Dawn of the Unthinkable (2 page)

But it was too late. The last shot found its
mark.

The funeral was a blur. Ryan remembered bits
and pieces of it—people expressing their sorrow and grief,
half-sincere offers of help, and rage and indignation at a
beautiful young life cut short. He was on autopilot, numbly shaking
hands, exchanging hugs, and expressing thanks for people’s genuine
efforts to comfort him. But through it all, a gnawing sense of
guilt and shame chewed him up, making his stomach churn with
nausea.

He was a widower now. A single father. He
had not been able to protect his wife from the monster. He could
only hope that in her last seconds of life, before the light went
out of her pretty blue eyes, she realized that Billy survived.

He
had
survived with just a flesh
wound, mostly because she had pulled him away before his arm was
pulverized. Ryan took care of the man after he had emptied his gun,
pounding him until the police arrived and pulled him off. Now, he
faced a life alone raising his son.

The little boy cried for his mother at night
before he went to sleep. “Mom-mom?” he would ask.

“She’s not here, honey. Go to sleep.” Ryan
would try to comfort his son while stifling a sob of his own.

“Mom-mom,” he would murmur sadly, as he
would drift off in his father’s arms.

The doctors had assured him that, being so
young, Billy would have no memory of the traumatic events, but
neither would he remember his mother. That thought left Ryan
devastated because she was the better person of the two of them,
and his son was being horribly short-changed. Ryan tortured himself
with the thought,
If only I had killed the SOB while I had the
chance!

But, he realized, he just wasn’t that
person. At least at that moment. He had done his best, disabled
him, but it was later found out that the man had smoked weed laced
with “angel dust” and had more juice in him than Ryan had given him
credit for. He thought he had put the man down, that there would be
time to call the police, to get him out of there and go back to
being a regular family. Now, nothing would ever be regular or
normal again. He stared into the horizon, looking for answers.

“Dude, snap out of it. It’s time to go,”
said Stephen Douglass, his close friend from their high school
days.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I know. It’s just that
leaving means….” Ryan was still sitting in his chair near Donna’s
casket in the cemetery. A cold wind blew a flower off the shiny
bronze lid. It fell into the hole underneath, making him shudder.
The burial crew shuffled off on the side of the road, eager to get
his beloved underground so they could get home to their families.
He was alone with Dawes, and it was time for them to go.

“Yeah, I know man. But she’ll always be with
you, with us, through Billy. No asshole can take that away from
you,” Dawes said softly.

It was what Ryan needed to hear. “You’re
right. I have a kid to raise, and she would want me to focus on
that. But I will always miss her. She was the love of my life….”
Ryan trailed off, looking at the casket again.

“Man, I know. You two had a marriage we all
envied, and I can’t even imagine the pain you’re going through. But
right now you have a reception to host, so we have to get you
there. You can come back here when all the fuss dies down and spend
some quiet time here. Talk to her, maybe,” he offered, trying to be
helpful.

“Okay,” Ryan said as he heaved himself to
his feet and followed his friend, turning his back on his old,
comfortable life.

Fall 1983

It turned out that the problem with the
credit card in the store was not an isolated incident. Somehow his
bank had swapped his accounts with a guy whose name was one letter
different than his. This guy was going for Deadbeat of the Year,
and Ryan suddenly found himself talking to bill collectors,
auditors from the IRS, and a scary guy named Vic who actually came
out to the house.

He tried to explain that he wasn’t the guy
that had caused all this trouble, and some were sympathetic, but
more than one suggested that he pay the other guy’s bills, advising
that it might be easier than trying to fix it. Ryan thought he was
finally getting to the bottom of it when an eviction notice arrived
at his house. Apparently his going to the bank and trying to work
things out had not taken, and here he was staring at being
homeless. Although he knew that it would take a while for even an
aggressive mortgage company to force the eviction, it was still
pretty unnerving and more than a little upsetting. Despite feeling
that he was losing even more of himself, he decided that his best
option was to move to get away from all of this money madness. As
he stared at the For Sale sign in the yard of his cherished home,
he marvelled at how much money effected everyone’s lives.

Life settled into a routine for them. Ryan
eventually returned to work and used a patchwork of family,
friends, and babysitters for day care. He woke up in the morning,
got ready for work, and took Billy to whoever was watching him that
day. He went off to his job, and at night, he returned and played
with and read to his son until it was time for bed. He mostly ate
alone, not having much interest in mixing with friends or family.
His mind constantly circled the horrible events, and something kept
poking at him.
What caused this?
he wondered for the five
hundredth time. He stretched out on his sofa in the den with a
grunt and opened his paper. His day had been routine, too routine,
and his mind hungered for intellectual stimulation. This would come
from the TV show
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, which was
in reruns for about the nine millionth time. It was hard to get
excited about something where you had practically memorized the
dialogue, but when your workday was boring, something that was off
in the cosmos could still grab you.

At thirty-eight years old, Ryan stood about
six feet two inches, and weighed about two hundred twenty pounds,
so he was moving toward being a middle-aged, slightly overweight,
suburban, white guy. He was acceptable looking in a bland sort of
way. That is, most women did not look twice at him, unless it was
in a bar with dim lighting. He was a federal government worker,
with seventeen years in. He was a building manager, responsible for
making sure that the building under his control was safe,
operational, and efficient in its operations. There were many
tenants in his seventeen story downtown high rise, and it had
elevators, HVAC, roofs, and other building systems that had to have
constant maintenance and upkeep. Not to mention security for
sensitive areas, and janitorial services throughout, so it was a
full-time, challenging job.

