In (Future) Memory of an Absent Father
by A.W. Prihandita
We are fourteen years old, some of us fifteen, all of us in the ninth grade, the last year of junior high school. This is when those of us who haven’t figured out our Intuition start fidgeting in our seats. We know everyone will stare in pity if we walk into graduation not knowing what we are.
Because what will we do in high school, then? Futurists take classes that set them up to be investment bankers, policy makers, climate forecasters—highly respected jobs. Most Presentists are in the service industry, of course, or psychotherapy, them being the best at understanding people’s pressing needs. Antiquists do not have to be historians or archivists, Mrs. Suparti says, but those are the most obvious career paths, if you want them.
I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what’s ahead of me. I don’t know my Intuition.
“If the previous assignment didn’t do anything for you,” says Mrs. Suparti, who made us solve fifty sets of probability problems every day for a week in the hope of teasing out some Foresight, “then this is another chance, bismillah. I’ve had students come to their Retrospection with this assignment. Being an Antiquist doesn’t earn you a lot, but don’t you worry—you can still make a career out of it. You can simply ask your parents and grandparents about themselves or collect artifacts, but always, always do everything mindfully. Every act is a meditation. Feel the past. Sometimes it lies between words, sometimes in an old photograph, sometimes under a pile of your grandpa’s old sarong. You just have to seek it and feel it.”
She stares at the six remaining students in the class, fixing her eyes on us one by one, her red hijab as bright as the fires of hell. I feel the weight of her impatience—You’d better figure this out soon, boy—but no one is more impatient than me.
This is our last assignment sequence. We are one week away from the last day of class. And then, it’s graduation, and all will be too late.
When the final bell rings, I bolt straight for the door and down the stairs, as one with the streams of stomping students in blue-and-white uniforms. In a few months, if I’m lucky, I’ll be wearing the gray-and-white of high school. How quickly time flows.
I still remember wearing elementary school red-and-white, like the flag of our country, wrapping itself around me tighter and tighter until it was hard to breathe. Those days I worried about reciting the Constitution and the Qur’an, contorting my mind into the shape of this one nation under Allah. These days I worry about Intuition. From what I heard, in high school I will still worry about Intuition, but not about figuring it out. It will be about making sure I don’t misuse it. If I have anything to misuse, that is.
I pick up my bicycle and breeze past the school gate, between the rows of hawkers selling half a dozen kinds of satay and other street foods—and, for the kids still in red-and-white, playthings like helium balloons and colorful fish in clear plastic bags.
It’s a hot and humid day, as usual, and I’ve forgotten my jacket again, so there’s nothing between my skin and the sharp sting of the tropical sun. Mother always complains about how dark-skinned I’ve gotten. It’s like she keeps bringing it up because it’s the least of her worries, and she’d rather think of it than the other ones—like Father, for example.
My heart sinks back into the icy dread I get with every thought about Father—thoughts I’ve been carefully partitioning off so I can function at school. But school’s off, for now, and I have this family history assignment, and I’ll need to talk to Mother about it, adding my own worry about Intuition to her already significant pile. Guilt prickles behind my eyes.
My pedaling goes slower and slower the closer I am to home. I pause in front of the door, fingers reaching into my bag’s pocket, groping around before they find the cold serrated end of the house key. The door opens smoothly, too smoothly, more smoothly than the ragged breath coming out of my nose.
My eyes narrow as they adjust to the dimness inside. The only illumination comes from the TV set. Mother sits on a sofa in front of it, balancing a phone on her thigh, its little screen glaring bright as her finger flicks upon it, scrolling with the automated mindlessness of a clock and the nervous obsession of a wife left in the dark.
I force out the question I’ve been repeating this past week. “Any news?”
One glance at the TV tells me the answer is no. They’re still playing the same footage from days ago, when the first flight of reporters reached the devastation of the earthquake. It’s easy to imagine an earthen gash underneath all the rubble, splitting the tiny island in two.
We didn’t feel the quaking at all. The island is far away, at the northernmost edge of the country, posing no threat to us—except it’s one of the islands that Father’s fishing ship visits in its trip across the seas.
