Читать книгу The Crossing - Jason Mott - Страница 17

ELSEWHERE

He was checking on his father every single day and, when he was honest with himself, he didn’t know how much longer he could keep doing it. They had never gotten along. He’d always been a burden to the Old Man—as least, that’s how it felt to him—but now with things going the way they were in the world, the good thing for him to do was to make amends before the end came in that soft, quiet way it was coming these days.

It had been his girlfriend’s idea. “Make up with your father,” she said. And she said it in that gentle, movie-of-the-week way of saying it. The way a person says it when they have no idea what they’re asking of someone.

It wasn’t that he hated his father. Not anymore, at least. He’d gone through that period of hating for years. He’d spent every single day of his life gnashing his teeth on the memories of everything the Old Man had done to him. The beatings, the name-calling. The Old Man had even gone so far as to lock him in a closet for a full day because he hadn’t come home on time the day before. And there were worse things. Things that he didn’t want to remember. Things that he probably should have gone to see a therapist about—at least, that’s what his girlfriend told him—but he never did. He had been raised by the Old Man to believe that a man takes care of his own sadness.

But visiting the Old Man now was something that he felt he could do. More than that, he felt that he had to do it. Between The Disease and the war, everyone was trying to make amends, to settle the old debts and put things to rest on their own terms. People called it “Settling Up.” And, whether the Old Man knew it or not, his son was coming to him over and over again in the hopes of Settling Up, even though he didn’t really know what that meant. He just knew it was something that needed to be done.

So for over a month he went to the small retirement home and he walked through the antiseptic-smelling hallways with a knot in his stomach and all of his muscles tense and as soon as he saw the Old Man the knot hardened and the muscles got even tenser, yet he smiled and said the familiar words, “Hi, Pop,” just the same way he always had.

The Old Man had been wasting away for years, but he was still strong. He sat up straight—a military man through and through—and every time his son came into the room and said, “Hi, Pop” the Old Man replied to him by saying, “You’re late.”

But the man had gotten used to the way his father was and, nowadays, he actually did show up late since he didn’t particularly want to be there, but showing up was the right thing to do and people were all about doing the right thing these days.

So the cycle went for months.

And then one day the man showed up and said, “Hi, Pop.”

“You’re late.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Good enough.” The Old Man jutted his lower jaw forward like an anvil. “You heard about these damn kids? These Embers?” He spat the word like snake venom.

“Yeah, Pop. I heard about them.”

“Goddamn cowards,” the Old Man said, almost at a growl. “Too afraid to go off and fight the way they’re supposed to. Goddamn bleeding-heart cowards.” He tightened his fist and slammed it on his chair and tried to stand but his legs hadn’t worked in years on account of a car accident that had broken his back and he sometimes seemed to forget that. Or maybe he was just too stubborn to accept it.

“I can’t say I really blame them,” the man said.

The Old Man ignored his son’s opinion and continued on: “The fact of the matter is everybody’s got a job to do and these kids ain’t doing it. They think they’re the first ones to be afraid of a war? Well they ain’t. Problem is they think they’re special. They feel like they’re too good to go off and fight and maybe die and, mark my words, that’ll be the exact thing that brings an ending to everybody and everything on this planet.”

“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.