Todd (16 page)

But he takes a step away from it,
then another. Screw the couch. Screw the moss. Screw everything.
Just get
what I came for.

The cool darkness of the grocery
store closes over him.

As his eyes adjust to the dim
light, he sees the moss is here, too. It has dragged itself over the registers
and the magazine racks; it is dripping from the shopping carts like vomit.

He could turn and run away,
screaming and tripping over empty clothes. He could grab the box cutter sitting
on the nearby counter and slice his wrists open, or sink to the floor gibbering
and let his mind slide away. These would all be reasonable responses.

Instead he crunches through the
broken glass toward the pharmacy. Even now, months since everyone vanished, he
feels an asinine twinge of self-consciousness as he pushes through the little
gate that leads behind the counter. He doesn't belong here. He looks like a
junkie. Someone will call the cops.

Sertraline.
The drug's name
shimmers in his head. He is adrift in a sea of horror; it is the lighthouse on
the shore. If he can find it, he can go back to his couch.

Sertraline, sertraline.

The drugs are ordered
alphabetically into aisles, each in its own little bucket drawer—but his drug
is not in the
S
section. How can they not have it? It's a common SSRI.

There's a taste in his mouth, like
chalk or antacids. It's the moss. He can smell it, too: a cloying, stale
whisper that lies in a haze over everything.

He wants to get out of there. He
wants to get away from it. He tears out the drawers and hurls them, clattering,
into the dark. After a few frenzied minutes, he realizes the drawers are
labeled by brand name. He ducks back to
Z,
and finally gets his
prescription.

Should get something to eat
while I'm here,
some long-neglected, rational part of his mind tries to
suggest.
Todd said we—

But he doesn't give a fuck what
Todd said. He's scrabbling through the mess of drawers, he's bursting through
the little gate, he's slipping in a patch of empty clothes, thick as a carpet,
on the way out. Then he's in the car, heading home, but he can't help himself
this time. The novelty of driving is no longer distracting him. During the trip
he watches through the window for the moss, and he finds it.

Oh God, he finds it everywhere.

57

He's shaking as he comes through
the door, his stomach a clot of nausea. His eyes, eager and terrified, leap
around looking for moss in the house, but it's not there. He stumbles into the
kitchen and drops the pills on the counter, a gesture painfully reminiscent of
a more normal time, and sees Todd in the living room. He's holding the note
Alan left.

Hey, pal.
He can imagine
the words, remember their taste: casual and fond. But he can't say them,
because they don't matter.

"Daddy?"

He reaches into his bag of loose
pills and grabs two, then turns to find a bottle of water. "What."

His voice is shaking. "Are
you really going to kill yourself?"

The question stops Alan cold.

All that shit I said to him,
he marvels,
all that mean, evil shit, and that's what he remembers? That's
what scares him the most?

A thousand ramifications flash
past him, indistinct and unsettling as Blurs.

I don't know
. He wants the
words to be callous.
Maybe.
He wants Todd scared. He wants Todd gone. He
doesn't care what the boy—

And the father somehow halts his
tongue. He's staring at the kitchen counter, hands quivering, a bottle of water
in one and a pair of pills in the other.

Todd waits: a display of
eight-year-old patience worthy of the Nobel. When the whisper comes, Alan
barely recognizes his own voice. "I don't want to."

He can imagine the look of
confusion on Todd's face, but doesn't look up to see it. God, he is so ashamed
of himself. He wants to crawl in a hole and die. Todd is only eight. It's not
fair—

"So you won't?"
Tremulous. Scared but confrontational. "Right?"

I don't
want
to,
Alan
nearly repeats. The phrase is succinct and perfect. It articulates everything:
the stakes, the facts—

The odds.

Instead his mouth pries itself
open again. "I'm sick, Todd." He pops the sertraline to emphasize the
point. "I need to lie down."

Todd's lip is quivering with rage
or grief. "All you ever
do
is lie down!"

