Haru.

I woke still tangled in subconscious panic, certain I was dying, stumbling from bed into a dark forest, pushing at moss thick as curtains, heart pummeling my lungs, choking on my own wet gasps until my palms pressed against a cold, calming surface. As the residue faded, my dorm room reasserted itself. The thrumming slowed and the vibrant dream palette seeped into the muted tones of everyday life. I stood at the window, hands splayed on cool glass, curtains tucked open around my elbows. My breath had left a swath of damp fog obscuring my view of the outside world. The desk clock glowed 3:10 a.m.

I had always been unusually sensitive about mortality. But since my father’s passing two weeks ago, death had become incarnate, escaping its future prison and lodging like a stalker in my dreams. The estate sale was next week. That’s what triggered these nightmares, I told myself. I loved my father and emotionally could not comprehend that he was atoms now, as gone as if he had never existed, as if I had made him up. The wound of permanent loss was manufacturing bad dreams, I told myself. That’s all.

But as the glass cleared, I saw my father standing naked outside the residence hall. I leaned closer to the window, heart and breath rising again. He was right there, as solid as the empty benches, the grass, the concrete under his bare feet. Asian American man, gray hair tousled like a boy, face carved in bemused contemplation by clay-soft lines, potluck belly, skinny legs. He looked around, confused, then pushed his hands against the air as if miming his way out of an invisible box. My breath fogged again. I wiped the glass. He was gone.

I knew I wasn’t dreaming. It had to be a hallucination, or worse, the start of the nervous breakdown I had always feared was in my future.

I got dressed, tucked the bronze Rubik’s Cube–sized urn into my jacket, and ran downstairs. The street in front of the residence hall was empty. I looked for the moon. I needed to gaze into the sun’s billion-year-old nuclear reactor mirrored in the sky. But the row of dark buildings blocked all but a narrow band of stars.

An hour later, I parked at the ocean. It was grief. That’s all. I never knew my mother. Only my father. He was the gravitational force in my life. When I came out of the closet, Dad held the door. When I left seminary to major in astrophysics, Dad refinanced the house. When I jettisoned God like a leaky lifeboat, Dad supported my decision even though it cut against his personal faith and his calling as a pastor. He loved me from the ground up. He gave me an orbit. Now I felt cut loose, my heart an orphan comet.

Waves breathed around my tennis shoes as I fumbled with the urn, fingernail slicing at  the bronze seam. Maybe I needed to let him go completely. Scatter his ashes just as his atoms had been scattered.

Haru.

Dad stood on the sand, looking around as if he sensed I was close but couldn’t find me. He was younger now, mid-30s, naked body lean as a desert monk. He kept pushing on the air. His lips moved and then, a second later, I heard his voice.

Haru.

Clutching the urn so tight it cut my palm, I ran back to the car, chased by the thunder of waves as if death crashed at my heels.

I spent the week in my childhood home. Maybe immersion was the way through. Surrounded by his religious symbols and old photos, his rare books and simple clothes, saturated by his presence, I hoped the visitations would stop. But each day I caught another glimpse of him, in the garden, in the living room, on the front porch, always a different age, always pushing or pulling the air as if rearranging invisible walls, always looking around, head tilted, listening, as if he knew I was just around some corner. I felt myself crumbling inside. At first I closed my eyes each time he appeared, or turned my back and folded into myself until he was gone. Then I stumbled into old solutions, went out, drank.

On the morning before the estate sale, I woke on the couch in Laura Dunsany’s office. She was an advisor for my thesis on modified Newtonian dynamics, and held two exotic doctorates, one in a subbasement of physics, the other on a tweaked branch of evolutionary psychology. Even drunk, I must have known she was the only one I could tell, the one who could help contextualize my mania. I vaguely remembered spilling my guts and my bowels before passing out.

“I did some research last night,” she said. “I don’t mean bestseller life-after-death, tunnel-of-light, taken-up-to-heaven stuff. I mean psychiatric studies documenting patients who for a brief time caught glimpses through the veil, so to speak. The mind, like the universe, is a quantum place. Really, Haru, the post-death literature is surprisingly extensive.”

“Come on. Post-death is death. Just tell me it’s a nervous breakdown. That’ll it pass. That I’ll get better.”

Her round blue eyes gazed through round glasses. “Memories are biochemical. Consciousness is atomic. Maybe identity is converted by death into another form of energy. Sometimes, when trauma shatters our perceptions? We get knocked like citizens of Flatland into three dimensional space. It’s important to pay attention during these moments because nature always rebalances. Don’t think of this as a nervous breakdown but as evidence of something outside our current boxes of knowledge. Something as natural as evolution.”

The hem of my shirt was stiff with dried vomit. “Get serious.”

“I’m always serious. Science is not limited by what can be proven.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Listen. I found some very consistent case studies. For centuries people tried to record these presences. Centuries. These are psychic breadcrumbs. Of course the phenomena has never registered on our instruments. But that doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, it does!” I rubbed the sting of light out of my eyes. “The presences don’t register because the phenomena aren’t real. My dad is gone. He no longer exists in any form.”

“There are more forms in space and time than are documented in your theses.”

I recognized the Hamlet rip-off and looked up to reply, but she stared so thoughtfully over my shoulder I turned around. All I saw was the row of Rorschach smears framed like art on her wall. Those wet-looking shapes unnerved me.

“Or maybe,” she mused, “we need to consider different instruments. The Geiger counter of our emotions. Radio telescope of our memories. Specimen kit of our senses.”

I laughed. The hangover crunched the halves of my brain like stones. I didn’t want to argue. Laura was the queen of soft science. It was time to leave her sandbox.

I slept until late morning then woke abruptly, surprised by a hundred strangers on the front lawn. The estate sale. I opened the door. The agent came in first, annoyed. I stood back and watched crowds move through my father’s house like polite locusts. It was heartbreaking, this fire sale of a life. Afterwards, I sat on the wood floor in an empty home.

Haru?

Dad stood outside in the garden. He was old again, naked and potbellied. I stood to leave, then sat down. Looked away, then looked back. If I eliminated the obvious (I’m not dreaming, I’m not losing my mind), then this was reality in some unexplored form. I didn’t know what else to do so I pulled my phone, tapped the camera, and began recording.

Haru?

He was old again.

Using the only other instrument I had, I called out with my heart.

Dad.

He turned his head and walked toward the house, changing age every few seconds like he was reintegrating each moment of his consciousness, sparking, popping, boy/senior/middle-aged/teen. Heat pulsed from his combustible identities. I wept and laughed, rising to my feet as he approached. I felt like a new Oppenheimer witnessing not the splitting but the reformation of atoms. I gazed into his volatile face. He smiled a dozen smiles, rested a dozen weightless hands on my shoulder, and, as if stepping through a door of his own making, vanished.

Of course, the video recorded only an empty house.

I still don’t know what my heart recorded.

Charles Duffie is a writer working in the Los Angeles area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Anastamos, Bacopa Literary Review, Prime Number Magazine, Exposition Review, Mojave River Press, Meat for Tea, Heavy Feather Review, FlashBack Fiction, Riggwelter, and American Fiction by New Rivers Press.