I saw a man getting off a bus in Spain. He was old, black, and hunched over. He didn’t use a cane like so many older men there do. He tried to walk under his own power. He reminded me of you. He reminded me of how you left.
I looked you up recently, curious about the man you were, and how that walks alongside the man I am trying to become. Clarence Kingston lives in a malaise of fictional references. He is the CEO of Skynet. He is the head of the nefarious EGG labs. Of the real you, my stepfather, there is nothing.
My mother didn’t let me see the open casket. She didn’t want that to be my last memory of you. So, I have no last memory of you.
I didn’t see you in the hospital. I wasn’t allowed. I don’t know how you died. Where you scared, like my Grandmother? Did you fall asleep the way they do it in the movies? I don’t know what killed you. I heard snatchets of conversation. You died of liver failure. You needed a blood transfusion, but they gave him blood that had AIDS in it and you died of that. These form the outline of my understanding of where people think you went.
I never thought any of that was real. I remember being twelve. It was weeks after you died. It was a few days before we were set to take the boat out again and ride deep into the waters where we’d catch fish. I was running to catch a bus. I wanted the M1 but as I approached, I saw it was the M2. I still pushed to run up alongside it, stretching my long legs to keep pace. I looked up and I saw you.
You were sitting at the back of the bus. I couldn’t see your entire face, but it was you. It had to be. You radiated that warmth that kept me sane when everything around me felt crazy. You wore that gray shirt you loved so much, but mommy said looked terrible on you. The bus sped up, catching the flow of traffic. I pushed on, trying to catch it, though the stop itself was three blocks ahead. My legs failed me, and then the light did. A red light sprang up ahead of me. Your bus cruised through, catching the dying embers of yellow. I skidded to a stop as a wave of cabs buzzed angrily through the intersection. By the time the light turned the bus was gone. You were gone. I never got a chance to ask you why you left.
That night I asked my mother if you were really dead. She stared at me for a long time, not speaking. Then she told me that people die and that is a part of life. She told me I would die one day and so would she. She didn’t answer my question. She left me that small hope, at least.
I imagine you very old now, eyes staring forward at the back of the bus as it rolls away from me over and again. I don’t know where you are going. I know only that you are a passenger and I am not.