Trouble

My heart stopped beating at 11:35 on a Saturday morning. I heard someone saying I had waited for my daughter to arrive before giving my last breath, but the truth is that everything has been planned before, and I'm a man who likes his plans. That was the time expected, and that's when it happened. While a group of people discussed the music, candles and company I should have around in my last moments, the machine stopped beeping; I opened my eyes, choked, grabbed the first person who dared to hug me and died in the most gruesome and traumatic way I could fake.

It was not pretty, and I was not a gentleman, but I didn't have a choice; I had to die... kind of.

The drugs in my system had paralysed my body, and I could barely breathe, so the choking part was not difficult to fake. For a bit, I thought the nurse had messed up the dosage, and my family would get what they had waited for. I didn't care about the money I was about to lose into their pockets, despite they being worse than a nest of angry snakes. I knew that leaving no money would raise suspicion, and that's the least I needed after going through the whole experience of death and trauma. Anyhow, what they got was peanuts. Elias, my right-hand man, was good at hiding things, and I was unwilling to go anywhere without a certain amount of comfort.

My dramatic end was caused by some troublesome business partners, or better said, by me not wanting to do whatever they told me to do. My move to the other side of the ocean years before had been a shock to many because I was supposed to be a good man, take care of my family and live for others, but there is a definitive moment in everyone's life when we are given the opportunity to change or settle, and I didn't settle. I grabbed the chance to be bigger and better and never looked back. Why should I, if I were the best anyone could dream of? I had more money, fun and women than I could ever imagine. Although I soon realised not all of my partners were the best kind of people I should surround myself with, the price to pay for my good luck was small enough to help me forget the things I did not fancy about them. I did not mind the shake-offs of smaller fish in our shark pool, the insane amounts of money going in and out of my accounts or the fear some people around me felt about my business partners. For years there was a good definition of space for each of us, lines not to cross and people not to piss, but as time went by, space needs grew, the lines turned blurry, and the capacity to piss others increased exponentially, making my life much less uncomfortable or fun than I was used to.

After a nasty business episode, I should not speak about here, I knew I had to disappear, something rather difficult when there is money to look for you all over the world. But I am a resourceful man, and creative too. It took Elias and me a bottle of rum and a sleepless night to find the way to save my life. I only had to lose my money, people and life, and my problems would be over.

I had gone through a health scare two years before. No one had bothered then to visit me or offer any kind of support, which gave me the idea. I could return to the motherland, see the family cry by my bedside, and, if lucky, say goodbye to my daughter, whom I had not seen for five years. It took us two weeks to move around money and papers so there would be no trail of me afterwards, and before I could do much more, I saw myself in a plane with some kind of poison in my bloodstream that made me look sick and tired when my sisters came to pick us at the airport. Elias had called them two days before. He told them I was in my last days and willing to die in peace, surrounded by those I loved. He asked them to contact my daughter, too.

We touched the ground, left the plane and saw the two women after we picked up our luggage. They looked exactly the same as the last time I saw them, except for some eye wrinkles. I had solved that months before; no one could say I was fifty years old. I looked forty at most. My life in the white sandy paradise had provided a full year tan, the money had been wisely used in whatever cosmetic procedure I could see fit, and the attractive businessman vibe had guaranteed me company for years. I stared at them and felt pity because they could never understand what a good life looked like.

Elias took care of the logistics, from the bribing of doctors and nurses to the transport of my body, not forgetting about the hassle of finding a proper dead person to take my place in the casket. One thing was a make-believe death; another was spending a whole night listening to people whining about me. That was a big no from my side, and Elias respected it.

So, I died.

I heard the people crying around me. I even think I listened to my daughter. She was late, and I never had the opportunity to say hello or goodbye, but I always thought it was better that way. Delaying the process could have led to failure, and I could not let that happen. I was taken to the morgue, and soon, I felt I was moving somewhere else. When I woke up, I was in another hospital bed, but the doctors were different, and so was my name. I had become someone else, and in the following days, my face changed too. I didn't recognise it the first time I looked at myself in the mirror, and I laughed. I was reborn, and I loved it.

Elias told me about the funeral and how many people, including bad guys, attended. My new life required a new kind of weather, and although I'd never been a fan of rain or cloudy skies, I learned to make peace with it. I travelled a lot, too, in the following years, and my new passport never raised questions. I was a forty-something dude travelling worldwide and writing about whatever I saw on those trips. I kept in contact with Elias throughout the years, and we even met a few times. The money kept flowing, and my life was good, and then, so much later, I got an email that changed it all. It was from my ex, and it was about our daughter.

"She knows you're alive," she wrote, and for the first time ever, I knew I was in real trouble.