He reached up and yanked the chain that held the medal. There was the same pain on his neck that he felt that night.

He had the medal in his hand and he felt his arm go back and throw the medal into the water. There was that same slight sound of a splash as the medal hit the water. Suddenly he was back in his apartment and he was covered in sweat. He had been sure that he had been back at the bridge. It had seemed so real that he couldn’t believe it had been a dream. The next day he called up the instructor and told him about his experience.

He went over to the coffee shop the instructor owned and they talked for an hour about his experience with the meditation. The instructor was excited for him. It was rare, he said, that someone so new to the practice to have such a realistic session. He encouraged him to try to go back to that moment again, and see if it seemed as real the second time.

And so there he was calming and breathing. He started to focus on the bridge and that night when he threw away Saint Christopher. He was there again. The breeze, the sound of the water, it was all there again. He felt the rage at the saint’s abandonment of him in his hour of need. He reached up for the chain and yanked it free. He could feel the pain, just as it had felt it that night those many years ago.

He remembered, thinking that he had been there before and then he decided not to throw the medal away. Instead he put it in his pocket and walked off the bridge. He woke up again sitting on his pillow. How strange he thought, that this time he remembered the event differently. He decided to tell his instructor about it the next day.

In the morning he was getting dressed and decided to go over to the coffee shop for breakfast. They had muffins and coffee, and that was what he wanted today anyway. That way he could kill two birds with one stone; breakfast and talking to the instructor about the altered remembrance. He reached into the bowl where he threw his loose change and keys. As he picked up the keys he saw the Saint Christopher’s medal hanging on the ring of his keys.

He dropped the keys as if they had been on fire. They clanged as they fell back into the bowl. One again he reached for the keys and this time carefully looked at the medal. It was scratched and dented as if it had had a hard life in his pocket He felt the medal to be sure it was real. It was real and it was the same one he had thrown in the river. He put the keys in his pocket and went over to the coffee shop.

After the early morning rush the instructor came over to where he was sitting and said that the man seemed distressed. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys, and then told the instructor what had happened last night as he meditated. His instructor listened and after he finished the instructor told him that since the medal was there now in front of them, the earlier memory must have been a false one and the one from last night was the true remembrance.

Faced with the fact that the medal was right there in front of him he finally agreed, but couldn’t understand how he could have suddenly replaced the true memory with the one where he threw away the medal. The instructor laughed it off with the comment that the mind is a complex mass of nerves and it can play funny tricks on us. His instructor suggested he try to find another memory from his past to focus on and let him know how it went.

That night he searched for some minor event that he was sure he could remember accurately. It was true that his years as an alcoholic had scrambled a number of his memories and finally had to admit that was must have happened when he first tried to remember the night on the bridge. He took out his wallet and saw the picture of his daughter he always carried with him. She was there in her blue prom dress. A tear slipped out of his eye as he looked at his daughter. Then he noticed the other picture. They had been on vacation and another person had taken a picture of his daughter, his wife, and him standing in front of a café. He remembered the night, some weeks after his wife had left him, that he had taken the picture and ripped his wife out. The edge where she had been was ragged and the angle on that side of the picture was all wrong.

He put the picture on the table and sat down on his pillow. Again he went through his routine to begin the meditation. He started to focus on that night when he ripped the photograph. That night he had already had one drink and was about to pour another when he saw the picture in a small frame. He was there, living in the memory. He picked up the picture and threw it against the wall. He could hear the glass break as it smashed. He went over to the wall and picked up the frame. The picture fell out of the frame and landed on the floor in the middle of all of the broken glass.

He reached for the picture and managed to cut himself on the glass from the fame. The cut hurt and now the rage was building in him as he saw his wife there with him and his daughter. He folded the picture so that the end where his wife stood was now folded under the picture. He was about to tear the picture so that his wife would leave the picture just as she had left him in real life. Then he thought he remembered doing that before. And he decided not to risk tearing the picture and just left her folded underneath. 

It was morning and he had slept on the pillow again. He was stiff as he got up from the floor. He noticed the picture lying on the table. There it was just his daughter and him from that day on vacation. He started to sweat as he picked it up and realized it felt wrong. He turned it over and there was his wife smiling at him from that day. She was folded onto the back of the picture, but not torn off. Her side was a little rougher from having been at the back of the photo, but was still her.

