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Thorfinn is standing on the roof of Woodstone Mansion. There’s mostly no reason for that, except maybe he wanted to be closer to the sky. Or maybe he was thinking of how the aged and useless were once thrown to their deaths, and how no one can do the same for him, aged and useless though he has become.
Hetty is here too. Thor doesn’t know when she arrived, nor why. Maybe something happened recently that would explain it. Maybe it even happened today. But most todays fall through the holes struck into his mind by lightning and the passage of time, so, in the end, he doesn’t know when Hetty arrived, nor why.
“My baby is gone,” Thor informs her and the darkness, staring out at the vast land before him, most of which he cannot set foot on.
In life, he traveled to distant lands. But he has been dead far longer than he has been alive, so much longer that life is little but a series of fragments that rarely arrange themselves into cracked pictures, and his afterlife is really only different because there’s more to arrange. “Everyone is gone.”
Everyone, and everything.
His mother’s touch, his father’s name, the color of his wife’s eyes: they have all escaped him. His memories of life and much of what has come after it are little but approximations of what may have been, amalgamations and perversions of what was true.
He has stories of hunting, battles, torture, tradition—but in the end they are all, somehow, the same story.
“You have us,” Hetty says, leaning her head against his shoulder, looping her arm through his.
He remembers Hetty’s childhood better than what he experienced of his own son’s, but even those memories meld together like molten metals, hardening into rusting sculptures of lost reality.
(Usually, none of this pains him so much. He forgets to be disturbed, as he forgets most things. He does not move on, exactly: it all just slips away.)
“Yes. Have you,” Thorfinn agrees, but the words taste of emptiness. Words are all he has tasted in a millenium. “It is not the same.”
He’s not certain what exactly he means by that. It’s something that happens to him more often than he would like, this manner of not-knowing, this inability to put what he feels into words.
The language that he speaks is not his language, but his own language is lost to him after all these years, so he can communicate only with these words that came after a neverending stream of losses, and they are so often inadequate.
Hetty only sighs, still next to him, still looking up at the stars.
Many years ago—so many years ago that perhaps they don’t even matter anymore—Thorfinn showed his little son the constellations and explained their sacred meanings.
At least, that is what he thinks of now, when he looks at the stars, but maybe all he’s doing is creating a recollection from bits and pieces of what was and what he wishes might have been.
Oh, what time has done to him.
Bjorn was a ghost almost as long as Thorfinn has been, doomed to this forgetting in the name of a search for a father left behind because he was not worth saving.
Thor should be happy that Bjorn is gone for good, then, but all he can think of is how he will never be able to ask his son if he taught him anything at all. Will never be able to ask him if he remembers the names of those constellations.
Thor doesn’t recall most of them.
His knowledge of what the world was when he last fully inhabited it comes and goes, and tonight he points out the only star he can name, blazing in the sky with cold permanence as the world spills out under and around it.
“Polaris,” he says.
Hetty hums in agreement. “Yes, the jewel.”
And with her words spark new memories—old memories—sudden and soon to fade. He grasps them tightly, not minding that the embers burn his hands.
Thorfinn with his arm around his baby Bjorn, still a little wordless thing, surrounded faceless figures roaming through the village he once lived in, the place he called home—
Thorfinn next to tiny red-haired Hetty, kneeling behind her as she looked out at the night—
Pointing to a star—
“When this world was only beginning, the gods thrust their spike into the heavens, and on its tip there was the jewel Polaris, and now the sky revolves around this jewel, and it will always lead you to where you must go.”
The embers of memory turn to ashes in his hands, but he grips them still, treasuring them in all of their impermanence.
Everything is impermanent.
Thorfinn remains.
+
There is a storm raging once again, cold rain lashing against Thorfinn’s cheeks, painful enough that he puts on his helmet to protect himself from its harshness.
He doesn’t think about the lightning.
Then he doesn’t think about anything.
