The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  ...like fists and pushed the memories away.

  It’s like I told you: I have a tendency to drift.

  I stopped walking. When I had finally clawed my way out of what was and into what is, I opened my eyes and looked up at the stars.

  Andromeda was brighter than usual that night. One trillion stars burning, raging. Reduced by time and distance to little more than a pinprick of noiseless light. That’s how memory was supposed to work. A narrowing down. A softening that made it possible to let go of unwanted or painful memories. Maybe that was why I liked astronomy as much as I did—and still do. It proved that with enough time, even the brightest stars burned out. Everything faded away eventually.

  But I understood that, because of distance and time, when you saw a star you only ever saw the way it used to be. Even the sun was eight minutes in the past by the time you saw it.

  “Andromeda,” I began, smothering the memory of the car crash with bare, calm facts. “Officially designated as NGC 224. Coordinates: RA 0° 42m 44s | Dec 41° 16.152' 9". 2.537 million light-years away. Two hundred twenty thousand light-years across. 1.5 × 1012 solar masses—estimated. Apparent magnitude of 3.4.” On and on I continued. Definitions of mass, luminosity. It was a spiral galaxy and I quoted the composition of each of the spiral’s arms. Fact after fact after fact, pulled perfect and undiminished from memory.

  I built a levee with each fact, and the recollected dead receded back into their holding places.

  “Ten more miles,” I said, looking off down the cold, empty, dark road ahead. “Seventeen thousand six hundred yards. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred feet. Six hundred thirty-three thousand six hundred inches...and a partridge in a pear tree.” I sang the last part. Badly. But the starlight didn’t seem to mind.

  I took one final look up at the sky. I found Jupiter. I found its moon Europa—nothing more than a whisper of light so difficult to see it made my eyes hurt and I wondered if what I saw was real. But whether I actually saw Europa or only imagined seeing it didn’t seem to matter. To some extent, we are all solipsists. I started walking again, heading toward Florida and the last shuttle launch of human history.

  * * *

  I had just passed the crossroads where PEACE was written when the headlights rose out of the far darkness behind me. It had only ever been a matter of time. So I stopped and waited for what was coming.

  The headlights approached in cold silence, then the silence shifted into what was almost the sound of applause as tires sizzled over the cold pavement. A chill raced down my spine as the blue lights atop the car flashed into existence.

  The police car stopped in front of me. The headlights glared bright enough that I had to shield my eyes. The car shifted into Park and sat idling for a moment. A small plume of steam rose from the exhaust, effervescing into the darkness. The door opened. Booted feet thumped onto the pavement like punctuation at the end of a grim declaration about life. The lights still shone too brightly for me to see who had stepped out of the car, but I didn’t need to see in order to know that it was him.

  “Got pretty far,” he said finally. “I’ll give you that much.” His voice was as hard as steel, like always. Because of the headlights, he was only a deep shadow and a deeper voice, like thunder come to visit in the late hours of the night. His breath steamed from his lips and expanded into a small anvil head cloud above him.

  “I could explain to you why it’s important, but you wouldn’t understand.” There was arrogance in my voice and I knew it, but I didn’t try to curb it. At this point, there was no turning back, nothing to be said that would undo what was already done. I knew, better than most, that time’s arrow only moves forward. “I’m going to be there to see it,” I said. “And I’m never coming back.”

  He stepped away from the car door and walked out in front of the headlights. I counted each one of my heartbeats, if only to keep myself calm. He was tall and broad as he had always been. His hair cropped close as a harvested field. The backlight of the car’s high beams turned him into a monolith, eternal and omnipotent. Something to be worshipped, if only for its cruel disinterest.

  He looked around, scanning the open field of darkness surrounding us. Then he sighed. “You Embers are something else,” he said. Then he spat. “You’ve had your fun. Now, where is he?”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than the blow landed against the back of his head. A tremble went through his body and he slumped to his knees with a pained groan. Then Tommy was there, standing behind him, his fist trembling.

