by Jason Mott
“Just think about it for a minute,” Gannon said. “Really think about it.” He flicked the ash from his cigarette, then stared over at Tommy. “Reality has nothing on imagination,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to think about all the ways things would be better if they were different. We like to think we can fix everything that’s broken. We can fill all the gaps in our lives. But we can never really know.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The most I know about your parents is that they were smart. That’s what I heard about them when Jennifer and I first got told about the two of you. The social worker kept talking about your sister, saying how smart she was, so smart in fact that it made folks find out more about her parents. Kinda like she was a genius or something and everybody had a duty to find out where she’d come from. So once we heard about your daddy being a writer, Jennifer insisted we track down his stuff.” Gannon shook his head. “I’ve never really had a head for that kind of stuff, but even I have to admit your old man had a way with words.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Tommy replied. He tried to remember some of his father’s words, anything from the letters he had written and that I still carried around inside of me, but nothing came to mind, as usual.
“You take after him,” Gannon said.
“No I don’t,” Tommy replied. He wanted to say something else, ask some question, but for the life of him the question never escaped his lips.
“I guess I can see why it’s easy to think life would be better if he were here with you right now. If your parents hadn’t died in that car crash. You think about all the birthdays you could have spent together, the hugs you never got, the Christmases you missed out on. I get that. But what if gravity didn’t work the way it did?”
“What?” Tommy asked.
“Think about it. What if gravity didn’t work the way it did? Then nothing would be like it is. Everything would be different. And it would be so dramatically different that we wouldn’t even be able to imagine the way things are right now. Everything we know and love about the world would be gone and we’d be too ignorant to even understand what we’d lost.”
“So you’re saying I should be glad my parents are dead?” Tommy asked. For the first time, Tommy was genuinely angry at Gannon. Throughout everything—from the moment he knocked Gannon unconscious, to the moment Gannon came and got him out of jail, to the confrontation at the fairgrounds with me, even to the fight he set up with the enlisted boys—throughout it all Tommy had never been angry at Gannon. Not really. In every case, he’d only ever done what he felt he should. There was some internal compass guiding him, telling him to protect his sister even if it meant fighting Gannon, but there was never any hatred.
Tommy was, after all, an animal of sorts. The type to act because an action needed to be taken, not because there was poetry behind the action.
“I’m not saying you should be happy,” Gannon said. “I’m just saying that you shouldn’t define yourself by their deaths. Yeah, maybe some things in your life would be different if they were here, maybe even better, but that’s not going to happen. This world is the only way it can ever be. Wishing it away will never get rid of the moon. My daddy used to say that.”
Hours later, when the traffic finally began moving again and the long line of lights up ahead started forward and, eventually, Gannon and Tommy were able to continue on their journey, they would find out over the radio that a man had come out into the middle of the highway, doused himself in gasoline, and set himself alight, all in the hopes of stopping what couldn’t be stopped, wishing the world could be some way other than it was.
“The world can only be one way,” Gannon said.
To My Children,
The Terrifying Nine. That’s what we called the months your mother was pregnant. We bought the books. We went to the classes. We watched the videos. We listened to the tales and divinations of old women who told us that hanging garlic above the bed would make sure you were both born right-handed and that your wisdom teeth came in uneventfully. It all seemed perfectly sane at the time.
I had a conversation with my mother that lasted for three weeks. The subject: how a baby’s poop is a barometer for health. We talked about colic. Tried not to talk about SIDS. College savings plans, vaccinations, hard-soled training shoes, how to get the best deal on gently used OshKosh coveralls and their legendary resilience. Topics came and went and, all the while, your mother and I watched her belly swell and heard that drum of life beating beneath and we felt small and afraid—suddenly we were children ourselves—and all we wanted was for someone to come into our lives and tell us what to do.
Neither of us slept for those nine months. Yes, we closed our eyes in the late hours of the night, and sometimes we even slipped into unconsciousness, but to call it sleep is to call a flashlight a bonfire. I had recurring nightmares: a child somewhere in the bowels of an unnavigable house; standing before two small graves, uncertain of how I got there; kidnappings; forgetfulness; distraction; all the ways that a parent could fail and a child could be lost.
Nine months of it wrung us out. We felt small and fragile. Then she started labor and the fear went away. Nine hours of adrenaline later, we had the daughter and son fate had promised us all those months ago.
Virginia, you came into this world just after sunrise. Tommy, you came just before. I told your mother that because you’d both split the light and darkness, you’d never get along as siblings. I’ve never been one to subscribe to omen and superstition, but it sounded a little poetic and it made your mother smile.
She slept for hours. It was a little after ten in the morning when she awoke and the nurses brought the two of you in and she held you as the television on the far wall of the hospital room glowed and the news came in.
