by Rian Moneypenny

Content Warnings: References to Postpartum Depression

Buck lived two lives, and one needed to end.

This is not meant in a figurative sense, as in Buck had a double life or another part of himself the world never viewed. No, Buck literally lived two lives, in two different parts of the world, and he didn’t know why. He also couldn’t precisely pinpoint when these divergent narratives began, and why they shared similarities. But he knew this: he was cracking under the pressure.

See, Buck believed for many years he must be clinically insane. This existence, living one life in Los Angeles and another in London at the same time, didn’t make any logical sense. It was physically impossible, he knew that, but it was happening all the same. If these were hallucinations, they were of a variety that knocked back steroids and LSD in equal measures. He’d tried talking to his parents, and his wife, Persephone, about this condition, but always in limited detail. For fear they would think he’d gone utterly mad.

And he was mad. Furious. Afraid.

Afraid that he would always be living half a life because he couldn’t juggle two.

𓆟

Buck used to dream of being a sailor. Some of his earliest memories were of his mother reading The Sea Wolf, Moby Dick, and Treasure Island to him as a child before bed. He imagined himself a pirate, an oceanic wanderer that visited strange and unusual islands, gaining gold and the love of beautiful women, but always returning to the tide. The water was the greatest mystery in the world, he thought: unfathomable, ever shifting, and tethered to its own set of rules.

He knew his body was its subject, and occasionally he considered that this was why his being had split: the sea inside of him had been irrevocably altered. Something about the salt and stardust in his veins had mutated, made him a human who stepped through the door of Foyles on Charing Cross by morning and left via The Last Bookstore on South Spring Street by evening. This was the only common denominator between his lives: books, and the art of selling them to tourists.

Well, perhaps not the only common denominator: there was Persephone, his parents, and, most recently, Martha—a daughter—also known as the newest fracture in his mental state. Because while he couldn’t exactly denote the time when he began his exercises in teleportation and dual realities, he knows it started approximately around the time he met Persephone. And that his periods in one place or the other had become increasingly erratic since Martha was born.

Buck met Persephone at Cole’s French Dip in Los Angeles one night after he got off work at the store. She had the longest and blackest hair Buck had ever seen, like ink stains on his fingers from a burst pen, and high, pale cheekbones. They contrasted wildly with that hair: the same shade as words on a page. And stylish, he thought, in her black corduroy midi dress and matching ankle strap heels. He was immediately drawn to the sound of her laugh, the loud freeness in it, and her love of reading. When he asked her name, she smirked and took a long sip from a can of Hamm’s.

“My mom loved Greek mythology,” she said, twisting one of the gold buttons on the front of her dress. They were shaped like flowers, and this one had the form of a rose. “She used to say that with this name, no matter how long or far I traveled, I would always find my way home. Back to her. Underworlds were temporary, that was her motto.”

“Do you still see her much?” he asked. She’d already told Buck she moved from Las Vegas to LA two years ago to pursue a career in screenwriting.

“She passed away last fall,” Persephone said. She continued to twist the golden rose between her fingers.

Buck, unsure of how to proceed at first, ordered another round of beers with the flick of his fingers. Then said, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I hope—well, I just hope I haven’t–”

Persephone settled a hand on his knee and looked at him with a soft smile. “I like talking about her. Underworlds are temporary, remember? We’ll find each other again.”

Buck tried to return the smile, and the warmth of the beer in his stomach almost allowed it to happen. He placed his hand on hers, and with the other, raised the fresh can. “To liminal spaces, and reunions with the ones who will always be home.”

Her smile widened, though the corners of it trembled. “I’ll drink to that.”

After the toast, Persephone shook her head and snorted.

“What?” Buck said, grinning.

“Oh, I was just thinking I like my name now, but high school? Do you know how much shit I got for it? It never stopped, especially after half of my English class read Edith Hamilton.”

Buck laughed, and everything changed. Time, place, and all that he believed was upended, thrown to strange currents, unnavigable rivers, and he awoke the next morning, or maybe it was the following week—month?—in a one-bedroom flat in Croydon. What followed was a disorienting panic of how did I get here, why am I here, and what parts of my life are still mine? He drifted in a haze through the shabby little space, stumbling over secondhand furniture and walls he didn’t remember purchasing. He called his parents in Virginia, and their number was still the same. His dad congratulated him on the move, and said his mother was overjoyed about the engagement. Engagement?

