Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Yes. I promise.”

  Two days before the war came to Harrisburg, the resistance was massing weapons in the street in front of the church. Stacks of rifles, jumbled boxes of ammunition. The guerrillas working in eerie quiet. All thinking of the noise to come. Of crouching in a ditch while the earth exploded. Clothes wet with blood, urine, gastric fluid. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim stood on the steps with Aaron. The boy wanted to carry one of the rifles, wanted to know how to shoot one. Sunny Jim’s hands were on his shoulders, fingers tight.

  “I don’t want any part of this,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Me neither,” Reverend Bauxite said.

  But then the church fell, and Reverend Bauxite found Sunny Jim and Aaron in a slumping apartment on Agate Street. The son playing with a yo-yo that the father made from a spool. The father watching the street for violence. Reverend Bauxite gray with ash, on his face and hands, worked into his clothes.

  “They knocked my church down,” he said.

  “Sit,” Sunny Jim said. Shook his head. Thought for a few minutes without moving, because he did not want to lose this man. Could not afford to.

  “I guess you have to do something about it,” he said.

  “Yes,” Reverend Bauxite said. “If only to end the fighting sooner.”

  “I understand.” Then: “No guns,” he said. “There are enough already.”

  But there was so much else to do. Engineering and sabotage. Said they were there to install a generator, robbed power from battalions. Clipped cables. Filled frequencies with noise. Kept lines open for guerrillas huddled in apartments carpeted with shattered glass, rifles angling from empty window frames chipped by enemy fire. Listened on headphones so Sunny Jim could hear Aline’s voice, know she was alive. They worked in the day amid fires, the rush of falling shells, rising smoke. At night, under the stripes of tracers, pink arcs of flares. They always took Aaron with them. Kept him where they could see him. We need to keep him safe, they kept telling each other. But even Grendel Jones, their commander, noticed how the boy seemed to be good luck, how the fighting never touched him, like a blind giant groping for a wily insect.

  “The war can’t find that kid,” Grendel Jones told Sunny Jim one night. “Won’t find you or the priest either, as long as you’re with him.” She did not finish the thought out loud, how Aline would have to fend for herself. For Sunny Jim would never take his son to the front’s annihilating edge, and Aline would almost never leave it. There was so much about Aline that Grendel Jones could not understand. Why, when the fighting started, a spark lit inside her. Why she had a family. Why her family wanted her. She could not see into that, or get Sunny Jim to explain. So she never learned how Sunny Jim and Aline had pulled each other through and away from the leanest years of their lives. How, when the war came and everyone else panicked, they looked at each other and nodded, recognized the shapes of their own pasts in the face of the war’s violence, knew what it was, even as it began to pull them apart.

  Perhaps that was why the boy was the charm he was. He was the best of both of them. He warded off the mayhem, just by breathing, that his parents had taken years to learn how to survive. Aaron, Sunny Jim, and Reverend Bauxite had shacked up one night in a burned-out apartment building near the state capitol, moved out at dawn. That afternoon, a flurry of mortars leveled the building. A firefight broke out on a busy street only twenty minutes after Aaron left it, killed forty-seven people, too many of them children, but left him unharmed. The boy played amid cracking masonry while his father strung wire to a satellite dish on a factory roof. Sat in the bottom of the boat when they crossed the river. Slept through bombing raids and firefights, woke up hours later, blinking and yawning. He did not know what power he had.

  Didn’t, until six months ago on North Second Street. There had been a market there in full bloom, vegetables and animals amok. The sweetness of picked fruit, sourness of butchered flesh, tang of hay, flowing together in the air. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim passing through, cable slung from Jim’s hip. Aaron zigging and zagging, curb to curb. Then a shell, a bomb—they argued later, for they never went back—and everything was quiet but for the moaning. They were far enough away to only be thrown, knocked down. By the time Reverend Bauxite could see, Sunny Jim was already cradling his son, a dirty hand over the boy’s eyes.

