by Jason Mott
And The Disease...it was raging more than ever. At the latest report, a seventeen-year-old girl had fallen asleep and not woken up. The first Ember to fall victim to the disease. Who would carry on the war now? Who would carry on anything at all?
The end seemed very real now.
On and on and on the news went, stacking up the horrors of the day one upon the other, until finally Gannon switched the radio off.
“Damn this world,” he growled, sniffling not unlike Branigan had done earlier. “Just damn it all.”
* * *
It was hours later before Gannon finally spoke. The sun was cresting the earth and Tommy had fallen asleep in the long, quiet period of late night. “Do you believe any of it?” Gannon asked.
“What?” Tommy answered.
“This business about aliens.”
Tommy sat up and stretched and tried to clear his head. He didn’t remember any conversation about aliens, but that didn’t mean one had never happened.
“This whole Europa thing,” Gannon said. His eyes thinned out into small dashes as he squinted through the windshield. A mist was filling up the world beyond the car, thick as soup and gray and sad. Tommy felt the car slow a little. Gannon seemed uneasy by what might be hidden on the road ahead. “I don’t understand the idea that there might be something or somebody out there other than us. If you ask me, it would be a huge mistake for God to make something more than this planet. So all these scientists think they’re going to go out there and dig around on some planet and find something living.” He clucked a hard laugh, but it was clipped by the braking of the car as a pair of taillights swam up out of the fog. Gannon pulled at the wheel and the car lunged around the vehicle ahead, narrowly missing it.
“Virginia thinks it’s possible,” Tommy said. He made a fist with his hand and rubbed his thumb against his fingers.
“That cop back there,” Gannon said, “the one that talked to us. He’s about to lose his job. If something don’t change, there won’t be anyone left to pay people like him, people like me. They’ll work for a while after that, but it can’t go on forever. None of this can. It’ll all fall apart for him. He’ll linger for a while, trying to decide if this is really how it all ends, trying to live in denial, even as everything falls apart. That’s what people do: we live in denial. The water around us keeps getting hotter and hotter and we don’t believe it’s going to boil until it’s too late.”
“Can’t he just get another job?” Tommy asked. “Cops are everywhere. Especially now.”
“You’re missing the point.” Gannon shook his head and squinted even harder at the fog ahead. Even Tommy couldn’t ignore the fog anymore. The thick gray soup seemed to be pressing in, as if it might shatter the glass and come flooding into the car, drowning them both. “What might be out there and what he’s got in his hand are two different things,” Gannon continued. “And right now he’s got a wife and kid at home that he won’t be able to feed at the end of the month. Right now he’s losing his job. Right now he’s losing the thing he loved and letting down the people he loved. Right now, at this second, there’s no world out there. Who’s got time to dream about other planets with all of that going on?”
“Maybe that’s why we should dream about other planets,” Tommy said solemnly. “Maybe just because you can’t see what’s ahead of you or behind you doesn’t mean there’s not something out there.”
And then, because the universe has a long ear, a hunk of metal and fiberglass in the shape of a stopped car rose up out of the fog in front of them. Gannon stomped on the brakes. The car went into a slide and there was not enough time to stop. Forward, always forward. Like everything else in life.
Virginia,
You’re going to be smart. Very smart. You get it from your mother. She was a prodigy all of her life who, somehow, settled on a man like me. A man who had never done anything worth talking about. I grew up in a small house in a small town. I went to a small school and graduated. I got a small job and had small relationships with various women. Until I met your mother.
We met at a coffee shop. She was reading some book whose title I can’t remember and whose subject matter I, to this day, can’t claim to understand. But she looked happy. She was happy. The sunlight poured in through a high window above me, creating a long, rectangular stalk of gold that showed the thin layer of dust particles dancing in the disturbed air as the air conditioner kicked on with a thump. And it’s amazing how hard it is to find someone who looks happy in this life.
It’s odd that I remember all of those details. As a general rule, memory and I have always lived different lives. I can hardly remember the first girl I kissed or the first time I went swimming. I couldn’t tell you the name of any of my high school teachers and I’m no good at reciting what team won which Super Bowl with which quarterback. Memory is just a long, dark river for me.
But the day I met your mother, that memory breaks up out of the river like an island, glowing and trembling with life, always in sunlight, always in my mind. The date was October 21.
On our first date she told me the story of how her parents had made her a chess champion by the age of seven. There were magazine articles written about her, more than were written about most celebrities. But because of the nature of the sport—being that nobody much cared about it these days—she lived her life and went about her business and only talked about it on rare occasions, even though she wanted, more than anything, to talk about it.
On our first date we played each other.
We sat across from one another at her apartment. Her chess set was old and worn, the pieces chipped here and there, rubbed down by repetition. “I’ve had this my entire life,” she said, taking the pieces out of their boxes.