He listened to familiar voices in his ears while his eyes stared out on streets that couldn’t be more foreign. When Persephone walked inside with her hands full of groceries, he went through the motions of helping her and she was telling him, wasn’t he going to be late? It was his first day at Foyles, he shouldn’t be late on his first day. And the motions continued: he dressed, brushed his teeth, took the coffee she placed in his hands, and miraculously sorted the mysteries of the public transportation system to place him at the doors of Foyles. Where he supposedly worked. He sold books and sweated, breathing heavy and heavier still, but he did his job. Then he went home (home?) and lived in Croydon for a week, rinse and repeat, until the rehearsal dinner. He drank copious amounts of champagne that night, passed out, and woke up on Venice Beach. There was a diamond ring on Persephone’s finger as they walked into the Fig Tree for lunch, and she asked him if he was okay. He said yes and held back the urge to vomit on the boardwalk.

In many ways, his business became his greatest source of solace. Books, fiction and everything in between, must hold the answers to his condition. He read The Time Traveler’s Wife a dozen times at least. But was he moving in place more than time? Things moved fast, but that was just nature. He worked in two different continents, two different jobs, but loved the same woman, the same family, in both.

He studied the Fields of Asphodel extensively. Purgatory. Its name by every denomination.

He studied ways of escape.

But then, he wanted to be with her. He wanted to live abroad. Was it still purgatory if you prayed for it?

He dreamt of tadpoles growing in the River Styx and woke one night at a Sheraton in Pasadena to find Persephone’s water breaking.

But on his way to get their hospital bag from the bathroom, he stepped out into the stands of a Bristol Rovers game with two meat pies in his hands. Persephone was on a bench, cheering, her belly enormous beneath a blue and white jersey. He took a pie to her, reeling, and sat. He evaluated the notion that somehow he existed outside the domains of space and time.

Granted, he’d been grappling with it for years, but now he moved between what had and hadn’t happened. Here, Penelope was still pregnant, and in Pasadena, their child was being born.

He thought of something his dad said to him after he graduated college: “I wish I’d spent more time in life being mindful and less time being mindless.”

But wasn’t he mindful? He read. Christ, did he read.

Wasn’t this supposed to offer mindfulness? Wasn’t he more self-aware as a result?

Then he held Martha, at Croydon University Hospital, and realized he knew nothing. He never would.

This ocean was immeasurable.

𓆟

One night, at their two-bedroom apartment in Koreatown, Buck looked up their flat on Scarbrook Road in Croydon and discovered it was for rent. No one lived there—at least not in this moment of time. He did the same search for South Kenmore Avenue while in Croydon and found the same results: their K-town home was available. It was as though his family existed only within these bizarre pockets, pockets only he seemed to be aware of, and he just couldn’t make sense of the phenomena.

He continued his voracious reading habits: Gödel, Einstein, and Hawking. Wells, Vonnegut, L’Engle. Fact and fiction, one and the same to him. All these authors practitioners of a faith, a science, and he believed deeply in their medicines, placing equal stock in everything they wrote. Every sentence, a possibility, a potential explanation. But nothing concrete. Nothing told him why he honeymooned in the Canadian Rockies with Persephone at 12 PM and rocked Martha to sleep at 12 AM in Kenmore Towers. Nothing could explain why he was on his second date with Persephone Wednesday evening at Griffith Observatory, then going for the first ultrasound appointment Thursday morning in Thornton Heath.

He would call his mother and ask if there was anything unusual about his birth, his childhood. But she would only say no and then ask if he was doing okay.

“I’m not sleeping much, but hanging in,” he said.

“Well, babies are known to restructure sleeping habits,” she replied.

And he would think, right, in this second I’m a dad. It was hard to keep track of all the befores, afters, and in-betweens, and which he currently called his position. In this hour, he was Martha’s dad, Persephone’s husband. Soon, he might be neither. Or maybe he always was, always would be, and he took comfort in those passing thoughts.

Again and again, he considered spilling everything to all of them: I live two lives with you. But fear of how it might damage or alter these relationships always held him back. Plus, his state of being was so fraught with demands that he was typically just trying to hold on for dear life—he might get married and see the birth of his daughter in the span of a sunset. Not to mention the endless slurry of minutiae that still had to occur. Diapers must be changed, dishes must be washed, and the floors must be swept. He might disappear from one world for an interval, but it marched forward regardless.

𓆟

He was in bed with Persephone. It was close to midnight in Los Angeles, and he’d just come from dropping Martha off at Magdalene Preschool in Addiscombe. It was her first day, and she cried when they got out of the car. Buck hugged her tight, told her she was going to have a great day and make lots of new friends. She was going to have so much fun, it would feel like she just blinked, and he’d be right there to pick her up.

