Toby or Not Toby?
By: Dino Quaresma
"If you take a moment to think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that I am not here to kill you."
These were the ominous words that brought me out of my nighttime slumber spoken by the stranger standing across from me in my bedroom apartment. Though it was dark, and I was in the state of disorientation one experiences when pulled from much needed sleep, I could see that he was holding some type of blade in his left hand.
SLING.
The girl was stylish. But the Nissan just was little and happened to be the color of indigo.
Stylish Little, Indigo Nissan Girl. SLING, for short.
Just more evidence, couldn’t be clearer, that it was, in fact, love. Even when abruptly faced by an unknown assailant wielding a blade, my mind still drifted first to her.
And while it could have easily lingered with her, I knew it shouldn't stay there because--well, because there was a potential maniac standing in my room in the middle of the night. According to this man, however, if I took a moment to think about it, I'd come to the conclusion that he was not there to kill me.
Well, that was comforting.
But how would I come to this conclusion?
He hadn't murdered me in my sleep. He could have easily done so. That was something.
He had purposefully awoken me. If I had awakened without his wanting me to, and I'd discovered him there, perhaps then my life would more likely have been in peril. He was telling me he wasn't there to kill me. Maybe, I thought, I should just assume this was the case. Maybe assuming so would allow me to escape my situation unscathed. The next thing he shared with me gave me less confidence.
"I have," he started slowly, "ma-a-a-a-a-a-gical powers."
This was not good. And then he scoffed.
“Can you believe she just said that to us?” he asked. “And like that? Like that? So unnecessary and cruel.”
“It’s just me and you in here,” I said uncomfortably.
The fingers in his right hand, the hand without the blade, were trembling far less than subtly. Perhaps because it limited the aggressiveness of the twitching, he began using those same fingers to play the invisible piano before him. Soothed, he swayed to the music he imagined himself playing.
“If I scream right now,” I told him, “people would know that something was wrong, and--what do you think would happen if I screamed right now?”
“You’ll be stabbed. And not even in the in the back. Right in your face, and your heart will bleed,” he said.
“So, okay. No screaming, then.” I thought it best not to point out just then that my heart was actually in my chest and not in my face.
“You are all alone,” he said. “Not married. Not attached. Not with anyone. All alone.”
It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Had he somehow known that I was an unmarried man?
How could he have?
Sure, my tiny bedroom apartment seemed to lack a woman’s touch; it was definitely too small to support more than a single body; a married couple would more than likely have a high enough combined income to move into a larger residence; and, sure, my bed was not large enough to hold a wife, but he didn’t strike me as the deductive type. When he’d said I was not married, I suspected this had been something he’d already known about me before--breaking in?
Had he broken in? How had he gotten in, anyway?
“Did I forget to lock my door?” I asked. Maybe I was hoping he’d merely come in to teach me a lesson: When you leave your door unlocked, you welcome potentially dangerous people. Now that I’ve made my point I’ll be on my way.
But my question seemed to stump him, and his gaze shifted from me to his feet while he searched for an answer.
“I am very good about locking my door,” he said, “I’ve always been.” I had just barely begun my follow-up question when he interrupted me. “I journed long and hard to get here. Getting here--was quite difficult, but I journeyed through time, not space, from this very spot to this very spot. So you see, it wouldn’t have mattered how locked you’d doored yourself in. I’m still shaking from it, see?” He held up his right hand, which continued trembling noticeably. “I think it will stop soon,” he said.
So the man was a time traveler. How had he been able to travel through time? No doubt he had relied on his magical powers.
The flash of lightning that filled the room was immediately followed by the rumbling sound of thunder. My intruder turned from it frantically and prevented me from getting a good look at him. I hadn’t even been aware of the current incandescent weather until then. I was suddenly reminded of when SLING had unintentionally used her high beams one morning so long ago. I had to change my note to her at the last minute to let her know about it.
The man began to cower and make some faintly audible whimpering noises, which made me uncomfortable.
“So you’re a southpaw, then?” I asked him, feeling that it would be rude, somehow, not to break the silence.
