It takes time to reassure Dad that I’ll call him if I need him. Then I have to spend more time convincing him he shouldn’t take the day off and sit by the phone in case I do. It’s a tough fight, but after I swear a blood oath that I won’t hesitate to interrupt him, and remind him of everything he just told me about “letting go,” he agrees.
As his cranky Honda vanishes from the parking lot, so does my desire to visit the cemetery. Going to visit my mother’s grave is a damn silly idea. It has nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with strangelets or Anthony or dizzy spells. But I promised Dad I’d go, and, pound for pound, it isn’t any sillier than any other idea I have. It’s certainly not as silly as this diamond car in my pocket.
Trying not to imagine the world ending at any second, I drop by the house first, to shower and put on some clean clothes. I put my cracked laptop on the kitchen counter. Just to delay leaving a little longer, I tinker with it a bit, tell myself I might still be able to boot it, get the code out of it. But I don’t get anywhere, so I plug it in to charge and give up.
Rivendale Cemetery isn’t far. I even know exactly where Mom’s plot is. The week she died, Dad put a map of the graveyard on our bulletin board and used a red pen to X the spot. Details.
So far, he’s right about this clearing my mind. The awkwardness of the trek pushes my other worries to the back of my head, but I’m not happy about it. I am glad my memory holds true. Even on the one-lane road that winds through the cemetery, I don’t wonder where to park. When I get out to mount the monument-dotted hill, I’m only sorry I didn’t stop farther away. I could’ve used a longer, slower walk.
They’re not kidding when they say graveyards are peaceful and quiet. The air is crisp and the cemetery big enough to give it that kind of special silence usually only found on days blanketed with thick snow, when it feels as if both the world and me are alone in my head.
I trudge toward plot 247B, thinking, as I get closer, that I should be feeling something, anything, but I don’t, not even as I pass among the headstones. Some of the graves have photos of the departed. Dad wanted to get one of those, but I stopped him, thinking it was tacky. Maybe I was wrong. There’s something special about the faces.
As I pass a gnarled old oak, the pink quarried-marble Dad picked stands out like a flower in a field of white, black, and gray. Nice choice. It looks good against the grass, the sky. Doesn’t seem as harsh as the others. Doesn’t seem as dead.
Getting closer, I find myself looking forward to reading her name, the dates, closing my eyes to think, or better yet, stop thinking. I take out the bag with the diamond toy in it. Don’t know why I brought it with me. Maybe to show her.
Only, someone’s already there.
Who?
He stands right on her grave, like it’s his place, not mine.
Our eyes meet. My God, what a piece of work. What a mess. He looks like a street person, only he’s as young as I am. Maybe he’s a crack addict. His hair’s a rat’s nest, his skin gray, like it hasn’t seen the sun in years. He’s thin, too, enough for his cheeks to be sallow, which makes his eyes seem bigger, stick out slightly. And there’s this strange, wild glint to them, an animal sparkle. No, not an animal. More like… a clown.
Though his face has no particular expression just now, the lines conspire to make it look like he’s sneering, not at me but at everything, the entire world, like it’s some big joke, and he’s the only one who gets it. Don’t get me started on his clothes. Torn jeans, stained T-shirt under a drab olive overshirt. Exactly the sort of person I hate, a parasite, a hedonist, not caring about anything except what feels good. No worries. Hakuna matata. Ha.
While I scan him, he scans me, eyes narrowing as he sizes me up. I get the feeling his opinion of me is at least as low as mine is of him. I doubt we know each other. How could we? But… I do. Don’t know how or why, but I know him. Seems like he’s thinking the same thing. We know each other. From where? School? There are more than a few losers at Rivendale High. He’s my age. My height, has my hair color, my eyes, and, if you put a few pounds on it, my… face?
There’s a plastic bag in his hands. In it, I see the flash drive. My brow was furrowed but, seeing that, my face and mind go blank. He’s staring at the plastic bag in my hand—the car—with the same void expression.
Then I remember. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Once in my dreams, in the filthy bathroom of that coffee dive, I looked in a mirror. I was so horrified by what I saw I forgot it, until now. That’s where I know him from. It was him. I was him. This wreck. He’s like the diamond-studded car. He’s from my dream. In the dream, he’s me.
He knows it, too. Figured it out the same moment I did.
I step closer, my brow crunching so tightly I feel it pulse. He burns me with the wild light in his crazy eyes. He grins. Like everything else, he thinks this is funny.
How could this happen? Am I insane? What kind of insanity is this?
“Geez,” he says, in a lazy but accusatory way, “do you have to think so much? I can smell the wood burning in your brain from over here.”
I think out loud: “Did Prometheus open up a space/time rift when it made that first strangelet? Was Judith Wilson right? Do we have parallel lives? Do our dreams access another dimension?”
“Like I know what you’re talking about,” he says, with an insulting little laugh. “Maybe it’s more like that butterfly thing.”
Butterfly thing? What is he… “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?”
I don’t believe this guy. “Trickster’s what? That a rock group? Of course it matters. Everything matters!”
“Whatev,” he says.
“Whatever? Are you kidding me?” He is really pissing me off. Details of the dreams flood 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!”
“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.”
He knows. He knows me, too. “Shut up! And my life is none of your business. And… and… you abandoned Dad.”
The sneer vanishes. “He abandoned me, asshole. 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 lives 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 go quiet for a long time. We look at each other like it hurts just to see. We turn away for a break, then look back.
He breaks the silence, pointing 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?”
He shrugs. It’s annoying the way he shrugs. “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. It spite of all the strangeness, the quiet calms us.
“You remember what she said before she died, right? What she asked?”
“Oh yeah.”
We recite it, word for word, breath for breath, taking turns. We don’t skip a beat.
He begins. “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.”
When he stops, I continue. “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.”
As we speak I know he has the same picture of her in his head I do, lying in the hospital bed we brought home so she could spend her last days with us. We’d hoped it might be a week, but it was only two days, as if she could finally relax at home, let go.
Let go.
She lay facing her favorite window. It overlooked the little bay out back. A land bridge, made of piled stones, came and went with the tide. The tide was in, but going out. When the water left that last time, 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.”