by Jason Mott
“Someone died,” I said.
“What? Where?” the man asked.
“On the highway. A car accident.”
He made a tsk, tsk, tsk sound. “Terrible,” he said finally, looking off in the direction of the highway. “Always rough to start a day with the knowledge that someone has died. It makes things develop awkwardly from there on out. I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”
I thought for a moment. “Who are you?”
“My name doesn’t really matter,” the man said cheerfully. “You and I are strangers. And that’s really all we’ll ever be. So what does it matter if I tell you my name or if you tell me your name? We’ll both have forgotten before the sun is extinguished and the night comes climbing over everything.” He squatted and began poking about in the bottom of his sleeping bag, eventually retrieving a pair of black dress shoes that shone so brightly they looked as though they had just been polished. “I suppose I’ll see about breakfast now,” the man said, putting on his shoes. After he had his shoes on he picked up the roll of clothing he had been using as a pillow and unfurled it, revealing a suit coat, dress shirt and tie. And, like everything else he was wearing, the clothes were completely unwrinkled when he put them on.
Suddenly he was standing there in a full suit and tie in the middle of a field alongside a highway where a person had just died in a car accident, and he was so immaculately dressed that he might as well have fallen out of a men’s fashion magazine.
I had no choice but be intrigued by the man. He was just strange enough to appear as an illusion, a figment of my imagination. And the idea that, perhaps, he wasn’t real was enough to distract me from the blood seeping inside me. It was almost enough to distract from the death I had just seen.
Almost.
But I worked hard to let him distract me, regardless of whether or not he was real.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“You’ve already asked me that,” the man said.
“But you didn’t tell me,” I replied.
“I did,” the man said, rolling up his sleeping bag neatly. “I told you that I was sleeping, but now I’m not sleeping. So asking me what I’m doing now will most certainly provide a very different response from when you asked me before.” He considered this. “Okay,” he said, “I supposed it’s fair that you’ve asked me again. As my answer this time, I’ll say that I’m preparing to find breakfast somewhere around here. Yesterday, as I chose this place to bivouac, I noticed some naturally growing berries and a farmhouse less than a half a mile in the distance. Both of these should provide some type of sustenance to get me through the first third of the day. Which is really all anyone can ask for at any particular moment.”
“Do you know them?” I asked.
“Know who?”
“The people in the farmhouse.”
“No,” the man said. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
I was beginning to feel as though I was talking to a fortune cookie. Everything that he said was both direct and roundabout at the same time. I had read stories about genies and mythological creatures who spoke this way, only answering the wording of things rather than the spirit of them. It made my head hurt, but it fascinated me as well.
“How do you make your living?” I asked finally, feeling that I had finally created a question that would offer an answer I could feel satisfied with.
“I meet people,” the man said. He had finished rolling up his sleeping bag. He retrieved a small satchel from the brush from a place I had not noticed and tucked the sleeping bag into it. “I meet people and I talk with them and, invariably, they help me.”
“You’re a con man,” I said.
“A confidence man?” the man repeated back to me, considering the sentence as he said it. His face twisted into one of sustained thoughtfulness, as if the idea needed proper scrutinizing. “I suppose it does take a certain degree of confidence to do what I do,” he said. “But I’ve never considered myself a confidence man. I don’t take anyone else’s confidence. I simply meet people, talk with them, and they tend to help me. That’s all. I’m a stranger in their lives, and I’ve learned to take pride in being a stranger, and some people find comfort in that.” He seemed to like this answer. “There is nothing more comforting in this world than a person whom you do not know and whom you know will be gone soon,” he said. “They can become anyone for you in the brief time they are with you. You can tell them anything. Share anything. Give them burdens you have not given to anyone else, knowing full well that, when they leave, they will take the weight of that burden with them, leaving you lighter, more carefree, than you were before.” He paused and let the words buzz about in the air like fireflies. “It’s a beautiful thing, sometimes, being a stranger.”
I could not think of what to say, even though it had been said before by Connie back at the hospital as she prepared to deliver her and Nolan’s baby. It was as if she were there, bleeding through my memories the way my parents sometimes did.
I tried to properly understand everything that I had just heard, but I wasn’t sure that I was smart enough—or maybe wasn’t old enough, though I liked that idea worse than the idea that I was not smart enough. One thing that had always bugged me was people telling me that I would find some greater understanding when I got older. There seemed a fallacy in that, as if getting older was something that was promised so maybe a person shouldn’t work quite as hard at understanding a thing right now, at the age they currently were. And I had two dead parents, which proved to me that there was never a guarantee of getting any older.
“So,” the man said, “you’ve asked about the how and why of my life, so might I ask about yours? It’s obvious that you’re on the move. So why are you out here along this long, tumultuous road of being a vagabond?”
The man sat cross-legged on the grass where his sleeping bag had been, apparently with no concern for the cleanliness of his handsome suit. But I had a feeling that, as soon as he stood up, I would find that his clothes were perfectly cleaned and unsoiled.
