The Ring doorbell, with its announcement that “someone is at the door,” always sets Doris off. She’s a good watchdog. I’m very happy we found each other at the Hawai‘i Humane Society.
The front door is upstairs, so it takes me a little time to get up there. Often it’s the mail carrier leaving a package. Just now it wasn’t.
I brought the legal-sized envelope downstairs, quieted Doris, and sat at the dining room table. There was nothing on the outside to indicate who it might be from. It wasn’t addressed to anyone. A blank envelope.
I opened it and pulled out the contents. A single page covered with small tight writing. It was a letter. The heading read, Dear Lanning. People don’t write letters anymore. But my old friend had.
Dear Lanning, Gabriel here. I know it’s been a while since we got together for a beer. I haven’t been myself recently, haven’t been feeling well. I’d sort of fallen into the loop of work, sleep, work, sleep. On the weekends, I’ve mostly been in bed, when I haven’t been grading papers.
Gabriel and I, we’ve known each other some forty years now. We met at UH, both of us majoring in English. Lots of beer drinking has ensued. He went on to earn his teaching credential. I’ve been retired six years, but he still teaches English at Castle High School. I give him credit. It takes a lot of energy to grade papers for that long.
Sleeping on the weekends. That was curious. Usually, he did volunteer work on Saturday and Sunday.
We’ve known each other for a long time now, Lanning, and you’re the only person I know who’d be able to understand what’s happened to me.
I think I’m a good person, Lanning, and I hope you’d agree. But lately I’ve been feeling a lot less good. A lot less kind. Less understanding of others. I think I’ve lost track of any kind of compassion I used to feel for other people. Feelings. I’m having a hard time feeling much of anything anymore. It’s like I don’t care about anyone or anything.
I have to agree that Gabriel is one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. His house is loaded with the dogs and cats he’s adopted from the Hawaiian Humane Society. He volunteers there. I found Doris thanks to him.
One day I went over to see Gabriel at the HHS. It was early, a Sunday morning, and he was busy walking dogs.
“We’re short on volunteers today,” he said. “Do you want to help me walk these dogs?”
I agreed. He handed me a leash. “Pick any cage,” he said.
Doris was in that first cage. I went in and put the leash on her. She accepted it well, was very meek. I coaxed her out the door, and we proceeded to walk around the HHS perimeter. By the time we’d returned to her cage, I was in love.
“Good,” said Gabriel, smiling. “Doris is a very loving dog. If you hadn’t adopted her, I might have.”
I asked him about Doris’s name.
“She’s a stray. Someone here gave it to her. You can change it.”
I didn’t. By the time we’d come home, I knew that Doris was a perfect name for her.
I quit volunteering at HHS. I couldn’t take it anymore. On the last day, I took the last of my cats and dogs there. I knew I’d no longer be in the right frame of mind to take care of them.
This surprised me. Gabriel had written numerous stories about the animals he’d had since he was a kid. There’d been so many. One of the most memorable stories he wrote was about the homing pigeons he used to raise. He lived in Honolulu, but he’d take his pigeons to the neighbor islands, even as far away as Hilo, and release them. Amazingly, they always made their way back to his house on O‘ahu.
And then, just before he’d graduated from high school, one morning when he went to feed the birds, he found them all dead. Someone, for whatever reason, had poisoned them. This random act of cruelty devastated Gabriel. That story was called “Last Flight.” He’d written it so that the boy who raised the birds chose to imagine that they’d flown away rather than been killed.
When Gabriel first got married, about two years into teaching at Castle, he’d had no pets. College had absorbed all his focus and energy. But after he married Elizabeth, he began collecting animals again. It got so crowded at their house that Liz, who’d been begging him to stop bringing animals home, issued a them-or-me ultimatum.
He begged her to reconsider. He really did love her. I thought she was terrific, too.
Liz got everything in the divorce. The house, the car, everything except the pets. Those Gabriel took with him to his mother’s house. She was used to having a crowd of animals around, and she welcomed all of them home with open arms.
As you know, my mom has lived a good, long time. I can’t believe she’s made it to her 90s. I have to admit that part of my problem, this hardening of my heart, if you’ll excuse the old saw, has to do with caring for her. I’ve gradually ended up doing everything. The feeding, the bathing, and the toileting had become a challenge.
I was sorry to hear this. The last time I’d seen Mrs. Angelos, she’d seemed pretty spry for a woman in her 80s. I admired the fact that she got around without the aid of even a cane.
Aging, it’s one of the things I fear most. Not getting old, mind you. I mean declining. I have a great fear of dementia. My father had it for years, and toward the end of her life, so did my mother. Mobility is also another concern. There are lots of stairs to negotiate in my house. I’d like to die here, but I won’t be able to do that if I can’t manage the stairs anymore.
These last several months, things with Mom intensified. It felt like there was an exponential explosion in the number of doctor visits I had to take her to. I took so many leave days from work that I felt like I was disappearing. On the days when I did make it to school, I kept experiencing the odd feeling, first, that my students were having trouble recognizing me, and then that they were having difficulty even seeing me. It was so strange. To think that you’re not you anymore. That you’ve been replaced by some sort of nothingness. You’ve become an invisible man, or a ghost.
