Déjà Vu

The opening chapter, sort of, of a new novel I'm working on

Original mage licensed from Adobe Stock; titling by author

Part One: I’m Dead

The first time I died was on the Beltline.

The Beltline is a long pedestrian walkway and sometimes bicycle racetrack that snakes around much of Atlanta along an old, retired rail corridor. That’s where I was that first time, walking to the supermarket, admiring autumnal hickory, maple, and magnolia trees that lined each side of the wide concrete trail.

The chlorophyll had been depleted a few weeks prior, changing the palette of the trail’s arboreal walls to shades of brown and gold and dark reds, even occasional hints of indigo. Fallen leaves swirled around my feet as I walked. A crow yelled at some men who were noisily unloading a truck at a big box store just beyond the trees below the elevated trail.

A young woman jogged past me in yoga pants so tight that only their pink color convinced me she wasn’t naked below a tantalizing yellow sleeveless crop top. She wasn’t cold? The air felt nearly frozen on this grey day. I walked briskly, more so than the moment prior, unaware that a part of me wanted to catch up to the vanishing woman.

Her tight pink yoga pants were sirens, but they alerted only me. There were few other pedestrians. Rule of noon. Nothing’s ever real busy before noon.

She turned around. Must have reached some arbitrary mileage marker on her run. Jogged past me. Ignored me. I tried to make eye contact anyway. No response. My relationship with her was now in its waning moments. A normal conclusion. It was just a walk. I’ve never struck up a conversation during a walk on the Beltline.

I shoved my hands into my jeans. My fingers were cold. I should have brought a jacket. The hoodie wasn’t enough, and it didn’t have pockets. I wanted to turn around to see if she of the pink yoga pants had vanished yet.

A man on an electric bike blaring loud hip-hop whizzed by me from behind. So close I could feel a snap of air whip against my clothes as he raced by.

A mother walking toward me balanced a purse and a child in one arm. A nest of full plastic bags dangled from her other arm as a hand dug into her purse. An impossible balancing act. An urban acrobat. Looking for her phone, probably. It would be nice if we lived in the kind of world where I could offer her a hand.

We don’t.

Next, a man approached from the same direction as the shopper/acrobat. A man who looked precisely like an old college friend from twenty years ago.

“Sasquatch!” That was my college nickname. He smiled at me. “Jesus, look at you.”

It was twenty years ago. How can there be no change?

“Jesus, look at you,” I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Mac?”

His shoulder-length blonde hair was still highlighted by two purple streaks along each side. Impossible. Too long ago. People change. I had enough time before responding to wonder why we had lost touch. Never really thought about that. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him.

“It’s been twenty years, Mac. You look the same. Like you haven’t aged a day.” I was wearing a mountain of disbelief, but I didn’t care.

“Oh, that’s because I haven’t.” Aged a day? I wondered. “Check it out,” he added. “There’s a portal on Waverly and Bond St.” He said it like he was reporting on a coffee shop or bakery. He stood up close to me. I was taller than him by a foot, but it felt like we were eye to eye. “Check it out,” he said again. He had always been a little manic.  I could feel the warmth of his breath wash against my face. “I mean, well, we should talk about it first. I swear I’ll be back. Don’t worry. I’ll find you.”

He slammed my right shoulder with his hand hard like he was trying to return something to its proper place with authority. He walked quickly away without another word. Then he disappeared. It was as if Scotty beamed him up but without the fuzzy decorations.

The woman in the pink yoga pants jogged past me again. My eyes watched using the same methodology as before, locked in. But I felt nervous, so I looked away.

Then I glanced back her way. I must have looked like a bird. She turned around again. I pretended to look at the trees. I wondered if this was how women feel when they’re stalked. Probably not.

That deep dark black hair. That was part of it. Part of the allure. Long, straighter than possible. Shining like it was material from a black star. How did I not notice it before? Oh. It had been in a ponytail. That’s why. When did she change that? And why? She’s running. Gotta be a ponytail when you run, right?

As she ran past me, it was like she hit the brakes and was going to skid for a few feet.

“Do you want to go on a date?” she asked through thin lips surrounded by dark olive skin. What a quaint word these days. Date. Cute. But weird. What kind of woman approaches a strange man on a public pedestrian thoroughfare and asks that?

A hustler of some kind. I found a benign way to tell her this. To alert her that I wasn’t born yesterday. Or that maybe she should be careful. I could be a serial killer. Plus, she looked twenty years younger than me.

“Okay, yeah. That’s fair,” she said. “Thank you. How about just coffee? We’re like, five hundred yards from a Starbucks. Nobody gets hurt that way.” She looked down the incline beyond the wall of trees. “Unless we fall down the hill getting there.” No pathways, no stairs. Not the recommended route. But it would do if that was the route she wanted to take. I was feeling slightly adventurous.

Especially after my encounter with Mac. I wondered if it was his girlfriend. She seems odd enough to be, I thought. Or maybe I should try to track down Mac and introduce them. They’re made for each other. But no. I decided to see what this was all about.

A part of me, bigger than I should admit, wondered if they were both hustling me. I considered options for my death. Maybe an extended, broken branch from a tree breaks my neck as Mac’s honey trap sends me sliding down the impossible slope at the edge of the tree line. More likely: An assault in the isolated parking lot below, the men unloading their truck cheering it on like gamblers. His girl pointing a gun at my head as Mac says, “You still owe me twenty dollars.” I don’t owe him twenty dollars. Or any dollars.

I still wanted to ask her why. Why me, why now? She beat me to it. “I know, totally random, right? Weird. But life is short. I like meeting people. You think I’m weird, don’t you?”

Yes.

