Second Chances

Derek hated everything about his life and is about to get a second chance.

“Morning, Uncle Derek” Jimmy sleepily muttered, holding his father’s hand as he entered Derek’s apartment.

“Hello Jimmy!” Derek replied as Jimmy sluggishly stumbled toward the couch and flopped.

“I am going to be a little late coming back from work today Derek” Raymond informed Derek.

“No worries Ray. I have a packed schedule for us today.” holding up his hand at failed attempt for a high five, waiting Jimmy to respond. His demeanor perkier than usual in an attempt to hide his sinister plans he had for Jimmy. Derek had been planning for this night for a full month. Tonight, everything was going to change for him and of course for Jimmy. It was sheer luck that Raymond was looking for someone to take care of his son while he gave his all to his new career path. Derek simply jumped at the chance of taking care of his best friend’s son. Derek’s devious offer to watch Jimmy during the day came as a boon to Raymond.

Meanwhile, at the lab, Ralphy was rechecking the equipment for the fifth time. He wanted to be ready for Derek when he brought Jimmy. If everything went according to Derek’s plan, Ralphy would have only a brief window of opportunity to work on them and he wanted everything to go perfectly for his first human subjects.

Raymond was puzzled at Derek’s strange behavior. Luckily, for Derek Raymond didn’t realize that he was simply nervous about what’s to come. Derek’s guilt, for what he was about to put Jimmy through, prevented him from looking directly at Raymond but convinced himself by remembering Ralphy’s promise that nothing was going to happen to the boy, physically and if everything went well, he could also ‘act’ normal, mentally.

Raymond gave Jimmy a quick hug and left for work. Jimmy didn’t like waking up so early during summer but he knew how much fun Derek was for the past few weeks, so he naively awaited what plans Derek had for today. In the past few days, they had hit arcades, museums and even the local town fares when Raymond was working late shifts at his new job.

Derek and Raymond went several years back. They knew each other from middle school and grew up in the same neighborhood only a few streets apart. Both had similar life stories to tell. Raymond’s dad had left home when Raymond was twelve, little after Derek had moved into his neighborhood, never to come back, which made Raymond’s ailing mother the sole breadwinner of the house. She took care of Raymond and his two brothers as much as she could whilst also suffering from severe asthma. The two brothers selfishly moved out the first chance they got and found lives of their own, leaving Raymond, the youngest, to take care of his mother. Raymond although being smart and a hard worker, did not do well in school and even had to drop out of college due to his mother’s health problems. After her body finally gave up, Raymond worked hard to finish college and get his career started. After a few not so favorable dead end jobs, he finally was on track for a good life ahead.

This new job was also a reason for him and Jimmy to move out of their old neighborhood and get closer to work, a classier neighborhood. Raymond made more money now and he could afford leave his battered past behind onto a more affluent future. He could now offer all the things that he always wanted for his son and was pampering Jimmy with the latest sneakers, coolest gadgets and video games. Raymond’s married life broke too soon when his wife gave up on him and walked away when Jimmy was only four.

Derek’s past was not that different. His dad was physically abusive to both him and his mother and they suffered his wrath almost every night. One such dreadful night, his mother received a fatal blow to her temple and died. Derek’s dad was arrested for manslaughter and was still serving his sentence. All of this was of course was unbeknownst to Derek, as he didn’t remember anything before moving in with his uncle who lived near Raymond’s family. After several visits to the free clinic, he was told that the severe physical and mental abuse that Derek had experienced had caused psychological and physical trauma to his brain which caused his memory loss. Derek’s uncle could not afford the high end psychiatrists or the hypnotherapies that Derek was prescribed so he had to live with the fact that one part of his life was gone, for good. Derek had several reasons to hate his father but knocking his mother’s memory out of his brain topped the list.

Raymond felt sorry for Derek and started helping him out in school. Soon they both took to each other and a strong friendship developed. Derek was in and out of school, attended a few years of college and took a minimum wage paying job that his uncle found for him at the local water treatment plant. Though Derek and Raymond understood each other and were good friends, Derek had his own wretched group from work with whom he liked to share intoxicated nights and self pity.