Then he wakes up, and his helmet is no longer on his head, and he can’t pick it up.
When he sees his body, he screams. In that moment, he is unable to imagine the world that will come afterwards, the one where he will watch his body disappear to time and it won’t really matter so much to him.
The world he will inhabit where, hundreds of years later, he will tell others, “Don’t worry. You will get used to it.”
+
“How’s the big guy doing?” Jay asks, setting breakfast in front of Sam. They’re booked this weekend, but there are no guests today, and it’s quiet. Even for Sam, it’s quiet; the racket of the ghosts is muffled to nonexistent, and Sam wonders if this is what it’s like for Jay most of the time. It should be a welcome reprieve for her, but it’s kind of breaking her heart.
She sighs. “He’s sad. He’s really, really sad. He lost his son, you know?”
Jay huffs out a bemused, sympathetic sound. “Yeah, that’s rough. And he didn’t even know his son was there for so much time. He must feel like he missed out on a lot, and now there are no more chances…” Jay trails off. “Wait, is he in here?”
“No,” Sam says. For once. “He’s been in bed for a while. Like, just lying in bed.”
“Oof. You bring up therapy?”
Sam grimaces. “Yeah, he wasn’t having it. He just turned his back to me.”
“Did he yell?”
“No. He didn’t say anything.”
+
Thorfinn’s skin and bones and armor are lost to time, to dirt: all the solid pieces of Thorfinn are lost to the dirt, and then he is solid to only himself, and it’s like that for hundreds upon hundreds of years that he only knows are passing because day turns to night, snow turns to green grass, birds sing and go silent, humans build huts next to the water.
Until, finally, someone else stays behind.
Thorfinn probably should not be glad that another person is caught in this not-life, but when he wakes from a nightmare to Sasappis asking him what’s wrong, he can only feel grateful, because for the first time in centuries, someone else can hear him screaming.
Still mired in half-sleep, he grabs Sasappis by the shoulders, and says, “You are here. You are my friend. You are my friend. I cannot hurt you. I know now it is worse to be alone than to starve.”
Sasappis barely understands, since Thorfinn is mostly not speaking Lenape, but he pats Thorfinn’s hair and says, “Yes, I am here.”
Thorfinn cannot bring himself to care about the bewildered grief in his new friend’s voice. He never wants Sasappis to leave.
He says, “I am glad, brother. I am glad.”
+
Thorfinn lies motionless, staring at the wall while he wanders within himself, looking for traces of his child.
His room is starting to get dark.
Flower slides into bed behind him, rests her chin on his shoulder. Runs her hand over his chest. Curls against him.
“Thor not in the mood,” he mumbles.
She says, “Me neither, man. I just want to be with you. Maybe it’ll help if I’m with you.”
He turns onto his other side, dislodging her, but she moves with him so that they are facing each other, and now he can look into her eyes. He thinks of all the times he has licked the blood off her face. It always comes back.
Her pretty mouth is downturned, her pretty eyes dark with sadness, her pretty hair even wilder than usual.
She presses her forehead to his.
He says, “Thor is tired of waiting.”
She runs her hand over his shoulder. “You don’t have to wait for me anymore. I’m here.”
But for how long?
Thorfinn doesn’t ask. He is too dead to speak: all of the words inside of him seem to be in a forgotten tongue.
Flower forgets things too, if not in the same way he does. He forgets because he has changed, she because in some ways she is cursed to stay the same.
Here they lie, two examples of the thievery of this existence, entwined.
+
The landscape around him pulsates with inescapable fire. Cinders fill his mouth, absent of teeth or tongue. Through the flames, he sees Bjorn, flickering between the form of a boy and a man.
Thorfinn gives chase, desperate to catch up to him, to touch him, hold him, he doesn’t remember what it was like to hold his own son—
“Wait!” he bellows. “Wait! Please, stay, please!”
But the flames engulf him, and he knows that it’s too late.
