Timeless Jack

“Loved your plum poem, plump it was, too.” Jack commented on the Facebook post. “I have had such moments and you did justice to them.”

He said he had a friend arriving from Korea on Saturday and they were heading out to Kenting from the airport. I had invited him to join us at the Kaohsiung Writing Workshop on whose page he commented about my poem. “It would depend on how much we have talked and caught up,” he warned.

I told him that a mutual friend recommended him highly as a person and since my experience with him had also been flamboyant, I would love to meet him one day and have a drink.
   “So let me say this,” he responded. “Your brain intrigues me. You post stuff that make me read up and think and that is a gift.” I was flattered. I had found a fan.

      Not long after, I texted Jack before I left the pool. He contacted me and asked me up to his place for drinks and barbecue, even inviting me to stay overnight. I was excited and looking forward to going. Then, he dropped a bombshell

      Jack has cancer; I didn’t know until he cancelled the get-together at his place. He wrote not to buy the HSR ticket yet. In my personal life, my wife needed to get a biopsy as soon as possible for an irregular lump in her right breast. I reminded her and myself that we had to make positive vibrations. We had a good evening drinking wine and watching TV, playing with the cats.

Jack was the surrogate pain in my heart. When with my wife I broke into tears at the department store while we were having tea time, I told her it was for him, and it surely was for him, but it was for her, too.

     He went live on Facebook that day as my wife shopped for a credit card wallet at Chung-Yo. He hadn’t made a video like that before and he didn’t know why he was doing it then. “Why not?” he asked. He said the worst part of the cancer was that the pain got worse when he though it couldn’t get worse, and worse than that, he was alone, except for his cats. He hadn’t seen anyone since early February. He was not married and had no children. His friends didn’t live nearby.

      One of the most horrible things in the world is to be a stranger in a strange land with no one nearby, and to be stricken with cancer. At least there was the internet now to counter the isolation. I don’t know how he communicated with doctors, since his Mandarin isn’t that good but they must have spoken to him in English.

      I wrote that I had seen the video. He was cranky and said, “You are a sicker for punishment.” I responded, “Call me sick again for caring for you and I will cry.” He wrote back it was an auto correct error; he meant “sucker.” He was the first person I told about my wife’s condition.

When I rode the bicycle up the river the next morning, I sent a message to Jack asking how he was. When he didn’t respond, I contacted our mutual friend from Kaohsiung. He responded to Jack’s change of Facebook page to black with perplexity. Since his somber “live” Facebook video, I decided I would contact him on Facebook and visit him. I drew our friend from Kaohsiung in on him, too.

“Poor bastard,” was all he said.

On Monday, Jack’s strength back, he invited to me his place again. He asked why I was nice to him. I wrote back:
     “You liked some writing I posted once. You are liked by someone I like in Taiwan, and you told me about your cancer, a chance to cry in front of my wife without letting her know I was crying for her through you. Whatever God has planned for us, you are in my life and I'm in yours for the foreseeable future. May it be a long painless future.”

        I would go visit him for dinner and spend the evening but not sleep over. He wrote he lived in Zhu-dong in Hsinchu County and said he would pick me up at the HSR station.

      That night, I wrote a poem based on my interaction with Jack and with my tax guy, Frank, who took leave to fight cancer. It was about the two things in life we can’t avoid; taxes and death, and how we can ignore them for just so long. I asked Jack if he liked the poem. 

the guy that did my taxes is dying

passed the fee to the subsequent 

left me here to do it alone

where it is good to be alive

when not reminded of taxes or death

the river runs so sweetly in the sun

simple falls and little white water

swaying weeds in gentle breeze

butterflies for staring eyes

catches me downing darkened wells

every country falls apart

never take demise to heart

follow the floating ballerina 

dancing across the stage

like wing tips of egrets that flap away

fragile branches bend 

under a tiny bird's weight

wind-up Jack for popping the weasel 

before it is too late 

written in the fifth estate

     He was too tired to chat. I wrote him I was looking into train schedules to go up to meet him.

     Jack wasn’t on Facebook or Messenger the day after saying he was leaving for twelve hours, for some reason, Thursday evening. I hadn’t confirmed I was going to see him the following day and I didn’t know if he saw my message. If I didn’t get a response, I would call him on the number our mutual friend gave me. 

I imagined someone like me might have been giving Jack the creeps that he took himself off Facebook Messenger and wouldn’t pick up his cell phone or return text messages until five days later, after he said he would sign off for twelve hours, that day after I arranged to go visit.

He wrote back saying he was having visitors that afternoon I was coming and had no strength to see me, too, so he was incommunicado. I said I would defer to the ‘peeps’ with whom he was to see that Saturday afternoon and make it another day. He has that prerogative with terminal cancer.

 I was glad he was alive, but I was not contacting him until he contacted me again. The empathy I felt when my wife found she had a lump in her breast was still fresh. That Friday she was to find out what to do. I would let him contact me from now on but I would check-in on him. I did that next morning and he responded he was too drugged and sleepy to chat. When Jack contacted me to say he was working on a painting, he asked how my wife and I were doing. He was as concerned about me as I was with him. At least she had me to go through it with, he said. That brought up a discussion about his personal life. He had previously mentioned his lover had left him three years before but didn't explain how or why.

       He warned me about the ordeal my wife and I were about to enter; he called it “surrendering to all I upheld.” I knew what he meant. I changed the subject; it was too hard for me talking with a man with terminal cancer; his best day was one without pain. He assured me my wife’s stage two was treatable; I didn’t know what to say. 

