Jason Mott - The Crossing

“What about The Disease?” the man asked his father.

“What about it?” the Old Man replied. “People been getting sick ever since people came into existence. And we’re still here. The world is still spinning and we’re still crawling all over it. No, there ain’t no getting rid of people. There ain’t no getting rid of humanity.”

“Well, maybe this time is different.” The man swallowed, looking for courage.

“Nothing’s ever different,” the Old Man butted in. And then he cleared his throat and looked over at his son, and suddenly the Old Man’s ever-present anger seemed to lessen, like a muscle that had become fatigued. “They found two people this morning. Right down the hall. Couldn’t wake them up. Wasn’t neither one of them any older than me.”

And there it was. The Old Man was scared. Maybe for the very first time in his life.

Seeing that, the man was afraid. Because if the Old Man could be afraid that this was the twilight of the world, maybe this was, truly, as everyone had been saying, the “end of the party” for all of humankind. Which meant that he would die and his girlfriend would die and, even more terrifying, the Old Man—a man so mean and full of spite that Death had been too afraid to take him for years—would finally die as well.

All of a sudden, the man loved his father and all of the energy he had spent being angry with him was gone.

So he looked away and said finally, in a low voice, “I forgive you.”

The Old Man didn’t reply, which didn’t surprise the man. But it still made him angry. “God dammit, say something!”

When he looked back at his father, he found the Old Man sleeping—his head lolled forward at the end of his neck, a small drop of spittle already forming in the corner of his lip.

The man would try to rouse his father but it wouldn’t work. He would call the nurses and they would come and, only because it was what they were paid to do, they would inject the Old Man with stimulants and race around shouting about blood pressure and heart rate, knowing that the Old Man wouldn’t wake just like no one else had wakened from The Disease.

The man eventually walked out of the retirement home thinking to himself that, finally, he had said the words to his father. Wondering if he had been heard.

FOUR

Years later Tommy would tell me about this moment, about this whole trip. He would give it all to me so that I could remember it and write it all down. He said to me that when he stopped to think about it, he had been expecting the draft notice all along. Since the day he turned seventeen. Since the day the letters started going out. Since the day the politicians decided to reinstate the draft. On and on, all the way back to before the start of the war. It was like he’d been expecting that letter from the president for his entire life. And so, when it finally came, he found himself confused and disbelieving, the way we all are when the world finally does the terrible thing we knew it would.

The letter from the Draft Board came in a plain brown envelope with the presidential seal—which some people had mocked by calling it “The Free Chicken”—in the upper left corner. He’d just gotten home from school and opened the mailbox and there it was, like a foundling, waiting for him. It stated Mr. Thomas Matthews in a typeface so bold and straight that he could almost hear the president himself sounding out his name.

He put this thumb over The Free Chicken for a moment and rubbed it back and forth. When he looked, the chicken was still there. So be it. He’d been preparing himself for this moment. Watching Gannon’s ever-growing collection of war movies when he wasn’t at home, just to get a sense of what Hollywood had to say how war was. He figured it was a pretty good way to get a handle on things. Sure, there were books out there that he could read, but he’d managed to get through only one of them: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It wasn’t a difficult read but it was a difficult book. Everybody kept dying and Tommy couldn’t predict when it would happen or who it would happen to next. In the movies, you knew that the more familiar the actor, the longer it would take for Death to find them. But with O’Brien’s book there weren’t any actors to recognize and so Death took who it wanted whenever it wanted. That notion left Tommy shaken and unsettled for a few days after he’d finished the book.

But then, as it always happened with Tommy, O’Brien’s book and the memory of everything it had made him feel began to recede and, before long, it was almost as if he hadn’t read the book at all. If someone asked him he could say, “Yeah, I read that.” But that it was a book about soldiers was all he could ever say about it. And because he was so gifted in his ability to let go of things—including fear of Death itself—his confidence could always come back to him.

As he stood there that day staring down at the president’s chicken pressed beneath his thumb, the fear came rising back up inside him. He remembered that he had read some book about soldiers and war and dying and he remembered that it had made him afraid, but he couldn’t remember why. So he simply folded the letter from the president and stuffed it into his pocket.

In the three days before he showed the letter to me, Tommy spent a lot of time watching the news. There was bombing in Baltimore. Where the war was happening, fifty-three soldiers had died in an ambush. In France there was a handful of killings. London caught a bomber before any damage could be done. Police and soldiers—one barely distinguishable from the other anymore—stood before the cameras with pride bursting from their chests in the way only the English can.

The war, terrorism, however you wanted to slice it up, was transforming everyone. But Tommy was too young to be able to see and understand it. Tommy only saw the way the world was and he couldn’t imagine it ever being any other way. So when people talked about how much better things used to be—the way his father did in his letters—Tommy listened and pondered what was being said but, ultimately, saw it all as little more than fiction. Memory was always fiction, Tommy figured. And maybe that was why he chose not to buy into it. Maybe that was why he chose not to remember anything. To Tommy’s mind, the whole reason the war was still going on was that everyone was too busy wishing the world was the way it used to be. It would be better, he figured, if people just accepted their world.

He got in two fistfights the day after the draft notice came. Won them both, of course. Because he was strong and hard and because he had started them both before the other boys involved even knew what was happening. There was one boy—big as a wildebeest and almost as ugly—who Tommy had walked up on while he was tying his shoe and stepped squarely on his foot. The boy rose up and towered over Tommy and Tommy knew good and well that he should have been afraid, but he wasn’t.

After he’d beaten up the boy and walked away, Tommy told himself that he should feel bad for what he had done. And maybe he actually did feel bad. It was always hard to say. What he really felt was the adrenaline racing through his veins like lava. He felt the bruises forming on his knuckles. He felt the throb in his left ear where the boy had brought around a haymaker and found a home for it. He felt a small quiver in his legs that was the sign that the adrenaline would soon be leaving him and he’d come crashing back down to earth.

* * *

Dinner had come and gone and Gannon was asleep when Tommy got home later that night. I was sitting in my bedroom reading on account of how I rarely ever slept.

“Did you win?” I asked.

“What?” Tommy replied. I made a motion to the side of my face. After a moment, Tommy realized what I was saying. “Oh,” he said, touching the back of his hand to the welt on the side of his ear. “It’s nothing.”