A Different Alchemy (16 page)

“You’ve never forgiven yourself for it?”

“I don’t think I’m the one that can do the forgiving. The only person that can forgive me is already in the next life. I’ll ask forgiveness when I see him again.”

The man invited Jeffrey inside for a glass of iced tea or some food, but Jeffrey said he needed to be on his way. He watched as the old man, sorry to see the first visitor in five years leaving so soon, shuffled pitifully back to the front door of his house.

“And,” the old man called out. “I think about the man’s family and how angry they must have been. One day their son was alive and the next day he was dead. And for no better reason than some fight outside a bar. Life doesn’t get much more unfair than that. I always thought I would know the man’s family if I ran into them because they would be the angriest people on the face of the earth. I thought about searching them out and apologizing, but I knew that wouldn’t do no good. That wouldn’t help them, and it wouldn’t take back what I did. I did a dumb thing, and because of that, one man’s anger became an entire family’s fury. That was when I stopped being an angry person. Because I realized, if you keep letting the anger of the world beat you down like that, if you let it eat away at you, before you know it, the entire world will be killing each other. It doesn’t take back what I did, but it made me a better person.”

The old man waved goodbye then, sorry to see his visitor leave so soon.

Jeffrey grumbled to himself. After all of that, the tree was still sitting there, still waiting to break his spirits. Wanting to get away from the pitiful, old man, he decided to nudge the very edge of the tree with the tank and hopefully push it aside. He didn’t look to see if the old man was watching him from the window. And when the tree was moved just slightly away from where it had been, he drove away without looking back.

His map showed a peninsula near by, the very edge of which was called Point Judith. The scene, when he arrived, was disappointing. He had hoped the peninsula would be wilderness, but it was a series of developments and non-stop beach homes. It was difficult to find an area where man hadn’t littered the land with houses, most of which looked identical to one another.

Developers hadn’t known what to do when the Great De-evolution started. All their lives, all they had known was how to build more and more houses. Even when there was a surplus of homes, they kept building because they couldn’t think to do anything else. A year before the Great De-evolution started, you could find two or three homes for sale on every road in every city, and yet they still built new houses everywhere they could find undeveloped land. It was madness.

And it didn’t stop just because the Great De-evolution signaled an end to man. Even when no new children were possible and the population kept shrinking, bulldozers were at work putting up new townhouses and single-family homes. Construction only stopped when the banks stopped lending money. That was the only way developers could control their nonsensical urge to build, build, build.

There’s a townhouse complex just outside Boston that never sold a single unit because people started moving south. A chain of million-dollar luxury apartments was built in Dubai five years after the population started declining. In Budapest, construction on a new 200-unit apartment complex began even though people had started migrating south. Not to be outdone, a developer in Oregon tried to build a new 100-acre neighborhood of high-end homes. He only got as far as bull-dozing the entire forest where the new homes would be built before construction stopped due to too many men sneaking away to head south.

Point Judith was nowhere near those extremes, and the peninsula’s tip offered a nice view. The focal point was a lighthouse positioned between the water and the houses.

He ended up staying four months.

During the days, he went for walks and read books. He took a blanket with him to the top of the lighthouse and spent one night doing nothing but staring up at the clear sky and at all the stars that were revealed once he was away from the city lights. The old man’s words kept repeating in his head as he watched the night sky. He didn’t want to be any of the people—the dead man, the murderer, the dead man’s family—in the story that the man had told.

It was difficult not to imagine Galen there with him. Their talks on the front porch would magically become conversations in the lighthouse. He wondered if Galen would have been an angry person if he were normal. The old man had said he had no reason to be angry, yet he had been, so maybe Galen would have been the same way. Or maybe he would have been melancholy for no apparent reason.

Every once in a while, he found himself thinking about the stack of dead Blocks on the side of the road or of the living Block struggling to survive on the highway. He tried to forget these things, but they were always in the back of his mind along with how his son had died.

Often times, he would wake up in the middle of the night, still in the top deck of the lighthouse, from crying in his sleep.

