Threesome: Book One: Simon Say’s

Copyright © 2019 by J.R. Gonzalez.

ISBN:                    Softcover                        978-1-7960-1883-7

                             eBook                            978-1-7960-1882-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Rev. date:02/27/2019

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter One A Labor of love

Chapter Two Rumors and secrets better left unspoken

Chapter Three The song IS over

PROLOGUE

"Your greatest enemy will hide in the last place you’d expect.

—Julius Cesar

In the spirit of the great television show, The Twilight Zone which many of us sat faithfully and watched every time we could, even during the Halloween season when they would do the marathons and we’d seen those episodes over and over again as we grew to adulthood, we never tired of the cool of Mr. Rod Serling as he calmly smoked a cigarette on public television and explained the lesson or message behind the episode they were about to present to our eager eyes and ears, I felt at times that I could never get enough of them, and sometimes when I saw them again I caught something that I missed the last time I saw it.

As Rod Serling explained the story of the day, I never got tired of hearing about the dimension between sight and sound, and what’s after that sharp turn in the road ahead, and when the deal being offered sounds too good to be true it’s because it probably is, and your making a deal with the devil who will never let you win unless you are smarter than he is.

He really had a knack for making you see things in a different light, hear words that were spoken before and yet this time they held meaning in your life; maybe it touched on a recent death in the family or some other such tragedy, and the odd thing was; it was sometimes as if they knew that someone you loved very much was gone now and you needed to see how what might have transpired after they closed their eyes for the last time in this world.

He also did a lot of the work on the behind the scenes on the show, writing, producing or working on them in some way that would make it work for our edification and enlightenment as he would say, and his handprints were all over ninety-two of the 156 episodes.

He is credited with three quotes that I know of, and a forth that wasn’t listed where I looked, but they are, and as tall as he was to us; he was only 5’4’’ tall, he said:

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.

Imagination…its limits are only those of the mind itself.

And the forth one, the one that resonates within my skull and I wish we’d discussed it:

If you have to take something to write, that isn’t you!

There were a number of great actors on that show over the years, I don’t mean they were just talented, because they certainly were; some were even special, they graced the screen with their mere presence and then their acting skills; but at the time, it was early in their careers and they were maybe just starting off because they were so young and yet they were so eager to work on this show because of the advanced thinking and programming that went into it.

For example; Agnes Moorehead, alone looking like she lived a thousand years in the desert and without speaking a word she fights off an invasion from outer space.

Seasoned veterans of the stage and screen now, and in some cases, not whom you might expect to see in a television production; and everyone I have spoken to about the show has a favorite episode and I am not surprised at the ones I hear them talk about; a number of them talk about the episode with William Shatner and the gremlin that only he can see on the airplane.

On the internet somewhere, I saw a picture of Mr. Shatner at the window of that plane, looking horrified, and outside the window is Mr. Spock, complete with Vulcan ears instead of the gremlin in the movie, this show touched so many that it must be a universal thing, I think, or maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.

Or there’s the one about the airplane that keeps landing in the wrong time zone or era, everyone has a favorite but my personal favorite is the either the one I spoke about, with Agnes Moorehead, (Born December 6th, 1900, Clinton MA, Died, April 30th, 1974 in Rochester, MN) where she’s alone in the desert in a cabin and a UFO lands on her roof and she has to fight the invaders off by herself; or the one with Burgess Meredith (Born: November 16th, 1907, Cleveland, Ohio; Died: December 9th, 1997, Malibu, CA) and he was in four episodes of the Twilight Zone altogether, but I liked him in All the Time in the World, where he was married to a shrew that wouldn’t let him read, and one day he comes out and finds the world destroyed and everyone else gone and thinks he has all the time in the world" to read the books he loves so much, until his extremely thick glasses fall on the ground while he’s celebrating and they break.

I remember a very young Robert Redford as death, disguised as a wounded police officer who works his way into the confidence of a frail lady who fears death until she speaks to it, or him; the one about the man that sold trinkets out of a suitcase to the little children that believed in him.

The leaves falling off the tree on the wall bringing death closer with each leaf that fell until it is barren, or the elders/children playing kick the can; Lee Marvin as the boxer fighting the unbeatable robot; there were so many good stories and so little time to relive them here, but "Dead Man’s Shoe’s was classic too and it would be so very difficult to choose only one.

That being said, with my apologies to the great Mr. Serling; "Consider if you will…Simon, the only son of Rose and Jack and the one that hears the voices of the dead and doesn’t know how to shut them out; he is compelled by those voices to write things down and do things for them as they confess their crimes or misdeeds, so that they might rest easier; reveal where they hid the bodies, the money or both.

The harder he tries to keep them out and fight for a normal life; the harder they fight to get in…but then, in this world we find ourselves in, what is a normal life anymore…I don’t think there is an answer for that.

