by Ime Atakpa
“At any rate…” He pulls himself up from the wall to stretch his arms and shoulders. His bones creak. His hair runs like thin silk down his back. Of this, I’m certain: his head used to be fuller.
“Aren’t you supposed to be immortal?” I ask.
“I am immortal.”
“You’ve been aging ever since I came back.”
He grunts. “I’m aware. At any rate, I stole the mantle of time. Each of us who rules over the Balance also rules over a mantle which—how do I put this? It’s the essence of our power. Hers was split into two halves, one for each socket.”
His eyepatch. He never talked about it. When we first met, it had seemed such an odd fashion choice. Obviously, I was too ignorant to understand that patches have more than merely practical uses. But even after that, when I first died and woke, he refused to tell me what tragedy cost him his eye. This is why. Shame, not trauma, kept him from revealing the truth. Rinaldo doesn’t know whether or not Time survived his theft of her mantle.
“To escape, I stole half of the mantle from her and fled through time.” He laughs the pitiful kind of laugh, the kind that comes when you’re full of self-loathing. “There was only one problem. I wasn’t the Time Lord. I had no mastery over her arte.” He sighs. “I hoped to reach a future where man had stolen back the puppeteers’ strings. As it happened, I came nowhere near that time. Instead, I landed five hundred years ago. Maybe more.” Rinaldo laughs at this. “The five of us always warned against transgressions. There’s a story we told of the first of us to fall. He could not return and so he perished on human soil. I’m the second of us to make that descent from above. I was afraid that the world had turned against him, and that was why he had died.” Rinaldo clenches his fists, visibly distraught by the memories of his shame. I try not to pity him. “I was weak and wretched, and the mantle of time had done its damage. Its power shattered and left me incapable of further pursuing my goal.”
I stop him there. “And what exactly was your goal?”
“Irrelevant.”
Of course it is.
Rinaldo pauses to breathe and looks up at the ceiling. “If I’m being precise, it isn’t entirely drained of its strength.” He gently rubs the surface of his eyepatch. “Leftover power seeps out in short bursts from time to time. Enough to move me a few minutes backward and forward.”
More pieces fit together in my head. Even if he can’t control the spasms, it makes sense that he’d be accustomed to them. Maybe he wouldn’t always notice crossing the length of a room or clearing within a second.
“So it was that I found your progenitor, just as wretched as I, condemned by her own people, and I saw in her tragedy an escape that I could not take for myself. I always imagined they’d eventually find me once I could no longer pass through time. Back then, I knew I was condemned to my fate, to be executed by my people. For her, it needed not to be so. I granted her wish to live forever.”
“You’re telling me she wanted that? To destroy the lives of all her descendants?”
“I gave her a choice. Granted, I may have glossed over the finer details. I was selfish.”
“Damn right you were.” It feels good, hearing him admit fault and being able to admonish him for it. Still, my anger barely has an effect on him. He stares off into the distance as if there’s something more important there hovering in space.
Rinaldo leans back against the wall, raising a hand to his forehead to massage a thumb against his temple. “We were both selfish.”
“Oh, like hell I was.”
“Not you, Hubert. She and I.” He glances at the door, rubs his temple harder. “Perhaps…would you like to meet her?”
-III-
Alceste
She appears in the doorway on cue, her blue nightgown trailing across the ground behind her. As she steps from the darkness into the small room, the light reveals soft though haggard features. A gentle and round nose, deep blue eyes, dark and glossy brown hair, a slender figure, and a mouth that smiles unwaveringly. Rinaldo’s wife stands before us, holding that gentle smile, looking at me—into me—with the same compassion I remember from when she and Rinaldo nursed me. I turn away, mouth twisting into a scowl.
“Don’t say anything.” Rinaldo steps forward with great effort. “You think she can’t be the one, because she’s been with me all along. But of course she has. I don’t expect you to see how painstakingly I’ve struggled all these years. The soul and body are deeply interconnected. Independently, they are useless.” He laughs weakly, then falls into a fit of coughing. Alceste steps forward to assist him, but he raises a hand to stop her.
