He sat on his disheveled bed, right beside the faded peach comforter that was virtually as old as he was. Around him was a signature disarray of books, overdue paperwork, and clothes piled on the desk chair: things that normally stole his ever-wandering mind in an instant. On this night, though, the young man couldn’t see any of it. His eyes were hopelessly transfixed on an opened tin box laid out palm-to-palm in his hands. “Fossil” written all over the packaging, the lid pictured a ‘50’s family reminiscent of I Love Lucy happily enjoying a train ride across America.
Mother, in her submarine-green, stiff, collared dress, gazes with a mix of enjoyment and adoration at her handsome husband, whose head is kicked back in an outburst of charming laughter in the seat beside her. Behind them, wearing a playful yellow Sunday dress matching her bright blonde, flipped hair, little Suzy crawls around her seat to examine the grandfatherly man in next row back. All the while, middle America, in all its peaceful glory, whizzes by the windows in the background, completing the perfect vacation scene for a perfect family.
But the object of this young man’s locked gaze, the rusty silver watch beneath this picturesque scene, was not the remnant of such a contented and pleasant family; not a skillfully cleaned, museum-displayed piece of fossilized history reminiscent to a time of wonder and excitement. This was a true fossil: the crusty remains of years of decay secretly buried below the earth’s surface in another family’s story, his family’s history.
The eight intermittent segments of ribbed gold breaking the simplicity of a silver surface framing the face of the watch seemed to hold his attention as though they held a secret on scale with that of the Egyptian pyramids. He recognized the word “Fossil” once more on the face itself, marking the obvious insignificance of this timepiece—one among countless thousands made by mechanized workers in one massive batch to meet the need of the latest retro trend to strike American youth. His eye traveled down the stretchy, elastic metal band, a silver-grated road that only leads to where it began. His analysis of the item spurred a remembrance as the words he’d written only three days before came back:
The earth. It slips further and further away from my view, becoming no more than scattered circuit board towns nestled into green plastic forests. As the solitary ice cream peak of Mt. Rainier slips across my little airplane porthole—behind the cold gray left wing, of course, because the view from coach is always impeded by a wing—I realize that I’m still gazing vacantly out the window. It’s as if I’m hoping for something magical, something healing, to come of the roaring airline departure from the earth. But nothing does.
The sun is set on my easterly side of the plane. The line between heaven and earth has faded under the encroachment of the deepening blue of night’s shadow. Sheets of lumpy, pallid clouds drift by through the dark, riding aimless currents away from the moon.
I’m inside this giant white tube packed with rows of people and filled with fluorescent lighting and plastic overhead compartments: backlit mouths full of tasteless baggage that people have inconsiderately crammed into them. I’m sitting here in a space the shape of a box of long-stemmed matches just like the one that used to sit alone on the chilled surface of my parent’s white brick fireplace, waiting to be opened. I have two feet by two feet by five vertical feet of space. And I know—we all know—that this pocket between my blue vinyl seat; the large blue-shirted man who’s spilled over onto the arm rest; the mute gray dinner tray latched to the seat in front of me that reads “fasten seat belt while seated;” and my small, rounded rectangular window to the misty blue outside will not be entered by another soul. Except, that is, for the hand that delivers one, maybe two, clear plastic party cups of pulpy, bright orange fluid called ‘hospitality.’
Just as I had anticipated, the juice does come. Nice stewardess—if I’m allowed to call her that nowadays—warm smile and a pretty face. There’s something particularly eye-catching about her nose. I want to say ‘round and pigly,’ but I know that won’t communicate the cute way it accents the rest of her face. But that is all I’ll ever know of her.
She gently releases the beverage and slides her arm back out of Row 23, returning her attention to her aisle-width beverage cart, toting tray upon tray of soda cans, and continues on to Row 24, which seems so distant, it might as well be Row 724.
Like everyone else here, I’m just a face, a number: just a butt keeping an otherwise vacant seat warm. No one on this plane could or would possibly care to guess that this skinny, brown-haired 23-year-old man-boy with the rectangular spectacles and a static gray Dr. Pepper t-shirt is not on his way to take a hard-earned California vacation. Not to see his longing blonde-haired girlfriend currently on her way to wait patiently at gate B5. Not to meet with a publisher, school official, or prospective employer wearing fine pin-striped business attire. Rather, on his way to bury his dead grandfather. And not even really his grandfather, just the ashes: the ashes of a man he really didn’t know any better than he himself was known by the woman who took his carbon-copy ticket and read his name for verification back at Gate D7 at Seatac.
I stare out the window again.
The world is now officially draped in night. Moonlight reflects off the bushy gray cloud fields and miniature lightboard cities scroll past me as though on microfilm. They serve as the backdrop to my reflection in the glass: the faint mirrored image of my left hand rolling my white Bic-stick across this page. My inner thoughts drift upon the distant sleepy clouds behind the glass: just me, left with the darkness, alone.
