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“Is that true?” Tommy asked.
Even I wasn’t immune to what Gannon had said. He’d managed to paint a picture in my mind—Tommy and me in a courtroom, on trial; Tommy would get the harder sentence because that had always been his lot in life; they’d send him to the electric chair and put me in prison; but they wouldn’t keep me there on account of how smart I was; they’d figure some way out for me on account of how I was special; that had always been my lot in life.
I walked on water. Tommy only choked on it.
“Just do what I told you, Tommy,” I replied. “We’ll leave the heat on medium and crack the windows. He’ll be fine. I promise.”
Tommy nodded in assent. He switched off the headlights and set the heater temperature as he had been told.
“Good,” I said. “Now get out.”
“Why?” Tommy asked.
“Just go, Tommy. I’ll be right behind you.”
Tommy stared at me. “I’m not going to do anything,” I said. I rapped my knuckles against the Plexiglas dividing the front and back of the squad car. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to. And you’ve got the gun, after all.”
“That’s right,” Tommy said, his voice full of sudden authority. “...that’s right.” Finally he opened the driver’s door and stepped out into the cold.
I turned in my seat, looking back on Jim Gannon. “Once the sun comes up it won’t take them long to find you. It’ll be a little embarrassing, so you’re welcome to tell them whatever story you want about how you wound up here. If I were you, I would say it was a prank.”
Gannon barked a sharp laugh. “A prank?”
“Yep,” I replied. “Just the local cops having a little bit of fun with you. You can say that you and them go way back. You just happened to run into them as you were passing through, on your way home from a law enforcement training seminar. That’ll explain why you were three states outside of your jurisdiction in your squad car and uniform.”
“Jurisdiction doesn’t apply with runaway children,” Gannon said. “But you already know that, don’t you, Virginia? You’re the smart one.” He slumped in the seat and checked the back of his head once more to be sure it wasn’t bleeding.
“Just say that they were some friends of yours and this was their way of being funny. They put you in the back seat of your own car and left you out here. It’s believable.”
“You got one hell of a mind on you,” Gannon replied. “But you already know that.”
“And he’ll be okay,” I said, looking at Gannon’s father.
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Gannon replied.
I looked out the car window at Tommy. He was standing just beside the car, watching our conversation.
Gannon’s eyes followed mine.
“Just let us go, Jim,” I said. My voice was softer than I had planned. There was a levee inside me that was on the verge of breaking all of a sudden. I didn’t know when it had begun swelling—I’ve never been particularly good with emotions. The energy it takes to keep all of the memories at bay tends to push down the feelings connected with those memories. It’s the only way that someone like me, who lives as much in the past as they do in the present, can exist without reliving everything again and again. So I learned to keep my feelings at arm’s length, but the problem with that is that they always eventually push in, suddenly and without warning. “Just go back home and let Tommy and me have this trip. And once it’s over...” I hesitated, then pushed on. “Once it’s over I’ll talk Tommy into coming back. It’ll be like nothing ever happened.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” Gannon said. “He showed me his papers. He’s already overdue. That means they’ve already put him on the dodge list. That means jail first and then the war. But if I bring him back, I can help soften that. I come from three generations of lawmen. My name counts for something. I can smooth all of this out for him. Make it so that, when he goes off to fight, he does it with honor. The way he’s supposed to. There’s a principle at work here.” Gannon clucked his tongue. “The thing that amazes me the most is how proud Tommy was when he showed me that letter. Never seen him so proud. Like getting drafted was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Living was the best thing that ever happened to him,” I said. “I’m just trying to keep that going for as long as I can.” Then I opened the door before any more could be said and stepped out into the cold, leaving Gannon alone with his father and, perhaps for the first time in his life, powerless, in spite of all the instruments and ornaments of the Law.
* * *
Go back far enough and you’ll find that Jim Gannon came from a long line of policemen. He called them “lawmen” on the night when he sat me down and recounted to me the names and stories of the three generations that had come before him. He had never called them lawmen before. But once he was finally convinced that I truly did remember everything I ever saw or heard, he brought me into the living room and sat down in front of me with an old scrapbook filled with photos and news clippings and recounted to me all the stories he could remember having to deal with his father, William Gannon Jr.; his grandfather, William Gannon Sr.; and his great-grandfather, Thomas Gannon. “All good lawmen. Each one of them,” he said.
It took him a full hour and a half to talk about what was important. There was the story of how his great-grandfather had come over from Europe and immediately gone out West, back before the West was settled, back when the Indians hadn’t yet been treatied into submission. And Tom Gannon, seeing the way things needed to be if this country was going to work out, took up the badge as a United States marshal. Years later, when his own son shunned being a marshal but took a fancy to the art of sheriffing, Tom was only slightly upset about it. And when William Sr. passed on his badge to William Jr., it was already decided that, when Jim Gannon was born, he would take up the mantle. But then Gannon’s father had a stroke when he was young and never recovered and a new sheriff won the election. Gannon hadn’t been old enough to run and now, fifteen years later, he still hadn’t managed to get beyond being a deputy.
