By
Juan Bautista
He was waiting at a bus stop in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco,when a man approached him. Years later, he continued to wonder if this stranger might somehow be right; maybe he would kill himself.
“You are destined to suicide,” said the stranger. “In the third hour, of your forty-sixth year, you will kill yourself.”
That’s all the man said and he never saw him again. While at first, he thought the stranger’s words meant nothing, they fermented somewhere in his head for six years, only to resurface on the eve of his forty-sixth birthday. The words in their entirety were bundled somewhere, alongside millions, if not billions, of other words and experiences, lost to the conscious mind, but not completely lost. For the years prior, he did not marvel at the possibilities, especially early on, because he thought they were ‘merely the words of a crazy man,’ which he knew was a common occurrence in a city full of lost souls. Instead, he rationalized the experience because he was a rational man, and labeled it as a coincidental crossing of paths, or again, merely the words of a crazy man.
“If it were not me standing there, this man would have uttered the same exact words to another- I’m sure of it,” he reasoned.
Then, he would recall the conviction in the eyes of this strange man. He remembered how fixed his eyes were on him, like set radar, and how the man spoke directly at him, in a crowd of many people. As his forty-sixth year birthday was fast approaching, he knew there was nowhere to hide because you cannot hide from yourself. His father had committed suicide and so had his brother. “It is not out of the realm of possibility,” he thought. “Maybe I will kill myself.”
“A complete stranger is nothing, if not just that, a stranger- a person with a life and a history and memories unbeknown to me. Even the people we intimately know are strangers to some extent, even your own mother, so why should I take his words to heart. Why should I listen to his silly words? - All they are is words”.
As the day neared, he thought of that evening– of how the stout or plump vision of a man approached him and spoke in such a tender voice. But there was little emotion in the man’s voice - like a deprived spirit in search of something, if not just feeling loved.
He remembered the experience in vivid flashes of pictures snapped by his perception of a moment passed, and these said snapshots flashed more frequently as the day neared. In fact, he would think about it so often, that it was difficult for him to concentrate on his work, and his productivity radically declined. His orthodox boss, who would not tolerate daydreaming, noted his regression, and attributed it to a lack of interest. Eventually, he would have to leave his job.
When he turned to look the man was gone. One moment he was there, and the next, he was gone, just like his mother, who was killed by a speeding car, while crossing the street on her morning walk. Like this strange man, she was gone from one from one moment to the next. He didn’t have the opportunity to properly tell her good-bye. Just like that, in a flash or an instant, like a picture- so much of his life had changed. The car just left her there to die.
It was a rainy day, wind blowing in cold, powerful gusts that turned umbrellas inside out. Raindrops were blown on the inside his eyeglasses, making it difficult to accurately focus on the stranger, who spoke in a perceptual blur. It was problematical for him to describe, even to himself, and several years later he remembered the voice as ‘almost angelic.’
“It was as if, the entire city went mute, on that day, at that moment, at least in my mind,” he thought, remembering back.
The rain fell from the sky in occasional downpours to the echoing sound, and the distant chatter of honking horns. This day changed his life, but it was not thy words that evoked the radical change, but in the end, it was his actions. This is true, whether just by chance, or a predetermined fork in the road of life. One thing is for sure, and that is that from that rainy day on Ellis Street, Juan Bautista’s life would never be the same.
One – (1)
“My children have always brought me joy. They have since the day they were born.” Melinda was born first, two years older than Juan, who was born one month pre-mature.
“How will they find their way without me, for it is I who supposes to provide them a guide in a life of infinite choices.”
He thought his children would be the ones to suffer. He thought they would have to endure the suicide of their only father, just as he had done. If he went through with it, he thought it would be history repeating itself, as it so often does.
“It would be such a tragedy,” he thought on the bus ride home. “It would be my children and their way of life that I would miss most; their pure and innocent existence, and the light they shed on my all to obvious and rational ways.”
He could only smile when thinking of his children.
The wonderment became an obsession for poor Juan Bautista. He could no longer sit and wait, regularly wondering the possibilities. At home, he became distant and unresponsive. He was unable to carry out a conversation in full, and on several occasions, he erupted in emotional breakdowns that resulted in angry bouts of yell. The life of those around him became an unbearable whirlwind, and thus, he had to leave.
“Are you sure Juan,” asked his boss, Mister Walton. “ Assistant Manager at Walton, Walton & Walton, is not an easy task we’re the best accounting firm in town. Regardless of your recent slip-ups, you have worked tediously to get to your position. It has taken a lot of discipline.” Juan did not respond. He simply walked out that day, one week before his forty-sixth birthday.
As a young child Juan wanted to be a fireman, but life would choose him a more practical route.
“There is never a lack of need for a good accountant. Money makes the world go round.”