Raymond tried several times to get Derek away from his alcohol addiction. He would often cite his father as an example of a man who was so submerged in his own regrets that he finally disappeared from their lives, never to find out how his kids turned out or what happened to his wife. Derek did not like these comparisons to prior losers or didn’t care for any of Raymond’s ideological lectures. His regrets were stronger than Raymond’s words. He wanted to brood and feel sorry for himself and the self pity club was perfect to pet his regrets. Derek regretted that he was not born to loving parents; he regretted that his uncle did not make enough money; he regretted that he didn’t have the courage to talk to Christie, the high school girl he was interested in; he regretted not finishing school or going to college; he regretted accepting the dead end job and falling into bad company. He was slightly jealous of Raymond who was turning his life around and thought it was unfair that life had dealt Raymond a better hand but not to him. He wanted a second chance, a start over.

Against his will and to put an end to Raymond’s reprimands, he attended a motivational seminar that Raymond wanted him to go.  As expected, the seminar did not cause as much as a small dent in his emotional baggage as all he could hear was empty words from sycophantic “gurus” trying to fill their wallets. Derek’s first encounter with Ralphy was on this session. Not inside the hall or on the podium but from an unnoticed stack of pamphlets that no one cared to glance.

Want to start over? The pamphlet read with a phone number listed. There was no name or address.

It was the perfect set of words Derek wanted to hear. He immediately dialed the number on the pamphlet and spoke to Ralphy. After scoring high on the desperation index, Ralphy finally gave Derek the address to come and see him.

Derek drove several miles away from the city and into a dirt road. He could see nothing around except for an abandoned airplane hangar. A man was standing outside looking directly toward Derek’s approaching vehicle. Derek stopped closer to the man and as he stepped out, a pungent stink of burnt flesh hit his nose. He quickly covered his nose and wondered why this did not bother the man standing in front of him. He looked around and realized he had no other option but to walk toward the man. He was less than five feet tall, unkempt, and rather fidgety.

“De..Derek? Hi! I’m Ralphy. Nice to meet you”

“Is this where you live?” Derek asked.

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is how badly you want to change your life.”

“Like I said, badly!” Derek replied

“Come on in then” Ralphy ordered.

Inside the hangar was a very different story. A room that was separated from the large space inside the hangar and looked like a laboratory was air conditioned, clean and spotless. The floor was shiny like it had just been washed; the walls were painted white which appeared even brighter by the large lamps that hung low from the tall ceiling, couple of shiny stainless steel beds that looked like operating tables were placed in the middle of the room, several control panels and computers also were strewn across the walls. Large shelves on one side of the room were dedicated to an organized pile of fragile apparatus; beakers, burners, boilers and such. The faint sound of squeaks from hamsters made him turn toward a glass cage that held several domesticated mammals; cats, small dogs, hamsters, separated from each other by glass walls. They seemed undisturbed by Derek’s presence and went on about their lives. The only thing out of order in the lab seemed to be the owner of the lab who took better care of his lab and his pets than he took care of himself. Derek did not like what he saw. He was hoping to meet someone who would say things to inspire him and not some mad scientist.

“I think I need to get out of here” Derek attempted to walk out.

“Wait! Just hear me out!” yelled Ralphy as his voice echoed.

“Just hear me out and then you can leave” Ralphy pleaded in a gentler tone.

“It’s my grandfather’s work. I am just continuing his dream to make immortalize the human mind” Ralphy said, pointing to a picture of a lean, white haired man that hung above the pet’s cages.

Ralphy’s grandfather was also a mad genius like Ralphy. He raised his grandson away from the city and gave him good education. Ralphy did not know about his grandfather’s work until he spilled everything before he died along with a hefty inheritance for Ralphy’s benefit. He confessed that he stopped his research after he miserably failed in an experiment involving humans. He warned Ralphy not to continue this madness but to get rid of all the equipment and research work that he had accumulated through the years. When Ralphy entered the lab and went through all of the abandoned work, he could not resist the lure of his predecessor’s vision. He went against his grandfather’s wishes, continued investing time and money in the research and soon became obsessed with it.

Derek looked up at the picture and could easily see the resemblance between Derek and his grandfather.

“Do you see Debbie here?” he pointed toward the only free cat that stepped toward him.

“She was dying Derek. So I used another cat’s body to transfer her mind. You know what the best part is? She remembers me Derek! My grandfather was never able to do that. He never was able to do what I have accomplished here.”

“My Debbie lives on”

 “You are crazy!”

“Maybe… but I need to work on humans. What use are you dead and rotting in a coffin Derek? What if you could get a new body? A younger body?” Ralphy rushed toward Derek and grabbed his shoulders.

