The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  “But what if you didn’t ever forget anything?” I asked. “What if you’d actually known, going in, that you’d be able to recall every second of every day you spent in the war just the way it had happened...would you still have gone?”

  Dini’s face tightened in thought. “That implies that I ever had a choice in going in the first place.”

  “But you weren’t drafted,” I replied. “You didn’t have to go.”

  “Yes, I did,” Dini replied. “There were a lot of bad things happening back then. My only option was to join. I knew since I was a kid that I would one day enlist. I just didn’t know what I’d be getting into. But I guess a person never really knows what they’re signing up for, not even when they do something simple like meet a new person. You never know who you’re meeting when you shake the hand of some stranger. So, for me, joining up was just like that: shaking the hand of a stranger.”

  “But you still didn’t really answer my question,” I said, quick as a flash. My hands tightened into fists. “If you knew that you would never forget what you saw there, would you still have gone?”

  “Yeah,” Dini said finally. “I suppose I would have.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was the way my life was meant to go,” he said. “And maybe never forgetting is the way it is for all of us.”

  I sighed, frustrated. “That’s stupid.”

  “Is it?” Dini replied. “We’re made of the days and weeks and months and years that came before. We’re all built from everything that’s happened to us, everything we’ve said or done. It’s all there, knocking around inside, making us act the way we act, making us do the things we do and say the things we say. You think I’d be sitting here with you right now if my life hadn’t had an impact on me?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I replied.

  “I think it is,” Dini said. He reached down and brought the coffee to his lips. “Let’s say for a minute that you can truly remember everything, that every single second of your life is right there for the taking.” He tapped his forehead. “Always has been and always will be. And every day—every second—the book of your life grows a little larger. So what? How does that change anything in this life? How does that exclude you from going to the war if it’s where you’re supposed to go?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Whether you remember none of it or remember all of it, it’s your life. We’re all afforded that.”

  I clucked a sharp, derisive laugh.

  “So, when did you get drafted?” Dini asked.

  “Was supposed to report in three days ago,” I replied.

  “It’s not the end of the world.” Dini folded his arms across his chest, looking chilly more than judgmental. “Are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. It’s hard to say when I had started crying. The thing about a perfect memory is that it doesn’t mean you see everything. There are always things you don’t notice until you’re wiping them away from your eyes. “I keep hoping that it’ll all stop, that someone, somewhere, will throw a switch and everyone will decide that there are better things to do with their lives. I keep hoping that people will just start talking more and shooting less. If I wait long enough, maybe someone will fix us all.” I looked down at the table. Where I had poured out the sugar packet I had etched the word PEACE into the sugar with my fingertip. “My dad used to say that things were different back then. Everything was better.”

  Dini was just about to reply when the bomb went off.

  ELSEWHERE

  For those who could afford it, there were other alternatives to wasting away from The Disease. There were places you could take your sick, slumbering loved one, places where they would be cared for in their unconscious existence with a degree of pampering and beauty that rivaled anything they had seen during their waking lives.

  Her name was Amber Shaw and she worked at one such place.

  For twelve hours a day she pampered those affected by The Disease. It was the quietest job she had ever had. She roamed the halls of the facility, checking in on the ever-sleeping-yet-still-alive patients. She turned on their favorite television shows or their favorite music so that they could hear the things they had most loved before they were afflicted. The facility where she worked did a wonderful job of producing pamphlets and brochures touting the theory that people in comas could still hear and feel and smell, that it filtered in somehow. It was all making a difference, the way rain three thousand miles away can dictate the weather for the rest of the world weeks later.

  She wasn’t very educated but she had heard someone who was call it The Butterfly Effect. She thought that was a beautiful name, and it made what she was doing feel beautiful, which was something she had never felt before.

  Day after day she came and went through the halls. She created playlists of music—something she took great pride in—and she would run the music for a few hours and then come back in and ask her patients what they thought of it. They never answered, but she decided that they enjoyed it.

  That was something that she had agreed upon a long time ago: even though the afflicted were perpetually sleeping, they were happy. Whatever dreams they were having—something else she had decided all on her own—they were good dreams, remembrances of their favorite moments: a kiss at the height of their youth, some small yet unfathomably important victory, the scent of the world in summer after the sky had broken open and everything is wet and lush and beautiful.

  Her favorite patient was Mr. Smith. He was in his midsixties and still handsome in that elusive Hollywood way.

  She knew for sure that he would have liked her. They had the same taste in music and movies. When she set up his TV for the day, she sometimes would sit there for a few moments and watch along with him—even though he wasn’t watching, only sleeping, constant and steady as a mountain. It felt good to be there with him. He liked absurdist comedies the most, like Airplane! and The Naked Gun.

  And those same movies had always been her favorites as well.

  If she’d been a few decades older or he a few decades younger, then maybe something could have happened between them. Something wonderful and glowing, something she had never been lucky enough to have on her own.

