McGregor One Parker McGregor left his house that morning for work as he did every weekday morning for twenty years, exactly ninety minutes before rush hour traffic started. He had diligently worked half way up the corporate ladder by going in so early and driving back home so much later than anyone else did in the downtown Pittsburgh area. He was determined to climb the rest of the way up that ladder if it killed him. Not even McGregor, as he was known by all, expected this particular day to be any different than the 5,200 other work days before it. He entered the Liberty Tunnels as he normally did and usually he was joined by just only one or two other vehicles coming into downtown through the tunnels so early. This particular morning, however, he did notice that he encountered no vehicles at all from the time he left his home twenty minutes earlier. He thought that was odd. Inside the tunnels, he was used to the radio cutting out, so he thought nothing of losing the signal a good third of the way through. What took him by surprise was that the radio came back on half way through the tunnel when his morning radio show usually didn’t fade back in until he was almost at the tunnel’s end and ready to cross the Liberty Bridge. Right after the half way point in the tunnel is when he saw someone standing in the middle of his lane up ahead. At first he thought there had to have been an accident, but he could not see one ahead. The road was clear. He mistook the man with the large red flag as a possible car jacker, so he did not immediately stop. He moved to the right lane, but so did the man. The man leaped out in front of  McGregor’s vehicle which  came to a screeching stop. Carefully, but angry as can be, he rolled down the window only an inch or so and yelled out to ask what the hell the guy with the red flag was doing. There had been no construction ahead signs anywhere on his journey coming into the tunnel. You need to step out of your car, McGregor,” the tall man with the red flag told him. “You need to do it now.” “How do you know my name? How do you know me? What do you want?” McGregor asked. “You know who I am, don’t you?” You need to come with me,” the man said. “I don’t know you. Get the hell out of my way or I will run you over,” McGregor said to the man who suddenly just vanished into thin air from the front of the car, only to appear knocking on the driver’s side window. McGregor jumped from fright. “Come on, McGregor, get out of the car. It’s time,” the man with the red flag told him. Unwillingly, under protest, a very scared Parker McGregor slowly opened his car door and got out. “What do you want with me?” he asked the man who walked around the car towards him. “You’re dead, McGregor. Your time on earth has ended. Back there before the tunnel, they’ll find you slumped over the wheel of your car. You had a heart attack worrying about how you’ll get all your work done today.” “No, you’re wrong. I’m not dead. I’m alive. I’m going to work,” McGregor said as he opened his car door. When he went to put his right foot into the car and sit down, the car suddenly disappeared and he fell to the pavement. “Do you need more proof, McGregor? Your life is over. Come with me.” “No, I don’t know how you made my car disappear, but I’m alive, very much alive and I need to get to work, “ McGregor said. “Do you think that business can’t run without you? It certainly can. Perhaps even better. Maybe worse. Who knows? That’s not your concern now. Your life is over.” “It can’t be,” McGregor said. “I need more time.” “That’s non-negotiable,” the stranger told him. “Everyone is supposed to be prepared for this day. Not everyone gets to have a lingering illness and pray for the end to come. There has to be people like you who never saw it coming. So come with me peacefully,” he told McGregor. “Or what? You’ll take me by force? Go ahead because I’m not leaving willingly,” McGregor said and bloody well meant it. “Look, it’s always the hardest on guys like you who think you’re in good health but really aren’t. You who are taken suddenly with no notice are always the biggest problems to get to leave. Why aren’t you ready? Give me one good reason to come back tomorrow to get you.” “You could do that, come back tomorrow?” McGregor asked. “I did once. Nobody really cared. It was just one day. And she had really good reasons.” “OK, I want one more day to live,” McGregor told him. “What will you do with one more day, McGregor?” “I’ll go to work to get things in order,” McGregor said “Absolutely not,” said the man who by now put down the red flag. “Your work is way ahead of everyone else’s. I can’t allow that.” As much as he didn’t want to admit it,  McGregor had no other reason than work to want one additional day on earth. He limited himself to his job, and by choice, had no real life outside of that office. The stranger gave him a few more minutes to think and sadly it didn’t matter. He had nothing else he could do for 24 hours. “Could I just walk around town, drive through the country, enjoy the beautiful day, feed the birds, take a ride on the incline because I never did that and wanted to? Could I go to a Pirate game?” McGregor asked him. “Sure, you could do all of those things in a day, I suppose. But isn’t there anything else or more meaningful that you would want to do?” he asked. “I think it’s pretty safe to assume that you’ll go on to heaven. Except for the