1989
I used my implant to link the living room Synthetic Location Projector to the computer system that stored my consciousness and my accumulated life experience. The projector transformed the living room into a scene from my childhood.
The couch where Lac and Sam sat became a couch which had been set on the curb for the trash. Over-filled galvanized metal trashcans were gathered to both sides of the worn piece of furniture. The air smelled like garbage, but it also had an acrid foulness which couldn’t be explained by the fly-infested cans.
Across the residential street were narrow, wood-framed houses which were built as twins. The homes were cheap when they were new, and they hadn’t been new in a very long time. Behind the homes and their weedy backyards, a giant sprawl of tanks and pipework stretched to the horizon. This was the old Sun Oil Refinery. A flame burned at the top of a tower with an angry crackle, like a flag snapping in a strong wind. The eternal flame of the flare was the source of the acrid stench. It burned off byproducts from the refining process and poisoned the air for miles around.
I moved behind the sofa to watch the scene from the same viewpoint as Lac. I almost rested my hand on his meaty shoulder, but I held back. I told myself that now was not the time to be overly familiar with him.
A white mail jeep crawled along the street and parked. A thin, sour-faced mail carrier climbed out through the sliding door and made his way along the block. A brand new Lincoln Town Car in triple-black whispered up the street. It turned away from us at a cross street and parked. A big man in a black suit heaved his overweight bulk out of the car. He frowned at the heat and blinked into the August sunshine. When his eyes adjusted, he lit a cigarette and walked along the alley behind the homes. The man moved with purpose, his eyes up and his hands loose like he was ready for anything. A little while later, an eight-year-old boy walked along the street.
The boy was a smeary-faced urchin, underfed and dressed in tattered second-hand clothes. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. The soles of his canvas sneakers were tied to the uppers with the laces which no longer threaded the eyelets. The boy walked with one foot in the street and one foot on the curb. His head bobbed up and down with his uneven steps.
The boy stopped in front of the second house from the corner. He crossed the street-level porch and let himself into the house with a key which was tied around his neck at the end of a string. His hollow eyes peered our way as he closed the door behind.
Lac pointed at the closed door. “That’s you!”
“It was me, a very long time ago.”
“Where are we?”
“The place was called Marcus Hook. It was never a town in the traditional sense. The oil refinery came first. The houses were built later to shelter the workers. When the workers grew tired of breathing the pollution, they left, and the cluster of homes became a slum. This year is 1989. Urban America is in the grip of an epidemic of drugs. The current drug of choice is called crack. It’s a form of another drug called cocaine, a stimulant.
“Cocaine is a yuppie drug. The upwardly mobile types like it. It’s a powder that’s snorted. It provides a euphoric high and a nice energy boost. Crack is a rock which people smoke, usually from a small glass pipe. Poor people smoke crack. It’s very addictive and it ruins most of the lives it touches.”
Lac asked a question which demonstrated his five-century removal from the scene before us. “If it’s harmful, why did people do it?”
“Life in the twentieth century is hard. A lot of people who lived back then used substances to escape. Look around. This is a miserable place. The people who live here exist under the weight of grinding poverty. Crack allows them to forget, if just for a little while.”
I concentrated my thoughts and used my implant to move the three of us from the curb, onto the rotten sofa inside the living room of the house. The couch faced the doorless opening between the living room and the kitchen. The boy we’d seen on the street stood in the doorway. The big man who’d gotten out of the Lincoln sat at the kitchen table. He pointed the nose of a compact firearm at the boy.
“Who are you?” The man asked.
“I live here.”
“There isn’t supposed to be a child.” The man insisted. “I always make sure. Who do you belong to?”
“The woman had me. She’s not my mother. That’s what she says. I came from her, but she’s not my mother. The man is not my father. I don’t know who is. Maybe I don’t have one.”
The man drew on his cigarette and stubbed it out in one of the dirty plates which littered the small, round table. “What’s your name?” He asked on a smokey exhale.
The boy shrugged his tiny shoulders. “They just call me ‘boy.’”
The man’s face scrunched in disgust over the boy’s answer. He shook his head over it. He lowered his revolver and laid it on the table. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”
“Nuh uh.”
“Maybe if you knew why I was here, you would be.”
“Are you here to murder me, mister?”
The big man stared at the boy. He sucked a breath and blew it out. He coughed at the end of his breath. “It stinks in here.” He complained as he lit another cigarette. He pointed to a chair at the opposite end of the table and told the boy to sit. The boy sat and kicked his spindly legs which didn’t touch the floor. “I’m here to kill the woman and the man. They took something they shouldn’t have. What do you say to that?”
The boy thought for a minute, then he nodded. “OK.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Nuh uh.”
“Would you care if I killed you?”
“Nuh uh.”
The man pointed at the boy. “What’s that on your arm?”
