Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust

by Nicolas Wilson

2076

  It’s a strange thing, growing up near your son, but not being his father, not being anybody he’d recognize. Stranger still, knowing he’s older than you are, and he always will be. I grew up believing I was nuts. Past lives? I just couldn’t square that circle. And feeling like I was related to some Buddhist monk? Yeah.

  I tried to kill myself, twice. Apparently, parents' groups got search engines to put up improper information on the internet as the highest results, so I slashed my wrists across, deep, but across. Lost a lot of feeling in my hands, a lot of mobility- but not nearly enough blood.

  In a different time and place, I would have starved to death, but these days anything electronic responds to thought commands through a chip behind your ear, and anything that’s analog, well, it’s either in an antique store or the crappiest parts of war zones in Africa.

  By the time I found out what I’d been doing wrong with my razor blade, I’d started reading about reincarnation and people who felt they’d had past lives. It wasn’t anything scientific, just not feeling alone anymore, knowing that you know maybe I am crazy, but that there are other people with my crazy out there, too- that I wasn’t alone. It helped.

  And the more I tried to remember about my past lives, the easier it got. I remembered being that monk- it was the first real conscious thought I remember having. No, even before that, when I was a baby, my mind would just stroke off, and it would be like I was watching somebody else’s home movies.

  I started not just remembering, but I was picking out details, really specific details, about people who’d really existed (and people who, like the monk I lived near, still did). And it became clear that I knew more than I should, more than logic and reason dictated I could, barring me being some kind of international spy or psychic.

  I remembered the monk’s son. I was his dad but I wasn’t. Then at some point he moved away, to a different monastery, and even though I didn’t really ever see him, let alone talk to him, not being close to him made me sad. So I moved to be near his new monastery. I even thought about joining up, or at least being one of the lay believers. Instead I used an old memory.

  The monk liked apples, but where they were in the mountains, so it was hard to get them. So I started up a distributor, but I ran the cart near his monastery myself. It gave us a chance to talk, though rarely did he say more than how, “Apples might be my last attachment.”

  We buried him this week. And I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with my life now.

 

  1884

  I remember it like the day before, Charlotte, breathy from passion, rolled over in our bed to tell me I was going to get a son. I laughed at her. “You ain’t even swoled up, how can you know it’ll be a boy?” She just smiled and said she knew.

  It weren’t the first time a woman told me she were with child. Several times they’ve been mistaken, once, I think she fixed to keep me with the lie. So at the time I paid it no mind. But then she didn’t bleed for three whole months, and she was tired and sick, and got big. I ain’t been a religious man since I was a boy- I don’t think an angel flittered down to whisper it to her- but it felt all miraculous none the same.

  The time hadn’t seemed real since the moment near two seasons back, when I recognized I was going to be somebody’s daddy. Seemed like a vivid dream. For the first time I had a string of breaks in my direction: got the farm for a song, and the loan for the land on the cheap from the bank. The horse I’d had for too long got sick, then got better.

  Only cloud on our horizon was her brother. I knew her from him, though how that came to be seems a mystery. I never liked him. I suppose there’d been a time when I tried not to dislike him so much.

  But I’d gotten away from my outlaw roots, figuring that his sister deserved better- hell, demanded better. He’d seen the both of those facts as betrayal, and spent most of this last year in a bottle. He was propping up one of the walls in my house, a bottle all that was propping him up. “That your bastard?” he asked.

  “If I weren’t holding my newborn son I’d punch you square in the jaw; I ain’t going to bloody the day up just because you feel an asshole. And I ain’t going to tell you to lie to your sister about being happy, but if you’re going to be sour and drunken, you ain’t going to do it in my home. Not today.”

  He moved to put a hand on my shoulder, but I got a hand on his gun still in his belt, twisted til it pushed into his belly. “I’m not fixing to take you out of this world the day we brought Robert in, but you so much as give me another sideways glance while I’m holding him and I swear I’ll fill you full from your own six shooter.”

