The Visit

Upon his arrival, the hospital room appeared the same to Jason Grey as it had before. His brown leather dress shoes still squeaked slightly on the shiny tile floor. Small black and red squiggles speckled in the pattern, like thousands of koi, each in their own separate, perfectly square ponds. 

Jason preferred to think of the square tiles as rectangles. It was technically true. And it made for one less thing to stress about.

Above him, the fluorescent lights hummed, a brilliant, sterile white emitting from their diodes. These, too, were shaped like rectangles. The ventilation shaft blew in a slightly chill air, the gentle breeze dampening the sounds of rushing traffic fifty seven floors below. 

But all of that background noise: The squeaking of his shoes, the hum of the lights, the air past his ears, not even the imaginary splashing of squiggly koi in subdivided, square-rectangular ponds could mask that beeping.

The heart monitor. The IV machine. Two new contraptions, a camera-like device closely monitoring the patient’s eyes, and some sort of blood pressure measuring device squeezing around the left arm periodically.

Connected to it all was Jason’s father, Fallister. Hooked up to all of the technology, he looked like a cyborg, of sorts. So many wires and tubes. The man Jason had grown to call dad wasn’t like that. He was - or had been - free. Unbound. Off the grid. Now, he lay stuck in a hospital bed, his body barely strong enough to move. The worst part was, Fallister was smiling at Jason, as if he were blissfully unaware of the invasive parts around him.

That smile puzzled Jason the most. At that moment, he would have liked to go back to thinking about koi ponds and rectangles. Instead, his subconscious drifted towards the summer evenings and late nights spent with his father; who now wore a watch counting down to the end of his life, by the millisecond. 

Jason forced himself to look at the watch. Six hours, forty two minutes, and thirty seven seconds. Sometimes it slowed or quickened slightly, reading and reacting to the cell movements in his father’s body, but “the timer” as Fallister had called it, never was far off in its estimations. When the time expired, so would the frail, old man that Jason looked down upon. 

“Are the little ones off to bed?” Fallister managed with some effort. He hadn’t spoken for hours.

“Yes,” Jason replied stiffly. The room felt like it was closing in on him. The distraction of his imaginary koi wasn’t doing its job to mask the intense flood of memories and emotions he had experienced the moment he looked at that time. Six hours, forty two minutes, and twenty nine seconds now. “We told them-”

“Look at me, son.” 

It could have been the vocal cords warming up once more after a long period of inactivity, but there was a commanding tone in Fallister’s voice. Not angry, but assertive. Authoritative. A tone Jason had often heard when in his youth.

Slowly, the man in leather shoes who thought of rectangular koi ponds brought his eyes up to meet the frail, old man’s gaze. And in that moment, his mind quieted. Every air of professionalism dropped from his persona as he closed the door. It was just the two of them in the room. Father and son. 

Fallister raised an index finger across the room. “One for me, and one for you.” Jason quietly strode over to the battered cardboard box on the counter that his father had been indicating. He unfolded the flaps. Time had eroded the will of the box, allowing him to easily bend them apart without much noise or damage to the material. Inside were two wire-framed headsets. Cheap, foam covered speakers stood out on the devices, the coloring bright orange. A small rectangular box made of glass protruded from the top of each. As Jason inspected the first device, he concluded that it would touch his forehead.

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Fallister motioned for his son to hand him one of the pairs, then for him to put the other on himself. 

“Pull up a chair.” He said. The authoritativeness in his voice was gone, and Fallister was back to the frail old man. 

Jason did so, folding out a cheap metal seat that had been leaning against the wall. As he sat down, Fallister touched his glass box with the tip of his pinkie. Several lines suddenly darted around inside the box. He motioned for Jason to lean closer. He did so, and Fallister touched his son’s glass box, this time with his ring finger, which still bore a plain, wooden wedding band. 

Immediately at the moment of contact, Jason felt his body go limp. His head fell to one side, almost causing him to fall out of the chair. He would have yelped, but his mouth wouldn’t move. His eyes didn't move. Nothing moved. 

And then, moments later, blackness.

Jason was floating in a void of zero gravity. He could move again, and tried to shout for one of the nurses to come help. His mouth moved, but no sound came. Nothingness seemed to fill his body whenever he tried to speak.

What of his father? Was he having an episode of his own? Perhaps the cruel device, whatever it was, had killed him. Maybe it had even killed Jason. The thought of leaving Rachel and the kids behind due to some suicide device raked at him. His mind again began to race. And, again, the rectangular koi ponds served him no aid. 

Around him, stars began to fade into existence. A cosmos of stars. Despite having no sense of scale or direction, Jason felt strongly that this was the cosmos of stars. His cosmos. The cosmos of his mind, or of his world? Perhaps both. 

He did not know. He still screamed silently, spinning. Then, a light. No, two lights. Jason could catch glimpses of them each time he spun, though it proved difficult to pick them out. Small at first, but not invisible. They approached, closer and closer, brighter and brighter, larger and larger. But not imposing. Somehow, they were very familiar.

It can’t be… he thought.

LeAnne. 

She was as majestic as she was bare. As unwieldy as she was nimble. Loud and gargantuan, but silent and still, her red body painted against the vastness of the stars. 

She was, in all cases of Jason’s mind, an impossibility.

But then again, that was how LeAnne worked. Eighteen wheels, two seats, and a lifetime of memories. She had been scrapped long ago. Yet here she was, impossible as ever, back from the dead like she had never left.

The port and aft engines mounted to the truck’s permanent trailer fired in reverse rhythmically, but it was a human rhythm. Someone was inside, controlling them. The truck pulled up, its passenger side door nearing Jason. He grabbed onto the handle, an anchor in the sea of stars. It came to him, almost like memory. The only difference was that he wasn’t wearing a vacuum suit. Jason planted his left foot against the side, hooked his right under one of the rungs of the ladder leading up, and pulled firmly on the door. It popped open, just like he remembered.

Looking inside, Jason saw another impossibility. An even unlikelier impossibility within an already improbable phenomenon. 

His father, Fallister Grey, sat behind the wheel. A cigar slowly burned in his mouth, but he threw it out the window once he saw Jason. Just like when his son had been a kid. His dad wore no vacuum suit of his own, but instead his trademark work boots, denim jeans, and red and black checkered flannel. On his head was that brown baseball cap. The patch of a single koi fish, almost luminescent orange, sat proudly on the front. It was as if time had reversed forty years for Jason’s father. The just-below-shoulder length, rugged brown hair, the patient brown eyes concealed behind a pair of polarized aviator sunglasses.

The void should have consumed them both, but it didn’t. 

“Son, we’ve been off schedule long enough. Could you quit gawking and climb in already?” 

The authority was back in his voice. Not angry, but not quite patient either. It was the voice of his father that Jason had always carried around in his head. The competent, capable man he knew. Not the senile, half cyborg that laid in the hospital bed. 

“Seriously, kid. Let’s. Go.”

Confused, frightened, joyous, and eager all at once, Jason climbed in the passenger seat and shut the door. LeAnne’s jets fired up again, this time propelling the eighteen wheeler semi truck forward, into the vastness of space.