“I’m going to the launch,” I said.
“Excellent!” the man exclaimed, tossing his hands in the air with excitement. He whistled. “Capital idea,” he said. “I absolutely love it. The whole human race is at a hell of a crossroads right now and you’ve chosen your path. That’s just terrific! The world needs more youth like you. You’re someone who’s chosen life in this world.” He raised a finger and pointed it at me to punctuate his point. “And make no mistake about it, that’s what the launch is: a choice of life. The only other choice is death.”
I started to ask a question, but the man continued:
“You know, I used to live in Titusville. Lived there for almost six years. Loved a woman there for almost twenty. I was an undertaker—though the current phrase for it is funeral director. But I liked it when I was called an undertaker.” He smiled and stood and brushed the back of his pants. Then he picked up his satchel and slung it over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I’ll be going now. There’s a living to be made out there and it can’t be done without the help of others. Know what I mean?”
I waved goodbye but the man did not see me. He walked without hesitation and without looking back over his shoulder. There was nothing but the forward arc of the world stretched out before him.
ELSEWHERE
The Morgan family was an old family. Which was to say that they were a family who had come into wealth many generations ago and, in the time since, had done a lot of things with that money to ensure that the Morgan name would continue to mean something in this world. For generations they had all worked hard, one after the other, owning land, donating to causes, enabling industry. On and on the narrative of success went, and now it had come down to simply two of them.
Harold Morgan had been the first to break tradition, the first one to not buy in
to anything. Ever since he was a boy he had cared less about the family name and more about books. His father, perhaps also getting tired of carrying the weight of the Morgan name, had doted on his son by building him his own personal library from the time the boy was able to read.
But that was a long time ago, decades, and now the boy was an old man, well into his seventies, and his father was still alive at ninety-five years old and the two of them were all that was left of the Morgan line on account of Harold being unable to have children and, perhaps even more than that, there was Harold’s general disinterest in people.
The only thing he liked about people was the books they wrote.
Books were the greatest thing humanity had ever stumbled across and, by some miracle, kept up for ages across the world. He was still indebted to his father for the library the old man had built him. And now that he was seventy the library was still his favorite place.
And now that the world was ending and his father had contracted The Disease, he could stay within his library and not feel bad about it.
There were servants to send out for food and to take care of all of those odds and ends that needed to be done. Six months ago he moved his sleeping father into the library and, each and every day, he sat and read to him for hours on end. He wasn’t sure whether or not those affected by The Disease could still hear what was going on around them. All that mattered was that they were together, the last two of the Morgan line, when everything came crumbling down. There was something noble and beautiful in it.
Every day Harold read. He began with his favorites, the classics that he had fallen in love with in his youth that had stuck with him over the years like familiar friends. His father, though he loved his son, had been an aloof man, especially after it became clear that his son would likely be the last of the line. The man had seemed disappointed or, perhaps, simply sad, like realizing that one has reached the final chapter of a novel they have been enjoying and would like nothing more than for the story to keep going and going.
But all stories must come to an end. So Harold read to his father, because that was as good an ending as he could dream up.
EIGHTEEN
The boy effervesced out of the fog. Smoke and water. Nothing more, perhaps, than a vision caused by the crash. Some type of brain damage. He looked to be about eight years old and he wore a three-piece suit manicured well enough to carry him to a christening or a funeral.
Tommy waved hello, because that was what he had been taught to do.
The suited boy standing in the fog smiled and waved back.
“Hi,” Tommy said.
The boy bolted.
Tommy didn’t know why he felt the need to give chase, but he did. He stumbled forward away from the highway without looking back to see that Gannon or anyone else was okay. In fact, he had no thought of Gannon, of me, of the war. Tommy pursued the boy with the focus of a parent.
The ground beneath his feet was wet and soggy, with a loamy smell so thick and wet he was not breathing it—it was simply pushing itself in and out of his lungs of its own volition. “Wait a second,” Tommy called out to the boy. “Hey! Wait up!”
But still the boy charged forward through the foggy gray dawn. The suit the child wore was only slightly darker than the fog, making him disappear and reappear over and over again as the distance between him and Tommy ebbed and flowed. He was like some memory stuck on the edge, always there and yet somehow never there. Tommy had a hard time believing that the child could move as quickly as he did. Then he realized it wasn’t that the boy was moving so quickly. It was simply that Tommy was moving slowly.
His legs were weak and the back of his neck hurt. His body was doing what it was told, but only barely. He listed to one side as he ran, favoring his right leg. But still he chased the boy that was made of fog.
And then the boy was gone. Finally consumed by the milky swell of air.
Tommy turned in a circle, calling out once or twice, and still he did not see him. Now far away, back on the highway, Tommy could hear the low thrum of cars stopping to see the accident, and of others slowing only to take in the sight of whatever carnage there was to see and then to leave it behind.
