All My Lost Time

All My Lost Time 

Matthew Ryan Fischer 

 

Pale and withered, the Old Man sat, dead eyed, glossy and cold, little bits of drool running down the sides of his mouth. The Old Man had no relatives to visit him, he had been abandoned years before, and it was a little unclear just who it was who had checked him in. He was now a permanent resident at the Seaside Springs Retirement Home, which was basically a nursing home for the sick and dying.

The Old Man didn’t speak. He didn’t interact. He could stare though. That was one thing he was especially good at. And if you looked into his eyes, you might find yourself shivering with fear, unsure why, but certain that there was once upon a time a very good reason.

There were people were all around him. They told stories, they played games. He sat in silence, perhaps hearing, but certainly not listening. Every once in a while his eyes would flicker, as if he had a sudden moment of brilliance, and if you saw it, you might thing he was about to wake from his long semi-comatose state. But the flickers were short and the staring was long, and very few other residents had the time to devote to his barely shifting state.

 

 

The Young Man fought. He was not a strong or well-trained fighter, but had an inner strength, a blend of stubborn determination, desire and will power. He head hurt. Blood was dripping down into his eyes. Something had cracked on his skull. He couldn’t lose focus. He wanted to, but knew if he did, it would be over. He had to stay awake, keep moving, and keep struggling. If he fell again, he might sleep, and he if slept he would certainly fade away never to wake again.

The attacker didn’t have the skill or competence of a man that knew what he was doing. He just attacked again and again in a wild, sporadic manner. Everything was moving too slow or too fast and the Young Man didn’t have time to focus become the attacks struck him. The attacker seemed to jump from one location to the next, always a step faster, and a step ahead.

The Young Man slipped to one knee. There was blood on his arms, his legs, from multiple cuts. His body hurt from a million different strikes and blows. His vision began to fog and the shadows crept in.

The attacker came again.

The Young Man lunged, taking them both to the ground. They wrestled. The Young Man hurt and wanted to stop, but to stop meant death. All he has was his will to live, his will to continue. Pain turned to rage as adrenaline took over.

The Young Man pinned the attacker, holding in down. The Young Man tried to catch his breath, the blood from his head wound slipping off his face and splattering down onto his attacker.

Sensing the shift, the attacker grew scared and struggled to break free. The Young Man was full of rage, his focus and energy returning. His mind aglow, his body becoming an unstoppable force.

 

 

At one point a man named Mack had tried to explain it to him. The problem with psychics and spellcasters was you never knew what was real or if they were trying to force some garbage into your mind. Your ideas could be meaningless tricks and your desires could be someone else’s game. He didn’t need things invading his mind. There was no joy in that. He was always on edge, unable to feel safe or relax.

Mack was an exceptional psychic, except once upon a time he was lost in the astral realm for too long and lost his way back to his body. He was comatose for weeks and had almost been pronounced brain-dead. When he came back he had fried some of what was important and lost most of his psychic ability. He still had occasional visions and could predict people’s deaths sometimes down to the exact second. He had learned to lie about that, but not before alienating or losing most of his friends and family.

Mack tried to train the Young Man. Tried to warn him off traveling too far or leaving his body defenseless. The Young Man had asked if Mack had seen his death in a vision. Mack couldn’t bring himself to lie about this. He had. He knew. But all he told the Young Man was that he wouldn’t die lost in the astral plane. Feeling invincible, the Young Man could hardly heed much else Mack had been worried about.

 

 

The shadows on the wall reminded him of what he once was. He and the attacker remained in the darkness. Hardly anything of their former selves remained. Time had passed by and they were shells. Mack had told him he wouldn’t die. This battle would not be the end of him. It was a promise, a remaining hope. It was all he had left.

They still existed, lost in a moment of interconnected space-time energy.  A trap, certainly, but still the promise remained. Even if he didn’t know how or when the promise remained – he would be free.

 

 

“Where am I?”

The Old Man looked at his surroundings, noticed the others, the elderly, the infirmed, the nurses and orderlies. He looked down at his wrinkled hands, realizing how old he now was. He knew what it meant.

“When am I?”

He was old. He was being taken care of. Someone had taken his entire life from him. He had faded into the darkness of time forgotten and there was no way of getting any of it back. He was gone, the real him, anyway. This wasn’t his life. He was somewhere long gone, lost in the past. Soon the rest of him would be gone. It happened to everyone. He understood. But so much had been taken, so much lost. He wasn’t bitter. The promise was honest enough. He was destined for this other prison. Had Mack seen that? Mack was long gone, there was no way to know whatever he had or hadn’t known or told the truth about.

He thought of the attacker. Where was he? What happened to him? It was all now just a faint memory, fading with every passing second, washed away in the flow of seconds. He looked at the shadow on the wall and the shadow looked back at him. The secrets of the past would stay there.

 

 

The nurse didn’t notice the Old Man was moving, mumbling for the first time in ages. She was distracted, for at the same time the Old Man woke, another patient developed a nose bleed and then something far worse as the convulsions began and the blood loss became uncontrolled.