Three dogs roamed with him whenever he journeyed through the streets of abandoned homes. The animals always looked at him, but never approached. They were old enough to remember what it was like to have a human master, but the memories were from long ago and could no longer be fully trusted. Sometimes the dogs whined when they saw him, as if they too wished everything could go back to the way it had been. He didn’t feed them because he didn’t want them to learn to depend on him just to have him ride away in a couple of months.

He spent one day going into abandoned houses on a random street for no other reason than to see what kinds of things had been left behind and what things were missing. An empty wall with nails sticking out of the drywall used to hold family photos. Empty drawers had contained socks and underwear that were needed during the long journey ahead. It was all very depressing, and it wasn’t long before the empty houses made him think of Galen and he wanted to go back to his reading.

Were the drawers in his own home empty? Had Katherine taken some of their family portraits with her when she left, or had they filled her with too much shame? He shook his head and groaned. His eyes burned. He tried to let the sound of the water help him forget what had happened to his son, but no matter how many times the waves crashed, he couldn’t get the thought of Galen’s burning body out of his mind. He rubbed at his eyes, but that didn’t make anything better.

Chapter 11

The skeleton’s opponent never returned after their on-air fight. It was assumed he had given up the debate and quietly moved south by himself. He hadn’t provided much of the show’s content, but even the skeleton noticed an element was missing without someone to sit across from him. No longer did he have to repeat himself as he was being interrupted, which had made his ideas seem even more taboo. No longer did he have someone to laugh at, which had made him appear to know truths about the world that no one else wanted to see. The only thing the producers could think of was to make him even more exaggerated. He went from making insinuations to direct accusations. The Blocks, he said, were making us all sick. Nothing was out of bounds. The Mayans had vanished after suffering from the Block disease. The first signs of the Block ailment had been discovered after researchers broke into King Tut’s tomb.

Not even Katherine was interested in being scared by him anymore.

But, with the TV off, she did turn to Jeffrey and say, “I don’t want to get sick.”

“Bullshit,” he said. He knew what she meant: she was afraid Galen might turn them into Blocks. He doubted she really believed that, but even saying it was bad enough. “You’ve been his mother for twenty years and he’s never made you sick.”

“Why am I always tired?”

“Because you worry all day. You listen to these assholes on TV and you let them worry you until you’re shaking. And I’m sick of it.”

Her tears soaked into his shoulder before he could say another word. When the crying subsided, she said, “Remember when we were getting ready for our senior prom and I had that meltdown about my curfew? What happened to that girl? Where did she go?”

What was he supposed to say to that? The truth was, he often wondered the same thing—where had that girl gone? What had happened to the person who cried anytime she saw the sad faces of newborn kittens and puppies that were locked up in tiny pet store cages, none of them having a chance at a happy life? What had happened to the girl who dreamed of having a huge dining room so her entire family could visit for Thanksgiving? Just because the Great De-evolution signaled man’s eventual end, it didn’t mean that girl’s dreams had to end too.

When he didn’t speak, she added: “I’m afraid to spend another day in this city.”

He asked what was wrong, but instead of answering, she only said they were stupid for not already having gone down to Washington. He asked what was so great about Washington.

“We never should have gotten married so young,” she said.

That was when he got up from the sofa and went to see how Galen was doing. There was no point in arguing. There was no sense to asking another question only to hear another answer she didn’t really mean.

Any time he was frustrated, he could look at his son and things would be better. There was never a trace of anxiety on Galen’s face, never a hint of shame or embarrassment, not even when he needed to be changed into a new diaper. He was exclusively peaceful, as though touched by the hand of a monk that had learned all of the answers to life’s questions. No matter what had happened that day, his son would have relaxed eyes and gentle breathing. Nothing was more heavenly.

As a teenager, Jeffrey had enjoyed fishing at the lake near his parent’s house. The act of casting the line and reeling it in wasn’t the relaxing part; it was the water that had soothed him, put him in a good state of mind. For years he had been sure there was nothing more tranquil and serene than that lake. Then Galen was born.

