The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  “Talk to me, Tommy,” Gannon said.

  “Talk to you about what?”

  “About your sister.”

  “Why?” Tommy asked. He rolled over and looked at Gannon. “You’re not going to be able to find her before she gets to Florida. And even if you drive all the way down there you still won’t be able to find her. Not with all of those people that are going to be down there.” Tommy pointed to the television. “Just look.”

  On the screen the news showed throngs of campers who had come to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch. Titusville, the small town around Canaveral, was overflowing. All of the hotels were full and people had begun renting out their houses at exorbitant prices. It seemed as though everyone in the country was there. And whoever wasn’t there was already on the way.

  “I don’t get it,” Gannon said. “With all the other stuff going on in this world, I don’t see what all this Europa fuss is about. It’s not like there’s never been a rocket launch before.”

  “Not one like this,” Tommy replied. “This is the last beautiful thing. That’s what Ginny told me.”

  “Bull,” Gannon said. “Ain’t that right, Pop?” Still Bill Gannon did not speak or nod or do anything other than what he had done for the last two decades since his stroke. But his son seemed undeterred. “There have always been moments like this, Tommy. If Pop wasn’t sick he could tell you about it. Happens time and time again. Sputnik. The moon launch. Hubble.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There’s always something that’s the newest, biggest mission or whatever. A whole bunch of eggheads sit around and tell us that something is important and we believe them. They tell us that something is revolutionary and we believe them. But how often is any of that true? How often are there really any big moments? And I’m not just talking about in the country. I’m talking about in life. How many moments are really important? The moment you’re born and the moment you die. Period.” He squinted at the television, as if accusing it of something. “They give us dreams just to distract us from the dying.”

  Tommy swallowed. His brain was full of things he wanted to say. Things that I had told him about why the Europa mission was so important. Things our father had written in his letters to the two of us. But Tommy couldn’t organize his thoughts into any cohesive manner. “It’s not like that,” is all that he could manage.

  “It’s not,” Gannon said.

  “No,” Tommy said. “It’s big. It’s important. People need to know that it’s important, even if they can’t really say why it’s important, even if they can’t find the words.”

  “You’ve been listening to your sister too much,” Gannon said.

  “It’s not about her,” Tommy replied.

  “Your whole life is about her, Tommy. You know it as much as she does.”

  “Whatever,” Tommy said. He turned over again and stared at the wall.

  “I’m trying to find out what you want out of your life, Tommy.” Gannon sat up and looked at Tommy. “What do you want to do?”

  “What I want doesn’t matter,” Tommy said after a moment.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because,” Tommy replied. He sat up on the bed and looked back at Gannon. The man was tall and square and intimidating in most situations, but just now, for the first time since Tommy and I had first come to live with him, Gannon looked like a man. Not a cop. Not a foster father. Just a man who looked nervous. Maybe afraid. Definitely concerned.

  “How did it feel when you got the draft notice?” Gannon asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know. I can imagine how it felt, but I want to hear your version of it.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Tommy began. He didn’t trust Gannon. It was as though he could hear my voice inside his head, pointing out all the things wrong with Gannon, all the nights when he had gotten drunk and started fights and yelled and slumped in his chair in a heap. I was in Tommy’s head, trying to make him remember. But Tommy was never any good at remembering. So, all of a sudden, Gannon was just a man sitting before him, asking how he felt. Which was something people rarely did.

  “I guess I was scared,” Tommy said. He lay back down on the bed and turned away from Gannon.

  On television the killing was still happening. The bombs were still falling. The Disease was still claiming its share of the world.

  Tommy heard Gannon reach into a pocket. He fumbled with something that sounded like paper.

  “I was supposed to go off to the military myself, you know,” Gannon began. “Pop was in the national guard when I was a kid. He’d done six years in the marines beforehand. So he wasn’t just one of those weekend warriors like everyone else.”

  Tommy rolled over and found Gannon staring at the draft notice.

  “Back then there was fighting but there wasn’t really a war,” Gannon continued. “At least, not officially. There were plenty of people being killed. There were bombings and mass shootings and things like that, but it was all just starting. It was like a lightning storm with no place to call home. A flash over here. A boom somewhere else. They came and went and didn’t hold any particular pattern. Like fireflies or something. And this disease or whatever didn’t even exist. The world, as bad as it was, was something a person could get their head around... Or maybe it all just seems that way in memory.”

  Gannon’s face seemed to dance in the light of the television. Still he looked at Tommy’s letter.

  “Each year it got a little worse. But we always thought it would get better. We always figured it would just get fixed, you know? Like there had been a switch thrown that had started all of this and so it made sense that it was just a matter of time before somebody threw the switch again and fixed it all. But then, month after month, nobody ever pulled that second switch. The whole country, the whole world, just slid further and further downhill.”

