The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  “You will,” he replied.

  Down the hall Tommy was still crying. A long, lonely wail.

  When I opened my eyes Tommy’s wail had become the whine of a police siren. The lights flashed in the cab around Cassandra and me. My stomach tightened and dived into depths of me that I didn’t know existed. Cassandra, just as she nearly always did, had her eyes glued to the rearview mirror. “Didn’t think I was speeding,” she said, slowing the truck.

  “Don’t stop,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. It wasn’t Gannon’s car, I knew that much. And the figure of the man behind the wheel didn’t match Gannon’s silhouette, but I couldn’t get caught. Not now. Not when I had made it this far. Not when I knew that I had to find a way to meet up with Tommy the way we had talked about.

  “We all have to do what we have to do,” Cassandra said. The right two tires of the truck crunched in the soft gravel along the roadside.

  “Please!” I said.

  Cassandra finally took her eyes away from the mirror and stared at me. I could see, even more than before, the ethereal, avian-like quality the woman possessed. She seemed more like a creature from a dream than reality, something to be discovered rather than met. Yet here she was.

  But before the truck could rumble to a stop, the flashing lights behind us shifted position like the setting sun. The lights swept around the car and Cassandra and I both turned to watch the police car turn around and race down the road.

  Cassandra continued to bring the truck to a stop. The truck sat idling for a moment, with Cassandra still looking at me. “If you’re running,” Cassandra said, “don’t tell me. I’ll take you down to Broken Boot like you wanted, but you can’t tell me that you’re dodging the draft. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’m dodging the draft,” I said.

  “Why would you do that?” Cassandra asked. Her eyebrows rose up like clouds climbing the blue sky of her eyes.

  “Because I think I’ve lied to enough people.”

  Cassandra clicked her tongue and sat with her foot on the brake and the truck rumbling beneath her. I could think of a dozen different things to say to her to convince her not to turn me in, but I said none of them. The words piled up in my throat like bricks at the bottom of an abandoned well. For once, I was going to do nothing but wait. Wait and decide. I opened my mouth, mostly by reflex, like a flower in the early hours of the morning calling out to the sun.

  There were no words.

  The world would now decide my fate.

  Then, having made its decision, the world gave out a low growl and a belch of smoke and started moving past me as Cassandra steered the truck back onto the highway, heading for Broken Boot.

  We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  * * *

  I made it to the Broken Boot fairground in the late afternoon. Cassandra wished me well and said a prayer of good luck for me. Then her truck trundled off into the overcast horizon. I waited there for hours, making my way through the quiet husk of the past. I tried to imagine my father here, walking in the places I walked. Perhaps he had come with my mother as well. I could see the two of them walking past the place where the cotton candy would have been sold. The old Teacup ride sat dark and abandoned now, but it didn’t take much effort for me to close my eyes and see the lights sparkling like candy. To hear the music grinding out of the overhead speakers, tinny and sibilant, but still beautiful in the way that only such odd things are.

  I walked through the overgrown grass imagining how things would be again when the summer came in proper and the townspeople returned to the fairgrounds and reclaimed everything. The grass would be mowed. The machines all uncovered and oiled. Bird’s nests removed from the Pirate Ship ride.

  Once everything was cleaned and washed and prepared, the power would be restored to the fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel—which, right now, sat tall and dark, like some ancient weapon—would begin to glow in the setting sun. The lights would burn and the gears would once again swing into action and the whole world would rise and fall and rise and fall, over and over again. There was nothing else in the world quite like the sight of a Ferris wheel lit up in the twilight. Nothing else made such a promise of nostalgia and happiness.

  That was what my father must have felt when he came here all those years ago. That was the reason for his article. The reason he talked as much as he did about the past and about how the world could be changed by something as simple as cotton candy and people willing to walk away from the lives they were leading for a few hours. He wanted to believe that there was always going to be hope.

  But he couldn’t have known about the rise of The Disease. He couldn’t have foreseen the war, not really. He couldn’t have understood that his children would march off into a world he could barely recognize, both kids heading to the same place now but ultimately somehow heading in different directions.

  And when I thought back on it, Tommy and I have only ever been stretching apart, pushing away from each other, held together by the orbit of our shared genetics.

  * * *

  It was when I came out of the haunted house that I saw my brother. He was walking along through the narrow lanes of the fairground, looking at everything with a sense of wonder. He stared up at the Ferris wheel the same way I had.

  I came out and walked over to him, each step a little slower than the last, like the heartbeat of a dying animal.

  “This is it, huh?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure it would still be here.” He looked around at the rest of the fairground, his eyes fleeting from one to the other. I’ve always wondered about the gap between what we see and what others see. I wondered what ghosts Tommy saw. Did the parents in his mind look like the ones I saw?

  “They still use this place?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “The woman in town told me that it’s a big deal here. World famous, in fact. All because of Dad’s article. He’s kind of a big deal here too.”

