Ice

I

He woke up, startled, drenched in his own stinking sweat. He vaguely remembered visuals of his nightmare, though he could not understand how cubes of ice, an old freezer and a few pages from a newspaper could together form something that could have scared him so much. He was normally not afraid of things, even less of people. One thing he had grown to be afraid of was probably this settling old age, and what ensued – death. The same death that had robbed him of his wife a few years ago. And death had lethal accomplices. To finish off his wife, death had brought along cancer. Or maybe it was a tumor in the intestine, he could not remember clearly. This was another reason for being afraid of old age. He did not like to forget.

He sat up on his sofa. The television was still on.

“Strange!” he thought to himself, “Ken is still not here.”

His hand reached out for his glasses on the low coffee table, and he wore them while putting his feet onto the ground. A glance at the clock. Red gleaming lines revealed 19:49. And Ken was still not back. The old man was now anxious. He rose to his feet, wobbled to the television and switched it off.

He usually had the habit of watching cartoon when he came back home from work. Lying there, in the sofa, remote in his hand, he would normally fall asleep in less than twenty minutes. Cherry would then come making the least noise possible, delicately remove the remote from his hand and turn off the television. Then she would go back to her kitchen, and hum together with the tunes of her old transistor.

But those were the good old days. When Cherry passed away from that atrocious fever, he was left alone. He thought he would never have such great naps again, lulled by the voice of his beloved, aware of her presence after coming back from work. But then what is good about habits, is that they never go away. Now the television had taken the place of Cherry. Tom and Jerry’s merry soundscapes would lull him to his nightmares, which he would forget as soon as he awoke. He did not even remember the visuals from the last one. But he still took his naps.

He now stood before the mirror in his bathroom. He took out his glasses, folded them, and dropped them into his front shirt pocket. He looked at himself; he looked at those lines on his forehead, under his eyes, on his cheeks, everywhere. But the advantage of having his glasses off was that whatever he saw was blurred. He kept thinking to himself that this may not be true. But then, some corner of his brain echoed “True… True…”

He opened the mirror-door and looked the three shelves of little bottles sporting weird names. He looked perplexed for a moment, then remembering what he needed, he removed one bottle with a dull blue label, unscrewed the cap and swallowed one of the contained pills. He then opened the tap, swallowed some water and started splashing  the liquid over his face, feeling the coldness robbing away the heat of his cheeks, of his forehead, of his eyes.

Suddenly, he stopped. Without turning off the tap, he rushed into the living room and looked at the glowing LED clock. It read 19:53.

“Strange!” he said, “Ken is still not here.”

 

II

The old man finished eating his food. He was getting worse and worse at kitchen work. However, he could not admit it. That is why he had to finish it all. He would not want to lose face in front of Ken, provided Ken came.

Had Ken been older, the old man would not have been so worried. But Ken was only eleven, and had gone to school. The old man sighed his way up his armchair. He needed ice cubes. Ice cubes in his drink. Ice cubes to keep himself cool. Walking into the kitchen, he froze, finding no refrigerator. Maybe he had none. But the memory of ice was so vivid. It was like part of him. As he stood perplexed, his decision lingering between returning to his armchair and going further into the kitchen for no apparent reason, a rattle was heard at the door.

“Ken! Finally!”

He decided to go back to his living room, expecting to find his son, planning a hug followed by questions and a probable scolding. But it was not his son. It was the doctor. The doctor was, he remembered, a very old family friend, so close that he even had a key to the house, and dropped in whenever he wanted. His name was not coming to the old man’s mind, though he knew the doctor had been helpful more than once. A doctor was always helpful, especially for an aging man like he was.

The doctor walked in with a smile.

“How is our young friend today?”

“I don’t know doc. Ken is still not here. I am worried…”

“Ken?”

“My son, doc.”

The doctor looked down, not knowing what to say further. The old man remembered how the doctor used to act strange. He appeared to be nearly eccentric, owing to how much went on in his buzzing mind behind the thick loosely worn glasses.

“Ah! Your son! Yeah…” recalled the doctor uncertainly, as if still engrossed in an unsolved medical case.

“Have a seat doc!”

As he settled down looking suspiciously at the sofa, the old man decided to go and make him a drink. But then he realized he had no ice.

“You know what doc? I owe you a drink! More than one actually. You were here all the time, for me, for Cherry.”

A faint smile drew itself on the thin dark drying lips of the medical expert.

“You were there until she died.”

The smile waded, making way for the visible guilt of a savior who failed to save a person who counted on him. But who could fight death? It had to come in any form. And for Cherry it came as Dengue.

