Todd (10 page)

As they walked, Todd said,
"I'm scared of death," and Alan nodded. He'd known this was coming.

Growing up, if he'd admitted
something like that, his father would have browbeaten him until Alan either
admitted that the idea of Heaven made everything better, or became sufficiently
convinced that he was a sissy. Carefully, again using his own father's examples
as a signpost of what to avoid, he said, "Me, too. What scares you about
it?"

"Because you can't get away
from it. No one can. And then when it happens you don't have your friends
anymore, or any of your stuff. You don't even have
yourself
any more.
It's like you don't have anything."

"Yeah." When Alan had
drifted away from religion, he'd spent years trying to make sense of death. If
he wasn't careful, it still had the power to suck him into the trap of thinking
that nothing was worthwhile, because everything ended. When he was having an
episode, it was a common theme.

It killed him to hear Todd
wrestling with it.

The boy's birth had brought hope
and light into Alan's life. It had seemed like a new chance to get everything
right, to rewrite the mistakes made by his own parents. His love for his son
had been so overpowering that he'd felt certain it would be enough.

Then Todd had gotten older. He'd
get hyper, or loud, and Alan had heard himself snapping at him—not just every
now and then, not just when he couldn't take it anymore, but
automatically.
It
was his go-to response, his normal way of interacting with his own son: to tear
him down, to rip him apart. He didn't choose it. It just happened.

He and Brenda had fought about it.
She had threatened to leave him over it, which had enraged him, but also made
him realize how seriously she viewed it. Instead of screwing Todd up or losing
his wife, he had pulled back. Kept the boy at arm's length, for years.

And now Todd was scared of death.
That innocence that had held such promise when Todd was a baby had almost
completely vanished. Alan didn't begrudge his son for this—it was part of being
human—but it tore at him all the same. It was hard, watching one of the only
things he'd ever thought was pure slip away.

"Mommy said nothing ever
ends," Todd went on. He was talking about the law of conservation of
energy: Alan and Brenda's secular stand-in for an afterlife. "But it's not
true."

"Well..." Alan's tongue
was a knot. He'd talked about it with Allie, once, but this was still a
conversation he'd have handed over to Brenda in a heartbeat. "Sure it's
true."

"No it's not. Mommy and Allie
ended. Grandma ended."

"Yeah. They did. But there's
more to everything than what we can see with our eyes. You know that,
right?"

"Yeah." He sounded like
he didn't know that at all.

"Like... me. When you look at
me, you see your dad, right?"

"Yeah."

"But you don't see what I'm
thinking. You don't see all the little cells in my body. You don't see my
stomach digesting my breakfast, but that's all there, all happening."

"Okay."

"You also don't see all the
energy that makes me up, but it's there. They've been able to prove it. Like,
if you put a chair in a room and sealed the room all up, and then vaporized the
chair." He winced inwardly; bad analogy, maybe. Or maybe the best analogy.
"The chair disappears, but there are changes in the room. There might be
some water left behind, and some gas. The temperature will go up because of all
the energy that gets released. And even the water and the gas... when you look
at those things really, really close you see that they're made up of energy.
That's all anything is, really, is energy. Even your skin and bones—even the
concrete."

Todd wasn't buying any of it. He
was reaching for a father; Alan was giving him a scholar. "I know it's
weird," Alan conceded.

But at the same time, Todd did
seem to understand. He just didn't see why it mattered.

"My point is just that maybe
getting turned back into energy is not so bad. We're all energy to start with,
just in a particular form. I'm energy and you're energy, and Mommy and Allie
are energy, too."

"So they're still here, kind
of?"

"Yeah, I would say so."
The thought was actually comforting, a little.

"But do they still... do they
know that they're
them
?"

"Well..."
No. How
could they?
"I don't know, man. I'd like to say yes. It would be nice
to think so. But I just don't know for sure. No one does."

Todd chewed on this before going
on. "Danny at school told me we're gonna go to Heaven when we die because
we don't go to church."