He used the quiet with his boy to calm his own nerves. As he sat there, looking at proof that it was possible to remain angelic through the end of the world, he wondered again what had happened to the woman he had fallen in love with. Where was the person who used to make him snort with laughter, who made him feel like he was the most loved man in the world? If only she could get the same sense of peace from seeing her son each day. If only all of the people protesting the Blocks, holding rallies against them, could see what Jeffrey saw.

It was then that he thought back to the Father’s Day card she had written, as though from Galen, many years earlier.

“Please don’t do this again,” he had told her, looking down at her deliberately scribbled writing—meant to mimic what she thought Galen’s hand-writing might be like.

Poor Galen had just stared at the wall while she wrote the card, signed it, and then, as if to authenticate it, rubbed the boy’s index finger in ink so it left a smudged print next to his name. She had thought Jeffrey was angry with her, but he hadn’t been upset with her at all, merely filled with anguish that his boy would never be able to write the card himself.

He couldn’t tell her that was why he was upset, though, not after feeling like he had convinced her to have a child in the first place. And so he had never explained, never brought it up again. It was the first and last time she had ever acted as the go-between for Galen’s love, one failed attempt at trying to be a messenger for the things their son might have said if he had a voice of his own. Was that also when she stopped changing the boy, when she stopped talking to him as though he might offer a reply? If only Jeffrey could have explained how sad it made him to have a voiceless child without making her feel like their son had been a mistake. But how do you do that when you were the one who wanted to cry because of the forged signature, when you were the one who had to bargain for the child in the first place? And so he never said anything.

That faked signature from their son had been the moment when he learned acts of love could be the most painful acts of all. Had she ever learned that lesson for herself, or was she overwhelmed with trying to learn all the other lessons life bombarded them with?

Maybe the woman he had fallen in love with hadn’t vanished. Maybe she was just too busy trying to figure the world out for herself to keep being funny for Jeffrey each day.

**

He came upon a billboard that read “Leaving Rhode Island, Welcome to Massachusetts” and he laughed because he hadn’t realized he was in Rhode Island until he was leaving it.

Everything he did, even something as simple as driving through the tiny state, made him miss his boy; Galen had never gotten a chance to see Rhode Island or any other part of New England. The tank passed by a large pond. If Galen was with him, they could have spent days watching bubbles rise to the surface while Jeffrey recounted what it was like to learn how to fish from Galen’s grandfather.

He would never be able to take his boy to the lakes again. Galen would never be at his side as something caught their line. For the rest of time, Jeffrey would be by himself. What was the point of it all if that was how things were going to be?

He filled up on gasoline anytime he found working pumps. At one gas station, he even drove the dirt-covered tank through a carwash. The sprinklers and soap machines let loose with a barrage of bubbles as the tank crept through the washer. Suds came in through the long turret. He did it merely because Galen would have laughed at the absurdity of it all. But instead of making him smile, he found himself feeling like it was all pointless.

He picked up a stack of new books. He re-read
The Catcher in the Rye
. In high school, it had seemed hilarious and brilliant. Now, it seemed like the most depressing book he had ever read, and he wondered how it could have ever made him laugh.
The Stranger
had been one of his favorites in college. But now, the ending made him feel like there was no use in anything. He forced his way through
The English Patient
and
Flowers for Algernon
and
Disgrace
. Each book made him hate the world he lived in, made him want to go to sleep and never wake up again. If Galen were around, he could have read all the same stories aloud and they would have enjoyed them together. Without the boy there, every story was sadder than the last.

At the junction of 195 and 495 he headed south, one of the only brief times during his journey that he would let the tank face the equator. When he came to the shore again he got out and looked at the land separated by water. He had always wanted to see what Martha’s Vineyard was like. There was almost no point in going if Galen couldn’t see it with him, however.

Years earlier, there would have been hundreds of boats docked, each ready to take him across the water. Now, there were only three, and two of them looked like they would sink if he stepped inside them. If he did actually get out on the water, the current might take him out to sea.

