Tonight We Rule the World

by Zack Smedley

  I wait for him to ask me questions, to offer condolences, to say he loves me, to sit in stoic silence. But instead he says, simply, “I can’t imagine what that was like for you.”

  “It’s nothing by comparison,” I say. I tuck my arms close, trying to cast out the images. “What happened to me is nothing compared to what happened to you.” “You were younger.” “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters,” he says, like it’s non-negotiable. Then, “And more to the point: I made the choice to enlist, okay. I signed up for the violence.”

  “So?”

  “You didn’t. You didn’t.”

  “What does 0341 mean?” I point to the wooden plaque on the wall.

  “In the Army and Marines, each job title is identified by something called a MOS—Military Occupational Specialty code. 0341 was mine.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It means I was a Mortarman.”

  “Oh. You never told me that before.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Why are you now?”

  “You asked.”

  My arms are still squeezed tight to my chest.

  “What’s it like?” I murmur.

  “War?”

  “War.”

  He purses his lips. “A lot of it is predictable. In a good way. There’s something nice about the order and routine of life on base—no matter what country you’re in, it feels familiar. It’s boring—a lot of downtime—but it’s consistent.”

  He can see that I want more.

  “Thing is, though, it’s consistent until it’s not.” His voice is more hoarse, lower, but still steady. “Hours, days of playing golf, writing letters, shooting the shit … until suddenly your best friend’s on fire and you’re running for your life. You think your last thoughts. It’s not too long until you learn to always sleep with one eye open. That’s the kind of thing you take home with you.”

  I swallow, sitting forward. “What else?”

  “Guilt. Plenty of that to go around,” he says. “You’re in the type of place where people get hurt because of your actions, or lack of action. Sometimes both. They die and they die badly. And you watch.”

  “The stuff that happened to you and the others—” I cut myself off, pointing to the paper. “That wasn’t your fault at all.”

  “It was.”

  “How?”

  “It was.” Dad folds his arms, mirroring me. “So you take that home too. When you hug your wife, you picture that guy who won’t hug his wife again. You replay the situation, and you wonder why you. What the hell brought you back when it struck down all those other devils worth ten of your rickety ass?”

  “God?”

  “No God.” He spits it. “This isn’t God’s world, man; this is all us. Every awful thing was done and made by us. And there was no part of God in anyone over there. There was no part in them and there sure as shit was no part in any of us.”

  My father speaks so vividly—I can’t believe how many experiences live inside him. It’s like a car accident: I don’t want to hear any more horror, but I feel myself hanging on to every word.

  “How could you stand it?” I ask.

  “The adrenaline gets you through it.” His voice wavers slightly. “You either make it out or you don’t, right? No time to think.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s the after-war that no one’s trained for, see,” he says. His gaze is on the floor now, his mouth tight. “No one teaches you how to come home. Not in the way you need to be taught.”

  I feel my heart twist—not for the images anymore; but for the fact that anyone, let alone my dad, would need to be taught how to come home.

  He covers his eyes.

  At first I think he’s recollecting himself. But then I see his shoulders shake, and the wetness pressed through his fingers, and realize he’s started to cry.

  “I miss the war,” he admits. Then in a panicked, wobbly whisper: “Some days I miss it so much I swear it’s going to fucking kill me, man.”

  And as he sits there crying, I realize I know what he meant earlier about how our experiences aren’t so different, at the core. My life and Dad’s are nothing alike, and our burdens are our own. But we were both awakened to the same sickening truth: that there’s nothing other people aren’t capable of. We each know what it’s like to be upended by our own harrowing experience. The kind that suffocates your soul if you don’t know better than to let it—building to the moment when all your wide-eyed wonder turns to dust, and you wake up to a colorless world. And the more you move forward, the more that cynicism festers until it’s become a part of you—baked into your bones and poisoning your heart.

  Dad sniffles and murmurs, so softly I almost don’t catch it: “I miss Captain Boots.”

  Now. Now, he and I are talking.

  “You helped her,” I say.

  “I tried.”

  “You took care of her.”

  “I tried.”

  I lean forward, my hands rattling. And I feel bold enough to ask the question.

  “Why not me?”

  He uncovers his eyes. Blinks away burgeoning pain.

  And he says, “I tried.”

  “No,” I tell him. “You tried to fix. But you didn’t try to help.” No answer.

  “You helped her,” I say. I wrestle with my own voice. “Why not me? I just want to know the reason. There has to be a reason.”

  “She was easy to care for.”

  “Whereas I’m not.”

  “People aren’t, Owen.” He looks at me seriously—not sad, just serious. “People aren’t.”

  Our eyes stay on each other.

  “The love was there,” Dad says. “I hope that’s clear. Everything I did for you, it was out of love.”

  But, I think to myself, that isn’t how it works. The plants in his garden wouldn’t feel the most love if he flooded them with water. A baby doesn’t feel the most love if you hug them so tight that you crush the air out of their lungs. At the end of the day, it’s easy to convince ourselves we’ve done right by someone. We fixate on all we’ve given them—gifts, effort, intention. But in doing so, we often shut ourselves off from the most important part: that the trueness of the love we give is measured by how it feels for the person we give it to.