“Sorry,” he said between his odd sobs. “I’m still feeling the effects of the journey. It’s getting worse, but I think it’ll get better soon. A southpaw?”
“You’re left-handed,” I clarified.
“My grandmother tried to fix me. Said I was supposed to write with my other hand, but I could never do it.”
“Mine did the same thing,” I said. “Grandmothers are like that, I guess. If something is different, they feel inclined to correct it. I’m a southpaw, too.”
“A Southpaw?”
“Left-handed,” I clarified a second time.
“Well,” he said, “maybe grandma was right. Maybe we should have listened. Just because it was hard doesn’t mean it was worth giving up.”
Though I didn’t quite agree with him, I decided to let the discussion end there. He hadn't finished cowering, after all, and I was pretty sure he was crying. There was no sense in arguing with the man on such a trivial thing.
“Anyway,” he said, “I was going to tell a joke but you kept interrupting me. I’m not anyone’s father, and I’m not from Texas.” I stared at him. “Never mind. It’s not funny, and you don’t get it. But you know, then?" he asked. "You understand?"
"No, I--that joke didn’t make any sense to me.” I shuddered, too late realizing that he was most likely about to tell me that only one of us would be leaving my bedroom apartment alive that day.
“Not the joke. You knew I was left-handed,” he said. “So you know who I am, yes?”
“No,” I said, “I knew you were left handed because you are holding a knife in your left hand. Am I supposed to know you?” I added this last question quickly after I’d noted the fact that I’d just called attention to the knife. Never call attention to the knife.
That’s Survival 101. And I’d just gotten a D on the midterm.
“It’s not a knife,” he said no longer cowering and turning once again in my direction. “It’s a scalpel. I think I feel better now. I think it passed. That wasn’t so bad, was it? But, yes; it’s a scalpel, not a knife."
“Am I supposed to know you from somewhere? Let’s talk about that.”
“Scalpels are tools for repair. Instruments of correction. Knives are just for cutting. For chopping. For stabbing. But this,” he said holding the blade up as if to catch and reflect off a few rays of the imaginary sunlight coming from overhead, “this is for improvement.”
“Yes, but why fix what isn’t broken?” I asked. “I’m fine the way I am, you know?”
“I know you think you are. I told you that if you thought about it, you would realize that I wasn’t here to kill you. No. That wasn’t my reason for coming. Not technically. I came here to kill myself. I came here to save myself from myself. I came here to stop myself before I went on to become the mess that stands before you know. I came here to fix things. To correct and improve them. So I brought a scalpel.”
I suppressed a giant sigh of relief, and I was probably smiling quite inappropriately after this last admission from the man. He was not here to hurt me but to hurt himself. Why he felt it best to hurt himself in my presence, I did not know, but I did not need to know.
And while I was grateful that my life was not in any danger, I couldn't ignore my moral responsibility to this poor depressed and desperate person. I didn't need to save myself. I needed to save this man, and most challenging of all, I needed to do so from himself. With this sense of obligation came two conflicting emotions: pride and shame.
The pride came because I was suddenly a beaming example of wisdom, there to guide one so misguided. I could explain life and all its worth to this man, who was clearly less stable than I. Then shame came about, I guess, because I'd felt this man's depression was reason enough for me to feel good. Like I said: conflicting.
"I should make this quick," the man said still looking at the scalpel, "but I can't bring myself to be such. I suppose we always prolong what we should never prolong. It's our nature. In fact we build things up so that they hurt the absolute most they possibly can. We wait for the water to boil before we stick our finger in. It’s natural, isn’t it?"
"Yes, but aren't you ignoring nature by resorting to the scalpel?" I asked him in my pseudo-therapist voice. "There's so much to live for."
"Then enlighten me," the man said lowering the blade. "You come here to your tiny apartment every night. Always alone. You are alone in every way. You go to work. You package things into boxes for a living. You secure them, make sure they won't break during delivery, tape them up, and scarcely talk to another living soul during your eight hour shift. You go to school. You chat with so few of your peers, though you've had classes with so many of them more than once." I looked at the dark shadows covering his face and felt a sharp pang in my gut.
