Vangie's Ghosts by Paul Di Filippo

Author:Paul Di Filippo [Filippo, Paul Di]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

3

When Vangie turned nineteen, five weeks after the hospice workers had started coming to the house, her father wanted to celebrate with a special dinner and a cake. But, wan and pinch-faced, Vivek Kocchar seldom left his bed these days, fortressed between stacks of books he was now unable to peruse and study, and he was in no condition to cook, a practice he had once enjoyed, along with his gardening, and which he had refined after his wife’s death. Vivek asked Vangie if she wanted him to arrange for a takeout meal to be delivered, anything she fancied. But as someone raised on baby food mush, she had never developed an appreciation for traditional hearty food. And if Kocchar could not share the meal—he was mostly subsisting on liquids these days, protein shakes and such—she did not see the point. As for a cake, she had never been the recipient of such a ceremonial treat before, not even when living with her foster families, neither with the Everetts nor the Troy-Salthouse ménage. Such extravagances for an unresponsive and uncommunicative child were surely a waste. And so that celebratory, candle-festooned dessert was nothing she would miss.

And there was no one else to invite to any hypothetical party anyhow. Vivek’s old faculty peers? Vangie’s coworkers at Happy Harbor? Hardly. Vivek and Vangie were a family of two only, a household strictly delimited and isolated due to Vangie’s unique and secret nature.

In the half-light occasioned by drawn curtains and a small lamp, although it was still an early sunny afternoon outside, standing by the side of Vivek’s bed, the noticeable but not distasteful odor of a sickroom, sweat and salves and antiseptic wipes, pungent in her nostrils, Vangie felt some small undeniable sadness for the current terminal state of her father. Overlaid memories and feelings residual from this timestream’s Vangie whose body she had invaded stirred her to a mild grief. The sentiment was compounded by some genuine gratitude accrued during the past three years, since Vangie had popped into this universe, the period during which Kocchar had come to embrace her talents enthusiastically and help her to sharpen and cultivate them, providing her with the refuge of peace and freedom, acceptance and stability that she had always sought.

But the tender feelings were compromised by irritation and anger at Kocchar’s stubbornness, his refusal to accept the gift she could bestow. She raised the touchy subject with the bedbound invalid once again.

“Father, you know you don’t have to suffer like this. Your life doesn’t have to be over. Just say the word, and I’ll transport the two of us to a continuum where you’ll have full health and many years ahead.”

Vivek regarded his daughter with a keen eye and not a little actual aversion and rebuke. He recalled that long night of confession when she had first arrived, and how her sorrow at the serial apocalypses left in the wake of her travels had quickly turned to denial and self-centered affirmation of the necessary rightness of her actions.

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