A Father’s Gift to His Son

Fiction by Adam Breckenridge

The ground was always softer in dream space. Troy felt his feet sinking into the rock of the cave floor, periodically having to readjust his stance to feel on balance, shifting his fingers on the grip of his staff as he stared across at his father, who was armed with a staff of his own.

 “You can’t always be fidgeting like that,” his dad said. “You ever see the bodies fidgeting?”

He pictured the movements of the empty corpses. Jittery, but never uncertain. The souls fidgeted, but he knew that wasn’t what his dad was asking.

“No.”

“That’s right. They dumb as last week’s shit but they don’t ever hesitate. You got a mind beyond theirs already. You gotta make sure your body’s superior too. Now come at me, and remember you can’t hurt me in dream space. I want you to swing at me like I’m just a body.”

Troy nodded, then charged at his dad, a warrior’s yell on his tongue, the soft rock bending beneath his tread, and he swung the staff towards his dad’s leg. His dad shifted to dodge the blow but it still connected, bouncing off his calf and causing his leg to buckle, sending him to the ground.

“Good,” his dad said, “That’s the first time you’ve swung hard enough to bring me down. You still gotta keep building your strength though. You gotta be stronger than the world. That’s the only way you survive. Your technique is good but you gotta be able to hit that hard every time.”

His dad rolled over on his back.

“Now show me how you’d do a head strike, and remember you can’t hurt me here.”

Troy knew that, but bringing the staff down on his dad’s head for a killing blow still made him queasy. He focused instead on how disappointed his dad would be if he didn’t give it his all, then brought the staff down. Dad reached his hands up to grab at it but he wasn’t fast enough and the staff connected hard enough to cave in his forehead. Troy had to look away. It was too much to see his dad like that.

“My man!”

Troy turned back to see his dad, forehead intact, picking himself up, a smile on his face.

“That was good. That was a killing blow.”

Troy smiled.

“We gotta keep working on that upper body strength though. I think we’re gonna have to double the number of pushups.”

Troy wasn’t smiling anymore.

“We gotta get you strong, son. It’s about survival. Always has been. If you could live in the world as a soft man I’d let you be soft, but it ain’t a soft world we got.”

Troy focused on the sensation of his feet sinking into the rock as his dad talked about softness and hardness.

“Can we go to the good place tonight?”

“Not tonight. We’re too close to dawn. We’re gonna have to wake up soon. But the good place will always be there when we need it.”

The earth was too real after dream space. He’d said that to his dad once and his dad had nodded in agreement.

“The world is too real,” Dad had said. “That’s what’s always been wrong with it.”

A gathering of souls was weeping by the river. Light filtered at an angle through them, like it did through water. Looking at the river through a soul made it look like the river was tilting up at the sky, like it flowed up to heaven.

Dad moved past the souls like they weren’t there. Troy was always afraid of them, even though his dad was always telling him that there was nothing to be afraid of. All the souls ever did was cry. Troy had never seen the souls do anything other than cry, but he still didn’t trust them. The bodies only minded their business too, until they didn’t. Until they got violent.

His dad dipped the buckets into the river, then beckoned him over with a nod of the head.

“Don’t mind the souls. They got their crying to do. We got water to carry.”

Troy hurried over, giving the souls as wide a berth as he could, holding his staff out between him and them, though he knew the staff would only go through them.

“Rest your staff on your neck like I showed you.”

Troy put it across his neck and shoulders, bunching as much skin beneath it as he could. His dad hung one bucket, then another, then filled the last two buckets, which he carried by hand.

“Gotta build your callouses up before you can go carrying buckets long haul like this. It takes some time. You’re gonna have callouses all over before you know it.”

Troy followed his dad up the slope to where they kept their cart. The staff was digging into his back, hurting bad, but he didn’t say anything. He knew his dad wouldn’t be interested in his complaints. His dad turned and looked back at him.

“Hurts, don’t it?”

Troy nodded.

“You gotta tough it through. I know you tougher than them buckets. Ain’t no buckets gonna keep my boy down.”

He laughed, then his laughter cut off as they approached the cart. Troy saw why a moment later. Three bodies were milling around it, studying it, trying to remember things only their souls had ever known.

“These ain’t good ones,” his dad said. Troy never understood how dad could tell the good bodies from the bad ones. He set his buckets down then came over to him to relieve him of his burden.

“Stay back for this one. They gonna charge as soon as they see us. I can tell these boys used to wave the stars and bars. If things get ugly you run back to the river. Them bodies don’t like the water.”