No he hadn’t stabbed me, but he might as well have. He'd been following me? For how long, I did not know, but it was clear to me that he'd been doing so for a while, and he'd chosen me, for whatever reason, to be the last person he'd spend time with before resorting to the work of his scalpel. The pride and shame were gone. Something else I did not understand had taken their place, or perhaps they'd worked together to become some new emotion: the new undefined emotion that I'd assumed.
“Who are you?” I dared ask. “Why are you interested in my life?”
“You know who I am,” he said. “And you know why.”
“I really don’t,” I said flustered. “Just tell me your name.”
He offered me a long extended moment of silence before he started me with a shout of frustration. “Toby!” he screamed, and his message was clear: He knew my name, and he was angry with me for not placing him or knowing his.
"But tell me," he said suddenly calm as if he hadn’t just delivered that sudden outburst. "Why suffer the slings and arrows?"
SLING. Did he know about her, too?
His choice of words couldn't have been a coincidence. And then I surprised myself by telling him the whole story.
“The first time I saw her I was parked at a red light,” I said. “I was on my way to work. I think it was just my second or third day. No it was my second. I remember because it was the first time I wore my ID badge, which they gave to me at the end of my first day. It has--you know--my face on it, and my--my name it big bold letters. ‘TOBY’. They accidentally left my last name out. They told me they were going to correct that, but I still have that same badge with just my first name. They never gave me a new one, but I never really ever asked for one, so…
“But I was waiting there at a red light on my way to work. It was just my car there--my beat up Volkswagen, and then a second car pulled up at the red light next to mine. I don’t really know why I looked at it. There’s always a bunch of cars on the road with me going to whatever destination, and I never bother to pay much attention to any of them unless they have some thought provoking bumper sticker or abnormally large dents or missing bumper that must have been the result of some nearly fatal collision. And I’ll look if their radios are blasting way too loudly or if there are people inside with their windows rolled down screaming in celebration or anger or whatever. Or I’ll look at them if the cars have one door painted a different color than the rest of the car or something or if the car is a relic from a far gone decade.
“But there was nothing immediately eye-catching about this car that pulled up slowly next to my car at that red light. It was a Nissan. It was little and the color of indigo. No big deal, but when I looked at the driver, that was when I saw her.
“There was this girl. Young. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, maybe just a year or two younger than myself, and she was--you know the phrase, ‘girl next door’? Well, I think that phrase was invented for girls like this one. Girls that are just--just perfectly lovely. In every way, just perfectly lovely, but there’s an ignorance behind it. I mean, they are this ideal beauty, but they don’t even--it’s like no one ever pointed it out to them. They don’t walk around like, ‘Look at me! I’m gorgeous!’ They just walk around with the same level of insecurities and anxieties about their appearance as the rest of us, only theirs are completely and grossly unjustified.
“She was sitting there in her car staring straight ahead, mouth opened just slightly with this look on her face like she was worried about something. She was wearing this very shiny purple blouse thing and had a matching bow on the side of her hair. There wasn’t a shred of makeup that I could detect anywhere on her features. She didn’t need it. She had this young, soft, should-be-left-alone skin that required nothing. And I thought she looked very stylish.
“I instantly gave her a title, I think. She was the Stylish Little, Indigo Nissan Girl. SLING, for short. Anyway, the light turned green, and her car sped up in front of mine, and eventually turned a different corner--she made a right on Market--and I thought that was the end of it. I think I forgot about her, and probably would never have given her a second thought if the same thing hadn’t happened again the next day.
“Same red light. Same situation with just the two of us there. Same look of worry and obliviousness to her own beauty painted over her face. Same level of style, too, only with a different outfit.
“Even then, I couldn’t have predicted it. It just felt like a little coincidence, but every day driving to work since then, I was that Stylish Little, Indigo Nissan Girl. Almost always at that same red light, sometimes just before, occasionally I’d only catch a glimpse of her vehicle before she’d turn right on Market. But every day, there she was: going on with her morning routine, going wherever she needed to go. And looking perfectly lovely in her natural way.
