Sarah Turbin

Honor Code

Sarah Turbin

Honor Code

My childhood bully was the only person I ever told. I usually sat in the front because my last name is at the beginning of the alphabet—Andrew Abrahms—and Scott Barbier would always be behind me. He kicked the back of my chair and pushed me around in the halls. My mother would have told me it was because I was small for thirteen, but I knew it was because I didn’t have many friends, and Scott was a coward. If someone had stuck up for me, he would have backed off. 

One day I grabbed his wrist to finally tell him off, and a brilliant vision came to me of Scott dropping from a great height. Propellers. Air whipping past. Gunmetal ocean underneath.

I told him very calmly that he’d die in a helicopter accident and I’d be glad for it, whenever it was, and that I hoped it was sooner rather than later. Then I dropped his hand away from me as if I’d been scorched.

Scott left me alone after that. Years later, when we were about to graduate, I caught his eye and he looked away. He died a few years later. He had gone into the army after all, even though he must have remem­bered what I said. I thought about how he looked away when he met my gaze, and I understood. In my face was an omen.

Ever since, I’ve resolved to never do that again.

Two decades after Scott Barbier’s death, I meet Sacha. The first time I see Sacha, he is at my egg stand on the side of the road. My town is quaint and moneyed, with only locals or the errant vacationer passing by my house in the summer. Now it is winter, so I’m surprised to see a new face, although it is obscured by a long wooly scarf. I see dark brows and deep-set hazel eyes. They crinkle with a smile.

“You can take as many as you’d like,” I offer, setting the crate down and unloading the eggs I fetched this morning. “It’s an honor system,” I say, pointing to the cash box I have bolted to a metal pole next to the stand. “Are you local?” I ask, surprising myself. I wasn’t usually one to make small talk, but the curve of his spine, the way he stood at a slant in order to face me better, made me trust him.

“I just moved here,” he sticks out his hand. He has a little bit of an accent. Something eastern European. “I’m Sacha.”

“Andrew,” I say, and I hesitate for half a second but then I move forward to shake his hand, even though we’re both wearing gloves. It’s a habit. I stick my hand back into my pocket, still feeling the squeeze of his fingers around mine.

“Nobody ever steals the eggs?”

“Never,” I say. Surely there were times when the money in the cash box didn’t align with how many eggs were missing from my stand, but I never counted carefully or cared.

“Until now, maybe. I don’t have cash,” he smiles. His scarf had come loose, and now I could see his chin and mouth. It was a nice smile, friendly and easy. A spray of freckles on his cheeks, faint compared to the contrast­ing color of his heavy brows and dark eyelashes.

“I won’t tell,” I say, picking up my crate and heading back up the long driveway.

A few hours later, I realize that I had forgotten to check if I had made any money. When I manage to get outside in the evening, the eggs are all gone. I unlock the cash box, and there is a piece of paper inside with Sacha’s phone number on it.

When I was younger I was always trying to see if there were limits to my power, so I would go out of my way to be in close contact with people. I guess you could call this my rebellious phase. Nothing creepy, because it’s not like it was very pleasant for me, but it turns out there are a lot of acceptable ways to touch people.

As an adolescent, I carefully chose my summer job. I worked at a grocery store all through the last two years of high school. Maybe—no, most certainly—this is where my fear of cardiac issues came from. I saw this almost every day I handed off bags to a customer: the constriction of arterial flow, the irregular thudding of muscle.

I should clarify something. This is guesswork. I see the locus of pain if there is one, the moment it happens, some other surrounding imagery, and nothing more. As a young child, the images weren’t even always fright­ening, just sudden and unfamiliar. Although they were sometimes scary, too. The crumpling of a form, a flash. Later, I realized this was probably a death by gunshot. Sometimes there is just darkness, and I know that this is different from nothingness. It is the darkness of dying in one’s sleep, heavy-lidded and easy. These scenes are more like a few torn out pages of a flip book than anything sequential like a movie reel.

Self-checkout lines: A godsend. Concerts: A mosh pit is a hellmouth, sticky limbs, every movement a flash of doom. A party: Too risky. It was always the same excuse: I’m coming down with something, wouldn’t want you to catch it, too.

