“Every man is born as many men, and dies a single one.”
-Martin Heidegger, 1889-1976
- Maxx Plopman, American Businessman
“Sir? Are you alright? Should I call Dr. Choi?”
“Who?” I asked in a wheeze. The world was spinning all around me in multi-colored nebulas and blinking stars.
“Your personal physician? Should I call an ambulance, Mr. Plopman?”
The face of the man speaking to me came into view for a moment. A chubby, but sharply dressed asian man in his early thirties with large framed glasses. A name came into my mind, “Grover.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Shut up and let me think.”
I was in the back of a limousine, my limo, with the man who was some kind of servant or employee of mine. I looked down to see I wore a fine tailored black suit. Numbers kept popping into my head, filling in the static with data and prices. Gold Rolex, 28k. 8 carat cufflinks, 3 grand. Bruno Magli loafers, 920 bucks. Personal Assistant, 400 thousand a year plus benefits. Car and chauffeur-
“Gah! Make it stop!” My brain felt too full, like my head was about to explode.
The asian kid got his glass phone out of his jacket pocket, “I should really call the doctor, Mr. Plopman. Maybe we need to skip the wedding. I don’t think you are well at all.”
The wedding! Things were starting to clear and come into focus. I was about to attend the wedding of my mentor and the woman who had put me in business, the illustrious Elaine Tremaine. “There’s no way I am missing the wedding, Grover. Now get me a glass of bourbon, straighten your tie and let’s do this damn thing.”
We made our way from the parking lot across a busy street to the facade of the recently constructed Jesuit Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Portland, Oregon. Golden statues of angels, and saints lined the high walls with larger portals behind depicting scenes from the Gospel. The massive door was a recreation of the baptismal door of Il Duomo in Florence, twenty squares of more scenes from the life of Christ all pressed in gold leaf.
My mouth was watering just thinking about the money it took to build this monstrosity, and every bit of it from the pocket of Elaine Tremaine. She had the place built almost exclusively for the purpose of this wedding, and let the Jesuits do whatever the hell they want with it after she was done.
Money. God damned glorious money. That’s what all of this was about. My entire life chasing the ecstasy of material success. An avenue to power, to adventure, to sex. Looking up at the church, gleaming white in the still winter sunlight, I saw my entire existence perfectly encapsulated and explained. Everything in its right place and me at the very top, above Christ, above the cross that sat on the apex of the steeple like a divine weather vane.
“I know who I am,” I whispered.
“Of course, sir. Maxx Plopman, self-made American success story... and my personal hero,” Grover said and seemed to blush as we made our way up the church steps. The hint of an oncoming sob in his quavering voice.
I looked at him with a raised eyebrow, “Don’t you start, Grover. If you lose it during the ceremony I’ll ship you down to janitorial.”
“Yes, sir.”
We were seated on the bride’s side towards the very front of the massive chamber, in the same pew as her two sons, both of whom had always been extremely jealous of the close relationship I had with their mother. What could I say? She liked me more than she liked them. I nodded to both of the balding men in grey suitcoats and of course they nodded back. The music started and we stood to look back at the grand entrance from where the grooms and maids appeared. Jesus, she didn’t even put her own kids in the wedding? The sour look on their faces told the story. They were not important enough to take part in what might be the most expensive wedding of the century.
The men and women who came down the aisle in advance of Elaine Tremaine were all well known musicians and movie stars. Members of the audience were slyly taking photos of the entourage with their omniphones, a product that my company owned, I remembered. Throughout the entire ceremony a thought kept creeping over hidden places in my mind, squirming like an insect crawling all over my subconscious, telling me that something was in my head that shouldn’t be there, a whispering phantom or some latent schizophrenia that decided to manifest itself today of all days.
“Mr. Plopman,” said Grover Sparks in a hushed voice, just as Elaine entered the church. It brought me back to earth to hear my own name, somehow reassuring.