“Eventually--definately not right away. I know it took a while, and it’s definitely not right away--but eventually, a word comes to mind when something like this keeps happening: destiny.
“And seeing Sling became the highlight of my day. It became the thing I looked forward to the second I’d lose sight of her. I’d be at work, packing and shipping box after box without a care in the world. Did I talk much? No. No, you are right when you say I don’t talk to a lot of people. And when I go to school afterwards, am I all that social? No, I can’t say that I am, but my mind’s on SLING, and she isn’t at work or school. My mind’s on SLING.
“SLING.
“Of course it’s not her real name. I’m more than just slightly aware that.
“And of course I want to know her real name. SLING is just a substitute. Though I obsess over each letter’s sound created within this false name, and have dreamily called out that name as I think of her, once I learn her real name, I’ll cast off that false name like it never even mattered and fall into a trance at the sound of her true title.
“But it created the question, you see? How would I ever learn her true name?
“Sure, I could continue meeting with her on the way to work like we’d been doing, and I could probably delude myself into believing that she and I were a couple carpooling every morning, but that wouldn’t make it true. So I had to come up with some kind of a plan.
“And I came up with one. I went and bought a white board. A small one that I could carry around with me and an indigo white board marker to match her car. I placed them down on the passenger seat of my car, and then went to work.
“The plan didn’t pan out during first three days.
“On the first two, I only saw her car and was never even alongside her. On the third day, we stopped at the red light together, but she kept that slightly worried look facing forward, and while I tried to get her attention by waving at her, she never thought to look.
“I had to go through a weekend before I got my next chance. It’s funny how hateful a weekend can be when it means no contact with my SLING. I spent the two days staring at the clock, and trying to imagine how she’d react when my plan finally worked.
“When Monday morning came, we stopped at the red light again, and like so many other times, our cars were there alone. I think I tried to wave at her for a little while, but when it seemed like she would never look, I grew more bold. I tapped on my horn. Yes, I tapped on my horn. I couldn’t believe I did it!
“And she immediately looked that way and this way, wanting to know who was beeping, and then she saw me looking at her. I kind of smiled, and she kind of frowned, and then I held up my white board with my indigo message written on it.
“‘Good morning! I hope you have a good day.’
“Such a simple and innocent message. I thought it best to start this way, and it paid off because she laughed a kind of girly little laugh, which I’d never been able to see her do until that moment, and then ended her laugh with a kind of--I’m going to call it, ‘appreciative’--little smile. And then she said the words to me, which I was able to make out even though my window was shut and so was hers: ‘And the same to you. Thank you.’
“And then the light turned green and we drove off. I went straight and she made her right at Market.
“Oh, I know I over romanticized the whole thing, but I couldn’t help it. It had gone so well! I’d made contact. I obsessed with wondering what her mindset had been. Did she think that I’d been driving down showing the sign to everyone I saw trying to spread good will through random acts of kindness? I’d heard of people out there who did things like that. People who went out and made other people’s days through small but meaningful gestures. If she thought this had been the case, then she would have thought favorably of me. Or could she have realized that the sign had only been meant for her? What if she’d also noticed that we saw each other every morning. Maybe she’d noticed but had never thought anything of it, but because I’d made contact with her, this would change?
“I thought about it all day. I mean, how could I think about anything else?
“All I knew for sure was that I’d have to have another message for her the next time.
“And I had fun coming up with it. In fact, I’m not sure how many messages I’ve written to her since then. ‘Wanna race?’ ‘I’m also really cute on the inside.’ ‘Hey, keep your eyes on the road!’ There were a lot like that. Fun, silly, and kind of flirty messages. And she would almost always laugh, and other times she would make this face like she wanted to laugh and then nod at me or shake her head and I’d see her mouth the words, ‘okay,’ as she’d shyly look away.
“And know I’m not crazy when I say this: I spend morning after morning heading for work and looking for her, but after the messages got started, she had started looking for me, too. I know she had. I was not a challenge to get her attention anymore. She’d look over at me like it was routine, and give me this look as if to say, ‘Okay, what message do you have for me, this time?’
