(no subject)

[seymoure]

5.

“It’s a small world, but it’s a big planet,” Benjy said, as he cleaned up the dinner dishes.

Mickey wondered why his mother wasn’t back yet, but his father looked in no mood to talk about it. He wasn’t real thrilled to talk about any of this, but appeared to be resigned to giving in to some of his son’s inquiry.

“Not all of us knew each other,” Benjy explained, “But there are always about a hundred or so of us around at any time.”

The boy looked at his father in a way he had never done before. It was an absolute and concrete realization that his father was, and always had been, a member of those known as “The Immorti.”

These individual were born with the memories of all their previous incarnations already in their heads. The minds couldn’t make use of the knowledge for several years, but would eventually
gain full cognizance of all that they had lived through out the history of years.

“So, who were you in the past?” The boy asked his father.

“Actually, no one you would have heard of,” His father stated modestly.

“Have you ever heard of Nikoli Tesla?”

The boy’s blank expression answered in the negative for him.

“Ahh, well, how about Andrew Jackson?”

It looked as if Mickey had been hit in the face with a chair.

“The President?” He stammered.

“Why don’t we talk about it when you’ve had a while to think about it?”

“You think of being the President after somebody else?” The boy said with disbelief.

“This is hard to understand,” The boy’s father began.

“That’s the rightest thing you could have said,” The answer came.

 “This is why we don’t talk about it,” Benjy went on, “People cannot have the same perspective on the process that we have.

“To them it is ‘What famous people have you been?’ and to us it is, ‘Which days in your long year come to mind first?’”

Mickey sat back in his chair.

“I’m trying to understand,” He said in a more reconciliatory voice, “But it’s a big step from thinking about your father as your father, to thinking about your father as someone who has
walked all over the pages of your school history textbook.”

“Most of our lives are not even remembered. We do not stand out. We try to blend in. We do what we can to make things better, but we still work within the realm of human ability. Knowledge and memory are great tools, but we are, in essence, still just humans,” His father told him.

“I mentioned Tesla,” The man continued, “First, because he was the most recent incarnation, secondly because I am proud of the scientific breakthroughs. It is sad that most of them are
still waiting to be instituted. And that is mostly because of human greed, rather than the flaws in the science.”

Mickey saw a genuine feeling of loss and defeat in his father’s attitude. He was going to have to look up Tesla on the internet.

“But, the things I have done are nothing compared to what your mother did.” Benjy stated with a matter of fact aspect that belied the seriousness of the statement. “After all, she, in no
uncertain terms, saved the life of the entire world.”

Mickey was stunned again.

“Mom?” He said, with the picture of the frail and nervous woman he had grown up with in his mind.

“She stood alone against Vadid Shastan, and turned away his personal Armageddon,” The man said with love and admiration welling up inside his being.

At that moment, Mickey’s mother walked into the apartment, smiled at her son and husband and went in to take a shower.

She looked like she wouldn’t survive a trip to the grocery store. She looked like she might crumble at a PTA meeting.

Mickey suddenly knew two things.

First: He was going to have a ton of questions to ask somebody.

Second: He was going to have to redefine what the word “Superhero” meant.

But, he also knew, as he listened to the water splashing in the other room, and watched his father cleaning in the kitchen, he knew there was something special in calling yourself a McCauley. What he didn’t know was that someone was, at that moment, rising who would make that name the prime target for destruction.

© 2005 by C. Wayne Owens