"I know." Alan stumbles
past him, retreating to the couch. Even the way he walks is wrong. "I'm
sorry."

58

"In a lot of ways," the
father explains from his cell as Alan dreams, "what's happening is pretty
fascinating."

Alan just stares, as always: looks
past the bars and wonders which of them is actually imprisoned.

"First the Blurs, now the moss.
Did the Blurs make the moss? They're the same shade of blue. They
must
be related."

Spurious correlation. Funny.

"What do you think it's for,
though? Is it using all the extra oxygen the trees are putting out? What's the
end goal—some kind of terraforming?"

Tricky, trying to get him to care.
Doesn't he know who Alan is, what's going on with him? He'd get just as far
talking to the wall.

"I wonder how long it'll
take. I suppose it depends on what they're trying to do. Actual terraforming...
it's supposed to take centuries, isn't it, at least? If not longer. Maybe the
moss makes the process faster, or something?

"You have to admit—yeah, it's
terrifying, but it's also kind of cool. We're kind of lucky to be here to see
it."

Wow, that was transparent. Lucky
to watch the world turn blue and die? That's all he's got?
Well,
Alan
thinks,
I'll be damned: I'm cured! It's a miracle!
You're right,
he
wants to crow.
Life
is
worth living!

The father falls silent; his eyes
are serious and intent. "You did the right thing today."

Alan looks away, but the voice
follows him.

"You did the right
thing."

59

He wakes to daylight.

The days have all been the same,
so he doesn't know how long it's been. Maybe two or three, maybe several. Each
has followed the same routine: he takes his pills, he sips some water, he stays
on the couch. Some days, he's managed to eat. Otherwise, the only thing that
makes this one different from the last is that he wakes wondering about Todd.

Is he okay? Is he eating? Alan is
hungry, too, but it doesn't matter. It's Todd he's worried about.

He sits up and says his son's name
to the empty room: an invocation that manifests nothing. He repeats it, nothing
changes.

Todd could be sleeping. He could
have run away.

He could be dead.

A sudden fist squeezes Alan's
heart: something resembling panic. He bolts upright, sweating, on the verge of
hysteria. "
Todd?
" The call echoes twice in the empty room.

He scrambles to the boy's room,
just off the living room. It's a shattered mosaic of dirty clothes, rotting
food, and broken toys. It looks like a squatter lives there. He's about to
lurch away, driven by the need to find his son, but his eyes snag on the words,
Jokes For Dad.

It's a collection of ragged pages
from a spiral notebook, torn out and stapled together into a makeshift book.
Below the title are the words,
To Make Him Feel Better.

Moving as if caught in a dream,
Alan picks it up. The first page reads:

 
How do Signs
communkate
?

He stares at it and remembers
things like pride in his son's vocabulary, concern over his misspellings, and
the basic thrill of seeing him create something. Still in the dream, he turns
the page.

With Sign
Langague

Alan exhales through his nose. Not
a laugh; not even a chuckle, exactly. More of an acknowledgement. The next page
says:

What store has the most Money?

Which,
he thinks
reflexively.
Not what.
The scholar corrects while the father turns the
page, eager.

Dollar Store

He does laugh this time. He
should've seen it coming, of course, but something about its absurdity, its sheer
earnestness, reaches him. He doesn't know why he laughs—it's not really that
funny—but he does.

The darkness in his head watches
and shakes its head. It knows there's nothing in the world worth laughing
about. It knows—it tries to remind him—that everyone is gone, that the world is
a rock in a sea of nothingness, that the eternal cold of space is coming to
claim them, and that the Blurs are its heralds. It knows he is an alien on his
own planet, treading water as the flood rises.

The book in his hands barely earns
the descriptor. It's ten thin pieces of paper. Against the weight of their
doom, it is frail and meaningless: matter making a quick pit stop between dust
and ashes.

But it made him laugh.

When he realizes this, he starts
sobbing.

