The Omen

“I’ve gotten a good look at the biopsy results, Mrs. Zarkoff. There’s some very good news, and some bad news as well.”

Dr. Wells’ weary hazel eyes flicked from me to Andrea before settling on the floor for a second as he peeled the nitrile blue gloves from his hand and smoothed it through his trimmed, graying waves. The clock ticked on softly in the beige-colored room, but Andrea was silent, watching intently. And I sat next to her, holding onto her hand firmly, her slender fingers laced with mine. She hid her fear well enough, but not well enough to stop herself from shaking.

The doctor’s eyes turned towards Andrea, and his face softened though his expression remained grave.

“Unfortunately, Andrea, we did find cancerous cells in your breast tissue that look consistent with an Inflammatory Breast Cancer, and judging by the symptoms you’re exhibiting it’s spreading rapidly. It’s even possible it could already be in Stage II or III by now, and the best treatment at this point is to remove the cancer and begin chemotherapy immediately.”

The clock ground to a halt.

No. God, no.

Andrea’s grasp on my hand tightened.

“… Dr. Wells…” Her voice escaped like air from a flattening tire. “Is… Is there a good chance the cancer will go away with treatment?”

The physician’s face remained ambiguous and distanced, and the only sound I could hear was the snapping of the nitrile glove from his other hand as it slid from his sweating palms.

“There is, yes,” he replied, folding his hands behind his back. “But triple-negative cancers like yours are very aggressive and can become chemotherapy-resistant. If the cancer continues to spread and metastasizes, the prognosis is two weeks. Now there is a decent rate of survival if we…”

My mind blanked, and the rest of his words blurred into the ticking of the clock. Hollow. I felt hollow. This… this wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. Not to Andrea, not to me, this can’t be happening!

Her scared eyes turned to me, searching for help, but all I could do was grip her hand even tighter in response. My heart was too busy trying to claw its way out of my chest, and my mind was too busy reeling. She’ll never be the same after this, I thought. This will change her. This will hurt her. She is going to get hurt. And there’s a chance she won’t survive her injuries.

And the damn clock wouldn’t stop ticking. Ticking. Ticking…

“Mr. Zarkoff…?”

I startled and looked into the doctor’s eyes, searching for help. Anchoring myself to the uneasy strength I found there. He’d fix it. He had to. Andrea wasn’t going to die. She couldn’t… I couldn’t bear to…

“I understand how upsetting this must be for you.” Dr. Wells’ voice was a gentle murmur of sympathy, a warm and comforting blanket. “I promise you, I will do everything in my power to help your wife. This is an aggressive cancer, yes, but it is also a survivable one as well. In fact, the sooner we remove the mass and start treating her, the better…”

“Then we’re starting now,” Andrea interrupted, standing up. “I want it gone. Get rid of it now; I need to get back to my job! Please, doctor, I…”

I barely caught her before she crumpled to the floor from exhaustion.

“Andrea, honey, don’t,” I murmured. “Just this once… please don’t. Let him help you.”

I watched as Andrea opened her mouth to protest, then slowly closed it again. She was silent for a very long time, and for a moment, the ticking of the clock was once again the only sound in the room.

“… Alright, doctor… Alright… Do what you have to.”

She was silent the rest of the appointment. Silent as the doctor proceeded to explain hospital stay and treatment arrangements.

Silent as I slowly kissed her goodbye, left her to the doctor’s care, and walked numbly out of the room.

It was cold out, and lightly snowing, but I barely noticed as I walked from the hospital back to the gleaming glass tower that held our apartment. It isn’t that far of a walk from the hospital. Maybe fifteen minutes down a steep hill, across the river, through the park, and you were there. The Presidential Museum resided in the park proper, across the street from the apartment building. Apparently, President Gerald R. Ford and his wife were buried there, on the museum grounds I mean, not in the apartment building. He passed first, then his wife passed away only a few years ago. I still remember the funeral proceedings, the hundreds of lights from the candle vigil outside the museum’s entrance. Andrea and I saw it all from right across the street, but we didn’t attend since we were too busy. I had always hoped that we’d be interred together when it was our time, somewhat similarly to President Ford and the First Lady. Maybe not as lavishly, but together…

I was maybe halfway across the bridge when I ran into someone.