  Tommy’s face was tight with thought. Then he turned to me. “How are you?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Not long now until the launch,” Tommy said. “You still think you’re going to be able to make it in time?”

  “I’m sure that I’ll be able to find a way,” I replied. “If we have to we can get on a bus. We’ll just have to be careful when we buy the tickets. And maybe we’ll have to use a fake name for you. That could actually be kind of fun. I’ve always thought you looked more like a Peter than a Tommy anyway.” I laughed, but it was not genuine. I could tell that Tommy knew it.

  “I guess you did it because I didn’t want to come along,” Tommy said. He looked down at his feet, as though they might tell him something that he did not already know. “Maybe you could have talked me into it, though. I mean, if you’d really tried. You’re smart enough to talk anybody into almost anything. So why’d you have to do it this way?”

  “I did talk to you, Tommy,” I said. No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t get away from the ball of guilt welling up inside of me.

  “No you didn’t,” Tommy said. “You told me what to do. That’s not the same as talking to somebody.” Finally he took his eyes away from his feet.

  “You just didn’t understand how important this is,” I replied. “That’s always been your problem, Tommy. You don’t understand how important anything is. That’s the reason you can’t remember anything. You choose not to. Because you don’t want to believe anything is important.”

  “That’s not true,” Tommy said. “It’s just that I’m not like you. I’m not special like you.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Stop saying what?”

  “All of it. Stop saying that you’re not like me. Stop saying that I’m special and you’re not. I’m tired of hearing that. I’ve been hearing that all my life
. I’m tired of being special. I’m tired of being alone. You’re just as smart as I am but you don’t want to show it. That’s all it is. This is just an act that you put on so that you don’t have to stand out, so that you don’t feel like a freak the way I do. And I hate you for it. I’ve always hated you for it.”

  The words came out faster than I could recognize them. It was like watching rain fall. Each word linked to the other, and all of them linked, eventually, to a part of my heart that I hadn’t known existed. Like suddenly opening a closet door in your home and finding a tunnel leading into darkness. You wonder if it had always been there. You wonder how it went unnoticed for so long. You wonder what that says about you.

  “I’m not special,” Tommy said. “That’s the thing that you’ve never really understood about me. Sometimes I just feel like an animal. There’s nothing in front of me, nothing behind me. I’m just here, in this moment. Sometimes it feels good, you know, to be able to cut away everything else around me and just exist in a certain place and time. And other times it’s the scariest thing in the world because I never know where I’ve been and I never know where I’m going. And nothing ever really seems to matter. It’s like floating in the middle of nothing.” He sighed and looked at me. “But the one thing I always knew was that you were there with me, in my corner. And because you had The Memory Gospel, we could always find out the truth. I could always know the facts of what happened. I could ask you about a certain day and a certain time and you could tell me everything. You’d be able to say where I had come from. And maybe even where I was going. And I always loved you and trusted you because of that. You guided my life. The thing I used to navigate everything that I otherwise couldn’t navigate. I trusted you. I trusted the fact that you were special to make up for the fact that I wasn’t special. The fact that I was just something that everyone would forget about one day. And maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, you know? There are always people that matter and then there’s everybody else.”

  “Stop saying that!” I shouted. “Stop saying you’re not special. Stop saying you don’t matter.”

  “So you’re going to tell me that everybody matters? That can’t be true.”

  “Not everybody. Just you.”

  Tommy flashed a smile, but it was gone so quickly it seemed like an illusion. “That can’t be true either,” he said.

  “I didn’t do it to hurt you,” I said.

  “You just don’t know what it’s like,” Tommy replied. “To know that you’re never going to matter in the world. To know that you’re never going to be famous. That you’re never going to have a great life. That you’re never going to see the world. To know that all you can really expect is to get a job somewhere and, if you get really lucky, maybe you don’t completely hate it. And then you spend the rest of your life doing that job and then one day you die. That’s the future for me. And I’m not being pessimistic. I’m just being realistic. That’s what life is like for most people. Most people live desperate lives in the darkness. And that’s the kind of life I’m going to live and I know it. I’m only ever going to be one of the people in the background of the photograph when something great happens. I’ll never be the person up front. I’ll never be the person to do the great thing.”

  “Tommy...” I began. But he held up a hand to stop me.

  “But when that draft letter came,” Tommy continued, “I actually felt special. I know everybody is getting those letters and that I’m probably not really special just because I finally got one of my own, but doesn’t mean it didn’t feel good. For once, I felt like I had really been chosen. I felt like somebody had said, ‘Yeah, we want Tommy.’ I thought I was gonna go off and be a soldier. Make all these friends in training and in the war. Be a part of something. And I’d always be able to share with them the fact that we had been chosen. And that would always bind us together. It would be special in its own way. We would make it special in its own way.” He shook his head. “It really felt like something.”

  “I’m sorry, Tommy,” I said.