Have you ever felt compelled beyond reason to do something that made absolutely no sense to you? Maybe something that you never would have considered doing before, something so out of the ordinary for you, ever felt driven so hard by things that you cannot see nor hear and yet, to you they are very real?

Then maybe you can understand and forgive our friend Simon because he was never really given a chance and was offered no choice in the matter; no ever asked him how he felt about it after all and the clock of his life was already winding down from the moment that he entered this world so unceremoniously.

CHAPTER ONE

A Labor of love

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

—Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)

The day that Simon came into this world was a day like any other for the rest of us, the rest of the world was unaware of the event as that unremarkable day, there were no big events, nothing of significance in the reports that went out to the televisions across America, it was for all intents and purposes a normal day, sunny, as always because it was California after all; where at times, it almost seems as though it’s against the law for rain to fall here.

That day was mostly unremarkable unless you asked his mother Rose, who suffered through three days of labor by the time he was born, and though they thought it physically impossible she screamed for the entire three days, at anyone that she saw as they passed by her room, and for some reason, especially loudly at her husband, Jack, who tried really hard to be patient but he was out of his bailiwick and he knew it; though they’d taken many classes to prepare him for the birth of his child, there were the things they planned for and expected, and then there were the unexpected things that always seemed to happen at the worst of times or when they didn’t expect it to happen.

Or you might have asked his father who experienced both ends of that spectrum; the joyous birth of his only son on the one hand; and that his days were coming to an end and he was not going to be there when his son grew to manhood.

Rose was not that strong-willed to begin with, and for her; even a little bit of pain would have elicited at least some loud complaining from her, some protestation at least; some loud whining and grinding of her teeth, but this far worse than that and though it was not her first time on that table it did not at all feel like that first time, but she thought that possibly was because child died shortly after she was born.

This time, she felt as though her insides were trying to get out, she kept screaming about her new-born son grabbing at the lining of her stomach and bringing it out with him as he went along the birth canal because he was afraid to face the world and felt that he wasn’t ready yet.

The pain was so sharp and painful that she began to wonder if all births would be like this from now on; some kind of punishment for losing the first child under circumstances that were never explained to her and she never fully understood.

They explained it by calling it sudden-death syndrome but that made no sense to her; she was so confused, so delirious that when they said that, she thought they were talking about the games her husband liked to watch when his brother Rudy came over, the games that ended in a tie and they played longer; something else she could not understand because she thought the game was over when the clock ran out.

The first labor was over much quicker and with very little pain and she wondered again if this was pay back for that loss, maybe she wasn’t meant to have that child and the pain was twice as painful and then some, just to remind her of that.

As confused as she as at that point, she thought that maybe that was one so easy because the baby was already dead, or maybe she was dying at that point and it just took a few weeks to catch up to her; just long enough to fall in love with her sweet face and what she thought might have been a personality.

Though she functioned for a short time; she breathed and moved her hands and feet as expected, she reacted enough that they declared her normal and free of any disabilities as they called them at the time, but when they spoke about it later they all noted one thing: that there was very little crying, no indication of discomfort or even hunger as you might expect from an infant; it was more of what they might have called a quiet expectancy if they were asked what described her best.

When they could stand it no longer, they tried sedating her as much as they could, which only worked for a short time; they couldn’t give her anything stronger because it would surely affect the child in her womb and maybe the process that she was going through, nothing was certain at a time like this.

But for Rose, there was no amount of sedative that might have been administered to her at such a delicate time that would help, she loved the thought of being a mother; especially after what happened and yet she was afraid as well, she kept thinking that she didn’t deserve this; that every child was a blessing from God and as such, she was being trusted with the welfare and safety of that child until it grew to adulthood.

They tried to work around her as much as they could, finding things to do on other floors and such until it started to wake and bother the other patients who’d decided they’d had enough and were now screaming back at her, pandemonium was about to break out and it would take a long time to quell that.

When they could ignore her no longer and were forced to attend to her, they took her vitals again and after another twenty minutes of her screaming at them for taking so damned long when they noted that her heart rate was much higher than normal, even though she was highly agitated and in the process of giving birth it should not have been anywhere near that high.

Then her breathing became abnormal, but they thought that she was being a baby, and that with all of the screaming and shouting that she was doing that this was just part of the package they inherited with her and kept treating her and preparing her for the delivery of her child.

Then her heart rate started climbing again, and though they again thought that it was part of the process because she was spending so much energy as she tried to tell them about how much it hurt; she knew something was wrong and she couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t listen to her; try to help her deal with it, she grabbed at the nearest attendant and shouted in her face:

"GIVE ME SOMETHING FOR

THIS GOD-DAMNED PAIN!"