 

III

“Have you written lately?” the doctor asked. This was the most personal question he had asked yet. He seemed as if still on duty.

“Writing?” the old man shifted uneasily, “I have written, yeah. But…”

“Can I read?”

“I don’t think so…”

A perplexed voice let out, “Why?”

A long pause followed, as the old man strived to fish for the appropriate words from his weakening pool of meaningful sounds.

“I don’t want to offend you, doc, but what I have been writing lately is… personal… very personal… I haven’t even shown it to Ken…”

His eyes widened. Ken. He got up in alarm and walked to the phone he could not remember having ever seen on this side table. At a loss for the number of the school, he turned to his guest.

“Doc, do you know the…”

“Can I at least know what you write about?”

“I told you it’s personal.”

“Okay, let me change my question. How do you write?”

No answer.

“Or when?”

No answer still. Then suddenly, the expression of the old man’s face shifted from uneasiness to determination.

A step after another, a word after another, synchronized into the deepest dramatic moment one could expect in real life. “Doc… I don’t know why I should be telling you all this, but… I usually write when I have nothing else to do… when am back home, and nobody is home…”

He threw himself into the sofa.

“I just sit down and write. That’s the time things bother me… Cherry, my age, the things I forget, reality.”

He leant towards the doctor, nearly whispering.

“I write about memories… because I know they were real. They are the most real thing I know. And somehow, in the middle of retelling that reality, I get lost. Like it never was… it never was real. And the next day, I pick it up, and find things I never knew about myself. The memories are there, but the way they stop…”

The doctor sat upright, all ears, expecting a secret to be divulged.

“It’s like the memories do not want to be remembered. It’s like they want to become forgotten memories. But what those memories are, I don’t seem to remember. Or I do not remember the last time I remembered them.”

The whisper went softer.

“I have been brainwashed. I do not even think I am real. I may be sleeping, or in a coma, or just an unnamed character in the unfinished story of some unknown hands.”

A tone of franticness appeared in his voice.

“I am not real.”

And he got up.

“Nor are you.”

He knelt down before the doctor.

“Nor is this sofa,”

Both his hands slapped the armrests of the sofa.

“Nor is this house, nor is Ken. And nor was Cherry”

He rose to his feet angrily, and let himself fall back into the sofa, his expression changing to satisfaction from his theory, and readiness to defend it at any cost. As he savored this moment of victory, he felt a hard pinch on his arm.

“You see you are real”, grinned the doctor.

“It’s not about this kind of real doc! It’s… It’s the meaning of things. It’s like… It’s like ice – invisible, solid, cold. It has an identity of its own. Yet, its reality is that it is water, ultimately. Then what if the ice discovers that it is not its own reality. What if it discovers that its reality and its identity are not one.”

“That’s… deep, and somewhat out of my grasp”, the doctor laughed.

A look of disdain flushed on the old man’s face.

“Laugh about it doc, but I believe in it!”

He got up in a hurry, went to a corner of the room, and took out a stack of paper from the cupboard. By the time he came back to his guest, the latter had already realized the accentuating effect of his little moment of fun.

“Take this!”

Caught by surprise, the doctor did not know what to do.

“Read! Go on!”

The doctor took the sheets, looked at them, and without saying a word, walked past the old man, and went out of the house, taking away the sheets.

 

IV

When the doctor came out of the iron door, a woman was waiting for him in the corridor. Seeing him, she got up, and in an interrogative tone, addressed herself to him, “Doctor…?”

In the deepest pensiveness he could have displayed, he exclaimed, “He speaks sense… a higher level of sense.”

Answering to the look of curiosity of her face, the doctor handed her the pages, in which she tried to find anything that could answer the number of questions her mind was putting forth.

“But… But this is blank!”

The doctor smiled.

“For us certainly. But for your husband, this is a new story every day.”

He walked back to the iron door, looking at the patient through the small pane of glass, closely followed by the impatient woman.

“For how long will he have to stay here now?”

The doctor sighed. This man had forced him to see the marvelous wonders of the mind, the various games the mind had the potential to play, the various stories it could create and enact, and make real, and erase in seconds which followed. For a moment, he had gone deep into the question of whether he really existed or whether he was just a character of his own mind. Just for a moment, he glanced at the man – a young man seated on his hard hospital bed, creating his world in the confines of a cell, making use of so much imagination that even trying to imagine what he could be imagining was an arduous task for the doctor. He turned back to face the woman, then dropped his eyes, as if ashamed.

“For as long as he is not sane.”

__END__