Miranda Read online

  Hey, how about those Giants?

  Most times, though, I just looked forward to my soaps, and I felt myself growing stronger with every passing day.

  When I was a newborn, my muscles were as dead as the rest of me, and I struggled just to roll over onto my side. Every day brought more confidence and less bed sores.

  It was a cool spring day the first time I felt strong enough to swing my legs off the bed and stand up. I steadied myself and backed over to the window. Then I swung around to see a patch of daffodils and tulips growing below. It was beautiful.

  They were bursts of color so different from the blasé pastels of my room. I stared for several minutes at the flowers and the bright green lawn surrounding them. I knew I was grinning as much as Nurse Tamblin always did.

  Could life get any better than this?

  After about ten minutes, I felt even stronger and backed over to the door of my room, looked down the hallway to the nursing station, and waved at the on-duty nurse. She nodded and smiled at me before ignoring me. The hospital stretched for a long way past her.

  I slowly shuffled backward to my bed and climbed back in.

  Dinner was about an hour after that. A male orderly brought me an empty tray and put it across my lap. He didn’t smile -- didn’t even look at me. I think he thought I was dying. Little did he know.

  I began to wonder how they found such personality-stricken people to work there. It was very different from the energetic and outgoing people who populated the hospitals in the soaps.

  I picked up the dirty plastic spoon and sucked on it. I regurgitated some vanilla pudding and spooned it out of my mouth into the little plastic container on my tray. It tasted quite good. I like vanilla better than chocolate.

  After dessert, I un-swallowed some mashed potatoes and roast beef, which didn’t taste nearly as good as the pudding. I bit the pieces of the beef all back together again and used the plastic knife to reassemble it on the plate. I spit up a glass of apple juice, too. They weren’t very creative with drinks at dinner. I only ever had water, apple juice, or orange juice. No coffee, not even decaf. I didn’t miss the coffee, but when I was younger, I became addicted to it.

  Eventually my tray was full, and I was feeling very hungry.

  The same orderly came back, still without a smile, picked up the full tray and placed it into a cart I could see outside my room. Not a word from him.

  I liked to eat, but I sure hated the hunger I felt afterward.

  The days passed, and with every new one, I felt stronger and more clear-headed. My vocabulary increased, and I was able to keep up simple conversations. Even so, it was still difficult with all the new words I was learning.

  “Dementia” was a word I heard a lot. And “Alzheimer’s.”

  These were nonsense words to me. I thought they described why I was in the hospital, but they didn’t mean anything more to me than random syllables strung together. For a few days, I actually began to wonder if my name was Johnson Alzheimer, since they kept talking about that disease, and I knew my name was Johnson.

  Eventually, I found that Johnson was my last name.

  My first name was Michael. I was five months un-dead when I first heard myself called that by Nurse Tamblin. Another penny dropped, and I learned more about myself.

  When you’re in the hospital with no visitors, very little English, and no entertainment, it’s easy to count the days.

  Exactly six months after my death, I was un-admitted from the hospital.

  “Your condition is just going to get worse.” That’s what the doctor told me the day I arrived. He didn’t pull any punches, describing how I was going to lose most of my faculties, my abilities to speak and understand English, and my memory would get more and more faulty as time went on.

  I wanted to say, “Well, of course my memory will get worse. We’ve already been through that, right?” But, of course, they hadn’t been through it at all. They were looking in the wrong direction.

  I smiled when I was released from the hospital. I un-admitted myself and left to see the world. Even though I was still very confused, I knew it was actually me that was time-challenged, after watching television and talking to doctors and nurses for the past half-year.

  Wow . . . it was me going backward, not everybody else. Of course, Occam’s Razor was at work, and it was obvious once I realized it, but even so, it seemed hard to accept.

  I tried to talk to a doctor about it once during my hospital stay. He was a shrink. Tall, almost bald, smiled all the time.

  He fake-smiled when I was with him. It wasn’t hard to tell. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you.”

  “I just sprung to life a few months ago. Yes, but I’m different.”

  “It happens to everyone eventually. You’re just aging. What do you mean?”

  “Doctor, this probably sounds crazy, but I’m living my life in reverse.”

  He never believed me. All he could see from his temporal orientation was me getting worse and worse, losing control of my body and my mind; in reality, I was actually gaining control of both, but I couldn’t tell anybody that.

  They’d think I was nuts. I’m a quick learner.

  Chapter 13

  When I left the hospital and backed out onto Cleveland Street, I had my first taste of unfiltered air. It felt great, and as the hospital receded in front of me, I took several large gulps, drinking in the freshness. Several people stared at me and drifted away. I must have looked like I was going to the mental hospital.

  I laughed at the bright sunshine raining down on me.

  God, it felt so amazing!

  The television was a very poor substitute for what the outside world was really like. I loved it.

  The colors were bright and so varied; I just stared at each new hue as I saw it. The olive green of park benches sitting among the darker green of the grass, the blue and orange stripes on the city buses . . . I even tried to glimpse the yellow of the sun, but I only got sore eyes for the effort. I laughed and cried as I wandered the city streets.