"He said... Heaven? Or did he
say Hell?"

"Oh. Maybe it was Hell."
He shook his head. "I get them confused."

"Yeah." Alan felt a
little wash of relief at hearing this. Both concepts had brought him constant
strife when he'd been young. It was nice to know that he'd managed, at least,
to spare his children the same. "Do you know what Heaven and Hell are
supposed to be?"

"Like... a place you go when
you die?"

"Right. That's the idea. They
say Heaven is a place where you're always happy and you get to see everyone you
love, even the ones that died. And Hell—"

He cut himself short. Why talk
about Hell? Why even put the idea in the kid's head, when he already had so
much to worry about? It was just a power enforcer anyway, a way for the
religious to abuse people into doing what they wanted.

But I could tell him Mommy and
Allie are in Heaven,
he thought.
There's no harm in that now.
He and
Brenda had been agnostic Humanists, at least on paper. They'd agreed to answer
the kids' questions about the origin of life and the nature of death with what
truths they knew for sure, and an exploration of the suite of human beliefs on
the subject. They hadn't wanted to say Heaven existed for certain, because they
didn't know that. And if it did exist, the question became: how do you get
there? Which religion is right?

But now there were no religions.
No one could try to convince Todd he was living his life wrong, or he should
give them his money, or he'd go to hell if he masturbated, or something equally
ridiculous.
I could just say I know about Heaven because everyone does. I
could make up anything.
It might give Todd some comfort, and comfort was at
a premium—but it would violate everything he'd agreed to with his wife.

Did that still matter?

"It's like... a bad
place?" Todd pressed. "Like the opposite of Heaven."

The opportunity passed. Alan felt
it go with a twinge of regret, wondering if he'd done the right thing. But if
Todd had already heard about Hell, Alan couldn't just pretend he hadn't.
"Yeah. But it's not real. It's just an idea people use to hurt each
other."

Used to use,
he realized.
He looked at the empty street, and a snatch of John Lennon lyrics drifted
through his mind.
No religion, indeed.

Todd looked confused, so Alan went
on. "Like, if someone wanted me to give them all my money, they could tell
me that I'd go to Hell if I didn't. Or if someone wanted me to do something
really bad—like kill a bunch of other people they didn't like—they could tell
me I'd go to Heaven if I did."

"So Heaven's not real
either?" Alan couldn't see his face—he was staring at the ground—but his
voice was tortured.

There simply wasn't any evidence
to support the hypothesis of an afterlife. The near-death experiences that some
people quoted for their vague beliefs were just too anecdotal; none of them had
ever been repeated in a controlled environment. And he and Brenda had agreed
not to tell lies.

But there was a line between
honesty and cruelty. Even Brenda had wanted their kids to believe in Santa
Claus.

There's no harm in this. Don't
take it from him.

"I don't know, Todd." He
managed a lame smile. "I've never died, you know? And that's the only way
to tell."

Way to go,
he berated
himself.
Talk a little more about your own death, that's great, that's
really getting to him.
Then he saw something terrifying: his own
depression, creeping into his son's eyes like the shadows of storm clouds.

The jolt of urgency he felt
overwhelmed him. "I can tell you this much," he said, racing against
those shadows, refusing to let them take hold. "I can tell you people have
believed in Heaven for thousands of years, almost as long as there have been
people around. I can tell you that some people who have died and then been
brought back by doctors have reported seeing a light and hearing the voices of
their dead relatives."

It was a fundamental betrayal of
the memory of his wife. Sure, people had reported near-death experiences where
they saw a tunnel and a light and all their dead friends—but some had also
reported endless emptiness and horror. Disembodied voices mocking them from the
darkness. Why wasn't Alan talking about that?

Scholar Alan said,
You
shouldn't be talking about either one. Neither instance is verifiable or
repeatable. They don't pass the sniff test.

Dad Alan said,
He doesn't need
to hear that right now.

