The Home of Forgotten Stories

“His name was… Tad the scrubber.”

“Tad Scrubber?”

“No no no, Tad the scrubber.  Back then surnames among the poor were mostly professions.”

“How far back are we talking?”

“Around 1430.”

“Oh wow.  Where?”

“England… his home was the village of Pudney.”

“Pudney??”

“You got it.  Here’s the dossier, what we could dig up.  It isn’t much.”

“… Thanks.”

I took the single-page document and walked out of the Past Lives Office, casting a glance at the others in the room, all waiting for their name to be called.  One of them might be Catherine the Great.  Or Shakespeare.  Or… my phone buzzed, and I took it out of my pocket with a sense of grim futility.  Naturally it was Alicka.

“Hi.”

“Albert Einstein.”

“What?”

“I was Albert Einstein, Joe!  I was a genius!  I mean, I’m a genius now, but I was even more of a genius then!  Can you believe it?  I invented the theory of relativity!”

I tried my best to make my “Congratulations!” sound like anything other than a nosedive into a panful of crap.

It didn’t work.  “Uh-oh.  Get some bad news?”

“Um, a little bit.  I was basically nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“Just some guy who was a scrubber, whatever that is.”

“A scrubber?  Wow.  One who scrubs.”

I sighed.  “I suppose it was a noble enough profession in the Middle Ages.”

Alicka paused.  “Well… look at it this way, you could have been Hitler!”

“You have the oddest way of cheering someone up.”

“Listen, I gotta go.  I have to go think up some great thoughts!  I never knew my potential until now!”

“Okay, you go do that then.”

“Chin up, Joe.  Be the best scrubber you can be.”

I disconnected.  Idiot.  I wasn’t sure whether I was referring to myself or to Alicka.  Or maybe I meant Tad.  Tad the scrubber.

I read the dossier on the train ride home and was incredibly unimpressed.  Tad was a humble scrubber who worked in the kitchen of Lord Girand, a minor noble of some kind who was famed for having the biggest pig and chicken farm in the region.  Tad was known as a hard worker.  He never married.  Didn’t seem to have any extended family, and in fact his parentage was unknown.  Was he an orphan?  I couldn’t see any details about where he had come from.  He had a skin condition.  That part was mentioned in parentheses, and again, no more detail provided than that.  They got the data from a past life scanner, and the scanner only picked out pertinent things.

So, in my one known past life, I was basically nobody.  Almost less than nobody; I would have preferred to get a Null outcome.  I half envied the people who did get the Null outcome, it seemed like it would be freeing to have no past incarnations.  Some people were emerging from the office with a cartload of papers, which either meant that they were someone important in history, or else that they had dozens of pasts.  I had my one sheet of paper.

I half-heartedly went to the pharmacy and picked up my order of Darmizod.  They took one look at my lone piece of paper, and gave me five pills.  I didn’t argue with them.  I reckoned five dreams spent talking to Tad the scrubber would be duller than actual sleep.

I checked my thoughts as I walked home.  Okay, let’s be real for a moment.  I haven’t done anything interesting in my life, either.  I’m a low-level business analyst at a company with fifty employees, which isn’t really big enough of a company to even HAVE low-level employees, but there I am.  I’m not married either, and my dad is a used car salesman who still pretends to other people that I work for NASA.  I’m thirty-five and just… weird.  But not weird enough to be interesting.

It was 8pm when I walked through my own door (what a boring door) and sat down with a plop on my couch (what a boring couch).  I thought about eating but I wasn’t really hungry.

I scrolled through some news, and decided to call it an early night.

Before I went to bed, I resignedly brushed my teeth and just as resignedly took the first pill.  It must have contained a sedative in addition to the psychoactive ingredients, because I went to sleep quickly.

I was surprised by a voice.

“Tad.  TAD.  Tureens!”

Tad leapt to his feet and took the armful of soup tureens from Marie.  She relinquished them with a heavy sigh, but Tad practically juggled them as he went to the soaking barrel.

I felt surprise, looking at him.  He was white, but his skin wasn’t the usual outdoor tan I would have expected of English peasantry, it was patterned almost like a quilt with darker and paler patches.  It was as though someone had forgotten to completely color him in.  But his eyes were large and blue and crinkled at the edges with an almost constant smile.

