Serendipity
B. Scott Christmas
Serendipity
B. Scott Christmas
Copyright 2012 by Scott Christmas
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And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;
And the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
I WAS IN Africa when I got the news that she had died.
My mother sent word via telegram. It came through our office in Mwanza and was delivered to me via courier. In the days before cell phones and laptops, the only link to the outside world from the depths of the Tanzanian savannah was through the agile feet of the local tribesmen.
I remember the night vividly.
It was a cool evening, cool and dry and silent, and a breeze blew from the west, redolent with the distinctive scent of Lake Victoria. In the distance, a pack of hyenas yowled and hooted in the moonlight as they finished off the remains of a carcass. The courier came padding up to our campsite in bare feet, his steps audible from a thousand yards distant.
When I first opened the telegram and read the words, I was struck by how odd and out of place it all seemed. This was the last piece of news I’d expected on such a quiet, tranquil African night.
I stood from my perch near the campfire and walked into the encircling darkness. Stars sugared the skies overhead, twinkling and sparkling as they had for billions of years. The moon hung fat and pale in the west, performing its nightly routine with pleasant persistence, unaffected by this unsettling news. At that moment, the futility of the human species struck me like never before. I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, how abominably small and vulnerable we all are. A bunch of advanced primates, stuck on the side of a blue planet in a minor solar system. Our collective humanity no more meaningful than a match: ignited, flared, burned, and gone, all in a matter of cosmic seconds. And afterward, nothingness. Eventually, our blue planet would turn to brown, then black. Then it would be sucked into our dying sun’s gravitational pull, and when it was all over, there would be no trace of us. Not so much as a single nanoparticle left to carry on our distinct human spirit. Our successors in the galaxy would have no more knowledge or understanding of our existence than Julius Caesar had of computerized axial tomography.
I looked up at the moon and realized that I, too, would die someday, and when I did, the moon would still rise and make its nightly journey, and the stars would still twinkle and sparkle in the African sky. They would not care that I was dead, just as they did not care that she was dead.
Rebecca was her name. When I had known her, she’d had a mane of brunette hair, straight and long, with a subtle beauty that was both mysterious and tantalizing. Her mother had been of Buddhist ancestry, her father a Jew, and her multi-cultural background only added to her allure. She had dark, almond eyes and a brilliant smile that lit her face with an ethereal glow.
We’d grown up only ten miles from each other, near Lexington in central Kentucky, but had never met until we crossed paths in Indonesia while working with the Peace Corps.
It had been that smile that first caught my attention.
I was standing beside a reed hut on the island of Buru, feet crossed, examining a small mosquito bite on my arm, when I heard someone approaching.
“You’ll want to make sure you clean that with peroxide,” a woman’s voice said.
I looked up and our eyes met. She was smiling, and the radiance of the expression hit me like a punch.
“I’m Rebecca,” she said, extending her hand.
I shook it. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jake. You must be our new doctor.”
She nodded: a supple, graceful movement like the sway of a giraffe. “That’s right. They just drove me in from Wamsasi.”
“Pleasant drive?” I asked, knowing it was not.
She smiled again and I felt a little starburst in my stomach. “It was…interesting.”
I chuckled. “I’m sure it was. Come on inside, I’ll introduce you to Finny.”
She followed me inside. The hut was small, furnished the way you’d expect a hut in the Indonesian rain forest to be: a bamboo desk, a few cots, a table. Behind the desk sat a young Indonesian man of about twenty-eight.
“Rebecca, meet Arifin,” I said. “Finny for short. He’s our translator. Knows sixty-five local and regional languages and dialects.”
The two of them shook hands.
“I didn’t catch your last name, Rebecca,” Finny said in his clipped, distinct British English.
“Marks. Rebecca Marks.”
“Doctor Rebecca Marks,” I corrected her.
“Oh, so you are the new doctor,” Finny said. “Wonderful. Well, nice to meet you Dr. Marks.”
“Rebecca, please.”
Finny smiled and nodded.
Rebecca and I stepped back outside into the balmy afternoon.
“So are you new to the Peace Corps?” I asked her.
She nodded, sliding a strand of long, silky hair behind her ear. It was a movement that was simple and nonchalant, yet strangely alluring. The way she tucked the lock behind her ear, with a little carefree flip of her fingers. It was the motion of a woman who loved being alive, who was completely at ease with herself. That otherwise innocuous act seemed to exemplify her very being, her very soul.
“I only finished my residency a few months ago,” she said. “So I’m still pretty green.”
“Well, I can barely apply a Band-Aid without sticking one end to the other, so don’t feel bad. I’m sure you’re a wonderful doctor.”
She looked at me and smiled curiously. “What makes you say that?”
Her question took me off guard and I stumbled over my words. “Well, I don’t know…you just seem – well…competent, I guess.”
She laughed delightedly – and delightfully. “It must be these muddy sandals and the cut-off shorts,” she joked. I was so taken in by her charm I had barely noticed her attire.
“Yeah, that’s probably it,” I said, smiling. In reality, that was part of it. She didn’t take herself too seriously, didn’t have the self-aggrandizing attitude of some others in her profession. She was down-to-earth. Real.
I was already in love with her and I’d only known her for ten minutes. But it seemed like a lifetime, or maybe even several lifetimes.
After that initial meeting, our relationship soared.
She had walked into my life rather unexpectedly (when we were told a new doctor was coming, I assumed it would be a man), and it was as though we were made for each other. I never felt uncomfortable around her, never felt that I couldn’t tell her what was on my mind. Nothing was taboo, nothing too personal to reveal. We were soul mates from Kentucky, teamed up in the Indonesian rain forest, bound by a common love of people and wildlife, and united by our determination to lend our services wherever they were needed.
We lived there together, in the little village on Buru, for nearly two years. And though we were the best of friends, and though my heart melted each time she flashed that pristine smile, and though I took her to be the most beautiful person I’d ever known, our relationship was purely Platonic. I was in love with her. Don’t doubt that for a minute. But back then I was selfish, too career-oriented, too fixed on my own goals. There was no room in my plan for anything unexpected, even a relationship with the most perfect woman on earth.
And even when she asked for my heart, staring up at me with those liquid brown eyes, holding my han
d in her warm, supple palm, I told her no. It wasn’t easy. She argued that we were old souls, created as an extension of one another, two halves broken apart at conception, now in need of reuniting. I told her that our lives had converged in this spot, in this little jungle village in Southeast Asia, but that our roads were bound for different destinations, running parallel for a while, but certain to veer off in opposite directions.
Though she never agreed with it, and certainly never understood it, she accepted it with all the grace, charm, and good humor that were the hallmarks of her personality. We remained close, relying on each other and working together for the good of the people of Buru, and when our tenure together was over, she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and gave a knowing squeeze to my hand as she saw me onto the boat in Wamsasi.
I waved to her as the little skiff lurched in the choppy waters of the Banda Sea. It was the last time I ever saw her: standing there on the rugged shore, brown water lapping her sun-darkened ankles, smiling and waving as the breeze ruffled her hair across her face.
It’s strange. I only knew her for two years of my life. And though we spent the majority of our time together during those two years, it represents only a sliver of my life’s journey. Yet it’s as though we had been together for all the years before we met, and all the years after we parted. Those two years, in my mind, stretch out for a lifetime.
After my tenure in the Peace Corps, I went back to the States to finish my degree in Zoology.