We spend most of our time in his room, and life proves again to be nothing if not circular: I pull a few favorites from the library, and then sit in a chair by his bed and read excerpts aloud.
From East of Eden, “A child may ask, ‘What is the world’s story about?’ And a grown man or woman may wonder, ‘What way will the world go? How does it end . . . ?’”
We taste Morrison’s Song of Solomon . . . “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude . . .”
We climb Mount Doom, travel with Billy Pilgrim, and when we follow Dumbledore into a cave full of Inferi, and the aging headmaster says, “I am not worried, Harry. I am with you,” my father raises his hand a few inches, says, “I know how he feels.”
While I am grateful for this time together, an invisible clock hovers over our heads, an incessant ticking, and I toggle between the Harry who loves Dumbledore for his goodness, and the Harry who hates him for his elusiveness.
“Dad.”
“You were born at the hands of an angel,” he says. “I saw your face that night, and I remembered it. Eyes like fire. I remember—” He taps his brain, as if to say, Steel trap.
“I know, Dad. I saw you too.”
“Did you see the angel?”
“You should really get some sleep, you know.”
But he doesn’t. He says those fiery eyes stayed with him through the years, says he watched them blossom slowly, right in front of him, day after day. “I knew it was time to send you when your mother . . .”
I have often wondered what it would be like to devote my entire life to a single person. To hand them my heart, and to hold theirs in return. As my father’s eyes fill with tears, I think of my photo from when they were young—Mom’s smile captured in time, a look that said she knew he belonged to her—and it hits me that while I’ve had eighteen years to cope with losing my mother, her death is still fresh for him. I kiss his hand as the maddening logic of loss rages silently in his eyes, and while I may never experience such pure devotion, in front of me now, I see what happens when the person you give your heart to is no longer there to hold it.
A few minutes pass, and he asks how I feel, and I tell him of my life in the House by the Solar Cliffs, how I ate only what I grew or what was in the basement stores, how my water was filtered. “Whether it’s another virus, or water or food—I don’t know. But my house saved me.”
“Good.” He smiles. “So, you’ll go back there. After.”
After.
I tell him what he wants to hear, and I smile, but a thought has been turning in my mind, something I need to ask while he’s lucid, and before his after is here.
“The other portals,” I say, recalling the cities in the file at Kairos. “Madrid, Seoul, Missoula—”
“Alexandria, Bend, Lima, Asheville.”
Like a switch, I think. His brain turns on and off and on again.
“So I’ve been thinking . . .”
And I tell a story. There once was a plague that wiped out the world. My story is bare bones, no jokes, not nearly the detailed depictions of his imaginative tales. But the gist is this: an apocalyptic world where the mass exodus of humanity occurs, while at the same time, a number of mysterious portals appear. “At the end of the world, what could be more convenient than a way out?” I ask.
“You sound like your mother.”
We smile, tinges of the maddening loss still lingering.
“Even if you’re right,” he says, “the portals aren’t ways out. They’re ways back.”
“Maybe instead of portals to other worlds, all we needed were portals to other times. Maybe it’s not alien or cosmic or some divine modern-day Noah’s Ark. Maybe it’s just the next step in evolution. Single-cell organisms, fish, birds, dinos, apes, upright, freethinking humans, followed by—”
“The same humans. Living over and over again.” He smiles. “Your evolutionary timeline needs some work, but it’s . . . an exciting thought.”
Silence for a moment, and when I try to fill it by reading again, he stops me. “Let’s just be,” he says, and so we do. We sit there, just being together, not speaking or even looking at each other, and it feels quietly tectonic, the kind of moment that might move a mountain if it were let outside.
“I knew it was you,” he says, breaking the silence. “Figured it out years ago.”
I don’t know what to say to this. The thought of so many years passing between us, each knowing the other is alive—like standing on opposite sides of a closed door, not being able to walk through.
“There’s a reason we couldn’t live together?” he asks.
I’ve memorized those particular entries in the Red Books. The transport imprints of them jumping off the cliff are burned in my mind, the nightmare those Lives became. I could tell him. And I almost do. But when I look at him, eager and frail and so close to the end, all I can say is, “Yes. There was a reason.”
He slips into a fit of coughing, which turns to blood in his mouth, and out of the blue, the verbal spiral descends: the angel from heaven, my mother’s sweaty hands, “Your sweet mother,” he says, and I hold him, tell him not to talk, just rest.
Later that evening, after he’s had a heavy nap, I help him eat some bone broth, and he asks questions about how the Tollbooth worked. I explain what it feels like, the mist of the spinning water, and my theory that going through so many times has left a mark on my soul.
“Like a tree ring,” I say. “Dendrochronology, remember?”
His smile is mechanical; I can’t tell if he remembers, so I go on, explain the concept of transport imprints, how I’d begun having memories of things from other timelines, other Nicos, earlier Lives.
“How many Lives?” he asks, his face an expectant sunrise. “How many times have you gone through?”
“I’m number 160.”
He laughs out loud. “My Nico,” he says, and my heart warms at the affection in his voice, until he follows that up with— “Number 161.”
That night after he’s asleep, I go up on the attic deck and stay awake into the early hours of the morning. As a child, when this treetop sea whispered possibilities and freedoms beyond my reckoning, I listened with eyes wide and ears open. Eighteen years of the Red Books have made the prospect of freedom dizzying. And so I turn from the view to face the Bell, try to recall a transport imprint from my last Life, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead I close my eyes and imagine how it might have gone, a time when, laughing, my father had called me his Nico.
My Nico, he would say. Number 160.