Chasing Stars: Chapter 14

  Markus had to get out of there.

  He thought an order for a skypod and ten minutes later one was landing outside the front door.  Molly came to the door to ask him where he was going but he ignored her and got into the pod.  He was angry at her.  Maybe not angry per se, just… frustrated perhaps.  She’d ruined the fun.

  Donna’s proposition had excited something in him, it was a new possibility, a way for everything he’d ever wanted to just be handed to him.  It was the future he’d always wanted, and it was now being dropped in his lap.  Yes the cost was the death of his brother, but he was appropriately grieving that and besides, he figured this was a way of honouring his brother, of taking care of his interests for him after he was gone.

  The skypod rose quickly into the air to the standard parking altitude and awaited further instruction.  The rain was torrential, and if the pods didn’t have the safety record which they did he might have thought to be concerned.  Realizing how dumb it was for him to just sit up there hovering above the cottage like a child having a tantrum, he arbitrarily gave the central receiver an instruction to fly him down the coast back towards the city centre.

  He was startled by the ringing which reverberated through the pod.  The pod had automatically interfaced with his brainchip and scroll, and his incoming call was routed to the screens on the interior of the pod.  It was an incoming call from Sadhika, still in orbit he presumed.  His first instinct was to decline the call.  He was in no mood to deal with her, or anything else to do with the New Horizon mission right now.  He pushed past the instinct though and accepted the call.  Sadhika’s thoughtful face appeared on the main screen at the front of the pod.

  “Markus,” she acknowledged, “how are you?”  She seemed concerned for him, but also clearly very weary of her own concerns.

  “Hello Sadhika, what’s up?” Markus answered, declining to answer her question for fear of answering honestly.

  “It’s getting nearer decision time but I don’t want to press you.  Instead I’ll just ask you how your brother’s doing?”

  “Oh he seems to be okay, I mean… you know, for dying.”  The comment was somewhere between dark humour and outright dickishness.   “They have him on all of the best drugs so he should be somewhat comfortable for a day or so before he really crashes hard.”

  “Yeah… pretty much the same deal for Sasha.  How’s his family holding up?”

  His family.

  Markus scoffed.  “Compared to what?” he asked with the same bad attitude.  He scolded himself and made the effort to sit up straighter in his seat and take the conversation more seriously.  “I’m sorry,” he offered.

  “No need to apologize.” Sadhika answered with a small wave of her hand.

  “The kids are distraught of course, confused… I don’t think it’s really hit them what’s happening yet.  They understand it of course, but it’s like it isn’t real.  He’s still there, but… it’s somehow like he’s already dead.”

  “Yeah, it’s tough…  It’s pretty much the same around here.  It’s hard for everyone to really believe that she is actually going to be gone just like that.”  She snapped her fingers for emphasis and the moment hung in the air as the rain drummed against the window.  “How is his wife holding up?”

  His wife.

  Markus chuckled.  “She is… she seems to be in kind of a weird place.”

  “I can’t imagine what she’s going through.” Sadhika shook her head.

  “Yeah.   So Sadhika, something’s come up that uh…”  It was hard to break it to her; he felt some degree of embarrassment, more so the harder he tried to actually say it.  “I don’t think I’m going to be coming on the ship.  I won’t be joining the mission with you.”

  “Oh.”   She was surprised.  Markus assumed that she had figured when it was all said and done he would in the end of course accept the opportunity that had landed in his lap.  She could only guess at what new exciting opportunity had landed there which could be more appealing.

  “I must say that surprises me.  And… that I’m pretty disappointed.  I really thought this’d be good for you and that you’d want it.  I was… well, looking forward to getting to know you better.   Can I ask what’s changed?  Or were you just never really considering it in the first place?”

  “Something… came up.” He shrugged.

  “So you said,” she observed as she continued to look at him expectantly, but now with growing suspicion.

  Markus sighed.   He was really going to have to tell her.   “My um… my sister in law made an… interesting proposal.”

  “Oh?”

  “You have to understand, we’ve always been very close.  Lucas and I both met her at the same time; we both liked her and she liked both of us.  She had to make a choice early on before things got messy, and… well she and Lucas were both very goal oriented, they both wanted to climb the ladder and start having kids and all that right away.”