  The colors in the park . . . I stopped there and crawled on the grass, feeling the tiny spikes graze my hands. I wanted more and plopped onto the ground to feel the tiny prickles across my cheeks.

  It felt so good to be alive! And free!

  The grass smelled so new. Everything smells like something, but I didn’t always have words for the scent. Even the diesel exhaust from the buses was a wonder.

  I really cared not a whit that I looked like a freak. I knew my senility was drifting behind me, not ahead. Nobody watching me in the wrong direction had a clue. It was very liberating.

  “Free,” I whispered. “Free to do whatever I want.”

  I laughed again and patted my cheeks where the grass had kissed me.

  I backwalked to the bank and pulled a small piece of crumpled paper out of my pocket, unscrunching it into a nice smooth receipt.

  I read the details. A deposit for $200. Not a bad start.

  I pushed the receipt into the tiny slot in the machine and fed my bank card inside. After a moment, an envelope sprung out with my money. I punched my PIN into the machine and put my card back in my wallet along with the cash.

  The receipt I fed into the machine said I had $186,467 in the bank.

  “That’ll last me a long time,” I said. It felt good to say things out loud, to get used to talking in my “natural” direction without nurses or orderlies looking at me weird.

  “Freedom.”

  I loved that word. Loved the feel of it as it slipped through my lips, loved the concept of being able to do anything I wanted without the damned hospital scheduling my every move.

  Backwalking farther, I passed an old woman sitting on the side of the road, her legs tapping the curb. A skinny orange cat sat sleeping beside her. I stared in fascination at the cat. It ignored me.

  I jumped a bit just before the old woman scowled at me and shouted, “That all?”

  She handed me a five dollar bi
ll. The cat blinked its eyes as I moved away. The woman, too, receded into the distance in front of me and slipped away from my consciousness.

  After a few blocks, I backed around a corner onto Merritt Avenue, a short side street littered with empty Coke cans and cigarette butts. I was ready for a quiet part of town after being on one of Oakland’s major streets for the past couple of hours.

  I turned one more corner and reached my home. I recognized the address, 67B Kingston Avenue, from my driver’s license. It was a small basement apartment, not far from Lake Merritt, where I would spend many hours in my past, watching ducks and children swim.

  I lived alone.

  There were no photographs of anybody else. No letters or documents indicating a love interest or even any relatives.

  None.

  Hmm. I guess I should have known that.

  For the first time since I un-died, I felt pangs of loneliness. I hadn’t ever really been alone in the hospital, at least not for long. There was almost always at least one other patient in the same room, sometimes several, and nurses would often come running in to see me, whereupon I’d always be sure to press the call button.

  Now, I was alone in my little apartment. That first time I shut the front door behind me, it felt like I was closing myself from the whole world, and it was much more difficult to bear than I expected.

  I backed over to a worn brown easy chair and plopped down into it, then surveyed my apartment. It seemed cozy enough, with most of the furniture being made of a dark wood. Oak? I knew it was fake, a veneer of some kind, but it was well cared for. Cheap but nice.

  I backed into the kitchen to find a dirty glass and an empty beer bottle on the counter. There was almost a dozen other empty bottles of Miller Genuine Draft in a box on the floor of the kitchen, near the pantry. I brought the glass and bottle back to the living room and sat again.

  I savored the taste of the beer as I regurgitated it, then spit it into the glass. The strong taste really hit me at first. I wasn’t sure if it was something I liked, but all the empties told me I’d get used to it.

  People were always drinking beer or wine in my favorite shows, and it made me feel like a real person to be doing that, too.

  I clicked the television on for background noise. There was a western movie playing. Clint Eastwood rode backward on his horse, and the bad guys followed in front of him. I didn’t really pay much attention to it.

  After I filled the glass, I poured the beer up into the empty bottle. When it was full, I snapped the cap on and put the bottle into the fridge. I took the time to see what else was there. Not much. I was sure I’d fill it up at dinnertime.

  I picked up another empty MGD bottle.

  After a few more beers, I had a nap, lying on the couch. All I could think about was how lonely I felt.

  It was noon when I awoke. The sun’s filtered light shone through the whimsy curtains covering the kitchen window.

  I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. Then, I yawned and took a leak, the piss splashing up from the tank and arcing into my penis, filling me until I felt very uncomfortable. It took several minutes before I could stop thinking about that, as my body reabsorbed the urine.

  I went to the door and opened it to find a woman standing there. I didn’t recognize her. She had a round face with a painted smile that reminded me of a clown. Her hair was frizzled, bits flying out at odd angles.

  “Have a nice walk,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Johnson!”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I just wanted to remind you the rent is due tomorrow. I won’t keep you.”

  “I was just thinking of going out for a walk. Yes, it’s a great day.”

  “Spring in California is like nothing else, isn’t it? The sun shining and everything. Isn’t it a great day out? Mr. Johnson, how are you doing today?”

  Her smile disappeared, and I closed the door in her face. She rang the doorbell, as I went back into my living room.

  I knew I wouldn’t be going for that walk, having just woken from the nap instead, but I was glad I’d gotten rid of the landlord.

