by Jason Mott
Of course, the only thing that Tommy could think was that it was his fault.
Of course he had done something wrong. Why else would they get rid of him?
That was his thinking then, as a child. Now he was almost an adult and he had a better understanding of how the world worked. He understood that there were no promises in this life, not even the promises of people who claim to love you, people who swear that they will always be with you, always a part of your life and your identity. Even if they wanted those things, there was death to make them out to be a liar.
* * *
“Let me show you something,” Vivian said after the family was settled in for the evening.
“What is it?” Tommy asked.
“Something you can’t see anywhere else,” she replied.
“Can I come?” Helen asked.
“You’ve got studying to do,” Vivian said politely. And then she leaned down and kissed the top of her head. The boy frowned in a dejected way, but then went off to his room to begin working.
Vivian and Tommy walked through the hallways until they reached a large, sweeping cavern.
“Here we are,” Vivian said.
Around the room were small lamps along the floor that illuminated the walls dimly. “What is it?” Tommy asked.
“Just wait here a second,” Vivian said. “You’ll see.”
Tommy watched as Vivian walked over toward the hallway through which they had come. There was a small metal panel on the wall. Vivian opened it, threw a switch, and suddenly there was nothing but complete and utter darkness. A wall of it fell across Tommy. It buried him. It was a darkness so complete and total that it made his eyes hurt.
“Vivian?” Tommy called out, fear in his voice.
“Don’t worry,” Vivian said. Her voice sounded impossibly far away. “Just wait there.”
“Okay,” Tommy said. He tried not to be nervous, but he was. He suddenly realized just how little he actually knew about this eccentric family who lived in caves beneath the loamy Floridian soil. He remembered horror movies and what happened to people who were in those movies.
He closed his eyes.
“Do you see it?” Vivian asked.
“See what?” Tommy answered. He opened his eyes, but there was still only blackness.
“Look up,” she said.
Tommy did as he was told. He looked up and, somehow, saw starlight. It took his breath away.
“It was Michael’s idea,” Vivian said, looking up at what was, by all visual accounts, the heavens. Stars upon stars upon stars shone above Tommy’s head and, for a moment, he forgot that he was buried beneath the earth in a hole in Florida. Instead, he was standing in the open darkness of space itself, floating there, timeless and ethereal.
“Michael spent months working on it,” Vivian said. “Hanging little lights in the most exact locations to make it look like the real sky.”
“It’s amazing,” Tommy said.
“It is. Sometimes I look up and I get lost in it.” She paused. Then: “I don’t know why you’re on the road. Maybe you’re running away from something or someone, or maybe you’re running to something or someone. Whatever the reason, just don’t forget that there are things like this out there. When you run away, you run past a lot of things that you can never get back. Don’t forget that.”
* * *
Tommy opened his eyes. Gannon was there, blotting out the sky, as though he had never been anywhere else. Tommy had forgotten about him. Forgotten about the car crash. Forgotten about the launch. Forgotten about the war and The Disease. He had even almost succeeded in forgetting about me and our dead parents.
Almost.
But seeing Gannon, he realized he hadn’t forgotten any of it. Not really. He’d only managed to hide within himself like the family hiding within the hollow of the Floridian earth.
“He’s dead,” Gannon said.
“Who?” Tommy asked, still confused, as if the family he had met was nothing more than a dream.
“Pop.”
They walked out of the fog together without another word. Gannon led, Tommy followed. When they reached the long, black slither of highway, it was still cluttered with police cars and ambulances and rubberneckers all gawking at Gannon’s overturned car.
They walked over to the ambulance where Gannon’s dead father lay beneath a white sheet speckled with blood. Gannon trembled, standing there in the light of the brightening day. He spat. “He deserved better than this,” he said. “He was my pop...and he deserved better.”
“I’m sorry,” Tommy said. He wanted to put his arm around Gannon, but it was a habit foreign to him, so he only stood and watched until Gannon spoke again.
“I wish you’d known him,” Gannon said. “All you ever saw was the aftermath, like everything else in this world. But in his prime... Well, you would have liked him, Tommy. He would have liked you too.”
Tommy nodded. He tried to imagine Bill Gannon as anything other than what he had known—in the same way that he sometimes tried to imagine the world without war and without The Disease, back when “everything was simpler,” as people were always saying—but it didn’t work. All he saw was what he had been given.
“Are we going back? You should bury him.”
“After,” Gannon said. “Your sister started all of this. I’m going to see you two together again. I’m going to see this through.”
“This wasn’t Virginia’s fault,” Tommy said.
“We’ll see,” Gannon replied.
Tommy,
It’ll be your job to take care of your sister. That’s just the way it will work out. She’ll be odd, always. She’ll never fit in and it’ll be up to you to help her fit in and, when she doesn’t, when she gets frustrated by everything and everyone—including you—it’ll be your job to bear the storm of her frustration.