“So I started using the notes to tell her about myself. ‘My name is Toby,’ was one of the first. And I told her where I went to school, and that I was born and raised here. She would read this messages and nod pensively. I think these new messages brought about a turn in the weird unconventional relationship we were forming. She didn’t smile as much when reading these messages, but they weren’t silly, anymore. They were personal, and I was trying to tell her that I felt a connection between the two of us and that there were kind motives behind the silly notes I’d been writing to her.
“My thought was that maybe my notes would scare her a little, but in a good way. Maybe she would recognize that I was a good person--like she was. That maybe the two of us--could be really good for--each other.
“And then I allowed myself to be vulnerable, which I was--incredibly so--and needed to be. I wrote, ‘I look forward to seeing you every morning.’
“Her reaction was quiet and hard to read. She kind of just bit her lip and nodded like she had been expecting something like this. Then she kind of stared straight ahead at the road. Gave me one last look as the light turned green, and then sped off before making her right on Market.
“That was yesterday.”
I let out a big sigh of relief. I had never spoken about SLING to anyone before, and here I was pouring my heart out to a man who spoke about stabbing faces and making hearts bleed.
“It wasn’t yesterday,” said the man. “Not for me. For me it was five years ago.”
A second flash of lightning filled the room. This time the man did not flinch and for a moment I clearly saw the face of the man I was dealing with, and it was not unfamiliar to me, for it greatly resembled my own.
It was a bit worn and showed signs of red blotching that I had never suffered from and the hair was longer and the stray hairs on his face had been left to run wild and untamed for what looked like a couple weeks, but the face would not have been more mine.
“Why do…?”
“Why do what?” he asked. “Why do I look like you? Idiot! I am you! I came here from your future to end the suffering of my present. I came here to make sure that I never feel what you are about to feel. You, as you lay in bed there, represent me at my happiest. The unscarred version of myself. You are me on top of the world right before it all came crashing down. And it did crash. Not once, but many times after. And always unexpected. History should be a great predictor, but people are stupid and can’t recognize predictions even when they’ve stomped on your gut like a leather boot putting out a fire. So just think about it. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to save you. If you were to die now, you would die happily. I, on the other hand, can never hope to achieve such a thing. You are lucky. You’ve no idea how lucky.”
So he came running at me with the scalpel but tripped and fell over my sneakers, and I threw my clock radio at him, but it was still plugged in and the cord kept it from flying at my attacker the way I’d envisioned it. I pulled the bed covers over me so that he’d have to go through the fabric in order to hurt me, and realizing the lack of a challenge this would present, I threw them off and stood on my bed, half prepared for a fight on my mattress.
But the man, the future me, if that’s really what he was, hadn’t gotten up. He remained unmoving and face down on the cheaply carpeted floor.
“Did you stab yourself with the knife or something?” I asked.
“No,” he said still motionless. “But I’m going to wait until I try again.”
“How about you don’t try again,” I suggested.
“Maybe I just don’t try?” he asked. “And remain a southpaw because of my lack of determination?”
“Grandma was wrong about that,” I said balancing myself on my flimsy springy mattress. “You can’t not be left-handed. It’s who you are.”
“SLING rejects you,” he said. “I won’t tell you her real name. You’d be disappointed by it, though, trust me. You’ll wish SLING had been her real name because her real name never seemed to fit. Maybe I should have recognized my disapproval of her name as a sign that it was wrong, but I never did that.” He sighed and sat up and twirled the scalpel between his fingers. “You want to know how it happens? The rejection, I mean?” When I said nothing, he continued. “You get her to roll down her window, right? You know with your wonderful little white board thing. And she does. She rolls down her window looking oh so sweet and innocent and interested while she does it. And you look at her, and you’re nervous, and you say to her, ‘I was wondering if you would like to go get a coffee with me some time.’ You know what she says? She allows this long pause, just to--I don’t know--just to make you more nervous than you already are. And then, without even an ounce of difficulty or while maintaining a very misleading level of stable eye contact, she says, ‘No. Not even a little bit.’ I thought she was teasing. It didn’t make any sense to me. After all that time, it had to be a joke, but she just kept the eye contact going like she was making sure I got the message, so I--I looked down, but I had to know--I--I had to know how… I looked back up at her, and I was nervous, but I asked her, ‘How could you just say it like that,’ and I guess I stuttered a bit when I asked her because I was hurt, and I was nervous, so she thought it would be fine to insult me further. Without blinking an eye, she smiled and said, ‘I have ma-a-a-a-a-a-gical powers.’ Then the light turned green, and she sped off. I was still sitting there at that green light when I saw her make her right on Market.”