  He took another long hard pull from the bottle to kill it, gripped the neck like he might swing it at me, then thought better of joining the bottle among the dead, and dropped it. The bottle shattered on the floor, and Robert started crying as Bill stumbled away.

  2009

  “So you remember being a cowboy? In the old west? Spurs and six-shooters and all that? And you were an outlaw who got hung? And you had a son?”

  His tone was mocking, and I knew that it was my wounded pride that begged me to recite the proverb about tongues causing wounds as grievous as knives. But suffering is craving, even if it’s only craving respect. “I have one now,” I said.

  “Wait. How do you have a kid?”

  “I was married. In the flesh, I still am, though I do not see her often.”

  “What happened to that whole, ‘Attachment is craving that which you already have’ shtick?”

  “None of us are born into the Sangha community; I had another life before this one.”

  “So you’re being flowery this time, not meaning a past life.”

  “Yes. Not a past life, a different one. I had a wife. We had a son. I discovered the man who murdered me in that past life had become my son. I could not kill my son despite the consciousness that lived within him, but neither could I look past that consciousness and love him the way he deserved. So I sought a third way, a life without craving for revenge or for love.”

  “And how’s that worked out for you?”

  “Bumpily. The Sangha is invaluable in keeping me on the good, upright, knowledgeable and proper way, but I am not always as detached as I wish. As an example, I miss my wife at times; I miss the life we shared. I miss past lives, as well. Not always, but enough that I suffer for my craving. That is why I am not in Nirvana.”

  2078

  I ended up back home. I sold controlling shares of my fruit distributor to a local businessman. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t settle into doing anything, ever. I found my way into finance, banking actually. Normally they wouldn’t hire someone my age for an entry level posting, but because of my distribution experience, they talked about grooming me for bigger things.

  Then, this last Thursday, a man came in. He handed me a money card and told me to route it through an account and then into his, but when I checked the ownership of the money card, it came back with a woman’s name on it. He made a hurried excuse, how he “Must have grabbed my girlfriend’s card off the counter instead of mine.” I wrote down his name, thinking I’d forward it to the cops, but instead I filed the number in my personal memory.

  When I got home I realized why the man seemed so familiar, not in his look, or his voice, not even in his walk, but something about his manner, bent over, mumbling, a bubbling anger. He was Bill. He had to be.

  And I thought to myself, I had to be crazy. Getting flashes of memory from dead people was one thing, but meeting up with a man who had you killed was another- especially with what I found myself fantasizing about doing to him. But there was one thing, one concrete thing that I knew couldn’t have come from anywhere else, that would prove once and for all I wasn’t sizing myself up for a straight jacket.

  See, I knew where the hanged man’s gun was. Because after he was reborn, the hanged man grew up, and dug the pistol out of his old body’s grave, then he tracked his killer down.
See, Bill got to die in the 20th century, by the gun of the man he’d killed. And that man, that time, had buried the pistol again. This time, he put it in Bill’s grave.

  Or at least that’s how I’ve rationalized standing out here, in the damned rain, shoveling away mud off a hundred and fifty year old grave. I hope I don’t get caught out here; I can’t imagine it’s fun trying to convince the police that you’re not a necrophile.

  1882

  Bill started life as a horse thief, and I remember knowing him when he was old enough to know better but still too young to know it. I told him why they hung horse thieves- why even outlaws looked down on them that took horses- because taking a horse was abandoning a man to the elements, and a long, slow, hard death.

  We took him in from a pup, on the thinking that a wolf in a pack ain’t as dangerous as a lone, rabid dog. He seemed grateful for that, but every day, every job, I question the wisdom in it. Just this Tuesday he smashed a teller’s teeth out for the sole reason that he weren’t hurried enough for Bill’s liking.

  As I said, though, the boy’s been grateful. And tonight, as a show for it, his family broke bread with me. Seems he’s told them I gave him a job at my stable, at a good wage, to explain his recent excess; quite a feat, seeing as I don’t own my own stable, or even room for my head.

  His father’s a nice old