“Nice dress, huh Grover? When you find Mr. Right I’ll buy you one just like it.”
“Hilarious, sir. Just remember to smile as she walks by. Lots of photos. Lots of press here.”
“Gotcha.”
Elaine came down the aisle to some Leonard Cohen song and took her place next to her next husband. A handsome kid, I’ll admit. Elaine did like them young. It would have been crude to bet, but Vegas odds-makers gave this, Elaine’s 9th marriage, no more than a month before she left him for a fresher specimen. All of this extravagance was to celebrate Elaine Tremaine, not some bronze-skinned stud. Then again what did I know, maybe they were totally in love and she would spend her eighties and nineties in wedded bliss. The ceremony was well on its way by the time I started paying attention. The couple was saying their vows.
“My dear Elaine, these past few months have been the happiest of my life. I commit my soul, my heart, and all the rest to you until the day I die. I love you more than life itself, and I promise I always will, until death do us part,” The wide eyed boy said to the 75 year old trillionaire
“Me thinks he doth, protest too much,” I whispered to my personal assistant.
“If he’s planning on her dying any time soon he’s going to be disappointed,” Grover replied smiling. We laughed until a guest across the aisle shushed us and we regained our composure to listen to Elaine’s vow.
“Dearest guests, friends, and loved ones,” she began, addressing the audience rather than addressing the man she was supposed to be marrying. “This wedding, for me, is like a fairy tale.” There were many aws and muffled comments of oh, isn’t that nice from the congregation at that. “And every fairytale has a princess,” she said and touched her own chest. “And of course a prince,” at that she looked at her groom. “And an evil dragon, who in this case is my doubts about this marriage.”
The groom’s side seemed to freeze in awkward silence but for the rest of us Elaine’s irreverence was about as surprising as it was for the last eight weddings we had seen.
“For a woman like me,” she continued. “Well, there is no woman like me, but for me to marry a lowly hotel clerk from Miami, let’s just say a few eyebrows were raised.” More gasps from the grooms side. A woman in the front pew who could have been his mother covered her face and sobbed quietly. “And I won’t say that love conquers all. This is my ninth marriage, of course, but what I will say about love is this,” at that she looked at her husband to be and smiled a smile of pure joy. “I will have whatever I want, and no one can tell me no.”
The Church went dark for me then, blackening into a long spinning tunnel. I felt myself falling to the floor and just before my face smashed against the marble floor I heard a voice in my head like the ringing of the solemn church bell, “Can you hear me, Maxx? I don’t want to alarm you but I need to borrow your brain for a while.”
And then a warm blanket of blackness and peace covered everything and I was alone.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“One, two, three, four. One, two, three-”
“You wanna call it?”
“No, two, three, four. Not, yet, three, four.”
“Come on, man. Dude is dead. It’s been two minutes. Let’s pack it in.”
“Fuck you, two, three, four.”
The EMT kept perfect rhythm as he spoke, compressing my chest with each count. After the fifteenth compression he bent down and blew a life-giving breath into my lungs. Light. So much light. Not a tunnel or a flash. It was as if dark could not exist in the same dimension as this brilliant luminescence. I heard myself gasp and then I was awake.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” the EMT cried and jumped off of my chest.
“Nevermind, I think he’s gonna pull through.” The other one was ghost white. I looked up at them from the floor, an overhead recessed light glaring like the sun in my eyes. I tried to get up.
“Sir? Stay still, sir. I need you breathe. No! Calm down, Mr. Plopman, sir. Just relax and breathe.”
Nothing made sense. Strangers hovered above me in a strange room. They called me by a name that I hardly recognized. Plopman.
“What... happened... to me.” Just putting the words together was excruciating. They seemed to come from a well deep within my subconscious.
“You flatlined, sir. You were dead for two minutes,” said the EMT who resuscitated me.
“Thanks, you two. Now get the fuck out of my office.”