“Hey, buddy, watch it, you’ll hurt someone paying no attention like that!” the man yelled, clearly annoyed. “Gonna hurt yourself, too...”

“Sorry,” I muttered, not even bothering to look up at him as I continued on my way. That man I ran into might as well have been faceless for all I cared. I didn’t want to think about Andrea alone at the hospital for the next several nights, or how suddenly everything had changed, because I knew the more I thought about it, the more it would eat at me. It was cold out and night was coming, and all that mattered to me was getting home and going to bed. Only the park stood between that and me now.

At least the park was quiet. Very few people came here in the evening, and even fewer came here during the winter. There were a few teens hanging out on the fringes, sure, but no museum visitors (it was starting to close down for the evening), and no families around this late in the day. They’d all gone home. I was almost entirely alone as I walked down the long, tree-lined promenade that led there.

If that was the case, though, why did I suddenly feel like someone was staring at me?

Confused, I looked back. There wasn’t anyone else there, just me, and a man standing at the end of the path, the end I just came from, dressed in all-black clothing and something that looked like a top hat. An odd choice of clothing, but with the way teens dress these days I was hardly surprised. Besides, he was too far away to discern any other details about him, other than that he seemed to be roughly six feet tall in height and built thin, and looked like he on his way to something important.

But the more I looked at the distant figure, the more I felt… uneasy. He wasn’t moving, for one, and for another, he seemed to be facing me. For the briefest moment, I even thought he might have been looking directly at me, but that had to be my mind playing tricks on me. I knew from experience what stress could do to the mind, and that’s all this was, of course.

I disregarded the man and kept walking. The sooner I got home, the better.

The little playground wasn’t that far down the path, in a well-wooded clearing, and it had been there for years judging by the metal play equipment therein. It always surprised me that the city hadn’t replaced it with bright plastic equipment like every other park, but perhaps it held some sentimental value to a parent and child that a non-parent like me could never hope to grasp. A lone little girl, dressed in a grey-and-black dress, sat on the swings, not even swinging so much as swaying. She seemed to be murmuring to herself as her black pigtails bounced softly against her pale skin. Strange… where were her parents? Off to the side somewhere? And why did she look so morose?

I instantly chided myself for asking that latter question. Maybe she’d been to a funeral with her family, and that’s why she was dressed in black. Or maybe she was just a very quiet child that liked the color black. Of course, Andrea and I have been hoping for a child, hoping to see him play in that little park at the edge of the woods and to walk down this very path and collect leaves with him, but now…

Something compelled me to look back down the path again, and that is where I found the man again, leaning against a tree and checking what looked to be some sort of watch. He was still much too far to see his face clearly, even when he turned his head to look up at me. And the instant he did, a vague sense of familiarity hit me. Had I met this man before somewhere?

Something occurred to me for just a split second, a paranoid thought pushed to the far back of my mind along with the rest of today’s misery. Was this man… following me? No… no, that couldn’t be the case… could it?

Of course not, I thought, smiling and shaking my head and I turned to walk back down the path once more. Don’t be paranoid, Michael. That man’s probably the child’s father, keeping an eye on her. He isn’t following you at all. But if that was the case, why did my gut continue to scream that something was wrong, and why did being fixed by the man’s gaze make me feel like I was under a microscope?

I was maybe halfway down the path when I ran into someone.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized, backing away a bit and brushing myself off as I looked up at the person. “I wasn’t paying any –”

The man was standing not two feet from me, hands folded neatly behind his back, and bearing an eerily calm demeanor for someone who had just been ran into. Now that he was closer, I could see just how tall he really was, maybe six foot eight, and built like a scarecrow, his pale skin stretched over his hands like parchment over wire. And then there was his odd attire – the polished dress shoes and neatly tailored black dress pants, the fine black suit coat with coat tails and the old-fashioned red ascot, the neat top hat with the shiny black ribbon. He looked, for all intents and purposes, like another Christmas caroler, dressed in period attire. About the only thing I couldn’t place was his face. It was as if I were looking at him through a foggy window. At his side stood the little girl, hands folded behind her back in much the same manner as the man’s. She peered up at me with dark, wide blue eyes and a distant look on her round features. She couldn’t have been much older than seven.