  “Dad, come on, let me see.”

  “No. No.”

  Soot was snowing on a wide wound in the pavement. The skin of people blown back and away. A slurry of blood and dirt. A knee on the sidewalk, disconnected from everything else, a scrap of denim wrapped around it.

  “We have to get Aaron out of this place,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Where can he go?” Reverend Bauxite said.

  “My sister’ll take him.”

  “Your sister can protect him?”

  Sunny Jim just looked at him. Ended the discussion. Reverend Bauxite acquiesced, and Sunny Jim sent the word up the highway to Lisle, thirty miles over the border into New York. Merry was there within two days for the boy.

  “We won’t be able to talk,” she said. “Just come and get him when you’re ready.” They turned to go, but not before Aaron hugged both men. It was then that Reverend Bauxite understood how the past few weeks had changed him, how the duty Sunny Jim had given him had become a mission. He thought he had begun to see a tiny fragment of God’s plan in the boy, let himself hope that maybe there was one, even if he could not say what it was. Aaron had given him some of his church back, and now he was losing it again.

  Merry and Aaron were gone before Aline returned. The mother railed when she found out, screamed for three hours.

  “How could you leave him with her?” she said.

  “The reverend and I talked about it. It’s the best we could do.”

  “The reverend is not his mother. I am. You should have asked me first.”

  He glared at her. You should have been around to be asked. Why the hell are you doing this, anyway? When Aaron was born, when the war began, he’d thought that both their fighting years were done. She’d known all along that only his were. He was so angry at her for that, yet still loved her so much. The two were chained together. Then: “You’re right. I’m sorry,” he said. The apology offered only because it did not matter anymore—Aaron had been sent away, and there was no getting him back unless they went for him themselves—and Aline knew it. What Sunny Jim said next, he would regret for the rest of his life, for it was as if he had been given powers of prophecy for that moment and failed to see it, could not hear his own message.

  “We’ll go and get Aaron when you and the war are done with each other,” he said.

  And since the Market Street Bridge, since Aline left, Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim had been having the same conversation in their heads again and again.

  We should go get your boy.

  No. I have to wait until she comes back. Then we’ll go get Aaron together.

  She’s not coming back.

  Yes she is.

  How do you know?

  I just know.

  Nothing of it spoken between them. They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now. Here, in these words. Us and the city and the towns and river, and everything else, too. All that we know, and everything—everyone—we wish we knew.

  * * *

  ALONG THE RIVER, THE market was already coming back, growing up around the ruins of the day before. The singsong calls of vendors, the shrieks of birds, gutter talk of larger animals, goats, cows. A troop of monkeys patrolled the dark, dank aisles, turning wares in their hands. The occupying soldiers were off the ground, standing in the backs of jeeps, behind weapons of comical size. The vehicles verging on tipping over. Propaganda barking from a loudspeaker planted on the roof. We are a force of peace. It is the resistance that fights us. Sunny Jim was already watching the soldiers’ eyes, was gone before Reverend Bauxite knew it. Sunny
Jim’s gift, he thought, was to become invisible, granted because there was so little keeping him here. He watched a soldier watching him, a woman with a ponytail sneaking out from under her helmet. The helmet too big, the jacket too small. The soldier turned to Reverend Bauxite, eyebrows raised. Seemed to see in him, then, all that he had done, for he was not like Sunny Jim. He was an open man, his passions playing in the air around him. The same thing that made him a fire, a beacon, in the pulpit, made him a failure at espionage. They should have left days ago, he thought. Gone north and found Aaron, then west, across all that land. The war could not have broken it all. They still could go, he thought. Change their clothes, their hair, their names, until Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim were just two more men who died somewhere back in all that fighting, and their new selves were free.

