Hope for Serious People
Grandpa hobbled over to the window and opened it. A breeze shuffled into the room and brought with it the sleepy warmth of a Saturday-evening neighborhood sunset, laced with the pumped-in, artificial scent of freshly cut grass. He inhaled, waved the air into his nostrils like an Italian chef, looked at me with one eye and laughed.
He had a beautiful habit of walking around the house, stepping outside and back in, picking up old objects whose stories I never quite understood, laughing, coughing and sitting back down, content. Though at the time, I didn’t find it beautiful. I found it puzzling. A distraction.
With his duck slippers, his unpolished wooden cane, and what I could only call a “suited lounge-kimono onesie,” Grandpa had, like many of his generation, foregone the technology he had grown up with in favor of life’s simpler clothes, pleasures and ironies. He seized every chance to flirt with the absurd, and his house was packed with just the tools to do so.
Take the “apothecary” bottle of ominous green liquid from his bookshelf, capped with a cork, cross-bones and skull, that he would show me, wild-eyed, spinning doomsday claims that could shame Nostradamus. He’d pretend to drink it and make his face red with rage, or swipe it over my drink and whistle, looking around as if he hadn’t just “poisoned” me while never uncorking the vial in the first place. His imagination and sense of humor only grew with age, and at about the same rate that mine diminished. “Grandpa,” I’d say, half disdain, half pity. “You can’t stop for a second to talk about serious things.”
Serious people. I’d thought there was room for no one else.
Most of my time back then at Grandpa’s house was spent in front of the Telepanel. Even though the screen didn’t adjust to my line of eyesight, and it wasn’t connected to any neural networks, it at least got the news. He and Grandma had a “no screens” rule with any guests over, which, to my chagrin, applied to family as well. But when she passed, he allowed the Telepanel to ease the tension she left behind. The familiar sounds of accusatory anchors became white noise to buoy the uncomfortable conversations about “how he was,” “how things were since Mel.” He came to once again appreciate it, I think.
But it wasn’t his crutch for long. Grandpa was back to his old self, I was told, within a few years. By that time, a bit of the Panel had become more acceptable in the Tyson household, and I was thankful for it.
My parents often left me there to “go run errands.” I knew they were striking, though. If it was a “tight month at mommy’s job,” they were striking. If it was “we’ll be back in the morning,” they were striking. If it was “hid in the bathtub,” or “daddy won’t be home for a few days,” I knew they’d found some success.
Any time I could steal away to watch the Panel felt more like a job than an escape, however. I jumped from face to face in the crowds of protesters pictured from the drone coverage, hoping with all my heart that it wasn’t my parents who were the ones attacked by the dogs, or my dad who had been the one skinned by a hot-water cannon, or my mom whose bloody face had been covered with a black sack and thrown into an unmarked van by President Mercer’s peacekeepers.
And that evening, as the summer breeze flowed in through the pollution screen, I noticed Grandpa watching as well. His laughs, shuffles and coughs stopped, and I turned around (as best I could, sitting Indian-Style on the carpet) to ask if he was alright. He snapped back after the third or fourth time I asked, and even though he smiled and winked, I’ll never forget how immeasurably tired he looked in that brief moment.
He walked over to his bookshelf. Carvings of figures from Norse mythology weaved around the dark chestnut molding, telling a story of conquest, fall and revival. Grandpa ran his fingers across the book bindings in his colorful collection. Kirkpatrick. Vonnegut. Rowling. Lovecraft. Sanders. Bradbury. McCarthy. Cooper. Tartt. King. Dostoevsky. Atwood. Reich. He traced the books back and forth, up and down, and the news channel on the Panel cut to a commercial break, leaving me wondering what I had missed in watching this elaborate display.
“There!” he said, pulling free a wedged book titled The Art of the Deal. That was one I knew. Or I had at least learned about in history class.
“Grandpa, why do you have that?” I asked.
“Because, my innocent little grass-hoppa,” he said, “I knew if they ever came and took away any of these, they’d always leave this one behind.”
He laughed as he took it over to the dining room table and sat down.
“Do you have a key?” he asked.
I sighed. “No, Grandpa. I don’t have a key.”
“Are you sure? I think I see it…ah! Yes,” he said, beckoning me with his hands, “come here, I’ll need it for just a moment and then you can have it back.”
I looked at the Panel. A group of the same three men, wearing the same three suits and ties, the same college rings on their fingers, were in the same commercial I swore had been running for the past five years, talking about their real estate seminar, proposing to take my life from “zero to rich hero” with just a five-course beginner apprenticeship at “Mercer University,” whatever that was. So I humored him and sat down at the table.
“Careful there…” he said, reaching to the side of my head as I settled in. With a single twirl of his hand, a key appeared in between his fingers, and instinctively, I touched the back of my ear.
“So kind, audience member sir, so kind. And now,” he said, unlocking the pad and opening the book, “feast your eyes: only 10 cents a look.”