“Right you are!”  He put the pots and pans on a table next to a large barrel of water, and picked up a large, harsh-looking brush.  “Have ‘em to ya in three winks of an eye!”

“Catch the lad, thinks he can outdo himself even.”  Marie laughed.

“Nary a point in living without besting yourself now and again,” he said cheerfully, and set to with the scrub brush.

I took a look around the kitchen.  It was a small space, not room for more than about three people, but I counted roughly ten, though they were going in and out constantly.  All but Marie, who seemed to be a coordinator of sorts, and Tad, who kept to his scrubbing.  The cooks and servants all seemed to scowl and complain loudly.  They at least looked intent and stern about their business.  But Tad whistled while he worked, scrubbing like a man gone mad with the desire to rid dishes of the scum of lordly food.

I found to my surprise that I was fascinated by him.  He took each pot and examined it, seeming to immediately know whether something would require a soak in the barrel, or whether it could be scrubbed immediately.  Plop, went the soakers into the barrel, almost faster than I could count them.  And then his hands and arms were a blur of haste on the non-soaking pots.

Occasionally he and Marie exchanged a quick word or two, but everybody else in the kitchen seemed to ignore his existence.  Until Marie caught another maid laboring over a cauldron almost half her size.  “Are ye mad, Lil?  Give it over, let Tad handle the thing.  You’ve no more sense than an addled goose.”  Lil rolled her eyes and lugged the cauldron over to Tad, who immediately turned with a smile and hefted it as though it weighed nothing.  I was impressed; he was not overly muscled or large, even compared to the other men who came in and out of the kitchen.  Lil immediately turned away from him after giving him the cauldron, seeming affronted at having to deal with him at all.

Marie turned to Tad once Lil was out of the way.  “That girl thinks a mite much of herself.”

“As should we all,” Tad said cheerfully.  “The stars birthed us, did you know it?”

“Oh, get on with your tall tales.”

“An’ a star bore us, an’ we grew by the sun, an’ the Lord blessed us, an’ this pan is done.”  He handed it to Marie, who giggled.  Tad turned back to his work, whistling again.

A child’s voice whispered, “Tad!”

Tad’s smile widened, and he leaned over to glance beneath his table.  There was a small girl there, wearing clothes that seemed finer than those of the others in the kitchen.  She grinned at Tad.  He said, “Now, what have I got?  It’s a fairy girl!”

The girl seemed delighted.  “Can you see my wings?  I just grew them today!”

Tad nodded with great seriousness.  “Take care, wee one.  They’ll fly you right off the earth if you flap three times.”

“I take great care!  I won’t fly off!”

“And what magics and mischiefs are you here to do, Rosie?”

“I have a snake!”  She lifted one hand, clutching a small green snake that had wrapped itself between her fingers.  “I’ll use it in a brew!”

“Why, my knees are a-shakin’, Rosie!  That’s real magic!  But you don’t want that little green man there, he’s too old.”

“Is he?”  The girl looked at her snake doubtfully.

“Tell you what, I’ll trade you, one old snake with no use, for a currant bun!”

She nodded eagerly and held up the snake, which Tad carefully took from her.  He gave Marie a look, one eyebrow raised, and ducked his head at the table.  Marie’s eyes widened and she immediately came over.  “Rosalyn, you wicked girl!  You know Tad has to work, and you should be supping at your father’s table!”

The girl scowled, but Tad said, “She only came in for a currant bun and a moment’s peace, Marie.”

Marie frowned and shook her head, but took a small pastry off the top shelf and handed it to the child beneath the table.  “Don’t bother Tad, now.”

“She’s not the least bother, not at all.  When you finish, wee one, go and join your good parents.  They would miss you if you flew away too far.  I’ve a short errand to run now.”

Rosalyn nodded, chewing rapidly.

Tad dashed to the back door of the kitchen and went out among the laundry barrels and detritus of the yard.  Once he reached the trees’ edge, he knelt down and let the snake go.  “Take care, little one.  Hide yourself more deftly.”  Snake safely disposed of, Tad sprinted back to the kitchen and was once again at work, whistling.

