Expiration Date

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.

But 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.