Description: George's father is getting too close to the truth, and it's time to discover just what Crystal is up to. Sometimes parents and meanings come in odd packages.
Author's Note: Rated for language. Sorry to my TMNT readers for the temporary jump. Everyone needs a break sometimes, right? As for Dead Like Me readers, I must say that the series ended so abruptly that I wanted to answer some questions for myself. I may be proven totally wrong by the made-for-DVD movie, but… whatever. Enjoy, and feedback is greatly appreciated. Seriously.
Disclaimer: If I owned Dead Like Me… I would have found another network to air it on because it was good. What the hell is wrong with the world when Friends can run for what, ten years and a show like this was cancelled in two?
The Nowhere Train
My name is George Lass.
…Technically speaking, of course, my name was George Lass. Tense is something you take for granted when you're alive—things you have been, things you are—things you will be. There's no "will be" for me anymore. There's only "was" and this other tense… "will never be again." The finalitive tense… or something.
I can't exactly sign G. Reaper on the dotted line, but what lines are there for me to sign? Names matter. In your head, you roll them around and around, cooking them with each repeat. I am. I am. I am. In school people obsess over what you will be, what you want out of life. No one tells you in class when you're talking about being a fireman that someday one of those fire-stopping heroes is gonna be extinguishing your blown-apart ass after you've been splattered by a zero-g toilet seat. No one tells you either that there's one career choice not on the books. I was a creepy kid though—I actually wanted to be a ghost. Every year, in fact, when girls my age were turning from fairy princess costumes to real princess and finally to sexy nurse outfits and parties, I always wandered around under a sheet. Maybe destiny has a sick sense of humor, the bastard.
Other than all this, for me there's only the past tense: what I was. I was somebody's daughter. Somebody's sister. Somebody's granddaughter. Even, if I think hard enough back to before I stopped giving a shit, somebody's friend. It's what I was that's the reason why I'm sitting on the old wall outside my mother's house at dawn, just after the milk man's gone. It's the fact that I was, not that I am, that's the reason I'm not in there now, in my bed, waiting for my mom to wake me up. But I'm not. When you were something, you're not that thing anymore—and that's what I am. The non-me. The un-me.
But this morning I'm not alone.
This morning someone else has stopped by in his mid-life crisis mobile, doing what I do at least once a week—and probably what he does once a week as well. Being a ghost. Thinking about what you were and what you miss, in those hours before the living world is going about its day. Before offices and classes and meetings open up, after the nightlife goes to bed, there's us—in-between. Except this ghost isn't dead. He's my father.
He was my father. That's the rule here—leave your life behind. Obviously that's something I've never been so good at doing. But even if I hadn't died at eighteen and went off to do something else, I wouldn't be able to say goodbye to this life so easily. It's the only thing I ever knew. I'd never lived anywhere—hell, I didn't even like to piss or take a crap anywhere other than this house, even into high school. I never really did anything or had to deal with being away—and one semester of U. Dub, still living at home, had been seen as traumatizing. No, death was God's way of both knocking me upside the head and having one hell of a good laugh while he did it—if there is such a thing as God or destiny or the big fat monkey in the sky or whatever.
So basically the idea of my dad being as much a ghost as myself is just confusing. I guess when you die, it's like you draw this line behind you—and you sorta expect everything behind that line stays the same as the moment you bit the dust. I didn't want anything to change after me. I guess I wanted the world to freeze in a moment, like I had—for people I loved to never get any older, or sadder, or move away. But the other reapers have taught me, like the assholes they are, quite differently. For Rube, the world's changed into something unrecognizable—a place where you don't smoke on airplanes, where people can blow the world to hell thirty-two times over, where you gotta watch your own kid die of old age. I've wondered if that will happen to me. Not with my kid of course—I don't have any trick babies to speak of—but with my little sister, or even her kids if she has them… weird as that thought is.
I wonder sometimes what goes through my dad's mind when he sits out here. Today can't be the first time—he's got that look of almost resigned habit. Like me, I guess. But it's thinking about Rube that stops me from going over to him, from hiding behind that un-me mask and chatting like this is my jogging route. I finally know that talking to my dad or mom or sister isn't really cruel to them—it's cruel to me. Your life is full of unretrievables, but the alternative is never remembering them at all. Not being anything. Personally, and as I really always have, I prefer haunting. But in the middle of it, you get good at playing life—imagining yourself back into that house where you were alive. But it's a comfort, really, once I get over the guilt, to think that my death sort of did close a curtain behind me—that I'm not alone here. My family changed from four to three to two, like a chain-reaction. That's what death does; it sets a spark, and at the end of the cord, everything left behind gets blown to fucking pieces. "The center cannot hold" or whatever. Rube is the father who died and left behind his daughter only to watch her die; and I'm the daughter who left behind her father, only to watch him die with me. When you fall out of that warm place, where life is—that's when you start to appreciate it.
My dad and I both have a second chance… maybe not to get back into that warm happy glow but to make ones of our own. We're still here, after all. My dad isn't done reading Shakespeare anymore than I'm done tacking post-its to my head. But we'll both haunt this space, even after it's changed so much we no longer recognize it. And it's funny, because this is the first time I've felt any relation to my dad since Reggie came along—and he doesn't even know that I'm here.