We don’t know if he was there when it happened. Communication isn’t easy at sea, and Father is the type who wouldn’t waste time trying to get in touch with people. Months often go by before we hear from him.
We’re used to this. But we wish we’d heard from him this time.
Mother looks up. Her eyes glow with unshed tears, but there’s also something else: a fiery redness, partly from lack of sleep, partly from rubbing her eyes in nervousness—but also, I realize, desperation and worry that have boiled together for too long, and become anger.
“I told him not to go,” she snarls. She clutches her bulging belly, as if it’s the baby who’s bursting with pent-up frustration. “I didn’t want to be a lonely wife like my mother, didn’t want you to be an abandoned child like me. He turned out no better than your grandfather, so here we are. You poor child. Poor me.” She pauses. “Did you forget to wear your jacket again? You’ve gotten too dark.”
I don’t ask her if her Intuition as a Presentist senses anything about Father’s current condition. I don’t point out that as a Futurist, Father could probably anticipate if a sailing trip would end badly or not. I don’t apologize for having no Intuition to help, because what use would apologies be?
Nor do I ask about family histories. Mother always says, if someone doesn’t care enough to speak to you or be in your life, why should you speak of them or count them as part of your life?
She’d rather not speak of Father. She’d rather not speak of Grandfather either.
Between the two, it’s Grandfather I worry about. He died before I was born. There’s no trace of him in this house; he never lived here. The house he called his was deep in the hinterland, though he was never there either.
The only thing I know about Grandfather is that he was a train driver. He drove the route along the northern coast of the island, back and forth, back and forth. Mother said that was why he was never home—the family’s house was up in the mountains, closer to the southern coast, not the easiest place to reach.
He died in a train wreck. His family hadn’t seen him for half a year by then, and Mother was only eight years old. The wreck happened just a few hours outside this small town we now live in. The ruined locomotive and train cars are still there, abandoned just off the track. I know where it is, but Mother forbids me to go. You shouldn’t bike that far away, she says. As for why she put down roots in a town close to where her father died, I do not know.
But maybe it’s good that I know nothing about Grandfather. Mrs. Suparti always says that to train our Intuition, it’s useful to seek things beyond our reach. It’s like climbing a ladder to search the inside of a dark overhead shelf. It’s a delicate balance between the known and unknown: there has to be some anchor—the ladder—to get us started, but the thing we seek should be something we don’t already know, like that dark cabinet.
So it’s Grandfather I focus on, searching for a ladder that will get me to him. My heart leaps when, after pondering a photo of Grandmother holding baby me on her lap, my body moves of its own accord and takes me to the attic, to a cardboard box in the corner, which holds Grandmother’s things from before her death. At the bottom, I find a fading photo of her and a man who must be Grandfather, on their wedding day.
Is this Retrospection or just a regular hunch? I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel magical enough, but it’s some sort of intuition. Which Mrs. Suparti says is often how it starts.
The night after her outburst, Mother finds me in my room and says, with reddened eyes that won’t meet mine, “Let’s pray for your father.”
It’s past isha; I’ve just rolled away my prayer mat. But I nod as she sits next to me on my bed, and I’m only mildly surprised when she crosses herself, clasps her hands on her lap, and shuts her eyes.
I follow. I repeat in my heart her wish for Father’s return, and at the end, I tack on an extra wish: Lord in Heaven, please help me find my Intuition.
“Amen,” we say together.
Mother crosses herself again and opens her eyes. For a moment her eyes are pools of rueful serenity. But then, like a bolt from the blue, fear flashes in them. As if she’s just realized what she’s done.
This isn’t how we’re supposed to pray. One nation under Allah, not a cross.
“Inshallah, Father will come home soon,” I say, and nod. I know, Mother, I can keep a secret.
“Inshallah,” she whispers back, the word sounding like she’s choking. She slips out of the room before I can ask anything about Grandfather.
In Mrs. Suparti’s class, my friends crowd around Daron in that buzzing way they have whenever someone’s showing off a brand-new gadget. Except this time there isn’t anything on Daron’s table or in his hands, just his words. Everyone leans toward him as if he’s dealing out the national exam’s answer keys.