Something in Gannon’s voice told me that maybe he actually hated his job.
“At least I’m still a part of the way things used to be,” Gannon said proudly. “There’s honor in that.” He took a deep breath and stared at me. He sat with his back erect and his chin thrust forward, as though he were posing for a picture. “You make sure you remember that part,” he said.
And, of course, I did remember that part. And all the other parts as well. I remembered the way he looked a little afraid when he talked about his not yet being made sheriff. I remembered the way his voice quickened when he talked about the sudden decline of his father—the way a child speeds up their pace as they pass an old abandoned house whose walls and gables have become nothing more than an empty husk. I remembered everything, with unrelenting clarity. To hear Jim tell it, his father had been a smiling, confident man. The type of man that other men wanted to be. The type of man Jim Gannon wanted to be.
And then, one day, that man was gone and all that was left behind was an invalid.
No matter how much he took care of the man, I’m not sure Jim Gannon ever forgave his father for that.
When Gannon had finished speaking, his wife and Tommy were pulling up in the yard. Gannon got up in a hurry and returned his scrapbook to his bedroom and came back out. “No need to talk to them about this,” he said to me in the solid, familiar voice I hadn’t heard in an hour and a half.
“I hadn’t planned to,” I replied.
And then, in a whisper, just before the front door opened and his wife and foster son came in, Gannon said, “Thank you.”
He had been like every other foster parent in the beginning, back when Jennifer was still with him. Back when The Disease was becoming more aggressive and the war seemed like something that might come to an end just like every other that had come before it. The two of them couldn’t have any children on their own—his fault—and so they decided to adopt and with him being well-off in the police force, it wasn’t too hard to make happen.
Everyone was trying to have children back then. The population of people over eighty had dwindled and those in their seventies were beginning to go. Back then there were still theories about being able to stop it. And some people say that’s what really started the war: the hope that some other country knew something about The Disease and was keeping it to themselves, hoping to outlive the rest of the world. Pregnancy rates tripled in those first years. Everyone hoping to fix the end of people by simply making more people.
And for those who couldn’t have their own, adoption became the fix. That’s how Tommy and I found Gannon and Jennifer. They came to our group home that day wearing their best Sunday outfits and smiling with the pleased euphoria of people in magazine ads. They’d both been told about how special I was and Jennifer had made it a point to say that “All kids are special.” At which point Tommy looked over at her with something akin to pity in his eyes and said, matter-of-factly, “That’s bullshit.”
Jennifer laughed a nervous laugh, and eventually Jim joined in and it wasn’t long before the laughter wasn’t nervous anymore. It was as good of an introduction to foster parents as we had ever had. Not that it really mattered. We were fifteen by then. Jennifer and Jim would be the last stop before we were too old for the system.
Over the next two years I watched Jim Gannon harden for reasons no one in the household seemed to be able to understand. He came home after work and talked a little less each day. Mostly he settled in front of the television and heard what it had to say. When the news wasn’t talking about The Disease it was talking about the war. And Gannon seemed interested only in the war.
Night after night he watched the reporters wearing bulletproof vests atop polo shirts as they hunkered down inside bombed-out buildings. They yelled about “total destruction” or “total resistance” while gunfire clattered like microwave popcorn somewhere off screen. Now and again they covered their ears and pressed their heads against the ruined floors of faraway war zones and they waited, mumbling to themselves, trying to look both brave and terrified all at once. Then there would be an explosion big enough to make the camera shudder. Maybe followed by a cloud of dust. Then the reporters would lift their head from the sand and look around with bewilderment and say, “Thank God. That was a close one.”
Every day Gannon was there watching. Sometimes he gripped the arms of the chair beneath him until his knuckles went white and his face reddened because he didn’t know he was holding his breath. Then he would realize and the air would rush into his lungs and he’d have to go outside for a smoke to calm down.
Jennifer would go out to him sometimes. I listened from the upstairs window as Jennifer begged Gannon to tell her what was wrong. Begged him to seek help for whatever it was. Begged him to “come back to me.” She even took time to blame herself for their inability to have a child and fix the world like everyone else was trying to do.
None of it worked, though.
He grew harder.
He drank more.
They drifted apart.
Sometimes when he was drunk he would fly into a fit of rage. Thundering voice. High-flying hands that threw dishes and put holes in drywall. And when the rage was over he would retreat to his wife’s bedroom door and knock, gently, like a child, and whisper, “I’m sorry, Jen. I’m sorry, okay? Just open the door. Please.”
