The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  ELSEWHERE

  He was checking on his father every single day and, when he was honest with himself, he didn’t know how much longer he could keep doing it. They had never gotten along. He’d always been a burden to the Old Man—as least, that’s how it felt to him—but now with things going the way they were in the world, the good thing for him to do was to make amends before the end came in that soft, quiet way it was coming these days.

  It had been his girlfriend’s idea. “Make up with your father,” she said. And she said it in that gentle, movie-of-the-week way of saying it. The way a person says it when they have no idea what they’re asking of someone.

  It wasn’t that he hated his father. Not anymore, at least. He’d gone through that period of hating for years. He’d spent every single day of his life gnashing his teeth on the memories of everything the Old Man had done to him. The beatings, the name-calling. The Old Man had even gone so far as to lock him in a closet for a full day because he hadn’t come home on time the day before. And there were worse things. Things that he didn’t want to remember. Things that he probably should have gone to see a therapist about—at least, that’s what his girlfriend told him—but he never did. He had been raised by the Old Man to believe that a man takes care of his own sadness.

  But visiting the Old Man now was something that he felt he could do. More than that, he felt that he had to do it. Between The Disease and the war, everyone was trying to make amends, to settle the old debts and put things to rest on their own terms. People called it “Settling Up.” And, whether the Old Man knew it or not, his son was coming to him over and over again in the hopes of Settling Up, even though he didn’t really know what that meant. He just knew it was something that needed to be done.

  So for over a month he went to the small retirement home and he walked through the antiseptic-smelling hallways with a knot in his stomach and all of his muscles tense and as soon as he saw the Old Man the knot hardened and the muscles got even tenser, yet he smiled and said the familiar words, “Hi, Pop,” just the same way he always had.

  The Old Man had been wasting away for years, but he was still strong. He sat up straight—a military man through and through—and every time his son came into the room and said, “Hi, Pop” the Old Man replied to him by saying, “You’re late.”

  But the man had gotten used to the way his father was and, nowadays, he actually did show up late since he didn’t particularly want to be there, but showing up was the right thing to do and people were all about doing the right thing these days.

  So the cycle went for months.

  And then one day the man showed up and said, “Hi, Pop.”

  “You’re late.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Good enough.” The Old Man jutted his lower jaw forward like an anvil. “You heard about these damn kids? These Embers?” He spat the word like snake venom.

  “Yeah, Pop. I heard about them.”

  “Goddamn cowards,” the Old Man said, almost at a growl. “Too afraid to go off and fight the way they’re supposed to. Goddamn bleeding-heart cowards.” He tightened his fist and slammed it on his chair and tried to stand but his legs hadn’t worked in years on account of a car accident that had broken his back and he sometimes seemed to forget that. Or maybe he was just too stubborn to accept it.

  “I can’t say I really blame them,” the man said.

  The Old Man ignored his son’s opinion and continued on: “The fact of the matter is everybody’s got a job to do and these kids ain’t doing it. They think they’re the first ones to be afraid of a war? Well they ain’t. Problem is they think they’re special. They feel like they’re too good to go off and fight and maybe die and, mark my words, that’ll be the exact thing that brings an ending to everybody and everything on this planet.”

  “What about The Disease?” the man asked his father.

  “What about it?” the Old Man replied. “People been getting sick ever since people came into existence. And we’re still here. The world is still spinning and we’re still crawling all over it. No, there ain’t no getting rid of people. There ain’t no getting rid of humanity.”

  “Well, maybe this time is different.” The man swallowed, looking for courage.

  “Nothing’s ever different,” the Old Man butted in. And then he cleared his throat and looked over at his son, and suddenly the Old Man’s ever-present anger seemed to lessen, like a muscle that had become fatigued. “They found two people this morning. Right down the hall. Couldn’t wake them up. Wasn’t neither one of them any older than me.”

  And there it was. The Old Man was scared. Maybe for the very first time in his life.

  Seeing that, the man was afraid. Because if the Old Man could be afraid that this was the twilight of the world, maybe this was, truly, as everyone had been saying, the “end of the party” for all of humankind. Which meant that he would die and his girlfriend would die and, even more terrifying, the Old Man—a man so mean and full of spite that Death had been too afraid to take him for years—would finally die as well.

  All of a sudden, the man loved his father and all of the energy he had spent being angry with him was gone.

  So he looked away and said finally, in a low voice, “I forgive you.”

  The Old Man didn’t reply, which didn’t surprise the man. But it still made him angry. “God dammit, say something!”

  When he looked back at his father, he found the Old Man sleeping—his head lolled forward at the end of his neck, a small drop of spittle already forming in the corner of his lip.

