The Oldest War (To Brave The Crumbling Sky Book 2)

by Matt Snee

  “I hear swirling winds. Nothing more.”

  “No sign of him?”

  “He is far. They have him.”

  “Can you read them?” she asked.

  “Almost.” Plerrxx stroked his beard. “They are not alive. Perhaps they never were. But they starve. They starve for fear.”

  “Only he can save himself, I'm afraid,” Jennifer admitted.

  “It looks that way. And all we can do is wait, like it's a fever that must break.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Do you want your wish jewel back?” he asked, all of the sudden.

  She was taken aback. She shook her head.

  “No. Not now. It would not help. It would only hurt. That's what it does.”

  * * *

  After their honeymoon they come back to Kalansket and return to their everyday lives. They move into a new house that Captain purchases with his meager royalties. At first, it all seems like a dream. They whisk around each other like feathers and converse long into the night about their future. Gail wants to have children. This he knows—and is eager to contribute. He has dreamt of children of his own for years, and the thought of it now—though he still feels unprepared—collides with what is left of his sadness and blows it to pieces.

  In the mornings they both write. Gail tries to emulate Captain's success by adopting his habits. She goes to work and leaves him the rest of the day to his own work, which consists of reading, writing, and editing.

  Gail is an art teacher at a local Catholic school and is passionate about her students, whom she describes every night in fantastic detail. Captain knows that underneath she still mourns for her first husband, but he believes that once they have a child, her pain will disappear in a kaleidoscope of new life.

  Months pass. Gail does not become pregnant. Frustrated, she sees a doctor. The doctor explains that nothing is wrong with her. Captain visits his own doctor. There is nothing wrong with him either. Give it time, both doctors say. They give it time. Another six months pass and still no baby.

  A subtle terror begins to develop in Gail. Her desire turns into anger. She becomes biting in her speech and cold with her affections. They argue. Nothing is solved. They make up, convincingly telling each other that they will never allow anything to come between them again, and that they just need to wait. Until the anger comes again. It is a cycle.

  Things are good again for a few months. Gail appears to develop a new gaiety. Her tenderness returns and she starts to write again.

  Her job becomes her focus. She comes home late from school, exhausted. During the week he sees her only in the mornings when he wakes up before dawn.

  In the brief hour or two she lives between coming home and sleeping, which includes dinner and a review of her “children's” schoolwork. Even though she seems happy, Captain grows lonely. After his class concludes for the semester, he finds a lot of emptiness in his life. He tries to alleviate this by being nicer to Gail. He cooks her breakfast every morning, running her errands, buying her things. On Saturday nights he takes her wherever she wants to go, which more often than not is out to a restaurant and then to a club to see live music and go dancing.

  He does everything he can think of to fulfill her. Her optimism seems to return, but she no longer seems interested in becoming pregnant. She has no interest in intimacy.

  Captain is inspired to take her away on a second honeymoon over spring break. He researches exotic places and adventure tours from all around the world, hoping that he might coax her back into their original equilibrium. She is reluctant in return, saying that she wants to stay at home for the vacation. He is adamant, determined some distance will fix their problems.

  Felling bullied she finally agrees. Captain readies the trip. She does not get excited about the travel plans. She stays later at work and is apathetic during the weekends while Captain shows her the maps and the itinerary. Captain blames it on nerves. He anticipates a renaissance. They plan to visit Europe and Northern Africa. Captain has never been out of the country before, except for small trips to Canada and Mexico. He is both scared and excited.

  On the morning of their departure, Captain wakes up early as he usually does, to find Gail is not in bed.

  He finds her down in the kitchen, sitting at the table.

  “I've been waiting for you,” she says. “Waiting for you here.”

  He smiles; she gestures for him to sit. Her face is serious. She does not speak for quite some time. “What is it?” he asks.

  “I've met someone else,” she tells him. “I'm leaving.”

  “What?”

  “I'm sorry, Lewis. It just happened. You should know, I'm pregnant—with his baby.”

  Weight crashes into his shoulders. He doesn't know what to say. “How could you?” he asks.

  “We both made a mistake, getting married. We should have tried things out for a little while longer.”

  “You wanted to get married!”

  “I know!” She looks away and holds her face in her hands. “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't say you're sorry,” Captain says. He is officially mad now. “I trusted you.”

  “I know you did. It just happened, all right? He's a teacher at my school. We work together.”

  “Is this knowledge supposed to make me feel better?”

  “No,” she says, exasperated. “I just thought I would be honest with you.”

  “You should have been honest with me before you cheated on me,” Captain says. He gets up from his chair.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don't know. For a drive.”

  “You shouldn't drive when you're angry.”

  “I'm not angry.”

  “I won't be here when you get back.”

  He pauses, looking down to the floor as he grabs the keys from the basket (their basket), saying nothing.

  * * *

  Jennifer shivered. It was getting colder. Still, Captain sweated profusely in his unconscious state. She wiped away the perspiration from his face with a cloth she received from one of the Delphiniums. Captain would occasionally cry out in his Terror-induced slumber. She knew he suffered. There was nothing she could do to help him.