“You promise?” she said, sniffling.

“I promise, honey,” he said, pressing his hand against her dark curls. “I’ll always come back.”

Martha lifted her pinky. “Pinky swear?”

Buck smiled and intertwined their fingers. “Pinky swear. I love you, sweetheart.”

“Love you, Daddy.”

After, on the drive to Foyles, he started crying and couldn’t stop. Somewhere in that film of tears, he was pulled into bed with Persephone, returned to K-town. Martha was back inside her mother, safe, and Buck had his palm pressed to Persephone’s stomach. He felt his daughter kicking—envisioned her floating, at total peace, protected by the water. He gently rubbed Persephone’s belly beneath the sheets and asked, “Have you ever been to London?”

Persephone lifted her head from his chest and looked at him. “When I was younger. My mom took me.” A faint smile grew across her lips. “We rode on the London Eye, and I remember her saying, at the very top, ‘It’s like we’re everywhere. We can see everything and we’re part of it.’ I think it was the happiest I’d seen her.” She settled her cheek against him again. “Why do you ask?”

The tears had followed him across the ocean, across the country. They wouldn’t stop. But in the dark, she couldn’t see them. He felt at once exhausted beyond reason and full of a bursting, manic energy. “I was just wondering. Maybe we should visit sometime, after the baby comes.”

Persephone yawned. “Mm, sometime.”

Was there any way to tie these realities by a common thread? To make them one? “Persephone?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever feel like you’re living two lives at the same time?”

“I mean, yes. Everything has been so busy lately, it’s hard to keep up.”

“Sure, but I’m talking actually living two lives in the same day, every day. Does that make sense?”

She patted her middle, and he felt their fingers touch. “Yes, Buck, it actually feels like I’m carrying two lives. And after a long fucking day at the studio, it feels like even more.” She shifted, still unable to see the pools forming around his eyes. “Are you alright? Is there anything you want to talk about? Because I’m here. You know that, right?”

He took her hand, squeezed it. “Just tired.”

Persephone sighed. “Okay. But if you change your mind–”

He kissed her forehead. “I know—you’re here.”

She drew her thumb softly across his knuckles. “Love you.”

When he whispered the same to her, his eyes slipped shut and he slid into another dream. He dreamt of being a woman, becoming pregnant, and giving birth to a boy that resembled the child he used to be—then watching that boy grow up in one place, watching him grow old, raise a family, and always being right there in that singular location. A motion linear, straightforward, locked in the present.

I know you’re here, Persephone, he often thought.

But am I?

𓆟

“You did say some odd things when you were little,” his mom said on the phone. Martha fed at Persephone’s breast across from him. They sat outside the Green Bird Café in Bath. The family had taken a day trip to see the Roman Architecture and Buck reserved a session at the Thermae Bath Spa for Persephone. Postpartum depression took its toll on her, and he believed a vacation, time to herself, was needed.

He watched her grimace as Martha struggled to latch. Persephone gazed out at crowds passing in the street, her stare vacant, dark half-moons under the eyes.

“Like?” he asked.

“You used to say that you loved me and your dad, but you missed people from before.”

“Before what?”

“Who knows? Kids say strange things. I didn’t think too much of it.”

When he hung up, Persephone began sobbing quietly. Martha cried.

He wrapped them in his arms—the salt shared between them. A common weight.

I’m here, Buck said.

𓆟

He couldn’t remember a time before this, before he split in two. And he didn’t know if it would ever end, and maybe that was ultimately okay. There were days it was overwhelming, and he didn’t think he could continue, but Underworlds were temporary. As a wise woman once said.

He returned to Cole’s French Dip, on their first date, and Persephone asked, “What about your name?”

“What about it?”

“You’re the first Buck I’ve ever met. Any history behind it?”

“Well, I was named after my grandfather,” he said. “He was a sailor, a captain, and my mom said he was the bravest man she ever knew. Said they got caught in a storm on the Chesapeake Bay one time, and he used oatmeal to fill up the cracks in the boat, cause they took on so much water. She said they rose up high on the waves then would plummet, into their mouth, and it grew darker than any night she’d ever seen. But Grandad got them through.”

“It’s a good namesake.”

“I thought so.”

They had one more toast.

To the sailors, and the stars leading them home.

Rian Moneypenny (he/him) works at Fern Montessori School in Taylors, SC, and lives in Campobello, SC. He received his BA from College of Charleston with a concentration in creative writing and is in the process of receiving his MFA from Converse College. His work has been featured in Ode to Dionysus, Livina Press, Persephone Literary Magazine, and Wild Willow Magazine.