A Call from the Past

Crossing the emptied room, a young man reached the terrace and leaned outwards, overlooking the familiar scene of intersecting roads spotted with the intermittent green overtops of trees. From his position, the height shrunk the ongoing flow of population and traffic into one swirling pool of ants, disorderly yet systematic. He knew himself would soon become part of that. The thought did little to distract him from his depression.

This tiny room had been his life until now. The handpicked furniture, all the books, the figurines over which he had poured painstaking hours, sweat, and blood into constructing during his childhood days, all those memories! They had all been neatly stacked away into boxes. The truck had taken them away. Now all that was left was a mere skeleton of what had been his little attic room. Without the comforting assurance of being 'his' that the room had held, it suddenly felt alien. He shivered.

With one last longing touch on the graffiti decorating the walls -- put there by himself, imagine! How many years ago had it been? -- he crossed the room one final time.

"Ready, son?" Accepting Dad's arms tentatively draped around his shoulders as an awkward gesture of affection, Eddie nodded and took a deep breath. His handsome features accentuated by a determined look, he looked towards the direction his apartment lay, where he would now live alone.

That had been 10 years ago.

The telephone rang, jolting him out of a restless sleep. Groaning from the immense fatigue accumulated over the days, he wished desperately for somebody -- anybody! -- to get to the phone first and turn the damn ringing off before realizing for the hundredth time that he was the only one in the house. He found himself yearning for those bygone days when he could simply lie in bed, ignoring Mother's cries for him to get the phone, knowing that if he did, Mother would get the call in the end.

In a fleeting moment of rebellion, Eddie contemplated shirking his work. After all, who else but the hospital would be calling at this ungodly hour? The place was huge; one would think that they could survive 5 hours without summoning a doctor who had just been given a well-deserved break after finishing a series of surgeries. But no. And sadly, that was work.

"Yes, Yowell speaking," the tired voice echoed inside the telephone. He didn't sound like himself. "Who is this?" He braced himself against the same metallic voice that brought him back to the hospital on his resting days. But the high-pitched, yet boyish voice crying out, 'Is this Eddie Yowell?' belonged to a different person. He dragged the name out from the depths of memories: "Laurence?"

The two had met years ago, in the first year -- or was it the second -- of high school. They had been such a peculiar pair at the time. It was a mystery to all who knew them why the two had gotten along as well as they had. They didn't know why themselves. But then, at the time, they didn't particularly care either. All that mattered was that when one wished to go exploring, the other would tag along. And there were certainly a lot of exploring; reckless thundering through forest. Eddie had once slipped and fallen into a lake on one of those expeditions. He had gotten pneumonia, had scared Mother badly.

There were a myriad of things he could say about Dan Laurence, but "mischievous and fun, but not smart" would sum it up. Dan had never seemed to care much about the future, even when he should have. 'But he should have changed. We're over 40 now.' Eddie braked the car to a stop and stepped out, the nostalgic meeting place facing him. It had surprised him when Dan asked to meet him here, a commonplace family restaurant in the neighborhood they had frequented as boys but had slipped from his mind as he had moved out of Father's house and begun working. 'I suppose he had wanted to refresh past memories? He had always had that sense in him.'

Strangely, Eddie felt unnerved walking into the restaurant from neigh 10 years ago, first visited for a glass of lemonade and a helping of well-done steak when they had been exhausted after a hike through the back hill. But upon seeing the face of his old friend, seemingly untouched by time, he could not help but feel the edge of his mouth turning upwards.

Dan jumped up from his seat and waved enthusiastically. Without needing words to be passed in between, the two embraced in a friendly hug. Eddie noted that Dan wasn't wearing a tuxedo, as he was, but a disheveled casual T-shirt and pants. The reunited men sat down, one with a huge, plastered grin, the other a bit more solemn, but with a pleasant smile nonetheless. Ordering a bottle of wine, they sat down chatting. Talks of childhood years sprouted out, until Dan could bear it no longer and exclaimed:

"How we used to dream those days! Do you remember? Those times when we would plan our entrance into society, becoming big! Making a name for ourselves. Do you remember?"