“...so I guess this is it, folks, my last time in this class,” he crows. “Shame I’m not a Futurist, but my mom said Retrospection can make money too. Some kinds of data scientists can use that Intuition, apparently, like a fancy kind of recordkeeping. Maybe I’ll get a job in the city.”
The others coo around him, a sound that feels like both admiration and wistfulness. All of us here would rather be the one crowing about finding Intuition.
“Hey, maybe you’ll all find Retrospection too,” Daron says. “This assignment clearly works. Don’t worry. You go be even more mindful, yeah? There’s still time left.”
We have three days. My heart crawls up my throat and pummels the back of my mouth, making me almost gag.
At home, I tear through Grandmother’s box in the attic, clutching at every memento, hoping they bear a trace of Grandfather. A tattered scarf—could it be Grandfather’s gift? I go through a reconstruction exercise, imagining the day Grandfather gave her the scarf—but it sparks nothing, because I don’t even know if the day happened. We build Intuition out of incomplete truths, not outright lies. I don’t have enough incomplete truths to reconstruct.
I try some of the sillier exercises. Mantras made up of garbled words that taste too much like practical jokes. Kinetic exercises like walking backward while holding a memento of a person, as if you’re moving backward in time toward the person.
Nothing happens.
I go to Mother. I demand that she give me a piece of Grandfather. She shouts at me, “I don’t know him! I have nothing of him!”
“But surely you have something? I just need a little more anchor.”
“Why don’t you find out about your grandmother instead?”
“She raised me with you. She was such a talker she told me her whole history. Mrs. Suparti said it works best with someone we know but aren’t familiar with.”
“Your father, then.”
But her voice fades even before her sentence finishes.
“Father’s not history yet,” I murmur. “I’d rather feel the present or the future, when it comes to him.”
Mother grips her belly like the baby inside has just kicked her. She nods stiffly. Before I can ask about Grandfather again, she turns around and slinks into her room.
Two days pass. I find myself at the front of Mrs. Suparti’s classroom, a presentation slide projected next to me. I present, of course, in the tone that is somewhere between a speech and a meditation mantra, which we learned in the first year of junior high, when we started seeking our Intuitions.
I have a dozen slides recounting Grandmother’s life. I have only one slide on Grandfather. Train driver. Coastal track. Not home often. Trainwreck. Despite my “mindful presentation”—despite the prayer I’m chanting in my heart to the god I wear on my sleeves and the god I keep secret, my country’s god and my mother’s—nothing new about Grandfather comes to me. No signs of anything, not even a hunch.
At the end, I let a long silence fall. My heart roars in my ears. I swallow, pray, wait, swallow, pray again, and when nothing changes, I admit, “I haven’t gotten any Retrospection.”
Mrs. Suparti’s glare cuts through me. I stare at the floor.
“You don’t seem like you’re trying hard enough,” she says, her voice a whip crack. “One slide on your grandfather—you don’t even need Retrospection to do better than that. I understand why you have nothing on your grandparents from your father’s side, since they died young and you’ve got no trace of them, and your father is currently… away. Now, did your mother’s father die young, boy? No? Then there should be no excuse. You should’ve had enough of a trace to start. At least you have your mother’s memories of him.”
I bite my lip. I’ve been asking Mother—even this morning before school—to tell me something. She’s refused every single time, in a voice that grows more and more screeching.
I tried. I did try.
“Haven’t I instilled in you enough urgency?” she continues. “Don’t you understand how impossible the job market is without Intuition? Answer me!”
“No,” I whisper. But unlike the smallness of my voice, the roaring in my ears grows louder, set off by her disdain and the wide-eyed stare of my classmates, who, I’m sure, are thinking of me only a bit more favorably than her, and that’s because they know no matter how badly they’ve messed up this assignment, I’ve done it worse.
I sprint out the building once classes end. I pause only a fraction of a second before I mount my bike and launch away.
I do not head home. I turn toward the direction Mother has told me to avoid. Down the big road that leads out of town.