He took the picture and went to the coffee shop. As he expected his instructor looked at the picture and once again said that he must have been living with a false memory. Since his wife’s image was still attached to the photo, he must have imagined tearing the photo and then never again bothered to take it out of his wallet to see that it was merely folded.

With the medal and now the photo he was sure the instructor was wrong. His other memories had been too strong to be false. As he sat there in his apartment he now was sure that the feeling he now had of “déjà vu” at both of those events was new and hadn’t been in his mind originally.

He was going to try one more test. He went to his closet and took out an old beat up pair of shoes. They were what used to be called “Penny Loafers.” There weren’t any coins in them now because he remembered taking out his lucky dimes and using them to help pay for a drink one night when he was out of money.

He placed the shoes in front of him as he sat down on his pillow. He looked carefully at them and even picked them up to check that there weren’t any coins that had slipped into the folds of the shoes. There was nothing there, just the shoes.

Again he went through his meditation preparations. He looked at the shoes one last time and tried to go back to that night when he needed every cent he could lay his hands on for a drink. He wasn’t able to find that exact memory. There were so many nights when he was desperate for a drink that they were forcing themselves together.

He stopped and went through his deep breathing again. This time he tried to focus on the shoes alone. Finally there they were with the dimes shinning in the pockets of the shoes. Then he tried to remember thinking of the dimes as a means of getting a drink. 

Wham, suddenly he was there with the shoes on his feet, and he was looking down at them. The thirst was on him and he was looking at his now empty wallet. Then he was going around the house checking for change. First the pockets of his other pants and a jacket he had worn the other night. He had gathered quite a few coins, but when he counted them he was still short of what he needed for the cheapest drink in the bar next door. Then he saw the shoes again. He took them off and started to get the dimes out. The shoes were stiff and the dimes wouldn’t come out. Suddenly he remembered trying to get them out before.

He left the dimes in the shoes and glanced at the watch on his wrist. It was a cheap Timex but he thought he should be able to trade it for a shot. He went out and negotiated for the drink by trading in his watch.

He awoke with a shock and almost fell over as he tried to reach for the shoes without fully waking up. He stopped and took a deep breath. Then he reached for the shoes in front of him. There weren’t any dimes in the shoes, they were pennies. He suddenly recalled taking the dimes out of the shoes another night and later putting pennies in their place. 

He started to shake. In a past life this would have been a moment when he would have reached for a bottle. Whatever was happening, it truly was happening. Somehow he was able to reach back into the past and change reality. He was left with both memories. The old-true memory of what had really happened, and the new-true memory of what was now reality.

He took out his keys, the old photo, and the penny loafers. He placed them all on the floor in front of his pillow. He knew what he had to do. He knew that all of this was happening so that he could do what he was about to do.

He sat down and looked at his things in front of him. They were proof that he could do it. He started to do his cleansing breaths and cleared his mind of all thoughts. Then he focused on that night of the movie and ice cream. He was back in the parking lot and was pulling out into the street. He remembered thinking he had done this before. Suddenly there was a bang and his car was spinning around and then a sharp pain in his back as the car struck something. He saw that they had been knocked across the street from the ice cream parlor and now where next to a light pole. 

He undid his seat belt and looked across at his daughter. She seemed groggy but awake. He tried to talk to her but she wasn’t coherent. He opened his door and was getting out when he remembered doing this before. What he was doing was wrong. He didn’t know why but it was. Instead he reached across and undid his daughter’s seat belt. He knew he should be careful because she might have a neck injury. He pulled at her and she slid across the seat toward him.

He got her out of the car and was turning with her grasped in front of him to get to a safe spot when suddenly there was a bang and he felt…

There in Our Savior cemetery a young mother and her ten year old son are standing in front of a grave. She was saying, “See I told you I could remember where your grandpa was buried.  Your dad and I may have moved away from this place before you were born but I’d never forget the way here.”

The young boy asks, “What was he like?”

The woman reaches down to pull out some arrant weeds. “He was a hero. We were in a car accident and he died saving me from the car when it blew up.”