Broken Record

Being named after someone dead is like being glued to their back. Someone looks at you and only sees the other. You’re cursed, doomed to be compared to them until you’re better than them. Maybe that’s ghastly to say—more charitably, it gives you a path to follow or not follow…but the path they took is known. You’re still compared to them, forever.

My name is Peter. My dead uncle’s name was too.

My uncle died on a field trip to a museum. As far as anyone knows, he had a great time there looking at dinosaur skeletons. Then, as the class was walking along the road to visit a restaurant together, a car jumped the curb and hit him.

It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The car had swerved to avoid a little kid chasing an empty can. Other students were hit too, but they were glancing blows and only needed first aid. My uncle died in the city hospital the same day, sixty-seven miles away from home.

There’s a mountain near the family’s rural hometown, called Numbers Hill. Every graduating class paints their year on a cliff facing their town, mostly in black or white. He would have graduated two years later, so the big 78 on Numbers Hill was painted in green, near the top.

One guess on what my uncle’s favorite color was.

I don’t think it’s that painful to the family anymore, even considering how loved he was. The Crofts are resilient. It just feels wrong for me to ask about, like I should already know somehow. But I didn’t have to pull how he died out of my dad, it was asked and answered. If anything, I had to pull the question out of myself. Maybe I’m worried that knowing more about my uncle will seal my fate or something. The more I learn about him, the more my destiny will be chained to his. Or, even worse, the connection is already there and I would just become more aware of it. Free will exists if you don’t know the future. Ignorance is bliss.

I’ve gotten a few other bits and pieces about him, though. He was nice, but they’re biased. He was an avid reader, and a brilliant artist. He was goofy, but not overly so—one time he greased Aunt Emma’s car door handle so she couldn’t open it. She was already very late for school, and he let her try for, according to her, three whole seconds before giving her a hand towel he’d been hiding. If she hadn’t been late, she said, he probably would have let it go on much longer.

I’m not any of that. My parents would say I’m nice, but they’re biased. I haven’t read anything since high school, and I can’t draw to save my life. It should be obvious by now that I’m not goofy, either. And I hate pranks.

Yeah, yeah, “comparison is the thief of joy,” whatever. I’m named after him, how can I not compare myself?

No one knows I’m thinking about all this, by the way. It’s a stupid thing to be fixated on, and it happens every year. My uncle wouldn’t care; in fact, if anything, he…

Being named after someone dead is like having a second shadow that’s always there. You can forget about it sometimes, or even ignore it, but other times you’re turned just the right way to see it. You can stare right at it, at him, all you want, but he’ll only ever be a shadow. You can never look him in the eye.

I’m in a warm coffee shop and it’s snowing outside, but there isn’t much on the ground yet. It’s loud in here, but not too much. It smells like coffee, if you can believe it, and I’m sitting by the bathroom so there’s a base note of antiseptic. The sun is low in the sky, but the light hasn’t changed color yet and it still overpowers the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling pot lights. Their buzzing is in turn overpowered by the music from the speakers next to them. I’m imagining my uncle sitting across from me now, in the other chair at the table. I want to age him up, to imagine what he would look like if he never died, but, well, I’m not an artist. Even like this, it’s hard to look him in the eyes—I want to, but I can’t imagine them right. There’s a spark missing.

So there he is, sixteen years old, just as he was in his last self-portrait. He has rimless glasses, settled over a nose dotted with freckles here and there. There’s a thin scar on his cheek, and short whiskers. He’s wearing a Star Trek t-shirt and blue jeans, from a photo of him at fifteen.

“Am I focusing on this too much?” I ask.

“Yes,” my uncle says flatly. He cracks an amused smile. “You don’t feel like this about all of your other relatives, do you?”

I shake my head, a little reluctantly. “It’s different. I was named after you, not any of them.”

He sighs. “You’re trying to live up to nothing. You won already. You broke my record ten years ago.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“You’re twenty-six. A decade older than I’ve ever been and ever will be.”