  That night they hid in the last building standing on the block of Peffer and North Seventh, a red brick house that used to lean on its neighbors, but had nothing to lean on now. The stairs falling off the porch. Window frames angling with rain and gravity. A kitchen half-gutted by rot, a gas stove with no gas. Across North Seventh, the railroad tracks were torn up in twelve places. They could see the remains of the capitol from the roof, burned down again. They drew the place where the building’s dome had been in the air with their fingers. They listened to the howling of monkeys in the houses near them, sirens from the other side of the bridge. There were alarms all over the city that night. Neither of them knew why.

  Their phone rang again after midnight. Reverend Bauxite had his speech prepared. We can’t do your work anymore. Aaron can’t lose a father, too. But Grendel Jones’s voice on the other end was small. Something has happened to the west and north of us, she said. No. Something is happening to the west and north.

  “What do you mean?” Reverend Bauxite said.

  “You won’t believe me when I tell you,” Grendel Jones said. She was right. Reverend Bauxite argued and shook his head. There must be some mistake. Nothing like that can be happening. Nothing.

  “What are you talking about?” Sunny Jim said.

  There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth, distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, Reverend Bauxite thought. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

  “You won’t believe me,” Reverend Bauxite said.

  But Jim believed every word. He stood there nodding and frowning. Aaron. My favorite boy. Why did I ever let you leave me?

  “We can get on the highway now,” he said. “Get there as fast as we can.”

  “No, we can’t,” Reverend Bauxite said. “The war is there. And the army is looking for you. They’re looking for both of us.”

  All because of Aline. We never should have gotten involved.

  We didn’t have a choice, Jim. Not a real one. Not one that was right.

  There is always a choice, and we chose.

  “How are we going to do this, then?” Sunny Jim said.

  Reverend Bauxite looked out the window, toward the Susquehanna. The long meandering stripe through the Pennsylvania hills that drowned the railroad track, spread into valleys. It could take them all the way to Scranton, ahead of the war, without the army ever seeing them. Maybe all the way to Binghamton. Lose a few days, but it was worth it if it meant staying invisible. They would get there just in time, before the storm hit. The Big One, Grendel Jones was already calling it. A storm as wide as the horizon. Maybe as wide as the sea.

  “We could go up the river,” he said.

  “Nobody’s going up the river now,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Someone must be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Reverend Bauxite said. “But someone has to be. Don’t they?”

  His faith again, shaking. He tried to keep his voice from doing the same.

  * * *

  DO YOU SEE? HOW the world is now? Nobody can say quite how it came to be this way. There is too much. There is not enough. It started generations ago, and so much has been lost, and even all that I found does not help. You wake up and the country is on fire, as far as you can see. How can you find the match that started it?

  Our great-grandparents told our grandparents that things were different once, when they were children. A little colder. Simpler. Not as many people were dying. That the change was slow, slow enough to argue about it. A gradual, creeping shift. A field full of cars, grown over with grass and stalks of trees. The plants tipping the cars over, breaking them apart. A massacre three decades long. In West Virginia, we had leveled a green range of peaks into a gray waste, spotted with the rusting yellow metal of abandoned machinery. In Pennsylvania and New York, we had drilled for gas until the rock broke and the water went bad, and the towns that used to drink it died. We burned and we burned, until there was more smoke than fuel, and then things started to come apart. The roads breaking into rifts of jutting asphalt. Libraries with caved-in roofs, full of decaying books and dead monitors. We saw these things and yelled at each other. The system had been built on argument, believing that any problem could be fixed, explained, weaseled out of, with enough money, the right words. Until the problem was physics, and then there was only what we did and how the planet responded. It did not matter what we said after that, though we kept talking anyway. As if it was all we had.