As they tried to deal with those symptoms and her behaviors they noted that her temperature was spiking now too, going extremely high and then dropping with no rhyme or reason for it, going as high as 102 and then dropping down as low as fifty-six degrees, when they tried to bring her a blanket to warm her she would by then become too hot, every time they tried to deal with it, they felt as though it would flip over to the other extreme; too hot one moment and too cold the next; by the time they reacted to it, her body reverted the other way so they were only able to stand at watch and hope it would stop soon, but they knew it wouldn’t.

During that time, there were a few other things happened that scared the hell out of them, though they were all seasoned veterans of the emergency room and witnessed many things in their time there that they never told anyone about, gruesome details of accident victims; others, victims of murder and the carnage that man expends on another when madness takes over. And sanity runs for the hills to escape.

As one of the nurses tried to cool her down, she noted that Rose dropped her right hand over the side rail and it looked uncomfortable so she tried to pick her hand up and place it back on the bed and she was forced to pull her hand back quickly because the skin on Rose’s wrist was so hot that it was uncomfortable to touch.

When another nurse checked a moment later, her skin felt cool to the touch and no feeling of warmth at all, yet they did notice a series of small bumps or blisters that erupted and the redness they left behind quickly faded away.

Some were asked about that later, they said it appeared that her skin was healing itself and though they were kept apart for a time so they couldn’t talk about it, they all gave the same description, though some were not that comfortable with words and didn’t have the vocabulary prior to that day to testify as they did.

The temperature was a little hotter than normal that day as well, so they felt that even mother nature was not helping this event go smoothly as they hoped; normally that was during the rainy season, Jack remembered his birthday when he was eleven and given a bright, shiny red bicycle and he couldn’t ride it because the rain was coming down so hard for that entire week.

The rain was absent that year, from February and all the way through the so-called Ides of March it was extremely warm, which led the experts to warn us that it was a sign of global warming and that we needed to change our wasteful ways and do something about it before we lost our protection from the sun so high above us.

The doomsayers said it was a sign of the end of days, the apocalypse that would end man’s reign on this planet for a long time to come; the experts that came out of the woodwork to explain why things were going south just because people were uncomfortable with the way things were at the time.

For others, the explanations sometimes seemed to make things worse, as though they were being forced to focus on things that they were trying to ignore; the man that works outside in the hot sun trying to ignore the heat and do what he was hired to do, wiping away the sweat from his brow being the only acknowledgment that he was uncomfortable until his co-worker said, Damn it’s hot today! as he stopped to wipe his brow as well and then take a sip of water from a bottle he kept nearby.

The first man would stop long enough to give him a look that said shaddup and then patiently say’s Let me ask you a question! and doesn’t wait for the other to ask what it is before he continues.

Do you think it’s warmer over there than it is here, where I’m standing? he said, Do you think that I don’t know that it’s hotter today than it was yesterday? He says, I’m trying not to think about that, and keep my mind focused on what I have to do instead, it makes the job easier and maybe it doesn’t even feel as hot because I’m not thinking about it! he tells him.

Understand? he says when the other man doesn’t say a word, I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just trying to get through this day and get back home to my family! he said and then gets back to work.

For a lot of people, the changes in the weather only seemed to make things worse, it was as if at times, people left the house planning to get wet, to be uncomfortable the rest of the day so that they might have something to complain about that others could see and identify with; misery loves company after all, everyone knows that.

So maybe in some cases it came down to that, a state of mind, and if you focused on the though things, the distractions that made life and everything else harder then they stayed difficult and challenging; but if you instead took your mind somewhere else and made lemonade as they say, then they might called you optimistic all your life, so maybe it was just perspective after all.

They got her to the hospital on time, actually with plenty of time, and Jack didn’t drive fast because in normal situations she really freaked out if he did, she’d act as though he didn’t see the car stopped in front of him, or that he couldn’t control the car at that speed though he hardly, if ever went more than ten miles over the limit, depending on traffic of course.

It wasn’t her fault, it was something she fought since early childhood because of nightmares she had; and though they were not real, she’d never been in so much as a fender bender in her life, but they looked, felt, and especially sounded so very real to her.

In the worst part of the nightmare, she saw images of a woman driving a car alone, and at first it seemed fine, just a woman driving along one of many freeways in Southern California just like any one of a thousand other women in cars at the same time that were going home after work.

As she drove along, oblivious to the fact that her life was about the end, she saw the driver grab at her neck as though she was bitten but she never saw any bug or insect that might have done it; she also noticed that the woman was involved in a chain-reaction of cars colliding with her and around her at a high rate of speed after that.

She saw the woman careening down the highway very much like a pinball as she went, bouncing along and off this car or that truck until she crashed head-on into a pole or something and then the car burst into flames; and though she was not there when it happened, nor did she know anything of the woman involved in the crash; she felt a great sense of loss at her passing.