You think I wasn’t trying? Let me try again, then. Let me try so hard it hurts.
People say the mark of a great Antiquist is when they’ve filled a hole in history with recollections as real as the present. But have they ever considered what happens when an Antiquist is surrounded by people who’d rather tiptoe around a hole of silence?
I’ll dig into the hole, then. I’ll rip the silence out.
The sun has touched the horizon by the time I reach the train wreck. It lies on a field of wildflowers, a few meters away from the tracks. All the cars have been righted, as straight as their dented bodies allow. I’m not sure why the authorities keep it standing here. Maybe it’s supposed to be a memorial, or a cautionary tale. Whatever the reason, here the train remains, even as rust eats into it, clothing it in red.
We had a Retrospection exercise back in grade eight: Walking the Past. Mrs. Suparti took us on a field trip to the ruins of a temple and told us to walk its grounds while meditating. It worked for some students. It didn’t work for me.
But maybe this time it would. This was, after all, my grandfather’s train.
I haul myself up onto the closest car, one near the end. The floor is covered in dirt and the footprints of teenagers who made it their haunt for one daring night, camping with ghosts. Candy wrappers and plastic bottles lie between the seats—those still intact, that is, for some are so flea-consumed that only the steel frames are left. The windows are riddled with cracks. Some still have specks of blood on them, unwashed by rain.
With a lump in my throat, I seek the Grandfather I’ve never known.
I begin my walk down the train, toward the driver’s car. For a while, I do it like Mrs. Suparti taught us back in the temple ruins. Arms hanging relaxed by my sides, I start walking down the aisle between ruined seats, slowly. Candy wrappers and shards of glass crackle under each mindful step I take.
It isn’t working.
I close my eyes and slow my breathing. I don’t know any Retrospection, Foresight, or Presence, but maybe a garden variety hunch can help me find my real Intuition, the way one directed me to the picture in the attic.
My feet shift, putting me in a runner’s lunge. Then I dash from the tail end of the train to its head, like the past shooting toward the present.
Everything around me blurs. And glows.
An outburst of desperation and hope roars inside me. I reach out with my mind, grasping the world around me, pushing it—pushing with the kind of energy you’d have if you believed you could move the universe.
I keep running. Through the blur, the light, the tube of the train.
And then, it’s no longer me who’s moving; it’s the train. The blur around me isn’t everything; it’s just the view from the windows. And I’m standing right outside the door of the driver’s car, which is not crushed beyond recognition.
What?
Inside, there sits a man in a uniform. The hair peeking from under his hat is black, cropped short. He sits up straight, eyes perfectly focused forward, fingers attending to the buttons on the control panel with the practiced ease of someone who’s done this as often as breathing.
“Come in!” he shouts above the din of the engine.
I hesitate, then slide the door open and step in. The clacking of the train against the track echoes loud in my chest. I swallow.
The man at the driver’s seat turns toward me and smiles.
“Yes,” he says, answering my unasked question, “this is Retrospection. Different Antiquists experience it differently, of course. Yours is apparently the generative type, which… revives things temporarily in your head. This vision will respond until you find the truth you seek. So, what did you want to know about me, Grandson? Or do you only care about gaining an Intuition?”
His smile is mischievous—and friendly, as if we’ve known each other all our lives.
I don’t know what to say. I stand petrified, blinking, but the sight of him doesn’t go away.
“Are you perhaps confused about why you’re getting your Retrospection now?” he asks.
I wasn’t thinking about that, but now he’s mentioned it, I don’t mind knowing the answer. I nod.
“You see, I was a Futurist. Have you heard that theory about what happens to your Intuition after you die? No? Well. Some believe Presentists are most likely to be stuck as ghosts, because they can’t move on from the present. Some believe an Antiquist, if they become a ghost, will be the most vivid because they’ll retain all memories of their past life. But a Futurist… can you guess?”
I shake my head. He grins.