  “Run,” Tommy said, as our foster father fell unconscious at his feet.

  ELSEWHERE

  The hardest thing was convincing herself not to be afraid of falling asleep. Each and every evening she watched the news and watched talk of The Disease. Her friend over in Alamance County had come down with it. Fell asleep on the sofa one night and then, when morning came, nobody heard from her until her children found her. And this was back near the beginning. Her friend was eighty-seven years old, but spry for her age. Still, spryness doesn’t do anything to repel the unexpected. But wasn’t that the way it had always been?

  And now nearly ten years had passed and The Disease was creeping ever closer to people her age. So, like many people of a certain age in this world, she figured that the best thing she could do was to get herself away from everybody. She went down to the store and bought herself as much food as her dead husband’s pickup truck could carry and she came home and loaded up the house and then went back and filled the truck up again and, this time, she also picked up as many sheets of plastic as she could. And duct tape and disinfectant and even a gas mask—which were slowly becoming all the rage even though nobody knew whether or not they would do any good.

  When all was said and done she had everything she needed to live for at least a year. Yeah, it might be a year of eating potted meat and crackers until she was blue in the face, but Lord knows there were worse things in this world.

  She lived far enough outside of town that she could live the type of life she wanted. The farm was big and old and her dead husband’s pride right up until the day he dropped dead, still sitting atop the same tractor he’d bought when they first got the farm. He’d been dead for nearly twenty years and she was glad that he didn’t live to see the world get to where it was: the killing, the dying, the slow fading away of everything that the whole damn species had spent thousands of years building.

  No. He was always too softhearted to be able to stand for such a thing. If that heart attack hadn’t done him the pitiful kindness of taking him when it did, he would have turned on the news in the world today and died from a plain old broken heart.

  She thought about her husband a lot in those first few months of living alone, isolated from the rest of the world. Mostly she thought about him as a way to keep from thinking about everything else that was going on around her. She stopped turning on the news in the mornings because it did nothing but let in the worst parts of the world. Nobody said anything good anymore.

  And so she would get up at the crack of dawn—always thankful and amazed and terrified to have woken up at all—and piddle about the house before time came to go out and tend to the garden and she would think about her husband and maybe she would hum some song that he used to love—he’d always been partial to Frank Sinatra—and, as the weeks stretched out into months, maybe she would even talk to her dead husband even though she knew good and hell well that he was dead and she wasn’t the type to believe that the dead could hear the breath of the living. But she did it anyway.

  Some mornings she talked to him about the past. She told him about the children they’d never had and how she, finally, after all these years, could say that she was glad that they’d never come along. “I just couldn’t live with myself if I had to watch those pretty blue eyes worry over this world,” she said. The only answer the house gave back to her was the gentle clunk-clun
k-clunk of the grandfather clock in the living room that never kept the right time but that she wound up anyway because, even if it wasn’t doing a good job, it was important for everything in this world to have a purpose.

  That old clock made her think about her own purpose. What was it? Her purpose?

  What was a woman without purpose?

  What was anyone without purpose?

  She asked her dead husband that one night when she woke up from a bad dream—a dream that she’d fallen asleep and been unable to wake up from it. Her palms were sweaty and her long hair matted to her brow and her cheeks were slick with tears, and the words trembled out of her lips like a newborn foal. “What’s my purpose?” she asked.

  And her dead husband did not answer her back, even though she sat and waited to hear his heavy, soft voice for over an hour with the darkness and the clunking of that clock down below counting off its irregular and inconstant seconds.

  That was the night that she made a promise never to go to sleep again. She’d stay up for as long as she had to, until The Disease came and went and burned away the rest of humanity and all that was left was her and then, by God, she’d know what her purpose was. She’d have the answer she’d been waiting for and she wouldn’t wake up at night sweating and calling out for her husband because, in the end, she couldn’t go on like this: afraid of sleep and afraid of life both at the same time.