When he had free time at work, he started to
think about life in general. He read a lot, consuming novels in his
youth and the newspaper, cover-to-cover, daily. He watched the news
every day and was an ardent web surfer. He found himself
gravitating toward Utopian sites, where people and “experts”
discussed how to create the perfect world. He felt reasonably
well-informed on most issues, and had his own opinions on the
affairs of the world, which he generally kept to himself. He
appreciated Abraham Lincoln’s saying, “A person never learned
anything by talking,” and someone less prestigious, but no less
accurate, “Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one, and they
all stink.” He had used these sayings to remind himself to be a
good listener. He found that what he had heard and learned
throughout his life had left him dissatisfied.

Personally, they were doing okay. His
program was running well now. He and Billy had moved to a nice
single house in the suburbs of Philadelphia, leaving behind the
scene of their violent confrontation. The house was in an older
development compared to the dozens of new ones that were constantly
erected nearby. It was starting to have some wear and tear problems
after forty years, but it was still a nice home. It had plenty of
big windows that made it a bright, cheery place. It was large
enough for them, but felt empty without a woman’s touch.

Donna was a bright, funny lady who drew
people to her with her bubbly personality. They had dated through
high school, gradually taking a further shine to each other as the
years passed. They had an off-and-on relationship for many years,
always coming back to each other after test runs with others ended.
They married at a young age and had Billy, named William after
Nick’s father, shortly thereafter. They moved from the suburban
homes of their youth to their first home, a row home in
Philadelphia, purchasing what they could afford on meagre salaries
and savings. Like many young couples, they had to make decisions as
to whether she was going to work full-time or spend more time at
home to raise their children, and they opted for more time at home
for her. Billy thrived with her daily attention, and she worked
while her mother or sister watched their child.

After the funeral, while people were still
sympathetic, they tended to avoid him out of their fear of saying
the wrong thing. This only increased his loneliness as, like most
men, he was not good at sharing his pain. So, he went about his
life, and it passed in a desultory manner, his grief gradually
lifting with the passage of time.

Ryan’s discontent had more to do with the
world’s situation, specifically, the United States. He would say to
his toddler as he bounced him on his knee, “You know, kid, every
day, it’s the same thing: murders, rapes, shootings, and
white-collar guys stealing millions. What a world you’re going to
grow up in. I bet you can’t wait.”

The more he contemplated the world’s
condition, the guiltier he felt at his relative good fortune, and
the more he wished there was something he could do. To pacify his
feelings of guilt, he volunteered at various activities. He was a
coach and a referee at the local police athletic league and a youth
aid panel member who counseled first-time juvenile offenders.
However, they were only small contributions, and he wished he could
do more. Even if he did, he was not sure it would make much of a
difference. In the end, despite the efforts of millions of
dedicated volunteers, it seemed that life kept some people down no
matter how hard they tried or others tried to help them.
Why was
that
? he wondered.

He said to Billy, who was now chasing a fly
trapped in the house with a swatter, “It seems that every type of
solution to the United States’ problems has been proposed or tried,
all with little to no success.”

The boy shrieked with laughter and terror as
the fly gave him a run for his money, darting every which way with
him in hot pursuit. Ryan thought that there were isolated
individuals who rose up from bad circumstances, but they were
certainly not the norm. Many seemed to spend generations trapped in
a welfare or shelter situation, never quite able to make it into
the mainstream.

Ryan thought,
It would be great if
someone could think of one plan that would fix all of these
problems, even if it caused some pain initially
.

Was it crazy to think that such an idea
existed? After all, man had been around for thousands of years, and
while some tremendous advances had occurred, there were still parts
of the world where people killed each other for food, water, and
money
. He kept coming back to that screamed demand, “Gimme
me all your goddamned MONEY!”

It didn’t seem like there was a solution. If
all the people that had existed throughout the history of man had
not been able to come up with an answer by now, he guessed that one
just was not possible. He sighed and went back to reading his
paper.

The episode of
Star Trek
played
unwatched in the background. This particular show had the
oft-repeated time traveler theme, where a person from the past had
transported to the future by an “anomaly.” The “transportee” was
amazed at the size of the ship, and asked the captain where they
found the money to build it. He said that, “the economics of the
future is somewhat different…” and “…we don’t work for personal
gain, but to better all of humanity….” Ryan suddenly came alert
with a thought that had not occurred to him the previous times he
had seen this show:
HOW? How could that be done?

How could society do that? How could you get
rid of all money? Was there a way? After all, if it was the cause
of the world’s problems, wouldn’t you want to do away with it? In
addition, what about homelessness and crime? Was there some idea to
solve them? The show did not explain how they did it, just that it
happened.

“How, Jean Luc, how did you do it?” he asked
the TV and the plucky star ship captain. Sadly, Jean Luc did not
answer, but kept right on speaking his scripted lines. Well, the
show was primarily a space exploration show, so to delve into the
intricacies of a political and economic transformation would be a
little beyond their scope. Nevertheless, he wondered if the thought
had occurred to anyone else. Surely, there must have been some
people who had questioned it. But then again, maybe not. Could he
try to do something?

He had the beginning of an idea that seemed
bold, and yet so obvious, he wondered why he had never heard of
anything like it before. He wanted to tell someone, but there was
no one there to tell. His son could not understand it. He decided
to sleep on it that night, assuming that it would be forgotten come
morning.

The next morning, he awoke and continued to
mull it over, but set it aside as nonsense a little while later.
Several times throughout the day, he kept coming back to the
idea.

He was finally going to take some action on
his idea when a new, welcomed distraction came into his life. He
had been going to a single parents support group at work and had
struck up a friendship with a pretty divorcée. She was a little
younger than he, and had a son, Scott, who was two years younger
than his boy. She had custody of him and seemed like a nice person.
Ryan was hesitant to ask her out, as he was not sure he was ready
for another relationship. Finally, after much hemming and hawing,
he worked up his courage and approached her after one of their
meetings.