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The Insurance Salesman |
| Written by JJ Tyler | |
| Wednesday, 20 February 2008 | |
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Share it:      I sat Indian style on the road, watching my Lexus burn like a camp bonfire. The emergency crew showed up and tried to save me, but when they found out it was too late, they let the fire run its course with the fire crew spraying it down. The whole thing only lasted 20 minutes or so, a surprising reminder to the living how quickly it can all turn into smoke. I didn't realize that I was dead at first, no. I tried talking to several of the people, and at first I thought they were ignoring me because of their duties regarding life or death, but they were ignoring me because the physical me still sat in the driver's seat. Toasty like. After the tow truck took my ashes of a car and drove on down the road, the taillights disappearing beyond the deserted intersection in the literal dead of night, I began walking. I wish I could explain what it is like, walking, when you don't weigh anything. Your feet are as comfortable as they are when you got them propped up on the coffee table, watching your favorite legal drama, if that is your thing. There is no pain for me here. No physical pain. So, I did what I probably would have done if I were still alive and went to a motel. Instead of checking in with the desk, I just found an empty room, walked through the door, and sat on the bed. To my surprise, although I don't know why this would be surprising, I sank through the bed and landed on the floor. I crawled out of the bed, swimming through it like it was a light fog, and I tried to turn the TV on. This also proved impossible to do. I would have given it all for any type of distraction, the Gideon Bible placed in the desk, a trip to the ice machine for some cold cubes of water, or even a read through of the phone book. But all these things were gone now. I was just a visitor in my environment, unable to interact or socialize with it in any way. How am I telling this to you now you ask? That will be answered with your patience, of course. When I was releasing carbon dioxide in this world, I was an Insurance Salesman. In fact, I was one of the best. My company, Stanton's Protection, was actually sending me to a sales conference in Dallas when I had the wreck. I was the companies representative, their poster boy of success, and I was going to lap it up with all the smiles I could muster. More contacts meant more business, more business meant more bonuses, and more bonuses meant I could eventually buy the fishing boat I had wanted for my entire adult life. Like some kind of beacon of success, the fishing boat had been on my mind throughout that life, pushing it and prodding me on. Silly now, I know. But I didn't have a family, I had given up on the nuclear unit long ago, and I was totally for the bachelor's lifestyle. Love and children's children? Who needs em? Not that I was against those things, but if they didn't work out for me, why should I worry about having them? Back to my vocation, I was one of the best salesmen you ever knew. If you already had coverage, I would find supplemental coverage that would in fact, be better and cheaper than the coverage you had, and then I would convince you that you couldn't afford not to get that coverage, and then you would be mine. I would become your best friend, your poor man's therapist and financial planner in less than 20 minutes. Was I always successful? No. Back when I sold vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner parts instead of life and home protection, I had been spit in the face, threatened by gun shot, and laughed at. I truly believe those were experiences that forged me into who I am today, ghost and all. So, in that motel, I realized that I needed to overcome the situation. I didn't need to allow the situation to control me--look for the win/win--all basic sales techniques. I laid on the floor and tried to go to sleep. The problem was that when you were not alive, you didn't need any sleep. The eternally rested need no rest, I guess. So I laid there and thought till sunlight, contemplating my new stage in life, and half of the time battling with myself to stay sane. After the sun poked its brilliant light over the horizon, I went out to see people. I knew that talking to them would be asinine, but I wanted to see them, to watch them. The front desk help wasn't that much fun to watch. He was overweight and ate his own dandruff. This wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I went out to the highway, where there weren't many cars at that time of morning, and the silence of the road was deafening. Alone wasn't even a word that covered it. I wished I felt alone. This was something new, something that felt that the inside of your soul had been hallowed out, and there was only empty stale air left, and when you breathed this air it escaped through your nostrils, reminding you of all that you were and all that you lost. I kept walking and eventually came to a small town, 30 miles south of Dallas. I stopped at a gas station there, wishing I had a tank to fill or a hunger to quench. I was there for days, sitting in front of the two swinging doors, listening to the bells chime upon every entrance and exit. I must have seen thousands and thousands of people, gassing up, using the facilities, picking up their Marlboro Lights. I tried to speak to