The Crossing
Page 28
I pulled the gun and leveled it at Gannon.
“Ginny...” Tommy said.
“I’m sorry, Tommy,” I said.
Gannon only looked at me, with something like pity in his eyes, and said, “I’m sorry.” Then he walked forward toward the waiting gun.
EUROPA
In certain types of stories, this is where the tragic end would play out. This is the moment when Gannon would have made some dramatic lunge at me. Tommy would have dived in front, come to defend his sister. The flash of light. The clamor of the gunshot. That’s the way things were supposed to have ended.
But that’s not the way things actually happened.
While I had the courage to pull the gun and aim it at Gannon, I never did find the courage to pull the trigger. I’m not ashamed of that anymore.
When I didn’t pull the trigger, all that happened was that life moved forward, syllable by syllable.
Gannon walked forward and took it from my hand, and I wilted as the weight of it disappeared. A few miles away—beyond the crowds of revelers and gawkers and dancers and misanthropes and believers and dreamers and desperate hopefuls who had trekked all this way in commitment to the idea that everything would work out in the end and the desperate nihilists who had come this far just to watch the final flicker of light before the fire of humanity faded and the embers burned out and there was nothing left but a lonely place in the sky where once there had been laughter—the booster engines of the rocket ignited and liquid helium expended energy and the shuttle rose—slow at first, like an idea taking root in the imagination—and soon the inches of ascendance became feet and the feet became miles and the cheers and shouts that rose up from the people were deafening and it made the air quake and it felt as though there would be no more oxygen left to breathe once everyone had let out such shouts and sighs and sobs and screams and laughter. As the rocket rose into the night sky, headed for Europa, even Gannon and Tommy and I all turned and stood in silence as though nothing that had happened before in our lives mattered.
There was only now, only this moment that stretched the rubber band of understanding, an understanding—sudden and terrible—that simply the act of standing and watching the launch was an act of belief, an act of hope. We had, all three of us, given up on hope a long time ago. Tommy and I had given up on it with the death of our parents. Gannon with his father’s stroke. And now here we were, all three of us, all children of the dead, trying to hold on to this one last flicker of light burning over our heads, stretching farther and farther away by the second.
“It sure is something,” Gannon said.
And then the moment passed.
Gannon eventually took us back home the way he had always promised he would. After I spent a couple of days in a Florida hospital we went back to Oklahoma, back to the small house where there was no wife or father anymore, only Tommy and me. And, further keeping to his word, he turned me in to the Draft Board a couple of days later. The thought was there in my mind of running, but I had no reason anymore.
Tommy did as I always knew he would. He went off and signed up for the war. But for a while, it turned out to be the best thing for him. They shipped him out and, for a long time, my brother became someone other than who I had always known. He wrote me letters every few days, telling me all the details of what had happened when he and I had gotten separated on the way to Florida, because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold on to the memories for much longer. We were both surprised that he had held them for this long.
That’s how I learned about his time with Gannon, the boys he fought, everything. In Tommy’s letters, he took on the qualities of our father, something neither of us had known he had. He found eloquence without me. Each letter was more beautiful than the last.
And in reply, I sent him our father’s letters, one by one, pulled directly from my memory, and Tommy read them and replied and told me more about his life without me. He enjoyed basic training, just like the army recruiters had always told him he would. He got to use all of his muscles and, with me not being there, he felt that he had “finally rolled out from beneath a shadow that had shaded me from sunlight.” His words.
I never knew my brother had that in him.
After basic training, after writing to me and showing me all these facets of himself that I had never known, my brother shipped out and was killed in his very first battle along with a dozen other boys and girls.
And that, as people say, was that.
My brother had finally truly left.
As for me, the Draft Board didn’t put me in jail the way they did with every other Ember who had tried to run away from the war. Tommy had been right all along: with my perfect memory, the government would find something else for me to do. It took them a long time. They had their hands full, after all. Over the next five years The Disease began to spread faster, catching up to the war in its disregard for human life until, finally, even the warmakers realized that there would soon be no one left to continue their bloody tradition. So the war ground to a slow, frightened halt.
I lost track of Gannon after I was finally properly drafted. For all I know he stayed in his empty home in Oklahoma and, right now at this moment, is still there, living, waiting, talking of duty.
For me, there wasn’t even time enough to become embittered the way people do after they’ve spent time trying to kill one another. There was only time for science and research, but by then it was already too late. Science can take a lifetime to master, and with The Disease becoming more aggressive, those who were the best chance for finding a cure began to succumb to The Disease. One by one the greatest minds of generations nodded off, never to be roused again.
Meanwhile the Embers, with no war left for them to run from and no future to chase them, stopped wandering. They set up camps in secluded parts of the world. Humanity’s youth returned to the forests and deserts and hidden spaces from which humanity itself had once come, all in the hopes that The Disease would burn itself out and leave them behind.
The government, with nothing else to do, reacted similarly. Youths like myself were sent into bunkers well below the surface of the earth, into places where we would not see the stars shine or feel the air push across our faces. The earth became like Europa—barren on the surface, but with something beneath that surface. And it was here, beneath the ground and at the end of humanity’s timeline, that I was put to work.
Someone nicknamed me The Recorder. My job was simple: catalog everything that was. Keep track of it all. A living, breathing memory bank that would always carry as much of humanity as anything else. Mostly, in the beginning, I carried facts: water and food rations, air handler calculations, chemical equations used in the making of medicines. I was the girl who answered every question.
But then, as people grew to believe that I would never forget anything, I became the keeper of stories. People came to me and told me of their personal histories. They told me of their children, their parents, their childhoods, the adventures of their youth, their talents, their dreams, their failures. And when I asked them why they told me rather than writing it down, they said simply, “It’s never the same as talking to another person.”
And so I became the vessel for their lives and, all the while, I only ever wanted to tell Tommy everything. Some nights, mingled among the cluttered memories of my life and the lives of everyone else I had ever met and talked to, Tommy was still alive, still smiling, still holding my hand in all those foster homes and on that long, long road to Florida. And our parents were there too, smiling, walking beside Tommy, filling up the spaces inside me.
As for the probe that was launched for Europa, I still haven’t heard about whether or not it found life there. I only know that I believe it did, just as I believe that The Disease will burn out and we Embers will emerge and humanity will survive. If memory and family can survive inside me, if Maggie and Connie and Nolan
and Gannon and my parents and, most important of all, Tommy, can live inside me, then why can’t the rest of it?
I am the world’s keeper. But I am, above all else, my brother’s keeper. Tommy is always alive.
That’s what memory is.
That’s what love is.
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ISBN-13: 9781488023521
The Crossing
Copyright © 2018 by Jason Mott
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