And still the young moved on their way to good or unborn wars, bad marriages, fine or awful employments.
And therehewas. William Clark Henderson.
The other me.
As he walked, laughing, with a pretty dark-haired girl, I traced my own profile in my high school annual long ago. I saw the soft line under his chin, the unshaven cheeks, the unfocused half-blind eyes that would never understand life but hide out in libraries, duck behind typewriters.
As he passed, he glanced up and froze.
I almost waved, but stopped for he could not make himself move.
He staggered as if struck in the chest. His face grew pale as he groped toward me and gasped.
“Dad! What’re you doinghere?”
I felt my heart stop.
“Youcan’tbe here!” the young man cried, tears brimming his eyes. “You’redead! Died two years ago! Can’t be. What? How?”
“No.” I said at last. “I’m not … “
“Dad!” He seized my arms. “Oh, God! God!”
“Don’t!” I said. “Not me!”
“Thenwho?” he pleaded and crushed his head against my chest. “What’s goingon? Christ!”
“Please.” I broke his grip. “They’rewaiting!”
He fell back. “I don’t understand,” he said, the tears flowing.
“Idon’t understand,” I said.
He lurched forward. I raised my hand swiftly. “No. Don’t.”
“Will you,” he mourned, “be here … after?”
“Yes,” I said, agonized. “No. I don’tknow.”
“At leastwatch,” he said.
I was silent.
“Please,” he said.
At last I nodded and saw color in his face.
“What’s goingon?” he asked again, bewildered.
They say that drowning victims’ lives flash through their heads. Here, with William Clark Henderson frozen in the processional, my thoughts, sunk in revelations, sought answers, found none.
Were there families worldwide with similar thoughts, plans, dreams locked in mirror-image flesh? Was there a genetic plot to seize the future? Would a day dawn when these unseen, unrecognized fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins rose as rulers? Or was this just God’s ghost and spirit, his Providence, his unfathomable Will? Were we all identical seeds hurled forth in wide broadcasts so as not to collide?
Were we then in some broad and incalculable fashion, brother to wolves, birds, and antelope, all inked, spotted, colored the same, year on year and generation on generation back as far as minds could see? To what purpose? To economize on genes and chromosomes? Why?
Would the faces of this Family, grown apart, vanish by 2001? Or would the replicas increase to envelop all cousined flesh? Or was it just a miracle of mere existence, misunderstood by two stunned fools shouting across blind generations on a summer’s graduation day?
All this, all this exploded light dark, light dark across my gaze.
“What’s going on?” the other me repeated.
For the line of young men and women was almost gone, quitting a scene where two idiots raved with two similar voices.
I said something, quietly, which he could not hear. When this is done, I thought, I must tear up the pictures, burn the notes. To continue this way, with old annuals, lost faces:madness! Trash it all, I thought.Now.
The young man’s mouth trembled. I read his lips.
“Whatdid you just say?” he asked.
“Nothing changes,” I whispered.
Then, louder:
“Nothing changes!”
I waited to hear Kipling’s words to that song of great sadness: “Lord God of old, be with us yet. Lest we forget.”
Lest we forget.
When I saw the diploma go into the hands of William Clark Henderson—
I backed off, weeping, and ran.
1997
The end