He’s right, but…it sounds weak, to me. Age has never been the problem. Age happens to you whether you want it to or not. We’re all dragged along by time. Then again, we do decide how we use all that time we’re dragged through…

“You never got to do what you wanted,” I say finally. “And you would have used ten years better than I did.”

He shrugs. “So what?”

The coffee shop is emptier now; the sun’s going down, making the sunlight orange and the shadows long. A bit of snow has gathered now, and some sun bounces off of it and into my eyes when I look. I swear the air is cooler, too, but that feels like it fits with a ghost sitting across from me.

I don’t really know what to say. No matter how many so whats I’ve told myself over the years, none of them have stuck. The glue’s still holding, the shadow’s still there, he’s still better. He had dozens of friends—or at least a dozen, his rural class was small. I went to school in a big city and there were three or four hundred people in my grade alone. I can count the number of friends I had on one hand, and I can count the number of friends I kept in contact with after graduation on zero. They didn’t have cell phones in ’76, but people communicated better back then didn’t they?

Maybe he gets bored of waiting for my response. “Just think about it,” he says, and my uncle is a shadow again.

Thinking isn’t my problem. I take out my phone and dial.

“Hey Pete,” Dad says.

“Hey—random question, why did you guys name me after my uncle?”

Dad pauses, and I feel my face warming, worrying that I’ve overstepped. But he answers. “Sorry, had to sneeze. While your mom was pregnant, we got snowed in at my parents’ house for…two weeks over Christmas, I think it was, and for half of that we couldn’t even get out of the driveway. Your mom and grandma got very close.”

“So…that turned into naming me after him?”

“They covered a lot of ground, that trip. Traded family history, life stories, the works. It turns out my mom and dad had Peter at the same age Leah was due to have you. Leah proposed the idea of using Peter for your middle name—to be sensitive, so they wouldn’t have to call you that—but they liked it being your first name.” Dad chuckles. “After we got out of there, we called them up at least a dozen times until you were born to make sure.”

“…huh.” I don’t know what to make of it. I realize my knee is bouncing.

“It’s funny,” Dad says. “Do you know why they named him Peter?”

“No, is there a reason?”

“Your grandma, my mom, had a brother named Peter who also died young.”

I cough, taken aback. “What?”

“Yeah! Let me tell ya, we were all hoping in the back of our minds that you’d beat sixteen.”

“…they both died at sixteen?” Dimly I wonder if the name is cursed.

“No, my mom’s brother died before a year, I think it was. My brother Peter was a…second try, you could say. That makes you the third.”

It’s weirdly hard to breathe, but I force a breath in and out. “You know this is a lot of pressure.”

“Why?”

“Because—because I’m the third try. I’m living for three.”

“No, you’re just living for one: you. I’m sorry you don’t see it that way—it was a poor choice of words.”

I shake my head, forgetting he can’t see me. I give a halfhearted lie. “It’s okay, I do, I think. Gotta go; thanks for the help.”

“Alright, talk later!”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, screwing my eyes shut, but I become aware of a quiet that makes me open them again. There are no other customers around me. The barista must be in the back. No one was around to hear the conversation. There are no sounds but the hum of machines I don’t know the name of left idle, and the soft music playing from speakers in the ceiling. I think it feels warmer again.

Sometimes a name is effectively random, just something the parents liked the sound of. Other times it’s something meaningful, like a favorite flower or something. It can be forced through some family obligation, without much input from the parents. It can also honor the memory of someone else—not to signify you’re an echo of that person, or a reincarnation that has to live up to who they were in life. Only that you’re named after them.

Being named after someone dead is like getting a hand-me-down. Sometimes it’s torn, or stained, or too big. There’s history attached to it. You become a part of that history. It was given to you so that the memory of someone else doesn’t die with them. I think just living is enough to keep that memory alive. The name’s yours now, and you can do what you want with it. You can sew the tears, clean the stains, and grow into it.

My uncle sits across from me again, looking at me intently with eyes that have that spark I was missing. Some new customers come into the shop, and voices drown out the music again. I take a deep breath in, picking up the scent of coffee beans and soap, and let it out slow.

“Happy birthday, Peter.”