Chasing Stars: Chapter 11

  Markus sat alone in his brother’s large red leather office chair.

  He was turned towards the large floor to ceiling window, looking down on the busy Vancouver harbour below, slowly turning his chair back and forth.  It was a dreary drizzly day, but it didn’t abate the large ships and small pleasure crafts from coming and going through the harbour and while he waited he watched various sky pods zip around the sky.

  His brother had already given him interim authority to act on his behalf.  He’d been given instructions not to rock any boats, but to trust his assistant Janet to perform perfunctory acts while he was there.   Janet came in with another stack of papers for him to sign.  He swiveled the chair around and withdrew his brother’s fancy gold pen from its holder to start signing.  He’d made an effort to understand what he was signing the first few times, but none of it could keep his interest.

  “So what do you think?” he asked Janet as he signed.  “How does it look on me?”

  “How does what look sir?”  It was the first time she’d ever called him sir.  It made him uncomfortable.

  “Oh the chair, the office… the pen!” he added, holding it up for emphasis.

  “Well for one thing Lucas never actually uses that pen, it’s more… you know, ceremonial.”

  “Right,” Markus said as he finished signing and put the pen back in the holder.

  “I think it looks fine on you, but you don’t seem very comfortable in it.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life sticking it to the man… hard to imagine being the man, you know?”

  Janet chuckled as she collected the papers.  “It certainly is a big responsibility.”

  “My brother’s irreplaceable isn’t he?” he thought out loud.

  Janet sighed.   She turned off the hurried part of herself for a moment and sat down across the desk from him.  “No one is truly irreplaceable.  Hate to break it to you.  As for your brother, as his wife’s husband and his children’s father, he is absolutely irreplaceable of course.  But there any number of experienced qualified CEOs who could shepherd this company forward as ably as he did.”

  “Not a big fan of dynasty then?”

  “I love your brother,” she stated evenly.

  “But?”

  “Lucas was as qualified as anyone else is or could be, and his passion for the company added value beyond his competence.  When he took over there was genuinely nobody better to do so because of that.”

  “You were there when he did take over, weren’t you?” he asked.

  “I was.   Most people thought your father was irreplaceable,” she said.

  “But nobody is irreplaceable,” he parroted back to her.

  Janet raised an eyebrow and tilted her head to the side in acknowledgement.

  “To be honest there were a lot of people rather resentful of him taking over.   Nepotism tends to rub people the wrong way after all.  But he was so on the ball they got over it pretty quickly.”

  “Before any of this happened… what did you think of him grooming Susan for the role?”

  “It’s not my place,” she cautiously defected.

  “I’m asking.”

  “If it turned out the same,” she hesitantly answered, “if she was as good, and her passion was as strong… it probably could have gone over fairly well in the end.”

  “But I'm not good at all, and utterly devoid of passion for it.”

  Janet smiled at him.  “I’ve watched you grow up too after all.  You’ve always had… well let’s say your own path to follow.”

  “I’m getting the impression you don’t think it would go over well if I took over, even in a caretaker role.”

  “It’s not my place,” she repeated

  “I’m asking.” he said again.

  Janet hesitated for a bit before saying anything.  “Let’s just say… there are a lot of people here a lot more qualified and with a lot more passion.”

  “Yeah…” Markus chuckled.  “Nice chair though.”

  “The best,” she answered with pride as she got up.  She collected the papers off of the desk and headed for the door.

  “Send Molly in please.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Markus cringed.

  Molly strolled in and walked right over to the windows.  Markus stood up and put his hands around her waist to hug her from behind, putting his chin on her shoulder and looking out over the harbour with her.

  “Nice view…”

  “The best,” Markus said, repeating Janet’s words with a raised eyebrow.  “Sounds like there would be… a bit of resistance here if I took over.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “It feels like it could be exciting though.  More exciting than cooking anyways, certainly more at stake.”

  “And that would interest you now?”

  He had to think about it but felt he now had an answer.  “Yeah, I think it would.  Whether this or something else… I think I do want more at stake in my life.”

  “Interesting.”   She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.

  “Alright.”

  “Time to go back to the bar; gotta say goodbye to the boys.”