To say that we actually played one another is a gross overstatement. I moved pieces around according to the few rules of the game that I knew and she talked about growing up and being able to remember everything that had ever happened to her over the course of her entire life. “It’s like living in a cloud of time,” she said. “Every second that ever was is there, and all I have to do is turn my attention to it.”
Now and again she would remember that I was there and that we were supposed to be playing. She would move a piece, almost as an afterthought, and the move would confound me for the next ten minutes. I’d stare at the board, with my stomach doing backflips because I knew it was hopeless and the last thing a man wants to do is look hopeless in front of a beautiful woman.
While I sat there perplexed at the game, feeling the failure that was coming, she told me, “You don’t have to win.” A small smile lit across her face.
“Then what’s the point in playing?” I asked. I placed my elbows on the edges of the board and tightened my brow and squinted harder, like staring into murky water in the hopes of finding gold.
“It’s the act of sharing time that matters,” she said. “That’s really all any of this is about.”
I was too busy just then to understand that she wasn’t talking about the game. She wasn’t even talking about the two of us. She was a nihilist. In her heart of hearts, she didn’t believe there was any point in anything. To her, it was all just time and waiting for the end of time.
The end of time always comes.
The game went the only way it could. She won. I lost.
But that never mattered to her. For her, she was simply creating a moment that she could count. Like building a totem that you could carry around in your pocket to always be reminded of something. And when the game was over and I began putting the chess pieces back into their homes, she leaned across the table and kissed me.
It was a soft, subtle kiss that surprised me so much I said “I’m sorry” as soon as our lips parted.
“What are you sorry for?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Looking back on it now, I was sorry for bei
ng who I was. Sorry for being myself. She liked me and I could tell—though I could never understand why. And I knew that I had already fallen in love with her. So from then on our lives would be tied together. And I would never be as smart as she was. I could never sit with her and wax philosophical about the economy or science. At most, when I got lucky, I could string a few words together to make them sound like something special.
But even that was fleeting.
And so, when I really think about it, I was apologizing to her in advance for all the times when I would be less than spectacular. Less than brilliant. Less than the wonder that she was.
Because I knew that she would always remember them, each and every second of my banal and mediocre existence. She would catalog it and carry it around with perfect clarity and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. She would remember every way in which I was not perfect, even if I forgot.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her again.
And now I’m saying to you, Virginia, I’m sorry. Because one day you’ll be like her. Smart, full of remembrance, able to look back at these letters and see the smallness of the man who wrote them. You’ll look at his words and see little more than the language of a child wearing an adult’s clothes.
And maybe you’ll laugh at me. Maybe you’ll pity me.
Or maybe, like your mother, you’ll love me.
If I had my choice, though, I’d hope you could simply forget me. Forget the imperfections, let me be something greater than I am. That’s one thing that memory does. It softens the edges and polishes the dullness of those we love so that we can remember them how we want rather than how they are.
But you, Ginny, you’ll be stuck with everything just the way it is. And that’s a heavy weight. I see it on your mother’s shoulders sometimes. It pushes her down into the earth, makes her footfalls heavier.
Forgetting is a way to freedom. A way that I’m afraid you will never have.
So the only thing that I can say is to look to your brother. He doesn’t have what you have. I can see it. He’s like me. He’s normal. He’s simply a person who will come and go in this world. He will live a small life, marry, die a small death, and that will be perfectly fine. That’s the best any parent can really hope for.
Stick close to your brother. Don’t think he’s dumb because he isn’t like you. You’re twins, after all. Let the one half carry the other when the time comes.
SEVENTEEN
I had been skirting the thin tree line that ran parallel to the highway for the last few miles when I saw the lights of police cars flashing. I took a moment to think about what I should do next. There were three vehicles and one ambulance flashing silently, clogging the highway into a long disappearing line of cars as still as dead ants.
There wasn’t far to go now. Only a handful of miles to Titusville and the end of this all, but endings were always a difficult thing, I knew.
The headache I’d had since the bombing was still there, as reliable as the sunrise, throbbing between my ears. It was a concussion and I knew it. And the wound on my abdomen—that was tender and seemed to be widening, bit by bit—was some type of internal bleeding. I knew that too. And the blood wouldn’t stop itself. It would only continue seeping out from the insides of my body to the other parts of the inside of my body, drop by drop, like an ocean filling up the inside of a planet. I would die if I didn’t get to a hospital soon.
But after coming this far, what else could I do but march forward?
When I was close enough to the lights, I was able to see it, finally: framed by broken glass, a small blue car lay on its back like an insect. Wheels in the air, a broken thorax of transmission and exhaust parts offered up to the sky. A puddle of glossy black fluid painted the highway.
Tall, long policemen in winter coats stood with their hands in their pockets, staring off down the embankment along the roadside. One of them pulled out a cigarette, lit it—despite protest from another officer—and sucked on it so hard he drained away half the cigarette’s life in a single breath. When he exhaled there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them, then flicked the cigarette onto the ground and crushed it beneath his boot.