The boy looked at a series of ugly red circles on his forearm to remind himself what they were. “They’re burns, from the woman’s cigarette. She does that when I’m bad.”
“Does the woman do that a lot?”
“Uh huh.”
The man drew another breath to say something, but he didn’t get the chance. He was interrupted by the sound of a pair of arguing voices. One of the voices was low, a man’s voice. It spoke rarely and used individual words. The other voice was a shill woman’s. It spoke constantly, a badgering, fault-finding, hen-pecking voice. A key was jammed into the door lock and twisted. The door opened and the arguing couple entered. Neither of them noticed the man at the table until the door was shut and locked behind. The man tossed his cigarette onto the floor and held his gun up.
I used my implant to pause the scene.
“Why did you stop it?” Lac asked.
“Because he’s about to murder two people. I didn’t think you’d want to see that.”
Lac turned his head to meet my eyes over his shoulder. “If these are really your memories, if this nightmare is really where you came from, I want to see it.”
I didn’t think Lac would like what he was about to see, but he asked to see it, so I decided to let him. Before I restarted the scene, I altered the reality of the memory to quiet the sound of the gunshots. I un-paused the scene and let it play.
The man at the table fired two shots, one for each member of the couple. Bright red blood gushed from their chests, and they fell. The man got up from his chair and stood over the mortally wounded people. He fired two more shots, one into each of their skulls. For Lac’s sake, I blurred his view of the ‘kill shot.’
Even though I’d reduced the volume of the gun, Lac and Sam still jumped with the sound of each shot. Three people in the room did not jump, the man, the boy, and me. Lac, who had likely never even seen a firearm in person, commented over the sound. “Fuck, that thing is loud!”
“He liked them loud.” I explained about the man. “Loud keeps people away.”
The man came back to the child at the table. He gestured into the other room with his gun. “What will you do now that those people are dead?”
The child shrugged. He had no idea what to do.
The man took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe his fingerprints from the gun. When he finished, he tossed the firearm toward the corpses in the living room. He stamped out the cigarette he’d discarded earlier and beckoned to the child. “Come with me. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but you can’t stay here.”
The man and the child left the house and walked along the alley. The man set a leisurely pace. He kept his eyes up to survey his surroundings, but he did not hurry. He walked like he had nothing to get away from and nowhere to be. Even though he had just fired four shots from a short-barrel .38, no one came running to see what happened. The boom of gunfire was not an unusual sound in that neighborhood.
The man unlocked the passenger side of his Lincoln and helped the small boy into the black leather seat. As an afterthought, he fastened the seatbelt around the boy’s tiny body. The man went around to the other side of the car and hauled himself in with a grunt. He started the engine and turned the air conditioning on full. By that time, Lac and Sam and I had relocated to the back seat of the car so we could watch.
The man turned himself in the seat with another grunt. He held his hand out to the boy. The boy stared at the man’s hand. He didn’t know what to do with it. The man explained the commonplace gesture of friendship. “Take my hand.” The boy reached out with his skeletally thin hand to clasp the man’s giant paw. “That’s right, now we shake.” The boy and the man shook hands. “My name is Tom Collins, what’s yours?”
The boy shook his head. The head shake reminded Tom that the boy had no name. Tom righted himself in the seat and put his car in gear. He drove directly out of the neighborhood. Just like his plodding walk along the alley, Tom spared no bother to disguise his route or to hurry his progress. Once he was on the main road, he pressed a button on the dashboard to turn on the radio. Green digital numbers lit on a small display. A tinkling piano sounded from the speakers. Tubular bells accompanied the piano. A male singer with a pleasant tenor voice sang in harmony to the music. “Oh, mercy, mercy me…”
Tom turned the music low. “Do you know who this is?”
“Nuh huh.”
Tom’s face scrunched again over the boy’s poor language. He corrected the child’s speech. “If you don’t know something, you say, ‘no sir,’ or ‘no ma’am.’ Got it?”
The boy nodded. “No, sir.” He realized he’d used his lesson incorrectly and tried again. “I mean, yes, sir.”
“Good boy.” Tom praised. He went back to his original question. “The man singing is called Marvin Gaye. He’s dead now; shot by his father four or five years ago. I guess that means his name is available. How would you like to be Marvin Gaye?”
The boy wasn’t sure. “I don’t know…uh…sir. Is it OK? If I use that man’s name, won’t people get us confused?”
Tom laughed at the windshield, a hearty, pleasant laugh. “No, I don’t think anyone would confuse the two of you. If you’re worried, we can add my last name to the end. We’ll call you Marvin Gaye Collins. How’s that sound?”
The boy agreed and thanked Tom for his new name. The two rode together to Tom’s home in Southeast Philadelphia. Tom parked his car in the small garage behind his rowhome. He shut the engine off and remained in the driver’s seat. He ran his hands around the steering wheel. He used the heel of his left hand to rub the back of his thick neck. At length, he turned to the boy with a grunt.
