The Contract

The contact came in a manila envelope pushed through Muldoon's mail slot on a dour day near the end of January.  Muldoon slid the contract from the envelope and studied it.  It was not junk mail. It promised him nothing.  It looked like a legally binding contract.  His name was typed into certain designated blanks. Yet for all this, Muldoon hadn't the slightest idea what it was or why it had come to him. Muldoon was no fool, but he could make neither heads nor tails of it.  It read like gibberish. He finally ended up throwing it in the trash. 

Two weeks later Muldoon got sick and then sicker until he was admitted to the hospital.  There his condition continued to worsen causing him to be transferred from the general population to intensive care and then from there to critical care, where he was surrounded by masses of tubes and beeping machines and teams of hardened physicians who had but to take one look at him to recoil and shout "God damn, what IS that thing?" It was in this way that Muldoon learned that his was more than just bad case of flu.  His doctors approached him as if he were some new species of spectacle.  They bandied about grim prognoses and the names of obscure jungle diseases in his presence.  He felt like the guy in that story One Day in the Life of Ivan Somebody or Other, by that Russian who made Dostoevsky look downright jolly. 

One day a man came to see Muldoon.  Muldoon had never set eyes on him before.  The man wore an old-fashioned fedora he declined to take off his head.  He was nondescript-looking to the extent that if you saw him once you would have to see him a second and probably a third time before you could even begin to recall his features.  He looked around at the machines surrounding Muldoon and said, "Remember that contract you got in the mail a while back?" Although half-delirious and barely able to recognize his own wife, Muldoon recalled with photographic clarity the yellow envelope with the strange contract inside it. 

He said, "I threw it out." 

The man looked at Muldoon in a way that seemed to bespeak great regret.  "Mr. Muldoon," he said. A sudden misgiving bloomed in Muldoon, of the type you might feel upon discovering you have accidentally ripped up a winning lottery ticket.  He peered at the stranger and something about the man's bland mien and mysterious presence in Muldoon's hospital room filled the sick man with the greatest suspicion.  "Who are you?" he cried.  He suddenly felt as if he were in the company of the uncanny.  "Are you the Devil?  Would that contract of yours have spared me all of this?"  The man picked up the briefcase at his feet and this seemingly innocent gesture so frightened Muldoon that he attempted to sit up in bed, causing first one and then several of the machines monitoring his decline to chirp like agitated birds.  Muldoon fell back in bed, exhausted.  He closed his eyes.  When he opened them again, the man was gone.

Muldoon called for a nurse, who told him he was allowed no visitors and she'd seen no one either enter or leave his room. 

From that moment onwards, Muldoon could think of nothing but the contract.  A copy of it floated in his mind's eye, and he would gasp out "the contract!" or "Bring me the contract!" in moments of delirium, and even grasp at it with a weak hand.  The nurses and doctors shrugged.  Inwardly, in his moments of clarity, Muldoon attempted to unravel the mystery of the man with the hat, whom he suspected was either the devil or an angel, but most likely the former.   The more Muldoon thought about the man, the more spectral did he become in his memory, until Muldoon could swear, looking back, that he'd seen the faintest outline of the back of the chair the man was seated on through the man's torso.  What's more, he became convinced he'd seen the man remove a particle of food from one of his back teeth not by means of a toothpick, but by simply pushing an ectoplasmic finger through his incorporeal cheek. 

Muldoon's wife could make nothing of his blathering.  He pleaded with her to go to the garbage dump to seek out a yellow manila envelope with his name on it and when she asked him why he grew angry.  When his fever rose, he would pick up an imaginary pen and mimic signing an invisible contract, before falling back with a smile upon his face.

The doctors told Muldoon he had to fight.  He knew the folly of this.  His salvation didn't lie in any amount of resolve.  He settled back and looked at them with pity.  Over the next several days Muldoon deteriorated rapidly, until the morning when his eyes grew large, as if he was beholding a terrible vision.  In truth, it was just the opposite.  For what Muldoon saw was the man, horns on his head, swim through the ceiling bearing the document that would ensure his salvation.  Then he died.

His survivors gathered around him.  They were joined by a stranger holding a manila envelope and a pen. The stranger saw that Muldoon was past the point of mortal care and bowed his head.  After speaking a few words of condolence to the widow he walked out.  He  returned to the office, dropped the manila envelope on his desk, and picked up an energy bar.  Farnsworth walked by.  "Did you get Muldoon's signature?" he asked.  The man said, "The poor guy's dead."  Farnsworth said, "What do you know. Why didn't he sign again?"  The man said, "I looked at the copy of what we sent him.  Some kind of computer glitch made it read like gibberish."  Farnsworth said, "Damn." The man said, "All this trouble over a damned accidental collision medical liability release form.  Over a fender bender the guy probably didn't remember in the first place."

Comments

[Dave]

The power of the mind! The same thing happened to me when I got my enlistment contract, except I signed the fucker. My ailment lasted six years.

[UF Mike]

The only thing that saved me from the military was unseemly cowardice. If I can't run from a fight, I steal a car. Hi Dave!

[keith]

wasn't it decided that you run more like flitter than actual running? might be why military wouldn't have you...plus your missing internal organs doesn't help either.

[Johnny Smoke]

Nice work. Your story made me think of Robert Coover's The Marker, although the stories are dissimilar.