But you look like a Bollywood actress playing a princess with that purple lipstick and those big loop earrings and that perfectly placed small jewel on the left side of your tiny nose. Weird is fine.

None of my imaginings transpired.

Instead, a guy on an old red Schwinn bicycle, who I had sort of noticed through the corner of my eye while admiring the coffee girl, hit the brakes on his bike hard enough to spin the back of his bike around just before nearly hitting me.

I had noticed him because he had been barreling toward us at the speed of a sports car. It wasn’t a ten-speed bike or anything like that. Just an old bike with big wide tires. I don’t know how he built up that kind of speed on a bike like that. The trail is flat. It’s on a tall embankment surrounded by all kinds of stuff at a lower elevation on each side. But it’s flat. Gravity wasn’t going to help that bike.

He looked like a mistake had been made at a factory that makes humans. Don’t worry. This isn’t that kind of story. No such thing exists.

It’s just that his disheveled long brown hair looked like it had been attached by a faulty robotic assembly line. Greasy, too. Maybe he dipped its locks in motor oil or something before he took a ride on his old red Schwinn. His pox-ravaged face had the look of an albino who added red food coloring to his many skin craters.

He was an exceptionally large man, more like a thick, tall tree than a man who’d need to someday watch his weight, especially noticeable when he jumped off his bike and tore his backpack off his shoulders in one motion. Pulled out a gun, shoved coffee girl with the hand holding his backpack, sending her tumbling with a stifled scream down the hill toward the guys the crow was yelling at. “Give me all you have,” he said to me.

Nobody carries money these days. What the hell is wrong with this guy? Everything. Shit. Everything is wrong with him. When I tried to tell him that nobody carries money these days, he said in a gravelly voice that sounded like he was talking through a cardboard tube, “Wrong answer, mother fucker.”

Then he shot me dead.

Part Two: I’m Back

I wasn’t supposed to remember that. That’s what Mac says. That’s not how it works.

“You’re supposed to remember it differently,” he says. He looks different now. Older. His hair is short, he has a goatee, his hair is more of a sandy blonde because he doesn’t swim anymore. He’s overweight. Middle-aged. More round than squat.

What about the portal? I want to ask. I decide to wait on that.

“That’s why I’m here. Why I found you, I think.” He found me? No, I found him. At Waverly and Bond St. Walking around like a stray cat. Aimless. No intent, just wandering. I had to shake him by his shoulders to snap him out of a trance.

“Because it happens to me, too. But it’s not supposed to. See, we all go through it. That part is normal. We just don’t remember it. Something happens, and we die. But we don’t remember dying. Instead, the next thing in our life just happens, but prompted by a different thread.”

I can’t respond to this. He may as well be speaking Russian to me. I guess it shows. “Okay, maybe it’ll help to know what happened to me the last time. Pretty basic, really. Car accident. See, that’s the part I’m not supposed to remember. What people don’t know is, what nobody knows, is that we never die. Not in our world. Wait. What I mean is, in your world, you will never die, but I will. Does that make sense?”

No.

“So, in my world, which is not your world,” he laughs, “but for some reason sort of is because here I am, I don’t have the car accident. I make a turn before it happens. Something stops me, so I make a turn. Before the truck hits me.

“And these near-death experiences keep happening until some final event, which is not death. I don’t know what that event is, but it’s not death. It’s something else. Everyone else you know is just a cast of characters in a vast game.”

“Like a video game?” I ask.

“Yeah, kinda like that. And these other people? This cast of characters? They have their own universe, where you play a bit part and die, but they don’t. Not ever. Not in their universe.”

“But what about aging? I’ve gotten older.”

“You will stop getting older. You may have already stopped. And then you’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“That you’ve reached the other side.”

---

I remember now. I laughed at her. I didn’t think it was in a mean way. I guess she didn’t either. I pointed to the speeding cyclist. “He’s gonna kill somebody,” I said.

She nodded. “He’s not even riding in a straight line. He’s totally gonna jack someone.”

“Probably us,” I laughed. “Ready?” I was looking at the tree line and the edge of the steep slope. She grabbed my hand with a giggle, and we scooted on our asses down the hill, barreling our way toward the guys unloading the truck.

Our asses miraculously found a trail of sorts. Just a wide path of grass and dirt, sublimely free of brush and trees and tree stumps. I mean, seriously, pure luck. Everywhere around us was brush and trees and tree stumps. And beer cans and fast-food litter and weird, unidentifiable metal and plastic detritus that I did not want ramming into my nether regions as we slid down the steep slope. We held hands, coffee girl and I, as our butts slid down the path, made by God himself, as if he had parted a sea made from a motley combination of nature and human slovenliness. Our path felt like a road to a mysterious destination. Free of obstacles. Free of inappropriate impalements into my nether regions. Free of brush and trees and tree stumps.

One lone empty bottle, kicked by my foot as we roared down, noisily bounced on the pavement of the asphalt in front of us as we reached our destination. The bottle bounced all the way to the men unloading their trucks. Coffee girl had been giggling the whole way. When she sat up to brush off her pink yoga pants, I desperately wanted to ask if they were made from some kind of new titanium-based fabric because they looked like they hadn’t suffered at all.

The men unloading the truck glanced at the bottle, then us, barely, before resuming their efforts. Probably on a clock. Or behind schedule. They were working fast. Pushing big packages along a skate wheel conveyor with relentless speed. It made me tired just looking at them.

Then came Part Three.

---

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Notes

I say this is “sort of” the opening chapter of a new novel because the novel is in its earliest stages. The first chapter is unlikely to survive. It may change significantly, or completely disappear.

Know someone who loves fiction? Share Ruminato with them. Don’t promise them they’ll live forever, though, because I don’t know which universe they’re in.