A Negative World(A collection of short stories)

The Story of a Dead Man(5)

The days didn't get much slower even after 'the pleading of birthday wishes' for George. The longer days were when his mother needed help continuing a sane life.

As told before, she died soon and unexpectedly.

After the funeral and the period of his father undergoing the same process as he had done, the days slowed a tiny bit.

"What if you come to live with me, dad?"

This was the most normal-paced statement at the point, thrown at a gloomy-looking hunched figure of his father sitting on a park bench.

The next month, his father moved in. He was never allowed to stumble into Linda's room, and it was checked on every day if he had ambled in to find a spare cigarette. She was a superficial alive soul stuck in time in her room, the mere fact that it was her room managing to keep the last traces of warmth in George Baker.

His father, without a complaint, got used to the life with George-everyday, he went out to earn money as best as possible, while George went lecturing every day.

They spent their lives together in the house Linda had lived in for 10 years.

By the time his father got cancer, he had managed to solidify his heart, make it more expressionless. He wouldn't allow anything to break his heart, to puncture it over and over.

When his father was buried next to his mother, George Baker-both the on-the-screen one and the soul one-was tearless, just staring.

That's what death can do to a person.

The year was 1992.

The hospital pay and rent of his house had swollen to over thrice the original size, and a man in a suit, in his late 30s, with rectangle glasses on his nose-the exact real estate agent type-appeared in the screen for days in a row, then in a slow-paced term of the film, two weary hands signed the papers, the pen shaking in their grip.

The day George had to move to the New York apartment he would dwell in for the next 26 years, he did everything he could do to keep Linda there, to always remain the superficial soul trapped inside his heart-he simply stepped carefully in, put his 50-year-old butt on her chair, then whistled to summon her dog.

With it on his lap, he spoke, half asleep, half unconscious, half faraway.

No voice answered him, though.

George Baker's soul now remembered that George was now finally realizing that she was truly gone.

After promising to visit her grave every day, George left the room shortly after that, her dog wagging behind his heels.

Shortly after moving into the apartment, aging George truly quit his job as professor and instead worked as a freelancer, keeping himself busy every night by writing a short diary of his life. Some days, he would even write some goofy quotes of himself there, his eyes empty. Then, after a few years of such a life, he got a job in a tiny publisher and worked like a hollowed-out workaholic.

He kept his promise of going to the grave every day, the camera showing the same course, the same path, the same flowers and the same stone every day.

Every day passed in the blink of an eye, too boring to be normal-paced. Anyway, how could a dull featureless life be interesting?

George Baker leaned way back in his cushioned seat-the film Death had forced him to see had now hollowed him out once more, and the worst parts were over; he just silently watched himself age and kill himself slowly over the years.