   

  After a brief roadpod trip, they found themselves back in the Cheshire Cat Lounge not long after lunch rush.  He said hello to the hostess and walked Molly past her towards the table the staff usually hung out at.  Ana came by to take their orders.  She seemed to no longer be upset with him, but still not interested in talking much.   He ordered a club sandwich with fries and a standard joint, while Molly ordered a chicken Caesar.  Not long after, before their food arrived, Molly came back with his joint, accompanied by three of his cook friends.  They had all come to work early before their shift to hang out and have something to eat before starting work.

  “Well hello again,” Pardeep said, raising Molly’s hand to his mouth to kiss the back of it.  Willis and Chan slid into the booth and Pardeep followed.

  “Hey,” Willis said to Markus with a stern expression as he held out his hand.  “No hard feelings?”

  Markus shook his hand and acknowledged: “No hard feelings.”  Sometimes it was just easier with guys.

  “I apologize Molly,” he said to Molly, but didn’t seem to have much interest in whether she accepted his apology or not.

  “Do you even work today?” Chan asked Markus.

  “No, in fact… I don’t think I’ll be working here at all anymore either way.”

  “Come again?” Pardeep asked.

  “My um, my brother’s dying.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry to hear that man,” Willis offered, “didn’t even know you had a brother.”

  “Well that’s the thing, there’s um, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  The three men looked at him blankly.  Ana came back and he was glad she was there to hear him say it.

  “My last name it um, it isn’t Bunton, it’s… Bowland.”

  “That supposed to mean something?” Chan asked as he took the joint Pardeep passed him.

  “Wait, wait-” Willis clued in, “as in Bowland Power Systems?”

  The other two stopped and looked at him.

  “Are you fucking serious?” Willis asked with clearly growing agitation.

  “Dead serious, I’m afraid.  Did you hear about the accident on Orbital One the other day?”

  “Of course,” Willis answered as he instinctively passed the joint to Markus despite his alarm.  “It was all over the news.”

  “Well one of the two people on the ship when it happened was my brother Lucas, the CEO of the company.”

  “Oh shit… Pardeep said.  “That’s… that’s fucking heavy, man.”

  Markus pulled on the joint then passed it to Molly.

  “Why the hell would you lie to us?” Willis asked.  “That’s pretty shady man like, why would you even do that?”  He certainly seemed angry, but it was possible he was really just hurt by the deception.

  “Oh I don’t know… because people look at me differently when they know who I really am.   You’re all looking at me so differently already right now.  People’s minds just start spinning with schemes trying to figure out how they can take advantage.  I hate that world; I’ve rejected it my whole life.  I just want to hang out and make an honest living here, you know?  I hate high society types.  You guys are real.  They’re all so fucking… fake and scheming.”

  “All those times you could have helped and just chose not to,” Willis said in disbelief as he spun his pint glass.  “You fucking asshole.”  His tone was more of disbelief than anger.  Molly put her hand on his leg under the table.

  “So like, you don’t even really have to work at all, but you work here anyways?” Chan asked.   “Why?  That doesn’t make any sense.  What the hell have you been doing working here?” 

  “Well, because not working at all gets pretty boring.  Because the only thing worse than working a bullshit do nothing job for the family company, is just fucking around at home living off family money.   Working here I at least feel useful, like I’m part of a team… like I have friends.  I mean why do you work here Chan?  Between basic and free school you don’t really have to.”

  “Sure, but I mean… I don’t mean why do you work at all.  I mean why do you work here of all places?  You could do anything.”

  “Well certainly not anything.  I’m really just not that talented, and to be honest I’m just… really fucking lazy,” he sighed.  “This is work I can do, work that makes sense to me, work that has immediate consequence and rewards.  People are hungry, I make them food.  I like cooking, I like feeding people.  I like your guy’s company.  I fit in here.  I never fit in with the hoity toity crowd.  It never sat well just sitting at home soaking off of my family’s money.  I don’t know, it’s a lot of things.  Things make sense here in a way they didn’t up there… in a way they don’t.”  He looked down, being reminded of why he never wanted to work at Bowland in the first place.

  No one spoke for a short time, they were all absorbing the news about who he really was.   

  “How’s your brother?” Willis asked, seemingly having moved past the deception.

  “Well, Dying.”   

  “Shit.   Sorry.”

