Decisions, Decisions

by Karen Backman

    “James?”  The voice was muffled, as if the speaker were trying to call through a wall. He turned his head in the direction of the sound, and his companion’s face appeared so suddenly, so close to his own and so sharp in detail that he jerked back instinctively, cracking his head against the windowsill behind him. “James, what is the matter with you? Are you OK?”

    Rubbing his bruised scalp, James stared across the table. A pretty blonde stared back, her blue eyes full of concern and tenderness and something else, something like doubt. “James?” she repeated. “Are you OK?”

    A good question. A moment ago, he had been in a hotel bathroom, watching a woman he did not know (and yet, there had been something familiar about her, as though perhaps he did know her) kneeling before the toilet, vomiting violently. But how could that be? He was clearly in a restaurant now, on a dinner date, by the looks of it.

    “James!” there was a new tone in the voice now, a sharper edge. He dragged his eyes back to the woman facing him, and found that the concern in her eyes had been replaced by irritation. “If this is some kind of a game you play with first dates, then I can understand why you’re still single. We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation, and then you just went blank all of a sudden. I thought you were having some kind of seizure or something!”

    “No, I just....” his voice trailed off as he realized how crazy his explanation would sound. “I was listening to you,” he began again, in a conciliatory voice. “And something you said just got me to thinking about something else. You know how sometimes one thought leads to another until you’re way off track? That’s what it was like.”

    “Does that happen to you a lot?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously. “I mean, do you always get so distracted that you stop listening and stare blankly into space and then jump so hard that you hit your head?”

    “No.” he replied sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

    She softened a little at the apology, smiling and sitting up straighter in her chair as she reached across the table to pat his hand. Then she shook a finger at him with mock severity. “Just see that it doesn’t happen again.” She chuckled as she opened her menu again. “Fish or chicken? I’m hopeless when it comes to restaurants. I can never decide what to have. And then no matter how good the food is, I always find myself wondering if the other dish — the one I didn’t order — would have been better.”

    His hand shook as he picked up his water glass. This woman sure could talk. No wonder his mind had wandered. He looked absently at his menu, then at the food on the next table. The salmon looks good, he thought, taking a sip of water as he glanced up to see if the woman was enjoying her meal. He gasped and dropped his water glass, which bounced off the edge of the table and shattered near his right foot, spraying water and glass shards in every direction. He sputtered and choked, fighting to regain his composure as a waiter rushed to clean up the broken glass.

    “Are you alright, sir?” the waiter cried. James nodded and waved his hands to indicate that there was nothing to worry about, but he could feel the cold stare from across the table. He looked instead at the woman at the next table. Yes. It was her. She was the woman he’d seen vomiting. She caught him staring, and he looked away, embarrassed.

    “I’ve had enough of this. I’m leaving.” The blonde hissed. She was standing with her hands on her hips, a black purse dangling from her left wrist. “Don’t call me again.” She turned on her heel and walked smartly out of the restaurant without so much as a backward glance at James.

    That had been the first time. It had seemed like an isolated incident, an aberration, an odd coincidence that one looks back on in a bewildered way. But then it happened again. Six months had passed, and he was sitting on the bus as several passengers boarded. Looking out the window at a man standing next to a parked motorcycle, he watched as the man picked up his helmet in one hand, ran his other hand through his hair, and looked up at the brilliant blue sky. Then he looked down at the helmet again, quickly clipped it to the back of the seat, and threw his leg over the bike. At once, James saw the man facedown, hair matted with blood, fifty feet from his cycle, which also lay broken on the road as policemen and EMTs rushed about. There were cars, too — three of them — two that bore the obvious marks of impact, and one pulled off to the shoulder of the road, its owner in earnest conversation with an impossibly young police officer. There was a woman in hysterics off to one side, draped in a blanket, and....

    The bus jerked into motion, and James snapped back to the present moment. He looked around, but the man was gone. Nobody on the bus seemed to have noticed anything. Exhaustion settled like a weight on him, making it difficult even to draw a breath, but he struggled against it, and sighed deeply. Be careful what you wish for, he thought bitterly.

            James had always wanted to be able to see the future. Each choice that confronted him seemed charged with danger. He lived in fear of being trapped by a bad decision, as he had seen so many people around him trapped. His parents, for instance, shared a house, but it could hardly be said that they lived together. Rather, they lived separately in shared quarters. They had married when James’ mother learned she was pregnant with James’ older sister, Amy. Then they had stayed together for the children, because that’s what people of their generation did.

James was only nine when he became aware of his parents’ resignation toward each other and their situation. Two weeks before Christmas that year, his father moved a bed into his study and began sleeping there. Otherwise, life continued as usual. James pondered his father’s decision, turned it over in his nine-year-old mind, and concluded that his father was trapped in the house, but felt better having his own room. He couldn’t quite make out what was trapping him there, though.

As he grew older, James realized that it was a series of decisions that had trapped his dad. Decisions became a matter of great importance to him. He became fascinated by fortune-tellers and readers of tarot cards and astrologers. He read his horoscope religiously in the daily paper. He read books about astrology, numerology, and prescience. And he learned to vacillate. The longer he could put off a decision, the more information he could have about its potential ramifications, he reasoned. He became a master of delay, and an expert at research.