What the Sick Man Said

There I was, posted up on the second-floor balcony, right next to the room where Leo’s body was lying. My eyes were doing a great job of staring blankly at the road below, but my brain was a chaotic mess — a washing machine on spin cycle, endlessly replaying the highlight reel of recent events, sifting through a firehose of new information while trying to hang on to whatever fragments of the past still made sense.

I didn’t hear the man approach. One minute I was alone with my thoughts; the next, he had just sort of… materialized beside me, leaning against the wrought-iron rail. He lit a cigarette. The bitter, acrid smell of it immediately invaded my personal space. I’ve always despised that smell, but in the grand, catastrophic scheme of the moment, a little secondhand smoke seemed like a laughably minor complaint.

“This will all come out soon,” the man said, punctuating the statement with a thoughtful plume of smoke.

“You think so?” I asked, my interest twitching despite my best efforts to keep it numb.

“Of course.” He delivered this with the casual authority of a man who’s seen this movie a few times before. “These things are never kept secret forever. Someone gets drunk, someone's conscience suddenly gets ambitious, and the stories start to spill.”

I finally turned to get a good look at him, and my brain did a full system reboot. It wasn’t what he said that hit me; it was his face. Thinner, definitely older, but the architecture was all there, unmistakably the same. It was the man from the bench. The sick man, from all those years ago. You have to hand it to life; it really knows how to stage a callback.

My mind spooled back to… what, 2008? Maybe a year later. Leo was in Tbilisi for a visit, crashing with my mother and me in our sprawling one-room flat. The kitchen and toilet were both an exciting, alfresco adventure on the floor above us. We had two beds, so we gave him one all to himself; my mother and I just doubled up in the other.

He was a human pinball back then, constantly bouncing between cities. Part of it was a security thing — he never liked to put down roots — but most of it was business, which seemed to consist of large tracts of land and conversations held in a low voice.

A young girl was a permanent fixture in those days. She was his girlfriend, and despite the not-insignificant age gap, she had an almost gravitational need to be in his immediate orbit. He seemed to like it, letting her circle him. Maybe it was a nice little booster shot for the ego, a reminder that he was still young and handsome. An ego, after all, isn’t a picky eater.

That particular day — the one this whole memory is taped to — she decided she wanted to go out to eat. There was a brief discussion before they landed on a ‘yes.’ I was sitting on the bed, sending out a silent, desperate prayer to the Patron Saint of Staying Home: Please, don't make me go with them.

But naturally, the moment their summit concluded, two pairs of eyes swiveled over to me. I refused immediately, but I made the rookie mistake of directing it at her. “Tell her to leave me alone,” I begged Leo. He just gave me that patient, unreadable look of his and asked me to come along. My vote had officially been vetoed.

So we got dressed and took a stroll down the street, enjoying the mild weather. The restaurant was one of those charmingly novel places. No tables and chairs, just low platforms drowning in cushions where you sat on the floor, vaguely Arabian-style. We ordered clay pots of beans that were still bubbling, dumplings, and the standard array of pickles and peppers. I remember Leo did something that struck me as both perfectly logical and deeply funny: he slipped his shoes off, padding around in his socks. It made sense. Why track the filth of the street onto the place where you eat? We laughed and told stories. For a hot second, the world felt light, and I was actually glad I hadn’t managed to weasel my way out of it — a genuine plot twist.

On the walk home, the girl peeled off toward her own place with a promise to reappear the next day. Leo and I walked on, wrapped in that comfortable, no-translation-needed silence of family. About halfway to our building, he stopped me. “Wait here,” he said, nodding toward a bench by the road.

We waited for five minutes, tops, before a man materialized out of the shadows, as if on cue. He was thin, maybe forty, with a sallow, almost translucent complexion that suggested he was on nodding terms with his own ghost. I knew on instinct that something was fundamentally wrong with him. He and Leo spoke quietly for a couple of minutes, then the man nodded and walked off, dissolving back into the night as neatly as he had arrived.

As we got up to go, I asked Leo who he was, and why he didn’t get an invitation to the house. Leo’s eyes were still fixed on the empty patch of street where the man had been. “He has an illness,” he said, his voice low. “It’s eating him from the inside out. He doesn’t have much time left.”