He wakes up crying and muttering, but not screaming. He doesn’t think he has been screaming much, though he should be cursing the heavens, proclaiming joy dead. All the things he has usually done when bereft.
But there is only silence. Endless, incomprehensible silence, and tears on his face.
There are others too. Not only Flower, who might still have been sleeping with him, but others, the others, his friends, people he loves who are not his son, come to look in on him, come to quiet him so that they can continue their existences without his pain getting in the way.
(For five hundred years, Thorfinn was alone, and that will never change. He will never get back the parts of his mind he lost in those unshared years, the stories forever untold.
Five hundred years alone, and for how many of those years was his son only a stone’s throw away?
How many of those years was his son alone?
To what did Thorfinn condemn his only child?)
Maybe if you talk about it, it won’t hurt so bad.
No. This is bigger than speech. Too big to hold in his mouth, too big to hold in his body.
Thorfinn curls in on himself, clutches protectively at his vest, pulls against his own body to make himself ever smaller.
(It’s not that he wants to be small. Of course not. Much of Thor’s personality is size-based. So he doesn’t want to be small.
He only wants to disappear entirely.)
“Do not look at Thor,” he says, unhappy with the thought of his friends seeing him weeping. “Go away! Go away!”
He digs his fingers against his forehead, squeezes his eyes shut. He will lose them all someday.
He swallows his sobs into his chest.
+
Samantha is with him. He knows this because the bed dipped when she sat down, and it only does that when a Living sits.
“I get it,” Sam says.
Thorfinn scoffs.
“Okay, I mean I kind of get it.”
“Target not the same.”
“I’m not talking about Target,” Samantha says with a little huff. “I’m talking about…I’m talking about my mom. She died, and then I got the ability to see ghosts, and I saw her again. I got to know her in a way I never could when she was alive, and I was already starting to plan for her to be in my future, you know? And then she got sucked off, and she was gone. Again.”
Thorfinn feels silence settle over him like a shroud.
For more than one thousand years, Thorfinn thought his baby long gone. For one thousand years, his baby was there. He came looking for him.
And then for barely a fraction of Thorfinn’s existence, Bjorn was with him again.
“Maybe would have hurt less to not have them back,” Thor says softly.
Sam is quiet for a long moment. “Yeah,” she finally says, voice small. “I guess. But I think I was still happy to see her again. One last time.”
Is Thorfinn happier for having known Bjorn existed so close to him? He thinks Bjorn was happier for it, at least.
Maybe that’s the important part.
+
“Thor was actually a little like this when we first met,” Sasappis says.
Everyone is in the living room except Thor. There’s a lot that’s been going on with everyone except Thor for the last couple weeks.
“Really?” Trevor asks. “He was this depressing?”
“…Well, no,” Sasappis admits. “He was actually pretty excited. But he was definitely quieter. He was even a little nervous. So I guess he wasn’t actually that similar to how he’s being now, but he was different. He was alone for hundreds of years, guys. He’s been through more than you think.” Sasappis sighs. “I think it actually helps that he’s forgotten a lot. It’s taken him, the fundamental parts of him, his personality, if you will, back to simpler days, I guess. But now he’s facing the loss of the last part of his life, and I think it might be reminding him that nothing’s simple at all.”
+
Oskar nibbles Thorfinn’s fingers, runs over his shoulders, nestles under his beard.
Thorfinn wonders why he was abandoned. What did he do wrong?
The questions only grow in number, in scope.
He eats every part of Oskar, even his heart.
+
Thorfinn stays in bed and does nothing, because if he does nothing, nothing will happen, and in the nothing there will be space for his son, space for the past, space for the memories he wants to keep with him, everything he wants to keep with him.
Alberta is here in his room today. Tonight. Whatever it is, whenever it is. His friends say they want to keep him company. Thor would think it sweet, but he is busy focusing on other things.
Alberta told him that she didn’t go to his thousandth birthday party because the idea of being a ghost for a thousand years frightened her.