  She didn’t make it a full two days before falling asleep again.

  She tried everything to stop it from happening. She drank coffee until it made her head hurt and her chest tight. She went back to watching the news, hoping that the fear the news gave would make her more able to sit up in the late hours and not fall asleep. The news told her about seventeen new cases of The Disease that had been found around the county and that did give her just the right amount of terror that she needed to stay awake for a little while longer.

  But she was an old woman and, try as she might, she could feel the sleep walking her down, as steady as that old clock in the living room and, just before she finally fell asleep—a sleep that she would never wake from, something she knew in the pit of her stomach—she thought she heard her husband’s voice one more time. He said a single word: “Love.”

  And her final thought before she fell into the deep, timeless slumber of The Disease was that her question had finally been answered.

  TWO

  For what felt like an eternity, I was unable to breathe. Seeing Jim Gannon at Tommy’s feet, I realized I hadn’t really expected for it to work. Gannon was six-foot-two and built like a bad dream. All angles and muscle. More animal than man. And that was before you took into account the police uniform that filled him out with cold authority and made you nervous about crimes you hadn’t committed.

  When I finally did breathe again the air rushed into my lungs, air so thick you could drink it, choke on it if you weren’t careful. I felt light-headed and gritted my teeth until the feeling went away.

  Standing there in the cold darkness with our foster father lying at Tommy’s feet, I thought of all the ways it could have gone wrong:

  Tommy could have stumbled on the uneven earth as he climbed up out of the darkness along the edge of the road, stumbled just loud enough for Gannon to hear him and turn and draw his pistol and squeeze the trigger and put an end to everything. It wouldn’t have been anything other than a reflex action for Gannon. Law enforcement training taking over. But it still would have ended Tommy’s life. Just a sudden flash like a lightbulb bursting, then the long darkness.

  Or he could have gotten caught in the headlights of Gannon’s car long before he noticed them. It had been my idea that Tommy follow along at a distance, away from the road, buried in the outer dark, orbiting like some phantom planet. “It won’t be long before he catches up,” I had said. “Do what I tell you and we’ll be okay.” And so he did.

  Only now that Gannon was unconscious on the cold, deserted road did Tommy and I laugh.

  The laughter was fleeting, but wonderful, like a meteor slashing across the night sky.

  “We’ve got to get him out of the road,” I said.

  Tommy flinched. He looked up to see me still standing there in front of the car. “I told you to run,” Tommy said, his voice steady and even.

  “We’ve got to get him off the road,” I repeated. I was already jogging around and opening the rear door of the police car.

  Tommy reached down and took the pistol from Gannon’s holster.

  “Take the bullets out of it and throw that away,” I said.

  He placed the gun on the highway. He fumbled through the pockets on Gannon’s belt. “Hold these,” he said, handing me the man’s handcuffs. “Hurry up,” he barked.

  I took the cuffs. “You don’t need these,” I said.

  Tommy rolled Gannon over and, after a few awkward moments, managed to pull him up off the ground and lift him over his back in a fireman’s carry. He’d wrestled off and on growing up. Most of the schools in most of the foster homes he and I had been shuffled through over the years had wrestling programs in some form or other. He’d actually managed to get pretty good at it. The physical side of it—all of the strength and muscles required—were just a matter of deciding to do it. The mental aspect required a lot of thought and Tommy wasn’t much of a thinker, but he had gotten pretty good at that too. He could always tell what his opponent was planning. He always knew, milliseconds before it happened, when someone was going to shoot their hips forward or try to spin out or go for an underhook. And his mind reacted to it all on its own. He didn’t have to think about it. It was one of the few things in his life, maybe even the only thing, that had come naturally to him. If he’d ever stayed in a single school for more than a season, maybe he would have gotten recruited by some college. Maybe in one of those places where wrestling was a pastime and boys like him could be someone people admired.