“Maybe she was kidding,” I said. “Maybe it was a joke. Maybe she was teasing and playing hard to get.”
“If you were there,” he said, “you wouldn’t suspect such a thing. Anyway, I never dared take that route after that. I took the long way to get to work from then on. I couldn’t face the daily reminder.”
“Well, I don’t believe you,” I said. “Just because you look like me, you--You might not even be me, I mean… What’s more plausible? Me coming from the future or a guy who looks like me telling me that he’s me from the future? The latter, that’s what!”
“I am you,” he said.
“Well, you know what? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, but it changes nothing. I told you that I needed to be and was vulnerable when writing those notes to SLING. Well, that vulnerability is necessary because without it, my courage would have been meaningless. Risks are necessary ingredients for success. Yes, I am taking an emotional risk by investing my time in her, but it’s worth the risk, even if it turns out you really are me from the future.”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s not worth it, and you never learn your lesson. SLING is just the first. Others follow, and the scars they leave run even deeper. They all stab you right in the face. They all make your heart bleed. Well, I’m completely drained. Cupid’s really good about firing those arrows, but he never takes the blood into account, and I can’t bleed anymore.”
I walked off the bed and sat next to him no longer eyeing this blade in his left hand.
“Oh, come on, sure you can. You’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know a thing,” he said. “You can take my word for it. You are naive and about to be suckerpunched.”
“Well, maybe I haven’t had as many experiences as you,” I admitted. “You are older, and this would be true regardless of whether or not you really are the future broken-hearted version of me.”
“I am the future broken-hearted version of you.”
“Just listen,” I demanded. “You are older and more experienced, yes, but that doesn’t mean my perspective is wrong. I mean, my perspective isn’t even permanent. Right? You would say I would eventually come to see things your way.”
“You will,” he insisted.
“Well, fine. Let’s assume that’s true.”
“It is true,” he insisted once again.
“If it’s true that my perspective can change, then it’s also true that yours can, as well. You just have to--to keep up your willingness to accept the risk that you will bleed because--because you are a good person, and sooner or later, you’ll put out that risk, and there will be no bleeding. Not even a droplet. And when that happens, I challenge you to come back here and tell me that it wasn’t worth it in the end.”
He sighed heavily and scratched his nose.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he said finally. “I guess I always knew I wouldn’t do it. I suppose we’re quitters, you and I, but only for the right things. Yeah, when I was you and the future version of myself visited me, he didn’t go through with it, either.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess how that’s how you were able to come here.”
“No,” he said, “I was able to come here by tearing a hole in the fabric of time and reopening it five years ago.”
“And how were you able to do that?” I asked.
“I used my scalpel,” he said.
“You used your…?”
“No, that was a joke,” he said getting up. “Anyway, you’ll figure it out.”
I hesitated for a moment but spoke.
“Wait,” I said. “Could you go back to your own time outside so that I don’t see you go? I guess I’d rather not know for sure if you really are me for the future.”
“I am.”
“Okay, but I’d rather there be some doubt, at least in my own mind. Could you go outside before you go back.”
“Fine,” he said with some traces of annoyance, “but I don’t know how I’m going to get back into my room afterwards. You know how good we are about locking the door.”
He went out the door just as another flicker of lightning lit up the room. I fastened the bolt in place behind him and immediately went back to sleep.