The Plopman Group LTD was the only multinational corporation to headquarter in Portland, Oregon. Its home was the monolithic Fritz Haber Tower, an eighty-story edifice covered in pink glass windows. It dominated the posh downtown waterfront like an incredible monument to capitalism and science. On the 79th floor was my office. Well, maybe it’s better to say the 79th floor was my office. I knew this to be true. I had memories of riding the elevator up to it while screaming at lackeys and assistants. I’m the boss of this place but what do we do?
We innovate. We market technology on the forefront of scientific possibility. We buy ideas, companies, patents, property; and we sell everything. These words sprang into my mind without effort. The sensation of sudden memory without context was like a having a cold snake wiggle out of my ear. Unnerving. It was as if I had known about the Plopman group all along, an inextricable part of my psyche with a whole set of connected memories. The amnesia that had confused me upon waking was now fading away, like a dream.
I sat down at my massive rosewood desk and picked a pen from the drawer. Gold, I thought, eighteen karat, made in Turkey. I rotated in my leather swivel chair to face the wall sized window. Sprawled out below was the city of Portland, wet and gray, worse than Ketchikan. I knew somehow that this was true but Ketchikan seemed like everything else from Isaac’s life. Far, far away.
The elevator, which faced a combination conference room/ putting green, made a ping and the door opened smoothly. A thirty-something man in chinos and a green polo-shirt rushed in and looked around frantically. Grover Sparks, my personal assistant. There were dark sweat spots under his arms. He was panting.
“Mr. Plopman!” he rejoiced. “Oh thank God!” He was breathing so hard that each syllable was broken with a violent inhalation.
“I’m fine, Sparks. But feel free to have a heart attack. The medics are still here. Just try not to die on the Persian rug.”
“Sir, they told me you were dead. That your heart stopped for two whole minutes.”
“Fuck that shit. I am too busy to die this week. And I am all done discussing it.”
“But you need to go to the hospital. Only a doctor-”
“I said I was done with the subject! Did you forget how to speak English again? Should I say it in Filipino?” Sparks was an assumed name. His family name was Rosario, but he changed it when he graduated college and went to work in business. I guess an Asian guy with a Spanish name was just too confusing for some people.
“I just-”
“Done, Grover! Now let’s talk business. I want to talk to my directors today. Moscow, Mexico, New York, and LA. I want the teleconference set up for sometime between now and lunch. I don’t give a shit about sleep schedules.” Grover had a quizzical expression on his broad face and his mouth opened silently.
“How many times do I have to say this-”
“It’s just that... well, sir, it’s 4:30 pm. And you already spoke with the directors today. Spitz said the mineral rights acquisition went through, but the Kremlin wants to wet its beak, as always. Klein is holding on the vaccine-buy until the developer comes down to 40 million; he’s sure they will. Gurtz said the new microchip is through the last phase of testing but that security might be an issue. They reported in already, sir.”
I tried to remember the conversation, but I found only an empty hole. It was like picking up a full jar of peanut butter, opening the lid, and finding it empty. I felt the weight of my mind and my personality, but I couldn’t touch it. I kept digging, beads of sweat forming on my temples from the effort of recalling memories that weren’t my own. Then I broke through. A name and then a place.
“What about Mexico? What about Charly Walden? What’s he say?”
“Sir?” He looked puzzled, almost afraid.
“What about Walden? How are things going with the Yucatan mine? The fuck is wrong with you today, Grover?”
“Mr. Plopman, Walden is dead. He was murdered last week. Some terrorist shot an RPG at his motorcade, we lost half the Mexico team! Don’t you remember? You told me yourself that he died!”
Later, Sparks had a doctor come do some tests. The doc was older, close to seventy, called Dr. Choi. A thin man with large hands and cold skin, Choi had the air of a man unimpressed with all that he saw. He was entirely nonplussed that I had come back from oblivion but he showed a small, purely scientific interest in the case. He was soft-spoken but unyielding in his insistence on giving me every kind of test that he could.