I hope you can do it. I know you can, but I have to hope that you’ll know you can as well.
I’ve seen it in your mother. The way she drifts off into herself, always remembering everything as if it were actually happening right here and now. It’s like someone watching television, only you can’t see what they’re watching. Sometimes, after she’s spent too much time in memory, she will come out of it, looking groggy and far away, and she’ll look at me and I can see all of the sadness that I can’t imagine and I wish, more than anything, that I could take away her memories. Make her able to forget. Able to be something normal.
So when it happens with Virginia, it’ll be your job.
There are rules: be patient. That’s the biggest rule. Even though she’s your sister and even though she will love you, she won’t be able to understand why you can’t see the world the way she does. Not really. She’ll empathize to the best of her ability, but she can no more understand your world than you can understand hers. I suppose that’s the way it is with everyone. We all exist in closed rooms behind locked doors inside our minds.
But with most of us, there’s enough normalcy to understand one another. We’re able to convince ourselves that the person next to us thinks in a way that’s very similar to the way we think. And we’re able to feel for them and they’re able to feel for us and that’s how we make it work.
But now that’s all going away. Which brings me to the second rule:
Protect your sister.
The world you’re coming into is different from the world I came into. By the time you’re of age, there’ll be a war on. It’s the logical conclusion to the way the world is going. And the world will take you both there, take you there and leave you with only each other to seek out salvation and survival.
NINETEEN
There was nothing left to do but bleed out and die. Sometimes life just happens that way. The miles to Canaveral were long and winding and, all the while, I was bleeding and the world was getting worse. I ca
ught a ride with a caravan of people heading down to watch what would happen. It took some work but I managed to staunch the bleeding enough that it could go unnoticed. The people were the partying type, lost in themselves and in the news that poured in over the internet about how dangerous the launch was becoming. There were threats made by terrorists and promises made by the government. The two sides both trying to convince the whole world of their sincerity.
Southern Florida is a landscape made of dreams that lead to stiff waking. The Spanish moss sags down from the branches like cloudy tears and the trees rise up like the fingers of the dead. The water holds both memory and promise, either depending on what you’ve come looking for.
The caravan snaked its way through the Panhandle in a long, brightly lit line of revelry and excitement. There were close to fifty cars, their headlights slicing through the waning day like candles pushing back the darkness of eternity.
I was being driven by a thin-framed blue-haired woman who talked more than she breathed. For seventy miles she talked and I half listened. My stomach wound ached but the blood had mostly stopped and there was too much else going on for the woman I rode with to notice. She sawed the steering wheel back and forth over the highway, swaying the car like a ship on unsettled seas.
A few times I felt the beginnings of nausea.
The other half of the time I was thinking about my wound and wondering if it was infected and wondering if the numbness that I was feeling was a severed nerve or just a damaged one and, more than that, I was wondering if Tommy would forgive me for not telling him that it was me who was drafted. I knew Gannon would have told him about it by now.
Tommy was known for his ability to forgive on account of his ability to forget, but maybe this would be the exception. Or, maybe worse, Tommy actually would forget but he wouldn’t be able to forgive and for the rest of our lives he would hold on to something that he couldn’t remember. I would always have a shadow over my head in his mind.
“Are you listening to me?” Carrol said. Her voice was like a mountain breaching from the ocean.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“You see,” she said, “I knew you weren’t listening. I knew I was wasting my time.”
Then she reached down and turned up the radio and the news came in:
The Disease wasn’t getting any better and neither was the war. The newest victim was just under thirty and all signs pointed to The Disease spreading even farther and faster than anything projected by the CDC. Within ten years there wouldn’t be anyone over the age of twenty-five. Not long after that no one over the age of twenty. And so on and so forth until finally there would be no one left old enough to reproduce and then, in the end, in the final days of humanity, all you would have were children bearing witness to an ending that they were too young to understand or appreciate.
“Jesus,” Carrol said. “It’s just...it’s just too much to bear. This is how the world ends.” She shook her head. “How old are you, child?”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“Oh Lord,” she said, shaking her head again like a willow tree. “I wonder how much longer you’ll be able to make it. I wonder how long before it comes for you just like it comes for everybody else. I used to think they’d find a way to fix it, but now I know better. This is it.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “And you’ll have to be there for it.”
“You’re still alive,” I said. “That’s something. Maybe things will get better. Maybe you’ll make it too.”
“We’re already gone,” she said. “We knew that from the very beginning. We ain’t like them rich people and politicians. We can’t afford to hole up in our bunker and breathe fresh air and stave off the end of the world. All we’ve got are these here masks and I don’t believe they’ll be around much longer. No. Don’t you get fooled by the fact that we’ve made it this long. We won’t be there at the end. Lights will go out for us long before the party ends.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked. “Why make this drive to Canaveral?”
