The EMTs moved me to a stretcher and carried me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train.
But by that time, I was already dead.
(XIII)
My Other Life
See that body on the mortician’s slab, waiting to be pumped with formaldehyde and other assorted preserving chemicals?
That’s me.
I don’t know how long I’ve been dead, but I have to presume it’s been a day or so. As I said at the beginning, when you’re dead everything seems to happen all at once.
Time’s arrow only appears to fly straight when you’re alive. Dead is something else. Once you cross that invisible line, you see things how they really are.
I am discorporated from my body. I am able to see everything I’ve done since birth, throughout my childhood, up through my adolescence and into adulthood.
But the strange thing is I don’t quite remember any of it.
There’s me, balancing on the edge of the couch, arms and legs extended like I’m a superhero with the ability to fly. There’s me, fighting with my brother, wrestling around on the floor like I’m Spider-Man and he’s the Hulk and…
See that? My
I don’t remember having a brother.
But somehow, I do.
In this life I also seem to have two sisters—one ten years younger, and another twelve years younger. Their names are on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t bring myself to speak them out loud. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I know them, I don’t know them.
I still have a father.
There he is, trying to teach me how to play guitar. Three small fingers on the fret board, struggling to form a C chord, the home base of all rock guitar chords, the first thing you learn.
Then there he is, teaching me what little he knows about the piano, because he decided he could use a keyboard player in the band rather than a second guitarist.
There’s me, playing along on my first “gig” with my father when I’m nine years old.
There’s me, playing a wedding with my father’s band. I am fifteen, and my father is still alive. We’re wearing tuxedo shirts and cummerbunds.
He’s alive! How is this possible?
But sure enough, there’s my father, in a suit, at my high school graduation. I want to be a writer, but music’s a way to make money for now. I write my stories on my own time. I spent my weekends practicing and playing gigs. Eventually I quit the band and go off into journalism. I only play the piano once in a great while, but I listen to music all the time.
I pluck a thousand memories at random from a life I don’t fully remember having lived.
I remember it all and I don’t remember it at the same time.
I am still dead, but I am also alive. There’s another me out there, living a life where my father never died.
The other me is married.
He’s married to a young teacher named Meghan. Her father’s a powerful Center City attorney. She’s cut her beautiful long blond hair short.
We have two children.
I keep thinking I’m going to wake up any minute now. But will I still be dead when I wake up?
After a while it occurs to me that the way this unremembered life makes any sense is that Grandpop Henry succeeded in going back and changing something.
Something huge. Something reality-warping. Something that’s rewoven the fabric of many lives. My life. My father’s. Meghan’s. The siblings I didn’t know existed. Everyone’s life has changed now. Everyone’s taken two steps to the right and carried on as if their other lives never happened.
I even wonder, briefly, where Whiplash Walt is right now. Married to another client? Because Anne, my mother, is still married to my father. She quit smoking a few years ago because of our children. Children I didn’t know we had. I grew up in a house full of cigarette smoke, but in the years since she’s read a few things. She knows how deadly it is. So she quit.
I pluck out other memories. I’m dead. I’m allowed to do this.
In this other life Erna Derace is childless. She never met Victor, she never had to experience the hell of burying her own child, never had to inflict living hell upon her other child. She leads a quiet lonely life. She never moves away from Frankford. Maybe she was never meant to have kids. Or maybe she was meant to have kids but screwed it up and is being punished in this alternate life. I catch glimpses of her, now and again, shopping on Frankford Avenue but I don’t know who she is and she ignores me, too.
I scan this other, alien life, looking for Grandpop Henry.