  “Do you know how stupid I felt when I found out it wasn’t true?” Again there was the brief flash of a smile, but this time it was pained. “I argued with Gannon for almost an hour until, finally, I went and looked it up myself at the Draft Board’s website. Put in my Social Security number and waited for the result to come back. And boom, turns out I wasn’t there. Turns out I wasn’t chosen, after all. Turns out I wasn’t special, after all. And it was all your fault.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Tommy. I just needed you to go with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my brother. You’re my family.”

  “You just needed a strong back to help make sure you got there,” Tommy said. “That’s what I think. You needed someone to protect you and keep you safe. Watch out for you when you weren’t watching out for yourself. And I guess I was a good choice.” He forced a small chuckle, even as he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “I guess I’m special so long as I’m useful.”

  A moment of silence came and went between us. Tommy took a long look around the fairgrounds.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” he said.

  “I’m sure it’s prettier when it’s all lit up,” I replied.

  “Better be,” Tommy said. “After everything Dad said about it... I wasn’t even sure that you’d be here.”

  “Are you going to come with me?”

  “I’m going back to Gannon,” Tommy said. “This is your trip now.”

  “I need you, Tommy.”

  “I don’t need you,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  And then Gannon was there.

  “Virginia,” he said, stepping out from behind one of the nearby rides. He stood with his thumbs-in-his-belt look, the way policemen did on TV. “I believe you’ve got something for me.” He took his right hand out of his belt and patted the empty gun holster.

  “No,” I said, flat and even as Euclidean geometry. I reached inside my coat pocket and, as always, Gannon’s gun was there, heavy and constant, impervious to doubt and weakness. I was invulnerable as long as I had it. It steeled me in ways I didn’t know were there, in ways The Memory Gospel couldn’t. After all, memory was protection against the past. The gun was, in the end, protection against the future.

  Gannon took a step toward me.

  “Stop,” I said, my hand tightening on the pistol.

  “Ginny,” Tommy said. I had forgotten he was there. When I looked at him now he seemed small and frightened, caught up in something he couldn’t understand or control. Which was, of course, the story of Tommy’s life.

  “Don’t worry, Tommy,” Gannon said, taking another step forward. “She’s not going to do anything. She’s too smart for that. Aren’t you, Ginny?”

  “Only Tommy can call me that.”

  “Okay,” Gannon said. He looked around for a moment, taking in the sight of the abandoned fairground. “I imagine it looked a bit better back in its prime.”

  “It was beautiful,” I said.

  “That so?” Gannon replied. “How do you know?”

  “Our dad told us about it,” Tommy interjected. He had a thin bead of sweat on his upper lip and his eyes were darting from me to Gannon and back to me.

  “Why’d you bring him here?” I asked, finally looking at my brother, though my hand remained on the gun in my pocket, my finger rubbing back and forth against the trigger. It was soothing and terrifying all at once.

  “Because this can’t go on,” Tommy said.

  “Of course it can,” I said. “Nothing ever ends. Somebody told me that recently.”

  “Okay,” Gannon said, exhaling like a bull, “that’s enough of this.” He started walking forward.

  “Stop,” I said, almost in a whisper. My voice trembled and my hand shook, so I pulled my hand from my coat pocket, finally showing Gannon
the gun.

  It didn’t stop him.

  He took another step toward me, certainty in his eyes, the war in his eyes, swirling about him. Suddenly he was everything in my life that had gone wrong. My dead parents, the foster parents, The Memory Gospel, all of the days of my life that I would never forget, all of the moments that couldn’t be put away, all of the times that things hadn’t worked out, all of the times that life had been sad and broken and full of pain and someone said, “Time heals all wounds.”

  Time can’t heal my wounds because, thanks to The Memory Gospel, time didn’t exist. The wounds were still open and they always would be. And just now, Gannon was all of that. He was proof that the past couldn’t be put away, that it would always come for me. The only difference was that, with a small twitch of my finger, I could send him away forever.

  My finger tightened on the trigger.

  Gannon came closer.

  I held my breath, anticipating the sound of the gunshot...

  And then Tommy leaped forward, his fist swinging in a hard, wrathful arc that struck Gannon square across the jaw and knocked him to the ground. In my pocket, my finger twitched in surprise and the gun fired and blew a hole in my pocket.

  Gannon and Tommy both thumped to the ground and scrambled back, staring at me, wide-eyed and motionless.

  My breath caught in my lungs.

  “I...I’m leaving,” I managed. “Just let me go,” I said. “The both of you... Please.”

  I backed away, slowly, carefully, the barrel of the gun poking out of my pocket like the snout of some strange, hard animal. Then I turned and raced away and was soon swallowed up by the surrounding forest, hoping that it would take me away from Gannon, from Tommy, from everything.

  ELSEWHERE

  The house was empty now and that kept her up some nights. As with all empty houses, it’s not the space that bothers us so much as it is the sound of our inability to fill that space. If we were bigger, somehow, more than we are, then we could fill those ringing empty spaces and there would be nothing to keep us awake at night.