each one of them, hoping that this curse had some type of loop hole, but no one said anything back. No one looked my way. I gave up, and walked on. The highway traffic picked up closer to town. There were sounds and clouds of exhaust that I couldn't smell. Right before I got to Dallas, there was a small black truck that had a flat tire. It pulled up in front of my line of direction, the tires crunching the gravel on the shoulder of the road. A portly man plopped out of the truck, cursing and spitting as he did so. He went to the back and pulled out a jack out of his tool box. He walked around to the back, took a knee, and started working on the jack, continuing to curse his truck, God, and the maker of all trucks ever made. I kept walking, knowing that I couldn't offer any assistance, and if I could, I probably wouldn't want such company. As I walked by him, trying not to notice his large plumber's crack gleaming out of his pants, I heard him stop swearing. "Buddy, you wouldn't mind giving me a hand, would ya? This jack is from the 80's, and I can't get enough weight on it." He said, looking at me from the corner of his eye. I did a quick 180, and there was no one there but me. I answered back. "Who are you talking to?" He got up from his knee and waved a hand at me. "Never mind Schizo, I don't need any help from a nut job." He turned and walked back to the bed of the truck, digging through trash and empty beer cans to find another tool. I couldn't stop there. "Wait. I'll help you." I screamed, forgetting that I could hold no solid object and could not provide any assistance except for advice, which I doubt the large man with a goatee would take. I stepped to the tire, and put my hands towards the jack, while he continued to rustle in his pile o' cans. When I did, I fell through the jack, lost my balance, and fell through the truck head first. I would like to tell you that this was some intricate event where I got to see the inner makings of the truck, like the camera that goes through the bodies on C.S.I. But the problem is that there is no light in these enclosed spaces, so all I get to see is blackness. Quite a let down huh? When the man looked back my way, he only saw my legs sticking out underneath his tire, and he screamed, assuming D&D--insurance abbreviation for death and dismemberment. For such a large man with an intimidating goatee and attitude, he screamed quite like a woman. And that is not quite where the weirdness stopped either. Instead of yelling the things that a person might yell at that time such as: "Dear God", or "Oh the humanity.", the fat goateed man yelled: "Not this, not now." And if you took that statement, and let it stand alone, it might not have sounded like such a peculiar thing to say. But next, he threw the jack in the back of the truck which clanged against the tire well, and then he fired up the engine, taking off down the road, flat tire flapping. Before the tailgate passed over my head, I reached out and grabbed. I can't tell you why it was different, but I felt solid metal in my hands, surrounding my hands. When the truck took off, I held on, dragging behind it, my hand firmly placed inside the rear bumper. The pavement passed beneath me, and did not scrape my skin off like it would if I actually had skin. I rode the truck, my legs flapping in the air like loose sheets, well into the inner city of Dallas, past the nicer neighborhoods, big box stores, and green parks. When the truck finally slowed down at an intersection, taking a hard right that put a strain on the rim with the flat tire, the truck came to a stop in front of a duplex, half of which was well taken care for with a prim yard and trimmed hedges, and the other half looking the exact opposite, with dead grass, a forest of weeds, and newspapers and ads stacked up upon each other like a collection of bodies waiting to be taken on a meat wagon. Guess where the large man lived. When he stepped out of the small truck, its frame squeaked with relief, and he hurried inside and shut the door quickly, without looking back at my direction he went into the duplex, quickly locking the deadbolt on the other side. I stood up there amidst the broken concrete that still served as a drive way despite its gorges and vegetation willing its way through the cracks. I went into the household, stepping through the door as if it were a suggestion of a door, and not something made of wood and glue. The first thing I noticed in his home was the absence of light. The home builders had found it fit to not leave a ceiling light in the main room, but the owner hadn't tried to compensate with lamps of any kind. There was a chair, sitting lonely in the room in front of a TV, that had to have been made in the Carter administration. There was no sign of my friend. I debated going any further. I had already invaded his privacy, and I didn't want to send him into a psychological nose dive that he wouldn't be able to come back from. How would I have reacted if I met a ghost? Go to church? Run and scream while trying to hold my bladder? I went to the garage half of the house first, to think about how I should approach him, in not such a scarring manner. "Hi, I'm a ghost. Hello, I died, but I now want to be your friend, cause you are the only one who can see me." None of these things sounded right or believable. As I stepped into the garage, there was more darkness. As a ghost, I didn't know if I had some type of illumination switch somewhere, but