Reading this, my concern kicked up a notch. Gabriel could be down sometime, as could I. But he and I were always there to cheer each other up. I should do something, I thought.
I put down the letter and went to retrieve my phone from upstairs in the living room. When I called Gabriel, the message said that the number was no longer a working one.
I went back downstairs to the dining room table and sat. What to do? Was it a temporary technical issue? Had he canceled his service? I picked up the letter.
I’m sorry about what I’m going to do, dropping this off without seeing you. I’m sunk so far into this depression that I don’t want to see or talk to anyone. If I did, it would be you, Lanning, but I can’t bring myself to even see you. I apologize for bothering you with my problems. Take care of yourself, my friend.
With great aloha for so many years of friendship,
Gabe
I put the letter down and went for my wallet and car keys. Driving as fast as I thought I could without attracting the police, I went to Gabriel’s house in Pālolo Valley.
I had to smile when I saw the Ring doorbell. Of like minds. The two of us. I’d once bought a car the same day he did. For a while, we both drove red CRXs.
There was that familiar deafening announcement of someone being at the door. After a long moment, the door creaked slowly open.
“Mrs. Angelos?” I said, surprised that she was mobile enough to make it to the door. She had no cane or walker.
“Yes?” she asked, peering up at me.
For a moment it seemed as if she didn’t know me. “Mrs. Angelos, it’s me, Lanning Lee.”
She continued squinting at me but said nothing. Perhaps she’d become hard of hearing as well.
I spoke louder. “I’m Lanning Lee, Gabriel’s friend.”
“Who?”
“Lanning Lee. Is Gabriel home?”
“Gabriel who?”
Oh boy. The extent of the dementia Gabriel had mentioned saddened me.
“Your son, Gabriel Angelos. Is he here?” I said, pointing my index finger into the house.
“Nobody stay,” said Mrs. Angelos. “I don’t know no Gabriel. You go away no bother me.”
I shook my head. This was truly tragic. “Mrs. Angelos, Gabriel is your son. He lives here with you, right?”
“Son?” she said. “I no more son. I no more any kids. Go away.”
And with that, she pushed the door closed with more force than I’d guessed she had.
I checked the carport and saw that Gabriel’s white Nissan Leaf was not there.
What now? I tried his phone again, and got the non-working number message. It was Sunday. He’d said he was mostly in bed on weekends. Just in case, I went around the back and peered through Gabriel’s bedroom window. There was the bed, neatly made up.
Confused but not sure what to do, I drove back home. I needed a beer to clear my head. Grabbing a Coor’s Light from the fridge, I went out into the dining room and sat down. The envelope was gone.
“Doris?”
I went into the bedroom. Doris was asleep on my bed. I looked under the bed and the desk. Sometimes she’d grab things she wasn’t supposed to and drag them under there to destroy them. Nothing.
Great. This is what I mean about aging. I felt a bit of panic coming on. Did I move the letter?
I went back out to the dining room. Like magic, there was the envelope. Sitting down in a mix of anger, depression, and some trepidation, I opened the envelope and took out the letter. I noticed there was a P.S. on the back of the page that I’d missed.
Lanning, please don’t try to find me. I’m going to disappear. Like my students think, right? I’ve become an invisible man.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Around 2:00 a.m., I gave up trying, jumped in my car, and drove back to Pālolo Valley. When I passed Gabriel’s garage, his car wasn’t there.
I parked up the street a bit, then came back and snuck around to Gabriel’s bedroom window. I could see the bed clearly in the moonlight. It still was neatly made up.
Back home, I tried Gabriel’s number again. Same message. Could I put in a missing person’s report? There was some law or something I recalled. A person had to be missing for 72 hours before you could do it. Or was that something I’d seen on TV? And who knew if he was even missing? How many hours it had been? I mean, he’d been at my house yesterday afternoon. Rung my doorbell. That was him, right?
I opened my Ring app and went back to the time I’d heard the bell. There was no mention of it being rung and no recorded video event. I went backwards, all the way to the last car passing by in the dark before dawn. There was no Gabriel.
How had someone dropped off the letter without it being captured by Ring?
I brewed some coffee, then sat at the dining room table rereading the letter over and over.
At 8:00 a.m., I googled the number of the main office at Castle High School. A woman answered the phone. I explained who I was and that I needed to get in touch with Gabriel Angelos.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Who is it you want to speak to?”
“Mr. Gabriel Angelos. I believe he teaches 11th-grade English there?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we have no one by that name teaching here. This is Castle High School.”
“Yes, Castle, yes. It’s Gabriel Angelos,” I said. “He’s been teaching English there, at Castle High School, for 40 years.”
There was a long pause. “Ah, I checked the teacher roster just to be sure, Sir. I’ve been working here for almost 25 years. I’ve never heard of a Gabriel Angelos.”
One good thing about retirement is that you can drink alcohol any time of day you like. I went for a Coors Light and then sat at the dining room table.
The letter and the blank envelope were there. They were real. I could touch them, feel them. I opened the envelope again and pulled out the single sheet. It was blank on both sides.
Lanning Lee 