  My father showed the least love because he made me feel the least loved. He found it convenient to pretend he was doing something else … something productive; something useful. Something for me. But I know it wasn’t; he knows it wasn’t, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t love because I didn’t feel loved by it.

  Dad drops his head and covers his face again.

  I want to tell him I see a man stripped of all masks and sardonic one-liners, all his height and scars and silver hair and I just see a person; someone like me, just a guy with his head in his hands trying to figure himself out. Someone worried about what’s in front of him grabbing at every piece of experience and past knowledge and thinking about his fuck-ups and wanting to make amends but worrying how to do so; worrying about how that rawness changes him, changes this. Itching to apologize but afraid it’ll look like he’s bullshitting. Oh, I’ve seen bullshitting before. I’ve seen people break down in front of me and cry, pretending they don’t want to be let off the hook, when that’s all they’re after. I’ve had my naïveté, my blind willingness to take things at face value, peeled off layer by layer until it was gone for good. I’ll never get that back—Lily took it with her, replacing it with a cold disposition that will always assume the worst about everything in everyone. But now, seeing my father dissolving in his own world inches from my own, I don’t see any of that. I just see him.

  “You did a lot of things right,” I say.

  He lowers his hands.

  “I grew up in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the state,” I continue. “I had health insurance. I had the Studio; I got my driver’s license, I was admitted into my dream college, I never had to worry about who I loved, and I know how to turn
a wrench.”

  Dad swallows. “What’s your point, man?”

  “That you did a lot of things right.” I hold his gaze. “I’m leaving the house with my head on my shoulders. That’s not a small thing.”

  “I should’ve done better.”

  “That’s true. But what I’m saying is true too.”

  “Whole thing’s a balancing act,” he says. “No parent gets it right; I sure as shit didn’t. My dad was stricter with me—any screw-up, no matter how small, meant beatings with a switch. Can’t tell you how relieved I was to get the hell out of that house.” “Did you ever talk to him about it?”

  “Afterward. Years later. When he was in the hospital and we exchanged our goodbyes.” “What did you say?”

  “I hugged him around the shoulders and thanked him for every goddamn day of it.”

  The two of us are standing by the window now, him leaned against his cane. Hills stretch all the way back to the tree line. I had another question for him, but I can’t remember it now.

  “You should go home,” Dad says. “Spend your last night with your mother—you owe her that. She’s done more for this family than you’ll ever know. And she gets lonely.”

  “She said it was okay for me to do my own thing tonight.”

  “That’s what she’d say no matter how lonely it’d make her.”

  I draw a tiny bit closer to him.

  “You should come with me,” I say.

  “No.” He raises a finger to the glass pane, tapping it. “I’ve done enough running from this shit. Wouldn’t be proper to come home before I’ve had some time to straighten it out. My VA case manager helped me find a guy about half an hour from here that specializes in counseling for … that stuff. Been doing weekly sessions with him, and he referred me to a second guy who’s going to start me on EMDR treatments.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something I should’ve started a long time ago.” I don’t respond. He turns to me.

  “It helps,” he says. “Therapy. Once you get settled in on campus—doesn’t have to be tomorrow, but within your first week—I want you to go to their counseling center. I won’t ask questions; I won’t pry. But promise me you’ll book an appointment and stick to it.” I tell him I will.

  “As for coming home, I’m not saying it won’t ever happen,” Dad says. “But it needs to be a while. Your mom has put up with my BS for long enough.”

  “She loves you.”

  “Then she’ll still be there when I get back.”

  I steal glances between him and the window.

  “Almost everyone you meet in life is going to try to sell you a bill of goods,” Dad says. “It’s important to me that I not be one of them.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not going to pretend I was right to do what I did, okay.”

  I snort. “You’re the second person to say that to me tonight.”

  “Hm. Who was the first?”

  “A guy I really like talking to.”

  “Someone special?”

  “We’re not dating or anything,” I say. “Not right now, anyway.” “But is he special?”

  I smile at all the warmth that comes with thinking of Luke’s face. And I think about how my father probably spent years in search of someone who could give him those same lost pieces. I imagine the agony of finding and marrying that person, only to watch it all be overtaken by unhealed wounds. And suddenly Luke’s plan to take things slow makes more sense, and Dad staying up here makes more sense, and Mom’s years of living in home movies makes sense too.

  And I answer Dad, “I think he’s the most special person I’ve met.”

  “That’s good. You deserve that,” Dad says. Then: “You deserve an amazing life.”

  “So do you.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  “So do I.”

  Dad walks me back to my car, all the way down the hill despite his bad knees. Our goodbye hug is fast and formal, but it feels proper. It’s a shared understanding that we aren’t okay yet, but we’ll be ready to put in the rest of the work when the time comes. Someday soon we’ll return home and finish figuring out what we need to. But for now what I need is to be on my own, and he knows that. So all he says is, “You’re ready.”