The other thing was; she would never forget the sound of her screams as she died; she was fully awake and aware of all that happened after the car exploded into flames but she couldn’t escape and the smell that rose off her and the terrible screams haunted poor Rose for many years as she grew; she could never explain them because she didn’t know where they came from, and since she couldn’t explain them, she had no real resource to exorcise it out of her psyche; out of her mind and especially out of her life so she carried it underneath the veneer of her smile.

Even as a very small child she knew that it was nothing to do with her; later, she met a psychologist that explained to her that Sometimes we are receptive to the other world that is out there! as they explained it, Open to ideas that are floating out there in the hemisphere, waiting for such an opening to exploit! and since it made sense to her it actually did help her to get over it.

On the ride to the hospital Jack almost ran over a kid that thought that the red light meant everyone but him and didn’t slow down nor even look to the side until he was almost hit; and then he turned just long enough to give the finger before he kept going down the sidewalk.

The problem began when they realized that she was hemorrhaging; there was blood coming from her nose and ears, then her toxicity levels began to rise and there was a distinct possibility that it would poison her or maybe kill the baby within her womb and it was serious enough that they brought in the doctor on call in case her own doctor didn’t get there in time as it seemed and were talking about a C-section delivery now; the one thing Rose asked them not to do unless it was absolutely necessary.

That doctor was scrubbed and ready to operate but was delaying the procedure for as long as he could manage simply because she wasn’t his patient, his excuse was that her own doctor knew her better and he stood to the side; gowned and ready but very much like a statue because he refused to move at all.

It was an excuse that he needed because he felt that he wasn’t ready; he was on call because he needed the experience and though it was the first time he worked that shift and in that capacity; he was hoping that he would coast through the night with no problems as had been the way it went for the past three days and everyone thought it would hold; that there would be no incidents and though this was such a common event delivering a baby; he stood there so silently as he was praying that she would hold on and he wouldn’t have to do anything.

He was speaking to himself as he stood there, at once praying softly and then reciting the manual; There are so many things that could go wrong at such a delicate time! he said, Best not to think of those things! he said and then coughed into his mask.

Though she knew it was the doctor that said all of those things, she saw his lips move and knew it was the doctor but heard her father’s voice as he spoke, there was a phrase he used when he was tired of whatever the argument was and wanted to end it, and his being tired of talking about it meant that they were tired of talking about it as well; especially when he would say the words, I don’t want to talk about it! which again meant that none of us did either, even if we wanted to.

There were already concerns that the baby was threatening to turn around and of course, that meant becoming tangled in its own umbilical cord and everyone knows what happens after that; it isn’t a pretty site and can be quite challenging to the inexperienced doctor who kept hoping that is colleague wasn’t hiding out in the back nine at the local golf course when he should have been here to deliver her baby.

As doctors were here before, they tried to be ready for anything that might go wrong, anything that might set things off on the wrong path because there’s all of the preparation and training that they went through and then there’s real life and sometimes the difference between them is a vast chasm of wild and often disorganized panic.

It didn’t take much for it to go bad either, they didn’t always need the mistakes of rookies or first-timers for it to go bad because even the so-called veterans sometimes panicked; made it worse because it was always when everyone needed them the most.

Everyone thought they knew what to do and wouldn’t make it worse and then seeing someone that knew what to expect and what to do about it lost in panic mode made it even scarier than before when there was always the element of unpredictable, of human nature.

Sometimes all it took was one small but unexpected noise; or a condition by the patient that was not foreseen; a reaction to the procedure, the body rejecting the treatment because it was such a trauma to the soul, anything that was unforeseen or unplanned; even so much as a nervous tic at the wrong time. Or maybe a tray or some implement that was dropped at the most quiet and delicate moment, even at times going to the wrong room and prepping it for the next procedure and having the wrong staff for that operation or the wrong tools that were meant for a different operation next door, you just never knew when you were dealing with human nature and frailties; there was no way to plan for everything.

The physician that was supposed to deliver the baby was the kind that blamed or credited everything to god, if it went well he was happy to say that it was The Lord’s hand that guided me! and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief at the result, but if it went wrong he would say that that’s why god invented insurance! and when it was once pointed out to him by a new nurse at the hospital who was only there to observe and hadn’t earned her scalpel yet and wasn’t trusted to do anything more told him; But god didn’t invent insurance! Someone else did! and waited for someone to agree with her but they knew better and turned away from her with a smirk or a laugh.

Who do you think gave him the idea? the physician would ask, as if that made the most sense and that she should have known that already.

He was also a germophobic and seemed to be getting worse about it, concerned that things weren’t cleaned enough or sterilized long enough to kill everything, he once told his