I will be danged if I could find it. Not too much longer, the man came through the door, switching on the light switch on the wall and revealing what was there in the room. I stood in the corner, out of the way. He didn't look my direction as he walked over to the large box in the middle of the garage, resting on the cool concrete like a giant silent monster. The box was about 7 feet high, nearly touching the ceiling, and it was a good 6 feet in width on each side. He lifted the sheet of the box, checked something, nodded to himself and walked back out, leaving the door open and the light on. With such a strange shape and height, I decided to have a look for myself, to see what I could. There were long tubes with a reddish brown paper covering them, laid on top of about 50 bags of fertilizer. This wasn't a brand of fertilizer I had seen in my days as an amateur gardener either, but some type with foreign lettering on them, so different that I couldn't recognize the language. Foot steps behind me. I turned around,and the man dropped the container he was bringing in. When it landed on the garage steps, pieces of metal, jagged and filleted, spilled from it, covering the floor before him. He grunted, then turned and ran. I followed him. Before I realized that I hadn't used the stairs properly, and I was up to my knees in floor, he came back with a pistol the size of Wisconsin, and pointed it in my direction. "I am an American citizen, and I have rights. There is no warrant for my home, so you have no reason to be here." He said in a now calm voice. I pointed at my feet. "Do you notice anything wrong here? I'm not a cop. I just came by because you noticed me. But now I want to ask you what you got--" He cut me off by trying to shoot me. I didn't even feel the bullets, but wood chips from the wall behind me exploded and shot out around my head, letting me know that it was a good thing I wasn't flesh and bone. He dropped the gun. I became upset at this moment, mostly because the first person that had actually seen me in days was trying to kill me, but also because I realized that the makeshift nuke behind me, was meant for some innocent people, either that day or the next. When I became mad, I noticed a shaking around me. I stepped forward and grabbed his legs. When I did so, he screamed the girlish scream again, falling to his butt and hitting his head on the floor. My hands, when they touched them, were burnt. When I physically touched him, it looked as if it were my body seared from the accident, touching his pasty hairy skin. This made me recoil, and I sat down, legs still lost in the concrete, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating this new facet of my new life. He had knocked himself out, conveniently, and this bought me some time. A few moments later, I had a look around his apartment. There were maps--of course, it always seem like these evil ones use maps to plot out their carnage, pretty cliche--of where he had planned to use the bomb. A daycare, on the east side of town. One where there were mostly Black and Hispanic kids attending. Going over some of his other literature posted on the walls, I saw the motivation behind such an attack: White Power, 'Keep the Pure Race Clean'. There were stacks and stacks of history books: "Stories of the SS, History Of the Nazi Regime , Hitler's Softer Side." I figured that this guy was just a throwback to the Klan, or at least I hoped that he was a throwback, and that there weren't many others of his kind around. I walked over to his phone. It was a maroon phone, with large gray buttons. A sort of strange choice for a Nazi. I stood there for a few moments, feet on the ground now due to me going back out and using the stairs, and I reached. Went through it the first time. I grabbed the receiver the second time. The buttons were a little more tricky. Finally I got them, 911. I tried talking, but realized that the operator couldn't hear me. I put the phone down, knowing that they would trace the call and come, hopefully while the Neo-Nazi was still unconscious. They did. I watched. He was too disoriented to make a fight about it. And that's kind of how I learned my point of being here, like this--in this state. Ya, I know. I lied to you earlier--I actually know why I am here walking the earth, but I wanted to get your attention and keep you listening, as it is so nice to have someone listen to you. And I hope you forgive the long story, but you have only been the third person I have spoken to since the accident. The second was planning the murder of his wife. And now, I need to know what you plan to do. Since you can see me, evil must be abounding. So, what is it? ------ After finishing his story in the dark and cramped bar, the insurance salesman reached out to touch the lady sitting across from him. When he did, the lady saw his skin change from the normal pinkish flesh to a dry burnt flesh, with the teeth fully exposed as if the burnt corpse had just heard the funniest joke ever told. After he was fully changed, he said: "I want to stop you from doing what you are going to do." The person sitting across from the apparition dropped her glass. It shattered and the alcohol splashed her high heels. She turned and left the bar quickly, escaping out into the light of day. The ghost followed behind, slowly but constant, invisible to the other patrons in the corner bar. Copyright 2008 JJ Tyler |
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