I woke up, and realized that I was smiling.  What a… well, it sounds like an epithet these days, but what a nice guy.  I felt mildly suspicious; surely nobody could be that much sweetness and light on the inside.  But Tad seemed to be the genuine article:  a human being of the truly kind variety.  I went back to sleep.  There were no further dreams, but I slept soundly and woke up in the morning feeling like I’d been scrubbed as well as Tad’s tureens, somehow.  I felt light and clean.

That day, as I walked to work, I thought about Tad, and I looked around at the people surrounding me… all of them with their street masks on, that tough, emotionally immune look that you develop after being panhandled about five hundred times.  Most of them looked businesslike, but some of them looked absolutely miserable.  Nobody looked happy.  I wondered how I looked.

When I made it to the office, I kept thinking about Tad.  My work, to be blunt, was boring.  To be more specific, it was an utter, soul-torturing morass of dullness.  But then, so was scrubbing pots.  If it was possible to scrub pots with a light heart, surely I could do my job with a smile.  After all, it wasn’t arduous.  Then again, maybe that was the problem; there was no challenge.  Tad would have said I needed to best myself somehow.

So I thought, Today, I will respond to fifty emails.  My reports were easy, but email was the one thing I tended to get behind on, and once an email made it to the end of the day unread, it would dwindle down into email limbo where no email ever escaped.  I had about a thousand unread emails in my box from months of procrastination (I tended to only work just barely hard enough to escape firing), and this morning, they were tugging at my attention.  So I clicked on my first email of the day.  I read it.  I gritted my teeth and responded to it.

After the response was sent, I thought, Nah, that’s not right.  I can’t grit my teeth and do it.  I have to whistle and smile while I do it.  Or at least smile.  I don’t think HR would approve of me whistling in the office.

So I smiled.

It was shockingly difficult.  I twisted my mouth up into some semblance of what I thought a smile was, and promptly realized that I must not have smiled in ages, because it felt completely unnatural.  I took out my phone and looked at myself in the camera view, and tried again.  It didn’t look all that natural either.  I spent a moment stretching my mouth and face, exercising every muscle I could feel, then I relaxed my face and tried again.  Better.  Almost normal-looking.

I wore that smile as much as possible for the next eight hours, and any time it started to exhaust itself, I would close my eyes for a moment and think about Tad’s smiling face.  He actually did more than smile.  He beamed.  I didn’t beam, but I did at least smile for most of the day.  People kept passing by my desk; I smiled up at them, and they would give me a surprised look and then a hesitant smile back.  One girl smiled at me with gusto, as though she had been just waiting for an excuse.  Some of the ones who knew me stopped to chat for a moment, which was nice.  That didn’t typically happen.  I wondered what kind of a face I usually wore at work.

Yolanda at the next desk at one point asked me what I was looking at that was so funny.  I had to say, “Nothing.  I’m just, uh, happy about life.”  She gave me a rather accusatory look and went back to her own work.

By the time the day was done, I had responded to thirty old emails in addition to my other work.  It wasn’t fifty, but it certainly wasn’t bad, and I could always do better tomorrow.

Once I got home at the end of the day, I Googled skin conditions and came up with two names:  vitiligo and piebaldism.  Tad had one of those.  I wasn’t sure how to tell the difference between them, visually.  It didn’t seem to matter much though.  I just wanted to know that there was a name for it.

I made dinner and thought about Tad, especially as I washed the dishes afterward.  I tried whistling.  It did seem to make the dishes go faster.

My phone buzzed at 8pm, and it was Alicka again.  I answered with, “How awesome are you today?”

“Very.  How kind of you to know that!”

“That’s what I do,” I said drily.

“Einstein is fascinating.  Do you know, he did nothing but study and work while I dreamed about him?  The man was a machine!”

“That’s wonderful!  Tad worked all night as well.”

“Who?”

“You’ve forgotten my past life already?”

“Oh right.  Your scrubber.  I suppose he must have scrubbed.”

I felt defensive.  “He has a very important job, you know, and he does it well.”

“I’m sure that’s true.  Well, time to go hang out with a genius again!  I have thirty pills!”

“You go have fun then.”  I hung up feeling mildly burned.  Tad may not have been important, but I was already starting to feel awfully possessive of him, and wanted him to be appreciated.  He was special, I felt.