I kept a clinic and testing lab on the fourth floor. It came in handy for product testing or for in house medical emergencies, like when the boss dies and then needs to be defibrillated. Grover and the doctor put me in a wheelchair, despite my protests, and brought me down to do some tests. With as few words as possible, Choi directed me to undress and then sit on a high bench while he prodded me with his icy fingers. After a mulling his Omnipad he picked up a stylus and began scribbling as he spoke.
“Blood pressure is a little high. Hmm. Could be stress related. Possibly from your, uh, little scare this afternoon?”
“I feel fine. I keep telling these whimpering idiots to stop worrying about me and get back to work.”
“Uh-huh, right. Tell me, what were you doing directly before you, uh, collapsed?” He was blasé and indifferent. Where Grover was practically shitting himself, Dr. Choi was so calm I thought he might be stoned.
“Before I blacked out? I was... er....” Again my memory failed. There wasn’t a single shred of information that I could use as a kind of touchstone. Just empty space.
“Your secretary told me that you were at a wedding?”
“Right, of course. Elaine Tremaine’s wedding.”
“And before that you had a previous episode while you were on the phone with an employee in Alaska?”
“Alaska? No, that can’t be right. We don’t have anyone there.”
“In your family, you mean?”
“What? Oh, God no. I meant the company. I’ve got no family anywhere. I’m like Bruce Wayne. Orphan Billionaire, you know?”
“Hmm.” He said, neither confused or amused. “You record all of your telephone conversations, yes?”
“You’re damn right I do. And it’s saved me money more than once.”
“Why don’t we listen to the recording? It may give me some insight into what kind of issue this is. Emotional, physiological, or maybe you have multiple personality disorder.”
“Funny, doc,” I said and had to smile.
“Not really,” He smoothly raised his wrist and checked the time on his watch. A Rolex, studded with rubies in an 18k gold setting, on a red alligator band with a solid gold clasp. My mouth was watering.
We took my private elevator up to my office and I had Grover bring up the recording in the conference wing. There was some kind of organic vegetable platter on the conference table that someone must have set out for me, hoping I would make a healthy choice rather than my usual dinner of ribeye and a glass of cabernet sauvignon. Choi picked up a piece of cauliflower from the plate and beheld it closely. He sniffed the white floret and made a face that betrayed more than a little surprise.
“Don’t like cauliflower, doc?”
“Hm. Is that what this is? The last time I had one was long ago, in Arabia.” He seemed to lose himself in thought as he turned the vegetable over in his hand. He sighed softly and then took a small bite.
“Ah, yes. Disgusting. I remember now.” Choi spit the white chunks into a waste bin in the corner.
Grover came in and connected his omni-pad to the stereo jack in the wall and we listened to the call in surround sound. The first voice on the recording was my own.
“Alright, Ms. Martinson. That’s a small price to pay if this little pet of yours can do what you say it does.” Martinson? That name...
“It can cure any disease, viral or bacterial,” said the second voice. It was a woman. Eloquent and precise, without sounding overly technical. Her cadence conveyed strength and confidence. “It purifies human blood better than any dialysis machine you could buy. And, this is my favorite bit, it heals any wound. It can’t save you if you get decapitated or blown to bits but a bad cut, broken bone, or even a gunshot, it can fix you.”
I began to breathe heavily and I felt hot. Dr. Choi calmly told Grover to call the medics again. My vision tunnelled and my heartbeat was pounding in my head like a bass drum.
“Ana,” I said, and again the world twisted into darkness.
“Mr. Sparks,” I heard Choi say to Grover as I fell from my chair. “Please fetch the paramedic team. I will stay here and begin CPR.”
“CPR? What?!” Grover was confused. “Why?! What’s the matter with him.”
“Because,” the doctor said about as casual as a man excusing himself to use the toilet. “Mr. Plopman is about to die.”