"Old Friends" by Duncan Cary Palmer

“Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.”
– Henry Ward Beecher –

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Here's my entry for @carolkean's Rhino Writing Contest #3.

Love is a many-splendored thing.

It tends to lose its edge over time, to get buried in the mundane business of life.

Sometimes, though, it can be suddenly re-awakened without warning.

My hat is off once more to The Writers' Block fiction workshop. Thanks for all the fish.

"She struck him as courageous, admirable..."
Image courtesy of Andrys Stienstra and PixaBay

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"Old Friends"

~by Duncan Cary Palmer~

Lifting a stack of ancient BYTE magazines off the bookshelf for dusting, the old man discovers a small laptop, wedged behind some books. He vaguely recalls having tucked it back there long years before.

The computer is standing on edge, piles of yard-sale paperbacks supporting it while waiting for the unlikely moment he’d take one down to read, to justify his quarter spent.

Sliding the forgotten machine from behind the piles, he struggles to recall why he’d retired it. Something about a bad battery, forcing a reboot every time?

One swipe through the dust reveals a Firefly sticker. His eyes widen. Sudden memories strike like a force of nature, like the wave that tumbled him that day he’d been surfing at Warm Water Jetty, held under so long he was sure he’d die.

Her name was Alice. They were just friends, really. Not even that, until a while after she had moved away. Alice and Tom—a young couple at church. Tom, an engineer. Allie, a housewife.

Still in his fifties, he’d known Tom and Allie just well enough to say hello in passing. That was it. That was all.

Only after they’d left had he heard about her activism.

Alice was a picketer, a champion for animal rights. A courageous soul, she also spoke out against American jingoism and the US war machine. She maintained an anti-war website in her spare time.

Hands now shaking, the old man carries the laptop to his workshop. A universal power supply brings some LEDs to life. Opening the lid—will the damn thing even boot?—he is rewarded with all the right clicks and whirs.

After the couple moved thousands of miles away, he had struck up an email correspondence with Allie. He was curious about her activism. It struck him as courageous, admirable, maybe even a template to follow.

Back in town for a few days, he took them both out for lunch and a gentle inquisition, delving into Allie’s activism and Tom’s tech work. Afterward, he shook Tom’s hand and bade Allie farewell with a brief hug.

Hoping to encourage others to follow in her footsteps, he wrote about Alice’s work on his blog. He still believed in the political process, back then. After picking her brains about picketing, he wrote blogs she then kindly edited, refining everything he thought he knew about punctuation.

It was a balanced friendship. An exchange of innocent letters, once in awhile. Is motherhood treating you well? What’s it like to travel to Europe for work?

Coming alive, his old laptop breaks his reverie. Could it possibly have been twenty years ago? The most recent file is about that old.

Maybe he should just let the matter rest… Why dredge up old ghosts?

They’d never meant to fall in love; it just sort of happened, a year or two after that luncheon. They’d somehow started emailing again. How’s your little girl? Fine, your grandson? Good, good. What are your hopes and dreams? Given complete freedom, what would you do? Where would you go?

Something simple in a recent email had stirred his imagination. “I wish you were here.” That’s all she’d said.

He suggested then that they take advantage of the new privacy technology. Encryption would let them share more personal thoughts. In no time, Allie set hers up and they exchanged keys.

As he drove home that night after Christmas caroling, Alice was all he could think of. Resolved, he sent a pithy but urgent encrypted message:

“Dear Allie, I’ll go first: I love you. I am in love with you.” That was all he’d said.

An eternity—ten entire minutes—later, her reply came back. “I love you, too!” Thus began the brief, May-December romance. He was 62. Allie, not quite 40.

Their situation was impossible, complicated, and amazingly curious in every way. After forty years of marriage, he knew what love was. Going to work. Paying the bills. Surviving the angry words and chill silences that erupted all too often. Forgiving, caring, going on anyway. But being in love? He had forgotten what that was like.

Old love songs sprang unbidden to mind. He walked on air, daydreaming constantly. He wrote poetry for her. Songs were sung. Playlists exchanged. Even some precious phone calls, a few sacred, stolen hours of voiced communion, ending with a quiet “I love you.” A card or two, some trivial gifts.

Doomed from day one, it could never, ever work. Irrevocably committed to their spouses and existing marriages, neither he nor Alice would ever seriously entertain the notion of cheating. Still, it was a mercy they were thousands of miles apart.

