The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce

Author:Thomas Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

He slapped my knee, he got out of the car and told me he’d see me Sunday, but did I say anything to him in reply?

Most of the time, my memories of my father are a jumble, one moment sliding into the next. When I think about him, he is saluting me from the doorstep. He is pulling out the chair for my mother at a seafood restaurant on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday; he is cracking his knuckles on a cold morning in a deer stand; he is jangling the loose change in his pockets; he is singing along to a song on the radio; he is asleep on the couch with a book on his lap; he is in a classroom drawing a parabola on the white board; he is massaging my mother’s neck to help her migraine; he is sliding his hand back and forth across his bald head; he is laughing at himself for ordering a latte instead of an old-fashioned plain black coffee.

He is seated beside me in the car after a trip to the graveyard, a speck of dirt in his goatee, his hand digging around in his pockets for his car keys. It’s always the car keys I think about, the way he leaned toward me to fish them free from his right pocket, his heavy breath, but for whatever reason, I can’t recall if I said anything to him before he set off for his car. I try not to torture myself.

Anyway, that day was among our last together. I missed church that Sunday, but we did get coffee that same week, and then later I was over at the house to help my mother with something, I forget what, and he popped downstairs to say hello. In truth, he lived another three months after our trip to the hologram shop and the graveyard, and I must have seen him half a dozen times, but it’s always that trip to Clara’s grave that hangs in my head as our final moment together.

A few weeks after he died—from a stroke—I worked up the courage to return to Hologramophone and inquire about his recording. My father hadn’t signed any paperwork as his session had been something of a demonstration, but I was grateful to learn that the tech had saved it anyway. I was given a small black cube, about the size of a ring box, and then shown into a small private lounge with a long gray couch and orange ottomans, very modern and slick. The cube had only two silver buttons: Play and Stop. When I clicked Play he immediately warbled into existence just a few feet away from me, a genie conjured from the lamp. He stood above me, as tall as he’d been in life. His shirt was bunched oddly at one shoulder, and his belt buckle was twisted slightly to the left of his navel. He looked down, at his shoes, which touched the ground, then up again, over my head.

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