“You can really start again. With all the knowledge and wisdom you already have. You could avoid all the mistakes that you made in this life and live a full regret free life”

It was what Derek always wanted. A new start but even he knew this was beyond craziness.

Without saying a word Derek rushed out.

The next day brought more misfortune for Derek. He was laid off from the plant where he worked most of his life. It was the only job he knew how to do and now it was gone. Life had given him blow after blow and he couldn’t take it anymore. His drunken session that night with his posse didn’t do anything to lift his spirits.

“Ugh! I wish I could die right here D. I mean… what’s the point? We separated water from filth all of our lives and now even that’s gone. You get only one chance and we blew it… There’s nothing to live for.” Sammy, Derek’s closest colleague, philosophized in a pure state intoxication.

But Ralphy was offering a second chance. What if he could make it work? Derek wondered. Jimmy was the youngest boy he had access to. As outrageous the thought was to put his friends son at risk, Derek tried to convince himself Raymond would not lose his son physically. He would be there, only as Derek and there was no way Raymond could ever find out if Derek never told.

Once Jimmy unfortunately fell in the care of Derek, he schemed and it was set. Derek was going to use Jimmy’s body to live another life, a second chance, a life with no regrets. When Derek informed Ralphy about his willingness to carry out the procedure, Ralphy was overjoyed and went in to overdrive to get ready for his first human subject.

After Raymond left, Derek slipped a muscle relaxant in Jimmy’s juice that was enough to knock him out for a few hours. Derek then drove Jimmy over to Ralphy’s lab. He followed Ralphy’s instructions to lay the boy on the table and put on the straps and a helmet from which several cables and wires were sticking out. Ralphy placed several monitoring devices to Jimmy’s body and injected Jimmy with a syringe filled with clear liquid that had already been prepared. Ralphy repeated the same steps for Derek and as Ralphy was done with injecting him with the same liquid Derek grabbed Ralphy’s hand

“He is not going to die… Is he?”

“No Derek. I assure you, even if the procedure fails, the boy will walk out of here with no harm. Your body on the other hand, needs to be taken care of. Leave it to me though. I will discard it” Derek didn’t like the idea of his body being ‘discarded’. He remembered the stink of burnt flesh that came outside the lab.

 “This is it man. There is no going back from here” Ralphy said. Derek could see even Ralphy was nervous at this point but he still nodded.

As soon as the last switch was flipped, Derek ears were pierced by a high pitched noise. Both bodies jolted chests up. After a few excruciating seconds of pain, Derek saw a strange white light surrounding him. It felt like he was smoothly moving fast through a journey of his life starting with his most recent memory. Every now and then his journey would slow down to view his memories in more detail, memories that had more meaning in his life as compared to the drab dead end job that he had most of his life.

He was among his alcohol buddies sharing sorry stories with each other, experiencing good times with Raymond; the games they went to; the games they played, pranks they pulled on the high school teachers, he was in the company of Christie in high school, his walks home from school with friends, his dinners with his uncle, and all the way back to his first encounter with Raymond. And then something strange happened.

He was back in the same lab looking at himself, younger, strapped to the table. The equipment looked older and not as state of the art as he last saw it. The person working on the panel was not Ralphy but someone that resembled him greatly, lean and gray haired.  He was now swept to a restaurant where he was talking to the same person, who he now realized was Ralphy’s grandfather with the same look that Ralphy had when Derek gave him the green light. Soon he was pulled to his neighborhood where he saw the younger Derek playing with Raymond but he wondered why he was watching himself from another person’s view.

A strange yearning filled him “He’d be perfect” he thought to himself but perfect for what?

Then, he saw a younger Raymond running up to him in panic and out of breath.

“Dad! Mom is having another asthma attack. You need to come now!”

 The feelings of regret were still there but this time it was different. The regrets were for something else, for getting married to a sick woman, not studying well in school, not having the dream job he always wanted, regret for having kids.

Derek was realizing that he is Raymond’s father who abandoned him. It was becoming clear now that he was Ralphy’s grandfather’s failed experiment that made him forget who he was before the experiment. As this was sinking in and the fact that he had already been given and wasted a second chance in life, a sudden realization struck him that Jimmy was also his grandson. He sprung up in shock with a gasp. He vomited on the side of the table and as his eyes adjusted, he saw a lifeless Derek in front of him. He looked at his hands and it were the little hands of Jimmy.