I did a little cleaning before I went to bed, in honor of Tad, who would doubtless have appreciated it.  I pictured him cheering me on from the side as I worked.  I took my pill at around ten, and fell asleep just as quickly as I had the night before.

Once again I found myself in the kitchen, Tad working merrily away, whistling and occasionally sharing a kind word with one of the others.  Marie was the only person who was kind in response.  I wondered why everybody else ignored him so thoroughly.  Tad sang little songs to himself, which I suspected he made up on the spot… there was one about a frog with a jewel in its head, and another about a fairy with no wings but instead legs like a grasshopper on which it hopped from fern to flower.

Lil, the maid I remembered from the night before, suddenly fainted with a tray full of food in her hands.  Everything crashed down on the floor, including herself, and there was a general uproar as the entire kitchen tried to help.  Marie managed to clear them away, “The lass needs air, you fools!  Tad, come right away!”  Tad came and picked Lil up lightly as a feather, and he and Marie took her outside.

Tad said, “Her face and hands are hot to boiling, Marie.”  He looked deeply concerned.

Marie pressed the back of her hand to Lil’s temple and frowned.  “Lay her down.”  Tad placed her gently on the ground and Marie loosened Lil’s collar.  There was a black bruise of some kind on her neck.  Marie gave Tad a look of grim fear, and said, “We’re all for it, now.”

Tad carried Lil home.  The walk seemed to take forever, though I guessed it was only about a mile or so; surely it wasn’t a very large village that they lived in.  When he reached her house, there was a man outside chopping wood.  He looked a little older than Tad; perhaps forty, though given the era it was probably closer to thirty.  He immediately dropped his axe and rushed to Tad’s side.  “Lily!”

“She took sick during her work,” Tad said quietly.  He gave Lil to the man, who seemed to be her father, and who took her inside without a further word.

About a minute later, there was a wail from inside, and the man came back out.  The wailing continued behind him as he said tightly, “You best leave.  Tis the Plague for certain.”

“Is there ought I can do?”

“Nothing.”

Tad sadly turned to leave and the man stopped him.

“Tad, I’ve known you twelve year and there’s not a drop of harm in you.  But you should stick to Girand’s kitchen from now on.  The Plague is loose, and there’s people who’ll look for someone to blame for it.”  Tears came to his eyes.  “My poor Lily never was strong… God help her now.”

“God help us all, Richard.”

Tad walked back to the kitchen with a crease of worry between his eyebrows.  I could feel a crease of worry between mine as well.  Why would anybody blame Tad for the Plague?  It must have been his skin that made Richard afraid for him.

I woke up in the morning feeling ill.  I’d only just met Tad.  Would he be taken away from me so soon?

I hummed Tad’s frog song to myself as I walked to work, and steadily ignored triumphant texts from Alicka during the day.  I tried smiling again, and again it seemed to work on the people around me, but it only barely touched my own mood.

Still, I read and responded to or archived about sixty emails, which seemed to be a personal record, not that I’d ever counted them before.  By the end of the day I was cheerful again.  I decided to do something for someone on my way home.  Maybe I would call my Dad.  I didn’t talk to him as often since Mom died, and he did seem to like to hear from me, in his own way.  If I called him during my walk, that would mean there was a natural end to the conversation when I got home.

“Hey Dad.”

“Joey!  I was starting to wonder if you’d died.”

“Uh, no, Dad.”

“What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, same old thing.”  I paused and thought about Tad.  “I found out my P.L. this week.”

“So you believe in it, then?”

“Actually yeah, I do.  I only had one guy, and he’s from the Middle Ages, but… I kind of like him.”  This was ridiculous.  I was talking to my Dad about my past life as though it was a girl I was introducing to him.

“Well, that’s good.”  In a tone that said he had no earthly idea what else to say.

I thought, what would Tad do?  It immediately felt silly, but it was an important question to me.  “How have you been, Dad?”

“Oh, keeping on.  You know me, I’m always keeping on.”

“Seriously, though.  How have you been?  Should I visit?”

There was a brief silence.  “I’d like that very much, Joey.  We should go see a game together!”

“Okay.”  I hated sports.  “What kind of a game?”