I work remotely in IT as a contractor. For a while the city was reliable, deliveries everywhere, take-out left at the front desk, but my doorman Randy liked to bump fists with the tenants. Every time I allowed this, I’d see Randy dying of a heart attack, so I moved to the countryside. I got a dog. Then a cat, and another cat. A few chickens. Named them after famous dead men. When I touch their downy coats, I cannot see their deaths. A relief. Maybe it doesn’t translate for other species. Maybe animals are too simple for their futures to cross over the membrane that must exist between us. Could a bug interpret the shatter of metal against bone when I know it means that someone is going to die in a car crash? Or the opposite could be true. Maybe I’m not enlightened enough to understand dogs, or elephants, or Bolivian anacondas. It is like seeing runes, an ancient language. There is no hope of learning how to understand.

For a while, I thought I could stomach it. Maybe each time I touched someone I could try to jumble my thoughts with other nightmare sce­narios and drown the premonition out. I did this for years, bare knees bumping against mine under the dinner table. My college girlfriend was going to die in a bike collision. Though she never biked. So, all I could do was look four times before we crossed any road. Then I’d think of other morbid scenes—third degree burns, choking on a piece of a sandwich, tumors mottling organs, sepsis from a rusty door hinge. That girlfriend dumped me. I was too absentminded, always somewhere else. It goes without saying that all sex was bad, and I had tried with men and women, old and young. It made no difference.

I never went into the city anymore. Maybe once a year. The first time I ventured back after moving away was a shock. Mirrored surfaces ev­erywhere, the chrome and glass capturing me each time I walked past. I didn’t like to look at myself, and now it felt like my reflection was chasing me. At the doctor’s office, I even averted my gaze when the doctor pulled out his stethoscope with gloved hands, the bulbous silver knob at the end distorting my face as he placed the earpieces in his ears. He was the only doctor I liked, a man who never questioned me when I asked for extra attention on my heart or liver or another organ, the bloodwork always coming back fine even though I made him run every test. I wouldn’t say that I’m a hypochondriac, but something else more unique and deranged due to my condition.

Of course, I can’t see my own death. That would be too easy. I think the universe would fold in on itself. That would be bad, but sometimes I wish for this anyways.

I am not sleeping well. I threw out Sacha’s number without adding it to my contacts. One morning I shuffle into the kitchen and make coffee, opening the fridge and splashing milk into my mug. I take in a big mouthful and jolt. The milk has gone bad. I spit into the sink and rinse until my mouth doesn’t taste rancid anymore.

The dog’s white face looks up at me curiously, his darkened paws crossed primly in front of him. He’s smart enough to know this isn’t part of my routine. The cats don’t care, already weaving between my ankles, meowing for breakfast.

I feel restless and alert now. I drive the dog with me into town to get a coffee from a drive-through. The roads are quiet and empty. The teenager working the window doesn’t even look up when she hands me my drink.

When I begin to make my way out of the parking lot, the dog whines, pawing at the back of my seat.

“Really?” I say to him.

We walk over to a curb so he can go to the bathroom. He sniffs around. I sigh.

“Don’t make me wait all day, Pete.”

Right then is when a blue car slides up next to me. Sacha gets out and smiles. “Andrew?” he inquires brightly.

I instinctively take a step back. He flicks his eyes down at my feet. I feel bad. His posture straightens and I try to remedy this by smiling a little. My dog pulls forward.

“Ah! Who is this?” he bends down to pet him.

I hesitate, feeling self-conscious. “You’ll laugh.”

He smiles, looking mischievous. “What?”

“It’s Tchaikovsky,” I say, and my dog perks up just at the mention of his full name, ears flicking and his tail making a sweep across the ground. His black nose swivels between us. “But I call him Pete sometimes. He has a lot of nicknames. Pyotr, T, a few others I’m forgetting.” I wonder if Sacha will bring up the fact that I haven’t texted.

“You’re a big fan?”

“I just liked the name,” I admit. “Where are you from?”

“Russia,” he says. “But I came here as a child.”

“Do you go back?”

“Not much,” he says. “But the snow here reminds me of it,” he snaps his fingers suddenly, looking like he remembers something. “You know, you’re right. Nobody steals.”

I blank. “What?”

“Eggs! I can see the egg stand from my room,” he says. So, we really are neighbors. I realize he must live up on the hill that faces my house. It is half a mile away. Around here, at least, that’s what counts as neighbors. “People come and I see them leave money,” he adds. “Did you get my note?”

I pretend to be confused. “What?”

“Ah. It probably blew away,” he says. He takes out his phone and taps around, then hands it to me. “For your number. Maybe I can come by tomorrow for eggs?”