And as I think of her name, I hate myself for being nothing more than a piece in Rinaldo’s elaborate game. Alceste, Rinaldo’s wife. Alice, my ancestor. Their names are too alike to be coincidence, and even Mom admitted that Alice hadn’t been an accurate recollection of her ancestor’s name. Then there’s the naked woman running through the forest in my vision. There’s the shadow that chased her and the words the shadow spoke.
“Now you have life,” I whisper. She’s survived all this time.
Rinaldo gestures toward Alceste again and she closes the door behind her. The three of us stand together in the room.
Alceste’s feet slide across the carpet toward Rinaldo. He stumbles to reach out for her and she throws her arms around him before he collapses.
I can’t stand seeing them together now that I know who she is. “This is wrong. She can’t—she can’t be here. She has a body. She didn’t need us!”
“Just as souls need bodies to survive, so too do bodies need souls. For nearly three hundred years, I’ve fed her body the souls of the deceased, but that solution is unnatural. It requires considerable strength to pervert the laws of nature. I did the same for your body, and I’m afraid it was that joint exertion that ultimately ruined me.” He smiles and coughs. “I’m sure your corpse is a heap of maggots by now. The moment we left, I stopped preserving those remaining pieces of flesh. But I feel no better.”
“If it’s so hard, then why did you let her die in the first place?”
“Let her die? She refused to make the choice I gave her and instead chose death. She defied me, so I denied her soul passage.”
“For the love of—you control death and you couldn’t just put her soul back in?” The pieces just aren’t adding up. Rinaldo looks irritated with me. He looks at me the same way Mom used to when she explained night walks for the first time and was frustrated that I didn’t immediately understand it all.
“I couldn’t do that because she died. Natural death takes all things that live. Not even I can negate that reality.”
“She’s living proof that’s not true.”
He coughs again. “No.” Alceste balances him against the wall. “No,” he says again, to her now. “In the chair, if you don’t mind.” She nods, her smile never fading. Once she has him seated comfortably, he breathes deeply and continues. “She is proof of the futility of fighting the natural law. Two souls within a single body run the risk of merging, as you should know first-hand. When I promised eternal life, I also promised her sanity. One soul, one body. And so it has been.”
He begs the question and looks upon me. It doesn’t need to be asked, but I know Rinaldo well enough to understand he won’t continue until I do. “Where did you find souls to keep her body alive?”
“Older souls are weak, brittle. They’d never manage. Developing souls, those are full of life. Same with bodies. It’s why you needed to be young when I implanted you with her soul.” A glint of menace returns to his eye. “I didn’t kill them myself, not at first. Before, I’d only sought them out. But the day you died, I needed more than natural death could bring me. There’s no shortage of children taken prematurely by disease. In my prime, I would have managed with those alone.” He coughs again. “But I’ve grown too weak to even wield my own powers.”
“I can’t believe that’s what she wanted.” I cast Alceste a sympathetic glance. “She’s
been just as much a puppet as anyone else.”
“Make no mistake, it was her choice to stay with me. I granted her eternal life, and she used it to search the world for love.”
That’s right. She’d been ostracized for loving another woman. Sadness has held my family in its grip since the very beginning.
“The woman she loved grew old and died, and she was left alone in the world. Her immortality served no more purpose, but she still had me. My plan was complete, and so I took her as my own.” He smiles weakly. “The two of us, we’ve been slowly dying. And now the rope is at its end. You died, before your time, and everything came undone.” If I’m not mistaken, relief undercuts the sadness in his voice. “The only choice left to make is yours, Hubert. I ask you what I ask all of your kind: do you accept death?”
He lets the word death slide off his tongue like a serpent, calm and menacing. I’ve already accepted it. I’m dead. Nothing can be done about that now. I understand. I’m done fighting the loneliness of being apart from the people I love.