  But he never did stay anywhere longer than a season and so he never had gotten really good and there were no college recruiters looking for him. The only person looking for him was the unconscious foster father he carried on his back.

  Just as Tommy got Gannon to the car, I opened the door and there, sitting in the back seat and as quiet as a corpse, was the Old Man, Jim Gannon’s father himself. He’d had a stroke years ago and been confined to his body ever since. The doctors said that he was aware, but paralyzed and unable to speak. The most he ever did was blink, and even that came only on rare occasions.

  Gannon had dressed him in khaki work pants and a flannel shirt and a pair of soft-soled nurse’s shoes. The Old Man didn’t seem to register me as I opened the door and took a moment to stare at him.

  “What is it?” Tommy asked.

  “It’s the Old Man.”

  “What?” Tommy looked past me. “Is he sick?” Tommy asked. “The Disease?”

  “No,” I said.

  Gannon groaned a little, in the early stages of coming around.

  “Give me the handcuffs,” Tommy said.

  “You don’t need to handcuff him,” I replied. “Just shut the door. It can only be opened from the outside. He won’t be able to get out.”

  “Give me the handcuffs, Virginia!”

  “You. Don’t. Need. Them,” I said, laying each word out like a brick. Then I turned and tossed the handcuffs out into the darkness. “Don’t be so simple.”

  Tommy was deciding whether or not to run out after them when Gannon, suddenly back to his senses, grabbed his arm. “Tommy...” Gannon said, groggy and slow.

  Tommy snatched Gannon’s hand away and shoved him to the far side of the back seat. Then he bolted back just in time for me to slam the door closed, locking the man inside. “Tommy!” Gannon called. He looked out at the boy through the window, a firm calmness in his eyes. “Tommy...open this door.”

  Without a word Tommy walked around to the front of the car an
d picked up the pistol that still lay in the middle of the street.

  “I told you to throw that away,” I said.

  He tucked the gun into the pocket of his coat. “If you want it, come over here and take it.” His voice was a hard, low warning, something that would let his sister know that for all of my intelligence, despite that flawless, unbreakable memory of mine, he was powerful in his own right. He’d saved me. Not for the first time, and not for the last.

  “You’re welcome,” Tommy said.

  “It was my idea,” I replied.

  “You’re still welcome.”

  Then we stood there in the dark and the cold, looking at the man trapped in the back seat of the car. It would be up to me to figure out what to do next. And it would be up to Tommy to do whatever needed to be done. Just like always. I would get us both to Florida in time to watch the launch and then, after that, I wouldn’t need him anymore. And, at the same time, he wouldn’t need me anymore. He’d go off to the war. Do his duty the way his draft notice demanded. He would die.

  It was the only way things could turn out for us, no matter how much we wanted it to be different. We couldn’t know that at the time, but years later, the past would be immutable, and I would have to live with it, perfectly preserved in the halls of memory. And, years later, I would be able to speak for my lost brother, to see this trip the way he had seen it. The last great gift he gave to me.

  * * *

  Tommy hadn’t been a smart boy and he would never become a smart man. But that wasn’t what really bothered my brother. Neither was it that The Disease or the war would one day find him. The latter, in fact, I’d almost say Tommy always saw as something inevitable. Maybe even welcomed.

  Tommy told me once that he could never be like me. Not even if he tried at it every single day for five hundred years, cloistered away like a monk. He’d only ever come up short. He said he’d known that for about as far back as he could remember—which wasn’t very far. To be sure, he had memories. As many as most other people did, he figured. He remembered important stuff: the first girl he’d kissed, the first time he got in trouble in grade school, a smattering of song lyrics, a handful of lines from movies. If he was supposed to show up somewhere at a certain time on a certain day he could, for the most part, hold that much in his head. Maybe he’d have to check the calendar again and again in the days before and tell himself, “Now, don’t forget!” But that’s how it went. That’s how it was with everybody.