The cemetery was never far. More than a few times I’d be bumming around and recognize a street or a landmark that made me think, “Oh, Mom’s buried near here somewhere. I should go.” But then I couldn’t find it, like it was invisible, and the urge faded. Of course I didn’t ask directions. I always figured that wherever I wound up was where I should be. Funny, if you do look at a map or ask directions, turns out that’ll get you places, too.
About three miles from The Rat, behind a row of big old apartment buildings that border the park and the nicer part of town, there are some rolling hills you might take for a golf course. From a distance, the hills look littered with golf balls, white, evenly spaced, all in lines, until you get close enough to realize they’re headstones. Game over.
I stand at the front gate, not remembering exactly where Mom is. I think about summoning my muse, but go to the office instead. The woman there, in her fifties, in a clean thrift-store dress and coiffed hair, ignores me. I guess she doesn’t like the way I look, even though I’m wearing my best jeans, T-shirt, and wrinkled overshirt.
Finally, I say, “Can you help me, please?” and give her my mother’s name. There’s some kind of maintenance money due, so along with the grave number, she hands me a bill. Normally, I’d crumple and chuck it, but I’m supposed to be respectful now, right? Grudgingly, she tells me how to find my mom’s grave.
By the time I’m back outside, I can’t remember what she said, so I figure it out by following the signs, counting the numbers. 247B, like an apartment.
Shouldn’t I be feeling something, something different from usual? I don’t, not even as I get closer, not even as I find the right row and trudge along the headstones. Some have photos of warmly smiling people etched into the stone, others have fresh flowers. Some have dates telling me that whoever’s buried there died as a child.
Then I see the pink marble my father picked out in those surreal days right after she passed. I still don’t feel anything, just the memory of where that deep well of numbness came from, and the weird buzz in my head. Looking at the stone isn’t like seeing something real, it’s more like staring at a photo a million years old. A dream. Less real than the flashy drive in Sergei’s germ-free plastic bag.
I came here to show respect, to think, but I don’t feel like I can do either. I try. I stand on the grass in front of her name and shut my eyes. I rub the flash drive through the plastic bag, feel its strange coolness. In the closed-eye dark it all feels distant, like none of it—The Rat, Ant, Alek, Klot, Po—has anything to do with me. It’s all way over there somewhere, and me, I’m right here. I begin and end here… don’t I?
I sense it even before I open my eyes. I’m not alone. Someone’s standing at the end of the row. His hair is clean. His clothes are new. He’s got some kind of jacket on over a black T-shirt and light brown pants that make him look like a nerdy clothing-store clerk. He looks like one of those ants who want to live in Denby’s house of cards.
I don’t like him, not at all, which is unusual since I don’t think about most people long enough to like or dislike them. But I know him. Don’t know how, but I do. My heart leaps. For a second, I think it’s Dad. But it’s not. No. This guy’s way too young. From the way he’s looking at me, I can tell he’s thinking the same thing. He can’t stand me, either, but he knows me. He’s my age. My height, my hair color, my eyes… my…?
Then I see it. There’s a bag in his hands. Through the clear plastic, diamonds sparkle, diamonds in the shape of a toy. The car. The car!
All my nagging half memories fall together and club me in the face. Once upon a time in my sticky comic-book dreams, I looked in a mirror, and he was what I saw. This guy. Super-Wade. The fainter. He’s from my dream, like the flashy drive. The thing in my hand is his James Bond flashy drive.
He looks at me, totally blown away, like he’s realizing the same thing at the same time. We know who we are. We’re us. We’re me. We’re Wade.
He walks forward, eyes dancing over my face, my body. His brow doesn’t furrow, it ripples. He’s thinking hard. A real thinker. Like Denby. Like I used to be.
“Geez,” I say to him, “do you have to think so much? I can smell the wood burning in your brain from over here.”
“Did Prometheus open up a space/time rift when it made that first strangelet? Was Judith Wilson right? Do we have parallel lives?” he asks. “Do our dreams access another dimension?”
“Like I know what you’re talking about,” I say, unable to avoid a little nose-laugh. “Maybe it’s more like that butterfly thing.”
He scrunches his face. “You mean Chuang Tsu? The man who dreams he’s a butterfly, then wakes up never knowing if he’s a man dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s a man?”
“Bingo.”
“But how is that possible? Both our lives can’t be real, can they?”
“I don’t know, man. I didn’t do it. Trickster’s business. Does it matter?”
“Trickster’s what? That a rock group? Of course it matters. Everything matters!”
“Whatev.” There are other things I’d rather be talking about. Besides, I came here to be respectful, and Mr. Science is making it tough.
“Whatever? Are you kidding me? Your whole life’s a mess! You quit school, you don’t have a job. You can’t commit to Denby. And you said something so stupid it made a mobster cut off your finger!”
So he dreams me, too. And he’s getting personal. Maybe I’ll take that crap from Denby, but I don’t have to take it from me.
“Yeah? At least I didn’t faint before I could press a button! What did you see that scared the crap out of you anyway, big shot? A mouse that wasn’t connected to a PC? At least I’m not trying to force my girlfriend to marry me because I’m scared she’ll run off.”
“Shut up! And my life is none of your business. And… and… you abandoned Dad.”
“He abandoned me, asshole.” It dawns on me I’m talking about stuff from his life I shouldn’t even know about. But the more I talk, the more I remember. “And you think your way is better? Yanking him to all those meetings, forcing him to go to work, managing his paychecks, talking him out of trying to get laid so he can work overtime instead? You treat him more like a pet than a man! Christ, he should run away! And your friends? Hunchback-Ant sold you out—”
“Anthony. His name is Anthony.”
“Fine. Anthony. Hunchback-Anthony sold you out to Particle Dude! You’ve got his and Denby’s life planned out for the next ten years. What do they call that in fancy psychological talk?”
“Enabling?”
“No. Control freak. You’re a damn control freak. You treat everyone you know like shit.”
“So do you!”
“Freak!”
“Loser!
We get quiet. We look away. We look back.
I point to the bag. “You’ve got my car.”
“Yes.”
“And you know I’ve got your computer thingy, right?”
“Flash drive. You think… you think it means we were supposed to meet?”
I shrug. “No. I’m just saying, just pointing out the obvious. But, yeah, maybe. Maybe we were supposed to meet. Here.”
We look at the stone. We read her name.
The anger melts. It’s just not important. Not here.
“You remember what she said before she died, right? What she asked?”
“Oh yeah.”
My mother used to sing, strong and loud, crazy and proud, but her last words came in a whisper. We recite them, taking turns. When I stop, he continues.
“Life is short, Wade. Too short and too precious to waste on being afraid, too short not to risk it all and go for what you really want. Too short not to ever decide.”
“So promise me just one thing—that you’ll find out what you really want to do, in your heart of hearts and, no matter what it is, you’ll do it.”
I know he has the same picture in his mind as I do. She’s lying in the hospital bed, facing her favorite window and the bay. The tide was in when she spoke, but going out. When the water left, so did she.
But she wanted me, us, to decide.
We look at each other and talk to ourselves. It doesn’t matter who says what.
“Part of us wanted to work hard to make the world a better place, and the other part wanted to quit school and become a singer.”
“And when it came right down to it, we were more like her than she realized. We just couldn’t choose between the two.”