Culture . 03/14/2008 12:54 PM . Tim Raveling

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

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

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


Concluded

Damian stepped into the shrink’s office and sat down wearily.

“I’m not happy,” he said. “The walks aren’t helping anymore.”

The shrink looked up at him. “Have you taken any time off?”

“No.”

She started to speak, but he cut her off. “I don’t need free time. I need freedom.”

“Why isn’t the exercise helping anymore?”

“I get exercise in the gym.” Damian shook his head. “The walks helped because when I got to that pier and saw that sunset, I’d earned it.” He paused. “It wasn’t free.”

“I thought you wanted freedom.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He sighed. “This is crazy. I’m angry because everything—my whole life—all of it’s free. It all just happens.”

“You have a job. You work hard, according to my files. You earn your paycheck every Friday, don’t you?”

“Sure. Fine.” Damian picked up a pencil and spun it between his fingers. “That’s not what I mean.”

“You’re angry because your decisions are made for you?”

“No,” he snapped. “That’s not it. What did your parents want you to do when you grew up?”

She regarded the question for a moment—not the answer, but whether to respond. “This,” she said, after a moment. “Psychiatry. My father was a psychiatrist.”

“And my father was a manager,” Damian said. “His life was my path of least resistance, and I never tried to step off of it. It was easy. It was free.”

“Is there something wrong with things being free?”

Damian examined the end of the pencil. “No. I don’t know. Yes.” He shook his head and set it down. “I guess you get what you pay for.”

“So you want to pay for your life.”

“I want to earn my life.”

The psychiatrist sat back, and for a moment her professional façade softened. For the first time he could remember Damian thought that she was beautiful.

“In my professional opinion, Mr. Porter,” she said quietly. “This will pass. It always does. I can give you a prescription to get you through it.” She paused, pursed her lips, then looked directly into his eyes. “In my personal opinion? Get the hell out while you still can.” She jotted the prescription on her clipboard and handed him the sheet. “Have a good day, Mr. Porter.”

Damian stood, looked at her, and crumpled the prescription into a trash can in the corner. “Thank you,” he said. “It helped.”

He left her office at a fast walk. He felt like he was tied down to his life by a thousand tethers, and that they were snapping faster and faster as the force grew in inverse relation to the burden.

His pulse pounded in his temples and his sight felt clearer than ever. Coworkers saw him coming and stepped aside.

His office was the third door on the left. He stepped inside. Stacks of papers, computer. Plenty of work to spend a lifetime accomplishing, with nothing to show for it at the end but an empty desk and a full waste bin. His hiking boots were sitting behind the door, and he picked them up.

The door at the end of the hall was open, and the warm sun of Hawaii greeted him through it. He stopped and looked at it.

Hell with it, he thought, and stepped through. The door behind him blinked shut as he left it, and he felt the last breaths of stale office air dissipate into the tropical breeze. He stopped, inhaled deeply, and squared his shoulders. Down the street fifty yards he took a door to Sidney; from there he walked to Singapore, then Beijing, and then Kathmandu.

It was breaking morning there, a cool and glorious day with a slight breeze and the sun gleaming on snowcapped peaks.

There.

He walked like a man with fever, through the local portal to a smaller city to the north. The mountains leapt towards him, breathtaking in their sheer size, in their dominance of the entire northern and eastern horizon.

His steps were giants’ steps, each steel doorway snapping the mountains tens of kilometers closer, until the crags towered over him, vast and menacing and mysterious and intoxicatingly untouchable. Damian thought: the whole world once felt like this.

There was a single door left, stained by time and use and built inside a two-manteled wooden torii gate.

Damian stepped through it, and the air was sucked from his lungs, then replaced clear and cold and thin. He was in the shadow of the mountains now, in a tiny village with the single door in the center leading back toward civilization.

The end of the line.

He walked north through the village in his suit, with hiking boots in hand. An old man was sitting against a hut wall in the street, an assortment of trinkets spread out on cloths before him. Beside him was an old set of clothing, neatly folded, with a wool coat sitting beside it draped over an old backpack.

The old man smiled a toothless grin. “You like?” he said, fingering the hem of the coat.

Damian nodded. There was no card scanner here, and he had no cash.

He fingered his silver watch, then took it off and handed it to the merchant. The old man cackled, held it up to the light, and waved to Damian. “Yours,” he said, pointing to the stack. “Nice day!”

The clothes were soft and well worn. The pack was light, but partially full – a bedroll, a few tins of food, and a knife were neatly arranged inside. Damian stepped behind an old wall and took off the suit, put on the new clothes, and laced up his hiking boots. He paused for a moment, then left the suit and tie sitting on a stump. There were always more suits.

The pack felt good on his back as he walked back through the village. At the northern edge, a low, simple stone wall crossed the path, and beyond it, the road ascended high into the mountains. In the distance Damian could see the glint of sunlight on a monastery roof.

Damian stood for a long moment and simply took it in. There was a vast expanse of land there, with no way to get to any of it but to walk. No doors led to those villages, those monasteries. Every step, every kilometer, every pass, would be earned with the sweat of his back and the blisters of his feet.

A little girl of indeterminate ethnic origin was sitting on the wall, watching him, no more than six or seven years old.

“What are you doing?” she asked, in English with accent he didn’t recognize.

Damian stepped over the wall and adjusted his pack. The sun was warm on his face, the air was clear, and the mountains were solid and real.

He looked down at the little girl and grinned.

“I think,” he said, “I’m getting away.”

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.


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