Sidereal

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. A funny statement because one could argue that nobody could hear anything if someone else wasn’t around. Hey, no one heard my father scream from the bathroom when he gazed at his reflection in the mirror. I only knew about it because he told me when he found me by the tree on the hill behind our house. I knew he’d go crazy when he woke up from his deep slumber. He had just arrived last night after having been gone for years, and now the aftermath was kicking in.

See, my father was supposed to be eighty-seven years old and look eighty-seven years old, yet as he approached me, he had the face of the young man I saw in the pictures around the house—the young thirty-year old man who I remembered when I was about four years old.

He stared at me now, seeming to try and make sense of my presence before him. I didn’t blame him. If he looked thirty, how was I almost twenty? I still should have been a four-year old boy, which was when I last saw him.

“Junior?” My dad stared at me some more, his hand lifting as though he wanted to touch me and see that I was real.

All I could do was contain my shock and say: “Dad…”

“B-but how can… How is this possible? I had…I had a…” His hand passed through his hair as he glanced around the scenery. After looking at the tree for a moment, his eyes returned to mine. “Junior, you were in your sixties when I last saw you. Your mom…” He looked over his shoulder at the back of the house. “Your brother and sister…. Oh no…”

Before he could start down the hill, I reached for his arm and grabbed it. “Dad, wait. Wait. Mom’s still here. Jack and Jenny…are here too…”

I couldn’t finish. My dad gave me another look, took his arm back, and rushed toward the house. “Then I have to see them. I have to understand how…”

When he dashed off, I took off after him. “Dad! Hold on. There’s something you have to know.”

He didn’t listen. He entered the house and frantically searched the kitchen and then the living room. “Helen! Jack! Jenny!”

I stepped through the back door into the kitchen. “Dad, they’re not here. They’re at Aunt Clara’s funeral for the weekend.”

My dad, standing by the stairs, froze and looked at me. “Clara is dead?”

“Yeah, she died of…”

“…kidney failure…” he finished.

I paused. “…yesterday.”

His eyes moved toward the floor. “This doesn’t make sense. If she died of that, then she must be over ninety years old. And Patrick…”

I knew that he would remember that name. Uncle Patrick was Aunt Clara’s husband…and my dad’s twin.

I pointed to a picture on the shelf beside the stairs. “There’s the most recent family photo right there. We took it when we visited the lake house last summer.”

Dad instantly looked at the photo and visibly assessed it. His eyes narrowed in what I assumed to be extra confusion. “They’re all the age I remember. Patrick is eighty-seven…like me. But I’m… I look like his grandson now.” He swallowed. “Your mother is…” What started as sentimental transformed into a sharp, puzzled tone. “Who is that man beside her?”

I knew that question was coming too. I sighed and stepped from around the kitchen counter. “That’s Steve…our stepfather.”

Dad delivered a frown in my direction. “What?”

“Dad, you were gone for…almost sixty years I think. We thought you were dead. Well…everyone else did…until…”

I could see him gazing back into the picture. “Jenny…Jack… Jenny looks like Jack here and he looks like her. My second child is a girl and my third a boy…”

I moved in even closer. “Jack was born before her…”

It was then when something appeared to sink into my dad’s understanding of the situation. He averted his focus from the picture to lower his eyes to the floor and say, “How come you haven’t aged…Junior?”

The million-dollar question at last.

“Because I went looking for you…”

My dad’s glance lifted to mine as soon as I said that.

“I knew you went off into Outer Canvas when I found your work journal. You marked all the galactic highways, the nebula seas, the celestial mountains. It was brilliant.”

For the first time since we began this conversation, my dad summoned the smallest hint of a smile. “You knew how to read all that?”

I leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Of course. I’ve studied and tracked stars since you left…because I somehow knew…that you went into them.” My voice had lowered toward the end of my thought.

Dad softly cleared his throat, inching toward the stairs as though he were going to take a seat on them. “I went for your mother. She became paralyzed, and I went to search for a new spine for her. In the Outer Canvas, humans get to live to about two hundred. I was still middle-aged…even if I didn’t look it. Frailty was another thing we were working on.”