“Oh, whatever’s out there right now.  What season is it, baseball?”  I realized in that moment that my Dad hated sports too (how had I not known that before?), and I started laughing.  “What’s funny?” he asked.

“Oh nothing, just laughing at us not knowing anything about sports.  How about a movie instead?”

“Sure!”

“Tell you what, I’ll call you on Saturday and we’ll make plans.”

“I look forward to it, Son.”

That night, I looked at my remaining three pills in the bottle and wondered whether I really wanted to take one.  I was on a roll at work right now, my mood was better, I was treating people better… maybe Tad had done all that Tad was ever going to do for me.

Then I felt lousy.  What was he to me, an anti-depressant?  No, he was a real person.  He deserved to have his story fully known.  I took my third pill and went to sleep.

I was back in the kitchen.  There were fewer servants, and those that were there seemed fearful of each other.  Marie and Tad were still there, Marie ordering everybody around and Tad scrubbing the pots.  Then he left the pots and went to turn one of the spits that was roasting some chickens.  Then he grabbed a small broom from the corner and swept some of the floor.  It seemed like he was filling in for a few people.  He never stopped whistling.

At one point, a maid stumbled right next to Tad, and he reached out to help her.  She jerked away from him and hissed at him like a cat.  “Off with ya, cursed one!”

He backed away, his hands held up as though to show no threat.  “There’s no curse in me other than the curse of constant song and useless talk, Agnes.”  He smiled at her.

She got to her feet, still glaring at him poisonously.  “They say Rosalyn is taken with it now.  Every one of us knows she liked you.”

Tad’s face crumpled and for the first time, I saw him look truly miserable.  “Not Rosie!”

“She’s paying the price of dealings with you!”

Marie charged up to both of them and snarled, “Tad’s no witch, Agnes.”

“He’s got the Devil’s marks on him!”

“That’s the skin he’s had for the ten year he’s worked in this kitchen, and no Plague in all that time!  Now go serve up the soup or find yourself a new position!  With half of us gone, we’ve no room for shirkers!”

Agnes spat on the ground and left.

Marie gave Tad a look of sympathy.  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

Tad’s eyes were filled with tears.  “How bad is Rosie taken?”

“Bad, but I’ve seen worse and they lived to dance again.  Now chin up, we’ve the work of ten to do and only five to do it with.”

Tad went back to his pots and pans, but there was a definite darkness in him now.  He whistled a sad tune instead of a happy one, and kept his eyes down.  I felt sad that the little girl was sick, but I was also mildly alarmed.  How far would Agnes’s fear of Tad spread among the servants?  Did Rosalyn’s parents know anything about him?  Had they hired him, or had it been Marie’s job to hire for the kitchen?  It seemed like a life of almost total obscurity had protected him in a sense, until now.

Still, there were pots and pans to scrub, and he was determined to scrub them, and did that with the same energy he always seemed to have.

I thought back on my other two dream memories, and now I guessed why Marie and Rosalyn were the only two people who ever spoke to Tad.  Apparently he had barely been tolerated among them.  Now, there was a danger of that tolerance failing.

I woke up afraid.

Work was difficult.  I had to tell myself several times that there was nothing I could do about Tad or Rosie, they had both lived and died hundreds of years back, and been completely forgotten by time.  If they both died of the Plague, or both died of old age, what difference did it really make?  They were dead and gone.  In a sense, this whole reincarnation thing was kind of sick.  It was causing everybody to obsess over things that could never be changed.  I wondered for a moment about those who had past lives that were notoriously evil, whether they had decided to take their pills or not.

But with Tad in mind, I responded to forty-three old emails and kept a firm (if small) smile on my face the whole time.  I tried my hand at making up little songs while I worked, and realized that I could.  I made up a song about a snail who loved a butterfly, and a song about an email that freed itself from a computer and went off to wander the world.  It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was Tad.

That night, I called Alicka before she had the chance to call me.  “So how’s life as a genius?”

There was a pause.  “Fine.  He works.”

“He works?  Nothing else?”

“Well… nothing else matters when you’re a genius.  The work he’s doing is very important!”

“Ah.”

“He’s married, though.  Not… that it seems to matter all that much to him.”

“Mine is single.  Apparently he lived during the Black Plague.”

“Ew.”