  “And?”   She asked expectantly, clearly quite clueless as to where he was going with this.

  “I wasn’t ready for all of those things back then, but… but well I am now.”

  “Yeah, I sensed that, that’s why I thought you’d want to come on the ship with us.”

  “She said I could take over for him in… all ways.”  He tried to hide his cringe over having to say it out loud to her.  “That… after an appropriate amount of time, she and I could finally be together,” he hated that he used the word ‘finally’.   “I can be her husband.  I can take over being a father to his kids and take on his role at the company at the same time.”

  Somehow when he articulated this to Molly it sounded perfectly rational, but Sadhika’s scrutiny was utterly withering.  For some reason it was only in trying to explain it to her that he could hear for himself how outrageous it all was.  Her stare made him want to disappear into the seats of the sky pod.

  “Right.” she acknowledged with cold dispassion.  “So you will just... take over his life.”

  “That’s right,” he said as he sat up, trying to regain some quantum of dignity.  He didn’t feel like he was having much luck though.

  “Well, that certainly does sound… easy,” the ice in her voice chilled him all the way from orbit.

  “What do you mean?”

  “God you are lazy, Markus.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Lazy, Markus.   The word is lazy?  After all this time, after all the growth you’ve had to do.   Now, after realizing the value of purpose and direction, you want to just slot unblinkingly into someone else’s life?”

  “Hey now, I-“

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said with such authority and certitude it stopped Markus cold.   “No you listen to me.  You’ve been a lazy good for nothing piece of shit your entire fucking life.  You’ve spent all of it squandering and disrespecting everything that I had to fight tooth and nail for every day of my life.  You were born with every opportunity to make something of yourself and instead, you choose to hide in a drug den’s kitchen, in a meaningless do nothing job for your entire adult fucking life.  God, even meaningful relationships were too hard for Markus fucking Bowland, so instead you just shack up with a fake woman instead because that’s what’s easy.”

  Her eyes were glowing hot with anger.  It was a reaction he wasn’t expecting, one that increasingly scared him.  “Every time in your life when you had the option to either do something real and meaningful or take the easy way out, take the path of least resistance, the path with less risk, you’ve taken the lazy way every fucking time.  You spit in the face of everything I am and everything I stand for.  And now, finally on the threshold of being a fucking man, of stepping up and doing something hard, of actually making your life worth a damn thing, you’re shrugging, blinking, taking the easy way out again!”

  “Hey!” Markus balked with full on defensiveness.  “You don’t know anything about me, you don’t know what I’ve been through!  My parents died when I was a fucking child, you don’t know anything about-”

  “Oh boo hoo Markus,” she cut him off, “nobody gives a shit.  My parents died when I was young too.  You think you’ve got a monopoly on hardship?  On tragedy?  Did you have to take care of your younger siblings when you weren’t even old enough to take care of yourself?  Did you have to start from the shit hole backstreets of Kolkata?   Life is hard, and brutal, and miserable, and not just for you.  You’re not special Markus.  In fact the only special thing about you is how little you’ve had to suffer, the privilege you had that others did not, so don’t give me your fucking sob story.  God it’s so disgusting you can’t even see any of that.”

  Markus was speechless.  Nobody had treated him like this in his entire life.  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “My only consolation is how much I know you’ll come to hate yourself, to hate your new life and what you’ve become, to hate your new wife, your new kids, your new job, all of it.  The inauthenticity of it will fill your mouth with sand and you’ll either stay there miserable and trapped, or admit it was all a mistake and live in that shame for the rest of your sad little life.

  “Fuck you Markus Bowland.  Fuck you, but thank you for revealing yourself early enough that we didn’t make the mistake of letting a loser like you on our ship.  Good riddance.”

  The screens switched off and he descended into darkness.

  Markus was stunned.  He felt nauseous as the existential panic crept in to reveal what a terrible mistake he’d made.  It was the worst kind of mistake, maybe the biggest of his life.  The kind which haunts forever, which can never be taken back.   The kind of mistake you feel in your bones as your chest tightens in panic.

  As his eyes readjusted to the darkness reasserting itself, he began hearing the beating of the rain against the windows, and the distant whine of the engines working hard against the heavy winds through the well-insulated pod.  In the total darkness he felt more alone than he ever had in his life, more like a failure than ever before.

