Robert Essig - Death Obsessed

Ronnie scowled at her.

Calvin blandly said, “Hi.” He didn’t want to show that slut any emotion north of annoyance.

“Where are you two going?”

“None of your business,” said Ronnie. If looks could kill, as the saying goes, Celia may have dropped dead right there on the spot.

Celia shifted her attention as she took in a lungful of smoke.

“What is it with bitches like Celia?” Ronnie said as they walked through the courtyard. “It’s like they have to put their nose in everyone’s business.”

“Yeah.” Calvin was off in the clouds. There was an enticing red flyer dancing through in his mind, the thought of which would prove to be the carrot dangling in front of his eyes that would help him make it through dinner and a movie without going completely insane.

On the other side of the gate to Calvin’s apartment complex, where Ronnie had parked her car, stood an old man. He looked lost, confused, or perhaps waiting for someone, but Calvin saw something else altogether. He saw the old buzzard dying, clutching his chest as the Big One hit, the look in the old man’s eyes like he knew what was happening, perhaps had thought about it every time he felt a tingle up his left arm. He gasped, mouth wide as if he was having trouble pulling in oxygen. The vision was so vivid, so real, that Calvin stopped dead in his tracks, no pun intended.

“What’s up, Cal,” Ronnie said, regarding Calvin and the old man with confusion.

The old man wheezed. Nothing came out of his mouth but spittle, as if he wanted desperately to scream, but was unable to. He fell down rather hard without even trying to break his fall, and his head hit the pavement with a CRACK!

The vision left Calvin in a flash, replaced with that of the old man standing there looking like maybe his Depends were soiled and he was a trifle embarrassed about it.

“What is it?” Ronnie said, weaving her arm through Calvin’s.

“Nothing.” Calvin blinked his eyes and shook his head. “Thought I left the stove on.”

“Go check.”

“No,” he closed his eyes tight, “it’s off. Lets go.”

Calvin walked past the man as they approached Ronnie’s car, gave him another look from the corner of his eye, and he could actually see the reaper dancing about in the ether, in the man’s blood-red aura, waiting for the old bastard to croak, and yet there was something about what Calvin glimpsed. The figure shrouded in dark, was it the reaper, or was it Mr. Ghastly?

Ronnie drove a little Ford Escort. It was an early nineties model, but still had some life left in it as long as she had her oil changed regularly. With her previous car she learned the hard way that pistons need oil or they tended to seize up, and when it’s a car that’s only a year old, it is very devastating to have to junk the motor for something as simple as forgetting to check the oil.

“Look, Cal,” Ronnie said as they sat in the car with the motor idling, “I’m sorry about walking out on you the other day, but I needed time to think. I know you’re upset with me, but can we just get over it. I mean, you’ve hardly said a word to me, and it’s really bringing me down. It’s like you’re mad at me or something.”

“Sorry. I’ve got things on my mind, that’s all. I’m not mad about the other day or anything. Don’t worry about it.”

Ronnie gave him a reassuring smile and put the car into drive. “Okay, I’ll try not to, but you need to treat me nice. I’m serious. If you’re not mad, don’t act so bummed out to be around me.”

Calvin nodded. “Loud and clear. I’m not bummed, just not looking forward to work tonight, that’s all.”

Situated near the movie theater was a chain restaurant that tasted about as horrible as Denny’s with the atmosphere of an old folks home. Over chicken fried steak that must have been frozen before they entered the restaurant, Calvin decided that the old man wasn’t going to die right there in front of his apartment after all. The image of the old man having a heart attack kneaded his troubled mind all the way to the restaurant. Once inside, with wafting aromas of mediocre food, Calvin knew what he’d seen was just a vision of that man’s death, not where his death happens, because what he saw inside the restaurant—the sheer masses of overweight people stuffing their gullets, testing the strength of their hearts as their blood pressure rose, as arteries became filled with cholesterol, elderly folks hanging on to the last threads of their frail lives—would have accounted for some sort of spontaneous mass murder. Not everyone was dying, at least not in Calvin’s eyes.

Only some of them.

The old and frail, the unhealthy.

Some of them.

The meal was in desperate need of salt, and that didn’t even do much to perk up what flavors must have been hiding there somewhere, but Calvin wasn’t really interested in his food.

Ronnie was in a chatty mood, but really she was trying to alleviate the uncomfortable silence between them. Calvin wasn’t being himself and he knew it just as well as she did. There was nothing he could do about it. It was too hard to concentrate on his girlfriend when the old and the sick were dying all around them. There was one point when Calvin did say something, but his conversation was off kilter, at least considering what Ronnie had been talking about, and what had she been talking about? Calvin couldn’t remember. He hadn’t even been listening to her.

“Look at that woman over there,” he said.

Ronnie looked over her shoulder. “That who you’ve been looking at all night? What’s with her? She kind of looks like my grandma.”

“That’s all, huh? You don’t see anything strange about her?”

“She’s on a breathing tube, but that’s not exceptionally strange. A lot of old people are on breathing tubes. Calvin, don’t stare, that’s rude.”

“No, that’s not it.”

Calvin scanned the dinner crowd looking for another, sure that what he was seeing wasn’t just some hallucination. Couldn’t be, right? “What about him,” Calvin all but pointed out an old man with a walker standing like a sentinel beside his chair.

“Cal, knock it off. Stop looking at people like that. What’s with you?”

“There’s nothing strange about him? He looks perfectly normal to you?”

“Well, yes.”

To Calvin the old woman was as pale as a dead fish and teaming with nasty purple veins, her slumped body practically slipping out of her chair and onto the ground. There were no signs of trauma, just the waxy look of someone who died alone and wasn’t discovered for a few days. As for the old man with the walker, he was withered away to a skeleton with a thin layer of flesh draped over it, his skin speckled with liver spots, bruises, and sores where the thin layer of flesh caught on things and tore open, giving up the battle to cover his anatomy. He, too, was clearly dead, eyes cataract and staring off into the great big nothing.

Ronnie was becoming increasingly upset. “Calvin, what’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting strange all day.”

She was peeved and it was evident in the way she called him by his full name whereas she normally addressed him as Cal. That was one of those little things you picked up on after being with someone long enough to pop the question.

Calvin looked her in the eyes, the façade of people in the restaurant appearing normal from the corner of his eye, the old dead woman suddenly alive and leaving with her husband (equally aged, but evidently not as close to death). Ronnie was worried about him, it was there in her eyes, eyes that were so tender and caring, eyes that had grown to love him.

He wanted to say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Help me, Ronnie,” but couldn’t bring himself to do so. There was something wrong, no doubt about it. What was right about witnessing the final moments of so many people around him? How could he explain that to her? Shit, he couldn’t even explain it to himself.