“For the same reason the launch itself is still going on,” she replied. “Because it’s been in the works for years and if this is going to be the way the world ends then why not end it doing something beautiful?”
“Do you even know what the Europa mission is about?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t I know?” Carrol interrupted. I realized I was being condescending.
“I didn’t mean anything,” I said.
“Sure you did,” she replied. “But that’s okay. What’s a Twilight like me know about rockets and moons and everything else? And the truth of it is that I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff. I know just what the news tells me and even that I wouldn’t put too much stock in. I heard all that stuff people have been talking about the rocket launch and everything else. All that talk about it being some sort of secret government escape plan. But don’t you get behind that. Not in the least bit.”
Carrol was still shaking her head solemnly, as if the action was saying everything she couldn’t find the words to say.
“But the thing about it is,” she continued, “even if that’s the truth, so what? What’s there for someone like me to do about it? I ain’t the kind of person that gets picked up and put onboard a spaceship and taken away from all of this.”
“Do you really believe that’s what they’re doing?”
“No,” she said. “But it proves my point. I’m a nobody and I’ve always been a nobody and that’s fine with me. I’ve been a happy nobody.”
“Don’t you want more?” I asked. I felt bad about the question no sooner than I asked it.
“Why should I want more? Is any of it gonna make me live forever? And even if I could, what would it be worth? How many sunsets can you see before you get bored with them? And if you got bored with them, what would be the point of living forever? That’s the old catch of life: you get all you get and you don’t get any more and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said. My stomach was in knots and throbbing all of a sudden. “People are meant to be more than just nobodies. People are meant to improve themselves. I keep telling my brother that. I’ve been telling him that his whole life and he doesn’t change. He just keeps on being who he is. He just keeps on forgetting everything.”
“You got a brother?” Carrol asked.
“Yep,” I replied.
“What’s his name?”
“Tommy.”
“That’s a good name. If I’d ever had a boy I was going to name him Tom. It’s a strong name.” Carrol’s mouth tightened and her eyes saw something beyond me, something from her past. Perhaps it was the dream of the boy named Tom she never had. “Tell me about him,” she said. “Tell me about your brother. He ain’t going off to the war, is he?”
“No,” I said. “Not if I have anything to say about it. But...”
“But he wants to go, don’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew it,” Carrol said. Her hands clutched the steering wheel. “I don’t know what it is about boys always wanting to play war. They act like there’s something in it that they’ll find that they can’t find no place else. Something that they can’t find in love, in their mother, in their sister, in having a child of their own someday. They act like going out there and getting their head shot off... Lord bless them all. It’ll all be over in another generation or two. They’ll reach a point soon when the war won’t have anybody old enough to run it and all them young enough to go off and get killed won’t have anybody telling them to go do that. And maybe that’ll be the way the world ends. All soft-like. Just a breeze running out over a flat lake until it can’t reach the other side.”
Carrol’s words hung in the air for the next few miles. We were silent, save for the radio and the drone of the motor until, finally, we were there.
* * *
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It wasn’t unlike the photographs I’d seen of Woodstock and other great parties over the stretch of modern history. The long line of cars was stopped, permanently and irrevocably. They all knew and understood that they would not make it any closer to the launch than they were and they had resigned themselves to enjoying the night, to celebrating the Europa mission in the best way they could, to making a party out of things until the moment came when the sky was lit up by the engines of the rockets and the vehicle broke the bonds of the earth, beginning its long, historic mission.
So people turned off their cars and got out and produced camping chairs and some of them even had small barbecue grills and there was food cooking and people cheering and people dressed in costumes of aliens—all manner of creatures ranging from the typical Roswell aliens to things with many legs and tentacles to things that didn’t quite make sense and seemed to appear from someone’s fever dreams of childhood. People cheered and drank and smoked and danced. Music blared from empty cars and the drivers got out and found other people along the road to dance and party with and everyone cheered and there were sparklers burning and fireworks being fired and, now and again, there would be some police officer who came along the road on their motorcycle. The intention of the cops were to keep things from getting out of hand, but whoever it was didn’t seem to be overly worried about things. In fact, they seemed just as excited as everyone else about what was happening. One of them had taped a sticker to his helmet that read “Europa or Bust” and, from time to time, he would stop and get off his motorcycle and find someone who was cooking something particularly interesting and he would eat with them and laugh.
As I passed by, I heard someone ask him about the launch and he smiled and gave a long, detailed description of what people could expect when the rockets finally fired and the night sky became a pathway to the stars. People stood around cheering and laughing as they listened, drinking and eating and forgetting that he was a police officer. They saw him simply as someone as excited by the Europa mission as the rest of them. I heard them refer to him as “Tommy.”