  Sadhika had broken him and taken him apart.  Like an expert butcher she had completely disassembled him with only a few strokes of her unfathomably sharp blade, leaving him in pathetic little pieces on the floor of the skypod.

  You’re not special.

  She was right.   He’d suffered, but so many had suffered so much more, and without the benefit of all of the privileges he’d had to fall back on.  The only things that made him exceptional at all were his privileges, not anything that stood in his way.

  You’re lazy.

  She was so right.  He’d never once in his miserable life ever been willing to put the work in.  He’d taken the easy way out at every turn, rested on every excuse.  His job, his education, his girlfriend, he always walked away looking for an easier path when met with the slightest resistance.

  I’ll come to hate everything.

  God she was so right…  It seemed like such a perfect solution, but it would make him nothing more than a pretender to someone else’s life.  Sure maybe after a time he and Donna could date, but… did he even really like her anymore?   Like for real?  Did he ever really?  Or did he just build up the idea of her on the promise of maybe someday, on the jealousy of his brother.  Was it just a comforting delusion used to preclude the possibility of something more exposing and real?

  In the dark, as his shock gradually gave way to a bottomless existential sadness, he started rocking back and forth ever so slightly, shaking his head from side to side, gradually losing all semblance of control over his emotions.  He cried out wounded moans into the bitter darkness, letting out all of the conflict and darkness within him.  He finally erupted violently, bursting out in screaming and roaring fits as he started punching at the inside of the pod as hard as he could, violently jerking back and forth against the back of his seat.  His eyes filled with tears and streamed down his cheek.   He roared with primal frustration over the bitter darkness, tearing apart his throat and leaving him a pathetic, spent mess on the floor of the pod.

  He was mourning.  He mourned every possibility he’d let slip by, every reward he might have secured if he’d tried even a little.  He mourned the loving wife he might now have if he’d been willing to expose himself in that way, the children he might have with her if that kind of responsibility hadn’t scared him to death.  He mourned the pride he didn’t feel over anything he’d ever done academically or professionally.  He mourned the years he’d spent high instead of doing something more productive.  He mourned every little opportunity along the way that was a seed which could have grown into something beautiful in his life.  Now he mourned losing out on the opportunity to go on the New Horizon, to be part of that magical ambition.  He had squandered that opportunity on yet another half-baked effort to find an easy way out.  He mourned that even if he started now, he’d already missed out on so much.  Effort in life yields with compounding interest.   Starting so late there was now such a low ceiling on any dividends he could expect from such effort. 

  All the shame and anger he should have felt long ago and all along since came torrenting at him all at once now.  “It’s not FAIR!” he screamed as he punched at the ceiling of the pod as hard as he could to emphasize his agony.  He then finally slumped.  He became quiet and simply sobbed and shuddered to himself in the deafening silence of the night until he eventually grew quiet and still.   

  It was in that moment that he developed the capacity to loathe himself.  He learned to be disgusted with himself, at what he had allowed himself to become.  He’d spent all of his life building up this impression of himself as a victim, as someone with no agency, as someone life just happens to.  But it was him, all him all along, just him.  It had always been him.  He’d always just shrugged at the way Lucas and Molly and Donna had all looked at him like a lame dog, not with sympathy but with disappointment.  Now he could finally see himself in their eyes.

  He sat slumped on the floor of the pod with his legs stretched out in front of him and his arms hanging limply to the side, utterly stunned.  He wasn’t sure how long he sat there like that.  Eventually he managed to gradually pull himself back together.  It took concerted effort to do so, but he managed the best he could before ordering the skypod to take him back to the city.

   

  When the door swung open, he got out and approached the cottage slowly as the rain poured down.  He saw Molly in the covered doorway and guessed she’d been there waiting for him to return.  When he stopped she ran out to him, getting soaked herself.

  “What happened to you?” she asked with clear concern on her face.  “I was worried, where did you go?”

  “I’m a loser,” he admitted to her and himself as his tears got lost in the rain streaming down his face.  “I’ve always been a loser.  A lazy, pathetic loser.”

  “I know…” she agreed with sympathy but not dispute.  For the first time he saw that disappointment in her eyes turn to sympathy.   “I know.” she said again as she pulled him into a hug.  “So what’re you gonna to do about it?” she gently asked him.