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.”
“Who gave you that nothing?”
“No one,” Tommy replied. Then: “Everyone.”
“That’s pretty existential.”
“It’s pretty what?”
“Nothing.”
Tommy sat on the floor and looked down at his hands. His knuckles were bruised and the fingers of his left hand trembled. He made a fist so that he didn’t have to see them shake.
“So, are you going to tell me what it is?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Tommy said. “I guess I’m just experimental or whatever.”
“Existential.”
“That’s what I said.” His brow was furrowed. His clenched fist wound itself even tighter. He heard a soft, muffled pop and looked up to see that the sound was that of me closing my book and focusing my attention on him, which I didn’t do often enough. I realize that now.
“Whatever it is,” I said, “I’m going to figure it out eventually.”
“I know,” Tommy said.
“Not because I’m smarter than you.”
“No?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m going to figure it out because you’re my brother. And because I love you.”
“Thanks, Ginny,” Tommy said. “You’re a good sister sometimes.”
“Don’t go ruining my image,” I said, grinning in spite of myself. “You want me to read you one of Dad’s letters?” I asked.
“No,” Tommy replied. He looked down at his hand. Finally it had stopped shaking. “Why do you read them?” Tommy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the point?”
“Because keeping them matters,” I said.
“Why does it matter?” Tommy replied. I could see the thoughts taking shape in his mind. “I guess I just don’t understand how holding on to the past does anything good for the future,” he said slowly.
He exhaled. He’d passed the candle that was burning inside through the crevices of his mind and body and he’d said what he felt. He’d achieved that miracle. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said immediately, before I could ask more questions.
He went to his room and pulled out the draft notice from his pocket. It was wrinkled. He looked again at the strong, indomitable font that they used to tell seventeen-year-old boys that it was their turn to pick up a rifle and go off and get killed, and then a voice was in his head, sounding like the president himself, saying, “No way in hell you can do this.”
Tommy stood in his room and it seemed smaller all of a sudden. Or maybe he seemed larger. Maybe he was swelling up, overflowing the inside of himself.
* * *
It was just after midnight when Tommy started out for the river. It was over two hours of hiking before he began to hear the roar of the water and feel the chilly spray rising up and misting through the January air. He had brought his backpack along—complete with camping supplies—on the off chance that he might run into someone and need an excuse.
He was almost upset when he met no one on his way to the river. One of the few times in his life that he’d actually thought ahead and there would be nobody to see it.
Then he found himself standing atop a large rock on the edge of the river, staring down into the water as the moon shone overhead and turned the water to light. The rock moved a little under his weight, like it knew why he had come there and wanted to help. When the rock shifted and settled again Tommy just stood there and waited for the bottom to fall out from beneath him. He straightened his back and stuck his chest out and looked like the statue of a hero who had conquered everything in this life and had gone on to conquer everything in the next.
Tommy knew that he was supposed to be afraid. But he wasn’t. Just tired. Like he’d carried too much for too long.
He inched closer to the edge of the rock. It shifted again beneath him, but still didn’t give up. Tommy waited for Death with the patience of a crocodile. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but somewhere along the way he had decided to put his life into the hands of Fate. So he waited for The Inevitable Lady to make her decision.
Time passed and the rock never gave way. The wind never came along and pushed him off. The river itself never reached up and plucked him out of the air. The only thing that happened was that time passed and he was still alive and, finally, the more he realized he was still alive, the more afraid he became.
Afraid