Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  Now I had him where I wanted him. All I had to do was stick the knife in his chest to the hilt and hold it there until he stopped moving.

  I had the knife out now, my three good fingers grasping the black plastic handle. Then I straddled Billy, my legs on either side of his chest. He was crying and screaming, hot fat tears running down the sides of his face. His skin was bright red.

  “You didn’t give me a choice,” I said.

  But he wasn’t listening. He was too insane with fear, not knowing where to turn or how to protect himself or call for help. Because now he’d realized that help was not coming. He shook his head back and forth as if he could shake himself out of this nightmare.

  The knifepoint was just a few inches above his heaving chest.

  All I had to do was stick in the knife and hold it there until he stopped moving.

  Think about it as a dream, I told myself.

  A nightmare.

  A nightmare you can wake from.

  It was as if Billy could read my mind; he knew what I was planning. This was not a normal beating. There would be no wiping the blood away, putting a Band-Aid over the wound. There would be no bruises that slowly fade until you’re no longer embarrassed to wear shorts outside. This would be the ultimate hurt, the final punishment for being a bad boy.

  So he started slamming me with his small fists, desperately pounding at my chest and stomach. His body squirmed beneath my legs. I was focused on the knife in my hand and tried to will myself to plunge it down. Billy got lucky. He reached up and grabbed a fistful of my ski mask and yanked down, exposing my face.

  “YOU!”

  He saw me. He recognized me.

  “I KNEW IT WAS YOU! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?”

  Why was I doing this to him?

  And then I finally put the last piece together.

  Billy Derace didn’t have a grudge against my father. They hadn’t met one day in 1972. Billy Derace grew up wanting to kill my father because of what I was doing right now, right this very instant. He’d been scared to death as a twelve-year-old by a man wearing a mask and he’d ripped away the mask and grew up terrified of that face and then later, after years of abuse and drugs and time-traveling pills, he’d gone looking for the face that terrified him.

  My face.

  But in 1980, the closest thing he could find was my father.

  I was my father’s killer.

  I let Billy go. I dropped the knife. I climbed to my feet. I left through the front door. I climbed the stairs. I heard a door slam down on the ground floor. Billy cried out for his mother. His mother cried back, an awful shriek that echoed through the stairwell. There was the urgent clacking of high heels up the stairs but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back into the office and collapse and close my eyes.

  The daylight in the hallway scorched the skin on my face. It felt like the worst sunburn I’ve ever had.

  I kicked in the door, just like I’d kicked in all the others in this building. There was a complete set now.

  I collapsed to the ground, then got up on all fours. The half pill I’d swallowed was already wearing off. I felt dizzy.

  Then Erna stepped through the open doorway, holding the gun.

  “You hateful son of a bitch,” she said, then squeezed the trigger.

  The slug sliced through my astral body and buried itself in the floor beneath me. I felt a searing pain in my abdomen, even though there was no entry wound, no blood.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She fired again, twice, and both shots were like hot needles in my chest, each stabbing me through my pectoral muscles. The pain made my eyes water. I dropped to my knees and lifted my left hand—the one with only three fingers.

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s no use. You can’t, because I’m not actually here.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  Erna squatted next to me and lifted me up by the lapels of my borrowed overcoat. Her knuckles were raw, fingers bony. I’d never noticed how thin her hands were. It must hurt to be slapped by those hands.

  I looked up at her.

  “You think I’m dead but I’m not. I’m alive in the future. I just visit the past. So believe me when I tell you that unless you help your son, he’s going to grow up to hurt a lot of people. A lot of innocent people. He’s going to be a killer, Erna, unless you pull your head out of your ass and be a mother to him.”

  “You’re from the devil! You’re here to torment me and my boy!”

  “Today is June 18, 2009. My real body is laying in this apartment in the future. Billy’s in a mental hospital. You’re living on the streets, and you’re a goddamned mess.”

  She repeated the date to herself.

  “June 18, 2009.”

  It couldn’t make sense to her. It must sound like the title of a science fiction movie.

  I tried to make her understand.

  “So you can’t kill me. It’s not even worth trying. But you can try to save your son.”

  She dropped me. My head hit the floor with a thump. She didn’t quite react at first. My words had to be picked apart, analyzed.

  Then she looked down at me, deranged smile on her face, and said:

  “No…I know how to kill you.”

  And then she began to rip the brown paper from the office windows.

  Sunshine smashed through the windows, washing over my entire body. My overcoat began to sizzle and then fade away. My eyes burned as if I’d looked directly into the sun through a twin pair of high-powered telescopes. The skin of my face was beyond fevered; it was ablaze.

  My ears functioned long enough to hear Erna ripping the rest of the brown paper from the windows. The nerves under my skin sensed the additional heat and light, and they curled up and withered inside my body.

  And then I was gone.

