by Jason Mott
“What makes people like this?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Gannon replied.
“You know what you did to us,” Tommy said.
Finally Gannon switched off the television. He dropped the remote and turned and faced the boy. But his face was not hard or cruel, only worried. Perhaps wounded. “That’s just what your sister told you,” Gannon replied. “Tell me something, Tommy...”
Tommy felt his body tightening. “Yeah?”
“What did I ever do to you?”
Tommy thought for a moment. But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Tommy understood, then, just how much of what he felt about Gannon was because of things that I had told him over the years. Gannon wasn’t just a foster parent, he was the latest in a long line of them. And I had picked each and every one of them apart because I needed Tommy to stay with me. So when we finally got to Gannon, the seeds of that failure were already sown. Tommy understood all of that once he had a chance to think without my influence. Tommy was, for maybe the first time in his life, truly free. That’s what life without memory is: freedom. Pure and untarnished.
How could I ever compare to that?
To My Children,
After the two of you were born, there wasn’t enough of anything anymore. Not enough good news. Not enough sunsets. Not enough stories told by strangers. Not enough wind in the late afternoon. Not enough meteor showers. Not enough conversations about theories none of us understood. Not enough insects hovering together in the evening sun like small galaxies.
Now that our house was full there wasn’t enough of anything anymore.
I trained myself to keep an eye out for unequal doting. Maybe I’d give all of my attention to the son who would carry on the family name. The family legacy was never something I’d actually cared about until now. I thought about my father and my grandfather, the fact that they had literally lived and died in order for our specific genealogy to march forward, generation after generation, and that history, all those stories and sacrifices, were contained in our last name.
It mattered, all of a sudden.
And then there was the dream of Daddy’s Little Girl. TV commercials were the best at stirring this sentiment: a man stands in the middle of his kitchen, four daughters racing around him, laughing, fluttering around him like hummingbirds. In another scene they’re painting his nails. In another scene the youngest daughter’s voice comes in with the image of her father cooking dinner and says, simply, “My daddy is everything.”
I wanted what the television told me I could have.
Meanwhile I was still writing my articles on the good things of the world. I wrote a two-part story on newly minted fatherhood. My readership emailed me with their support. They called it “the greatest journey.” Clarence came into my office on the day it was published and said, “You realize you’re done now, don’t you?”
“I guess it all had to end eventually.”
“Nothing will ever be the same,” he said.
“That could be said of anything, really.”
He wiped the top of his balding head and rested his hands on the paunch of his belly. “I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Am I fired?”
“Hell no,” he said.
“Then what are we talking about?”
“We’re talking about the future,” he replied. He was beginning to sweat. Beads rose up on the top of his head like fog on a window. “We’re talking about life. We’re talking about the things in life a person is supposed to talk about. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s conversation about nothing.”
“But so far, all we’ve talked about is nothing.”
“That’s not the point,” he said.
It went this way for more than an hour. He fired volleys that hit nothing but air. I fired back, landing blows but never really being sure exactly what I was hitting or why. At the end of the day I went home and your mother was asleep on the floor of the living room, sprawled out like a murder victim. The two of you were on the couch, also asleep. I tiptoed into the kitchen and sat at the table and tried to replay the conversation with Clarence, trying to find something akin to meaning. But nothing came to mind.
I checked the news and there had been another bombing. Death had become the weather. Overcast skies and stabbing in Los Angeles. Rain and mass shooting in Denver. There was always a chance of clouds and gunfire, no matter where you lived. So when your day was done and you’d made it through, you came home and tried to see how everyone else had made out. Tornadoes and gunfire at a Kansas school. Which one had killed the kids would take weeks to sort out. If ever.
In our world that day there had been only light fog and a drizzle of rain and gray skies and a car crash.
I sat in the kitchen and listened to the breathing of three people in the other room. Your mother came in after a little while. She hadn’t left the way she’d promised, but knowing that she wanted to was enough to create a trap door beneath both of our feet. We kept waiting, day after day, for the fall to come.
She looked haggard, as though she’d lost a great battle. She flashed a weak smile. “I forgot to read the horoscopes today,” she said.
She forgot to read them more often as time went forward. Eventually she gave them up completely. Maybe she just felt overwhelmed by the reality of things around her. Or perhaps, she was just trying to think less and less about the prognostication of life. The past and present were tumultuous enough without adding on the pressure of trying to divine what might happen in the future.
She told me more often that she loved me.
I replied in kind.