Shortly, a tow truck came along and pulled the blue car from the center of the road. The policemen watched the work with the patience of cows, each of them chewing something over in their minds as the tow truck gears whirred and groaned and sometimes seemed to sing—nothing happy, only their familiar, erratic dirge to broken things.
With the car moved away the police began waving a single lane of traffic through. One by one the lone line of travelers began to move. Horns blew in celebration. People yelled from the car windows poems of impatience: “’Bout fucking time!” and “Some assholes shouldn’t drive!” Still only one police officer beckoned the traffic past. The others stood solemn as headstones.
From the safety of the trees that shrouded me, I removed my backpack and shifted on a small, hilly spot that let me get a clear view of everything but, at the same time, kept me out of anyone’s main line of sight. My attention drifted from watching the police officer wave the cars through the one open lane to a large white cloth that lay in the ditch down at the bottom of the embankment. How I hadn’t noticed it up until now was difficult to say.
As if he knew I was there and had finally seen the important object that I was meant to see, one of the cops standing on the embankment stepped forward. He pulled his hands from his pockets and half walked, half slid down to where the white cloth lay in the muddy, brown ditch. He stood beside it with his fingers trembling at his sides, and when a small breeze came down out of the north, it fluttered the cloth and lifted one edge of it, and I caught a glimpse of the dead body—a girl, not much older than me—beneath it.
Then the wind stopped and the dancing cloth, like a magician who’s accidentally killed the dove, concealed its horror with fluttering white hands.
I scrambled onto my feet and threw my backpack on. I raced away from the road and back through the tree line. I thought I heard someone calling after me, but I could not be sure and I did not stop to look back as I broke into a terrified sprint.
I ran until my stomach hurt and my lungs refused to play along anymore. Then I stumbled and fell and cut my hand on a rock and, huffing the heavy, morning air, I coughed and the cough drove phlegm into my mouth and when I spat it out it was pink with blood. I barked a laugh and lifted my shirt. The purple-red bruise on my stomach was larger.
I swallowed and tasted blood and lowered my shirt and continued on.
My running had taken me into an open field. Hay bales were scattered here and there across the field like errant punctuation. On the far side of the field an army of pine trees stood and, behind them, cars drove southbound. It was the interstate again.
“Hell of a run,” a voice behind me said casually.
I turned so fast that I lost my balance and nearly fell. But there was a man’s arm there to catch me. He was lying on the ground in a green sleeping bag with his head resting upon what looked like a dress suit rolled up like a large pastry.
“Easy,” the man said, sitting up now that I had regained my balance and backed away. “It’s not like I came running into the middle of your camp. I was just lying here finishing off the morning sleep when you came stomping through here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just...” My voice trailed off.
“Doesn’t matter to me what you were ‘just,’” the man said. He closed his eyes and yawned. “You ain’t my kid so I don’t particularly care what you do. How old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Seventeen,” I answered. No one ever got my age right. He was the first. It was a flash of surprise in a long moment of pain. My stomach still throbbed and I felt tired and weak. And then, in the back of my mind, there was the dead girl on the highway.
“Yeah,” the man said, still speaking with his eyes closed. “W
hen I was seventeen I had left Georgia and was living in an apartment in Cincinnati with three women of varying ages and disposition.” He paused here to chuckle. “Good times,” he said. “Simply outstanding moments.”
I looked down at the man, trying to decide what my opinion of him was and what his ultimate intentions might be. Men alone were dangerous things. They made girls like me disappear.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
The man did not answer right away, so I asked again.
“No man, or woman, is an island,” the man replied with his eyes still closed, “but sometimes in life there are moments when you want nothing more than to float alone for a little while.” He cleared his throat and sat up in his sleeping bag. Then he stretched and moved the sleeping bag down to his waist. He wore a T-shirt that was surprisingly clean and unwrinkled for having been slept in. “I don’t suppose I’m going to be able to get any more proper sleep this morning, am I?” He did not wait for me to answer. “Well enough, though. It was very nearly time for me to get up and make efforts into taming this day.” He coughed again, clearing out the morning chill from his lungs.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.
“Waking was inevitable,” the man said. “So you did nothing that life was not, very shortly, going to do of its own accord. So in many ways, you are the thing that brought me into this world today, dear child.” He paused and considered what he said. Then, as he had done before, he chuckled to himself.
“My name’s Virginia,” I said.
“Beautiful state,” the man said. “Simply beautiful. Lived there for almost a full year. Lived with an older woman who liked cats entirely too much. Had dozens of them. Yes, ma’am, I’ve had my fill of cats in this lifetime. I don’t wish them any harm, mind you. But I’ve had my fill of cats.” With a few awkward movements of his legs, he managed to work the sleeping bag down so that he could properly stand. He wore a pair of black dress pants and handsome black socks and, just as with the undershirt he wore, none of them were wrinkled or crumpled. It was totally impossible to tell that he had slept in a sleeping bag the night before. He went through another round of yawning and coughing.