I supposed that was as good a response as any.  “Yeah.”

“I’m thinking about maybe not taking my pill tonight.  I mean, I have plenty of time to get to know Albert.”

“I’m definitely taking mine.  I have to know whether Tad got accused of witchcraft.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s complicated, but things got weird last night.”

“Well, don’t get too involved, he’s dead after all.”

It was the same exact thing I’d been telling myself all day long, but I hated hearing from her.  “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does.”

“It does not.  Just because someone is obscure doesn’t make them meaningless.  Tad is a good person.”

“Was a good person.  He’s dead.”

“Stop saying that!”

“It’s true!”

I pressed my lips hard together and tried to calm down and think of a coherent response.  “Isn’t the whole point of reincarnation the idea that some of the person lives on inside of you?  Isn’t that what you meant when you said you could be a genius?  If that’s true, then I can also bring some part of Tad back inside of myself.  The part that matters.”

“And what part of Tad the scrubber actually matters?”

“Sometimes I don’t know why I talk to you.”

“Seriously Joe.  You’re acting like he cured cancer or something.  His life meant nothing!  He didn’t do anything!”

“Let me ask you something… your Einstein.  How did he make the people around him feel?”

“What?”

“Did he make them feel better as a general rule, or worse?”

“How does that matter?”

“And that’s why you and I are different.  Because to me, it matters.”

“Whatever, weirdo.”

I felt unsettled after that conversation.  There were two pills left, and I was afraid to take either of them.  But Tad would have bravely faced his destiny.  I took one of the pills, and bravely faced… sleep.  It was sleep.  I didn’t have anything to fear.

But I fell asleep and immediately became aware of fear.

It was a dark, chilly evening.  Tad was afraid, that was clear.  He stood out in the yard, and the other servants (not just the kitchen ones apparently, there was quite a crowd in the yard) were shouting at him, many epithets that I didn’t understand, but “Devil spawn!” and “Witch!” were easy enough to make out.

Tad spoke out clearly in his amiable way, “I’ve harmed none of you in all my time here.  All I ask is to scrub my pots and pans.  With Marie gone, we all need to help as we can.”

That’s when I realized Marie wasn’t among the crowd.  Well, of course not, she would never have permitted such a gathering, she’d have shown them the kitchen door with her relative level of authority.  But maybe she was sick.

“Marie’s dead and you the cause!” shouted a man with a spade in his hand.

“I would never have hurt Marie.”  A clod of dirt struck Tad in the chest, and he backed away a step.  “Please, good folk.  You need not do this.”

More clods of dirt were thrown, and then there was a stone that hit Tad in the forehead.  With a look that was more grieving than fearful, he turned and trotted away from them.  When they followed him, still shouting, still throwing rocks, he began to run.

Tad wasn’t tall but he was strong, and apparently fast.  My mind’s eye stayed with him as he easily outran the other servants.  He passed through the village, where every door was shut.  Half of them had a sinister black mark on their surfaces, and there was silence except for the occasional cry of grief.  Richard’s house had the mark and was as silent as most of the houses.  Tad stopped for a moment, and I could see that he wanted to check on Richard and the family, I could see that he was worried about them, but he shook his head sadly and walked on.  Tad appeared to know that he would only cause fear wherever he went.

And where on earth could he go now?  I somehow knew that strangers wouldn’t be welcomed in other villages, much less strangers with nothing in their pockets and no skills to speak of.

He paused at the outskirts of the village and ducked into the trees, crouching down with his head bowed.  I thought at first that he was crying, but he was perfectly still and silent.  Then he crossed himself fervently, and I realized that he had been praying.

He stood up and walked on into the night.  After a few moments of walking, he began to quietly sing one of his songs, this one about a tree that got confused and grew sideways.

I woke up with a lump in my throat.

That day at work, I spent some time thinking about the hardships of the time that Tad lived in.  I researched the 1400s, and learned that the Black Plague killed a third to a half of the population of England at the time.  I couldn’t even imagine the kind of terror that would inspire, and that would have been before they knew how diseases were spread.  So they turned to spiritual causes.  Anybody with any kind of a deformity would have been a scapegoat.

