They drove to Atlanta in January, between the break and the spring semester, in a rented car with Cece navigating and a playlist she had assembled from both their preferences that was, he thought, one of the better collaborative works either of them had produced.
He had been thinking about this trip since he was twelve years old, when he had first considered the question of what Jason Park's life had been and where it had been lived. Not with the urgency of unfinished business — the previous-life questions had settled over the years into something more like curiosity and honoring than need. But Atlanta was the city that had made Jason Park, and Kael carried Jason Park, and going to the city seemed like completing something that had been left open.
Atlanta surprised him.
He had expected to feel the resonance of the previous life in a direct, visceral way — some flash of recognition, some dream-like doubling between what he knew from memory and what he was seeing. What he found instead was something quieter. The city was real and present and specific in the way that all cities were, and the Jason Park memories that surfaced were not vivid or overwhelming but specific and small: the smell of a particular fast-food chain that had been a childhood constant, the quality of the light through Georgia pines that was different from Louisiana pines or New England pines, the way the city's sprawl organized itself around the highway system in a pattern his memory recognized without his having to consciously call it up.
He stood outside the house in the Decatur neighborhood where Jason Park had grown up — now painted differently, new owners clearly, a swing on the porch that had not been there before — and felt what it felt like to stand outside the house where a version of yourself had learned to be a person.
'Are you okay?' Cece said, beside him.
'Yes,' he said. And he was — not performing okayness, actually okay. The feeling was not painful. It was the feeling of completion. He had lived two lives and the first one had been real and it had happened in this place and the place still existed and he could stand in front of it and acknowledge it.
He thought: Jason Park was a real person. He lived here. He loved mythology and argued about it with anyone who would argue and drove on this specific highway on an October evening and died in a way that was unfair and ordinary, the way so many deaths are. He deserved to be remembered as himself and not only as the source of what he gave me.
He stayed outside the house for several minutes. He did not go in — it was not his house anymore, if it had ever been — but he stood there and let the city be what it was and the memory be what it was and the two lives be the two lives.
Then he turned to Cece. 'Lunch,' he said. 'I know a place from memory. Let me see if it's still there.'
It was still there. He ordered the thing he had always ordered when he was Jason Park and it was exactly what he remembered, which was both mundane and, in the moment, something he could not quite find a word for. Not sacred. Present. Specific. Real.
They drove back through Georgia in the late afternoon with the pines and the highway and the particular quality of a January day in the American South — cold but not northern cold, the sky a specific grey that had blue in it — and he felt the two lives settle into each other in a way they had been approaching for seventeen years and finally arrived at: not merged, not separated. Simply both his. Both complete. Both real.
He thought: this is what I needed to do. I didn't know it was the last thing. Now that I've done it, I can feel that it was the last thing.
He thought: all the debts are paid. All the roads have been walked. What's ahead is only forward.
[ JASON PARK — FINAL NOTATION ]
Born: Atlanta, Georgia, 1987
Korean-American, second generation
Studied: Greek and world mythology
Died: October 2013, age 25
Highway accident, Decatur, GA
What he left:
— The mythology knowledge
— The strategic pattern-recognition
— The love of the thing
— The second-generation threshold perspective
— The specific Korean-American-Southern voice
that became part of Kael Alexander
What was returned to him, by proxy:
— The mythology was real
— The map was true
— His knowledge was used for exactly
what he would have wanted it used for
He is remembered as himself.
Not only as the source of the gift.
As a person who was real and mattered.
The road trip to Atlanta: COMPLETE.
The account: SETTLED.
Both lives: HONORED.
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