I asked him when I could go visit him but he had a surprise for me; he was packing up to leave Taiwan to visit his critically ill mom in South Africa, and he was relocating to Cambodia afterwards. He had hurt his hand and wrote he needed help packing. I offered to go help; I waited for his response. He said come on up. High Speed Rail was closer to his home than Taiwan Railroad

     Since Passover/Easter was coming I thought it nice to use the shrink-wrap plastic Russian egg design my daughter’s friend had brought from her mom to bring to Jack along with homemade borscht and sour cream I was making from buttermilk and cream. Along with matzo, it would be an introduction to Jewish cuisine for him.

     My wife wasn’t joking when she said some force was trying to prevent me from visiting Jack; the trip had been delayed a few times. It was a mystery to both of us why I was going; I barely knew the guy on-line and we had never met. When I foolishly booked HSR tickets round-trip to Chiayi instead of Hsinchu, I felt the fates were against me. When she went to the 7-11 to pick the tickets up, the clerk alerted her to my mistaken reservation when he commented ‘south to Chiayi’ when she knew I was going north. It made me consider why I was going.

Was it for charity or friendship I was going; I had never met Jack before and would probably never see him again. But he asked anyone on Facebook a few weeks earlier to help him pack after twelve years in Taiwan and move back to South Africa to visit his ailing mom; no one responded. His revelation that he had terminal cancer, as my wife went for her initial check-up, seemed like synchronicity. It was the right thing to do.

 Knowing me seemed to have lightened Jack’s load; he was hitting bottom when I lifted his spirits. He had gained 4 kg the previous month. But Jack was running a fever again for over two days and had no energy to have me visit. He was not optimistic he would get better in time. He asked for something to make him laugh and I sent a risqué Belle Barth record. The trip was on.

At the station, he picked me up in a dirty old car and drove a half hour to the three-floor shack he rented in the arm-pit of Hsinchu. Up a hill off the country road we went winding in impossible angles until he arrived at his space between two building outcroppings, a space occupied by the derelict son an unfriendly neighbor. Looking at him as he hesitantly moved his vehicle, I wondered why the wrong people get cancer. We sat in the disheveled dining area, the contents of the house for sale, and I noticed an unsalable clock with no hands on the wall.

 We went to lunch after an unwashed mug of coffee, down the hill to a western pub where everyone knew his name. He was going to have pancakes, and a steak, even if it killed him, as it could since he couldn’t digest, but the smell of the food made him happy. The pain would come back to haunt after I had left. He drove me back to the station.

A second trip was made to help him do gardening. I joined Jack in an extension of the squeezed space that was a garden overgrown with tropical weeds; we used two scythes to rip it and get to the cement blocks he was going to sell for moving money. We joked and chatted and worked like there was nothing wrong with him, but when we stopped for a break and he grimaced with pain, I realized the activity had kept his mind off of it temporarily; if only he had constant distraction.   

On the third trip, I drove to Hsinchu because Jack was too sick to pick me up; it was the last Jack for the time wasting minutes driving around the back roads where he lived. He guided me to his place by smart phone video.

 There wasn’t much work; we mostly chatted. He was awaiting two dealers to take furnishings off his hands; both were late, one arriving after I had left at 1:20 pm. We couldn’t go out to eat because Jack wanted to wait. The dusty wall clock, sans hands, hung in the kitchen meaning Jack was timeless; not out of time. So long as he had a reason to keep hanging on. There was no better medicine than being in love, which he was. Michelle was her name, and they were each other’s shamans. Jack had told me their story twice so I knew it was true, or rehearsed.  

We got lunch boxes down the road in my car and came back to eat. I ate it all but he had one bite. His box would last through Sunday, he said. When he started in with the shaman spiel about talking to the dead, I asked him if he knew about his own illness coming. He said yes and then went into the monologue about meeting three different Michelle’s until finally meeting the right one; the one he is looking forward to settling with in Cambodia when he returns from visiting his mom in South Africa. He wa leaving next Monday evening. He was in obvious pain. Though I heard the story before at the pub, I let him speak. Towards the end, I told him so, and explained that I hadn’t stopped him though he told me the story before. I asked again about seeing his own future cancer. He said he did; he was writing a novel in 2013 about the second Michelle getting cancer but every time he wrote “she” he felt uneasy until he changed it to the first person; that’s when he realized it.

The next I heard from him, he was on a twenty-three hour layover in Dubai, returning from South Africa, on his way back to Hsinchu for one night to pick up four tubs of belongs to ship to Cambodia where he would rendezvous with Michelle, his long-distance lover from South Korea. They wouldn’t live happily ever after, but happily day by day. However, I had my doubts about the reality of there being a Michelle until one day Michelle contacted me on Messenger, knowing I was Jack’s friend, and asked if I knew where he was. Jack wasn’t having hallucinations about her after all.

I started on the second loaf of sourdough bread I’d bought in Hsinchu that had been frozen since we last met. I thought of him and the song "Sour Milk Sea" eating the first slice. “Get out of your sour milk sea; you don’t belong there,” went George Harrison’s lyrics sung by Jackie Lomax. The next morning I heard from Jack; he was cat-sitting in South Korea while Michelle visited her family in the states before joining him in Cambodia.

I don’t believe Jack or Michelle is a shaman, but I do believe in the power of love; how we are all catalysts for change. I wrote: “I, too, have birthright intuition, but it's still in my closet; my 'coat of arms' reveals itself in translucent grains of sand under my eyelids before I sleep. My wisdom benefits my allies through synchronicity. It makes me wonder if I'm a shaman, too.”

 Jack assured me; I was not a shaman. “Teacher and chronicler come to mind; bard; carrier of the flame, but not a shaman.”