I

I was standing outside the Mall of New Hampshire, waiting for the 8 bus, when this wiry little woman with sunken eyes and brown teeth asked to bum a cigarette. She was dragging a comically large duffle bag behind her, and she moved her body in small, erratic bursts. I flipped open my pack of Pall Malls and held it out to her. She started to pull a cigarette out of the pack, then paused. “Mind if I grab one for later too?” she asked. I nodded. These are your people now, I thought.

“You live around here?” she asked.

“Kinda yes, kinda no,” I replied.

“The fuck does that mean?”

I told her that it meant that I was home from my second year of college and flirting with the idea of not going back in the fall. I’d been pulling shit grades lately, and anyways my heart wasn’t in it. I planned to get a job at this window factory where a high school buddy was making eighteen an hour (compared to the seven-fifty I got working in the dining hall at school). But my parents were corporate finance shills and might commit seppuku if they found out that their son was dropping out of college.

“I’m still mulling things over,” I concluded.

For all her fidgeting, my new friend was a good listener. Her eyes were the shade of blue that usually makes someone look crazy, but in hers there was a kindness that made me want to keep talking. But before I could, she abruptly asked me if I knew a guy named Chuck Barnum.

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

“You look like someone he’d be friends with,” she told me. Self-consciously, I glanced down at my skinny jeans and Sperry’s. She laughed. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. You just got a kinda artsy-fartsy way about you that reminds me of him. You sure you don’t know him? Well, if you’re moving back to Manch, I’ll betcha you meet him soon. Yeah, you two are gonna get along famously. His name is Chuck Barnum. Remember that name, cause you’re gonna meet him soon. I can feel it, I can feel it, I can feel it.”

“So what’s his deal?” I asked her.

“He makes movies. And he helps people.”

“Helps people how?”

“Oh, in different ways. You’ll see when you meet him. In fact…” She started rifling through the giant duffle bag and soon produced a paperback with no cover that was held together by yellow duct tape. She handed it to me and asked me, would I give this to Chuck Barnum when I met him? It was a C.S. Lewis book, but not one I’d ever heard of.

I tried to refuse the task, but she was adamant. “You don’t understand. I know, literally know, that you’ll meet him soon. I’m leaving town this week, and I don’t think I’ll get to see him.”

“All right,” I finally agreed. “But how do I find him?”

“You won’t have to try. You’ll just meet him.”

+ 

II

Five years later, in the aftermath of an unexpected breakup, I was frantically packing up my belongings when I found Chuck Barnum’s C.S. Lewis book. Clementine, my ex, walked into the living room and saw me flipping through it.

“That thing’s seen better days,” she said.

I chose not to remind her that she was partially to blame for this. On the day we’d moved in together, a year and a half earlier, she’d scraped off the yellow tape that had held the spine together while trying to force it between two hardcovers on a crowded bookshelf.

“My Uber will be here in eighteen minutes,” I told her.

“Come here.” She was holding out her arms for a hug. I knew she was trying to say: in spite of everything, there’s still tenderness here. But I wasn’t feeling that way yet, so I ignored her and carefully deposited the C.S. Lewis book, its pages now held together by a giant binder clip, into a duffle bag that I’d stuffed with DVDs and tchotchkes.

Ten minutes later, I told Clem that I’d come back for the rest of my shit when my car was out of the shop. Then I walked out to the parking lot to wait for Mikey––silver Honda, four and a half stars––to come and take me away.

When Mikey pulled out of our apartment complex, I broke. I’m talking loud, hiccuppy, little-kid sobs that I made no effort to muffle. Mikey handed me a box of Kleenex from the front seat. Then we hit a wall of traffic on 293. There was an accident ahead of us and nothing was moving. I had recovered my cool enough to tell Mikey that I was sorry he had to see that.

“Don’t be, brother,” he said in a cool, froggy baritone. “Sometimes you just gotta send those tears.”

I agreed that you did.

“You got friends to hold you through this?”

Something about the phrase “hold your through this” brought a lump to my throat, but despite Mikey’s advocacy for boy tears, I didn’t feel like letting them rip again. So I didn’t answer, and we passed the rest of the ride in silence. Then, as he was dropping me off at my buddy’s place, he reached into a backpack and handed me a flier for the Eighth Annual Manchester Film Festival.

“I got this pal who makes movies, small-budget deals––he’s no Scorsese or nothing like that. But he’s got a new movie premiering at this film festival over at the public library. I’mma check it out, and listen: I’m gonna write my number down on the back of this flier. If you ain’t got nobody watching out for you tomorrow, I want you to call me. And we’ll go see this movie, and maybe, I mean I don’t drink no more, but maybe we could go somewhere, and you can just have a beer and talk it out.”

I could barely say the words, but I felt that I had to: “Jesus, that’s nice of you. You do this for every dude that breaks down crying in your Uber?”

“I try to live by the whole pay-it-forward idea. You know like, you buy a coffee for the person behind you in line at Dunks, and then maybe, later that day, they go out and stop someone from jumping off the Queen City Bridge. Something I picked up from one of this guy’s movies, matter of fact.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Chuck Barnum.”

+

III

My buddy got me drunk on warm rye that night, and I cried some more. But these tears were more measured and masculine than the blubbering I’d apparently gotten out of my system in Mikey’s car. I threw up at the end of the night, waking up my buddy’s wife and causing a bit of trouble for him, I’m afraid. I fell asleep thinking about Chuck Barnum. Certainly, there was such a thing as destiny, I decided. And who could doubt that mine was somehow bound up in his? Somewhere down the line, I had strayed from the path that I should have been sticking to. Mistakes had been made. But no matter! Tomorrow, I would meet up with Barnum, and he’d help me find my way again. Yes, he would surely help me. It was what he did.

I didn’t wake up until two in the afternoon, and when I did, I was absolutely wrecked from half a bottle of rye on an empty stomach. The film fest was at three. The Manchester Public Library was only a twenty-five-minute walk from my buddy’s apartment. I could make it, but I’d need to get up at that very moment, when my stomach was turning and my whole body felt dead-armed. And for what? To give a stranger some book? I went back to sleep, and when I woke up a few hours later, I stuck the flier into the pages of the C.S. Lewis book and clamped it back together with the binder clip.

Was that the last time I saw it? No. I remember two or three times, in apartments I lived in later, taking the book down off the shelf, reading the first few pages, getting bored, and returning it. I have no memory of throwing it away and would never have done so intentionally. But the fact remains: it is no longer in my possession.

Could I have dragged my hungover ass out of bed for the chance at meeting the man who might have changed my life? In hindsight, it sure seems like I could have. My therapist presses me on this. “Change your life how?” she asks. “What kind of tangible difference are you imagining?” And I just have to laugh. No use in talking about destiny with someone who doesn’t wholly regret life.

+++

Colton Huelle is a friendly neighborhood fiction guy, hailing from scenic Manchester, NH. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he also teaches composition and creative writing. His fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and Drunk Monkeys.