“Oh,” I say, surprised, but save my number anyway.

I can see his open expression fade into embarrassment. “Or, I can help myself.”

“I’ll let you know,” I say. “I should get going.”

He pauses, then reaches out his hand for a shake. “I’ll be seeing you,” he says. It feels too formal. I pretend not to see his hand and instead give a quick wave. I turn and pull the leash so Tchaikovsky follows.

There is a snowstorm a few days later. I don’t go outside except to check on the chickens in their winterized coop. I keep the dog on a long rope and let him run outside until he gets tired. The temperature drops below zero at night, and the cats burrow themselves underneath my com­forter when I’m in bed, hungrily siphoning off my body heat.

I can’t sleep again, and it’s late, so late that in an hour it’ll be light out. Sacha hasn’t contacted me at all. I look at my phone, but nothing has appeared on it in the few minutes that have passed since I last looked.

Stupid to think otherwise. I turn over and I must fall asleep because when I open my eyes there’s light coming through the window and I have unread messages. It’s a photo of two eggs cooking on a skillet, over easy.

Hope you made it ok in the storm. Some good eggs by the way.

I type out something and delete it. Instead, I just thumbs-up his message.

I come down with a cold, and it’s so bad I wonder if it’s some mutated flu variant. I lose days to a bad fever, shivering on my couch, trying to distract myself with daytime TV and nodding in and out of sleep. I wonder, in my delirium, if choosing to be away from people most of the time means that I’ve lost the kind of general immunity that keeps most of the population from dying of basic viruses, like the uncontacted tribes who live on islands and have no interest in joining the modern world. I think about if I had just been born at a different time, but I’m not sure that would solve any of my problems either. I’d probably just be burned at the stake.

One evening, after a few hours of sleeping while the cats walked all over my prone body, I perch on the edge of the couch and attempt to mentally prepare myself to walk the few steps to the kitchen to feed the animals. It’s then that I hear a knock at the door.

I shuffle over. The knock comes again, this time louder. “I’m coming,” I rasp.

I open the door and see Sacha, whose friendly smile falls from his face when he takes in my sorry state. “Are you alright?”

I cough a few times into my elbow, the sound ringing in my ears. “Sorry. I’ve got a cold. Can I help you?”

“I noticed you haven’t been leaving the eggs out.”

My brain takes a moment to catch up to what he’s saying. “Oh,” I say. “That’s nice.”

“Do you need help?” he asks.

“Oh, please,” I wave my hand. “I don’t want you to catch whatever this is.”

“I never get sick. Do you have food?”

“I have food,” I say firmly. This is true, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve been eating any of it. I haven’t been able to stomach anything substantial.

“Wait,” he holds his hand up. “Let me run home and grab something for you to eat.”

Even though my senses are dulled, I still take a step back at the sight of the pale flesh of his palm. He notices and drops his hand.

For a second, he looks at a point beyond my shoulder instead of at me, and I’m reminded of Scott Barbier’s expression the last time I saw him. The guilt of this comes down clammy and swift, like falling into a dunk tank of freezing water. I mutter my goodbye and shut the door.

When the snow melts, I retreat farther into my house even though the newly arrived spring is already so temperate, so lovely, that I can tell the town is filling up with early vacationers, people who can smell good weather like bloodhounds. I see their cars passing by on the road in front of my house, and the eggs I leave out are picked up faster and faster. I walk back up the long hill of my driveway after checking on the egg stand one evening. Only one egg is left. I wonder if Sacha’s taken any of them. I haven’t seen or heard from him in almost a month, though, I always look twice when I think I see his car.

In the house, I wash my hands in the sink. The soft blue blanketing light of sundown stretches out before me. The grass once covered by winter snow is starting to resurface, and I can see the crocuses scattered in the field blooming.

But where is the dog?

“Pete?” I call out. I scan the area and still don’t see him. “Pete?” I call, this time louder. I run outside and see now that the leash has snapped in the middle, the once sturdy cable frayed like the end of a stick of dynamite in a cartoon. “Tchaikovsky!” I yell, as loud as I can. The area beyond the hills that surround my house gives away no movement.

I shove my feet into my rain boots, even though the sky is clear, because they are the easiest shoes to pull on. I run back down the driveway and look both ways down the road, worrying the dog might be out here, might get run over by a car on the road that had been so quiet up until a few weeks ago. I run up and down the road, dodging a few cars who honk at me. I yell for the dog until I’m hoarse.