On your birth certificate, forever and ever, it will say that you were born on September 11, 2001. But it will never explain to you how things were before that day. It will never tell you how your parents cried as they watched the world change on the day their children were born. We wept for the dead and the living, because we knew nothing would ever be the same. The two of you would never know the world as we did. And there was nothing we could do about it. From the day you were born, we knew the extent of our powerlessness.
CELESTIAL ENCOUNTERS
FIFTEEN
Everything hurt and the world was ringing. That’s all I knew for certain. My legs were heavy and there was the feeling of something wet pouring down on my face. It felt like a massage in a strange way, as though I had finally done something right, something that I could be rewarded for finally in this life.
It took a long time for my eyes to wind open. And when they did I found them half covered in dirt and soot and something else. When I wiped away the dirt I was finally able to see that the wetness falling down upon my face was rain, still spilling from the now black sky. The streetlights were all blown out, dark and open as a grave. Best I could tell, the lights were out everywhere across the city. The pendulum had swung in the direction it was always destined to. The darkness of the universe had come back to claim what was eternally its own.
But at least the darkness had brought the stars with it.
That was the one thing I’d always hated about cities: they swallowed up the stars. As I lay there in the rain, looking up through a small pocket in the clouds, I could see stars again. They shone in that soft, bright way. I counted them—something I hadn’t done since I was a child—and with each one I counted I felt myself coming back. The ringing in my ears lessened and, at last, there was sound.
Someone was screaming.
I turned, trying to find where the sound was coming from, but I saw only the long, heavy pile of rubble in which I was half-buried. On my first attempt at sitting up I trembled from pain and almost screamed, but was able to catch it in my throat. Then I tried again and made it to my feet.
The coffee shop was destroyed
. Everything gone, wiped away, as though a great, large hand had come along and simply scooped it up out of the earth. Such things were possible in the olden days, back when the gods were still a part of the world, when a person could burn incense or slit the neck of a bull and the gods would take notice. Would come down and provide.
But the gods didn’t help out anymore, I knew that. Mankind was on its own.
An angry red glare—an emergency light bleeding out from the ruptured arteries of a nearby building—lit up not far away, casting everything in a macabre, dangerous hue. Elsewhere, alarms had come together to create a symphony.
Alarms and screaming were the soundtrack of modernity these days. And somewhere behind it, there was the sound of rain, roaring like the applause of a television audience that had seen what had happened and approved.
After a long moment, I finally took my first steps into the rubble. I looked around for Dini. He had been right there in front of me before the explosion. But it was hard to even tell where the corner of the coffee shop had been. I found parts of the table, parts of the wall behind the table, glass shards from the window we’d sat in front of, but no Dini.
I limped in a small circle—clutching a stitch of pain in my side—and found someone’s head devoid of its body. I never found out who they were.
“Dini!” I called out. The reply that came back was the sound of someone screaming. It wasn’t Dini, but it was someone who needed help. I turned toward the voice and found a man half-buried in debris, holding his stomach. There was blood pooling thickly beneath him. The man screamed once more and then fell silent and limp.
“Are you okay?” a voice asked. I turned to see the runner from before standing beside me, her face full of terror.
“He needs help,” I said, pointing to the screaming man who was not screaming anymore.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked again.
“Help him!” I shouted, pointing at the man.
“Okay,” the woman said, jolting a little.
“Please,” I said. “I’m fine. Just help him.”
“Okay,” the runner repeated. “Stay here. You’re bleeding.”
I reached up and touched my own temple and when my hand came back down I found it slick with blood.
“See what I mean?” the woman asked.
I nodded. “I’ll be fine. Please take care of him.”
The runner finally turned to the man who was silent and motionless, still with his hand over his stomach and a puddle of inky blackness dripping into the dust beneath him.
I stood and watched as the woman went over to the man and called out to him over and over again. Then, maybe just because I couldn’t bear to watch any longer, couldn’t bear to find out whether or not the man was alive, I turned and resumed my search for Dini.
I limped over the dune-like rubble until, finally, I found him. He was in the middle of the street, lying on his stomach facedown with the rain drenching him and a couple of people kneeling beside him. I didn’t have to walk over to know that Dini was dead.
The bodies of protestors lined the streets. Some dead, others injured, some alive and seemingly too overwhelmed to do anything other than sit and hold their knees to their chests and cry. I walked through them like a ghost.
I wanted to talk to them, tell them all that it was going to be okay. I wanted to reach out and hold hands with each of them and hug them and remind them that the whole world wasn’t this way. But I knew better. It was like this everywhere. And maybe it had always been this way and always would be.
Who was I to tell any of these people that everything was going to be okay?
