Page 18 of The Life of Chuck

But there was nothing. The room was empty.

It was small, circular, no more than fourteen feet in diameter, maybe less.

On the far side was a single wide window, caked with the dirt of years.

Although the day was sunny, the light it let in was bleary and diffuse.

Standing on the threshold, Chuck put out a foot and toed the boards like a boy testing the water of a pond to see if it was cold.

There was no creak, no give. He stepped in, ready to leap back the moment he felt the floor start to sag, but it was solid.

He walked across to the window, leaving footprints in the thick fall of dust.

Grandpa had been lying about the rotted floor, but about the view he had been dead-on.

It really wasn’t much. Chuck could see the shopping center beyond the greenbelt, and beyond that, an Amtrak train moving toward the city, pulling a stumptail of five passenger cars.

At this time of day, with the morning commuter rush over, there would be few riders.

Chuck stood at the window until the train was gone, then followed his footprints back to the door.

As he turned to close it, he saw a bed in the middle of the circular room.

It was a hospital bed. There was a man in it.

He appeared to be unconscious. There were no machines, but Chuck could hear one just the same, going bip…

bip… bip . A heart monitor, maybe. There was a table beside the bed.

On it were various lotions and a pair of black-framed glasses.

The man’s eyes were closed. One hand lay outside the coverlet, and Chuck observed the crescent-shaped scar on the back of it with no surprise.

In this room, Chuck’s grandpa—his zaydee—had seen his wife lying dead, the loaves of bread she would pull off the shelves when she went down scattered all around her. It’s the waiting, Chucky, he’d said. That’s the hard part.

Now his own waiting would begin. How long would that wait be? How old was the man in the hospital bed?

Chuck started back into the cupola for a closer look, but the vision was gone.

No man, no hospital bed, no table. There was one final faint bip from the unseen monitor, then that was gone, too.

The man did not fade, as ghostly apparitions did in movies; he was just gone, insisting he had never been there in the first place.

He wasn’t, Chuck thought. I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

He closed the door and snapped the lock shut.