“It worked!” Ralphy shrieked as he unstrapped Jimmy from the table.

“NO! You got to get everything the way it was” yelled Derek in Jimmy’s voice grabbing Ralphy’s shirt with his little hands.

“Why?? You got what you wanted Derek! Your body is useless now. We can’t go back!”

Another regret filled life awaited for young Jimmy.

Author's Note

Comments and critiques welcome.

Reviews

[Mittens]

The moral twists and turns of this are quite interesting; it's a very intriguing concept because as the reader goes through the story line, there's always that question in the back of your mind asking "what would you do if you were offered the same choice Derek has?" It's a hard decision he has to make you do a great job of presenting the moral paradox behind it. This is another enjoyable read that connects with readers on a personal level.

Suggestions: There is a lot of background information in this one. A good portion of the entire story is spent filling in information and not necessarily progressing the story; it's easy for a reader to be lulled into a sense that they're just learning about Derek and Raymond rather than experience the story that's moving forward.

You can alter this by interspacing background information with events in the story. For example, Derek can recall meeting Raymond after he drops of Jimmy. Then, Derek can drug Jimmy, but while he's driving, remember more things from the past. After that, he can arrive at the hangar, and while Jimmy is prepped, remember more. This way you can spread out background information and move the story at the same time.

One other note: pay close attention to point of view while writing. It's always an author's personal choice how they want to work this, but I think this would be a more powerful piece if Derek's perspective was the main event for the reader.

[Mashoosh Kateb]

Thank you for your review. I struggled with the pacing too. Even for me the background of the 2 friends life was dull as I was reading it but it was crucial. I will take your advice on mixing things up.

[Nevtry]

A very interesting idea. I liked the twist at the end with the idea of constantly wasting lives.

As the other reviewer mentioned, a lot of information is given in chunks - it would be better spread out. And the description of the lab was a bit too thorough, although I did like the second half of the paragraph where you described how the animals lives continued normally.

The timeline is confusing though - if Derek and Raymond grew up together, how could Derek once have been Raymond's father? It was said that Raymond's father left after Derek moved in - how could they both exist? From what I understand at the end, the procedure is like a transfer of minds, except the other person's memories remain. And the memory loss would explain why Derek didn't remember being Jimmy's grandfather. Very intriguing concept.

Two other small things about the beginning - Derek comes off as inconsistent. At one moment he's gleeful and then the next we learn he's coming off as nervous because he's feeling guilty. The very start gave me the impression that Derek was selfish and didn't care what happened to Jimmy (via his excitement that his plan was coming together) so hearing that he felt guilty seemed odd.

Also, the jumping back and forth between Derek and Raymond was a little hard to follow at the start (during their back stories).

There are a couple of lines that feel unnatural or are lacking a definitive speaker, but overall, it's an enjoyable read. I really liked the ending. Especially the "he'd be perfect" line.

[Mashoosh Kateb]

I guess I was in a hurry to publish this. This needs to be tinkered a lot, I Agree. But for your benefit I will simplify the story.

Raymond and Raymond's Dad move in to Derek's neighborhood.
Ralphie's grandfather proposes the idea of mind transfer to Raymond's dad
After hesitation, Raymond's dad recruits young Derek to transfer his mind to.
Procedure is successful, Raymond's dad becomes Derek and Derek comes back with no memory of anything and forms a new friendship with Raymond.
When he goes through it the second time with Raymond's son (his own grandson) he remembers everything.

[Mashoosh Kateb]

An unlikely inspiration for this story was "I'm my own grandpa" from "The stupids"

[Nevtry]

Ah - that makes sense. The impression I got from reading though was that Derek was the one moving in. But that's a pretty interesting concept.

[Marie]

You have a good idea here, but somehow it got buried in all the dails and backstory. Focus on the experiment and leave out what isn't necessary to the story.

[Akshay Rawal]

Awesome Story My friend!...You developed great Twists in the story!..A good story to teach that we must be satisfied with our lives. Another thing that is worth noticing is that you always use a lot of space in developing the characters by giving their background history, and that gives a nice oomph of depth.This one too had a slight runny pace.So you may work upon that. And Thanks.......

[Mashoosh Kateb]

Thank you for your review. Much appreciated. There is nothing more fulfilling for a writer (if I Can call myslef that) than a satisfied reader. I want to develop this to a book.