“It’s going to be okay,” I said anyway to someone as I passed. Then I said it again to someone else. “It’s going to be okay.” Then I said it again and again. Every time I came near someone I said it and I meant it. I gave them all permission to believe that the horror of today did not have to be the horror of tomorrow. I gave them permission to remember that things, even within their lifetimes, were not always this way. I gave them permission to remember that there had been days of their lives when the sun shone and the wind was sweet and the rain felt cool falling against their skin.
I gave them permission to believe that everything was going to be okay.
And then, though I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, I had made my way past all of the injured and past all of the rubble and into the city itself. There were ambulances finally and firemen and police officers and simply people running from their homes and into the night trying to help. There were people running away from the ruins, chasing down the memories of some loved one who may have been in the area.
On and on it went, and I did my best to stay away from the police or, if I couldn’t hide from their eyes, simply to appear as just another teenager making their way across the world. I reminded myself that just because I was dodging the draft it didn’t mean that everyone who saw me knew it. I was the only one who had any reason to be suspicious of me.
“Do you need help?” someone asked me. I turned to find a tall, thin man dressed in his pajamas standing beside me. Without asking he gently placed his hands on my shoulders and eased me down to a sitting position on the sidewalk.
I didn’t resist. I was tired and sleepy all of a sudden.
“I’ll get help,” the man said.
“No!” I snapped, and I grabbed his arm before he could run off. “I’m okay,” I said. I reached up and dabbed the place on the side of my head that was bleeding and just now beginning to hurt. It was quickly evolving into a gentle, dull throb deep inside my skull.
The man took off his shirt and pressed it to the side of my head. “You need to see one of the paramedics,” the man said.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I’ve been hurt worse wrestling with my brother.”
“So you’ve got a brother?” the man asked. “What’s his name?”
“Tommy,” I answered after a moment.
“Good,” the man said. “Tell me about Tommy.”
“What? Why?”
The man pulled the shirt from my temple, inspected the wound, then pressed the shirt to it again. “I’m just trying to keep you talking. I read somewhere once that when someone gets a knock on the head you’re supposed to keep them talking. Ask them questions about themselves. Make sure they remember who they are and all that.”
“I know who I am,” I said. “I remember everything.”
“That’s good,” the man said. Then he took a long look around. “But maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll forget parts of this.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t forget any of it.”
* * *
It didn’t take long for me to collapse against a wall and begin crying. I cried for a thousand reasons and I cried for no reason at all. I cried because I was still in pain. My head was bleeding and there were shards of glass in my right leg. I cried because Dini was dead. I cried for the couple that had been sitting in the corner, whispering to each other. I cried for the workers who had been stuck behind the counter that was no longer there. I cried for the people who came racing up, simply trying to help. I cried because my father had told me that everything was better back then and yet here I was, stuck in the here and now. I cried because nothing seemed as if it was ever going to be okay. I cried because I wanted to wrap my arms around Tommy and hug him and have me tell him that it was all going to be okay. I cried because I wanted to go off to the war and get myself killed because maybe that was the only way I was ever going to be able to forget everything that had happened to me, the only way I would ever be able to come to terms with the way the world was. I cried because I was afraid of dying. I cried because all I wanted to do was go away and be with Tommy and sit somewhere quiet and listen to birds sing and to the sound of running water and feel the sun on my face. I cried because of The Disease. I cried b
ecause if the war didn’t get me The Disease would. One day I would fall asleep and linger and linger and linger, unable to move but still be alive, alive and yet not knowing I was alive. That was what terrified me about The Disease. It was the fact that, for a few days before your body finally shut down, a person was caught in the middle ground between living and dead. Their families couldn’t let go of them but were too afraid to hold on to them. People became living memories.
I cried because the sun never shines at night. I cried because my father wasn’t here to see the Europa mission. I cried because my mother had never believed it was going to happen. I cried because sometimes there’s nothing else to do but cry. I cried because sometimes crying is the only way to fix something that’s broken.
I cried because I couldn’t fix it.
* * *
It was sometime later when I finally stopped in the middle of the street and opened my arms and let the rain wash down over me. It took away the blood and gunk and debris that had covered me. I had managed to find my backpack and carried it dangling from one arm and it didn’t seem as heavy as it once had.
The sunrise was still far away—assuming the sun would ever shine again—and so was the pain that had been pulsing in my head. It still stung, like a needle stuck beneath the skin, but it was bearable. And the rain had helped wash away most of the blood so that now I only looked like a girl who had been traveling alone and caught in the rain rather than a girl who had almost been killed in an explosion.
When I closed my eyes, I remembered sitting across the table from Dini. The next instant, he was lying on his stomach dead in the street and there was no time in between. He existed in both places at once, alive and dead at the same time. And I had a hard time deciding which it was. If time really was something that left a trail behind the way it did in movies and books, something that you could go back to, then he would always be alive and he would always be dead. That’s what memory of dead people was: it was Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time, just waiting to be looked in upon by those who dared.