“Some say Futurists can project themselves into the future. A ghostly sentience beyond the point of their death. And perhaps that’s why we’re here. You have an underdeveloped Retrospection, but you tried to look back the best you could. And I was looking forward—am looking forward. I’ve been seeking you—and everyone else I left. And here we meet, in this blurry middle ground.”
“Does that mean I won’t be able to look back again, if you’re not around?” I blurt out.
“No, no,” he says. “Now that you’ve done it—now that you’ve seen something from the past—hopefully your talent won’t lie dormant anymore.”
“That… that’ll be good.”
The train glides down endless paddy fields, which glitter green under the golden sun. I take in every line of my grandfather’s face and commit them to memory: his thin smiling mouth, bright black eyes, apple-round cheeks. Mother always talks of him with such bitterness, but in the flesh, here as he drives his train down the same track that took his life, he has the gentleness of someone who refuses to make an enemy out of tragedy.
“Why did you leave your family?” I ask. “Why did you leave Mother?”
“Ah.” This time his smile turns sad. “That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it? You might not realize it, but you’ve always wondered. My daughter makes you wonder. Does she hate me?”
I think of lying, but he catches me before the lie forms on my tongue.
“So she does,” he says. “She’s a Presentist, isn’t she? She came to her talent really young. It worried me, you know. Even then I could foresee that my time with her was limited, and her being a Presentist, our Intuitions can never meet. I can roam the future, but she stays in her present—unlike you, who can reach out to the past and meet me halfway. Be gentle to your mother, because she can’t return to the things she has passed, or sense how much time she has with those still around. It’s difficult being a Presentist.”
He lets the words settle around us. I mull them over, thinking back to Mother’s touchy nervousness and short temper. The present must be exceedingly hard for her these days, what with Father and the earthquake. Can’t look back, can’t look forward—his current absence must be all she can feel right now, consuming her.
I wish I could hold her hand. Why did I never think of that?
“If you knew all this,” I say to Grandfather, “why did you leave anyway? Why did you spend so much time away?”
“Persistent, aren’t you?” he chuckles. “Very well. I’ll tell you my story.”
He begins, as a stranger’s account often does, with his name. Bede Satria Parakramanan—Par for short. His father found the name Bede in a book of lesser saints, those forgotten under the gleaming names of Benediktus, Vinsensius, and Fransiskus. It’s a foreigner’s name in a foreign language, but his father always pronounced it the way locals would: with the first e sounding like you’re keeping a secret inside your mouth, and the second e like you’re grinning wide. Which was just as well, for it made the name sound less like a saint’s name and more like a regular peasant’s name, so nobody ever bothered Grandpa Par about being of the wrong religion.
That was, of course, until 2016 when hardliners rallied and took over the government, turning it into one nation under Allah and no other god.
“Do you pray five times a day or on Sundays?” Grandpa Par asks.
“I pray on Sundays with Mother, but only in whispers. I pray five times a day too—we both do, but I don’t mind it as much as Mother does.”
“And your mother named you sensibly, I hope?”
“My name is Bandhu Setiakala. Or at least that’s all I say when people ask, and that’s what’s written in my documents. But I remember a third name, which Mother said I should keep secret. Stefanus.”
“Very good.” He nods approvingly. “Now, Bandhu, when you go home, will you do me a favor and pass your mother a message?”
Of course I will. My nod deepens the smile on his face.
As if he were speaking to Mother himself, he says, “Remember that night in 2016, when I wasn’t home, when a mob knocked down our door and demanded to see the family registry? And your mother told them the man named Bede Satria Parakramanan was no longer a member of the family because he was never home? Remember how she explained I was the only one who bore the name of a saint, that she and all her children had normal names, and always prayed five times a day? Remember how the mob spared all of you because of that? Because I wasn’t there and the rest of you claimed the right religion?
“Ask her all this, Bandhu. And then, ask her if she still hates me.”
The days after my meeting with Grandpa Par felt surreal. Mrs. Suparti’s eyebrow disappeared under the shade of her hijab when I told her I found my Intuition, and that it’s a very vivid generative Retrospection at that. She didn’t believe me when I told her about Grandpa.