baseball game, you’ll have all of that there. The scenery is much nicer there. You’ll have an eternity of that. Is there anyone you want to spend a day with here on earth? No human?” “No,” McGregor said in a whisper. “I can’t think of anyone.” McGregor sadly started to walk to the end of the tunnel with the man. Out of curiosity, he asked what that one other person who got one more day on earth did with her time. His escort didn’t want to answer his question. “Come on. Tell me. Maybe it will help me think of something,” McGregor told him. "She used some of that time to find you to call and ask you to go to lunch. You wasted three hours of those 24 telling yourself you were too busy to call her. Then when you did, you turned her down because you had no time.” “I wanted to see her very badly, but I was busy,” McGregor told him. “Really, I was busy.” “Sure you were, but you could have had lunch with her. You should have.” “What did she do with the rest of the 21 hours?” McGregor asked him. “She had lunch with other friends, flew to see her children and called everyone she could in between.” "She should’ve told me that I wouldn’t have been able to see her again,” McGregor said. “I would’ve met her if I had known.” “Once she made the itinerary of her day with me, she had no memory of meeting me once those 24 hours started. But she made each contact very special so that those people always had a good memory to keep alive in his or her heart of her. That’s what a special exception and 24 extra hours are supposed to do.” “So this is it?” McGregor asked. “My life is over and I’m walking towards the end of the Liberty Tunnels. The portal to Heaven is here?” "No, not here. Someone else will be along soon to take you the rest of the way. My time with you is over, so please have a seat over there and wait. It was a pleasure to have met you. I won’t see you again,” he told McGregor. McGregor sat on the side of the Liberty Tunnel most of the day. He didn’t like having to wait, but wasn’t in a hurry to leave either, so he did was he was told and just waited there. From this view, the city looked different. He could see part of his office building from there. He wondered what people would think when he wasn’t at his desk by 7 AM. When McGregor on the other side of the tunnel was found slumped over his steering wheel, emergency workers performed CPR on him and shocked his heart. Eventually, a pulse was detected. He regained consciousness in the hospital about 10 hours following emergency cardiac surgery. “Where am I?” he asked a nurse. “Is this heaven?” “No, you’re in a hospital. In ICU. You were lucky that a paramedic just happened to be driving through when you had a heart attack at the stop light. He brought you back. So just relax and let your body heal. The doctor will be in soon.” McGregor was in a lot of pain, so he knew that he was alive. Months later, when he thought about what happened to him, he said it seemed so real that he met the man with the red flag half way through the tunnel and then walked with him to the other side. It could have all made for an interesting water cooler story to tell people. But McGregor figured he’d keep it to himself since everyone probably had heard their share of white light stories involving tunnels when someone got to death’s door but came back through resuscitation. When he could return to work, he did so part time. He still drove into the Liberty Tunnels 90 minutes before rush hour started to get to his desk by 7 AM, but he left mid afternoon. He went to Pirate games, made some friends and had some type of life outside work for the first time in 20 years. When someone asked him to lunch, he usually accepted. One day McGregor decided to call the children of the woman who had the extra 24 hours on earth. They left return messages for him that they were too busy to meet him for lunch. McGregor then wrote them each a letter telling them how he regretted that he was too busy to have met their mother for lunch. Her daughter telephoned him to say that she will always regret that she did not have time to meet her mom who flew in for the afternoon on the spur of the moment hours before she died. The young woman said that her brother also had regrets because he was out of town and missed the chance to see their mom that day. How sad, McGregor thought, that she wasted so much of those 24 hours on people who were unavailable to her that day. He was ashamed that his reason for not meeting her again was that someone told him years  earlier that he was a horrible kisser. He was afraid that she might think the same thing if he kissed her. So McGregor decided that he had to overcome the fear of something so simple that stopped him from enjoying life with someone. After a few attempts, he mastered the art, but felt even more foolish then to have wasted not just part of that woman’s last 24 hours on earth, but most of his adult life alone and hiding at work. The next time McGregor met the man with the red flag again, it wasn’t in the Liberty Tunnels. He had retired a few years earlier and was in the middle of his best ever game of golf. However, he went without protest with the escort this time. The woman’s children paid their respects as did most of the new friends he made at the golf club. Meanwhile, few people from his old office realized that he even retired. Return to Fictional Fiction                        Return to Homepage