  So she would sit there with him and smile at the jokes she already knew and laugh at the jokes she had forgotten. And then she would go out and take care of her other patients, but when she had the chance she would come back by and look in on him—in her heart, even though she didn’t know it, a part of her was hoping to find him awake, sitting up in his bed, not necessarily waiting for her, but able to look at her with groggy, tired eyes and maybe say something nice to her like, “I dreamed about you.”

  She knew it was a silly and selfish thing to think, but maybe the end of the world was the best time to be silly and selfish.

  As things outside the facility got worse—bombings, the economy on its last legs, the war, The Disease spreading further and further into the populace—she was falling in love with him, whether she wanted to or not. But in this world, as everything seemed to be fading, what was wrong with love?

  FOURTEEN

  One of the few things Tommy did remember clearly—that had not drifted out into the sprawled sea of his forgetful mind—was the time he and I spent in the group home. For just over a year we had lived there, suffering beneath the weight of loneliness and lack of family along with nearly eight others—the numbers fluctuated, children came and went, sometimes being adopted by families but, more often than not, they simply ran away. It happened most in the spring. Tommy wouldn’t have thought that running away could have its season, like swimming, but it did. The long, hard winter always brought the bitter cold. So the children who wanted out were usually forced to endure until warmer weather. But their intention to leave was easy to see, even for someone like Tommy, who always struggled to know the
minds of the people around him. Since he kept forgetting what people had done before, he had even more trouble predicting what they would do next.

  But over the course of the winter he would see some of the others in the group home separating themselves from the rest. They suddenly became fascinated with maps, with cities and towns in faraway places. They would sometimes sit in the window and watch the traffic trundle past the old, rickety group home and they would stay there for hours, sometimes counting off the number of cars that passed. Other times, at the end of the day when dinnertime came, they would talk of license plates they’d seen. Always it was the plates from the faraway states that caught their imagination. Texas. Washington. Maine. Anywhere but here.

  After the winter snows and long, dark nights, one morning springtime would come knocking at the front door and the house would wake to find an empty bed and that would be the last anyone saw of the child.

  When he first heard the term “group home,” Tommy thought it implied a sense of community. It made the notion of living with people you didn’t know seem like something that could be tolerated, maybe even enjoyed. But if he could remember back to the beginning of his life, back to the crash and the time just after, he would find that foster homes, much like group homes, were about anything other than family.

  Tommy came out of that crash with a pair of dead parents and a scar on his outer thigh that, over the years, would recede so much that people—including him—would hardly be able to notice it. Someone had to know it was there, had to know the exact coordinates upon his flesh, and even then, it could have been waved off as just some type of beauty mark. Sometimes even Tommy had a hard time remembering that it was there and where it had come from. Sometimes he could convince himself that he’d simply gotten scratched taking a tumble on a bicycle, or horseplaying with me, or fighting with some bully in some school somewhere. It could all be explained away as anything other than the remnants of his fallen parents.

  Forgetting how the scar came to be made Tommy feel better about the fact that he didn’t remember his parents’ faces, the sound of their voices, the way it felt when they hugged him, or even if they had ever hugged him in the five short years he’d gotten to spend with them. A part of him knew that of course they had. But without the memory, without the ability to feel it in the pit of his stomach, to close his eyes and see them, it was just as easy to believe none of it had ever happened.

  In fact, sometimes forgetting was a blessing. A person couldn’t regret what they couldn’t remember.

  Tommy did not remember how, in the immediate days after the crash, the scar was just that: a scar. He did not remember how it was nearly an hour before the crash was found on account of the weather and the lack of traffic on that particular stretch of Colorado road. It was a young woman traveling alone who came upon the mangled metal barrier and the car that was beginning to disappear beneath the snowfall. After calling for help, she maneuvered down the slope and found the car on its roof and Tommy and me in the back.

  Tommy also didn’t remember how, not long after the crash, he and I had been put into a foster home but that I had been too much to handle and so Tommy, because he loved me and would not be without me, became too much to handle as well. Not long after that, we were both put into our first group home.

  At the group home children sorted themselves out based on a general scale of size—height, weight, build—more so than age. The teenagers were kept at a different group home on account of a public safety law that came after a fifteen-year-old boy was found in a closet with a nine-year-old girl.

  Tommy didn’t remember any of the kids he met at that first group home. He couldn’t remember the ones who sat up in the late hours of the night crying in lamentation of the lives they’d lost and would never have again. He didn’t remember the way I couldn’t sleep at night. He didn’t remember the way I would never talk about our parents no matter how many times he asked me to. He didn’t remember that he had asked me to because of the fact that he knew he was beginning to forget, that they were drifting away, shrouded over by the dark nothingness that eventually consumed everything in his mind. He didn’t remember how frightened he was when he first realized that, given enough time, he would forget even me.