Though I was very interested in what he said, I couldn’t help but ask: “You left in your eighties to help Mom, but I remember you leaving way before that. Why’d you leave back then? Did you start a family somewhere else—in some mirror world?”

He sat down on the stairs at that point. A long breath left him as he stared straight ahead of him, clasping his hands. “First I need to make sense of my own situation. I’m still trying to figure out how I got here…like this…” He gestured over his younger appearance. Then his eyes raised to rest in mine. “How old were you when you went looking for me?”

I bit my bottom lip for a split second. “Seventeen…no, sixteen. I was gonna turn seveneen that year. I went searching for you for what seemed like a couple weeks. Even landed on Anger and Love Planets.” Interesting times those were, but I couldn’t elaborate at that moment. “When I came back, apparently forty years had passed.”

My dad never broke his focus from me. “You went through sequences—revolutions. Sometimes one sequence is ten years on this world. Some planets also have longer days than us. What did the family think when they saw you?”

“They were….shocked at first. They thought they were seeing a ghost—a ghost of a teenage kid. They believed I was dead, which made sense, but it was rough for them because it was déjà vu for Mom, especially after what happened to you. Seeing me gave her hope that you were still alive…and now here you are.”

Emotion trickled its way down my dad’s face. His movements appeared to be in slow motion as he unclasped his hands and then clasped them again. For the second time now, he cleared his throat. “Even in this world…” he started softly. “…she’s the most amazing woman in the galaxies.”

I leaned forward slightly, repeating his phrase and not understanding it. “Even…in this world…?”

Dad straightened his posture and faced me again. “I don’t know how far you traveled, but did you know that there are sidereal bridges that lead to the Parallel Dimensions? Places where others are living our almost exact life with maybe a few differences? Sometimes people wish to be somewhere or someone else or have another life, and these Dimensions offer that opportunity. A few cases of déjà vu are attributed to those others. The stronger to desire to have a different life, the more likely it exists in the Dimensions. It’s believed that these desires are what created those dimensions.”

I stood there, astonished. My arms crossed over my chest as I mentally revised every detail he said. I had heard of doppelganger worlds, but this appeared to be very different. “Is that what you meant when you said that you looked for another spine for Mom? You were going to ask one of her other forms?”

Dad looked slightly amused. “No, of course not. There’s an inter-galactic facility called the Revival Center where people donate their organs and parts for travelers like us. If a Parallel dies earlier or just chooses to donate, the body parts go there. I researched the facility, and found that one of your mother’s Parallels donated her entire body.”

The more he spoke, the more awe filled into me. I had seen plenty on my travels outside of this world, but I never imagined it was that expansive. To be able to replace injured or sick parts of you so easily—to perhaps even have the life or be the person you always imagined. It made me wonder, but it also made me question, especially in regards to my dad.

Again, I wanted to ask so many things, but I had to focus on what was occurring now in front of me. “So when you went to go look for a new spinal cord, you somehow ended up here.” It was what I assumed, and based on my dad’s nod, it seemed that I was right. “I didn’t age when I left, but somehow you de-aged when you got here. Maybe when you went to the Revival Center, there was some sort of regeneration cloud or fountain?”

An amused sound came out of my dad as he set his glance toward the floor. “If there is anything that regenerates out there, I’d love to find it.”

“Then…what happened? Did time reverse? I still want to know why you left all those years ago—the first time that you left.”

“Junior…” A deep sigh punctuated his stating of my name. After clearing his throat a third time during our conversation, our gazes found each other. “…I never left a first time. I wrote the journals, I did the research, I worked for the Astral-Travel Galactic Corps, but I never left the planet until I was in my late eighties.”

I furrowed my brow, stepping away from the kitchen counter now to move in closer to him. “But I remember…” This wasn’t making sense. “I remember you. You weren’t here all those years. Where were you then?”

“You made me realize it after you told me about Jack and Jenny’s order of birth…”

“Made you realize what?”

My dad unclasped his hands. “That I’m a Parallel.” He got to his feet and took a step toward me. “And I’m not your father. He’s still out there somewhere.”