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.
And all at once, of course—because everything happens all at once when you’re dead—I pluck out the details of his altered life story.
Seems I’ve never met Grandpop Henry, in this version.
I’m able to go back and watch him beat my grandmother. They both drink too much. They argue a lot. They both married young, Grandpop just a year out of the service, and they’re still figuring each other out. Then she gets pregnant with my father. Now he’s married young and saddled with a kid he didn’t particularly ask for and it makes him angry and it’s stupid but he takes it out on her. He works a lot. He says it’s to make them money, but it’s more to avoid her.
In the late 1950s, when my father is only ten years old, Grandpop Henry gets into a bar fight at a joint under the Frankford El. The guy comes out of nowhere, starts hacking away at Grandpop. The assailant’s name was Victor D’Arrazzio. Later, he would change it to “Vic Derace.” According to his FBI rap sheet, D’Arrazzio liked cheap sweet wine, BBQ ribs and prostitutes.
Grandpop Henry was stabbed seventeen times, in the chest and throat. He died at the scene. It was declared a senseless killing.
My grandmom doesn’t remember the beatings. She misses her husband. She mourns the life they could have had together.
D’Arrazzio kills himself a few years later, in state prison.
I grow up never having met Grandpop Henry.
In this other life, the Frankford Slasher still killed women under the El during the late 1980s.
Only, it was somebody else doing the slashing.
By the time I was born, Grandpop Henry was long gone. Right now I remember him, and I don’t remember him. I’m named for him. My father was thinking about musicians, but my mother suggested Henry. After his own father. The father he barely knew.
My name is Henry Wadcheck.
I remember him, and I don’t remember him.
I want to remember him.
I need to remember him.
But I don’t think I’ll be allowed to remember him for very long.
And this is because my death is almost over, and in my original life, my grandpop’s eighty-four-year-old body is about to give up and take its last breath. Everything’s exploding out of that moment. My vision is blurring. I know what happens next, because when you’re dead everything happens at once. That doesn’t mean I experience life in one quick burst—like the old cliché about it flashing before your eyes. No, I relive every second. I retake every breath. I feel every cut, I savor every kiss. But I still know everything that is happening, did happen and will happen.
I knew everything the moment I started telling you this story.
I saw it all because I was dead.
But now I’m alive.
So I’m about to forget everything.
I told you this story because I so badly want to remember, even though I know it’s impossible. You tell stories because you want some part of you to live on. And I know that’s impossible.
I know that because right now I’m going to wake up.
When I wake up Meghan is already propped up on one elbow, beautiful eyes wide open, staring at me. I reach out and touch her face—her perfect, beautiful face. Even after two kids, even after twelve years of marriage, she’s as gorgeous as ever. I love the feeling of her soft skin beneath my fingertips.
I’m pretty hungover.
Hot waves of sunshine burst through our windows.
It’s a humid Sunday morning—the first day of summer. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and tell her I dreamed about something, and it was one of those annoying, busy dreams where you’re working so hard at something…but I can’t remember a thing about it. So frustrating.
Then the kids come screaming into the room and jump on our bed and my daughter pushes a stuffed animal in my face and says kissy! kissy! So I kiss the stuffed animal—a bunny. They’re loud. They’re not going to let us sleep. They’re also not going to allow us to fool around. They want one thing: us up.
They also have drawings in their hands, which puzzles me until I remember: it’s Father’s Day.
My dad’s coming over later. Meghan’s, too. I’m going to be on grill duty. I really should have more sleep if I’m going to be putting up with both sets of parents today…
But you know, whatever. I smile at my kids. They’re beautiful, just like their mother.
I go into the bathroom to wash my face. My head’s throbbing like crazy—Meghan and I had more than a few glasses of wine last night, and then we got friendly on the living room floor. I’m paying for it this morning, though. I open the medicine cabinet door.
There’s a bottle of Tylenol inside. I don’t recognize it. Bottle looks old, but I’m sure the pills inside are fine. Meghan wouldn’t buy out-of-date medicine. Probably just an old container.
I tap two into my palm.
Also by Duane Swierczynski
Novels
SECRET DEAD MEN
THE WHEELMAN
THE BLONDE
SEVERANCE PACKAGE
Interactive Mysteries
THE CRIMES OF DR. WATSON
BATMAN: MURDER AT WAYNE MANOR
Graphic Novels
CABLE: WAR BABY
CABLE: WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
IMMORTAL IRON FIST: THE MORTAL IRON FIST
IMMORTAL IRON FIST: ESCAPE FROM THE EIGHTH CITY
WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: IN THE BLOOD