Even so.
“I haven’t gotten to be my own person,” I tell Rinaldo. He narrows his eye at me. “I’ve lived most of my life with her inside of me. What kind of life is that?”
“It’s no life at all,” Rinaldo admits, pulling himself up in his chair. “You are dead, Hubert, but if you wish it, I can give you a new life.”
I look to Alceste, silent and robotic in her every manner. She spent three hundred years by his side, living in the shadow of death. “So I can be like her?”
“Not at all. So you can be like me.”
“What?” I scoff. “A manipulative shit?”
“No, powerful. Powerful enough to reshape the world. Imagine a world with no more suffering, where your parents don’t have to mourn the loss of their child.”
“That was your fault!” I snap, content to battle his every suggestion with anger.
“Then imagine a world where no parent ever has to bury their child. No more stillborns. No more drunken drivers colliding with boys and girls on bicycles. Think, Hubert. No more pain.”
There will always be pain. “You’ve weakened, you said. And you admitted yourself that you’re dying. But you expect me to believe you somehow have enough strength left to do something like that?”
Rinaldo doesn’t answer.
“Even if you could, why should I even trust you? It’s probably just another half promise. Like you gave her.”
Now he smiles. “You’re considering it, though. You’re not ready to go, Hubert, and there’s so much more you can do.”
He’s not wrong. I don’t want to go yet. I want to live a life on my own terms. These few hours have been my first taste of the person I really am. I might as well have just been born today.
Alceste moves closer to Rinaldo. She wraps her arms around him and he coughs in short bursts.
However it was that he managed to win her over, Alceste still loves him. She’s stayed with him for all this time. My soul throbs.
“What should I do?” I ask her. She looks up from Rinaldo and smiles. She doesn’t speak though. I don’t think she ever has. It’s always just been tea and smiles with her. Every time I stayed the night here, she peppered me with kindness. She must have known who I was or felt her soul trapped beneath my flesh. Through all that, she kept to herself and continued to smile. There’s something about her eyes, her face, her skin…this woman captivates me beyond the description of words.
“I don’t even have a body,” I say, mostly to myself.
“Nor do I,” Rinaldo answers. “Not truly. Mine is crafted from different elements. As is this place. Have you never wondered why there are never cars here? Only the dead can reach this place. They and you who carried the soul of your deceased Alceste.”
I hadn’t considered it at all. Whenever I’d been at Rinaldo’s, it was for a place to rest after waking from a night walk. Whether or not cars were parked in his driveway hardly seemed important.
“Take my place. I’m tired. I thought I might live among men and change them for the better, but I only brought more trouble.”
That much, we could agree on.
“You’re different than I am.”
“Of course I am,” I interrupt for the joy of admonishing him. Then I catch myself and fall silent. Rinaldo does not smile, not even a grin. His face is somber and thinner than it had been just ten minutes ago. He really is dying.
“Hubert, you stood by your parents and did all you could to return to them, even as the gale called you to it. Yours would be a merciful reign, bereft of the tumult I’ve incited.”
The power to control death. That is what Rinaldo offers me. I stand here in his hidden lodge, my three-hundred-year-old ancestor staring blankly at me, and the self-proclaimed Death Eater breathing his final breaths in a shoddy wooden chair. It feels comical at best. He can’t be serious.
“You’re plotting something,” I say resolutely. Three hundred years ago, he swept Alceste unwillingly into his plan, and she suffers till this day for it. I refuse to fall so easily into his trap. Rinaldo is clever. And he is patient. But he’s also at the end of his life. He has nothing left to gain.
“I understand. You need time to think.” He coughs profusely, covering his mouth with both hands as he does. Alceste bends down over him, cocooning the dying man beneath the protection of her chest and arms. “Go home,” Rinaldo coughs. “See your parents again.”
Those words set a fire alight in my soul. Only hours ago, I ran from home in search of shelter. Instead of a homely bed and Alceste’s herbal remedies, I found the Death Eater, and I found truth. Now that it’s all laid bare, I’m not sure what I want out of life—or out of death. But I do know one thing: I’m not ready to go.
