Jason let out a sigh of relief as he plopped himself onto the sofa. It was another long, hard day at the office, as usual. He lit himself a cigarette and took a long pull. The phone rang a few minutes later but he didn’t bother to answer. The answering machine did the job for him.
“Hello? Jason? You’re still not home yet? Come on, man, stop hiding from me. Look, I got a gorgeous gal that I’m sure you’ll be interested in. you can be friends with her, for starters. Call me.”
As soon as Jason heard his friend hang up, he deleted the message. He refused to have anything to do with him. He trusted no one. No one at all. No gorgeous chic was going to draw his attention. He had himself to himself, and that’s that.
His living room seemed pretty empty after he got rid of all his photos. The last photo he had removed was the photo of his youngest daughter graduating from college. Aside from a few paintings, his walls were bare. Even the photo of him getting married with his wife (now his ex-wife) was burnt. It was as if he had cut off all relationship with every human in the world, including his own flesh and blood.
It felt really alone in the house he lived in, but he embraced the loneliness. After another long day surrounded by people he refused to trust (except his boss, which was a forced one), he was glad to be in a place with nobody at all. Nobody to trick him, nobody to cheat him, nobody to even rob him out of his happiness. He was glad to be alone.
Well, almost.
Occasionally, even loneliness bugs him.
--:--
Jason lay still on his bed, unable to sleep. The silence was pretty deafening, as if everyone in the whole world was dead, leaving him the only human alive. It even made his dark bedroom even darker.
It’s been almost 3 years since he lived in this completely solitude life. The first time he tried it, it drove him to tears every night. Almost every bedtime for the first few months, he cried himself to sleep. Now that e had gotten used to it, he was beginning to have second thoughts about choosing this type of life in the first place. The feeling of no one there to do him harm was OK, but the feeling of no one to talk to, to pour out his true feelings was quite bad. Maybe he should…
Jason shook his head. He almost lost his guard there. He chose this life and he himself thought that this life was better than anything else in the world. No way was he going back to the way he was. If he were to choose one thing, he’d better stick to it. He turned to one side and forced himself to fall asleep.
Moments later, he heard a faraway jingling. At first he tried to ignore it, but the jingling continued without stopping. It was a pleasant sound to hear, but if it goes on and on non-stop, it could be pretty annoying. And that’s how Jason felt. He got up in a thrice, picked up his baseball bat (he had it during high school) and rushed downstairs to see who was making such a racket at this ungodly hour.
He wasn’t kept in the dark for long—there, on his front door, hung a crystal bell hanging from a silver string, jingling and jangling like mad. Weird though, because it was jingling crazily when there wasn’t a whiff of wind anywhere.
“So you’re the one keeping me awake, eh?” Jason growled as he grabbed the bell. “I’ll show you what’s it like to mess with me!”
So saying, Jason brought the bell down to the solid floor hard, smashing it into a trillion pieces. If that wasn’t enough, he even brought his bat onto the pieces and almost clubbed it into dust. He couldn’t control himself. Somehow, he had vented all his pent-up anger onto that harmless little bell. He only stopped when he heard a loud bellow from the neighbour complaining about the noise.
“What am I doing?” Jason suddenly felt foolish of himself as he slumped down to the floor, panting slightly. He stared at the crystal dust on the floor and felt even more stupid.
All of a sudden, as if there was an invisible wind blowing, the crystal dust gathered together at Jason’s feet. It stayed there for a few seconds and, to Jason’s astonishment, began to mend itself back together again. The dust collected itself, forming into solid pieces and slowly stuck itself together, fragment by fragment, until it became the original crystal bell. The silver string even threaded itself into the bell’s tiny loop, making the finishing touch.
Jason stared long and hard at what he had just witnessed. It was too unbelievable. He pinched and slapped himself, thinking that he was having a very extraordinary dream. He wasn’t, though. He touched his forehead, thinking that he had gone mad. Maybe, maybe not. He poked at the crystal bell. It was real, alright. He suddenly felt himself unable to trust even his own judgments. He had to make sure his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him.
He picked up the bell and smashed it again, but this time without reducing it to dust. Again, the bell mended itself, like rewinding a scene from a video tape. He tried burning the bell, but the burnt mark disappeared almost immediately before his eyes. He tried flushing it down the toilet, but it was immediately spit out and was dry as a bone instantly.
