Alma Katsu - The Taker

I scrambled into the seat quickly, fingers poised over the keys. What to say? So much bottled up inside after decades of silence. Of wanting to speak and having no one to speak to. Of talking to the walls, to the heavens, to the pigeons, to the gargoyles clinging to the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral. Thank God-I thought I’d never hear from you again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Does this mean you’ve forgiven me? I’ve been waiting for you. You can’t imagine how it feels to see your name on my computer screen. Have you forgiven me?

I hesitated, clenched my hands into two tight fists, shook them, unfurled them, shook them again. Hovered over the keyboard. Finally, typed “Yes.”

Waiting for that day to arrive was torturous. I tried to keep a tight rein on my expectations. I knew better than to get my hopes up, but there was still a small part of me that harbored romantic dreams where Jonathan was concerned. It was impossible not to indulge in a daydream or two, just to feel joy like that again. It had been so long since I’d had anything to look forward to.

Jonathan told me about his life in his second email. He’d picked up a medical degree in the 1930s in Germany, and used it to travel to poor and remote places to deliver medical services. When one had suspect paperwork, it was easier to get past the authorities in isolated areas where a doctor was needed and harried government officials could push your case through. He’d worked with lepers in the Asian Pacific, smallpox victims in the subcontinent. A hemorrhagic fever outbreak took him to central Africa and he had remained to run the medical clinic in a refugee camp near the Rwandan border. It’s not open-heart surgery, he’d typed: gunshot wounds, dysentery, and measles vaccinations. Whatever is needed.

What could I say in response, other than to confirm the time and place we were to meet? It thrilled and unsettled me to think Jonathan was a doctor, an angel of mercy. But Jonathan was waiting for me to tell him about my life, and as I sat before the computer I couldn’t think what to write. What could I say that wasn’t embarrassing? Life had been difficult after we’d parted. I’d done stupid things, which I believed at the time to be necessary for my survival. Now, finally, my life was peaceful, almost a nun’s life and not entirely out of choice. But I had come to terms with it.

Jonathan would notice my omission, but I assured myself that he wouldn’t harbor any illusion that I’d changed in our time apart-at least not as dramatically as he had. Instead, my first email to Jonathan was full of pleasantries: how I was looking forward to seeing him and the like.

I couldn’t sleep at all the night before and sat up, looking into a mirror. Would I look different to him? I examined my reflection fastidiously, worried that there had been changes, as though I was like the women in commercials fretting over laugh lines and crow’s-feet. But there were no changes, I knew. I still looked like a college student with a permanently cross expression. I had the same smooth face that Jonathan had looked on the day he left. I still had the smolder of a young woman who could not get enough sex, even if in truth I’d had enough sex to last my multiple lifetimes. I didn’t want to look desperate when he saw me, but there was no way to avoid it, I realized, looking into the mirror. I would always be desperate for him.

Still staring in the mirror, I wondered if it would seem strange and maddening, when we met tomorrow. To look at each other, time might as well be standing still. How long had it been since I’d last seen Jonathan? One hundred and sixty years? I couldn’t even remember what year he had left me. I was surprised to find that it no longer hurt violently, that it had taken decades but the pain had eased into a dull throb, and was easily outweighed by my eagerness to see him.

I put down the mirror. It was time for a drink. I cracked open a bottle of champagne. What was the use in saving it for tomorrow in the hope that he was coming back to me? Wasn’t it enough cause for celebration that Jonathan had contacted me after an eternity of separation? I resolved to nip my hope in the bud before I changed the sheets or put extra towels in the bathroom. He was coming to visit me and nothing more.

Meet me in the lobby at noon , he had instructed in his last email. I could barely wait and considered instead camping out at an earlier hour or going up to Jonathan’s room. But wouldn’t that be pathetic; better to pretend I could exercise self-control. So instead, I watched the hands of the clock in my study crawl to eleven o’clock before I stepped outside, hailed a taxi, and directed it to the Hotel Prix St. Germain. From the back window of the taxi, I watched my street peel away like the cartoon-painted backdrop to a carousel when the music started up.

I knew of the Hotel Prix St. Germain, but had never been there. It was a quiet place buried on an unfashionable street on the Left Bank, quite in keeping for a bush doctor in Paris for a few days. The air in the lobby was stale, and a professionally dour-looking clerk behind the front desk watched as I took a seat in one of the leather club chairs in the lobby. Did all hotel lobbies feel like this, like a room holding its breath? The chair I had selected faced the path that ran between the door and the front desk. An ornate old clock suspended over the front door read 11:48. As a young man, Jonathan had made it a rule to keep others waiting. As a bush doctor, I imagined he’d learned to be more punctual.

A discarded morning newspaper sat on the side table. Never one to follow world events, I rarely bothered to get a newspaper these days. Events confused me, they had all become similar. I’d watch the evening news and slip into an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. A slaughter in Africa? Was it Rwanda? No, wait, that was 1993. Or the Belgian Congo, or Liberia? A head of state shot? A plummeting stock market? A plague, of polio, smallpox, typhus, or AIDS? I’d lived through all of it from a safe distance and watched as events ravaged and terrorized mankind. It was terrible to see the suffering, and be unable to affect anything. I was a ghost standing in the background.

I could see how it might have appealed to Jonathan to go to medical school, to equip himself to do something about the terrible things going on in the world. To roll up his sleeves and apply himself, even knowing that it would be impossible to eradicate disease, even within a single village, but trying nonetheless. Without realizing it, my eyes had fallen to the newspaper the entire time I’d been thinking.

I looked up abruptly, anticipating Jonathan’s entrance.

The front door was pushed open and I leaned forward anxiously at what seemed to be a familiar shape, but relaxed again. The man was wearing wrinkled khakis and an age-worn tweed jacket. A piece of cloth in some ethnic pattern was wrapped around his neck, sunglasses were over his eyes. And his face had grown over, three or more days’ worth, scruffy and uneven.

The man walked right up to me, hands in his pockets. He was smiling. Then I knew.

“Is this the welcome I’m to get? Don’t you remember what I look like? Maybe I should have sent a recent picture,” Jonathan said.

We went outside at Jonathan’s suggestion, saying I looked faint. Jonathan took my arm right away and held it tightly as he escorted me out to the sidewalk. We found a quiet corner of a park that was all cement and park benches, only one lone tree bounded by concrete on four sides, but it gave the illusion of nature.

“It’s good to see you.”

I couldn’t answer and my response was unnecessary anyway. It seemed absurd that he had been absent from my life this long and, seeing him again, it seemed no reason on earth should keep us apart. I wanted to touch him and kiss him, to reassure myself that he was there, in the flesh, before me. But as familiar as we were to each other, more than a hundred years of separation stood between us. And, something about his demeanor told me to proceed slowly.