“Marvin, I’m all alone in the world, and now you are too. I didn’t expect to find you today, but here you are. You need someone to look after you and I could use a little help around the house. I’ll make you a deal. From now on, you live with me. You do as I say, and you help as much as you can. In return, I’ll keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food in your belly.” Tom held his hand out to Marvin. “Deal?”
Marvin shook his hand. “Deal…sir.”
“Good! Let’s go inside and get you squared-away.”
The pair got out of the car. Their departure left Lac and Sam and me alone. We sat in silence while Tom closed the garage doors and set the padlock. Lacas whispered in the dark. He sounded like he was fighting back tears. “That was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m stunned there was a time when things like that happened.”
“Does that mean you believe what you saw?”
“I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one could make that up. It’s too heartbreaking to be a lie.”
I used my implant to stop the projection. The three of us were back in my living room. Sam barked and scrambled up from the couch. He went to the back door and whined. I followed to let him outside. Lac followed me. We stood on the landing to watch Sam as he did Sam things.
I pointed a little way beyond the rear stairs. “You see that low spot in the grass? That’s where the garage was. Tom always drove black Lincolns.”
Lac shook his head in amazement. “Wait, you mean this is the house?”
“Yes. This was Tom’s house. This is where I grew up.”
“Five hundred years ago.” Lac said like he was trying to convince himself.
I did some math in my head. “I met Tom in 1989. That means I started living in this house five-hundred-thirty-six years ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
Lac seemed to come unhinged. He shouted. “I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!” He threw his arms up over his head and waved them around in a meaningless gesture. “How the fuck could any of this be possible? HOW? How could you be five hundred years old? How could you be that same poor kid we just saw? IT’S CRAZY!”
I tried to reach out to my boyfriend, but he cringed away from my touch. I drew my hands back and stuffed them in my pockets. I apologized, even though I didn’t know what I had to apologize for. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t easy. It’s never easy, but I had to tell you. It wouldn’t be fair to keep it a secret.”
Lac folded his arms over his chest like he needed to buffer himself against my words. “You just said this is never easy. What does that mean? How many times have you had this talk?”
“Seven. I already told you that. I’ve had seven lives before this one, not counting my original life. This is my eighth.”
“That means you’ve been married before.”
“Yes, seven times.”
“And kids?”
“Yes, seven families.”
“I don’t understand.” Lac said again.
I tried to explain. “My original life ended in 2007. I was granted my first body in 2053. The first body wasn’t completely flesh. It was more of a cyborg, but I was still capable of reproduction. The next body was better. By the third go round, I was fully organic. Each time I lived, I had a spouse and children.”
“A spouse?” Lac asked. “You mean a husband?”
“Six husbands, and one wife. For my fourth life, I decided to try to live as a heterosexual. It was a mistake. I loved my wife, but I never enjoyed her as much as I did my husbands. I suspect she knew. It was wrong of me to do that to her. I told her about my endless consciousness and everything else, but I never told her that I lived my other lives as a homosexual. She assumed I’d always been heterosexual, and I allowed her to keep her assumption. It was a lie of omission, but a betrayal just the same.”
Lac stared like I’d grown a second head. “You talk about it so casually, like you’re telling me about some curtains you bought or a sandwich you liked. I feel like I’m insane.”
“It’s still me. I’m still the man you met at the glass shop.”
“NO, YOU’RE NOT! That man was twenty-seven years old, not five hundred! You’re a fraud! You’re a walking, talking, breathing fraud! It’s like you’re playing dress up; masquerading as a regular person when you’re anything but. What the fuck are you anyway? Why do you get to go on and on while the rest of us have to die? WHY?”
Lac’s accusations hurt. The words always hurt when my potential partners said them. Each one of them had. I suspected that each one in the future would. At some point, they would start to believe my story about my endlessly repeating lives. Almost as soon as they believed, they would demand to know why. Usually, they accused me of being something akin to a science fiction monster, just like Lac had. Experience taught me not to apologize for what I could not help. I addressed the matter with Lacas just like I had with the others.
“The ‘why’ is in the story. If you want to know, you have to listen to the whole thing. It’s a long tale, but one I can tell before the weekend is out. You will listen to all of it, or none of it. I will not jump ahead. I can’t tell you the punch line before you’ve heard the set up. I’m willing to share it with you, because I love you and I want to share this life with you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered to tell you anything. You need to decide right now if you want to stay and listen. If you stay, you will not insult me. I’m still a human being. I have feelings, and I can be hurt. I offered this story to you in good faith. You can listen to it in the same manner, or you can get the fuck out of my house.”
I had my say and stepped off the landing. I went down into the yard to see what Sam was up to. He was sniffing around the oak tree. I stepped into the shade to pat his head. Lac remained on the landing.