  “My dad used to say something like that,” Tommy said.

  “Smart man,” Gannon replied. “As for me, I was going to sign up for the military. But then my dad got sick and my mom was already dead. Somebody had to take care of him. And by then, hell, I’d met the woman that was going to be my wife. She had nothing against the military, but she didn’t want to be a military wife. She didn’t want to do all of the moving around, all of the waiting for the phone call that one day comes. So I let go of thinking about the military and I watched the war on television just like everybody else. Figured that the politicians and boots on the ground over there would fix everything. But then nothing ever did get fixed and I was stuck in a small town being a cop in a place where nothing ever happened and I never really made a difference, all the while Rome burning down around me. I resented her for that.”

  Gannon’s voice trembled and it surprised them both. He cleared his throat.

  “She was the one that wanted kids,” Gannon continued. “For me, I was on the fence about them. Didn’t have any real dislike of kids, but neither did I feel any particular need to raise any. Kids, for me, were just something that existed. And having one of my own was something I could take or leave. But not her. She said she’d dreamed about being a mom ever since she was a kid herself. Said that as far back as she could remember, she had seen her life filled up with them. A house somewhere just flooding over with children. Five, six, seven of them. As many as a house could hold. And when I asked her why they were so important to her, why it was such a hot topic for her, all she could say was ‘Because that’s what life is supposed to be.’”

  Gannon waved his hand dismissively. “Foolish thing if you ask me: for a person to grow up thinking that the world is supposed to be any one particular way.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Tommy asked.

  “Oh,” Gannon said. He seemed to have genuinely forgotten his point. “What I’m trying to say is that a person can make a difference in the world. A person can change things, even though it might n
ot seem like they can. But they have to be able to go into it with both eyes open. They have to know why they’re doing something. And they have to do it for their own reasons and not for anybody else’s. You can’t live your life for anybody else and you can’t make decisions if you don’t have all of the information.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said, still not understanding where Gannon was going.

  “Do you want to join up?” Gannon asked. “I mean, do you really want to be in the military? Do you really want to go off to the war?”

  “I got drafted,” Tommy said.

  “That’s not what I asked you,” Gannon replied.

  “It doesn’t matter what you asked me,” Tommy said. “I. Got. Drafted.”

  “Damn it, boy. Just answer the question.”

  Tommy thought for a moment. He imagined the way things would be when he finally joined up. He saw himself marching in a sea of other young faces during basic training. He saw himself running, jumping, all of those things that people did when they first joined up and had to become a soldier. And then he saw himself in the war. In the desert. He saw himself carrying a rifle. Firing it, being fired at. Back and forth. Bullets whizzed past his head. He returned fire. And on and on it went until, like a movie, the firing became louder and the explosions hit closer to home, and finally he saw himself being shot. In his imagination, he fell into the dusty earth, moaning and screaming and a fellow soldier tried to save him. But of course, it was to no avail. The lights all went out. Blackness. He was dead.

  When Tommy finally drifted back from the throes of his imagination, Gannon was still there. Waiting for an answer and watching him all the while. The room was still too small and the bed still smelled of mothballs and cleaning supplies. The art hanging on the walls was still tacky and beautiful all at once. The war was still playing out on the television. The sky was still the color a sky was supposed to be.

  But somehow, something had changed.

  “If I hadn’t got drafted,” Tommy began, “...I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “That sounds like an honest answer. Keep going.”

  Tommy’s face twisted in surprise. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you asking me this stuff? The fact is that I did get drafted. So what point is any of this?”

  Gannon held up Tommy’s draft notice. “It’s a fake,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This draft notice. It’s a fake, Tommy. She forged it.”

  The air was suddenly too thin for Tommy’s lungs. “Bullshit.”

  “Not at all,” Gannon began. “That sister of yours needed to get you moving. So she forged a draft notice. She lied to you, Tommy. Turns out Uncle Sam doesn’t want you.”

  Tommy trembled.

  “Now,” Gannon said, “tell me where we can find her.”

  To My Children,

  Nothing was getting better and there was nothing anyone could do about it. So people took up art as a means of getting by. It was a strange and wonderful time. “Art stems the tide” someone famous said, and for the next few years you could almost believe it. Celebrities took up pottery. Construction workers took up painting. People wrote poetry on the walls of bathroom stalls. I once went into a gas station bathroom and found Robert Frost scrawled into the place usually reserved for racism and misogyny. It was beautiful and unexpected—to go in there that way and find those soft words in a rough place. Everyone was trying to take away the fear, all of us together, holding hands as we felt the earth falling away beneath us, trying to flap our arms and create wings from the beautiful things. What else was there to do?

  Your mother and I took up knitting. Something about the tying together of the strings. A cliché and trite metaphor, but not the kind of thing you worry about in times like those. You exist to survive. You survive to exist.