Could the two marriages survive an added connection? Not likely. Wife Pat would find the thought of polygamy repulsive, insurmountably threatening. Tom would suit up and crush any challenger.

Despite the risks, they spoke frankly of love, with an openness he had only before imagined, never experienced. He remembers having erased all the damning emails… What possible benefit would bringing them back now afford?

Trembling, he installs magic software to undelete the archive. Success is only partial. He remembers having thought that someday, far in the future, forensic data analysts would plumb the NSA archives with their quantum computers, recovering the PGP encrypted stack of love letters. Failing that, the lyric beauty of the words that had escaped between the two would certainly be forever preserved in the mind of God.

He manages to recall the lengthy decryption passphrase on the second try, but intervening time and reuse have left substantial gaps in the record. Even so, enough remains to bring those enchanted days vividly to life.

She:   %@$#&…You are a frickin’ genius! I’m so proud of you…&%#$
He:   &%$&… yes! If I were free, I’d marry you in a heartbeat…&#%$^
She:   &$$#..If only we were free. It would be so shiny! …^%$
He:   @^!$^#%,, older than you? A bit thicker in the middle than when you last saw me….&$^^&#…pick you up on the back of my motorcycle!…&$%&%
She:   ^&%#%…I’ll hug your neck as we drive off into the sunset…_&^#&$…Blue Room at the Art Institute? Chagall, one of my faves as an artist…&%$^
He:   #@!$^…We could have a picnic on the lakefront, and th…._+^$%%
She:   &#%&…cosplay. I’d play Inara to your Mal at ComiCon…%#$@…You are the most romantic man I’ve ever known….&$%^

After twenty years, even these crumbs, mere fragments, move him to tears. How could he have been married, loyal to Pat, yet so in love with Allie? Was it a betrayal? He’s glad she’d never found out.

What cruel twist of fate, what wrinkle in time had kept him and Allie from meeting while still unattached? Weren’t they soul-mates? Couldn’t they have found one another before committing to (her) a life absent romance and (him) twenty five years of happy marriage—buried amidst a total of fifty-five?

During those extraordinary days, he and Allie had expressed more feeling and communed on a deeper level than most couples in a lifetime.

Perhaps spouses ought to exchange emails…

They also had some surprising spats—misunderstandings—but sharp enough to persuade them both that they weren’t simply starry-eyed teens.

Once, Pat had startled him at the computer. He feared she had found them out, but she was actually on about something else. What she didn’t know never hurt her… Or did it?

The ardent correspondence lasted but a few months. Allie’s sudden silence was followed by angry emails from Tom… No, he never intended to steal Allie. No, it was unplanned. It just happened. No, he was not pursuing other women. Yes, he would cease all communication. Please, please forgive any pain he’d caused.

Alone now, he’s grateful for the life he’d shared with Pat. Good days, scattered among the chaff. Five years ago, she’d abandoned him on this side of the impenetrable chasm of death.

It’s been much longer—twenty years now—since Allie threw him under the bus. Cut off from Allie then as surely as he now was from Pat, he forgave her long ago, knowing she had to blame him to appease Tom’s wrath. His ongoing prayer has been for Tom and Alice to be at peace, to thrive.

Is there no cure for aging? No remedy for jealousy? No panacea for the painful paradox of out-of-sequence events? If only he had a time machine, and could correct the missteps of life…

Despite the shock of revisiting the past, he can’t bring himself to regret his time with Allie. Their correspondence had been a life-restoring gift—a brief, unspeakably wistful break from the mundane. It brought into focus the striking difference between loving and being in love.

Seeing himself once more through Allie’s eyes reminds him that, no matter how deeply buried, there is still beauty and value embedded in his soul, in his ideas, in himself. That he might yet be seen as desirable, praiseworthy, a man of innate value.

Love letters. In times past, they were enveloped, stamped and occasionally perfumed. Banded in stacks, private, cloistered in cigar boxes and stored in closets and attics, occasionally discovered generations later.

Now, they are more ethereal; bits and bytes, flashes of light, magnetic domains and minuscule potentials. Nonetheless, they remain mute but substantive testaments to the overwhelming power of emotion and the eternal optimism of the human soul.

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~FIN~

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"A forgotten laptop from behind the piles..."
Image courtesy of Taduuda and http://unsplash.com

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