Day 36 - Only Laugh - Chapter 36 (1781 words)

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ONLY LAUGH WHEN IT HURTS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 36 

“I am dead?” Tony was sitting in an arm chair in a hotel suite, where he had been discharged to that day, after a week longer in the hospital. He was very much alive and in the moment, but on paper he was officially dead. Apparently just being alive was not enough proof that he was in fact alive.

He was getting better at talking, working the muscles and parts of his brain he had not used for a fairly long time now, but every sentence was short and the words came slowly and in smaller bites where he could. He had to concentrate on what he wanted to say before he said it so conversations were at a minimum except with Aida, who despite not having seen him in over a year fell back into the comfortable rhythm they had where words were not necessary.

Aida and Oriana had moved from Tonga to Sydney, Australia three months after the plane crash and there was no ambiguity from the remaining passengers on the flight, everyone had seen him get sucked out of the plane in mid-air and since the body, most of the wreckage and the contents of the plane were lost to the depths the declaration of death without a body was almost instant.

There was a matter of the life insurances paid out to Aida, but that money lay untouched in a trust account and Tony had plenty of money built up over the years from the business interests and earnings he still brought in from his famous years and wise investments by his holdings. So repaying the extra was not a big problem, he had plenty of money. Had plenty of money, past tense. Now it was all Aida's money as he had named her long before the crash as beneficiary and executor of the estate. Now that he was alive though, he needed to unravel the red tape and his declaration of death overturned. Unfortunately it was not as simple as being declared alive, it never was going to be that easy.

He lived in a legal limbo, and for most people being a non-person and having no official status would be a kind of purgatory, but for Tony it was as liberating as being a hermit on an almost deserted island.

Aida had the flight divert him to Sydney where she was and she put him in a local hospital in the city, and had a cadre of doctors battling the infection, the pneumonia and malnutrition from over a year of living rough on a tropical volcanic archipelago. The Conservation workers were stunned to find that there had been a man living in the darker corners of their island for that long without them knowing it. They found his various hiding places after some searching about and retracing some of the damage he had caused in his fevered stumble through the bush to the camp the day he was found. They saw the stolen items, the clothing, some of which they recognised and some of which had been taken from the wreckage washed ashore. They also dug up the buried suitcases he had hidden in his cave headquarters and pieced together an idea of what his life had been like and how he had managed to stay alive and hidden for so long on Raoul island, right under their noses.

He had broken laws, the island was a conservation zone and fishing inside it's waters was illegal, but no one seemed that interested in prosecuting him for those infractions. Technically they were incursions of New Zealand law, and he was firmly under Australian jurisdiction and not even legally alive. He could not fly, work or do much at all that required any kind of paperwork until that was cleared up. Even when it would be eventually all squared away, his story was fascinating and intriguing and no one was pushing for a settling of the legality of being a voluntary, or partially voluntary castaway.

The police in Sydney did come to talk to him and he answered their questions truthfully, albeit in short sentences. They quizzed him on how he survived the crash but his answer like many of the details surrounding the incident on the plane was “I don't know.” because he did not. The police knew more about the cause of the incident than he did, the fault in the engine was caused by a lightning strike and it in turn caused a specific part which was since found to be faulty in all plane models of that age, to explode and then, the plane cascaded into deterioration from there. That particular part exploding started a world wide recall and refit of all the other aircraft of that type in service, some of the planes being put of commission entirely. They still asked the question, but he did not have anything too much to add.

Except why he did it. Why did he hide out in the bush, away from everyone for that long?

“Because I had enough.”

The senior police officers nodded, knowing enough of his story by now to understand what that meant. They had no particular crime to charge him with, no one was baying for a conviction or an extradition, but it did seem like that someone should talk to him, find out what and why these things had happened. Curiosity got the better of them and so the two most senior police officers in the media office came down to the hotel where Aida had put Tony in hiding, and everyone assumed that they had a job to do, and so they went about asking him the questions.

Tony knew less than they did except about the daily routine of living life as a castaway. The workers and scientists had the evidence of what he was doing, eating and surviving, but no one knew how he was feeling or thinking until they asked. Tony himself had no articulated the thoughts he had out loud and even now he was just arriving at the reasons in his own mind.

They left him alone, not having satisfied their curiosity but also not finding any excuse to question him any further when most of the whys and wherefores were just unknown.

That left Tony, Aida and Oriana alone in the hotel, guards hired to watch the entrance of the suite and keep reporters and well wishers away from Tony at all costs. Even though he had been gone for a while now and presumed/declared dead, it took very little to ignite the public interest in Tony once again, it was a life he could not escape. He knew it, accepted it and had decided after all these years to embrace it, face it and deal with it.

Aida called Room Service and ordered them some lunch, Oriana sat and stared at the man she thought had been dead for well over a year. She was a little older than he remembered and had grown considerably in that intervening time, but she was still a child. She had come to terms with his death and now he just turned up again, like a nightmare she could not shake away again. She still felt the guilt for the lightning strike and the subsequent hiding, fleeing and bizarre twists their lives had taken since he umbrella had been caught by the wind and blown onto the church roof. Italy was a lifetime away, and she was no longer that same little girl full of enthusiasm and fun, she was withdrawn and overcautious about life.

Tony could see it in her eyes when she looked at him like he was a ghost, her own private one. He felt that it all had to stop, it was not a matter of his own safety or his own fame at stake. That was the mess of conflicting motivations that moved him stubbornly down a path of self flagellation, using the public’s desire to watch as a whip for his sins. Oriana chose none of this, she was as innocent as the gust of air that blew him up after that parasol.

Her reticence, her broken spirit and the end of her childlike approach to the world was on him. He didn't need to fix himself, he was already broken and no matter what he would always be broken to the world that watched. Oriana though, he did not want her to go down any road except the one where she could grow up without all the pressure, fear and responsibilities for things out of her control.

Tony had blamed himself for everything that had happened to himself over the years. He had riled up Roy into stabbing him. He had taken the stage dive that split his skull. He had ripped open his wounds on stage and invited people to be part of his open punishment of himself. He stepped in front of a bus. He wiped his own memories to start again, but once again he put himself in harms way and got hit, this time by lightning. He shut down completely, unable to interact, unable to give anyone what they wanted from him, except the woman who wanted nothing but his company. And then to avoid that happiness and punish himself for finding he jumped to his death. A legal death of a castaway presumed dead on the ocean floor. He cut himself off from everyone and everything and still fate and circumstance put him front and centre of the human experience again.

“You can't avoid it.” He looked directly at Oriana and spoke to her as succinctly as he could. “Life happens to you. You don't happen to it.”

“What are you on about?” Oriana had picked up a slight Australian twang and her English was very good, immersion learning had taken root with her. She had difficulty conversing with her brother over Skype calls in Italian from his apartment in Rome.

“You don't make life happen.” Tony massaged his throat and sighed heavily, he wanted a thousand words of denial of guilt and a forgiveness of her and himself and so much more, but it had been too much recently and he could only manage a few words at a time.

“I don't understand you. I never did. You're ...” Oriana shrugged and left the room, there was some level of understanding passing between them, but all the words that he wanted to say would not have conveyed what he wanted to have her understand anyway.

Tony needed to talk to someone, but he needed everyone to listen.