"Really?" A cautious
hope had dawned in Todd's eyes, crowding out those horrible shadows.

"Really," Alan said.
"And I don't know what it means. It could mean there is something beyond
death that we just can't understand or see while we're alive. Or it
could
mean—"

—that the brain just imagines
happy things right before it dies.
Alan thought this was an equally
comforting narrative. There was little difference in his mind between an
eternity of paradise and an illusion of the same thing concocted by his own
mind an instant before the end. But Todd would see it differently, so he shut
the scholar down before it could say it.

Todd thought he was prompting him,
the way Brenda always had. "That Allie and Mommy are in Heaven." The
darkness in his eyes vanished completely, replaced by curiosity. "But how
do we
know—
"

"We don't." Alan
squeezed his shoulder; the motion felt awkward and forced. "I won't lie to
you. It is one of the hardest things about life. But we just don't know. But
that can be an exciting thing, too. It's almost like an adventure. Everyone
gets to find out. It's new to every person who experiences it.

"And hey, if Heaven
is
real,
then just imagine how excited Mommy and Allie were to find it."

32

It was twenty minutes to Fast Gas
by foot. They got there to find a mess of melted candy bars, the result of
three days
sans
A/C in a Minnesota
June. The licorice and the gummy candies were in good shape, though.

Alan left Todd to pick whatever he
wanted and walked to the far aisle, with the batteries and miscellaneous car
supplies. The station was a lot smaller than Crown or even the hardware store,
and one entire wall was made of glass, so there was a lot more light. Alan kept
his flashlight out anyway, but it was nice to be shopping in the equivalent of
early dusk instead of midnight.

As he walked, he noticed a chill
radiating from the cooler glass. "Hey, hey."

"What? Hey-hey what?"

"This glass is cold." He
opened the door and rested his hand on the side of a gallon of milk. Chilled
condensation had never felt so good. He gave his son a victorious grin, feeling
like he'd just won the Powerball. "How does real milk with dinner
sound?"

"But I thought all the milk
went bad!"

"Not here. Not yet, at
least."

"But the power went
out!"

"They must have had some kind
of emergency generator." He couldn't hear anything going now, but maybe it
had switched on for a couple days and then run out of juice.
Fast Gas had a generator,
and Crown didn't? Weird.
Or maybe they had, until it was taken out by a
suddenly-vacant car? He shrugged. "Don't look a gift horse in the
mouth."

"A horse... what?"

"It means—" Crap. Where
did
that one come from? It wasn't the Trojan horse, he knew that, but he was
drawing a blank, and of course he couldn't use his smartphone. The Trojan horse
was an interesting story, anyway, and the kid would never know.

Never mind,
he started to
say, but it hit him like a ton of bricks: if he didn't explain, Todd might
never know. And it wasn't just the colloquialism, it was the very concept of
the Trojan horse. The history of human literature and mythology. If Alan died
before telling him, it would all be lost.

Even if I tell him, it's lost. He'll
die too. We're the only two left.

The world suddenly felt even
heavier. Alan shook his head, trying to force the thoughts away. He was sick of
them. "I'll tell you on the way home."

He looked behind the front counter
for the expected pile of empty clothes, and dug through them for a set of car
keys. A few minutes later they'd loaded some dead guy's Dodge full of cold milk
and frozen pizza, yogurt and ice cream bars. He wasn't sure they'd have enough
room for it all at home. He wasn't even sure they'd be able to drink that much
milk before it went bad, but by God, they were gonna try.

He explained the Trojan horse as
they drove home. He told Todd about the Greek gods and how weird they were,
always growing out of each other's heads and banishing each other to the
underworld and stuff. Todd laughed. The sound was a tether, holding Alan to Earth
instead of letting him float off into that old, suffocating darkness.

As they pulled into the driveway
Alan caught another glimpse of blue, vanishing around the corner of the house.

33

"All right." He was
suddenly furious. "Enough." He threw open the car door and shouted,
"Hey!"