He left ten vacation days, seven sick days, full medical benefits, including free dental cleaning twice a year. Six months earlier it would have been inconceivable, and quite frankly, he never could not have imagined himself doing something so impetuous. In fact, Juan never did anything impetuous. Life was a calculated risk. Every weekday, after his ten and a half minute coffee break, he calculated the compounded interest of all his bank accounts, and calculated that if he were the forty-eighth person waiting for the bus, he would still get a seat. He determined that if he ran all his daily work calculations first, and then entered them into his spreadsheets, he would save nine days of busy-work in one work year. Like mentioned, Juan’s entire life was a calculated risk.
“How secure is security anyway,” he thought the day after leaving his job. “It’s all an illusion or a delusion created by bankers and corporations. We are only as secure as we make ourselves. Their security merely keeps us running in circles. Just like a mouse on an exercise wheel-. And, for what, more stuff?”
His obsession led him on a physical quest. As much as he tried to forget, as much as he tried to change, he continued to obsess, rather than simply just living out his life as he had done for forty-five years. He could no longer appreciate the simple joys in front of him. He could no longer appreciate his children. In essence, he focused on what would be, rather than what was. One day, he left his family and went on a journey. No longer completely sane, Juan Bautista left all that he had. He left without any regard for anybody but himself, selfish as a selfish man on his most selfish day. He boarded his small economical car en route for the desert. He knew not where he was going, but he knew it was in the Mohave Desert. His father used to take him camping there.
“What do you mean you’re going away?! What about your job and your responsibilities? We have children for God’s sake!”
“We have plenty in savings, and I’ve been investing over the years. You could say our little nest egg is a big nest now. I also bought health insurance for you and the kids, and a good life insurance policy for me, just in case…”
“Really?” she responded with a sensual glow.
“If you keep spending how we usually spend, there’s nothing to worry about. You and the kids can still eat out twice a week, and we can keep the kids in private school. Just don’t buy anything lavish. And, if I were to die for whatever reason, you and the children will be set for life.”
“Don’t say that,” she responded, looking down.
“All that I do know, is that I don’t’ know about anything anymore. My life has been turned inside out,” he said peering out at the horizon. “I’ll know when I get there.”
And so, he walked out the door, but as he opened the door he stopped and said, “Tell the kids I went on a long business trip, and that I love them very much.” She agreed with a subtle nod.
Lucinda loved Juan in a practical kind of way. He felt the same. The spark in their relationship had ceased many years prior. They were life partners, sharing life, loving their children, but not investing in the interest of their own relationship. In fact, for several years they slept in separate beds. No one else knew this fact, not even their children. They would copulate once every other month on Sunday mornings. He was always on top. And with time, they stopped their physical intimacy altogether. It was how it was, and neither of them would do anything to change things otherwise. They would rather masturbate, because it was less messy and complicated this way. Life was a sad routine, until Juan Bautista went on his journey.
It is important to note though, that life for Juan and Lucinda wasn’t always this drab. Juan and Lucinda met through mutual friends and for some time, they were madly in love. Some at the time would even say that it was true love. It was not until they lived their lives like an agenda that their relationship ceased, where they no longer wondered what the other was thinking. After several years, they saw the smallest things as chores. One could even argue that they got lazy, and thus lost the lust for their life together. He did this just as much as she, and for some time they lived somewhat tolerable, but unhappy lives. In fact, a part of Lucinda was relieved to see him go, though she did not express this verbally. She could not know he would be gone for good. It was only after she lost him, that she loved him once again as lovers do. It was only after she lost him, that once again, she would describe him as ‘the love of my life.’ Ten years later, she told her daughter Melinda to never take anyone for granted.
“I don’t know anything anymore. I just know I have to go,” he told her, his beard already starting to grow out. Before this day, it would be uncommon for him to go unshaven. It was not the act of shaving that is significant, but a sure sign that a shift in Juan’s universe had occurred. You see, Juan Bautista shaved as part of his daily routine. He got up at six forty-five every morning, shaved, went to the toilet, and showered by seven-thirty. He was out the door, coffee in hand, by seven forty-five, and on the express bus to the financial district by seven-fifty. You could set your clock by how he lived his life. And so, when he stopped shaving, it was a sure sign that something was terribly wrong, or as mentioned, that a shift in Juan Bautista’s universe had occurred.
“I’ll be back when the time is right. I cannot continue to live like this, and I don’t think you can either. It’s not fair to you, and it sure as hell isn’t fair to the children...”
He never told her about the man at the bus stop that rainy afternoon, or of the suicidal dilemma in his unstable head. He never told her about his suicidal father or his suicidal brother. He told her that he was an only child, and that he never met his absent father. He simply knew he had go.
