Castles in the Sky
by Gabriel S. de Anda
Chapter IV: Jose Luis Espejo-Alatriste
My son’s world is open, filled with light, sometimes a little harsh on the eyes.
Perhaps it was this dichotomy that bound him to his mother, who was a creature of the penumbras, the poetic and the half-glimpsed. They fit into each other perfectly, like day and night.
And he continued with this athletic, sunlit outlook, a playful child even after his mother left to visit her offworld family and never returned. Such things are often metabolized by children in tragic ways, creating patterns that take a lifetime to undo.
The dark, on the other hand, is my milieu, my medium and clay, even when stationed on the brightest of worlds. I find that it is in the shadows, tracing the outlines of things often more felt than seen, where I find the sweet spots of existence. In mystery. This is the place where I found my wife, where we fell in love.
Yet while she and Amado were like the two hemispheres of the same world, he and I danced in a complicated gravity, like a world and its moon. It was never a violent repulsion, merely a gently loving dismay that colored our affection, like the curiously tumultuous cuisine of Siqueiros Elán, from Peachstone Aria: one bite you love, the second taste you hate, the third you can’t make up your mind but, by then, you’re hooked.
Never an outright rejection, at least not until she — wife and mother — left us, never to return.
I refused, so many years ago, to activate the Biotech Compugenix sophismatic soap bubble of my wife, legally declared missing and presumed dead in the Cunard starliner disaster that took her from me, from us. She was gone, and no amount of voodoo neuromantics would ever, ever change that. Medically and existentially — in realtime and in realspace — she’d been torn away from us, even though in our hearts she lived on. Her construct would merely have hampered the necessary and natural process of healing.
Years later — many years ago now — in the midst of all the other expected and unexpected teen rebellions, Amado had accused me of killing her.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You took her from me when I needed her the most.”
“I think the disaster in Hellespyn did that,” I said. “Besides, I don’t subscribe to self-deception.”
“Oh, no, of course not, not you. You had your drugs and your whores but, in paternalistic fashion, decided that it was in my best interests not to learn the art of self-deceit. How hypocritically noble of you.” He’d bowed, adding, “Thank you for the education.”
“You can scoff all you like. My vices are mere distractions. I don’t try to fool anyone: myself and, least of all, you.”
“Illusions, father, not distractions. We all need them. Our illusions define who we are.”
“Perhaps,” I conceded, a little nonplussed at his growing sophistication. “And when you become an emancipate, you can define yourself in any way you choose.”
“Wrong again, father. Choice is something we have little, if any, control over. We are who we are.”
“And that’s where we differ, son. One day you may have a child of your own. Then you will see the limitations of your philosophy. What I’ve done I’ve done for love.”
“And what I do I do to counter your love? You are an illusion, father, a debilitating crutch.”
I smiled. “Perhaps. But you are the one touting the supremacy of illusion, not I. Wherever you go, you will take yourself. And you are my son and, like it or not, I will follow you wherever you go.”
And then he left my life.
I think now that activating the illegal gift from Sen Dwell and the board of Banco Fabricanista Amerikano is a form of atonement for never having allowed my son — or myself — the legally sanctioned mimicant of my dead wife, the mother my tender child needed and which might have guided him with a tenderness and understanding superior to anything I was capable of.
I fear the narcotic of need, and Biotech Compugenix constructs, like garden variety memories, can often be the chains that bind the heart and reinforce its reactionary nature. Death, however, is a quietly eloquent negotiator, and my son’s is one too many arguments for me. I had decided to forsake principle in a bid to retain whatever I could of my lost son. I would not let something so shallow as hypocrisy prevent me from keeping Amado close to me. Not this time.
“It is important that you not give in, Sen Espejo,” the technicians instructed me. “Reconcile, yes, in time, if you choose, and gradually at that. But you must make it appear to be a struggle. If you let everything go his way, the illusion’s weave will loosen and eventually unravel.”
Ironic, that by having once denied him what he’d needed most, I must now do the same again in order to thaw out his affections, purify his mind and soul.
The Biotech Compugenix Turing mixmaster smiled as if reading my mind. “He has to believe you are you.”
“But he thinks I’m dead.”
“Well, he’s not the only one,” conceded the reality consultant. “A lot of people thought you were.” The faction that had attacked when our ship broke through the veil had been caught, interrogated, then subjected to neurolysis.
“But is this ruse necessary?”
“It’ll keep him distracted and engaged. He believes that he is doing precisely what you are doing: making you believe that you are alive when you were in fact killed. That’s what he thinks. And it’s the perfect ruse. It fits in with his own internal reality consensus rather fluidly and naturally, like two hydrogen atoms with an atom of oxygen. We want to maintain that molecular structure, so to speak. We don’t want to risk an illusion-rejection or some form of psychosis.”
Something about the techie’s words snagged my attention. I wondered then if I had died, and not my son, would he accept custody of the memory cartridge of my soul? And what would he do with my mimicant? Would he activate it or let it gather dust? And if he did run the program, what would he say to me? Would he pretend that I was still alive, or would he gleefully inform me that I was dead, and flaunt the irony of my death in my virtual face?
My thoughts brought on the tilt of a mild swoon, and a voice in my head, not my own, suggested that maybe Amado in fact wasn’t dead, and that perhaps I was the one navigating Stygian waters. That Amado was the inheritor of my boxed consciousness.
The Biotech agent had chuckled sadly and, as if reading my thoughts, shook his head and said, “Don’t overthink it. Just put yourself in his shoes.”
Think about what his needs and wants are. This isn’t about you.
I love my son, fiercely. He was, after all — or is — not only of my own flesh-and-blood, but a beautiful little splinter of who my wife was, too. I miss them both. My wife has been gone for over thirty years; the passage of time can and does bleed and cauterize the emotive content from memory while preserving a taste — but no more than a taste — of the imagery that seduced us to begin with.
But while my son has been absent in a self-imposed exile for almost twenty years, in the roots of my being I knew he was alive, organically so. And now that he is no longer alive, my wound is fresh, the pain sharp. It is this pain which I want to keep alive. I need so much for him not to be a mere memory. I am giving myself the gift I withheld from my nine-year old child so long ago.
If only I’d known.
“You’re right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Help me make this right.”
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
