My father died seven lives ago.
Relative to our lifespans, three centuries isn’t monumental. It’s just enough to forget, crossing the line into that liminal space where memories become distant echoes—perhaps because our surroundings shift too much to reconcile with those memories. And yet.
Seven lives, three centuries, seven continents crossed but I still can’t shake his ghost. Damn him.
Longevity such as ours can get boring remarkably quickly, and then you’re left with an indeterminate amount of time chain-smoking into the middle distance. So, partly for entertainment reasons, I tell myself it’s a sort of race. Jerusalem, Xi’an, Cairo—Canterbury down to Timbuktu and then up to Athens again, some time later a detour to Sydney—I’m not even sure how I’d gotten to Sydney, but it was young when I went, blooming colonial bluster into downy morning and salted air. Lifetimes spent glancing over my shoulder for that shade, not-eyes trailing me in desperate eagerness as I coaxed the tremulous swarm within my chest to think itself good-natured adrenaline. A competition between old friends.
Fool. I should’ve burned his body. I was too scared to.
I’d expected to find him again, as we always did when snuffed out and relit. Though it might take decades we would manage, rejoice when we finally reunited to hear each other’s voices again and share in a bittersweet forever. And though in these lives he never was my father—innumerable strangers and once an older brother—that was the only way I could think of him. That was how I would know him. Even now, as I duck and swerve through the streets of New York, my eyes dart instinctively from face to face as if begging for a lie.
But seven lives ago he had died, which wasn’t unusual because we died as we lived, so terribly and so well. Until he had settled into his chair one afternoon, soft round features sagging with age—we were in Dubai, I think, melting into the walls of our sweltering Airbnb. He’d closed his eyes and said that he wanted it to stop.
My gaze finds him now. Tucked between a bodega and a gated apartment entrance, turned toward me though he isn’t seeing because he’s got no eyes in this form.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
I remember it keenly—it’s funny what memories our brains choose to preserve. That despair in his voice. He’d chanted it, half-conscious, like a prayer. Not once in millennia had he despaired, but I suppose time will catch up to anyone, even those who live to defy it. Sooner or later we want everything to end.
As usual, I’d killed him. Then I would’ve cremated him, scattered his ashes in a nearby river so he could dissipate and reform. Rebirth would unclutter his mind from foolish thoughts, and I’d begin another search for a newborn boy, born the precise date and time he’d gone.
But clearly something had gone wrong, because once the blood had soaked his cotton shirt and he’d stopped breathing, he hadn’t stopped moving.
I had run; he had followed in that undead way of his, and so had begun a three-hundred-year race.
Here’s the thing. I think I’m done running. Cruel, ancient Time had seized him—now it comes for me, and at last, I’m weary.
I think that I want to say goodbye to him, first, before I go.
So I turn and walk toward him. The crowd mills in the opposite direction, idyllic and unaware.
He’s shy. He shrinks back—I don’t know if he knows me until I’m near enough, and it’s only after I avert my gaze, reach out tentatively with a soft knuckle like I’m greeting a wary cat (as with the tiger in Mumbai; the shark in Sydney; the schoolchildren of Wichita, Kansas), that the wisp of a finger brushes mine in return.
Father? I’ve said it innumerable times, but it feels like the first.
No answer.
It’s almost a relief when I dare to look. I realize he doesn’t know me, not really. He’s just been following me because I’m the only one who can do this for him.
I kneel beside him. I ghost my fingers over where his eyes should be and close them to the world, and I whisper to what used to be my father: I release you.
An exhale—
When I stand, I don’t remember why I’d been sat down at all. The New York streets are gritty, loud, canopy of concrete against a pigeon-feather sky, and vaguely I decide to stop by that noodle stall before heading back to work; I’ll need to hurry or the boss will go ballistic. Someone gives a long, ululating call, like a tropical bird.