  There must have been a day, a single day, when it was too late, when we could not go back, but nobody can remember when it was. The storms started coming, more and more of them. A typhoon walloped in from the ocean, put an entire city underwater, and the water tore half the place down when it receded. Tornadoes swept across towns that could have lasted for centuries more, turned houses, fences, and cars into giant fields of shredded wood and metal strewn with the dead and everything they had loved. The bare trunks of dead trees that the wind had snapped in half and stripped of bark reached for the sky like scorched hands. The survivors staggered through the broken streets, stunned and shouting. Far away, there was news of entire countries flooded. Places where people had been for thousands of years, gone. In Richmond, Virginia, I found photographs in the basement of an apartment building showing a massive fleet of dilapidated ships arriving at a port, maybe in New Jersey, maybe Maryland. Maybe everywhere. Old cruise ships streaked with oil and smoke, tankers of rust, dropping sheets of corroded metal into the sea when they shuddered to a stop. Filled with people with clothes rotting off their backs. In those pictures, the seawalls our great-grandparents had put around the cities were still there. The ocean knocking on the door, about to let itself in. It took maybe seventy years. A growing beat, they say, of stronger and stronger storms, a long chain of hurricanes, until the walls gave way and the streets went under, buildings fell. Savannah. Atlantic City. A freak storm in Boston. A ragged swath carved out of New York. The remaining cities cringing with every change of season, every gathering of clouds, waiting for the Big One. A tide of survivors inland, looking for things that were not there. The government able to do less and less, until it was just men in frayed suits, arguing in buildings where the power kept going out, whose surroundings were turning back to swampland. The borders on the maps of America getting hazy, the names and the boundaries becoming lines and letters of no significance. Then there were just the cities and the towns, and the land all around. As though the planet was taking it all back from us. You could almost see it happening before your eyes, our grandparents said. The trees rushing over empty fields, year after year. Jumping from one dead farm to the next. The diseases followed, one after the other.

  The war, the war. There was no Fort Sumter, no Pearl Harbor, no moment that we all understood at once that we were fighting. No one to tell us things had changed. There must have been a first shot fired, perhaps two me
n—it must have been men—arguing over where one’s land began and another’s ended, a first bullet flinging a ribbon of heat through the air. Another one shot back. But I have to believe they did not know what they were starting. If they knew, why would they have shot? An army was raised, a resistance arose. By the time Charlotte, North Carolina, burned, nobody was asking what it was about anymore. It was about territory. It was about food and water: who had it, who did not. The old fights, the ones we had fought since we got here, the ones our ancestors brought with them when they came here, all those bitter old things becoming new again. It was about how much we had done to the planet, and the way the planet, at last, had turned its great eye to us in anger. You have done enough. The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

  The war came for us, my daughter and I, four years ago, in Charleston, West Virginia. We had moved six times, on a ragged diagonal across the South, from a washed-out beach house in South Carolina into the mountains. Slept in a garage outside of Roanoke, listened to the flood of rain find its way through the roof. Sat against the wall of a freight car with thirty other people, my arms around my little girl, while the train screamed and banged along the old Winchester and Western rails, too loud to rest. In Charleston, we heard the war was coming up the Kanawha river valley, talked about moving again. But the trees all around Charleston were in bloom, and we had a house, just big enough for us both, with a small yard behind it, a cinder-block wall. We were so tired of moving. Always thought we had more time. Three days later I was howling in the bottom of a metal boat with a man who had lost both his arms, shells exploding all around us. Then we drifted toward the Ohio, away from the war. He died when everything got quiet.

  Do you see? The story I have left to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled. Two men going upriver to get a boy. Four soldiers going up the highway after them. Then the house where everything converged. But I had a child, too, strong and small. I lost her when I lost that house in Charleston, and I do not know where she has gone. And since then, I have been to Baltimore, to New York. I saw what happened to Philadelphia. I stood at the edge of a mass grave in Maryland, next to the parking lot of an abandoned shopping center. I walked through the windows of a fallen bell tower in Delaware that had crashed into the street after the bombs came for it. I was in a firefight in West Virginia, all oil and darkness and screaming animals, and when it was over, nothing but moans and crying, the ground swampy and fetid with blood and pieces of men. A tree hung with human limbs. I want to tell you their names, all those people who died around me, but I cannot say who they were.