As I approach the egg stand after no luck, I see Sacha in his car. He jumps out, and I feel slightly relieved. “Andrew! What’s wrong? I saw you outside,” he gestures in the direction of his house.

I must look crazed. I’m not wearing a jacket, and the weather has dropped at least ten degrees since it was light out. Of course, today of all days is one of the colder nights. I’m clutching a container of kibble in an effort to lure Tchaikovsky by the sound of the food jostling. “My dog ran off,” I say, my voice cracking on the last syllable. “I’m worried he’s going to get run over.”

“Here,” he takes off his hat and puts it on my head. I feel his bare hands brush over my ears, and I have no time to brace myself. The moment we touch, the images arrive as they always do. But it’s strange. I see my own face, as if in a mirror. Although, it’s not exactly a mirror, either. It’s like looking at myself on the surface of moving water, like standing on the edge of a riverbank. My features are there but I’m not sure if anyone else would have recognized me. Maybe only I do because I know my own face.

Warmth envelops the feeling. This has never happened before. It’s not harsh or painful. There are no flashes of agony or multiplying viruses or car crashes or cardiovascular events. It’s quiet.

He pulls away his hand, and I’m thrown back into the cold wind, the tree branches crosshatching all around us, the crunch of gravel and earth under my boots. He runs over to his trunk and fishes around. He produces a big flashlight. Sacha sprints ahead of me, calling out for the dog and lighting the wooded path ahead.

Behind my house is a field and a precipitous hill at the edge of the property. I peer over it when we reach it, but there is nothing. Sometimes there is a rustle in the tall grass, but it’s usually just a stray squirrel. I’ve nearly lost my voice, and Sacha has already switched over to whistling, the sound high and bright. The moon is over us in the sky now. The rainboots are hurting my feet. They’re not meant for long stretches of walking like this.

“Let’s take a break,” he says. He sees the hesitation in my face. “You can change, at least.”

“Alright,” I say at last, and we walk back to my house in total silence. When we get inside, I kick off my shoes and turn up the thermostat. “I’ll make tea,” I add, shaking out my fingers because they’re frozen with cold.

Sacha fiddles with the flashlight in the doorway. Its light has been flickering in the last half hour of our outing. “I have batteries,” I offer, opening a few drawers in the kitchen to search for them.

“Don’t worry, I have some in my car,” he says. “I’ll go get them.”

“Okay,” I say, resisting the urge to ask if he really is coming back. “Thank you.”

He is about to leave but swivels on his foot to face me again, as if reading my mind. “Of course. I’ll be right back.”

I watch his figure retreat down the hill of my driveway, until he’s out of sight. I take a few breaths, leaning against the counter. The kettle starts to trill and only when I turn off the stove and steep the tea do I allow myself to wail out. I pull out a kitchen chair and sit heavily on it, wiping at my face, trying not to shake. It is somehow worse, not knowing what will happen to Tchaikovsky. With no prediction, my ideas whir out into vivid scenarios, more detailed and horrible than any other vision I’ve ever had. Most of all, perhaps worst of all, I don’t know if it would make any difference. I’ve always known I’d outlive my pets. Maybe this was how it was supposed to happen.

My brain is already ticking ahead into a more realistic future. I’ll print out photos of Tchaikovsky and drive around in the morning when I can see in the daylight. I’ll call the non-emergency line at the police station and let them know what my dog looks like. I’ll post online.

I hear the back door. I expect Sacha to walk through holding batteries, but he instead takes up the entire door frame and holds the dog in his arms like a baby, even though the dog’s nearly eighty pounds. What’s left of the broken leash is wrapped around one of his hands, and the dog’s tail wags against Sacha’s arm. Tchaikovsky is, by all accounts, completely unscathed, almost pleased with himself. His tongue lolls out of the side of his mouth. He leaps out of Sacha’s arms and trots up to me, placing his paws on my lap and sniffing at my face.

“He was waiting for me. Right next to my car,” he says, still breathless from carrying the dog uphill. He grins. I stand up and hug Sacha, pressing my cheek against his, a bear hug. Again the vision comes to me, flashes of color whipping by like pieces of a zoetrope. There’s my face again, the features still blurry, a shot of warmth despite the cold. Then it’s over. When I pull away he looks at me and I can tell he’s holding back, so I kiss him on the mouth.