Eddie shifted uncomfortably at his friend's intensity. There was a pause for the longest time, then a rather quiet, "Yes, I suppose I do."

Regardless of his companion's discomfort -- or perhaps unaware -- the unrelenting reminiscing continued: "One can't ever really tell, can they? I mean, what will happen? I remember -- you were... tell me, do you still want to be a cop?" There was a boyish gleam in his eyes.

"I changed my profession a while back. Majored in medicine, actually. I'm a doctor."

"Why! I cannot in the world imagine for what reason; you had such ideals. They're what kept me to you, you know. Us two, different as day and night on everything else -- but those ideals kept us together. We used to dream so much. I haven't got a decent job, not yet. But I've been searching, and there's a huge opportunity. They're reaching out for me, Eddie buddy! As soon as I tackle this baby, I'm going to make it big."

"You don't say."

"Sure, you know, it takes longer for a person to be appreciated properly." Eddie could hear his friend prattling on, but he suddenly found himself unable to focus. He had been glad to see his childhood friend, exuberant even to a degree, but to hear him speak so -- at his age! One couldn't remain childish forever.

He had dreamed, of course, and indeed, as Dan exclaimed, he had once wanted to be a police officer. Unfortunately, he had never been what others could call a sturdy child. The pneumonia wasn't the only illness he had gotten during his adventures. The nightly chills would cause horrible coughing, his lungs gave out faster in sprints, and he had been skinny. This was why Mother had ultimately decided to move, believing that his little expeditions with Dan would do him no good. His ideals had sprouted partly from that idolized vision he had held for policemen, dashing across roads in chase of 'bad men'. It had been full of illusions, and he realized that with time. The police weren't superhuman protectors of justice who had the absolute power to jail evil men. They didn't even do much running. And it certainly was not easy to get promoted. By the time he had put on enough weight and cured himself of the weak stamina, his ideals had already faded into the distant past.

In the distance, Eddie was vaguely aware of Dan explaining about his 'big opportunity'.

"I've done some photographing, you know, in the wilderness? Basic stuff, really. Apparently, some of the pictures caught the eyes of a big corporate giant. Asked me for a personal interview! Good gracious, Eddie, you wouldn't believe how brilliant the guy was! He had ideals -- wanted to start up a new magazine. With my photographs!"

The proposal seemed so utterly fitting for Dan that Eddie could not help laughing. Yet at the back of his head, he could not throw off the thought that this proposal was somehow bordering on pure luck. He had developed a comparatively realistic dream. Being a doctor was a perfectly respectable job, and although the working hours pushed him around like a slave, he had income and he could stand by himself without leaning on his parents for support.

Here was a relic from the past, not the tiniest bit matured! Eddie nodded in the right moments, smiled as was his duty albeit a bit unwillingly at times, but could no longer feel the past familiarity he had felt from the man.

But, ah! Seeing that gleam in Dan's eyes brought him back. When was it that he had lost that fervor? It had been too long, indeed. Seeing him capable of still having that look of faraway fantasy filled him with a pang of loss. Perhaps envy as well?

"And when I've expanded my industry to the far West, I'll have achieved greatness! Wouldn't that be exciting, Eddie? Wouldn't that be just grand? And I could do it too, with this new offer I've just received."

"I'm sure you can, Dan."

"Here, won't you come along with me. It'd be like those old days, the two of us together, with our ideals?"

By the way Dan looked towards him, Eddie could feel that this, this, was the reason he had suddenly called out of the blue. For a second, he felt a tinge of change. Maybe he could take this hand offered to him. It wouldn't hurt to take one last adventure, would it? But the moment of indecision passed as suddenly as it had come. Eddie's answer was a slow but firm shaking of the head.

The two parted on cordial tones, yet Eddie wondered if he should ever hear from Dan again. He instead turned his thoughts to pondering how much time he had to rest before duty called, before having to return to not knowing whether he was spending the hours or whether the hours were spending him. He never was contacted again, but whispers of a new magazine company vaguely similar to what Dan had described reached his ears from time to time, and he couldn't help but wonder. When he did, although he never noticed himself, the distant light returned to his eyes.

#sarahchang #fiction