by Jason Mott
After I had walked a little more I came across a small store nestled in the corner of a large building. I walked inside on account of how the rain had gotten heavier and I was soggy and wanted to change my clothes and pretend that I would be able to forget what I had just seen and what had just happened.
The bell above the door rang as I entered. A lone night clerk stared at me from behind a counter. He looked past me as the door swung open. “What happened?,” the man asked. “Did you hear that boom? I keep seeing cops go by here but there’s nothing on the news.”
“Bathroom?” I said, caring nothing about his curiosity.
“Do you know what happened?’ he asked, this time standing from his seat. It was obvious that he wanted to run out the door, race off into the city to see for himself what had happened. But he didn’t. Maybe simply because he couldn’t afford to lose his job. Or maybe because he was afraid that whatever horror had come for the people at the epicenter of the turmoil would pull him in as well.
Whichever fear it was, the fear held him to his seat behind the counter.
“I just want the bathroom,” I said, trying not to sound as frustrated as I was.
“Customers only,” the man said.
I walked up to the counter and picked a pack of gum and placed it on the counter. The man rung it up and I paid for it and went to the bathroom without a word.
The bathroom was small and smelly, but warm. When I undressed I noticed the blood trickling from my stomach. There was a wound just beneath my rib cage, a cut of some sort. It only began to hurt after I noticed it.
I winced as I touched it. It was deep, whatever it was. I searched my memories, trying to remember how I had gotten it, but nothing came to mind. Obviously it had come with the explosion, but it was the first time in my life that something had happened to my body that I couldn’t remember. It was the first time The Memory Gospel had failed me.
The more I inspected the wound the worse it seemed to be. As I looked at it in the mirror it seemed to grow longer and deeper. The pain from it grew more and more present in my mind and I wondered how I hadn’t noticed it to begin with. It was almost unbearable.
With trembling fingers I touched the wound. The pain from it made me yell out. I clenched my teeth and tried again.
The more I dug at the wound the more it bled. I was naked now, standing in the middle of the bathroom, staring into the mirror, watching my own blood trickle out of my body and run down my stomach and down my thigh and splat in drops upon the floor.
But I couldn’t stop.
I continued sticking my fingers into the wound until I felt something smooth and thick. Something that felt like the corner of glass. I was crying now. Fear and anger and rage and more fear again. I reached into my backpack and searched for something to pull out the glass or whatever it was that was inside me, making me hurt and bleed.
I found nothing helpful. So I went back to using my fingers.
It was long, painful work. But in the end I pulled a three-inch-long shard of glass from my torso and it clattered to the sink. The blood flowed and I couldn’t help but wonder how badly I had hurt myself.
* * *
“You were in there long enough,” the cashier said when I finally came out of the bathroom. My stomach was still bleeding and it seemed to hurt worse now than it had before. I staunched the flow of blood with paper towels and made the decision that everything was going to be okay.
“What’s the matter with you?” the man asked. “You look sick.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I walked over to the row of coolers and picked out two large bottles of water. Then I found the row with first aid and picked up ibuprofen and bandages.
“Seems like you might not be okay,” the cashier said, looking at the haul.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The man began ringing everything up. “Heard what happened?” he asked. “There was an explosion! People died!”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s all you got to say? It’s terrible! Everything’s terrible out there, I swear.”
I nodded. Once again I saw Dini—both alive and dead—in my memory. The Memory Gospel had cataloged him well.
“And then there’s Florida,” the man said. “Wonder if they’ll still launch that thing. Ain’t nothing safe these days.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rocket,” the man said. Then he nodded to the television.
I turned and saw on the television an image of Cape Canaveral and the rocket for Europa that was waiting to be launched. Beneath the image was the heading Explosive Device Found on Launch Pad. Mission in Doubt.
“No,” I said.
“I know,” the man replied. “Be a damn shame if they wind up never launching that thing after all these years, you know?”
He was wrong, as so many of us were. The launch would happen on time, if only because it had to. People needed to see that there was something wondrous that could still happen in this world. And no one needed that more than me.
ELSEWHERE
It was the longest they had been alone together in years and whether it was a blessing or a curse was left to others to be decided. Mostly they agreed that the best thing to do was simply tuck themselves away and wait for it all to end. But being tucked away in a home that spent decades holding a family between its old walls, and that was now bereft of the sound of laughter and the thump-thump-thump of childish footfalls, was a strange type of torture.
They were in their fifties and their children had been grown and out of the house for a decade now, but at least they used to come and visit. Nearly every weekend they came by and brought their grandchildren and the sound of laughter once again rose like a tide that filled the house and spilled out into the yard and seemed to bring the very trees to life, like a summer breeze pushing away the August humidity with a soft, cool palm.
But now everything was stagnant and quiet.
