Culture . 03/07/2008 12:11 PM . Tim Raveling

Click here to read the first installment of “Getting Away.”

Click here to read the second installment of “Getting Away.”

. . . .


Section 3

Damian was entirely alone on the city street. Downtown Seattle was sunny, for once, and very warm. Light and heat baked off the empty asphalt. Birds sang in the trees undisturbed by automobiles or pedestrians. He blinked.

The pharmacy was six blocks away. Many offices used pharmacies in India or the middle east, but his office linked directly to this one in an attempt to support “local” businesses. It was nothing more than PR; “local” these days was an entirely theoretical concept.

The walk took nearly ten minutes. Damian marveled at its length, at the way the buildings looked in the sun, at the way his feet developed a comfortable warm soreness from the asphalt through his dress shoes. He saw no one else.

When he pushed the door open into the small pharmacy the clerk behind the counter and the several other customers inside looked at him in surprise. Damian smiled awkwardly and handed the clerk his prescription sheet.

On the wall was a postcard showing a range of snow-capped mountains. Could be the Himalayas, for all he knew.

The clerk handed him a plastic capsule full of pills and watched silently as Damian paused, then left through the real door back into the street.

He checked his watch – a fine watch, silver, heavy. It was just after three in the afternoon, local time. He called the shrink. “I think I am going to take the day off,” he said. “Let them know, will you?”

Damian hung up before she could reply and turned off the phone. He looked up at the steel buildings towering above him and the blue sky above that. The streets were immaculately clean. He took off his black leather-soled dress shoes and began to walk.

The city passed with a slowness at once maddening and entrancing. Some part of his mind kept telling him that all he had to do was walk into one of these buildings and through a door and he’d be anywhere in the world instantly. The rest of him ignored it.

He was walking west. He’d been to the wharf before, of course, through one of the many doors that lined the piers. People came from all over the world to fish here, nothing special these days. He’d never found it interesting; there were far more spectacular coastlines to be had if that was what wanted.

Today was different, though he couldn’t precisely say why. He took a wide and meandering course through the city. Now and then he would see a crowd around an outside door, perhaps in a park or in front of one of Seattle’s more interesting buildings. He gave them all a wide berth.

Hours passed, and his feet burned, but he couldn’t bear to put his shoes on. It was a justified pain, somehow, an earned pain, and he savored it even as he winced with each step.

The sun was sinking low on the western horizon when he finally reached the wharf and hobbled, painfully, out onto the pier. There he sat, with his legs dangling over the water, as the seagulls circled and cried overhead and the salt waves lapped the barnacle-encrusted pier supports below him. The sunset was a mild one, shades of pink against the deepening blue, and Damian thought it more beautiful than any he’d ever seen before. He’d just walked – how far had it been? Ten kilometers at least. He had no idea. He’d never walked that far before, never walked anywhere, really, and had no means by which to judge distance.

He’d sat here before, he realized, in this very spot, and been unimpressed. Now the texture of the wood was solid and wonderfully real, and the smell of the air was strong in his nostrils. Alive. That was the word. Earned, he thought; it was different now because it had been earned.

After that, Damian walked more and more. He bought a pair of hiking boots—difficult to come by—and made small excursions wherever he could. He walked the beaches in Hawaii, climbed a mountain in Colorado, and, on one memorable occasion, walked from one town to another in the Scottish highlands on an old rocky path now almost entirely abandoned.

Two weeks after the first walk, he gave the prescription sheet back to the shrink. “I’ve found something better,” he told her, and didn’t come back.

At first, he was satisfied. He savored each new experience and drank his fill of his new life.

Still, no matter how far he walked, there was something missing. After every hike there was a door leading back home, back to his office, a door anywhere in the world he could possibly want to go. Perfect freedom.

The dissatisfaction came back, stronger than ever, only assuaged while he was walking, and even then less and less.

One night in the height of summer, Damian took a series of doors to an open rooftop bar in Kathmandu. There he sat, alone at a table to himself, a glass of whiskey in his hands, and stared at the jagged slopes of the Himalayas raising in the distance. The dusky evening painted them in watercolors, violets and lavenders, distant, entrancing, untouchable.

Damian watched them for a very long time, his mind slowly turning over and over and over in his head.

The following morning he saw the reflection of his apartment behind him in the mirror. It was still grey. He drew his tie up to his throat and straightened it. Looked his reflection in its eyes.

The reflection looked back accusingly. Success, it seemed to say, is that what this is?

Damian absent-mindedly moved his fine heavy watch on his wrist, rotating it with the fingers of his right hand, eyes never flinching from that reflection.

Later that day, he saw the shrink again.

to be concluded…

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.


<