Between confirming our love to one another we poured those words into you two. The books talked about all the different ways that people show their love. Words, actions, time, on and on. Love was a list of languages that we all spoke in our own way, and we felt it vital that the two of you, who were still too young to speak, be told in all possible languages that you were loved.
So every day the words “I love you” buzzed about our house. Every day actions of love filled up the corners and spilled out of our windows and we swam in love, trying to smother you two in it.
“I’m so tired,” your mother said often.
“It’ll be over soon,” I replied.
“I’m just so tired,” she repeated.
“I know.”
We said this to each other almost every day, in secret. The two of us still tiptoeing over that trap door that threatened to end our marriage. Sometimes we switched the roles around.
It wasn’t until Clarence died that we understood we couldn’t give you the world of our choosing, only the best of what was left.
THIRTEEN
It was right where I had left it in my backpack. The letter from the Draft Board. I couldn’t say why I suddenly felt the urge to stop and look at it, but I did. I was almost to Florida now, on a back road in Georgia lined with soybeans and old barns and pictures of the way things used to be back before the war. There weren’t many places like this left. Everyone lived in the cities, it seemed. The countryside was a dying breed in America. I thought back to that word PEACE that I had seen painted in the middle of a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. I wished I had enough paint to spread that word. To write PEACE in places it didn’t belong.
The letter was folded and creased and a little soggy from where I had gotten caught in the rain a few hours earlier. I had mostly dried out but the backpack was still moist in places, like a sweaty shirt that had been folded and left in the hamper.
On the front of the letter was The Free Chicken, the presidential seal that verified the recipient had been selected by the president himself to go off to the war and get themselves killed. It gave a person’s ending a sense of meaning and importance. At least, that’s what I figured the letter was supposed to do.
I was three days overdue now. That would be the end of it if I was found out. Three days overdue is officially dodging and the courts—as well as the people a person met in the day-to-day of the world—weren’t particularly kind to dodgers.
I stood and watched the letter in my hands for a moment, as if it might suddenly transform into something else—a bird perhaps—and flutter away.
But it never did.
* * *
His name was John Dini and he was famous for saying, “It’s easy to see God in life, but more difficult to see God in death. But He’s there, just like He’s always been.”
John Dini had served three tours in the war and had come home without a scratch. Not even a bruised knuckle. And to make matters even more dramatic, it was soon discovered that he could write rather eloquently about what he had seen in the war. He’d written two memoirs and seventeen articles on the subject of the war and of survival, and I had read and relished all of them. So I took it as a sign of predestination that when I came into Jacksonville, Florida, I saw posters advertising that Dini himself would be holding a reading at the local bookstore.
For a while after our meeting I had been worried about encountering Tommy and Gannon again. But the world, small as it sometimes could be, was big enough for me to get lost in, if only for a little while. More than that, there was a part of me that wished that Tommy and I could go our separate ways. That we could leave one another alone and that he wouldn’t be there in Titusville when I got there to see the launch. Maybe if my brother got away from me before the war, he could be happier. He could be better. Maybe the only reason he forgot everything and thought so little of himself was all the ways I had taught him to do that. Maybe Tommy was “less” because I had tried to convince him that I was “more.” Even though, in the end, all I really wanted was to fit in the way he so easily could.
But these are the types of things a person realizes too late.
I knew that Gannon and Tommy would find me. But I knew it wouldn’t be now.
The sky was black and rain fell in a stiff wall ahead of me when I arrived at the bookstore. A crowd was gathered out front, some of them protesting, others counterprotesting. A lone police officer stood by the door of the bookstore with his arms folded and his attention elsewhere, as if his job wasn’t worth doing anymore.
The inside of the store was small and cluttered with books, as most bookstores tend to be. There were long, winding aisles just barely wide enough for two people to pass one another without bumping. The entire placed smelled of mildewed paper and parchment mites. At the far back of the rectangular building was a large chair on which the war writer sat. I made my way to the back of the store, squeezing past the other people who had come to hear his reading.
Most of the people who came to see him were around my age. There were a few older people, many of them war veterans who wore their uniforms out of respect for the war writer. But for the most part, it was the young who came to hear him speak because, more than anyone, the young were the ones being the most affected by the war. They were all within a year or two of being draft age. Why wouldn’t they want to hear more about what might be waiting for them if their name came up in the lottery?
The area around John Dini was small and crowded. He was a small man with a leather, pockmarked face and a wiry gray beard that hung down from his face like moss. His clothes were too large for him, which made him look even smaller. He looked as though he was happily shrinking into oblivion and he wanted everyone to know it.