“You can not possibly feel what I am feeling unless you’re in my shoes,” he thought on the long drive to the desert that night. “It might seem crazy or absurd to most, but it is very real to me, much like a crazy man’s delusions!”
Lucinda resisted at first, but prior to his walking out the door, she gave him a look that told him it would be acceptable. It was an understanding look, or the look of one who was experienced in such escapes. Regardless of what could happen from the endless possibilities of a will set in motion, Juan knew she would be there upon his return. He had accepted Lucinda, and her troubled past, with no questions asked. She also had an absent father, and therefore processed a longing desire to feel accepted, more so than most, acting like an unfortunate orphan when all the doors were wide open and welcoming. He opened his heart to a troubled soul full of sighs with little hesitation. For him, it was about not being alone anymore, and at the time, Lucinda accepted him with folded arms.
Juan Bautista did not anticipate the downpour that started the second he exited the building. As he walked out of the fifty-story building, he ran, along with everyone else caught in the downpour, running to the crowded bus shelter, trying to escape the cold wind and rain, but with very little success. He stood under the shelter, unwillingly pressed against several people, looking straight ahead, not wondering but existing, and such is the game. He stood there, with an all too familiar glare, anticipating a seat on the evening bus, where the seat was the relevant goal. He had already calculated that he would in fact get a seat that day, and a feeling of warm contentment flowed through his body, like a sip of hot tea on a cold day. Then, out of nowhere, the stranger approached him and spoke.
“You are destined to commit suicide on your forty-sixth birthday,” he said. “In the third hour of your forty-sixth year, you will kill yourself. What you do with your time up until that day is up to you.”
The people standing around him heard these words to deaf ears as they continued to stare straight ahead, as if nothing had occurred. But it was he who was the recipient of the fateful words as such.
“Are you talking to me?” Juan quickly replied, surprised, not knowing how to take a statement as such. He was confused but more than confused, he was stunned and unable, recalling the day his father hung himself in the garage of their suburban home. His suicide note read, “Good riddance!” It did not say good-bye or anything that would make Juan feel loved, or even a reason why. The note just said, “Good Riddance!” with an exclamation mark in bold. The man said nothing more. He simply nodded slowly, and his mouth made an expression that resembled a smirk.
Juan stood still, wondering, just as the bus arrived and the people at the bus shelter methodically walked in, in a single file. They walked around him like ants in a rush to a scent. He was left there alone in the falling rain, partially stunned from the words, still recalling the expression on his father’s pale white face, eyes wide and bulging, a hint of drool crusted on the side of his purple lips. In quick flashes, he saw his father’s body dangling, like horrific pictures in a troubled mind.
“Sir- you wanna get on the bus, or what? There’s room for one more…” asked the bus driver in a blurred hurry. On the bus ride home, he thought of what this man had said. Then, he put it away for some time.
By late morning he found a little motel on the outskirts of a small desert town in the middle of the Mohave Desert. It was not a premeditated choice, but rather, the first place he saw. He knew it was down the road from the entrance to the national park, where he and his father would go camping, when he was still a young boy. This was the only fond memory he had of his father. The motel was on the south side of the highway and looked, ‘clean enough’ according to Juan. It was basic; with only the basic necessities, which meant overly bleached white sheets, a dilapidated bathroom with several cracked baby-blue tiles, and a strip of white paper wrapped around the cracked toilet bowl, to somehow insinuate cleanliness.
With added time, he missed the slightly sweet smell of his children’s hair. If asked, he would tell you that it was his children that he would miss the most. He worked very hard to be a good father, a polar opposite of his own father. He strove to be the best father possible until he was faced with the dilemma of facing himself. It was only then that he failed as his father before him, and he chose to escape his all too uncomfortable life. Regardless his futile efforts, Juan Bautista would repeat history- his children would grow up without a father present.
In the dessert, he met an old man as he was hiking towards the oasis at the bottom of a deep river-valley, where the dirt is rusty-red from the clay, and the sky is always blue. The old man sat on a large rock en-route to the oasis, his eyes closed, breathing heavily from his nostrils. In valley below, there were hundreds of palm trees and a slowly trickling meadow. The luscious life was a wonderful contrast to the parched landscape and scattered cacti. It could even be considered mystical or majestic, and not because it held a certain energy, but simply because of the extreme contrast of lush life to dry dessert.
“Excuse me,” asked Juan. It was quiet. As he waited for a reply to the old man’s breathing, a flock of twenty ducks in the shape of an offset arrow flew by above him. Juan Bautista could hear the bending of their wings and the sound of the wind pressing against their feathers as they flew by. Once they passed it was silent again.
