THE TURQUOISE PEN

GABE'S STORY

Noël R. King

Gabe knew that he had an important story to tell, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out yet. He’d get this tremendous compulsion to start telling it to his buddy, Danny, for instance, but then end up having to flounder and backtrack, feeling like an utter fool, when the words would not keep coming out of his mouth no matter how hard he tried.

The farthest he had been able to get so far was this puzzling phrase: "The postmark was faded and blurred." He had no idea what a postmark had to do with his story or why it was the only part of his story he was able to voice. The rest of the story—he could feel it in there, sort of midway between his chest and throat—was like a big burp that just wouldn’t come out, no matter how fervently he tried to encourage it to do so.

It would have been one thing if he could have just resigned himself to never getting the story out and had been able to forget the whole matter. Unfortunately, however, it poked and prodded at him, never allowing him to simply relax into whatever he was doing at the moment. It never let him rest, never let him get comfortable.

He tried all the usual—banging on his back with an encyclopedia (P–R), running up and down the flight of stairs to his apartment, drinking heavily carbonated sodas, and writing down all his thoughts in a journal. He swore; he stomped; he begged; he cried; he ate chocolate chip cookies. Still the lump of unspoken words remained unspoken. In fact, it got even worse as the consonants came loose and started poking into his lungs and ribs. He could tell the story was getting longer and filling up more and more space inside his body.

Soon he was starting to wheeze a bit as he breathed. His thumb hurt from writing so much in his journal. He began fearing seriously for his life as the story overtook him from the inside out.

Gabe was a practical person, however, and he decided to simply keep living as best he could despite this tremendous inner pressure, although he still allowed himself a half-hour tantrum every evening and generous outbursts of despair as needed throughout each day.

Then something else happened, something even more alarming and disorienting, at least from Gabe’s point of view: He began blurting out disconcertingly strange statements and responses to people, unbidden. Sometimes it was to the customer service people at his bank. Sometimes it was in response to his mother when he spoke to her on the phone. Sometimes it was in staff meetings at work or while he was on the treadmill at the gym and somebody said, "Excuse me" when accidentally brushing his arm with a towel.

The blurt was always fascinating, always interesting, always somehow germane to the situation at hand, but never, ever something Gabe would have dreamed of saying of his own volition (whatever that was, in this case).

Often, in these blurts, he would promise to do things or state definite preferences for causes of action he didn’t even know existed. Astonished to hear such things coming out of his mouth, he nonetheless had the courage and sense to actually listen to what he was saying. In doing so, he was amazed to find that he was delighted by what he heard himself pronounce and promise, and he decided on a lark to actually follow through on his declarations.

At this point you know the rest of the story, even if you think you don’t, because it turns out that Gabe was the story he had been trying so hard to tell. Finally, when he let the story tell itself, his whole life fell into place. Not only that, the big blob in his throat and chest gradually melted away, except for a stray K or N that he occasionally coughed up for a few months more thereafter. This now only amused him.

And that, my friends, is the story of Gabe, although I am sure he would say it is not really a story until it ends.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Reston, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including stories like Gabe’s.