There was nowhere to sit when I finally made it past the crowd. The bookstore owner pointed at me and hissed for me to find a place to sit. It seemed that I was holding up the start of the reading—or perhaps had even interrupted its beginning. I looked around but there was no space. Dini cleared his throat and pointed at a small circle of carpet at his feet. It was the only unclaimed spot left, and I took it.
Dini began to talk about the final hours of a man named Phillip Horowitz and the end of his life: “In his final moments,” Dini said, “Phillip became a poet philosopher. We could hear the gunfire and explosions coming closer, and I told Phillip that it would be better if we kept moving, but he was in no shape to move. He clutched at my hand—his blood slippery and warm in both our palms—and he looked up at me. ‘Write this down,’ he begged. ‘Get all of this. I’ve figured it all out.’ He choked on his blood for a moment, then continued: ‘It’s all a dream—every flicker of it. We dance and we dream and then the dream dance ends. I’m not immortal,’ he said. He repeated it again and again: ‘I’m not immortal. I’m not immortal.’ It was as though Phillip had reached into his pocket and found the sun hiding there—among keys and lost change and lint and unused condoms. There was wonder in Phillip’s voice. Wonder and awe and reverence. ‘It all ends,’ he said. And then, after a few pulses of resistance, for him, it all ended.”
The reading concluded not long after that. People struggled to find questions to ask and Dini struggled to find the desire to answer them. So, slowly, the crowd dispersed.
It was after the crowd was gone and the bookstore was locking the doors that Dini finally came walking out. He looked smaller than he had only a little while ago, as if being out in the real world had reduced him down into himself, inch by inch. He carried a leather satchel slung across his shoulder and he kept his eyes lowered as he walked to his car. Perhaps that was why he didn’t notice me as I came walking up behind him.
“Excuse me?” I called.
He jolted, turning on his heel so fast he nearly lost his balance.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Dini looked me up and down. “It’s okay,” he said. Then, “So which is it going to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re either here to start an argument or ask me for advice.” He shifted his shoulders beneath his overcoat and sighed. “So which is it?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said truthfully. I didn’t know exactly why I had waited around for him. I only knew that there was something I wanted to ask him. Exactly what that something was, I couldn’t say.
“Well, suppose you buy me a cup of coffee until you figure it out,” Dini replied. “I could use something to drink.”
“Okay,” I said.
The coffee shop was small and smelled like bread and cinnamon. A couple sat in the far corner, holding hands across the table and whispering to one another through thin smiles. They looked a little like my parents once did.
“Over here,” Dini said, heading for a table in the window. “I like my coffee black.”
I nodded and got his coffee. When I came back I found Dini staring out the window. It had begun raining again, coming down in long, heavy streams that flickered in the lamplight like moths as they fell. There was the din of applause as the rain hammered the street. Cars sizzled.
“Did you like the show?” Dini asked.
“The show?”
“The reading,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “I’ve never really gotten the hang of it. You probably wouldn’t know it to look at me, but it gives me panic attacks. Bona fide panic attacks.” He patted the pocket of his overcoat hanging on the back of his chair. “They gimme pills to help with it. There’s a pill for almost everything nowadays.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“This,” I said. “Writing about the war.”
Dini took a deep breath and sipped his coffee before speaking. “Years.
I try not to keep count of it.” His mouth tightened, then relaxed into an embarrassed smile. “Used to didn’t think I’d actually live to see thirty, much less wake up one day having spent just that long talking about the same thing over and over again.”
“I suppose it happens fast,” I replied. “At least, that’s what my father used to say.”
“‘Fast’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” Dini said. “More like it happens suddenly and all at once. You try to keep up, but then you can’t. It just all kinda stacks atop itself, one piece at a time. One day you’re coming out of high school and joining the army. Next thing you know you’re almost sixty and you’ve been doing nothing but talking about a time in your life that happened so long ago that when you see pictures of yourself, somebody else has to convince you that it’s actually you.” Dini laughed then, a loud, deep bellow.
“It sounds like you don’t really enjoy it,” I said.
“I’m not really sure what that word means anymore,” Dini replied. “I do it because it’s what I do. It’s who I am.”
I looked out of the window and into the city. A woman jogged past, ignoring the rain and cold, going about her exercise as if it was high noon on a spring day.
“Does it ever get any easier?” I asked.
“Does what get easier?”
“Remembering.”
Dini thought for a moment.
“I’m not really sure,” he said. “Remembering things is never really a hundred percent. So I’m not really writing about the facts. I’m just writing about everything that I think happened to me. Sure, sometimes I get things right—but it’s not a guarantee. And I’ve come to accept that.”