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.
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