  She spoke to him softly. “It's okay, Lewis,” she told him. “I'm here. It's Jennifer. We're with you. We're not going anywhere without you.”

  She clutched his hand in hers, and thought now of when she had been poisoned on Mars, and how he had watched over her. She remembered he had made her promise that if they ever got out of that quest alive, they would simply enjoy some ice cream cones on Earth. The memory made her smile. Only Captain would think of ice cream at such a moment.

  The Delphiniums continued to fight the Terrors with their plasma whips.

  No one spoke. The Seer and Passion sat together trying to keep warm as the rest of the Delphiniums protected them.

  “It's okay, Captain,” Jennifer spoke again. “It's just fear. It's just the past.”

  * * *

  He drives around for hours. When he returns home she is gone, along with her suitcase and all of her favorite things.

  It is surprising to Captain how little effect the absence of her presence has. He realized she only lightly set foot in the house; she was never as truly happy. It all makes sense to him—the distance, the absence of affection, the late nights at work. He is sickened by the cliché of it all. How he could have not noticed the signs?

  He looks down at the plane tickets he bought for their trip and sadness drowns his heart. He is alone again.

  Captain turns to his mother, who nurtures him as his heart breaks recklessly. He feels annihilated, completely spun. The pain is crushing. He spends most of his time in bed, staring at the ceiling. Food loses its taste. The sun becomes an annoying glare.

  He and his mother decide to sell Captain's house. He moves back in with her, desperate for any kind of companionship. She welcomes him back and takes care of him in the way mothers do.

  “It's okay, my son,�
� she says one day as they finish dinner. “You'll survive this. We're strong. We survived your father; we can survive this.”

  “You're right,” he says, though he is not utterly convinced. “It just really hurts right now. I don't know how to take my mind off it.”

  “Well,” his mother says, “You could write.”

  The next morning, he wakes up early as always—still thinking of Gail—and settles upon his typewriter with new vigor.

  The book he writes, “Constants of the Planetique”, becomes a bestseller. The success pierces his life with newness. His mind stops its rumination of Gail and instead turns to a pale but warm future. His publisher sells the book's rights to a film producer.

  Captain gets over his love for Gail more easily than he suspected he would. Writing was the salve to his broken heart.

  Despite his newfound success, nothing changes; he continues to live a secluded life with his mother and a few on-line professional acquaintances who live far away in New York. He no longer teaches since he doesn't need the money. It is just his mother and his absent father, and his consuming imperative to write.

  He finishes another novel, set in revolutionary-era Pennsylvania; a crippling love story unbearably similar to Captain's own recent heartbreak. The one difference is the cheating damsel ends up dead. He has her murdered by a zealous British sergeant, along with her lover. This book meets with success that equals the last. Captain is praised for his marketability and dramatic insights.

  The days and months pass. Captain visits his father in prison and finds him grayer, grittier, and sadder, possessed of a subterranean cough and depressed eyes. We're some pair, Captain thinks, feeling sorry for himself and his dad. The prison doctor asks to speak to him after a visit. Captain is told his father is dying, with only has weeks to live. Captain's father doesn't know his fate. Captain is given the job of telling him. His father sat silently hearing that his days were numbered.

  Captain drives home under the weight of the news. He waits a day before telling his mother. When he tells her, his voice stops and he can't say all of the words. His mother understands, touching his arm with one hand and bringing the other up to her lips. She weeps. They sit together silently until Captain offers to make them sandwiches.

  As he is slicing the bread, the phone rings. It is the prison warden. His father has committed suicide, slitting his own neck with a sharpened spoon. There was nothing anybody could have done.

  * * *

  “There has to be something I can do!” Jennifer told the sleeping Captain. “I'll do anything, just wake up, wake up, please!”

  She bent and kissed his lips.

  They were warm. It was the first time their lips had ever met, and he – did he realize it, somewhere, far away? She knew what he felt about her. She knew he would die to kiss her, and now she would certainly die to let him kiss her.

  His lips said nothing back. He continued to lie still, muttering to himself and shaking.

  What do I do now? She wondered. “Captain! Please come back to me!”

  * * *

  Captain hangs up the phone and informs his mother; the sadness that gnawed at them minutes before now seems terribly quaint. Captain contemplates his new life with a dead father. He feels an immense saw of energy braced against his ribs. This feeling stays with him for days until they bury his father. Anger begins to replace the sadness. His father had been in prison for most of Captain's life and it had been obvious that he wouldn't survive his jail sentence. The weeks following his father's funeral were spiked with both pity and vitriol for the deceased.

  Captain receives a letter from Gail some months after the funeral. She has heard about his father's death and wished to offer her condolences. She explains that she is now a widower. Her son has been born, and she gave him her dead husband's middle name, Jacob. She lives in California and is teaching at a public school since her divorce from Lewis was frowned upon by the Catholic diocese. 'Everything is well, she writes. Hope you are too!'

  It's the final blow. He has lost everything – some things he wanted to keep, in the case of Gail, and some things he wanted to lose, in the case of his father. A new emptiness expands in his chest, thorns that exhibit themselves in his every breath.