How many people, without any sailing experience whatsoever, had chosen to venture forth on the ocean as a way to get south when they heard the roads were deteriorating? The tank wasn’t fun to ride in, but at least it was simple to use. He knew better than to think he could just jump in a boat, get the sails working, and head safely in the right direction.

The seas were littered with the boats of people who hadn’t known better. Some simply didn’t have a clue about sailing but still managed to get out too far to be able to swim back to shore before the boat capsized or started drifting without purpose. Others would know enough to correctly get the sails rigged, but then wouldn’t be able to navigate correctly and would let the current take them into the middle of the ocean where sharks looked up with grins. Still others would want to stay close to the shore, needing to see land to feel safe, until they ran aground, some of them drowning, others lucky enough to get back to dry land in some other random part of the country from where they had started.

He had two distinct fears. One was that the boat would go in the direction it wanted, not the direction he wanted it to go. This would happen because of wind or because he wouldn’t know how to adjust the sails. A day later he would be so far out to sea that he wouldn’t be able to spot land and would either drown trying to swim back to shore, or would die of dehydration in the middle of the Atlantic.

In Ireland, more dead bodies washed ashore each day as ghost ships were carried toward land. In Argentina, authorities stopped trying to identify where the ships and their dead passengers had come from. Along the coastline of South Africa, they didn’t even bother to burn the ships or bury the dead. The bodies that arrived there were left to join the new cemeteries along the sand where it was easier for the elderly to dig graves for the Blocks.

His second fear was that he would be able to plot the boat’s course without any problems—if he could figure out how to drive a tank, how hard could piloting a boat be?—but it would refuse to take him back to the mainland and he would be stuck on an island prison for the rest of his life—a Great De-evolution Napoleon.

He and Galen would never get out to see the Grand Canyon. There would never be a photo of him standing at the Golden Gate Bridge with his son. Here was a place, though, that he could get to and yet he was still questioning if he should, because if Galen wasn’t there to see it with him, he wasn’t much interested in seeing it either.

He glanced at the Martha’s Vineyard shoreline one more time, then got back inside the tank and continued northeast.

The roads, long forgotten by the road crews, were reminiscent of man’s first attempt at connecting trading posts. Parts were completely hidden by grass and dirt. Other sections looked like they had never been paved at all. He passed an old football field where the only proof that there had been games played was the single remaining goalpost. The other goalpost and the entire playing field had been taken back by nature. He passed a billboard that had faded completely white under the sun. Whatever message had once been there was now gone and forgotten. He drove over or around fallen trees and other debris.

And finally, after traveling through this apocalyptic stretch of land, headed to Cape Cod. The road offered breathtaking views of water on either side of him. Trees were growing out of the side of miniature cliffs. Others grew out of mounds of rock. The water to the east was rough and choppy, a constant series of waves cutting against the shore. To the west, the water was still. Birds gathered on the latter side because the fish preferred these waters too.

If he had come here with Galen, he would have taken his son to the eastern shore when they wanted to watch the waves, but when it came time to actually get in the water he would have carried his boy to the western shore, where Galen’s feet could dangle in the water without fear of an errant wave splashing his face. Everywhere he went it was always what he would have done if Galen were there.

He drove through marshes and forest. There were rocky parts. The sand was a desert bordering every other land type. He even drove past a lake. He could be at the shore, walk on sand to a lake, then walk across more sand to the ocean. Wonders would never cease. Instead of making him glad to have seen it, however, he thought about Galen’s charred body and how his boy would never get to see the treasures that the world had to offer.

After all of the beautiful views, man had found a way to ruin the land: at the water’s edge was a local airport. It was concrete where only sand belonged, glass instead of brush and marsh. There were times when a man had a revolutionary vision that showed the excellence that people could achieve. It was how airplanes had been made. It was how the Chunnel had been formed. What would Henry IV have thought if you tried to explain the concept of motorized vehicles traveling back and forth, under water, from England to France? The same brilliance made it possible for shuttles to fly out to space and even for the Great De-evolution’s food processors.