And Jennifer, because she was a soft woman capable of forgiving anything, always opened the door and let him in. Then I would sit in my bedroom, usually with Tommy not far away, and I would listen while Gannon slumped to his knees like a sack of potatoes, sobbing apologies into the late hours of the night. All the while his wife would whisper—the soft sound of her voice drifting through the walls like an incantation—and her whispers would be full of forgiveness and something more. Absolution maybe.
I had once asked Jennifer why she forgave Gannon the way she did. “Because,” Jennifer said, “the heart can break and break and break again, but then turn around and love like it’s never known how.”
Jennifer held out hope for her and Gannon’s emotional resurrection. But I knew better.
If this had all happened when I was younger, I might have been inclined to lie awake at night worrying about the fate of my latest set of foster parents. But The Memory Gospel was full of foster parents whose relationships didn’t last. Foster parents who had taken in foster children in the hopes that by filling the empty places in their home they would fill the empty places in their hearts. That’s all children really were when you got right down to it, I figured: just a person’s attempt to create someone who loved them wholly and completely, from birth. Someone who would carry that love forever.
Children, in the end, were gods of our own design. And when you couldn’t build your own god, you called social services and had one delivered. But I was tired of being someone else’s therapy.
It was during one of Gannon’s outbursts a few months ago that I made the decision that Tommy and I should run away.
“To Florida?” Tommy asked. It was late and Gannon was in the living room screaming and Jennifer was in her bedroom refusing to let him come in. The house trembled and shook, but continued standing.
“To the launch,” I replied.
“This is that whole Jupiter thing again, right?” Tommy asked.
I sighed a long, slow, damning sigh. I would have to explain it all yet again to my brother. “Not Jupiter,” I began. “Europa. One of Jupiter’s moons.”
“Still don’t care,” Tommy said.
“They’re sending a probe up there that might find life.”
“They won’t,” Tommy replied. He was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as we talked. Whether he genuinely didn’t believe in what I was telling him or whether he just wanted to frustrate me, I couldn’t decide, but the latter was the one that was working the most. “And no,” Tommy said, “I don’t need you to explain the math to me about how they actually might find something there. That whole Frank’s equation of whatever.”
“The Drake equation,” I corrected him.
“The Bobby equation. The Joe equation. The Captain America equation. I don’t care what it is,” Tommy said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t know why I bother,” I said.
“Because I make frustration fun,” Tommy said. Then he smiled a self-satisfied smile.
“Do you remember Dad’s letter?”
“Nope,” Tommy replied, almost before the question could be asked.
“He said, ‘Even back then I knew that Europa was important.’ Do you know when people first had the idea that there might be life on Europa?”
“Nope, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“As far back as 1989,” I said. “That’s when the Galileo mission was launched and sent back all that data in 1995 that showed there might be an ocean under the surface. Dad was just a kid back then, younger than us, but I bet he heard about it and fell in love with Europa immediately. He knew it was special. He knew we’d have to send a probe there one day to find out. He always knew.”
“Good for him,” Tommy said. He rolled over onto his side, tucked his forearm beneath his head and closed his eyes. In the living room the sound of Gannon’s yelling was starting to subside. He’d be asleep soon, and then Tommy would fall asleep, but never before.
“Let’s do it for Dad,” I said.
“Dad’s dead,” Tommy replied. “He’ll never know whether we do it or not.”
“We’ll know,” I replied.
“I’m not going,” Tommy said. There was finality in his voice, like a door being closed. “And if I don’t go you won’t go.”
He was right, of course. And I knew it.
So that night, while Gannon descended from shouting to slurred mumbling to that final, incomprehensible bit of soft gibbering that always swept over him in the moments before sleep, while Tommy was on his side, falling asleep, I began being buried in The Gospel:
...Tommy is twelve years old and wants to be a magician and I know that he won’t be any good at it but I sit patiently as Tommy stands in front of me with a cape made out of a foster father’s jacket and a top hat that is nothing more than a baseball cap and Tommy clumsily holds a deck of cards and shuffles them back and forth in his hand and he has forgotten to say the magic words and he has forgotten everything else so that when he holds up the seven of hearts and asks, “Is this your card?” I say to him, “Yes!” even though it isn’t my card and Tommy, because of his knowledge of his own weakness with memory and planning, doesn’t trust that he has chosen the correct card and so he turns it around and looks at it and then looks back at me and his eyes ask me to confirm whether or not he has chosen the right card—because he knows that I will remember what he doesn’t and he has come to trust The Memory Gospel and trust what I tell him to be true—and he stands waiting, never looking more like a child than right now, and he asks a second time, “Are you sure this was your card?” and without hesitation I say to him, “Yes, that’s it,” and Tommy smiles stiffly and doubts himself and his lack of memory even more and I know that, because of this one moment, he always will and so I decide, right then and there, to always be the keeper of not only the past, but also the future...
ELSEWHERE (#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496)
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.