Thorfinn wonders, now, if the thought that he’d been a ghost for a thousand years frightened him back then, but he doesn’t think it did. It probably would have if he had been alone. Being a ghost for one hundred and two hundred and three hundred and four hundred and five hundred years frightened him for that reason, because time went by and by and he couldn’t even make notches on trees to accurately count the days—years—centuries.
After Sasappis died, that was when they started figuring out exactly how long the world had been going on without Thorfinn, and it was during one of their long nights of ghostly arithmetic that they realized Thorfinn’s thousandth year was fast approaching. Isaac insisted that they throw a party, and Thor liked that the others wanted to celebrate his existence instead of cringing at his curse. He didn’t even mind that Sasappis had to choose a random date as his birthday, since Thor had long forgotten.
“At thousandth birthday party, was hoping to hear you sing,” he says.
Thorfinn expects her to storm away, since he is being petty when she is only being kind, though he doesn’t mean to be petty. He isn’t sure what he means.
But she doesn’t leave. After her unhappy noise, she goes still, as though she’s pausing. Thinking. Maybe she will understand something he doesn’t.
He’s not sure.
Whatever either of them think, what is important is that she starts to sing.
Thorfinn loves to hear her sing.
He is briefly discomfited by the possibility that he’s making a new memory now, when he doesn’t want to crowd out the ones he needs to conserve, but he comforts himself with the fact that he has heard Alberta sing this song before, though he isn’t sure when or how many times.
But he knows the song, and he knows Alberta’s voice, and for a moment the whens and the wheres and the whys escape him. He only listens to Alberta.
Alberta now and Alberta years ago, Alberta he has forgotten and Alberta who is right here with him.
No one here can love or understand me…
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me…
Make my bed, light my light…
I’ll arrive late tonight…
Blackbird, bye bye…
+
Bjorn is…Bjorn was…Bjorn is…Thorfinn is…his wife was…his wife’s name is…was…what is her name? Olga, his wife’s name is…was…
Thorfinn is not good with tenses and doesn’t think he ever will be.
He knows the others at times suspect he is playing, when he forgets things and speaks around them, and sometimes he is—he knows what a car is, he just finds “landship” more evocative—but mostly he is not.
Alberta says the lightning knocked something loose in him, and Thorfinn thinks that maybe she is right.
Then again, maybe not, because he can’t be certain what was loose or stable in him before.
It isn’t as though he can ever truly grasp how he used to be, if some of his struggles with words, memories, understanding the world beyond its most fundamental parts, have always been a part of him.
The person Thorfinn used to be is gone.
The being that Thorfinn is watches the wall and has never felt more dead.
A ghost watches the grass grow, the seasons change, humans live and die, and only Polaris anchors his mind.
+
Thorfinn is a ship tossed in the ocean, tumultuous waters raging all around him. Thunder rumbles. Lightning shatters the sky. Tall grass whips at his ankles. The rain is everywhere. He is breathing it in. He does not know what electricity is, or that his helmet conducts it. The rain starts to turn to ashes, the grass to snakes coiling around his ankles. The lightning courses through his body and won’t stop.
Electricity and metal and a flash of light and it smelled like burning and it felt like burning too, he still feels it sometimes, a zap through his body that leaves him off-balance. When there are ray guns on the television, he closes his eyes. He doesn’t like those tendrils of buzzing light.
A crash of thunder fills his body.
Lightning illuminates the room.
Thorfinn presses his face against Flower’s messy hair.
More than a millennium since the lightning killed him, and still when he sees this light he remembers those last few moments. This was the light that changed everything.
The storm was like this one.
He knows it must have been like this one, and even if he doesn’t remember how it was exactly, he remembers enough that every storm becomes that storm, the storm that took everything from him. The storm that took Bjorn’s father away.
Every storm before and every storm since will always be the one that destroyed him, because in his mind there is just enough space for dying, pushing away everything else, and it is painful in its cruelty, the way that the storm surrounds him even though he wants to push it away, wants to think of other things. He’ll never see his son’s face again, but there will always be other storms.