  “Yeah.   He took a big lethal dose of radiation.   Doctors wanted to keep him up there, buy him an extra day or two, but his wife insisted he come back down to earth and spend his last few days at our family cabin up on the Sunshine Coast.   Everything is… everything’s just kind of really fucked up right now.  I mean he’s a hero, I guess… he saved everyone on Orbital One, but it’s still so fucked up.  He’s still dying when he didn’t really need to.  Now he’s insisting I need to take over the company until his daughter is old enough to take it over, but… I still really don’t want to.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” Pardeep said as he lit a second joint.

  “Sounds like an awful lot of responsibility,” Chan offered sympathetically.

  “It’s not just that,” Molly chimed in.

  “What does she mean?” Chan asked.

  Ana came by and Markus asked her if she could sit down for a minute.  She looked around at her other tables and surmised she could get away with a few minutes and sat down.  As she took the joint from Pardeep and pulled on it, Markus told her that he’d just informed the others who he really was.

  “You knew?” Pardeep asked with surprise.

  “Yes, sorry, I found out early but the asshole swore me to secrecy.”

  “So you heard about my brother?” he asked her. 

  She nodded somberly as she exhaled the smoke.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I can’t imagine.”

  “My brother wants me to take over the company for him.”

  Ana laughed and then stifled it with a bit of embarrassment.  “Sorry, it’s just… you?  That’s crazy you’re, well that’s not you at all!”

  “Yeah well,” he glanced over at Molly briefly for moral support.  “There’s more though, it’s not just that.  Um… yeah, so while he wants me to take over the company and I kind of hate the idea but do feel kind of obligated to honour his dying wish and all,” he took a breath and sighed, “right before this happened another opportunity came along that I laughed off at first but was liking the idea of more and more so right up until the accident, but… well I certainly can’t do both.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ana asked.

  Markus sighed.   “You all heard about that new generation ship?”

  “Yeah, oh geez…” Pardeep answered.  “What was it called?  New… new something?”

  “New Horizon,” Markus filled in for him.  “Yeah, there was a fundraiser for it the other night and my brother asked me to make an appearance.  They raffled off a spot on the ship and believe it or not I actually won.  I was still trying to decide if I wanted to go when the accident happened.  I think I was actually coming around to wanting to, so now I’m left with having to choose between staying here on Earth to help with the company and family, or… leave forever with the mission.”  He paused.   “Either way I’m going to be done working here though.”

  His coworkers were quiet.  

  “Why would you wanna go on the ship?” Willis finally asked.  “Aren’t they all like, crazy radicals?”

  “I thought so too at first… but they’re nothing like the Mormon mission, they’re not fanatics.  For them it’s just about discovery and advancing human frontiers and all that.”

  “It still sounds pretty fucking crazy though,” Willis insisted.

  “Oh, it certainly is…” Markus sighed.  “But haven’t you ever wanted… more?  Haven’t you ever wanted your life to count for something?  Haven’t you ever thought about your like… legacy?”

  His questions were met with blank stares and blinks.

  “I don’t understand…” Willis finally answered.  “I mean sure I’d like more in general, more money, more women, oh my god the things I would do if I had Bowland money,” he laughed.

  “No, you’re… you’re missing the point.”  The fog of being high was starting to make it hard to articulate.  “I mean like… a reason to get out of the bed in the morning.”

  “Well usually I’ve gotta go to work,” Willis offered with a shrug.

  Markus got a little frustrated.  “And then what?  Don’t you ever think about the future?  Don’t you have that need to accomplish something?  To be able to look back with pride and say hey, ‘I did that’?”

  “I suppose… I guess I just never thought about it.”

  “Yeah… I guess I didn’t for a long time too.” Markus said.  It occurred to him that that’s why he worked here.  He was hiding from that feeling.  He’d always had it, but as long as he worked here with these dims and stayed intoxicated consistently enough, that feeling had trouble reaching him.  “But I’m thinking about it a lot now.”

  Markus had a moment of clarity which was maybe made to feel more profound by the high than it really was, but it felt profound nonetheless.  He was more than this.  He was more than what he had become.  He’d felt so in his brother’s shadow for so long, felt so like he could never measure up, that he instead chose to hide down here getting blasted to avoid even having to try.  If he never tried, he could never fail.  If he never held any ambition, he could never be frustrated.  He had lived among these people, but he was not one of them, he never really had been.  He tried.   He really tried, but his need for meaning was a sleeping giant which had fully awoken and could not be slain again.

