Chapter 26 #2
But it wasn’t all bad. Eventually, I came to realize that she did love me in her own standoffish-cat kind of way.
I hired people to help out around my house—what rich person doesn’t?
—but Ruthie wouldn’t tolerate any of them.
If one of them tried to clean her litter box, she attacked.
If they tried to feed her, she acted like the food was poisoned. I had to do everything for her myself.
It felt good, being needed.
I loved that evil cat to bits for the nearly seven years I had her before she passed.
Other than that, I continued to live my life. I accumulated wealth that I spent a fraction of. I searched for love in people who were unable to give it to me. Probably for the best, since I was unable to give it back.
I took up smoking real cigarettes, my vaping habit a thing of the past. Somehow, I was still surprised by my lung cancer diagnosis.
It’s strange, the things money can’t fix.
Over twenty years after Joey died, on April 23, 2052, I died at the age of fifty-eight.
And then the strangest thing happened.
I’m not supposed to talk about this part.
I woke up in a waiting room. A drab waiting room with altogether too much wood in it.
I knew immediately that I had died. I had been waiting for it for months by that point.
My immediate reaction was to laugh, because whatever god I thought I’d been praying to—or pointedly not praying to—all those years, whatever afterlife I’d been imagining, it certainly hadn’t looked anything like this.
“Alexander Aquino?”
I looked up and saw that there was a person standing in front of a doorway I hadn’t previously noticed. I stood at the sound of my name and approached them. They were shorter than me by a few inches, with black hair, jovial eyes, and an androgynous appearance.
They sized me up, held their hand out for me to shake. Once I did, they told me, “I’m your caseworker. Follow me.”
I glanced back at the room, my eyes lingering on the empty desk at the front.
“Apologies if you were kept waiting long. The receptionist is on break.”
By the time I took my seat across from my caseworker, I was sure I was in hell.
Or perhaps at some sort of purgatorial pit stop where my sins would be weighed before I was directed to hell.
Instead, my caseworker informed me that I was getting a second chance at life.
They said I would retain my memories of my first life but could not speak the truth to anyone or I would be erased from existence, and then they asked when I’d like to go back to.
I didn’t give them a date. I asked, “Is this real? Or is it all happening inside my mind?”
It didn’t feel real. It felt like the hopeful hallucination of a dying and desperate brain.
I half expected to wake up with a strained, painful gasp in the same hospital bed in which I had fallen asleep, inches away from the death that would have been a glorious relief and therefore kept eluding me.
Maybe it was a cruel joke. Perhaps this was hell, and hell’s first torture was psychological in nature.
Hope, I was quickly discovering, could be its own kind of torture.
“Reality is a relative concept,” my caseworker informed me with a smile.
The people in hell are nice, I thought. “You have just left a reality where you are dead, and that cannot be undone, so in that sense, this is not real, but you are being offered the chance to return to a new reality, one where this moment could be real. The choice is entirely up to you—whatever you decide, I can promise you, we are not inside your mind.”
“I want to make Josephina Vasquez fall in love with me.”
I was surprised by the words that came out so instinctively. I hadn’t thought about her in years.
Or maybe I had spent years thinking of nothing else. It’s hard to say.
The caseworker considered me for a long moment. As they did, a second thought came to my mind.
“Did Joey get a second chance?”
“We’re not allowed to disclose the decisions of other clients” was all they said—but there was something in the way they said it that implied that she had been offered a second chance.
I knew exactly what that meant.
Of course Joey took it.
Somewhere out there, in another timeline or universe or plane of existence, Joey was alive.
My Joey.
A Joey who shared all the same memories of us together that I did, the good and the bad—most of them bad. A Joey to whom I could apologize for everything I had done. Everything I hadn’t done. Everything I’d said and everything I hadn’t said. A Joey I could make it all up to.
“Show me. I want to see her,” I commanded. I had a tendency to command things. Years of never being told no does that to a person.
How ridiculous of me to sit there and dare to command an otherworldly being—even one dressed as a regular office worker—to do anything, and yet they complied.
Their eyes even lit up, like they were excited by my request.
“We’re not supposed to do this,” they said gleefully, like a teenager playing hooky for the first time. They leaned in and turned their computer screen toward me.
And there she was.
Joey popped up on the screen, following a woman—another caseworker, I realized—through a hallway not unlike the one through which I had just passed. I turned to the doorway. It couldn’t be—
I stood up.
“You won’t find her out there,” they warned me.
All-knowing son of a—I felt suddenly irritated and impatient with my caseworker. “Where is that?” I asked, retaking my seat and nodding to the monitor.
“That’s one of our offices.”
“Where? If I were to walk out into the hallway and wander for long enough, would I find her?” I asked with another jerk of my head toward the monitor.
“That’s not how the offices work.”
“When is that? Is that—” Joey looked just like she had on the night she—
The screen went dark. I slumped over. That was nearly thirty years ago. This was a fucking video recording.
“When is a complicated word.”
“It really isn’t,” I snapped.
“Not to you. It wouldn’t be to those who don’t understand it,” they said cryptically.
“I just want to know—is that happening right now? Is she… here somewhere?”
“She is not. And in point of fact, neither are you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It does not matter.”
“Of course it fucking matters. If I’m not here, where the hell am I?”
“You are nowhere. All that you are, your very being at this moment, is a choice. You are choosing where you would like to be. You are choosing when you would like to be. Until that choice has been made, you are nowhere. You are no-when. You are no one.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose in frustration and took a deep breath.
“Okay. Well, if I’m a choice, my choice is her. I want to be with her. Wherever she is, whenever she is—send me to her.”
My caseworker nodded, hit a button on the screen, and there Joey was again, this time on the familiar grounds of our college campus.
Even weirder, there I was.
It was surreal seeing myself, age eighteen, on that screen. It had been forty years since I’d seen that face staring back at me in the mirror.
It was weird to watch a memory I had forgotten I had. I used to love sitting at that picnic table reading whatever book I was devouring that week.
I used to read for pleasure.
Odd—I couldn’t fathom doing anything like that at this point. The only time I consumed art, I did it in front of my eighty-five-inch flat-screen while drinking cheap beer.
I expected the Joey on the screen to strut right past my eighteen-year-old self, but she stormed directly up to me and started telling me off for my taste in books.
“This didn’t happen,” I murmured. But still I watched, fascinated.