  I woke up in the same position on the floor. Belly down. Head turned to one side. Drool coming out of my mouth.

  I don’t know how long I’d been there, or how long I would be there, because I was completely paralyzed, top of my head to my feet. Just like my fingers, just like my right arm, I knew my body was still there, every piece of it. But I had zero control over any of it.

  I could die here.

  I could die here and no one would know.

  Many hours, I think, passed before the door creaked open behind me. I heard heavy footsteps.

  “Hello, you bastard. It’s June 18, 2009.”

  Oh God. No.

  She showed herself to me first. She wanted to make sure I knew it was her, so I knew who’d be doing this to me. It was Erna, the bag lady from Frankford Avenue. Which was where she’d ended up after watching her son institutionalized, and her lover knifed to death under the El. She’d been crazy back in 1972, and the intervening years hadn’t done much to improve the situation.

  But what made her real crazy, I realized now, were all the dead people she saw walking through her apartment and the empty apartments she cleaned. They’d make faces at her, because they were just goofing around, having fun. Dr. DeMeo’s patients, in their past and some even propelled forward into the future a few years. And she thought she was losing her mind, but was afraid to tell the doctor, because then she’d lose her place and her job and then what would they do? So she said nothing and she drank wine and tried to forget about all the dead people.

  Except the one dead person who’d told her the truth. That he was actually alive, in another year altogether. He’d even helpfully supplied the date.

  So Erna Derace had waited.

  And on June 18, 2009, she went back to that apartment building.

  And she used the last three bullets in the gun she’d been saving for thirty-seven years.

  “Do you understand now?”

  She shot me in the back three times, right between the shoulder blades.

  Willie Shahid, owner of the bodega downstairs, heard sharp cracks, three in a row, then heard so
meone rumbling down the steps and out the front door. He made it out in time to see an old woman go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. What was that about, he must have wondered. Then he locked the front doors of his shop and walked upstairs to check it out, cell phone in hand.

  Willie stood outside my apartment door—3-A. He knocked and waited. Something wasn’t right. He sniffed the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper filled his nostrils. Gunpowder. It wasn’t an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.

  So Willie flipped open his cell and dialed 911, giving the address and even the floor.

  A short while later the EMTs arrived, and then three squad cars from the Philly PD, 15th District.

  The EMTs moved me to a stretcher and carried me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train.

  But by that time, I was already dead.

  (XIII)

  My Other Life

  See that body on the mortician’s slab, waiting to be pumped with formaldehyde and other assorted preserving chemicals?

  That’s me.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been dead, but I have to presume it’s been a day or so. As I said at the beginning, when you’re dead everything seems to happen all at once.

  Time’s arrow only appears to fly straight when you’re alive. Dead is something else. Once you cross that invisible line, you see things how they really are.

  I am discorporated from my body. I am able to see everything I’ve done since birth, throughout my childhood, up through my adolescence and into adulthood.

  But the strange thing is I don’t quite remember any of it.

  There’s me, balancing on the edge of the couch, arms and legs extended like I’m a superhero with the ability to fly. There’s me, fighting with my brother, wrestling around on the floor like I’m Spider-Man and he’s the Hulk and…

  See that? My brother.

  I don’t remember having a brother.

  But somehow, I do.

  In this life I also seem to have two sisters—one ten years younger, and another twelve years younger. Their names are on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t bring myself to speak them out loud. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I know them, I don’t know them.

  I still have a father.

  There he is, trying to teach me how to play guitar. Three small fingers on the fret board, struggling to form a C chord, the home base of all rock guitar chords, the first thing you learn.

  Then there he is, teaching me what little he knows about the piano, because he decided he could use a keyboard player in the band rather than a second guitarist.

  There’s me, playing along on my first “gig” with my father when I’m nine years old.

  There’s me, playing a wedding with my father’s band. I am fifteen, and my father is still alive. We’re wearing tuxedo shirts and cummerbunds.

  He’s alive! How is this possible?

  But sure enough, there’s my father, in a suit, at my high school graduation. I want to be a writer, but music’s a way to make money for now. I write my stories on my own time. I spent my weekends practicing and playing gigs. Eventually I quit the band and go off into journalism. I only play the piano once in a great while, but I listen to music all the time.

  I pluck a thousand memories at random from a life I don’t fully remember having lived.

  I remember it all and I don’t remember it at the same time.

  I am still dead, but I am also alive. There’s another me out there, living a life where my father never died.

  The other me is married.

  He’s married to a young teacher named Meghan. Her father’s a powerful Center City attorney. She’s cut her beautiful long blond hair short.

  We have two children.

  I keep thinking I’m going to wake up any minute now. But will I still be dead when I wake up?

  After a while it occurs to me that the way this unremembered life makes any sense is that Grandpop Henry succeeded in going back and changing something.