“Excuse me,” he asked again. The old man opened his eyes, but did not respond. His eyes were glazed over with a thick white film-like gloss- he was apparently blind. The old man looked deep into Juan’s eyes.
“A stranger once told you that you would kill yourself,” he told him.
“How did you know that?” he quickly responded, amazed.
“I can see it in your eyes, even though I am blind like a cave bat.”
After a long pause, the old man continued.
“My father taught me to listen, and that is my gift to you. You have to see with your eyes and listen with your ears, if you have the luxury of both senses. It might seem too simple, but many people forget these simple things.”
“What does that have to do with me?” he asked him.
“It has everything to do with you Juan Bautista.”
“Wait,” he responded. “How did you know my name?”
“Because I listened.”
“You cannot breath the air, if the air is poison to you,” the old man told him with calm content. When he turned back around, the man was gone, like a gust of passing wind.
Juan’s unbearable angst was not subsiding; in fact it was increasing every single day as his birthday approached. It was the eve of his forty-sixth birthday, and all he could think about was his father’s dangling body, or the bloody mess his brother made with the revolver. He remembered walking into his brother’s bedroom that night. He heard ‘something loud,’ only to find his brothers body slumped over in a chair, blood steadily streaming down a gaping hole in the back of his head, that created a puddle of blood that left a stain. Six months prior, it was his father, and now, his one and only brother. His mother told him never to bring it up. “Never!” she said.
For many years, he had not stopped to think about the implications the suicides had had on his all too tragic life. He buried the past alongside his emotions. He could not know that this was the reason why he could not move on. He could not know that this man at the bus stop would resurface old wounds. He could not know that he held it so deep, and it had affected him so much, that he lived on, but not completely. It all came out one day, that day, the day before he was supposed to kill himself according to the man at the bus stop. Death was always something he ignored. She told him with an exclamation, never to bring it up again.
He looked at the butcher knife on the nightstand, and for unknown reasons, he found himself walking towards the knife, like metal to a magnet. As he walked nearer, he reached out and grabbed the knife with the curiosity of a child. He put the cold blade up to his chin, scraping it along his cheek, along his four-day stubble. He had an unpredictable and somewhat crazy look in his eye, and in one swift movement, he grabbed the knife with both hands and placed the sharp tip of the knife up to his thorax, exactly where his heart was. With the hearty grip of a disgraced Samurai, in the dimly lit room, suddenly, he awoke in a panic.
“I could literally feel the cold metal blade on my bare chest,” he thought, slightly trembling. Then, he felt the cool early morning wind on his sweaty body in the chilly desert night. The window was wide open and the curtains swayed from the howling of the desert wind, illuminated by three quarters moonlight. This was a reoccurring nightmare during that time.
Six - (6)
The suns rays entered the room filtered by an erected red sheet, the makeshift curtains, held up by a splintering bamboo stick. Within a safe distance, he could feel the warmth of the sun, and the clarity of light. The orange glow of the sun melded with the intense red curtains, giving the room, a color in a palate, a painter might use when describing a beautiful and somewhat magical desert sunset. As he lay naked in bed, surrounded by this red-to-orange, orange-to-red aura, Juan Bautista began to understand complexities he could not before. His life in San Francisco was now distant chatter.
He challenged his conscious mind to understand why it was that such an extreme shift had occurred this late in his life. In the course of the night, he came to pass his troubled past. He faced his father’s suicide and regarded his father as a ‘selfish and horrible man.’ He was finally able to let it rest.
Then, his brother.
“How could you leave me like that Travis?! Why didn’t you just talk to me!?” Then he cried. He had not cried in some time. In fact, he could not remember the last time he cried, possibly as a child. In a vision later that night, he walked with his brother in the desert and they talked, just like they used to, brother to brother. In his mind, he forgave him, and thus was able to move on.
“Why did it take a stranger to set me on such a quest?” He could not explain it, even to himself. “Maybe this is the meta-physical. Maybe this is what they call fate.”
“Today for me, is like watching my children take their first steps, or smelling my wife for the first time! It’s like tasting chocolate for the first time!”
For this day marked Juan Bautista’s forty-sixth birthday, and he realized that he was still alive- in fact he was alive for the first time in a long time. In the early morning hours, he did not commit suicide as a stranger once told him. So much history, and yet it took Juan Bautista thirty-six years to look back at his troubled past. How complex is the human mind. Before this journey, he chose not to see. Before this journey, he chose not to feel. Before this journey, he did not choose.
Seven – (7)
Fate however, would have the last laugh. Early that same morning, Juan Bautista started his car and drove away from the desert inn. A feeling of contentment filled his heart. Lucinda did not re-marry. The children lived with an absent father, but did not endure the suicide of their father. Juan Bautista’s name is still uttered at his work, as an urban legend of days past. And so, life goes on.