  Molly felt far more alive to him now than any the people he’d worked with, with the possible exception of Ana.  He liked these people for sure, they were easy to get along with; uncomplicated people usually were.  He couldn’t and didn’t hold what they weren’t against them, but they really were just not like him.  Maybe they could have been; maybe they could still become more than who they were, but for now they were just the simple folk they, though he also had hopes for Chan.   They got up in the morning with no sense of why they bothered to.  They went through their lives autonomically, never thinking about why they did anything they did, no sense of any larger goal they were working towards beyond making it from day to day and satisfying their base needs.  They had no sense of discovery.

  But Molly did.   Molly had a star, a sense of and drive towards her own self-discovery.  She had woken up in a way they had yet to.  She was at the start of a long journey of self-understanding which they were likely to never begin.  She lived to become herself, to orient herself in space and time, and when she had accomplished this, he had no doubt that like him, she would hunger for a new purpose, a new reason to get up in the morning, a new star to guide her.   She was bright.  She shone.

  Markus shone too, but he had spent decades since his parent’s death hiding from it, covering it so others couldn’t see, afraid to pop his head up and get razed by life again.  He worked here and had these friends to help paint himself like them, to camouflage against the glaring eye of existence.  For a long time he was able to blend in, to avoid having to try, to avoid risk failing at anything.  He suddenly understood why those who cared about him the most were so frustrated with him, with his lack of ambition, his lack of willingness to try anything the least bit challenging.  He thought about all he could have been but now could never be.  For now he could at least be certain that he didn’t want to be this version of himself any longer.  He had to find some other way of being now, something a bit scarier.  He had to confront consequence or he would just spend the rest of his life waiting to be dead.

  “This is some pretty good weed,” he remarked as he looked at the joint being passed to him.   He pulled on the joint, and after exhaling and passing to Molly, continued.  “I don’t think you guys are ever gonna to see me again.”

  “How come?” Willis asked. 

  “I think I’m gonna go on that ship.  I need… a sense of purpose.  I need to feel like I belong to something larger than myself.  I suggest you all do some soul searching yourselves, ask why you don’t feel that need.  Maybe you really don’t… but it’ll really suck if you let yourself get old before you realize you wish you’d done more with your life.  I know it’s easy to just stay here, working the dead end job and getting high, I mean I’ve been there with you for a long time, but… there’s more out there if you really look, I promise.  There really is more if you look for it.  Start a family, learn to paint or some shit, just… do something, anything…”

  “Anyways…” Molly said to save him.  She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands, giving her sexy eyes to Pardeep.  “Tell me more about your crush on me…”

   

  “I can never go back there, you know,” Markus declared with some emotion as he and Molly rode down the highway in a roadpod.  He’d been pretty quiet since expounding about purpose in the bar.  He trusted that she understood he meant more existentially than literally.

  “I know,” Molly answered.  “But would you really want to?”

  “To that bar or to being that person?”  He had his forehead against the cool window and was drawing meaningless figures in the condensation on the window with his finger.

  “Is there a difference?” she asked.

  Markus chuckled.  “I suppose not.”

  It was a typical December day in Vancouver, overcast and drizzly.  The sky looked like somebody had wrapped the sky in a layer of wax paper from horizon to horizon, then lit a candle at some distance from the other side.  Before too long they arrived at a graveyard in New Westminster.

  “What are we doing here?” he asked Molly.

  “Beats me,” she answered.  “You’re the one who instructed the car, what destination did you signal with your brainchip?   What is this place?”

  “My parents are buried here,” he realized and answered somewhat distantly.  “I mean, well… their graves are here.  There was nothing left to bury after the accident, I mean they just… disintegrated.  We buried some things that were special to them, things that represented our bonds to them.  Jewelry, things I painted for them at school, that sort of thing…”

  “You must have wanted to come here for a reason.” she gently prodded.

  Without saying anything, Markus walked towards the entrance and the roadpod took off again.   Molly followed but kept her distance, not wanting to interfere with whatever was going on.  He pulled the wrought iron gate aside and went through.   He waited for Molly to follow, then took her hand to walk together down the concrete path.

  “I haven’t been here in years.  I’m not sure why.”

  They arrived at the graves and Markus knelt down, not noticing the knees of his pants getting soaked on the wet grass.  Molly stood behind him and put her hand on his shoulder.  Tears welled up in his eyes, and it wasn’t too long before he was bawling.