I didn’t tell her all about Grandpa, of course. He warned me no one can know I had a heretic for a grandparent, even if he was kicked out of the family.
I told him of course I’d be careful. But I also told him no one really kicked him out of the family. Mother might’ve hated him, but that was because she missed him too much.
“Do you forgive him, now that you know why he left?” I asked Mother after I relayed Grandpa’s message. She didn’t answer, but her lips trembled, and the tears flooding her eyes didn’t look like the same kind of tears she held back when she held back anger.
And perhaps the most surreal of it all: we got a phone call. They found Father. At a hospital on the earthquake-torn island, injured and dehydrated after days under the rubble, but alive.
Every day since then, I’ve been doing my homework at the living room table, facing the window, hoping when I look up I’ll spot him tottering down our driveway, and proving—like Grandpa did—that he never really abandoned us.
And today, as I wrestle some math problems for exam practice, I hear the hum of a car engine stopping before our gate. I look up and see Father climbing out of a taxi, a crutch under one arm.
“Mother!” I shout. “Mother, he’s here!”
He’s grown a beard around his mouth, but I think I can see a smile underneath. He embraces me with one hand and greets me with a grunt. I chalk up the awkwardness to his injuries. He looks pale.
I sit him down at the living room table. Mother is still nowhere to be found. My stomach sinks as a dark thought overtakes me: is she too angry at him for leaving us in the dark for too long?
The thought scatters away when Father takes my hand, squeezes it, and says in a gentle rumble, “How are you, my son? I’ve missed you. How was… how has school been? Did you ever find an Intuition? Are you preparing for your final exams?” He pauses. I can see his jaw tensing. He averts his eyes. “I’m sorry I’ve missed so much.”
“I got Retrospection—Grandpa Par helped with that. That was only a few days ago, actually.”
I think of Grandpa Par, of how he stretched his Foresight past his death so he could meet the family he’d missed when he was alive. And here was Father, another Futurist in the family.
I take a deep breath. “Father, I don’t want to wait until you’re dead to know you. Tell me about the earthquake. Tell me about you.”
I watch with bated breath as his face shifts from confusion to surprise to a tender, fragile smile. “Of course. I—”
Footsteps behind us. I turn around in my seat, and there she is: Mother. She takes the chair beside me, arranges her dress so it falls neatly down her legs, and rests a hand on her belly.
Mother and Father stare at each other. Mother with an unreadable expression, Father with trepidation and guilt, tension on his shoulders.
He clears his throat. “I have good news. I was promoted to first mate a few months ago, when Rendi—the old first mate—died. It was… it was tough sailing. It’s been tough sailing. But I worked hard, harder than ever, and I got paid more, and I think now we’ve got enough money for the birth. I still sense a C-section might be needed—but you’ll likely be fine, of course, don’t worry.”
He pauses. With shoulders sagging and eyes downcast, he mumbles, “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I was just… too focused on catching as many fish as possible. I was afraid I wouldn’t make enough money in time for the birth.”
A long silence stretches between them. And then, Mother sighs. “It’s unfair, isn’t it, that each of us in this family is stuck in different locations? You’re always looking out for our future, as is your nature. But you’re here now. That’s what matters to me. And I understand you were just doing what you needed to do.”
She reaches out and grasps his hand. Her smile is small, as if she’s still practicing it, getting used to it. But it looks sincere. “Now, do as our new Antiquist said, will you? Tell us about the earthquake. Tell us about you.”
So he does. And for a moment, the past and the future meet in the present, around a table, as family.
Anselma Widha Prihandita (she/her) is an Indonesian speculative fiction writer, college writing instructor and PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition, with scholarly (and personal) interests in decolonial and transnational writing. She splits her time between the US west coast, where she currently teaches and studies, and Indonesia, where she grew up and where her home remains. She attended the Odyssey workshop in 2023 on their Fresh Voices Scholarship, and the Clarion workshop in 2024 on their Octavia Butler Scholarship. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Cast of Wonders, and khōréō, among others.
“In (Future) Memory of an Absent Father” by A.W. Prihandita. Copyright © 2024 by A.W. Prihandita.
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