  The man would try to rouse his father but it wouldn’t work. He would call the nurses and they would come and, only because it was what they were paid to do, they would inject the Old Man with stimulants and race around shouting about blood pressure and heart rate, knowing that the Old Man wouldn’t wake just like no one else had wakened from The Disease.

  The man eventually walked out of the retirement home thinking to himself that, finally, he had said the words to his father. Wondering if he had been heard.

  FOUR

  Years later Tommy would tell me about this moment, about this whole trip. He would give it all to me so that I could remember it and write it all down. He said to me that when he stopped to think about it, he had been expecting the draft notice all along. Since the day he turned seventeen. Since the day the letters started going out. Since the day the politicians decided to reinstate the draft. On and on, all the way back to before the start of the war. It was like he’d been expecting that letter from the president for his entire life. And so, when it finally came, he found himself confused and disbelieving, the way we all are when the world finally does the terrible thing we knew it would.

  The letter from the Draft Board came in a plain brown envelope with the presidential seal—which some people had mocked by calling it “The Free Chicken”—in the upper left corner. He’d just gotten home from school and opened the mailbox and there it was, like a foundling, waiting for him. It stated Mr. Thomas Matthews in a typeface so bold and straight that he could almost hear the president himself sounding out his name.

  He put this thumb over The Free Chicken for a moment and rubbed it back and forth. When he looked, the chicken was still there. So be it. He’d been preparing himself for this moment. Watching Gannon’s ever-growing collection of war movies when he wasn’t at home, just to get a sense of what Hollywood had to say how war was. He figured it was a pretty good way to get a handle on things. Sure, there were books out there that he could read, but he’d managed to get through only one of them: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It wasn’t a difficult read but it was a difficult book. Everybody kept dying and Tommy couldn’t predict when it would happen or who it would happen to next. In the movies, you knew that the more familiar the actor, the longer it would take for Death to find them. But with O’Brien’s book there weren’t
any actors to recognize and so Death took who it wanted whenever it wanted. That notion left Tommy shaken and unsettled for a few days after he’d finished the book.

  But then, as it always happened with Tommy, O’Brien’s book and the memory of everything it had made him feel began to recede and, before long, it was almost as if he hadn’t read the book at all. If someone asked him he could say, “Yeah, I read that.” But that it was a book about soldiers was all he could ever say about it. And because he was so gifted in his ability to let go of things—including fear of Death itself—his confidence could always come back to him.

  As he stood there that day staring down at the president’s chicken pressed beneath his thumb, the fear came rising back up inside him. He remembered that he had read some book about soldiers and war and dying and he remembered that it had made him afraid, but he couldn’t remember why. So he simply folded the letter from the president and stuffed it into his pocket.

  In the three days before he showed the letter to me, Tommy spent a lot of time watching the news. There was bombing in Baltimore. Where the war was happening, fifty-three soldiers had died in an ambush. In France there was a handful of killings. London caught a bomber before any damage could be done. Police and soldiers—one barely distinguishable from the other anymore—stood before the cameras with pride bursting from their chests in the way only the English can.

  The war, terrorism, however you wanted to slice it up, was transforming everyone. But Tommy was too young to be able to see and understand it. Tommy only saw the way the world was and he couldn’t imagine it ever being any other way. So when people talked about how much better things used to be—the way his father did in his letters—Tommy listened and pondered what was being said but, ultimately, saw it all as little more than fiction. Memory was always fiction, Tommy figured. And maybe that was why he chose not to buy into it. Maybe that was why he chose not to remember anything. To Tommy’s mind, the whole reason the war was still going on was that everyone was too busy wishing the world was the way it used to be. It would be better, he figured, if people just accepted their world.

  He got in two fistfights the day after the draft notice came. Won them both, of course. Because he was strong and hard and because he had started them both before the other boys involved even knew what was happening. There was one boy—big as a wildebeest and almost as ugly—who Tommy had walked up on while he was tying his shoe and stepped squarely on his foot. The boy rose up and towered over Tommy and Tommy knew good and well that he should have been afraid, but he wasn’t.

  After he’d beaten up the boy and walked away, Tommy told himself that he should feel bad for what he had done. And maybe he actually did feel bad. It was always hard to say. What he really felt was the adrenaline racing through his veins like lava. He felt the bruises forming on his knuckles. He felt the throb in his left ear where the boy had brought around a haymaker and found a home for it. He felt a small quiver in his legs that was the sign that the adrenaline would soon be leaving him and he’d come crashing back down to earth.

  * * *

  Dinner had come and gone and Gannon was asleep when Tommy got home later that night. I was sitting in my bedroom reading on account of how I rarely ever slept.

  “Did you win?” I asked.