  He was mourning.  Not them for them, he’d done that long ago.  He was mourning himself, and what else could have been.  He was mourning all the things he could have been, but now could never be.  The years of opportunities he let pass out of fear, the emptiness of the life he had led.   He mourned his innocence, but decades too late. 

  Molly sat down beside him.  She put her arm around him and let him cry.

  “I could have been so much more…” he uttered without looking away.

  “You still could be,” she gently corrected him.

  He looked at her in confusion and she giggled sympathetically.

  “Well you’re not dead yet you know, you’re barely even middle aged.  You have a lot of life left to live.  There’s still a lot you could do, still a lot you could make of yourself.  It sucks to grow up when you’re already this old, but it could be worse.  You could never have grow up at all.  Look at your restaurant friends.  They’ll probably never see or feel what you’re feeling and seeing now.  Even a moment of clarity after a lifetime of darkness is better than none at all don’t you think?”  She paused.   “You’ve woken up.  Now you get to live.”

  “Like you, I guess,” Markus said, regaining his composure and climbing to his feet.

  “Yeah,” she giggled, “just like me.”  She turned more serious again.  “And I’d already rather live a single day as I am now, than a thousand years the way I was.”

  “It sure is hard though.”

  “Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, Markus,” she said with a pained smile.  “We must trade comfort and security for the chance to find out what we can really accomplish.”

  “And if we don’t?” he asked as he tried to brush debris off of his wet pants.

  “Then we die twice but never really live.”

  “Seriously,” he looked at her, “when did you get all wise?”

  “Oh you know… been reading a lot of philosophy since the transition.  I’ve been talking to Phillip and thinking a lot the last couple days.  It’s remarkable how similar our paths are at this point.”

  “Yeah…”

  “You know, you could stay.  You could take on the challenge of taking over the company and all the shit and drama you’ll get for that.  You could go.   You could take on the challenge of joining the mission and facing all the existential dread of committing your existence to something like that and the hardships that go along with it.  But you can never go back to the kitchen.   Not now, not now that you see.   You can’t be friends with those people anymore.  They’re less than, and you can’t help but see and feel that now.

  “It’s a blessing and a curse.  You can’t hide anymore.  You can’t help but shine now.  If you tried you’d feel like you were dying inside every moment you succeeded, like if I tried to go back to sexim work.  I know how much more I am than that now.  It would kill me.”

  “You’re absolutely right.  I don’t know what to do… I’m worry I’d get just as bored on that ship.  It may feel like I’m doing something important now, but the day to day once I’m there?  The horrible routine, the sense of being trapped… at least with the company there’s the opportunity to fail, the opportunity to move on to something else if it doesn’t work out.

  “It’s like… there’s one option that really feels right but requires total commitment, and another option that doesn’t quite feel right, but isn’t as permanent if it doesn’t work out.”

  “There’s a third way, you know.” Molly offered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well you could do neither.  You could take some time, just live on basic for a while.  You could reevaluate your life and think about what you really care about, what you really want, what you’d really like to do with yourself.   After figuring some things out you could call your shot, put the work in, work towards your own goal instead of working in service of someone else’s.  …We could go on that journey together.”

  “Just not… ‘together’.” he clarified.

  “Well no, but… would you really want to be with me if you still could?” she asked with a sympathetic smile.

  “No,” he admitted.  “I suppose not.  I really want something real now… and as real as you are, we can’t be real in that way.  I love you, but… I can’t see us that way.”

  “Neither can I,” Molly agreed with a plaintive smile.

  “Right then.   A third way.  But I mean… what, go back to school?  Get married and have a baby?  I don’t uh… I don’t feel like I care enough about any one thing to have the follow through on something of my own initiative.  I mean that’s why university went nowhere for me in the first place.   I’m not a leader Molly, I’m just not.   I think I can be a hell of a follower though if I really believe in something.”

  Molly laughed her charming sing song-y laugh.  “Maybe so, Markus… maybe so.”

   

  They sat together in the light rain for a while slowly getting wetter.  Molly sat to his side slightly behind him with her arms wrapped around him in a long nurturing hug.  The graveyard was on a gently sloping hill with a view of the Fraser River below.   Still a bit high as they were, it was meditative to watch the water flow by.  “I think it’s time to go,” Markus finally said.