  Tommy also didn’t remember the time when he was six years old and late one long winter night that stretched out like an unending highway, he awoke to the sound of my voice.

  “Tommy? Tommy, wake up!” I whispered.

  His eyes rolled open. For a moment I was little more than a shadow. Then he blinked again and saw me. “What’s wrong?” Tommy asked.

  I replied by pressing my finger to my lips, indicating for him to be quiet.

  “Come on,” I said, taking him by the hand.

  Tommy no longer remembered how I led him through the darkened corridors of the group home that night, tiptoeing over the creaky floorboards that always smelled of mildew and exhaustion, as if the entire house had seen its share of sorrow that it could not shirk.

  Tommy no longer remembered how the two of us made our way up to the upstairs bathroom, which had a window that led onto the roof. Once there, I opened the window and crawled through and Tommy followed without question or hesitation. We settled next to one another on the shingles, both sitting with our knees tucked to our chests, our eyes watching the heavens.

  “What are we doing up here?” Tommy asked.

  “Just be patient,” I replied, looking around. Then, after a moment, I stretched out on my back with my hands behind my head and stared up at the sky.

  Tommy did the same, eventually. The shingles were warm, somehow. They felt like small, hot rocks beneath his back and he found himself drowsy all of a sudden. “I like this,” he said.

  “It’s not bad,” I replied.

  I closed my eyes and I heard the small sounds coming from inside the group home. There were footfalls from children not yet ready for bed and the heavier thud of the house mother, Louise, thumping around on the bottom floor. She was a heavyset woman easily irritated but, in the end, not quite as bad as she sometimes seemed. She was always telling the children at the home about the importance of hygiene and staying clean. “Nobody wants a dirty child,” she would say, as though the children in her hair were applying for jobs when the potential parents came to see them.

  Tommy was almost asleep when I nudged him with my elbow. “Look,” I said, pointing at the sky.

  Tommy looked, but there was only the clouded sky and a handful of stars—city life affords so little of the heavens—and the moon. “Look at what?” Tommy asked.

  “There!” I replied, pointing a finger at the moon.

  Tommy looked, but noticed nothing different. The moon was round and the edge of it was dark the way it always was. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Just keep looking,” I said.

  And then, after a few moments, I saw the shadow at the edge of the moon slowly making its way across the surface. As the seconds turned to minutes the moon reddened and seemed to turn to blood, and all the while, the black shadow walked across its surface.

  “What’s happening?” Tommy asked.

  “An eclipse,” I said, wonder in my voice. “Do you know how much has to align for an eclipse to happen? Do you have any idea how many exact steps there are?”

  “No,” Tommy said flatly. “But I know you do.”

  “I do,” I replied slowly. I was quiet for a moment. Then, when the shadow had completely fallen over the moon and the night was at its darkest, I said, “Make a wish.”

  “A wish?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s good luck. Even better luck than wishing on falling stars. If you make a wish during an eclipse then it’s got to come true.”

  Tommy thought for a moment. “I wish Mom and Dad weren’t dead,” he said.

  “Wish for something else,” I replied.

  “Why?”

 
; “Because that can’t happen.”

  “But why not? It’s a wish, right?”

  “Wishes don’t work that way,” I said. “Don’t be a child.”

  * * *

  Because Tommy didn’t remember any of this, when Gannon asked him, “If you could wish for anything in the world, Tommy, what would it be?” Tommy’s reply, as immediately as a lightning strike, was, “For my parents to not be dead.”

  The three of them—Tommy, Jim and Bill Gannon—sat in Gannon’s car in the middle of an I-95 clogged with other motionless cars. As far as the eye could see on the road ahead there was only the angry red glow of taillights. Here and there people stood beside their cars, talking and looking off into the distance, all trying to discern why the traffic had been stopped in both directions on the highway. The answer would come later. For now, there was only the cruelty of waiting.

  Gannon took a deep breath and spat into the grass next to the highway. “I hate this shit,” he said.

  He looked down the road, then back to Tommy, grimacing all the while. “What would it change?” he asked.

  “What?” Tommy replied.

  Gannon reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it and leaned his back against the seat and looked around at the other cars stuck in Park on the interstate. “If your parents were here, if they weren’t dead, what would it change?”

  Tommy’s brow furrowed. It was rare that he was given a question by someone that was so easy and simple, even he considered it to be foolish. “It would change everything,” Tommy said derisively.

  “You sure about that?” Gannon replied, the end of his cigarette burning like a captured star. “I mean, can you say to a certainty what things would be different? How exactly would your life be better?”

  “This is stupid,” Tommy said. He stuck his hands into his pockets and tucked his shoulders up around his ears as if a cold wind swept over him. There were words he wanted to say, but they flashed in and out of existence, dancing on the edges of comprehension like the notes of a song playing from another room.