His dad took the staff and approached the bodies slowly, readying for an attack. As soon as they saw him they charged, yelling something that must have once been language but was only gibberish now without the soul to guide the mouth. Dad swung his staff at the first one. Troy heard the crack of its skull as it connected and its knees buckled. Dad swept at the legs of the second one, bringing it down like he had shown him last night in the dream space, but didn’t have time to land the killing blow before the third body tackled him and pinned him down, raining blows down on him while yelling inarticulately.

Troy rushed in, staff in hand, and hesitated for just a moment between the two bodies. He wanted to save his dad, but the second body was just getting up and he knew he couldn’t handle both at once. He brought the staff down on its head, just like dad had taught him and felt the skull crunch through the wood. The horror of the staved-in head beckoned for his attention but he turned around and swung the staff at the other body, not hard enough to kill it but hard enough to knock it off balance so his dad could get out from under it and bring his foot down on its head hard enough that there was another crunch, the worst one yet. Troy hated that sound.

His dad turned to him. Troy thought he would be angry at him for not running like he’d been told, but instead he smiled.

“My little warrior.”  He came over to embrace him. “You got your first kill today, and you did the brave thing. You stood and fought. That’s how a man survives in this world.”

“Can we go to the good place tonight?” Troy asked.

“Oh ho ho, we can go to the good place alright.”

The island was a little bit different each time. That was just how dream space worked. The good place was always more or less the same but the details always shifted around, and sometimes Dad would add things or take things away. What mattered wasn’t the details. What mattered was that the good place always felt right,  and now, laid out on deck chairs in the sand, sipping something sweet out of a coconut, it had never felt more right. What he drank wasn’t real, it was only an imitation of the sensation of it, but it felt real.

“How do you know the good bodies from the bad ones?”

His dad looked over at him and blew a note into his beer bottle. He had shown Troy that trick with empty bottles in the real world before.

“It comes from living in the old world, the before time. You had to learn to tell a man by his body, how he carried himself. I know you see all the cool stuff we had back then and think it must have just been a great time, but the old days were dangerous too. A lot of folks would hate you for who you were, they would hate you for your skin. There were a lot of folks wanted to kill us just for the color of our skin back then.”

Troy examined the dark skin of his arm.

“But why?”

“It’s a long story, goes back thousands of years. When you got hatred that old, people don’t want to let it go. It gets bred into their body, bred into their bones. The cataclysm made me realize how deep it goes. When the bodies charge at us that’s the hate of the old world coming out. The world’s a lot more broken now, but it’s got a lot more love in it too. It’s only decent people made it through with their bodies and souls still together.”

“But there’s hardly anyone left like that,” Troy said.

His dad took a sip of his beer.

“And that tells you everything you need to know about the old world.”

They were coming on the ruins of a town. Troy couldn’t help comparing the dead rubble and tragic angles of these old towns to the shine and clean lines of the good place. He would always try to restructure the broken pieces into what the town must have looked like before, but it never came together right.

“Oh now that is a tragedy,” his dad said, approaching a rusted hunk of metal.

“That’s a car, right?” Troy asked.

“Oh no, this ain’t just a car, this here’s a Pontiac GTO. This here’s a work of art. We could have gone fast in this thing, and far, driven all the way across the country in this.”

His dad had impressed upon him before just how big the country was, but this failed to instill any sense of mysticism in him where the car was concerned. He couldn’t see the beauty of it, even if he could see how different it looked from all the other rusted hulks around it.

His dad tore himself away from the car slowly, Troy growing impatient as he did. Finally they started making their way up the street again, giving wide berth to a trio of bodies staring at a wall. Troy tensed when one of them looked over his direction, but it soon turned its attention back to the wall.

They walked into the ruins of a restaurant. His dad had told him people used to just bring you food in a place like this. Tables and chairs were still scattered around. They moved past them, into the kitchen to rummage through cabinets for anything that could still be eaten. Troy found a cabinet filled with canned vegetables.

“That’s my man,” his dad said, “finding us a meal.”

They carried the cans out to the dining area and sat at one of the booths. His dad pulled out a can opener and a moment later they were eating carrot chunks with their fingers.

Troy stayed put when they were done eating. His dad had a tension in him that he knew meant a conversation was coming.

“I want to give you something,” his dad said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a chain necklace with a locket on it and held it up in Troy’s gaze.

“I’ve been worried for you, worried about whether you could survive out there if something happened to me. I’ve known for a while your soul was strong enough for it, but your body was another matter. You can’t just be one kind of strong or the other out there. You gotta have them both. You’ve shown me for years that you’ve got the strength in your soul, but now I see you’ve got it in your body too. I think you’re ready for this.”