  I’m about to open my car when I remember my question from earlier.

  “The stuff that happened to you,” I say. “Did you get nightmares afterward?”

  He looks away, then nods.

  “Did you?” he asks.

  I look away, then nod.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Do they ever get easier?”

  I watch my father as I ask it … his figure tiny against the backdrop of the night. His cane digging into the cracked earth; his eyes, gray ghosts.

  “Christ, I hope so,” he tells me.

  SEVEN

  MOM REACTS TO MY STORY THE SAME WAY DAD DID.

  I have her read what I wrote for him, so I don’t need to re-tread it. After she’s finished pulling herself together, she spends a lot of time hugging me and crying and asking me the same question over and over: “What can I do?” I can’t think of anything, so she makes me promise to let her know. Then I ask her to dial it back, so she kisses me on the head and watches TV with me until it’s time for bed.

  I want to go to sleep too, but this is my last night here. So instead I finish packing.

  I’ve saved the toughest part for last—the boxes in the garage full of my desk items. I find them still shoved in the back corner on the concrete floor, stacked beside a trash bag and covered in cobwebs.

  I sit down, tear the flap off of one, and wedge it under my knees. Using my phone as a flashlight, I dig my way through the first box: mementos. Mostly old photographs, the ones I’d printed out to tape to the wall. There are a lot of the group, and, of course, a lot of Lily. A few of them make me cringe, and most make me smile.

  I look at all the photos of Lily and me—countless memories from when we were just little kids—and I let my eyes rest on her smile. It feels like it belongs to a stranger. That is a girl, I think. Then it properly hits me for the first time: This person is gone. You aren’t going to see her again. You’ll never hear her voice or laugh at each other’s jokes or hold each other’s hands.

  I sit back on my heels and flip through the pictures. Our first selfie—the two of us at freshman year pep rally, with me squinting and sporting newly-sprayed blue hair. Us at our first Homecoming, slow dancing in sunglasses. And so many of her just hamming it up for the camera, making funny faces with me. I pause on the one she and I took after our first Friendsgiving in ninth grade. I’m in an old sweater that’s too big for me, and she’s in a green blouse with her leg kicked up like she’s in a movie. She’s clutching my arms, her chin on my shoulder and an enormous grin on her face.

  All this living we did.

  I wipe my nose with my arm.

  A beautiful girl. God, she was a beautiful girl. Impossible not to love, once. And I did love her, once. Even though she hurt you. Yes.

  That’s screwed up.

  But you didn’t know her. The things she did for me. The way she gave me my voice.

  Without ever listening to it. No.

  Yes.

  Stop.

  She didn’t.

  I know. But shut up and let me look at her. Not her, the person who hurt me. I mean Her—the sweet ninth grader who befriended the boy with the broken arm and invited him to things because he seemed lonely. The person who looked out for me, and loudly loved me with all her golden heart. I thought it was that simple, once.

  But then that love unmasked itself bit by bit, gradually—across years. Lily was the girl who had my back; who let me find my words and helped me share them with others. But there was always that ugly imbalance under the surface—an immunity to loving me in any way other than her own. She became someone whose currency was control: She secured it, hoarded it, and always made sure she had enough to spend when needed. And the o
ne night she couldn’t have it, she took it because she could. A simple theft that sent me into the worst kind of limbo—the kind that taints everything good, bleeding your daily life dry of all its joy. Plunging you into an ugly, insipid gray.

  Once, I knew a girl. Let me tell you about her: Her name was Lily Caldwell, and she was the author of all my joy. She was a girl who teased me when I couldn’t finish my smoothie without brain freeze. Someone who got excited over cute dogs on the street. A poet who had a name and wanted to sign it all over a forgetful planet. A person who seized the world by all its stars and saw every one of them for what they were. She was a girl—my classmate and my first crush; my first love and my first friend. And God damn was she a great one.

  But she was also everything after. I’ll never know where the schism started—where one girl morphed into the other. All I know is I’d give anything to see that first girl one more time. Why can’t I have that? Just for a few minutes … enough time to thank her for finding me on my front stoop and asking me about my arm. To tell her I love her and let her know I’ll carry a piece of her with me wherever I go. To wish her well, thank her for my childhood, and give her a hug goodbye.

  But this is what I’m left with instead: pretty pictures and skewed memories. Grieving someone who’s still alive—a mangled, unrequited catharsis. Because there are no two girls out there, conveniently split so I can love one and turn my back on the other. There is only this one girl. And there will be no tender goodbye between us … not tonight; not ever. There’s letting go, and that’s all.

  I reach for my bracelet, snap it one last time, and pull it off my wrist. It sinks into the trash bag with barely a sound.

  Lay your memories down and put them to rest. They aren’t going anywhere; not tomorrow and not ever. No one can change them or undo the fact that they got made. But it’s time to let them rest, now.

  I nod.

  Find a way to live with that.

  “Okay,” I say, softly. And I will.

  It’s time to let go now. “Okay,” I say, softly. And I do.