-IV-
Another Homecoming
It’s a strange feeling, knowing with certainty that all of your growth has come to a halt. I’m not even twenty years old. I never had the opportunity to strike out from my parents’ house or meet the woman of my dreams. I never experienced childhood the way children are meant to experience it, and throughout all of my night walks, I was never myself. The real me lived in the shadow of the woman I hosted.
I won’t be returning to my family, not now or ever. At least not the way I always intended. I should feel sad or disappointed. I can’t because Rinaldo was right. I think I always knew the truth when I awakened that day. Everything ended on the edge of the forest. I think it clicked when I saw that hummingbird splattered on the road that there was something more to investigate than some ridiculous beauty in death.
Now I know that there’s nothing beautiful to be had in no longer existing. There’s only your memory, but even that will eventually fade, I suppose. Then what’s left? What monuments have I built for the world to remember me by? Nothing. Too much of my time has belonged to someone else. I’ve built no monuments of my own, just continued the construction of another’s. Me. I’m her monument.
But what’s my monument? No, no, no. Don’t be so shallow, don’t be so down on yourself. There they are, just down the road. Go a little farther and they’ll be there. They’ll be there (until they’re not) waiting for you, thinking about you.
I take the last slope down the road and my house emerges amidst the surrounding foliage. It’s as average a house as it’s ever been. You wouldn’t know from the outside, from the peacefulness around it, that the people who live here have been so totally uprooted.
Yes, Rinaldo, you’re right. One last time. I need to see them.
The wind howls and the front door opens. Grandfather strikes at the hour. Behind me, the sun hits its peak. It streams into the house.
“Damn wind.” Dad rises from the table, a beer clutched tightly in a clammy hand. His free hand, trembling, closes the door behind me. His face reminds me of Rinaldo’s. The color has drained from it, and wrinkles crisscross above his brow. Veins in his eyes glow bright red, strained by his focus.
The door in the wall.
He w
atches it quietly, motionlessly; the grip on his bottle shifts and tightens, and his face twitches. These are the telltale signs that his war continues. I understand now that I have no power over him to affect the outcome of this. I never had that power. Coming to terms with the inescapability of all this is a small comfort. Still, I try to appreciate it. All I could ever do was delay the inevitable. Now time’s run out and nothing can stop him now.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. It hasn’t just been my death that I’ve been hiding from. I clung to happy endings wherever I could. Dad will get better. Mom will learn to move on. They’ll be happy again. Happy without me. Misplaced idealism, all of it. The truth eluded me long enough that I bought into that ideal. As much as I believed I’d find some way out of that tragedy, belief couldn’t stave off the sadness. And it sure as hell can’t stop Dad from being the person he’s always been: a drunken wreck. He doesn’t know what he wants and couldn’t reach it even if he did. That’s just who he is. His heart led him to Mom and he followed it, and now he has to choose how to move forward. No one else is responsible for where he goes from here.
The same is true for Mom. I move toward the couch where she soullessly flips through channels. It’s something she does—something most people who enjoy television probably do—when nothing good is on. Flip through channels. All the channels. Again, and again, and again. She knows better, but each time she holds on to the hope that something might catch her attention. The same news reports, the same shitty movies, the same cartoons. She’s fully aware of how useless the search is yet stays along the course.
I apologize to her too. For a moment, I consider reaching out again. The tendrils ache and throb inside of me. Outside, that beating wind continues. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The day I first returned as I watched my parents sleep and thought about the tragedy that had befallen us, I must have wished to be dead and numb to it all. I wish I could remember the thoughts that kept me awake that night. I wish I could travel back to my past self and show him just how foolish he was. I wished for death that night, just as Rinaldo said, and the clattering gale came for me. But I hung on. And because of that, it had no power over me. But my freedom from death cost me something: my sanity. And theirs too.