Meds are working,
the
scholar notes wryly, but the words vanish under a tidal wave of grief. This
little, pathetic book. Todd made this. He made
this,
while his father
lay on the couch waiting to die. In the face of cataclysmic, impossible
despair, he chose joy. This feeble thing, this tiny, irrelevant bunch of
papers. He chose this.

"Daddy?"

Alan snaps his head up. He doesn't
want his son to see him like this, but there's no escaping it.

"Are you okay?" Todd
says.

It's the question Alan should be
asking
him
. He don't deserve it, he hasn't earned his son's concern.
He's failed him in every way a father can fail a son. He wants to flinch from
him, to hide, and so he forces himself toward him and pulls him into a hug.

"I'm sorry," he
whispers. "Todd, I'm so, so sorry."

60

"I'm really sick." They
sit on the living room floor, Alan steadfastly ignoring the couch. "I
don't know if you remember, you were pretty small still at the time, but a few
years ago I got sick like this. I had to take some special medicine before I
was able to get better."

"Is it like a cold?"

"No." Alan taps his
temple. "It's in here. It's like being really, really sad all the time,
and not being able to feel anything else." That's not exactly right. It's
more like endless darkness, like the vacuum of deep space. Compared to that,
even the sadness he feels now is a welcome change. But he doesn't clarify.
"It's called depression. When you feel this way it's hard to do anything.
And you..." He braces himself, forces his eyes to seek his son's.
"You can be really mean, sometimes, especially to people you care about,
and I'm sorry about that."

Todd won't meet his eyes.

"I said some really mean
things to you. I didn't mean them. I never would've said them if I wasn't sick.
And that doesn't excuse—"

"But they were true,
though."

The words trip him. He cycles
back, trying to remember what he actually said that day, but all he can
remember is the rage. "I—"

"We're gonna die here.
Right?"

Everyone dies.
He swallows
the words, but he's too weak to deny them outright. "I don't know. I
shouldn't have said that."

"But the Blurs..." Todd
trails off, blinks rapidly, and tries again. "The Blurs—"

"The Blurs can't hurt
us." This much is true. He's no cheerleader, but he can hold to this, at
least. "I shouldn't have said that. Just think about it. They've never
hurt us. They've never even touched us. I don't know what they're doing"—
Changing
the planet. Growing the moss.
—"but whatever it is, if they could hurt
us they would have by now."

Todd stares at the floor. His
hands have found a pile of markers and are idly forming geometric shapes with
them: a triangle, then a square, then a rectangle. He is constantly creating.
He can stop no sooner than Alan could fly to the moon.

"Are you going to kill
yourself?" he says.

Alan answers immediately.
"No."

Todd's bottom lip quivers. His
voice is writhing. "That scared me really bad when you said that."

"I know. I know. It was just
the depression, Todd. I promise."

"Because if you died I would
be all... all by my..."

He grabs his son, pulls him in.
"Listen. Not gonna happen."

"I wish you never would've
said that."

"I know." Todd's body is
a live wire in his arms. "I wish that, too."

"I
hate
that
depression!"

"Me too."

"I want to just...
vaporize
it!"

The admonitions are like whip
cracks. Alan wants to burrow into the couch until they stop. He hates himself.

He should've gotten the meds
sooner. He should've known how bad it would get.

And even now, the voice in his
head says,
This is all pointless.

"I'm sorry," he says
again. "I'm here now. I'm here." He draws a breath and forces those
damn words out, the ones that Alan's son needs to hear but Alan's father
poisoned. "I love you."

You're lying,
his dad's
voice sneers.
You're putting on a show, but you're as pathetic as you were
yesterday.

Maybe. But if putting on a show is
what he has to do, then he'll do it.

61

Todd holds his hand as they walk
next door to use the facilities, and hugs him every time they stop or slow
down. He hasn't been this clingy with Alan since he was an infant. Again, Alan
wonders briefly if the trauma is making his son regress, and decides it doesn't
matter. The constant hugs are desperate with need; they're impossible not to
return.