Eden

  The interview didn’t turn out as well as Eden had anticipated.It didn’t turn out well at all. The moment they heard his surname, they turned him away with the excuse that they weren’t hiring. Every other location he visited gave him the same excuse.

   He went from door to door, searching and asking, but no one was hiring.

  As he followed the path down from where he’d just left, he was lost in thoughts of the day’s events. It was just another day of disappointment. But then, he shouldn’t really be surprised. His hope was long lost and he’d known better than to hope that today would be any different. Still, the frustration he felt wasn’t lost on him and he wanted to vent. Needed to. Else he would break down.

    He couldn’t afford to break. For Elaine, he had to keep going. She was the only reason he kept going.He wanted to be worth everything for her. He wanted to make her proud. So much so she would proudly say one day that she was the wife of Eden Vangot.

   Lost deeply in his thoughts, Eden didn’t notice that he strayed from the main road leading to Elaine’s home. He’d taken the left turn instead of the right, and when he looked up, he found himself on a completely strange street he couldn’t recognize. He turned around, a little lost. Scratch that. Very lost.

   “Where am I?” He asked himself and began tracing his steps back to where he’d come from.

   And that was when he stumbled upon a shocking scene.

   The sounds of groans and grunt filled the air and Eden slowed as it drew nearer and nearer to his location. His instincts screamed at him to flee before he got himself involved in something that didn’t concern him, but Eden was not one to get dissuaded very easily.

   His feet obliged him, taking him further into the street and he paused before a group of men in masks, attacking a man on the ground, who looked to be in a lot of pain. They kicked and punched the man who kept groaning and letting out small pained sounds.

  “Hey!” Eden shouted and they turned as one, looking at him. It would seem they already had what they came for, because they immediately fled the scene, leaving Eden with the injured man.

   Despite the red flags that went off in his head, Eden rushed for the man, eyes scanning the injuries in the man’s legs. He was bleeding profusely from either of his legs from a shot wound. Eden turned in the direction the masked men had fled, but he found nothing. No one. How could something like this happen in the middle of the street, in the light of day, and no one had come to help?

    The man in question was breathing heavily, and he was unconscious. Eden eyed the wound. The blood was quite a lot and who knew how much blood he had already lost. He took off his shirt and began ripping the soft fabric into shreds. He needed to reduce the bleeding before he called the ambulance.He wrapped the shirt pieces around the man’s legs to stem the bleeding.

   His hands were bloodied when he was done and he wondered if what he did made any difference, as the clothes were now soaked. He reached for his phone in his pocket but he groaned in frustration when he realized he didn’t have it with him, or anywhere. He didn’t have a phone. Elaine had taken ill last week and he’d had no money on him to pay for her bills, so he’d sold his phone to pay for her treatments.

   Still, he needed to call the ambulance, else this man might very well die here.

    Panic set in, and he patted either sides of the man’s pockets, searching for a phone. He found a phone in the man’s left pocket and he fished it out, only to find that it was turned off as well. He tried turning it on for several seconds and he discarded it when it wouldn’t budge. His frustration grew and tension tightened his body. He looked to the man’s form again. He looked to be growing pale and the blood on his body had begun to form crusts. He’d tried to get an ambulance, but he couldn’t.

    He had no idea what to do next, but he couldn’t leave the man there. He couldn’t have someone’s blood on his hands. He had to do something.

   With a newfound determination, he crouched low and grabbed the man’s arms, ignoring the looks he got from the passersby, who still refused to help a dying man. He lifted the man off the ground, groaning at the weight and hefted him unto his back.He raced back, still trying to find his steps back to the main street so he could find a taxi that would take them to the hospital. It took him a few minutes, in which his back had begun to hurt and his legs weakened.

   He staggered into his street and the people who passed by steered clear of him, peering at him strangely, as he was dressed in nothing but work pants and shoes, and he was carrying a bleeding man. It was alright until the taxi’s also refused to stop for him, deeming him strange and dubious.

    His day just kept growing worse and he kept stifling the urge to bash something. Numerous emotions and thoughts plague him as he ran, heart racing. He had no money, no phone and no one to call for help. Well, except Elaine, and he wasn’t about to place her in this sort of situation. She would likely leave everything she had doing just to come find him. He didn’t want that

   But he was running out of options.

   The thought of leaving the man lying on a bench crossed his mind but he discarded it. He couldn’t stomach doing that either.

     A car suddenly honked, pulling him from his vile line of thoughts and he found himself smiling with tears in his eyes when he noticed the taxi driver behind the wheel waving at him. He rushed and pulled at the door handle, carefully arranging the man in the back seat of the care, lest he stained the chair. He shut the door carefully before racing to the front seat and hopping in.

  When the driver kept shooting him skeptical looks, Eden explained the situation. “I found him bleeding. I think he was robbed. I didn’t want to leave him there to die.”

   The driver laughed. “In this city where people take pains to avoid problems and mind their business, you went an extra mile to help someone you don’t even know? You’re either very kind or very stupid.”

   To that Eden had no reply. He wasn’t stupid, that was for sure. The driver told him of the price and Eden nodded, even if he was well aware that he had no money to pay for the ride. He had no plan. He just had to get the man to the hospital. Perhaps, if he woke up, he would help pay the cab fare. Or not.Eden shook his head, dispelling the thoughts of getting beaten up because of his inability to procure a cab fare.

  Sure, it would not get to that point.

   He let out a sigh of relief when the cab pulled away from the miserable street. He watched the building unfold as they moved, taking note of the places he had tried out and the place he had not.Perhaps, he would revisit tomorrow.

  What if he never got a job?

   Would he continue to live like this with El and keeping subjecting her to suffering with him for the rest of their lives? He had no one else to go back to if he chose to run from the city with her. He didn’t even have any money to run.

  How pathetic. Run? That was far off. Looking at his situation now, he was surely going to get beaten and tagged a thief as soon as the driver realized he had nothing on him. He never should have crossed that street.

   Soon, the car arrived at the hospital, and Eden flung the door open, yelling for a stretcher. He was attended to almost immediately. He was soon flooded with nurses who helped him lift the man onto the stretcher. He helped push it past the entrance and he was led to the counter, where he was asked to register as the patient’s guardian.

   Eden knew very well what that meant. It meant he’d need to pay the bills before the patient got attended to.

   “I don’t know him,” he explained to the nurse over the counter and she listened attentively, giving him instructions on what to do.

    Soon, he was done. He looked in on the man he’d brought in, but he was still being attended to. So he wandered outside the building to meet the taxi driver. He couldn’t put it off a minute longer.