I thought I saw him only once, maybe ten years after he died. I was driving down a little two lane road that runs on top of the cliffs just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The road winds up through knee-high scrub and wildflowers and then through this dark cavern of Lebanese pines before the branches open up into nothing but the wind and the white-and-blue Pacific. The shoreline curves like a hook way down at the bottom of the cliff, and the water chops in white-caps all the way out into a hazy nothing. I was driving home from work, and I was tired, but there, in front of me, in a little blue Volkswagen, was Chris. It was his head. And when he turned to speak to the passenger beside him, it was his face. Without question.
For maybe fifteen, twenty seconds I followed that little VW around the curves of the cliff. He was in that car. In this place at the end of the land that opened up to the sea. He had never died. Chris hadn’t died. And all of our sadness had been a mistake.
And if death was not the end then what else was endless? I knew then that it was I who was dead. That I had died into this new world, or that perhaps my life had been swapped out for his. I knew that soon, maybe even in the next instant, I would fade or vanish or cease to be. I thought that was fair. I was settled with it, as the road turned left and right. He was with friends, and they were laughing. There, just in front of me, laughing to one another in the cab of the car. They were headed down to Baker Beach at the bottom of the road. I knew they couldn’t wait.
I took the turn off for my apartment. I passed by the trees and the cars that I knew. I parked in my parking space. I cut off the car. I picked up my bag and walked up the fifteen steps to my door, and as I did these things I let the thing inside of me that knew Chris’s walk and eyes and smell withdraw back into itself. And I let it say, don’t be silly. And I let it say, please be afraid.