  I'll be here forever, he thinks. This same life, alone, until the end of my days. How will it end? What happens when my mother gets too old? What reason will I have to go on living?

  What reason do I have now?

  * * *

  What reason did Captain and Jennifer come here? To save the Solar System? Or to save themselves? Perhaps, they hoped, both. Two lost souls standing against the No-Shape, the Fangler, Jon Jason, the Shadows, everything, perhaps even God. How did they know they were doing the right thing? Why did they suffer so?

  As Jennifer held Captain's quaking body, she wondered now why she had even brought him here. Was it because of some alien ghost's promise? Or because she felt alone and wanted someone to share what she was cursed with? How could she have been so selfish?

  * * *

  That night, Captain climbs the stairs to his room with a new feeling in his heart. His mother is sleeping; when she wakes, he plans to be dead.

  He often considered suicide during his life, ever since he was a lovelorn and confused teenager swallowed by the possibilities of his own imagination. Now he resolves to finally go through with it.

  He readies the bath and his razor. When the water is warm he sits in the tub, fully clothed, waiting for the water to fill. He soaks his wrists patiently, knowing that once they are soft from the hot water he will be able to cut into them more easily.

  It will probably be painful, he thinks, but he knows it will be a sweet release once it's done.

  As he braces himself with the razor in his hand, a new thought occurs to him. What if he's wrong? What if something changes, if something changes, if something needed him?

  Hope dawned in his blood, which a moment before had been trying so hard to escape him.

  I can wait, and still do this later, he thinks. If something comes, I will be waiting. I'll always be waiting. For one thing or another.

  And if it comes, he thinks, I will be ready.

  Yes. Things will change. They have to change. I will MAKE them change!

  There will be something, he thinks. There will be someone.

  * * *

  She gasped as Captain awoke convulsing in her arms. “Oh God,” she said. “Lewis! Captain! You're here!”

  His eyes slowly open and focus on her.

  “Where was I?” he asked.

  16. The Birth

  There is no end;

  only change.

  Drink death

  like it is the finest wine,

  and break back

  into the stardust you are.

  –Jennifer Pichon, Poetry

  “What happened?” Captain gasped. He lifted himself up so he was sitting. There was a fire and they sat around it, warming themselves by its heat. He peered closely and saw the fire's base was a chrome cylinder popped open that shot flames into the air. The idea made his head hurt as he realized where he was and what he was doing.

  Jupiter. The Death Dream.

  Looking past the fire, Captain saw a dimly lit forest of tall improbable squiggles the color of cherry stains; one's eyes could get lost there. He forcefully tore his eyes away and focused on his companions again; they were improbable too, but they were his friends.

  “Are you okay?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling better by the moment. His eyes found Passion. She was held by the Seer and Courage. Calm sat in front of her administrating some kind of care to her lower body. A blue sheet of fabric hid all that was going on.

  “Passion is having her baby now,” Jennifer explained.

  “She is? In a place like this?”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. “It will be fine. They do this… a lot.”

  He could hear Passion groaning over the wind. He said nothing more about it.
He turned back to Jennifer. “What happened to me?”

  “You were almost taken by the Terrors.”

  “It was like—like I was back in the past,” he told her. “My wife…” he caught himself. He had never discussed Gail with Jennifer before. The topic seemed suddenly taboo… hot in his hands … despicable.

  “Don't worry.” Jennifer touched his arm. “Your Terror is for yourself. You do not have to share. But if you want to talk about it later—I'm here.”

  “None of the Delphiniums were affected?” Captain asked.

  “They've been trained. Besides, they're used to it.”

  “And Plerrxx?”

  “Ha!” the Mmrowwr answered for himself. “Mind games are my language!”

  Captain felt embarrassed for having succumbed to the weakness. He changed the subject.

  “What's next?”

  “We have to wait until the baby is born,” Jennifer responded. “Right now we are protected by the fire. Spirits hover over us, waiting to strike. We cannot leave the sphere until the baby is born and the spirits are appeased.”

  Captain absorbed what she had said.

  “So we just wait?” he asked.

  “We wait.” She smiled, in obvious difficulty.

  “It's okay,” he said, touching the back of her hand. “We'll wait.”

  Tess, who sat next to Trust's body, stood and walked over to Captain and Jennifer.

  “It shouldn't be long now. We gave him a life. He will give us one in return.”

  Captain looked into the girl's face. She did not return his gaze at first, but after a second she set her eyes on his. He could see the fear in those bright eyes. She looked older all of a sudden. This all belonged to her.

  “We don't have much time now,” Jennifer said. She pointed up at the sky. A purple light flashed in the distance.

  “Jon Jason's ship.”

  Captain looked up at it. Through the pulsing light he could see the shadow of a huge vessel. Jon Jason, he thought. He stood and checked himself, confirming his backpack and knife were close by. He clenched his fists, thinking he was ready for anything.

  A harsh wind blew from all directions. It was cold here. Captain continued to ooze in his dream suit. He looked back at Jennifer. They reassured each other silently.