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Zachariah

Posted on December 31, 2006
Filed Under The Stories |

It happened suddenly. It’s more likely that it had been happening for a while and he had finally noticed on one day. Either way it was clear that he was getting slower and his perception of things was being coloured by something.

Maybe it stemmed from the fact that his name began with the last letter of the alphabet so it took a while for him to be called up for anything. He got used to waiting, he got used to stretching his muscles when they called Walker and Welling, standing up when they asked for Yeats and Yun and shuffling forward when they finally yelled Zachariah. But it was always a long wait; one that caused him to twitch expectantly as they ran from Andropov through Jones. He was reduced to raising and lowering his eyes as the call went out for Karlovy or Munshi or Oz. He was almost settling back against Rexene upholstery or wooden boards by the time they reached Tomjanovich. Over the ten years that he served, his body had become used to waiting and perhaps in that inertia was built a certain stagnation that began to manifest itself as a backache and an inability to accurately judge distances. As he approached the age of 30, the incidence of bruises from accidents that were no one’s fault began to increase in frequency and one day, as he bit his own lip while chewing on a particularly tasteless cheeseburger he thought, “Jesus! Is this what growing old feels like.”

The knowledge that he might have lost something irreversibly began to form when he started walking into tables and not quite wide-open doors with increasing frequency. The kernel of doubt began to gain substance like the early layers of coating on the dirt that enters an oyster. When his toothbrush began to slip with increasing regularity, causing the inside of his mouth to feel like a collection of glowing pain centres he simply decided he should wait for a while after waking up before putting a potentially lethal weapon into his mouth. He actually got to a point where the inside of his mouth was blister free. Meanwhile he continued to curse when he stubbed a toe and had to hop around a room for ninety seconds or when he snagged a sleeve against the edge of a cabinet in a corridor.

But the signs were all there and eventually he had to confront the fact that his sense of perception and his motor coordination were on the decline. The little grain of dirt grew into a full-sized pearl when his over-enthusiastic hand drove the toothbrush back into the places that made eating a chore, drinking an exercise in grimacing before swallowing and cringing before the next sip.

He tried to be more careful but it was as easy as trying to figure out why there are so many people in the world who think they can only get ahead by denying the rights of others. If he managed to give the cupboard a wide berth, he drove the fleshy part of his shoulder into a coat hook on the other side of the corridor. If he managed to pull a chair back without bending a little toe he was likely to shut a door with an edge of his jacket stuck inside. He’d managed every single imaginable public accident. He bumped into a stop sign because a pretty young thing drove by in a flashy car. He allowed his snagged jacket to cause momentum to take his legs out from under him so that he crashed painfully on his back on the front stoop of his apartment building. Cut his fingers on the rim of his mailbox slot, walked into an open dryer door at the local Laundromat, slipped in a pool of cat piss and upset at least three people’s beverages as they walked by him on crowded sidewalks.

One morning, he was returning from a quick visit to the local post office. He hadn’t yet managed to lick along a stamp and have it disappear down his throat but he was resigned to the knowledge that it might someday happen. In the plastic bag hanging from his right hand, he had a tin of beans, a loaf of bread and a bag of Twizzlers. A crowd was lining the street so he tried to give them a wide berth, certain that he would tip someone into the street if he walked too close to them. Lost as he was in thought, he didn’t see the little metal stump jutting out of the pavement. A sudden fractional flash of light somewhere high above the trees distracted him just as his right foot swung ahead of his left in the age-old practice we had come to define as walking. Three of his exposed toes encased in an open Birkenstock sandal crunched up against the rusty metal. He dropped the bag and grabbed his foot, hopping sideways in his distress, tears rushing to his eyes even before his fingers had closed around the sole of the sandal even as his thumbs tired to massage the pain away. The fingers of his left hand closed on something mushy on the underside of the sandal and even as the brownish-yellow image of canine excrement jumped unbidden to his mind’s eye he pulled the hand away and waved it in a bid to shake the offending matter off. Instead he hit a pretty young lawyer smack on the ass as she stood behind the crush of the parade-watchers and adjusted her makeup before pushing through in a bid to having her trim femininity catch Mr. President’s eye. When she felt the backhanded slap on her rump she squealed in surprise and waved the hand bearing the compact, whose lid fell open, caught the sunlight and bounced it back up into the eyes of the sniper who had positioned himself high above the parade route. His jittery trigger finger squeezed off a round even as his aim was displaced by the sudden flash of light. One Secret Service Agent ran in the direction of the woman who was berating Zachariah while the others raced to overpower the exposed assassin.

Weeks later he would continue to stare at his award for bravery and wonder about the intricacy and elaborate extent of cosmic design. All he could do is shake his head and go about getting ready for date three with the pretty lawyer.

If he played his cards right he might not return home alone that night.

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