The Appointed Hour

00:00:03

00:00:02

00:00:01

Gone.

Tiny fleeting moments, here one second and not the next, over and over again until the second that takes our life away. But what then? What happens when there’s no more moments, no more seconds, no more anything. I wish my abnormality helped me answer that question, but instead it just forces my small mind to fight with itself day in and day out, trying to break out of the tiny corner of the universe that it resides in, so that it can understand all the things that it shouldn’t.

Doctor’s offices are the worst. Every time I can feel my next existential crisis creeping out of the pits of my stomach past my heart and into my head like the tides in the harbor before a hurricane. Sometimes I can let it pass. The hurricane hits a different town, slightly too far south to affect my own city. This time I don’t feel like I’ll be so lucky.

A man sits across from me in the waiting room with numbers across his forward shining like a neon bar sign. 03:15:09. Each second that passes lowers the number. A rough cough escapes him and he holds his chest cringing from the pain. He probably knows, like I do, what’s coming. Before tomorrow his moments will be over and he’ll get the answer to all my questions without ever being able to tell me them.

Another glowing patient turns the corner, a woman this time, and I’m a little kid again, seeing the countdown appear on someone’s head for the first time as I drove by a crash on the side of the freeway during the biggest snowstorm of the year.

“Eric?” A nurse calls out to break the silence. Waiting rooms are always quiet, no one wants to talk about dying. I get up from my seat and follow her to an empty office where she lays out a paper robe for me to change into. “It looks like you’re just here for a regular checkup,” the nurse reassures me and I nod. “The doctor will be here in a minute.”

The relief of leaving the doctor’s office sometimes makes the trouble worth it. It is far too stressful and if I weren’t so worried about trying to avoid the inevitable I would ditch the habit altogether. Finally getting a chance to check my phone, I see a text message: “Coffee at noon? Usual spot? I desperately need to leave the office early today.” Maybe my luck has turned around.

I get into the coffee shop around eleven. A little early, but being alone has never made me nervous, I have far more things occupying my anxieties. I grab a book from the shelf, Slaughterhouse Five, a book about death, ironically my favorite kind.

The sound of the bell that hangs above the entrance breaks my focus and I turn to look at her: Renee. For a moment all I can see is her smile, the way she smirks upon recognizing me in a crowded room, the relief lifting the sides of her lips into a crescent moon, making the reflections in her eyes shine like stars. This second is interrupted as my eyes shift upwards and I am overwhelmed by fear. The familiar, ominous, green glow is shining on her forehead. Twenty-two hours, forty-eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds. Thirty-six. Thirty-five. It takes me until twenty-one to hear her voice calling for my attention.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay? The doctor didn’t tell you something bad did he?” she probed.

“What? No, it’s..”

How do I respond? How do I tell her she’s dying. She just walked into the door and I’m going to tell her that she has less than a day before her world comes to an end. Then she’ll really think the doctor gave me bad news, that I’m crazy and need to be institutionalized. These worries can only last a second. “It’s nothing,” and by that I mean it’s everything.

“You’ve always been an awful liar,” she retorts, “But I won’t pry. Listen, I can’t stay too long, I have lunch plans with my mom so it’s just coffee for now. I really needed to just get away, Linda from HR is driving me nuts, sure I’m the problematic one when Richard, oh, he’s a whole other story…”

I should be hanging on to every word she says, eating up all the Renee I can take, but I can’t even focus enough to hear what she was saying anymore. Her voice sounds like a soft hum, one that I wish I could listen to forever. All I can do is stare at the way her hands hold onto her coffee mug tightly, still holding it for warmth between sips. I realize that I hadn’t even noticed the waiter bring our drinks. I look down at my black coffee, wishing I could jump into the deep dark abyss that it resembles, maybe there I would be able to keep her safe.

After half an hour, which only felt like a few minutes, Renee puts down her coffee cup and checks her watch. “I guess time’s slipping away from me,” she remarks, naive of how right she is, “I better get going, my mom will kill me if I’m late.”

“Alright, but I’d like to see you again later” I suggest and am affirmed with a nod and grin, before she walks away.

In the corner of the shop a muted television displays the news, which normally bores me but now has my full attention. Images of a storm prediction sprawl out across the screen and the eye of a hurricane plants itself right in the center of our harbor, threatening the life around me. This time it’s a hurricane I have no chance of controlling.

My mind is now faced with a new question that it cannot solve. How do I argue with fate? There must be something I can do. I see people who are dying all the time. There must be a reason that I’m warned about it. Why would I be able to see when someone is on their last day, and their last minutes, and their last seconds, if I couldn’t do anything about it.

All I can think to do is get Renee away from this hurricane. I open my laptop and look for the earliest flights away from here. A trip to Colorado in three hours, I think that’s manageable. I pick up the phone and redial the most recent call.

“Hello?” Renee’s soft voice answers.

“Hi, I know this is going to sound crazy but with all this bad weather coming I think it’d be really great to take this time to get away for a few days. There’s a couple tickets left to go to Denver, that might be kind of nice. Work will probably be cancelled anyways. I’m sure that you want a break from thinking about Linda, right?”

“You’re right, that does sound crazy, but it also might be kind of fun. Plus if it’s got you rambling it must be important,” she laughs.

“Really? Get ready I’ll come pick you up.” Maybe this could actually work.

We eventually reach the airport that’s filled with passengers awaiting their flight, everyone else must have had the same idea. We find our gate, check our bags, all the regular boring airport steps. Normally the wait wouldn’t bother me, especially when waiting with Renee, but I can’t take waiting anymore. I need to get on the plane and know that she is safe.

We finally board the plane, all passengers get settled and the captain announces we are ready for take off. Relief flows through my veins easing the tension I had felt all day. I turn to my best friend beside me and see the glowing countdown on her forehead starts to fade. “I’m glad you’re starting to feel better, you’ve been pretty out of it all day,” Renee tells me. I can only smile, it’s too much too explain what’s been bothering me now and once we land in Denver it will all be behind us anyway.

In the middle of our flight the plane begins to shake, probably normal, but she grabs my hand. I don’t understand how such a tough squeeze could feel so gentle. I expect her to let go of my hand once the plane is stable but she never loosens her grip. Maybe this is my shot to tell her how I really feel.

A loud alarm startles us, breaking my thought and from the loudspeaker we hear, “Hello this is your captain speaking, things are looking rough out here. Please plan for upcoming turbulence and prepare for emergency, we may not make it.” Anxiety washes over her face, and the numbers that were almost gone now brighten back up. The pace speeds up and they quickly drop down to 00:06:38 before my eyes.

I realize that since I’ve seen the countdown appear on her head I hadn’t seen myself, not a single reflection, and if I could see myself now then I bet my life, that I won’t have a life worth betting in six minutes.

Panicked cries from fellow passengers press on my eardrums as we hit rougher turbulence and the acceleration of our fall increases.

“This is it, this is the end. I just hope that it’s everything that you deserve. Renee, I love you, I wish I had time to say more, I wish that the time never ran out, but it will, and I just want the last thing you hear to be me telling you what you mean to me, because you are everything. You are every moment, every second.” And then that second, like all of the other ones, is gone. A burst of light consumes the plane. There’s no time for pain, just, nothing.

Nothing.

That’s it. No more life. But I’m still thinking, I can hear my thoughts, this isn’t nothing.

Everything around me starts to get lighter, the bright light that’s been blinding me dims enough for me to see a crescent smile and the twinkling of reflective stars in the eyes of Renee. She’s staring back at me and she smiles wider and this moment feels just a little bit longer than all the rest.