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answered the phone
when I called, she hung it up immediately. I never knew what to do
in those moments, so I usually did nothing. I would always receive
a call from Jeremy later on so at least she had the decency to tell
him I had called.
    I didn’t visit with them. Jeremy and Wyatt
came out to see me once and that was nice. We spoke mostly about
our childhoods; we laughed a little. The strain on our relationship
did give me the opportunity to realize how important they were in
my life. I could only hope that they felt the same way. When you’re
a kid, you fight with your siblings or you ignore them. Generally,
siblings are apart in age and they build their own social lives.
Sometimes they compete. More often than not, there is an animosity
that builds between them. But if things go well, that animosity
fades with maturity. No matter what our differences were, my
brothers and I all came from the same place. The three of us shared
something that no one else in the world possessed and that bond was
surprisingly strong.
    On Wednesday morning, the 3rd of October, I
got out of bed, showered, dressed, drank some coffee, and went to
work. Only when I arrived did I realize that something was wrong. I
had offhandedly noticed that the train was more empty than usual,
but the light of day seemed right. There had been nothing to tip me
off until I arrived at an empty office. Since I don’t have a key, I
was forced to wait outside the door for someone to show up. That
someone was Estelle Goldblatt, the company receptionist. She was
due in, daily, thirty minutes before everyone else. She was more
surprised to see me than she normally would have been but declined
comment. In fact, she practically ignored me, opening the door and
going inside without even holding it for me.
    I began to get that nervous feeling in the
pit of my stomach. The office looked the same so I couldn’t have
missed that much time. But, clearly I had missed enough to
raise a few eyebrows. My desk was disturbed. At least it hadn’t
been cleared out. There was, however, the definite indication that
someone had been sitting there and using my computer. As I switched
it on, I heard someone enter at the front. There were whispers and,
just as the computer finished booting and I saw the date, I
realized that it was my boss who had just arrived.
    Needless to say, I was in a meeting with her
inside of ten minutes.
    “Where the hell have you been?” she
asked.
    What could I say? I hadn’t told anyone at
work about my problem except Morty, and I wanted it kept that way.
But now it seemed that I would have to come clean or lose my job
(which I’d probably lose anyway). It was not Wednesday, October
3rd. It was Tuesday, October 9th. I had blacked out for almost a
week. My boss was convinced I’d skipped out for a vacation to the
Caribbean, which was ridiculous.
    “You never called in,” she said. “You didn’t
take any time. You didn’t answer your phone. I even asked someone
to go by your apartment, but you didn’t answer the door. I was just
about to begin interviewing.”
    So I explained the situation to her, using
the term “blackout” instead of “time jumping”, which was my
suspicion. Of course, I could produce all of my medical records
(which would have been reported to my company for insurance reasons
anyway) as proof of my condition. But they were inconclusive. All
they would prove is that I had been seeking medical advice on the
condition. I could ask Morty to testify on my behalf, but I hated
to put him in the middle of it. Besides which, he didn’t
necessarily know that I was telling the truth.
    “You mean to tell me,” she said in a very
snide way that I did not appreciate but would never mention, “that
you were home the whole time, passed out in bed…”
    “Blacked out,” I corrected.
    “Look at you, Mathew,” she said.
    So I looked at me.
    “If you were passed out, forgive me, blacked
out, in your bed for a week, you’d be a rotting