  So we knitted and we sewed and we made colors and, eventually, we put on an exhibit. You wouldn’t think people would come out to that type of thing, but they did. They came out in droves. Lining the streets and filling out the thoroughfares, all for the sake of knitting that was terrible and badly done. Everything, even the small things, could be handled if all we did was create enough art.

  But there wasn’t enough art. Not really. Art only ever goes as far as we are willing to take it. And in spite of the fact that we were all loving and needing art, we weren’t doing anything with it. It was only another way to hide within ourselves, to tell ourselves we were safe, that we had built the levees high enough and locked all the doors tight enough as we watch through the windows of our lives and see the storm swirling.

  So the world continued on the path it had chosen.

  Your mother and I kept knitting, kept tying strings together, kept making small things into long, elaborate, large things, and the process kept working. We were happy.

  I spent more time learning about the Europa mission that was being planned. It began to feel like another piece of art. Some interplanetary painting that was being thrown across the face of the sky, swelling up around us all like some voice in the early throes of an aria.

  Debating on the existence of life beyond earth became the nation’s favorite pastime. The fundamentalists said that there would not be any sense of unity or family to come from the search for life. We would all only come to realize that we are less than singular, that we can be mass produced. The discovery of life is the end of life, some people said.

  “We’ve got a whole planet full of people who think they’re alone in the universe, and all they can do is try to kill one another. So just imagine what they’ll do if they find out they’re not special. Just imagine the killing.” That’s what your mother said to me late one night.

  I was groggy and uncertain from sleep. “People have always been the way they are,” I said, not really sure what I meant by that.

  “Can you imagine what it might be like?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they find something there,” she said. “Something alive.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Life’s a hard thing to create. It’s a rarity, not a given.”

  “You can’t know that,” she said. “No one can. It’s all too big. It’s like standing in the middle of the desert and saying that the ocean doesn’t exist. Just because all you see is sand doesn’t mean waterfalls don’t exist.”

  I took a deep breath and swallowed.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said without warning.

  I trembled. Somehow I had known all along that it would happen.

  ELEVEN

  The name of the town was Broken Boot. It sat in the palm of Georgian foothills barren of trees but full of life. I came into the town in the cab of a pickup truck driven by a woman named Cassandra. She was a long, gangly woman full of sharp angles, like an egret crafted by Picasso. She spoke in riddles and hummed to herself. There was just a couple of days left before the launch. Not long now. But there was Tommy to think of. We both knew where we were supposed to meet, but I was worried that he would forget. Because that was what Tommy did best.

  But more than that, I thought about what Gannon would have already told him by now.

  I rode with Cassandra for two hours, taking in stories of the Gothic South. She was a researcher, focusing on the oral tradition. “The South is full of ghosts,” she said at one point, staring into the rearview mirror as the small truck trundled along the narrow, two-lane road. Cassandra watched the rearview mirror as much as she watched the road ahead. What was chasing her was difficult for me to say. “The North’s full of ghosts too,” Cassandra continued. “The West. The Pacific Northwest. Whole country’s haunted.” Cassandra made a sucking sound with her teeth. “Whole country’s full up with the dead,” she said. “And getting worse every day. We can’t let go of them and they can’t let go of us. Nothing ever ends. Not even people.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said.
<
br />   “Of course it is,” Cassandra replied.

  It went this way for hours. Cassandra made points about the existence of ghosts. I confirmed it. Cassandra reconfirmed it. Eventually I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the smelly headrest of the smelly truck. It wasn’t long before I was asleep.

  Dreams and The Memory Gospel mingled together in my mind like always. In my dream, I was five years old and sitting on my father’s lap, watching television. On the television the planet Jupiter came into view, roiling and golden, the Great Red Spot spinning like the angry eye of some ancient god. On the television the camera pushed closer to the planet and my father sat with held breath and a slight fidget in his knee.

  “How big is Jupiter’s red spot?” he asked.

  “It changes. But usually it’s about twice the size of earth,” I answered.

  “The exact numbers.”

  “Forty-thousand kilometers tall and fourteen-thousand kilometers wide,” I said. “But it fluctuates.”

  “And where did you read that?”

  “The book you gave me: Our Solar System.”

  “What page?”

  I sighed.

  “Come on, honey,” her father said. “Indulge me. Please.”

  “Page 83,” I said.

  Then he kissed the top of my head and chuckled to himself. “You’re going to take the world by storm,” he said. “Do you know that?”

  Down the hall in the kitchen Tommy was crying.

  “You’re going to be more than anyone else can even imagine,” he said. “More than I can imagine. Maybe even more than you can imagine.”

  Then he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me again before turning his attention back to the television, back to Jupiter, back to the world that was far away from his own. “You’re going to do what I never could,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  “I guess so,” I said.