She doesn’t know I’m here now. I’ve never believed in ghosts, spirits or anything that’d wander whatever someone’d just left. I’m not saying there’s no existence after or before this one, and I’d never argue with someone who believes in reincarnation. But I’ve never experienced déjà vu as far as I know, and for that matter I’ve never had any wish to find out that I inhabited someone else’s body in Ancient Greece or some village just outside the farm where my great-grandfather was born. It would’ve been useless information to me—actually, very few facts and almost none of the ideas I’ve encountered could’ve changed the course of my actions.
Yes, my actions. I won’t try to explain them as the results of any other person’s actions or words, or any other force outside my own body. I killed. Yes, I killed. I could’ve claimed self-defense but I never have; I don’t expect to. None of it matters anyway: Nothing has changed the fact that someone is dead. Someone, perhaps the state, could’ve imprisoned, tortured or killed (Don’t you love that euphemism: Execute?) me, but it wouldn’t’ve brought him back or made his family—actually, his mother—whole again.
Anyone who’s ever taught—In fact, anybody who’s had as much time as I’ve had to see people from the other side of one-way mirrors—knows that the fear, the anticipation of punishment doesn’t cause someone to reconsider the action he or she is about to take; the actual punishment, once the act is done, is useless. It didn’t take long for me to realize that whatever ostracism, whatever abuse, I might run up against for killing him wouldn’t change the fact that he’s gone, that other people knew—or simply believed, which on this block is the same thing—that I’d aborted, cut down, short-timed, snuffed out, or whatever descriptive phrase they used to avoid saying “killed,” someone they might’ve treated even worse than they treated me.
So it’s not even a matter of how or who you kill, whether the victim was intended or not, a friend or an enemy, or a relation of any kind: I’ve paused longer for the deaths of people I’ve never met, or of whom I’d never heard except for their deaths, than for the one whose life I terminated. Even the death of Mother Teresa, whose work I always detested, left a hole in me no one else could and that couldn’t be filled with anybody or anything else. Some people can’t, won’t or don’t mourn their own fathers; others dissolve like rainclouds over the loss of a non-sentient being.
I’ll admit some guilt: I never stopped to grieve my father. The fact that he wasn’t there for me to grieve doesn’t explain or rationalize my lapse any more than necessity, whatever that may be, excuses my killing.
Of course he knew, if only for a moment, that when I had the power of life and death over him, I made the only choice, consciously or not, that could hold any meaning for him. Our lives did not intersect, as some would say: They never could have. Instead, he existed on one side of an opaque window. I began on the other side. Nothing in the life he lived has changed, or will be changed, by actions I or someone else have taken since his death.
So why, then, did I attend her funeral. She’d never know I was there; even if she did, she might not’ve recognized me. No, not even she—she’d only see what was, who was, in a moment called the present only because nobody’d yet decided what to call it, in a new suit of clothes—or at least something she’d never seen me wear before.
She, as much as anyone else could, or at least would, see someone who hadn’t killed—not even a “yet” attached to my story. I would not be the one who left, who ran. I’d still be that child who crept by the door and peeked through the window when she didn’t want me to know what she’d seen or heard outside. To her, I’d still be the one who wasn’t supposed to know the truth about Adam’s death—about Death—years after poking my nose through a curtain and lifting a slat of the Venetian blind. I still wasn’t supposed to know, or at least let on that I knew.
I’m sure she knew—Mother wasn’t stupid—but somehow I never wanted to tell. I never wanted to disillusion her. And what is disillusionment but the loss of one’s prerogative not to know that his or her life up to that point was an illusion, a dream. So what did I do but keep up one last illusion, even though she wasn’t there to notice.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, I went to her wake and funeral out of respect for what I perceived to be her wishes. She’d’ve wanted me there, I told myself. And still tell myself. Me—or at least a memory of me—that’s who was in that room, along with my memory of her. Of course nobody goes to a funeral to remember: One only transports and transposes a memory of someone onto the corpse in the coffin. I couldn’t see her any more than she could see me. But nothing has ever seemed more imperative to me than to stand before that amalgam of wishes, dreams and fevers, frozen in an embalmer’s moment, encased in silk from the neck down.
I lied to her, disobeyed her, even stole from her, though I see now there are some things even I couldn’t’ve taken from her. Her half-hearted attempts to inculcate me with a faith she never questioned but never really believed did not take. Her more serious efforts to instill conventionally correct notions of sexuality and family in me proved even more fruitless.
I repeat, I’ve never been free from hypocrisy; probably never will be. I want to honor feelings my mother had now that she can no longer have them. For years, many years, whenever we could’ve gotten together, I made some excuse or found another obligation. Or I simply managed to be in some remote part of the world with no convenient way of getting back to this block to see her. Certainly we didn’t abandon any thought of each other: through all those years, we talked every week, usually on Sundays. She could sense, over the phone, that I’d changed, that I was changing. She’d never mention the differences she’d noticed in the pitch of my voice or the speed of my speech. She’d simply demand, almost plead, “Is everything OK?” How could she not know that I was trying to comfort her, or at least not worry her, with my evasions: “Yeah,” “Could complain, but won’t.”
Everyone learns not to tell a parent what he or she already knows, or at least believes. I learned that lesson after I’d been away a few years, when I told her I’d smoked back in the days on the block. I’d never again reveal what she never want to know. Not married, no kids—“You just haven’t met the right girl yet. Some day, maybe.” Right, mother. “You’ll find your calling, your purpose.” Of course, I’d never tell her I wanted any such thing, or believed anyone had one.
There was only one thing I ever wanted—myself, now, becoming. I killed only because I thought it’d bring me to the one I know now, who would never know him. And she would never know me in this moment any more than the women—There were only women—at her funeral knew me, or would know me.
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