Do Better

Do Better

I was driving home after yet another unnecessarily long night at work. Lack of competent staff and an unwillingness from upper management to pay a higher wage had left me stuck working until 1am every night that week, instead of my normal 9pm. I was utterly exhausted and all I could imagine was getting home and collapsing into a heap on my magnificently soft mattress. My eyes only closed for a moment, but a moment was all it took. I just nearly missed seeing the man dart from out of the woods and into the middle of the road directly in front of my car. I slammed on my breaks and swerved my car to the side of the road, just barely avoiding flattening the man. Once safely stopped, I took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. The man staggered toward me and it was then that I noticed his clothes, tattered and covered in blood.

“Thank God I found you in time,” he said coming closer.

And I could swear, looking at him up closely, that he was--but no. I was exhausted, and my mind had to be playing tricks on me. He placed a bloody hand on my shoulder and pulled an equally bloody manilla envelope from the inside of his jacket. He thrust it into my arms.

Take, take this,” he said with gasping breaths. “Take this and run. Take this and do better than I could. Then I ever—”

The man collapsed to the ground and I knelt beside him.

“what is—”

Suddenly there was a rustling in the woods nearby and muffled voices that I could just barely make out.

“This way, he ran this way.”

The man gripped my shirt.

“Run,” he said urgently. “Run now!”

I was scared. I didn’t know what else to do so I took the envelope and did just that. I ran. Once in my car I hit the gas and sped away. Glancing back only once to see three more men come out of the woods and head straight for the one on the ground.

When I finally made it home, it felt as though I had not taken a breath the whole drive there, I gulped in breath after breath as if I were a man just surfacing from the depths of the deepest ocean. Once I could breathe normally again, I climbed the three stories to my one-bedroom apartment, locked and bolted my door and brought the envelope to the kitchen to examine. It was a thick package, with no writing or any kind of postage on the outside. I ripped open the top and dumped the contents onto my kitchen table. Money! Two stacks of hundreds, neatly banded with strips printed with $10,000 on them, and a little black notebook. Twenty thousand dollars and a notebook. I was shocked, scared, and confused. What on earth was going on.

With a shaking hand I picked up the note book and opened it to the first page.

To whomever may be reading this,

I am writing this largely to document what has happened so far and try to understand what on earth is going on, and why it has happened to me. First, my name is Victor Paulson—

I dropped the book and sat down hard in one of my kitchen chairs. My name! Victor Paulson was MY name. So, what I saw was real, it was real, or I was losing my mind. The man that I saw was me. But how, and what did that mean for me now.