They were all that was left in the house, and soon they too would pass away—fall asleep like everyone else seemed to be doing.
She was taking it all worse than he was—which was not to say that he was immune to the sadness that crawled around the edges of their world. He missed their children as much as she did. Hadn’t he been there for them just as much as she had? Hadn’t he had as many sleepless nights and headaches and belly laughs as she had?
But maybe she really did feel it deeper than he did. She had always been more sensitive that he was. She cried at movies even when all a person was supposed to be doing was laughing. She seemed to find a sliver of sadness at almost anything, but he had never once called her a sad person. It was simply that she seemed to feel too much.
Of course she was grief-stricken now that they had told their children to stay away.
That moment was a particular type of hell, even after six long months.
It had all happened over the phone because he knew—and so did she—that they’d never be able to do it in person.
“It won’t be forever,” he lied. “It’ll just be until they get this thing cured.”
“But you and Mom shouldn’t be there by yourself,” his oldest daughter Sheila said. All three of their children—Sheila, Matthew and Paul Jr.—were on the call together, all of them yelling and talking over one another, just like they had back when they were younger. Which, of course, made it all the worse.
“We’re not invalids,” he told the three of them. “We’re barely sixty. We’ve still got a few decades left.”
“What about the house?” Matthew asked, pragmatic as always. “You all got things secured? There have been break-ins.”
“Not around here,” he said, proud of his son for thinking of such a thing, because it had been on his mind too but he hadn’t wanted to bring it up. “This neighborhood has always been too boring for anything bad to happen. You th
ree know that.” And then he chuckled because he knew that they couldn’t see him smiling. Neither the smile nor the laugh was genuine, but there was no way for them to know that.
“Can we talk to Mom?” It was Matthew, the youngest and most delicate of the three. He had always been the one that took the most after his mother.
“Your mother’s upstairs sleeping,” he said—another lie. “I wanted to make this call by myself. But she’s in agreement with everything I said. It’s the best thing for everybody.”
“I want to talk to Mom,” Matthew said.
“Not right now,” he replied. “I’ll get her to give all of you a call soon. How about that?”
“Is she okay?”
“Of course she’s okay,” Paul Jr. butted in, just like he always did. He was the type of boy who had always kept his bedroom in order, and now he was the type of man who made his children organize their Lego blocks by color when they put them away at the end of the day. He was exacting, but he loved his children and so that made him a good father. “Dad wouldn’t let anything happen to Mom. You know that.”
The phone call went on this way for half an hour. It was a rubber band of everyone pushing the conversation away from their mother, and Matthew—God bless him—always bringing it back again. When Paul had been bounced around too much he said, simply and flatly, “Okay, I need to go now.”
“I’m coming over,” Matthew said.
“No you’re not,” he replied. “Paul Jr., it’s your job to keep your brother away. They still don’t know how this thing works and the last thing I need is for any of you to somehow get it. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Paul Jr. said.
And then Matthew protested again and promised to drive over, but he had been living with his brother for the last few years and Paul Jr. was confident that he could keep him home.
But their father wasn’t so confident. After the phone call was over he went upstairs where his wife was sleeping—over twelve hours now. He tried one more time to wake her and she resisted him by continuing to sleep, continuing to lie there peacefully, as if there was nothing at all wrong with the whole of the world. It was how she had always slept, which Paul had always loved about his wife. As much as she stressed and fretted and worried, she could sleep anywhere—on planes, on boats, in cars, even standing up once or twice over the years. Paul had been tortured by an inability to sleep anywhere but in his own bed. And as a result, he hated traveling on account of how he was always tired and groggy and was always tortured by the sight of his wife sleeping just as pleasantly as she pleased, while he sat awake at 3:00 a.m. watching infomercials and regretting his decision to leave home.
And now he would leave home one more time.
He lifted his sleeping wife and put her into the car. He didn’t know where he would take her, but only that it would be someplace where their children would not find them. The last thing he ever wanted was to be a burden to them. He was, after all, a pragmatic man. And he knew that it was better to have them wonder, because as long as they wondered they could have hope. They would think that he had simply left to keep them safe, which was true. And he could call and maybe make up stories about why she wasn’t coming to the phone. That could work for a while. And if the day came when the truth was necessary, he would cross that bridge when he came to it.
But for now, he could postpone that. He could preserve his children’s memory of their parents for just a little longer.
With his wife loaded into the car he went back inside and collected their packed bags. He was tired and beginning to feel sleepy, but that was okay because once he got in the car and on the road the air would wake him.
After everything was packed he closed up the house and locked it tight and went back to the car. She was still asleep, peaceful and happy. He rubbed his tired eyes and took a seat behind the wheel and leaned over and kissed his wife once more and, before he knew what was happening, he was fast asleep.