Jason was dumbstruck. He had never come across anything as bizarre as this. The belt continued to jingle and jangle in Jason’s hand, pointing towards the direction of the door. Jason couldn’t help but ask the bell directly, “What is it you want?”
The bell pointed towards the door.
“You want me to go outside?”
The bell jingled urgently.
“Why?”
The bell stopped abruptly, as if hesitant to answer.
“I’m not going out there in the middle of the night if you don’t bloody tell me what’s going on.”
Jason felt utterly stupid talking to a bell, but there’s nothing else he could do to know the bell’s intention.
“If I take out my laptop, will you talk to me? I mean, type it out?”
The bell jingled softly.
Jason rushed to his study and hunted for his laptop. He had placed it in a small briefcase on the high shelf. He used to do that so that his kids would not attempt to do it in ruins. He was surprised that he still had that habit after his whole family left him. He took down the laptop, plugged it in and turned it on. After entering the Microsoft Word, he held the bell loosely over the keyboard and said, “OK. Type away.”
The bell remained unmoving.
“Come on now. Tell me who the heck you are.”
The bell moved slowly up and down, clicking onto the keyboard. Minus the punctuation and spaces, it was pretty easy to read.
YOUCANCALLMEANYTHINGYOULIKE
“Alright then, I’ll call you ‘Brat’.”
THATSNOTVERYNICE
“Well, you said I can call you anything I like! Besides, you woke me up in the middle of the night for no reason! Doesn’t that sound like what a brat would do?”
SORRY
“What is it you want from me?”
GOOUTFULFILLYOURDESTINY
Jason wrinkled his nose. “Destiny? What destiny? What do you mean by that?”
SEEKANDYOUWILLFIND
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This has got to be crap, right? I mean…”
The bell was moving faster now that it was being denied and ignored: SEEKANDYOUWILLFINDYOURDESTINYAWAITSYOUHAVETOTRUSTME
“Woah, woah, woah! Hold your horses! Trust you? I’m sorry but I don’t trust anybody. Not anymore!”
The bell kept still for a couple of seconds, then started typing: THENYOULLHAVETOLEARNAGAIN
“I’ve out my trust on people and they end up stabbing me in the back. How would I know you bloody won’t stab me in the back too?”
IDONTINEVERWILL
“Yeah, right!”
TRUSTMEFORNOW
Jason stared at the bell. He began to contemplate its words. Should he or should he not trust the bell? It’s just a thing, not a person that would betray him just like others did, yet it’s quite alive, to be exact, so it can be regarded as a person, not a thing. He had lost his trust in everyone around him; could he be able to put trust on a thing that has a mind of a person? Would he be able to even start trusting somebody or…anybody? Jason let out a long sigh.
“Where shall we go?”
The bell jingled before replying: IWILLLEADTHEWAY
“What am I supposed to do now? Cease to exist?”
LEAVEYOURPASTBEHINDLEAVEEVERYTHINGYOUONCEWEREBEHINDJUSTSTARTPACKINGWHATISNECESSARYANDLETDESTINYDOTHEREST
“Whatever you say. But I’m bringing this laptop, so we can talk.”
ASYOUWISH
Jason got up, went to his bedroom and rummaged through his cupboard. He took out a few pairs of boxers, some socks, some men’s underwear, a few T-shirts and jeans and a number of casual wears, some formal clothes and a few different kinds of shoes—sneakers, shoes with shoelaces, sport shoes—two or three pairs each. He threw out a suitcase and stuffed them all into it. Then he grabbed a backpack and filled it with anything edible from the kitchen: canned food, junk food, a few cans of beer and a few instant cup noodles, tea bags and instant coffee packets with a flask to go with. He even stuffed a few books between them. He had never felt so busy before in his life.
Finally, he checked his wallet. He threw away all his credit cards and business cards that were piling in it, leaving one credit card, which was his favourite. He knew he had to give it up as soon as he finds himself unable to pay the debts, but he kept it anyway. He made sure his identity card was there, of course, and his driving license. Apart from these and a few thousand bucks, the whole wallet was pretty light and empty, much to his surprise.
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