Tucked inside the hollowed-out pages were old pictures, the first of which showing a young man and woman who looked remarkably in love. The man sported a strong jawline, a wool vest over a gray shirt with rolled up sleeves, a thick black mustache that curled at the ends, and a fiery pair of blue eyes the same color as the paint streaks on either side of his cheeks. He and the woman held each other at the hip, and for all the determination and consequence that rumbled in her counterpart’s eyes as he stared at her, her eyes shined even more so as she stared onward and upward. Flecks of blood spotted her bare shins, jean shorts and bomber jacket, as well as the young man’s pants, and her long, cinnamon hair waved in the wind as they both thrust a fist in the air. The group behind them hoisted their fists in support.
I didn’t realize I had taken the picture from Grandpa’s hand and was staring at it with such fervent interest until I heard him chuckle.
“This was you? And Grandma?”
“We were hardened criminals, Mel and I. Guilty of the highest crimes. Pirates in the sea of people. She was breathtaking, William. She had this spirit that sucked you in and made you want to…not give up on anyone.”
“Is that blood?” I asked. I studied the scene behind them. Off in the distance: mobs of white hats, red letters. “Grandpa…is this at the Washington Monument?”
He nodded. “At the introduction of the New Constitution. We made it out just fine. A few bruises, but nothing else. That was Mel. As long as I was with her, and she with me, we were untouchable.”
Sirens and chants leaked out from the Panel in the living room once again. Commercial break was over. I turned around to see the headline.
CHIEF MATTHEWS: CURFEW TO BEGIN IN FIVE MINUTES
I cracked my knuckles and kneaded my fingers. Had I known what blood pressure felt like back then, I’d have felt it rise.
Grandpa pulled out another picture: A bridge this time, with a crowd at the guardrail hurling people into the river below.
“This was one of my favorites of Mel. You can see her there,” he said, pointing to a woman opposite the bridge caught mid-dive off a high rock into the water. “Those people threw them off the bridge because they didn’t believe how two people of the gender could love one another. But Mel jumped in after.”
“Did she save them?”
“She saved two. And actually you know them. Uncle Finn and Uncle Bobby,” he said, his face suddenly losing spirit.
“What about the third person?”
He shook his head. “That haunted her. We didn’t know the poor girl, but your uncles did. They said she was smart, loving, a fighter like Mel. About her age, too.”
I didn’t say anything. Just stared the picture. Studied the people on the bridge. Tried to understand how they could all, each of them to their core, truly believe such a thing was only right.
“They were eventually able to joke about it,” he continued, “but at the time it was traumatizing, Will. Those people were bad. They still are. And they’ve been in charge for a while.”
I put the picture down and looked back at the Panel. The curfew had just come into effect, and a wall of peacekeepers in full tactical gear marched across the streets, sweeping them like one long broom. A group of people, balled together like a school of fish refused to move. The wall came. They were mauled.
“Oh no…”
The peacekeepers beat their bodies with nightsticks. They kicked their ribs and popped their noses with ends of their rifles. I watched on in horror, almost in slow motion, as one young woman, whose hand splintered to the side in an unnatural, broken way, crawled across the asphalt away from the brawl, reaching for help from invisible people. Two peacekeepers pounced on her back, and I turned away.
It was then that all the stoic childhood years of trying my best to stonewall pride and swallow fear came pouring out. Warm tears welled in the corners of my eyes and dripped on the table. I hid in my arms and felt my chest shake as I tried to control them. But I couldn’t. Grandpa placed a hand on my shoulder. I cried until my face hurt. Every fiber in me said I was too old for it, but something deeper told me none of us were.
I had no idea how long we sat there together, me in a puddle, he with his arm draped over me. Maybe an hour. Maybe three. For the first time in a long time, though, I felt something, and I slowly realized, sobbing into my arms, that we could all be that way. Vulnerable. That sometimes our exoskeletons grew so hard with fear, with worry, with hate, with anguish that they could only be broken from the inside out. Grandpa’s arm felt like a warm raincoat as I shattered, and at the time, there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to stay dry.
“Something tells me, Will,” he said, after I finally calmed down, “that your parents are going to be just fine. They’ve got Mel’s spirit in them. And one day, you’ll be out there too, right beside the person you love, fighting for something you believe in. But without that love, Will, without laughter, without the small ironies in life to recognize, put your hands on your hips and shake your head at, without people, without empathy or perspective, you are fighting, but you’re not fighting for yourself, too.”
I looked up and wiped my nose. The snot fell from my hand onto the table. We both looked at the snot, then to each other, then back to the snot and laughed.
“Will,” he said, once again getting serious, “how you see things in the world will change as you grow older. But you always stand up. You always fight. You defend. You resist those who would crush your life if it meant their power.” He sat back in his chair. “Until you’re an old dog like me. And then you tell your grandson how to do it. And that you’re proud of him. And you love him.”
I wiped my nose again and smiled. He smiled back.
Footsteps at the front door ended the moment. Someone fumbled at the doorknob. Grandpa looked over. I turned around. The door swung open and in walked two people.
My parents stood in the door frame, their shirts ripped and their eyes shining with something I’d never seen before. An exhausted elation.
Something big had just happened, they told us.
Come outside.
It was something good.
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