There will always be this storm, then and now and forever, Thorfinn is standing in a lightning storm and it’s going to kill him and then? Then the real loss will begin. That’s why he needs to stay in bed, but he is not in bed.
He’s standing in the storm. He’s in the storm more than a thousand years ago and he’s in the storm in front of Woodstone Manor, and he doesn’t even remember getting out of bed, doesn’t remember the moment he slipped away from Flower, the moment he left the mansion. He’s standing in front of the fountain, which didn’t exist when he died. Nothing that exists now existed when he died.
Lightning crashes. It drags him backwards and forwards.
Finally, something in him gives way, and there are no words inside of him that can convey whatever it is he’s feeling, the sadness and the rage, so he doesn’t use words. He only screams. He doesn’t have to know any languages—the ones he’s lost or the ones he’s learned—to do what he’s doing right now, and it’s comforting, so he screams again and again. He could probably scream forever if he wanted to, except the storm will be over eventually, just as it will return.
So he can’t scream forever, only for now.
Lightning shatters the sky again, and he isn’t screaming anymore. The reason he knows this is because he hears, “Thorfinn!”
A familiar voice. How soon would this voice stop being familiar if its owner left him?
Thor turns around to face his oldest, best friend.
Sasappis looks at him with concern, confusion, sadness, and Thorfinn admits, “Thor confused too.”
Maybe that is what tortures him most.
Sasappis doesn’t look like he understands. Neither does Thorfinn, but he still explains.
“For all that Thor forgets, lightning remains,” he laments. “Lightning remains and lightning comes back, the nightmares remain and come back, these bad moments come back, but Bjorn is gone forever.”
Sasappis gives him a look of miserable sympathy. “I’m so sorry.” He takes a deep, useless breath. “Come inside, okay? Everyone’s inside. We’re all waiting for you. Let’s wait out the storm together.”
Thorfinn’s face is wet, and even though he is standing in the rain, he knows he’s crying. It has been a thousand years since his skin and clothes became wet from rain. The feeling has escaped him so completely that he’s not certain he could say he’s ever felt it at all.
“Thor forgets so much.” Sometimes he thinks the only reason he remembers his name is because he’s always saying it. “You probably have more of Thor’s memories by now. And Bjorn is gone, and he was good, he was a good son, he made me happy, and the happy things disappear faster, so what if the memories of him go too? Thought maybe if Thor makes no memories, then…maybe…” Thorfinn shudders as another bolt of lightning serrates his consciousness. “Maybe the old ones, the old good ones, will stay longer. I don’t know. Don’t know. It’s so confusing. Everything is confused, and not moving does not make it better. Only more confused.”
“Oh, big guy,” Sasappis says, “you’re confused because you’re living lost in memories when you yourself admit that memories are…unstable and impermanent, and the ones that come to you first when you think really hard aren’t the good ones, we both know that. You just said that. I think. Whatever. Thorfinn, you don’t deserve to just lie there torturing yourself. That’s pointless.”
“Thor is pointless,” he says sadly, because that’s what it always comes back to.
Except Sasappis doesn’t even seem to consider the statement before saying, “No!” He swallows. “No. Thor’s not pointless. Thor’s not useless. Thor’s my friend. Thor is our friend. You’ve been here to guide us all from day one of our afterlives.”
Thorfinn hesitates for a moment, until, on a surge of emotion, he says, “Polaris.”
“Yes. Just like Polaris,” Sasappis says. “And someday, Thorfinn, you’ll go to your glory. But for now, just…come inside, okay? Spend some time with us, big guy. We need you. We need you here with us.”
The storm outside is calming. The storm inside of Thorfinn has gone away entirely, at least for now.
He goes with Sasappis, because time doesn’t stop moving just because he wants it to, and if he must make memories, he may as well make them with friends.