He handed the locket over. Troy took it, feeling the warmth from where it had been pressed against his dad’s chest.

“Open it,” his dad said.

Troy opened it. Inside was a photograph with three people in it.

“Who do you see there?” his dad asked.

The man in the photo was easy enough to identify.

“That’s you,” he said as he studied the face of the man who was before him in the flesh but there in the photo younger and so much happier than Troy had ever seen him. “And that must be me.” He pointed at the baby his dad was holding, then drew his finger to the woman leaning against his dad, a warm smile on her face. He understood who this was, but to say it was something different.

“It’s…” he started but then trailed off.

“It’s alright. It’s your mother.”

He studied her face, trying to imagine it as a living thing, with skin he could touch, hands that could touch him.

“I’m sorry you never got to meet her,” his dad said, “she died when you were still a baby. It was a real death, not something caused by the cataclysm. She was the strongest of us. We were all together when it happened, when they set off that…thing…and the winds came and blew everyone’s souls out of their bodies. It was her who kept us tethered. I really think if she hadn’t been there my soul would have been kicked out of my body too and I would have been one of those creatures out there. The first few months of the aftermath were bad, as bad as it ever got. A lot of folks survived the cataclysm but they didn’t survive what came afterwards. It was scary to be going around in a world like that with a baby in your arms, but I’d always thought that as long as I had your mother with me I wouldn’t have anything to worry about, and I didn’t worry, until she was gone. She didn’t leave me her strength. I had to find that on my own. I had to be strong enough to make sure you had a chance out here, and now I know I did that.”

Troy had kept his eyes on his mother’s face while his dad spoke. What would these words have sounded like out of her mouth instead?

“You’ve got some history now. Make sure you carry that with you, so your past will always be with you.”

“I will,” Troy said, then put it around his neck to prove he meant it. His dad’s gaze was distracted by something out the window. Troy looked. A procession of souls was making its way up the street in single file, weeping as usual, and pounding their chests in unison. The pounding made no sound, but their chests rippled with the contact. A loose crowd of bodies came up the street in the opposite direction, moving with the directionlessness typical of all bodies. One of the souls broke away from the procession and approached one of the bodies, reaching out to try to touch its face with one of its ethereal limbs. The body brushed the soul off as though it were a buzzing fly, and the soul grew more frantic in trying to get the body’s attention, its arms passing through the flesh while the body passed on indifferently. Eventually the soul gave up and fell to its knees, both processions moving on without it.

Troy and his dad waited until the bodies were well out of sight before leaving the restaurant.

“Let’s double back,” his dad said, “I want to take another look at that Pontiac before we leave here.”

They lay out in the open that night. Troy stared up at the stars until he felt disconnected from his body, as though he could float up to space.

“Dad, will you show me how fast the cars went?”

His dad looked over at him with a smile.

“Alright, I’ll show you.”

The road stretched on forever through the desert, clean and unbroken. They were sitting in the GTO, now made flesh in the dream space. His dad was dressed as he had been in the locket but with a pair of sunglasses on. The desert scenery was tearing past them, the scrub near the road a blur while the mountains in the distance were only passing thoughts.

“This is fast,” Troy said. His dad laughed.

“Cool isn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah,” Troy responded, too enraptured by the speeding scenery to conjure up much more than that. His dad laughed again.

“How’d you like to drive around the country this fast?”

Troy turned away from the scenery to look at his dad, the thrill of this suggestion pounding at his chest.

“That’d be awesome. But all the cars are dead right?”

“Yeah,” his dad said, “all the cars are dead. Now let me show you what this thing can really do.”

The engine roared and the car lunged forward, moving fast enough to make their old speed feel like stillness. Troy shouted but soon the energy took over and now he was whooping instead, his dad whooping along with him as they plowed ahead towards the retreating horizon.

They could see the high rises of a city in the distance. They were skirting a long path around it, the downtown the pivot to their movements. Too many bodies in a city, so they stayed far out, even though Troy had always wanted to see what was inside those towers. Dad had told him before that everything had happened in them: people had lived and worked in them and Troy had imagined people living their entire lives inside one of those towers and never leaving, the opposite of the roving he and his dad did. The cataclysm really had turned the world upside down.

The road was littered with the skeletons of cars, but apparently none of them were as interesting as the GTO. He recalled the time in dream space last night, and how the road had once been a place for cars and not people—another upside-down thing.

His dad froze at something ahead Troy couldn’t see, then beckoned him forward. There was a body slumped against one of the cars—a dead body—and standing over it was a weeping soul. Troy hid behind his dad.