Tad must have known that he had nowhere to go and nobody to help him.  He had lost his one friend, and little Rosalyn, assuming she survived at all, wouldn’t have had the standing to protect him.  For his entire life, Tad had lived on the edge of a precipice of banishment and death.  And he knew it, too, which is why he left so easily, without fighting back.  Then again, fighting back would also have meant hurting someone, and that was something I knew Tad could never bring himself to do.

I thought about living that way.  Living knowing that you were on the edge, living knowing that any day could be the day they came for you.

And whistling as you did it.

Screw all those important geniuses and politicians, I thought.  Tad was a hero.  Tad deserved a Nobel Prize.  Not for doing anything spectacular, but for choosing happiness even under the circumstances of his inevitable life.

I didn’t answer many of the emails in my backlog that day.  But I did something I rarely do.  I got up from my desk and wandered around the office, and I asked people here and there, my acquaintances, how they were.  I asked if there was anything they needed help with.  Most of them answered with a polite “Fine,” but some of them actually gave me real answers, and I heard enough to know that everybody in the office had their share of problems.  Some of them sounded mild, some dire.  Yolanda’s boyfriend was moving out.  Terry’s favorite football team had lost the championship.  Hamid’s son was “experiencing some problems” that he didn’t specify, which said something of itself.  None of them needed my help, but they all seemed surprised and appreciative that I would offer, and several of them counter-offered.  I just smiled at them and said, “Nah, I don’t need help, but I may in the future.”

That night, I texted Alicka.

I hope you have a good dream tonight.

She texted back, Sorry I was super judgey about your scrubber, lol.

I just shrugged to myself.  She couldn’t possibly understand, and I realized in that moment that I felt sorry for her that she couldn’t.  Because Tad had taught me something that nobody else probably could have:  that my life was important.  Low-level employee, single, weird, one friend who wasn’t that great, and all the rest of it.  I was still important, and I still had power.

I looked at my one remaining pill in the bottle and thought, They gave me five pills because that’s all there is.  I knew he was going to die tonight.

I took my pill and went to sleep.

Tad was half-asleep himself, sitting against a tree, leaning a little to one side, and whistling.  He was thinner than he had been, very thin in fact, and I wondered how long it had been that he had been wandering.  Then I saw the black marks on his neck, and noticed that he was having trouble breathing between whistles.

His eyes opened.  “Hail, good friend.”

I was so stunned that I answered without meaning to.  “Hello Tad.”

He laughed a hollow laugh.  “Have you a name?”

“My name is Joe.”

“A fine name for a good friend.  You’ve been here with me all along, haven’t you?”

“Yes I have.”  I was desperately thinking, now that I finally had a chance to talk to him, of what I should say.  Should I be sympathetic?  Encouraging?  Should I mention God, since he clearly believed in God?  What the hell do I say?

“I felt you here and there, and always wondered what you were.  Are you a spirit?”

“No, I’m just a man.”  I paused.  “I’m from the distant future.”

He smiled.  “So there is a future for us.”

“Oh yeah, there really is!  Human beings can survive nearly anything, and we build great cities, and learn to fly large machines…” I was on a roll now, “We can cure and prevent diseases, and we travel all over the world, and we’ve even gone to the moon.”

His eyes were wide now, and still he was smiling.  “Such wonders!  I never would have thought.  Say,” he paused, and for the first time, I saw him drop his eyes in shame.  “Would a man in such a future be cured of his own skin?”

I said, “We teach our children that the color of a person’s skin does not determine their character.”  It didn’t seem enough.  “And I know your character, Tad.  It’s a good one.  A great one.”  Dammit, I was crying now.

“How fine, to know such a thing,” he said.  “You’re a kindly sort.”  He closed his eyes.

“I’ll remember you,” I said.

He said nothing more, and after a short time his breath rattled in his chest, and he died.

I woke up.

I woke up.

I have never had a waking like that in my entire life.  My eyes were full of tears, my lungs were burning, my throat was tight, and I sprang out of bed and told myself that I was going to live differently.  I was going to be kind to people.  I was going to work hard.  I was going to whistle and sing, and be happy, because that makes a difference.  A real one.

I realized there was a text from Alicka on my phone.

I’ll never be as smart as he is.  I’m a failure.

I texted back, You are a being born of the stars.

And I whistled on my way to work.