And that was how their children—led by Matthew—would find them, propped up against one another in the car, sleeping more deeply than he ever had before, perhaps dreaming of his wife right up until the end.
SIXTEEN
Gannon and his father and Tommy were somewhere in the Florida Panhandle when the news of the bombing came over the radio. Seven lives snuffed out in a puff of wind and rubble. Gannon reached over and turned up the radio, as if hearing the news at a higher volume could do something to make it less terrible. It filled the car with dread and fear, with a sense that everything was going wrong.
The broadcast concluded with an announcement that, because of the bombing, checkpoints were being set up throughout the state of Florida. The governor’s voice came crackling over the radio, warm and confident, promising that law and order would be maintained and that people in need would be taken care off. He called for prayers and offered his own. Then he was gone and, as if he had put them there himself, blue and red headlights of police cars flickered ahead on the highway.
“What’s the world coming to?” Gannon asked. “I can’t believe this, Pop,” he called to his father.
A tall, young policeman standing in the center of the road motioned for Gannon to stop as they neared the checkpoint. “License and registration,” he said when Gannon rolled up and lowered his window. The air outside the car smelled of oranges and humidity, even now in the dead of winter, as if the earth needed to hold on to the smells of spring to remind itself that things would soon get better.
The young policeman’s nameplate read Branigan.
“Where you headed?” Branigan asked, looking down at Gannon’s license. His eyes were puffy and his voice was wet, as though he had been crying. “You’re pretty far from home,” he said. Then he took a step back and looked at Gannon’s car, probably wondering why it was so many states from its jurisdiction.
“Searching for my daughter,” Gannon said.
“Jesus,” Branigan hissed. “Amber Alert?”
“No,” Gannon replied. “Just a...well, just a kid trying to show me that she’s an adult. Know what I mean?”
Branigan leaned down and shone a flashlight into the car, into Tommy’s eyes. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“My son,” Gannon said.
“He don’t look much like you.”
“Foster.”
Branigan inhaled, seemed to mull this over for a moment. “That true?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “He’s my foster dad. We’re going down to the launch. My sister’s on her way there.”
Branigan paused for a moment, still keeping his eyes on Tommy. Then he nodded and aimed the flashlight at Bill Gannon in the back seat. “And this one?”
“My father,” Gannon said.
“He okay?” Branigan asked.
“He’s fine.”
Branigan squinted. Bill only sat there, oblivious to the world, trapped inside himself. “He don’t look fine,” Branigan said. “He looks like he might have that disease.”
“He doesn’t,” Gannon said. “And even if he did, you know a cure for it? We’re in the car. Ain’t nobody else going to catch it.”
Branigan didn’t seem convinced.
“It’s all on the downslope anyhow,” Gannon said. “Just let us go.”
After a moment, Branigan said, “I got lucky. My old man died before all this.” His voice was heavy again, tired, like the wind at the end of a long day of blowing against a mountain it could not budge. “Move on along,” Branigan said, waving the car through.
Gannon nodded and shifted the car into gear.
In addition to the bombing that had happened in Jacksonville, the radio told Tommy about a school in Michigan where a student had walked into a basketball game and started shooting. The early reports were that two students were dead and others were injured and the gunman was still on the loose after having raced out of the
gym in the midst of the panic. It was unclear whether he had planned to kill only those two people or wanted to kill many more.
In London there was a knifing on a train. In Japan there had been a mass suicide. In Afghanistan troops on both sides of the conflict had been killed but there was less insistence on keeping count of that because people were supposed to be killed in war. In California a man walked into a bank and took five tellers hostage. He didn’t ask for money, but for his wife and daughter to come and visit him. When the man’s family was contacted his wife refused to come see him and so the man surrendered not long after and wept when they took him away. He was heard apologizing.
The last of Greenland’s glaciers melted away. The newspeople called it “The Death Knell for the Planet.” On a small island in the Atlantic the seawaters rose up and finally, after millions of years of failing, swallowed it whole, never to offer it back in the lifetime of humanity. Near Hawaii a volcano was erupting. Millions of tons of ash was propelled in the air and people watched as soot rained down on homes and painted the paradise gray-black and, off the shore of the Big Island, a new island rose up out of the ocean, still steaming like a foal freshly birthed on an early winter’s morning. The scientists said they didn’t know how much longer the earth would continue to grow around Hawaii but, already, the real estate speculators were fighting over the rights to the fresh earth. “For once,” the radio quipped, “the old expression about how they’re not making any more land has been tossed out of the window.”
A famous singer died. Natural causes. A famous writer died. Alcohol poisoning. Tuna were put on the endangered species list along with tigers and elephants, who had spent generations recovering their numbers only to finally stop circling the drain of extinction and flush down into it.