  “What?” Tommy replied. I made a motion to the side of my face. After a moment, Tommy realized what I was saying. “Oh,” he said, touching the back of his hand to the welt on the side of his ear. “It’s nothing.”

  “Who gave you that nothing?”

  “No one,” Tommy replied. Then: “Everyone.”

  “That’s pretty existential.”

  “It’s pretty what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Tommy sat on the floor and looked down at his hands. His knuckles were bruised and the fingers of his left hand trembled. He made a fist so that he didn’t have to see them shake.

  “So, are you going to tell me what it is?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Tommy said. “I guess I’m just experimental or whatever.”

  “Existential.”

  “That’s what I said.” His brow was furrowed. His clenched fist wound itself even tighter. He heard a soft, muffled pop and looked up to see that the sound was that of me closing my book and focusing my attention on him, which I didn’t do often enough. I realize that now.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “I’m going to figure it out eventually.”

  “I know,” Tommy said.

  “Not because I’m smarter than you.”

  “No?”

  “No,” I replied. “I’m going to figure it out because you’re my brother. And because I love you.”

  “Thanks, Ginny,” Tommy said. “You’re a good sister sometimes.”

  “Don’t go ruining my image,” I said, grinning in spite of myself. “You want me to read you one of Dad’s letters?” I asked.

  “No,” Tommy replied. He looked down at his hand. Finally it had stopped shaking. “Why do you read them?” Tommy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Because keeping them matters,” I said.

  “Why does it matter?” Tommy replied. I could see the thoughts taking shape in his mind. “I guess I just don’t understand how holding on to the past does anything good for the future,” he said slowly.

  He exhaled. He’d passed the candle that was burning inside through the crevices of his mind and body and he’d said what he felt. He’d achieved that miracle. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said immediately, before I could ask more questions.

  He went to his room and pulled out the draft notice from his pocket. It was wrinkled. He looked again at the strong, indomitable font that they used to tell seventeen-year-old boys that it was their turn to pick up a rifle and go off and get killed, and then a voice was in his head, sounding like the president himself, saying, “No way in hell you can do this.”

  Tommy stood in his room and it seemed smaller all of a sudden. Or maybe he seemed larger. Maybe he was swelling up, overflowing the inside of himself.

  * * *

  It was just after midnight when Tommy started out for the river. It was over two hours of hiking before he began to hear the roar of the water and feel the chilly spray rising up and misting through the January air. He had brought his backpack along—complete with camping supplies—on the off chance that he might run into someone and need an excuse.

  He was almost upset when he met no one on his way to the river. One of the few times in his life that he’d actually thought ahead and there would be nobody to see it.

  Then he found himself standing atop a large rock on the edge of the river, staring down into the water as the moon shone overhead and turned the water to light. The rock moved a little under his weight, like it knew why he had come there and wanted to help. When the rock shifted and settled again Tommy just stood there and waited for the bottom to fall out from beneath him. He straightened his back and stuck his chest out and looked like the statue of a hero who had conquered everything in this life and had gone on to conquer everything in the next.

  Tommy knew that he was supposed to be afraid. But he wasn’t. Just tired. Like he’d carried too much for too long.

  He inched closer to the edge of the rock. It shifted again beneath him, but still didn’t give up. Tommy waited for Death with the patience of a crocodile. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but somewhere along the way he had decided to put his life into the hands of Fate. So he waited for The Inevitable Lady to make her decision.

  Time passed and the rock never gave way. The wind never came along and pushed him off. The river itself never reached up and plucked him out of the air. The only thing that happened was that time passed and he was still alive and, finally, the more he realized he was still alive, the more afraid he became.

  Afraid of the war
. Not afraid of dying in it, but of going to it and not being smart enough. Afraid of failing the man next to him. Afraid of messing things up the way he could sometimes and getting somebody killed. Afraid he’d go there and get it all wrong and be sent home and I would be waiting for him and I’d look at him with eyes that looked just like our mother’s and I’d say, “It’s okay, Tommy. You did your best.”

  And he would be forced to live with the fact that his best hadn’t been good enough. It never was.

  The fear never broke. Not even when he stepped back from the edge and started home. He didn’t cry, even though he thought that was probably what he should have done. That’s what a person was supposed to do at these types of moments. But there were no tears. Not until he got back to me.

  He came inside the house just before sunrise and found everyone asleep just as they had been. He took off his backpack and placed it in the closet. He walked into my room and sat on the floor next to my bed and, finally, he began to cry.

  He sobbed like a child until the new day broke.

  When I woke—from a dream of rain and sadness—I looked down at him and saw him crying and I climbed out of bed and sat beside him and put my arm around him and said, as though ending a long conversation the two of us had been having, “Thank you.”

  He clucked a sob-filled laugh.

  “I never know how to do anything right,” Tommy said.