  Later, I found my checkbook and bank statements. I appeared to be an organized person and had a small box of cancelled checks neatly filed.

  Lucinda Caldwell.

  Tomorrow, I wouldn’t be writing any checks to Mrs. Caldwell, since I’d be admitting myself into the hospital, but I’d need to do it in earlier months.

  I found a computer in the corner, near the desk where I kept those checks. At first it was a bit intimidating, but I got the hang of it.

  The Internet was wonderful. I’d have pages pop up on my monitor every time I sat down, and they were always topics I had been wondering about. Genetic mutations, left-handed molecules, and quantum abnormalities glued me to the screen, hoping for hints about why I was living my life backward.

  After reading each article, I’d end up back at the Google main page and type in a couple of keywords to summarize what I’d just read.

  Of all the options, some kind of genetic mutation seemed to hold the most promise, but even that wasn’t really helping me understand. Why me?

  I couldn’t find any hint of another person living my kind of life.

  Chapter 12

  The next five years were relatively uneventful, and I won’t go into too much detail about them. Just a few of the highlights.

  At first, time seemed to stretch on for a very long time. I found no friends, no relatives.

  In fact, I met few people at all, preferring to stay inside my little apartment most of the time. The TV was my best friend. Every once in a while, I would walk down to the bank and deal with the ATM but rarely spoke to a teller. There were still a few in the branch, but I guess it just seemed easier to talk to a machine.

  My letter carrier was a stout woman. I rarely had anything for her. I watched her from my kitchen window, picking up mail daily from Mrs. Caldwell, but only occasionally did she stop at my door. A few monthly bills and bank statements were about all I had to give her.

  I did get to recognize some familiar faces at the grocery store and the nearby deli, whenever I returned my food. They would scan all my purchases before I placed them back on the shelves. One cashier always smiled at me, even if I wasn’t in her line. But, then she pretty much smiled at everybody. I liked her, but she was so much younger than me, it was futile to even hope.

  The only person I had any kind of regular conversation with was Mrs. Caldwell. She turned out to be a nice woman, kind of cranky at times, but I just avoided her when she was like that.

  One time, she caught me off guard. She handed me the rent check as she stormed to the door and said, “Not just watch that brain rot! Or at least read some of the classics or something.”

  “I -- ”

  “Anyhow, you should be volunteering in the community or something, not wasting away.”

  “I -- ”

  “How can they get away with that? They just use those hidden cameras to disgrace people. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s fun,” I mumbled.

  I shrugged and looked back over my shoulder at the TV, which was showing a new reality show called “Those Little Cameras!” It was trash, but at the time, I wasn’t very discriminating.

  “Shouldn’t you do something with your life beside just sit and watch the boob tube?”

  She unsquinted and smiled. It was rent day.

  I closed the door and backed over to my chair to watch the beginning of the show.

  She got me thinking. Maybe I was wasting my time watching television all the time.

  I was like a hermit in my little apartment, and her rant had made me realize I was afraid of leaving. Afraid to meet people and try to interact with them, even though I had mastered backtalking.

  Why was I afraid?

  Time passed and I spit up a couple of beers while thinking about this. What good was freedom if I was just going to be a hermit and not benefit from it? I was already 60, five years of my li
fe gone, never to be reclaimed.

  As the afternoon hit, the sun rose up and was very bright. I opened the door and watched the sunshine pour in. It was invigorating and helped instill confidence in me. Not only was it time to get outside again, it was time to join society. I was well-versed in everything I needed from reading three daily newspapers and watching twelve hours of television every day.

  Shopping was one thing. Going to deliberately meet people was quite another thing altogether.

  Well, let’s be honest. It was a woman I wanted to meet. Everyone on TV had a lover, and I wanted one,

  too . . . but, I’d settle for a friend. I really was lonely.

  Oakland is a beautiful city, and I think spring is my favorite time of year. We don’t have dramatic shifts in seasons, but even so there are some changes. The summer heat fades into nice cool breezes, and the leaves on the trees pull back into tight little buds. It’s our last gasp before the cold winter winds come racing down San Francisco Bay.

  I could feel the wind kiss me as I wandered down Laney Avenue in the hip part of town. There was a lot of laughter coming from the various bars, as everyone seemed in a mood to celebrate. It was Friday night -- party night.

  I backed into a small jazz club and found an empty table in the corner.

  The lights were dim, and I could smell a hint of marijuana in the air.

  On stage, a black trumpeter with chipmunk cheeks bounced his horn up and down in the air in time to the music. Behind him were a saxophone player and a guy with a trombone. From where I sat, it looked like the trombone was skewering the guy in front.

  I picked up the tip lying on the table and pocketed it. Five bucks.

  A waiter brought me two empty glasses. I listened to the music for a few minutes and then choked up some beer into the first glass. It tasted great.

  The music sang, and I recognized Springsteen. Jazz-style? Why not?

  I looked around the club; there were a couple dozen other patrons. One obnoxious drunk was waving his arms around at the other side of the room. A group of twenty-somethings were huddled near the back, passing a joint back and forth.