Tommy stood and thought for a moment, deciding between walking forward into the gray or heading back to the highway.
Going forward felt like a bad decision, but forward he went.
It was the image of the boy that drove him forward. He could still see him in his mind as he stepped slowly and carefully through the soft earth.
Again Tommy called out for the boy. He stopped walking and stood and called out and held his breath to listen upon the chance that he might respond. There was none.
* * *
It took a moment for Tommy’s brain to understand that it was seeing a door. There was simply a mound of kudzu and loamy earth that rose up out of the soggy flatness of the marshland. When he first saw it, he thought it might have been an abandoned car of some sort. But as he got closer to the mound Tommy was able to make out the brush and bracken that covered it. He thought he saw movement—a shaking of some of the leaves on one of the scrubs—but left the thought as a figment of his imagination. It wasn’t until he was able to physically touch the bushes that he believed what he saw was real.
Carefully, he pushed aside the bushes and found the mouth of the cave. It was a door, he understood then. The bushes were not placed there by nature, not simply the random growth of the wet earth, but placed there intentionally by someone. Designed to create a barrier of privacy. With only a slight hesitation, Tommy pushed through the bramble and entered the cave.
Long, wonderful coolness. Tommy could feel his heart beating in the sides of his head now that the cool, wet air washed across his face.
Tommy sat and closed his eyes and breathed slowly. He nearly fell asleep, then heard a sound. It was a soft thud, like a rock falling. He opened his eyes and squinted into the darkness ahead, seeing nothing. He rose to his feet—shaky, his body still in need of rest—and leaned against the wall. Behind him the dim fog pushed its way into the mouth of the cave, doing nothing to illuminate this underworld.
Like a leap of faith, he started forward.
The darkness reached for him with each step, growing around him like dark vines. He traced his hand along the wall as he walked, his body gripped with the fear of a sudden drop-off reaching up out of the blackness to pull him down to his death. The path turned gently to the left as he went along. The wall on which he traced his hand was hard and old and smooth, concrete most likely. This was no longer nature that contained him, but a structure of mankind.
Soon the fear that is latent in all of us—that fear that only darkness can bring—swelled up inside Tommy and made his stomach tighten and made each step forward into the belly of the cave more and more difficult. He could feel the cave swelling around him, as though he were descending into the belly of some immense creature. The sounds of his own breathing and footsteps took longer to come back to him. There was a sense of more air above his head.
But his eyes were finally beginning to adjust. He could make out his hand in front of him when he tried—when he stood and focused and concentrated—and he thought he could see what looked like stalagmites rising up out of the ground in the wide open room ahead of him. The sand that had been beneath his feet was replaced by solid rock and the sound of his steps echoed even louder.
Then he could see that, indeed, there were stalagmites around him. He could hear the sound of dripping far off in the distance—dripping and the sound of something else that he could not quite make out. The stalagmites looked like teeth—improperly placed—but they possessed a strange type of beauty.
Tommy’s eyes adjusted more and more to the dimness. He could make out his hand in front of him more clearly. He could see the hue of his skin shining brightly in the darkness. He continued to stare at it. It looked slightly alien, as i
f it did not belong to him, but to some creature that existed in the darkness at the bottom of the ocean. He spread his fingers and saw his hand as a starfish, creeping along at an impossibly slow pace. The longer he studied his hand the more it became clear and visible to him, as though there were a light shining down upon it.
Tommy looked up.
Above him, somehow, Tommy saw stars. Countless stars. Glimmering and sparkling. Clustered together and spread out. He saw the Big Dipper and Taurus, and the framework of other constellations he did not know as well. Somehow, here in the belly of this cave, there was starlight, shining down upon him, some type of miracle.
“Excuse me?” a woman’s voice said.
Tommy startled. Not ten feet away from him was the small boy he had seen earlier. Next to the boy was a tall, thin-framed woman with blond hair. She wore blue jeans and a denim work shirt. “Hi,” the woman said, smiling.
Tommy did not know what to say.
“My name’s Vivian. This is Jake. Jake says you followed him home.” Vivian looked down at the boy, who was obviously her son. She patted the top of his head and tousled his hair. For his part, the boy only watched Tommy with a mixture of curiosity and leeriness.
“I’m sorry,” Tommy said.
“Why are you sorry?” Vivian asked.
“I...I don’t know,” Tommy replied. “I didn’t mean to... I just saw him and I was worried about him. That’s all.”
Vivian smiled wider. “I completely understand,” Vivian said brightly. “Jake usually stays away from strangers. And he’s not supposed to go out there on his own like that.” The boy looked up at Tommy, then turned his eyes to the floor. “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“I suppose,” Tommy said.
“Okay,” Vivian replied. “Well, you’re welcome to whatever we have. After all, you were trying to look out for Jake here, so the least I can do is invite you into our home for a meal. Or at least get you out of that world out there for a while.”