As his mind and heart lingered in those darkened clouds, still a thousand miles from the room he actually sat in, the watch’s face drew him further into his own story. He remembered dinner with his mother and father the day after the funeral: a military funeral that had been so poorly planned that it had a salute of only nine guns instead of twenty-one. It only took him back a day prior, but the recollection seemed distant, like a movie on deteriorating film.
He looks up from a pitiable mass of shredded lettuce, pork, and other unrecognizable substances—which had recently been a crisp-looking carnitas tostada—and looks around the circular table sitting right up the stairs from the host’s podium at the front of the establishment; the walls are a bright orange with verdant green trim that can only be found in a Mexican restaurant. Two family friends at the mid-meal table listen—appearing lost—as his parents, against a backdrop of other family gatherings more innocuous than their own, discuss the tragic, life of his recently deceased grandfather. Whenever he called, his father recollects over the din of clinking silverware, he always wanted something. They explain that no one knew who this emotionally distant, crust of a man really was. They’re certain he didn’t even know. He had never seemed to care about anyone, they say; the people around him, family and all, were merely a means to his own end for countless years. And no one had ever really cared about him. Not his parents, not his domestically abused ex-wife and mother of his children, not his aged live-in girlfriend of twenty years. No one. No one, that is, except his daughter: the daughter he’d violated as a little girl and left with repressed memories, fossils of the twisted “love” of a father.
This woman (the young man’s mother) had held his hand as his frail, vegetative body ceased to function. She repeated I love you over and over into his old, splotchy ear as the heart monitor went flat, echoing its straight, monotone “beeeeeeeeee…” through the sterile room. The man who had used, neglected, and been passed by humanity ceased to be, and still, no one knew what to make of him.
Discussion at the wooden table pauses; a woman in a black polo shirt comes up and asks if they need some boxes. The young man looks back at the half-sized glob of “taco salad” on his plate, Yeah, I’ll take one.
The memory jumps ahead.
In the quiet living room of his mother and father’s current rental home, his mother approaches him with a small tin case, something like a pen box.
Katie told me to give this to you.
He takes it into his hands and removes the light metal lid, the one with that lovely American traveling family. It’s his grandfather’s watch. Standing in the middle of his parents’ mildly elegant living room, strewn with a thin layer of traveler’s mess, all he’s aware of is the enunciated thump of his own heart and the tick of his father’s grandfather clock across the room as he stares deeply into the otherwise ordinary timepiece.
Do you want it?
Silence.
Yeah, I’ll take it.
Back on his disordered twin bed in Seattle, he found himself still staring at this mundane wrist-bound object glistening in the dim light of an energy-saving light bulb. In only a day, it had become the petrified remnant of a buried tragedy that he feared could still be lurking beneath the surface of his family, pulsing through his own veins: an inheritance of self-determined isolation at everyone else’s expense, a life he certainly didn’t want to emulate, but one that the ticking hands of a watch would insist he could not avoid. It was only a matter of time. He found himself lost in possibilities, terrible prophecies of what he himself could become, just another number pressed against the lonely window of a plane, capable only of using others for his own pseudo-gain.
The bed shifted.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the blonde head of a friend who had slipped silently into the room and sat down on the jumbled comforter just behind him. Silence held for a moment, his searching eyes behind the rectangular spectacles still lost in the sharp edges of the links in the crusted watch band lying within the walls of the tin resting in his clammy hands. The watch was dead.
How are ya?
I don’t know. I’m just thinking.
The isolating silence returned, but the thought-drowned young man could feel his friend’s blue eyes scouring the back of his head, digging for thoughts that he himself couldn’t make out.
Ya know, his friend suddenly started, all the guys in this house would say that they’ve been blessed because you’re here.
He just sat there, ruminating on his friend’s words, trying to synch the unsolicited encouragement with the cold family blood that he could still feel pulsing through his body: sins of the fathers visited on the third and fourth generations, right? Well, that’s me. But wait, there’s a step between first generation and third: second. His mother. She had broken the pattern, caused something else to course through his veins, forgiveness circulating right beside the poison his grandfather had left with him. The swirled mix of living, loving blood and venom handed to him by the generations of his family left him unalterably bound to neither; there was choice. And so far, he had chosen the legacy of his mother.
After a second, he returns to the present, to the bedroom he’s been sitting in, to his unexpected companion in the stagnant air of the room. He turns to see the upturned brow and closed, concerned lips dressing his friend Morgan’s long Norwegian face.
Though the threat of the old man still lives in his chest, in his hands, just below the surface, for today the young man is not his grandfather; the watch is stopped.
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