I backed away a bit. I wasn’t sure why, but something in their constant gazes gave me pause, something that I couldn’t place, something that tugged nervously at the fringes of my mind…

“… Sorry,” I repeated, dropping my gaze to the concrete beneath my feet and moving quickly around the pair. It was getting late; I wanted to get home. And besides that, I really didn’t like the way being close to the man made me feel – it made me anxious, as if he were going to do something horrible to me if I stayed there another second. Of course, it wasn’t fair of me to judge someone I didn’t know, but it wasn’t as if I’d remember them anyway. I couldn’t even place what about the man made me so uneasy. I’d just forget all about it when I got home, anyway, and besides that –

“Are you okay, mister?”

I stopped. I’d barely heard the small voice over the soft sounds of the wind and the traffic, and there was something in it… something that tugged at my heart… something almost regretful…

Something that, despite my unease, made me turn back, and look at the girl and the man once more.

“No… Not really,” I sighed, shivering a bit from the cold. “I’ve… hm.”

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, wide eyes looking to me as if she already knew the answer.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” I responded truthfully, pulling into myself. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t like the fact that the man wasn’t moving. Hell, he wasn’t even shivering. He just kept staring at me, staring down, as if watching intently for some specific response…

“You can tell us,” the girl murmured, drawing closer and giving what seemed like a shadow of a true smile. “We won’t tell anybody. We’re really good at secret-keeping.”

“Who are you?” I thought aloud, grappling with my uneasiness. “I swear I’ve met you before, somewhere…”

The little girl looked up at the tall man, as if asking for permission, and the man nodded.

“I’m sorry. Nobody ever asked my name before,” she said, looking back to me. “Um. My name is Mori. And he says hello.”

At this, the man took the hat from his bald head in hand and bowed slightly in greeting, his eerie, unidentifiable gaze never leaving me for a second.

“He wants to know what’s wrong, too,” Mori said breathlessly, smoothing out her dress. “He’s really worried. He says you looked troubled...”

My gut screamed at me until it was hoarse, screaming at me not to say a word, but something… something in the girl’s sincere eyes, something about the man’s persistent silence… I couldn’t just leave. I wanted to, God, did I want to, I wanted to turn my back on them both and go home, forgetting I’d ever run into them, but even worse… I didn’t know why I wanted to leave so badly. After all, they’d done nothing worse than ask why I looked upset. Why then, did I feel like they were prying for answers and teasing me, slowly, into telling them everything?

“I… am,” I responded again, choosing my words warily. “My wife… you see, she’s in the hospital, and she’s… she’s very sick.”

The man inclined his head ever so slightly, but otherwise remained motionless.

“Oh no… we’re sorry to hear that. Does that make you sad?”

I raised an eyebrow at the redundant question.

 “… Yes, actually, I’m very upset about it. Why do you ask?”

“Are you scared?”

 “I’m sorry, what?”

“He wants to know if you’re scared for your wife.”

“I… don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“But he just wants to know what you’re going to do…”

“I don’t know, alright, and I don’t care if he wants to know or not. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, goodbye.”

“But Michael…”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

“That isn’t my name,” I lied, backing away. “Just… I don’t want to talk anymore, I’m sorry, I… I can’t. Goodbye.”

I turned on my heel and, shaking, began to speed walk down the rest of the trail.

“But Mister Michael!” cried the girl, seeming desperate. “Where are you going to go if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

I didn’t look back as I broke into a jog, then into a run. I didn’t want to look back, but the uneasy feeling of the man’s constant, silent gaze followed me as I left the park. Ignore them, I thought to myself, shivering from cold and nerves. Ignore them, what can they really do? Why should they care about someone they don’t even know, let alone that person’s wife?

And the more I thought about it, the more questions came to mind. Why did they seem to care so much about me? Why did they stop me halfway down the path to begin with? How did that little girl know my name when I’d never mentioned it? Why did I have so much trouble placing that man’s face when I could so easily identify every other part of his person? And where, for the matter, did that feeling of being watched go?

I stopped at the sudden realization, and looked back down the trail. But neither the man nor the girl was anywhere to be seen. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air…

And that’s when something far more disturbing occurred to me, a horrifying, delayed realization that shocked me at how easily I’d overlooked it, how little I’d questioned it at the time. Of course I couldn’t have placed the man’s face. How could I have?

He’d never had one to begin with.