I took up smoking real cigarettes, my vaping habit a thing of the past. Somehow, I was still surprised by my lung cancer diagnosis.
It’s strange, the things money can’t fix.
Over twenty years after Joey died, on April 23, 2052, I died at the age of fifty-eight.
And then the strangest thing happened.
I’m not supposed to talk about this part.
I woke up in a waiting room. A drab waiting room with altogether too much wood in it. I knew immediately that I had died. I had been waiting for it for months by that point. My immediate reaction was to laugh, because whatever god I thought I’d been praying to—or pointedlynotpraying to—all those years, whatever afterlife I’d been imagining, it certainly hadn’t looked anything like this.
“Alexander Aquino?”
I looked up and saw that there was a person standing in front of a doorway I hadn’t previously noticed. I stood at the sound of my name and approached them. They were shorter than me by a few inches, with black hair, jovial eyes, and an androgynous appearance.
They sized me up, held their hand out for me to shake. Once I did, they told me, “I’m your caseworker. Follow me.”
I glanced back at the room, my eyes lingering on the empty desk at the front.
“Apologies if you were kept waiting long. The receptionist is on break.”
By the time I took my seat across from my caseworker, I was sure I was in hell. Or perhaps at some sort of purgatorial pit stop where my sins would be weighed before I was directed to hell. Instead, my caseworker informed me that I was getting a second chance at life. They said I would retain my memories of my first life but could not speak the truth to anyone or I would be erased from existence, and then they asked when I’d like to go back to.
I didn’t give them a date. I asked, “Is this real? Or is it all happening inside my mind?”
It didn’t feel real. It felt like the hopeful hallucination of a dying and desperate brain. I half expected to wake up with a strained, painful gasp in the same hospital bed in which I had fallen asleep, inches away from the death that would have been a glorious relief and therefore kept eluding me.
Maybe it was a cruel joke. Perhaps thiswashell, and hell’s first torture was psychological in nature.
Hope, I was quickly discovering, could be its own kind of torture.
“Reality is a relative concept,” my caseworker informed me with a smile.The people in hell are nice, I thought. “You have just left a reality where you are dead, and that cannot be undone, so in that sense, this is not real, but youarebeing offered the chance to return to a new reality, one where this momentcouldbe real. The choice is entirely up to you—whatever you decide, I can promise you, we are not inside your mind.”
“I want to make Josephina Vasquez fall in love with me.”
I was surprised by the words that came out so instinctively. I hadn’t thought about her in years.
Or maybe I had spent years thinking of nothing else. It’s hard to say.
The caseworker considered me for a long moment. As they did, a second thought came to my mind.
“Did Joey get a second chance?”
“We’re not allowed to disclose the decisions of other clients” was all they said—but there was something in the way they said it that implied that shehadbeen offered a second chance.
I knew exactly what that meant.
OfcourseJoey took it.
Somewhere out there, in another timeline or universe or plane of existence, Joey was alive.
MyJoey.
A Joey who shared all the same memories of us together that I did, the good and the bad—most of them bad. A Joey to whom I could apologize for everything I had done. Everything I hadn’t done. Everything I’d said and everything I hadn’t said. A Joey I could make it all up to.
“Show me. I want to see her,” I commanded. I had a tendency tocommandthings. Years of never being told no does that to a person.
How ridiculous of me to sit there and dare to command an otherworldly being—even one dressed as a regular office worker—to do anything, and yet they complied.