  Something huge. Something reality-warping. Something that’s rewoven the fabric of many lives. My life. My father’s. Meghan’s. The siblings I didn’t know existed. Everyone’s life has changed now. Everyone’s taken two steps to the right and carried on as if their other lives never happened.

  I even wonder, briefly, where Whiplash Walt is right now. Married to another client? Because Anne, my mother, is still married to my father. She quit smoking a few years ago because of our children. Children I didn’t know we had. I grew up in a house full of cigarette smoke, but in the years since she’s read a few things. She knows how deadly it is. So she quit.

  I pluck out other memories. I’m dead. I’m allowed to do this.

  In this other life Erna Derace is childless. She never met Victor, she never had to experience the hell of burying her own child, never had to inflict living hell upon her other child. She leads a quiet lonely life. She never moves away from Frankford. Maybe she was never meant to have kids. Or maybe she was meant to have kids but screwed it up and is being punished in this alternate life. I catch glimpses of her, now and again, shopping on Frankford Avenue but I don’t know who she is and she ignores me, too.

  I scan this other, alien life, looking for Grandpop Henry.

  And all at once, of course—because everything happens all at once when you’re dead—I pluck out the details of his altered life story.

  Seems I’ve never met Grandpop Henry, in this version.

  I’m able to go back and watch him beat my grandmother. They both drink too much. They argue a lot. They both married young, Grandpop just a year out of the service, and they’re still figuring each other out. Then she gets pregnant with my father. Now he’s married young and saddled with a kid he didn’t particularly ask for and it makes him angry and it’s stupid but he takes it out on her. He works a lot. He says it’s to make them money, but it’s more to avoid her.

  In the late 1950s, when my father is only ten years old, Grandpop Henry gets into a bar fight at a joint under the Frankford El. The guy comes out of nowhere, starts hacking away at Grandpop. The assailant’s name was Victor D’Arrazzio. Later, he would change it to “Vic Derace.” According to his FBI rap sheet, D’Arrazzio liked cheap sweet wine, BBQ ribs and prostitutes.

  Grandpop Henry was stabbed seventeen times, in the chest and throat. He died at the scene. It was declared a senseless killing.

  My grandmom doesn’t remember the beatings. She misses her husband. She mourns the life they could have had together.

  D’Arrazzio kills himself a few years later, in state prison.

  I grow up never having met Grandpop Henry.

  In this other life, the Frankford Slasher still killed women under the El during the late 1980s.

  Only, it was somebody else doing the slashing.

  By the time I was born, Grandpop Henry was long gone. Right now I remember him, and I don’t remember him. I’m named for him. My father was thinking about musicians, but my mother suggested Henry. After his own father. The father he barely knew.

  My name is Henry Wadcheck.

  I remember him, and I don’t remember him.

  I want to remember him.

  I need to remember him.

  But I don’t think I’ll be allowed to remember him for very long.

  And this is because my death is almost over, and in my original life, my grandpop’s eighty-four-year-old body is about to give up and take its last breath. Everything’s exploding out of that moment. My vision is blurring. I know what happens next, because when you’re dead everything happens at once. That doesn’t mean I experience life in one quick burst—like the old cliché about it flashing before your eyes. No, I relive every second. I retake every breath. I feel every cut, I savor every kiss. But I still know everything that is happening, did happen and will happen.

  I knew everything the moment I started telling you this story.

  I saw it all because I was dead.

  Bu
t now I’m alive.

  So I’m about to forget everything.

  I told you this story because I so badly want to remember, even though I know it’s impossible. You tell stories because you want some part of you to live on. And I know that’s impossible.

  I know that because right now I’m going to wake up.

  When I wake up Meghan is already propped up on one elbow, beautiful eyes wide open, staring at me. I reach out and touch her face—her perfect, beautiful face. Even after two kids, even after twelve years of marriage, she’s as gorgeous as ever. I love the feeling of her soft skin beneath my fingertips.

  I’m pretty hungover.

  Hot waves of sunshine burst through our windows.

  It’s a humid Sunday morning—the first day of summer. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and tell her I dreamed about something, and it was one of those annoying, busy dreams where you’re working so hard at something…but I can’t remember a thing about it. So frustrating.

  Then the kids come screaming into the room and jump on our bed and my daughter pushes a stuffed animal in my face and says kissy! kissy! So I kiss the stuffed animal—a bunny. They’re loud. They’re not going to let us sleep. They’re also not going to allow us to fool around. They want one thing: us up.

  They also have drawings in their hands, which puzzles me until I remember: it’s Father’s Day.

  My dad’s coming over later. Meghan’s, too. I’m going to be on grill duty. I really should have more sleep if I’m going to be putting up with both sets of parents today…

  But you know, whatever. I smile at my kids. They’re beautiful, just like their mother.