With time, the image never alters when I touch Sacha, it only becomes clearer, brighter like looking through a camera lens adjusting its aperture. I get older in my vision, like I am aging with it. I finally tell Sacha about my ability, many years after we had met.

It happens when we are walking Tchaikovsky through town, although we keep stopping and starting because the dog is old now and has arthritis.

It is summer here, and we waited until dusk to avoid most of the heat.

But there are still plenty of people out now that it’s the tourist season, and the restaurants that are only open for a few months out of the year are overflowing onto the street.

“Do you want a picture together, pretend that we’re tourists? We can ask someone.”

“Ha, no,” I say.

He looks a little hurt. “But we don’t have many pictures together. I was thinking that.”

“We don’t?” I ask, but I know he’s right. I don’t like to have pictures of myself taken, and I especially don’t like to ask strangers to take my photo. “Why don’t I take a photo of you?” I ask, trying to compromise.

“It isn’t the same,” he says. We walk together in silence, and he seems less upbeat. His walk is a little less buoyant, a slouch in his shoulders has appeared.

“Sacha, let’s sit,” I point to a nearby bench. We sit, and the dog walks gratefully over and lies at our feet.

To Sacha, at last, I explain the things I’ve seen my whole life, and the look on Scott Barbier’s face when I told him.

“So, you know how I die?” he asks. He looks amused.

“Yes. But also no, in a manner of speaking,” I say.

“Hm. I don’t think I want to know,” he says. “Don’t ever tell me. Not even if I beg.”

“Of course,” I say. Relief comes over me, because I wouldn’t know what to say, anyway.

Sacha is set to retire soon. He will work on the last book in a series before we start our travels. We hope to retrace some of the places we visited many decades ago, though, I can’t remember exactly how old we were when we first went. It must have been when we were still very young, because Tchaikovsky was still alive. Sometimes, those memories are as clear to me as anything I see in the future.

Every now and then, Sacha makes a joke about my ability. “Is this how I die?” he asks now from the kitchen, yelling a little over the sound of crackling oil. I watch him turn the heat up on the stove. The meat sizzles. He pretends his face is melting off. I roll my eyes. He is bald now, his face somehow more handsome for it. He spoons some sauce onto the pan. This life is nothing like I imagined. Sacha’s cooking skills have always been better than mine, so I let him control what happens in the kitchen.

Tonight, it smells more than good, pork with a wine sauce, caramelized sweetness, and amber notes of the liquor swirling around the air.

I couldn’t imagine myself any older, but to my surprise, I only keep aging. My hair thins. There are new lines on my face. Someone else lives in the house across from us, because Sacha sold it after we met. I look up Randy, my old doorman. Nothing comes up. I wait a few years and look him up again. He finally dies at the age of 101. I laugh out loud, awestruck. A heart thing, was it? I couldn’t remember anymore.

When Sacha sits me down and tells me he has colon cancer, he tells me he’s decided to go to Switzerland to end his life. Assisted suicide, and all that. I balk. This is not what I thought would happen at all. But now, I realize, I still don’t quite know how to square this with what I have imagined.

“I can’t let you do this,” I plead. But he looks calm.

“It isn’t up to you,” he says. “But they still have to approve me. Do you know, by the way? If they will?” a mischievous look sparks in his eyes. I don’t reply, but I brush my hand against his. That eternal mirror appears again, this time the image of myself is so clear it feels like I’m able to watch myself in real time, like I’m editing footage and only need to move a few things around to sync up the audio with the picture. “I’ll go,” I agree.

When it is time, I can tell he is in pain. It took many months for the approvals to go through, by which time he didn’t have much time left anyway. Sacha takes the pills in one swoop and leans back in the bed that has been provided for him. The doctor waits nearby.

He squeezes my hand and I have the tilting feeling of Déjà vu, but something even stronger lies beneath it. For the first time in all the decades I’ve known him, I don’t see myself hovering near when I touch him. I only see his expression, open and honest. Oddly enough, it is still the clearest image I’ve ever seen of myself, sharper than any high-definition photo­graph or a reflection of my face in the most perfect pane of glass. I am relieved, and it is unlike any feeling I could have predicted. I am where I should be, and I’m grateful. It took a very long time.

 

Sarah Turbin is a writer and graphic designer living in Brooklyn. Her writing has received support from the Tin House Winter Workshop. Previously, her work has been published in Peatsmoke Journal.

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