“Today is June 18, 2009. My real body is laying in this apartment in the future. Billy’s in a mental hospital. You’re living on the streets, and you’re a goddamned mess.”
She repeated the date to herself.
“June 18, 2009.”
It couldn’t make sense to her. It must sound like the title of a science fiction movie.
I tried to make her understand.
“So you can’t kill me. It’s not even worth trying. But you can try to save your son.”
She dropped me. My head hit the floor with a thump. She didn’t quite react at first. My words had to be picked apart, analyzed.
Then she looked down at me, deranged smile on her face, and said:
“No…I know how to kill you.”
And then she began to rip the brown paper from the office windows.
Sunshine smashed through the windows, washing over my entire body. My overcoat began to sizzle and then fade away. My eyes burned as if I’d looked directly into the sun through a twin pair of high-powered telescopes. The skin of my face was beyond fevered; it was ablaze.
My ears functioned long enough to hear Erna ripping the rest of the brown paper from the windows. The nerves under my skin sensed the additional heat and light, and they curled up and withered inside my body.
And then I was gone.
I woke up in the same position on the floor. Belly down. Head turned to one side. Drool coming out of my mouth.
I don’t know how long I’d been there, or how long I would be there, because I was completely paralyzed, top of my head to my feet. Just like my fingers, just like my right arm, I knew my body was still there, every piece of it. But I had zero control over any of it.
I could die here.
I could die here and no one would know.
Many hours, I think, passed before the door creaked open behind me. I heard heavy footsteps.
“Hello, you bastard. It’s June 18, 2009.”
Oh God. No.
She showed herself to me first. She wanted to make sure I knew it was her, so I knew who’d be doing this to me. It was Erna, the bag lady from Frankford Avenue. Which was where she’d ended up after watching her son institutionalized, and her lover knifed to death under the El. She’d been crazy back in 1972, and the intervening years hadn’t done much to improve the situation.
But what made her real crazy, I realized now, were all the dead people she saw walking through her apartment and the empty apartments she cleaned. They’d make faces at her, because they were just goofing around, having fun. Dr. DeMeo’s patients, in their past and some even propelled forward into the future a few years. And she thought she was losing her mind, but was afraid to tell the doctor, because then she’d lose her place and her job and then what would they do? So she said nothing and she drank wine and tried to forget about all the dead people.
Except the one dead person who’d told her the truth. That he was actually alive, in another year altogether. He’d even helpfully supplied the date.
So Erna Derace had waited.
And on June 18, 2009, she went back to that apartment building.
And she used the last three bullets in the gun she’d been saving for thirty-seven years.
“Do you understand now?”
She shot me in the back three times, right between the shoulder blades.
Willie Shahid, owner of the bodega downstairs, heard sharp cracks, three in a row, then heard someone rumbling down the steps and out the front door. He made it out in time to see an old woman go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. What was that about, he must have wondered. Then he locked the front doors of his shop and walked upstairs to check it out, cell phone in hand.
Willie stood outside my apartment door—3-A. He knocked and waited. Something wasn’t right. He sniffed the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper filled his nostrils. Gunpowder. It wasn’t an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.
So Willie flipped open his cell and dialed 911, giving the address and even the floor.
A short while later the EMTs arrived, and then three squad cars from the Philly PD, 15th District.
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 brother.
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.