“Can’t be hiding scared around souls,” his dad said. “Go over and talk to it. You gotta find out for yourself they ain’t nothing to be scared of.”

He nudged Troy forward. Troy approached the soul slowly, questioning his own fear as he did. Why did he fear the souls?  They couldn’t hurt him even if they wanted to. And yet there was something unsettling about them, the way they seemed to live in death. This soul was weeping, as all the others did. It looked up at Troy as he approached.

“Why are you always crying?” Troy asked, “all the souls I mean.”

“Don’t you see how sad it is?” the soul asked. He had never heard a soul speak before. Its voice was empty, like the middle of the words were missing. He couldn’t tell if the soul was male or female.

“I guess so,” Troy said, “but I don’t remember what it was like before.”  He pointed to the body. “Did you know him?”

“He was my brother,” the soul said.

“My mom died too,” Troy said. “I don’t remember her either, but I wish I could.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” the soul asked.

Troy leaned against a car, his fear now seeming absurd. He was grateful that the corpse’s head was tilted down to its chest, sparing him the displeasure of its dead eyes. The sorrowful look of the soul was bad enough.

“Is there anything we can do to make you less sad?” he asked.

The soul sat quietly for a minute.

“I want to touch my brother again.”

But that’s impossible, Troy almost said, but then he had an idea. He hated everything about the idea, but he was sure he was going to do it anyway. He stood up.

“Put your arm in mine,” he said to the soul.

“What do you mean?” the soul asked.

“You’d pass through me if you tried to touch me, right?”  Troy held out his right arm. “So line your arm up with mine.”

Now the soul understood. It drifted towards Troy, right limb outstretched, and pivoted around until its body was lined up with his. Troy cringed at the coldness of the ether as it entered his skin, but that was still half as unpleasant as what he was about to do next. He approached the body, the soul drifting with him, and put his hand to its cheek. He expected it to also be cold, but the heat of the sun was keeping it warm. It didn’t feel like living flesh, more like the rock of dream space, softer than it should be.

It took a few seconds of fumbling before Troy and the soul could synchronize their movements and for the coldness of the soul’s ether to blend with the warmth of the sun and then it began to feel natural, even his revulsion at the texture of the corpse drying away. He was so caught up in the rhythm of the movements that it took him a moment to notice that the soul was no longer crying.

“I want to make the dream space tonight, Dad.”

His dad laughed.

“You think you ready?”

“You just watch.”

It was his version of the good place this time, like his dad’s but sloppier, the walls of the buildings distorted, the ground shifting, the colors just a bit off. But it was the good place, or good enough.

“Not bad for your first time,” his dad said. “It’s another muscle you gotta work on. Another way you gotta grow strong.”

Troy had added the carnival that his dad sometimes included in the good place. These details he could manage easily. They were among his favorites.

“Do I get to kick your ass again at whack-a-mole?”

“No, I got something better planned.”

Troy couldn’t conjure up crowds the way his dad could. Dad’s people always looked real but Troy could manage little more than shadows. There was one body he wanted to make sure came in as real as possible though.

She stood apart from the crowd, beneath the Ferris wheel. He’d only had her face and chest to work with: he’d had to guess the rest, but staring at her now as he’d created her he was sure he had done a good job.

“Oh no, son, oh no you didn’t.”

Troy turned to his dad, saw the anguish there, the pain, his eyes like souls’ eyes, and he now wondered if he’d made a mistake.

“But I thought you’d…”

“No, this is not something I wanted.”

Troy turned back to look at the apparition of his mom. He was struggling to keep her together, the more detail he tried to fill in the more it drew from the good place. It was impossible to keep both whole. His mother started unraveling from the feet up, but he could at least hold her head and body in place. That was the easiest part to picture. He approached her. She looked down at him, her chin pressed against her chest like the corpse from earlier, but she smiled at him, though only because he wanted her to smile. He reached up to brush her cheek. He tried to fill the sensation with the texture of brushing his dad’s cheek but the memory of earlier, of helping the soul with its dead brother, was too dominant in his mind. He couldn’t picture anything else, couldn’t make her skin feel any other way. He could only feel the dead skin of the corpse. He had made a mistake. He drew his hand away and gazed at her face a moment longer before letting her dissipate. He was able to give more concrete form to the buildings and crowd once he did. His dad was sitting against the wall of a target shooting booth, his head in his hands.

“Dad. I’d never gotten to see her before, Dad.”

His dad looked up at him. He’d been crying.

“I know you hadn’t son. I know.”

The air between them was different the next day. His dad was tense, quiet, too focused on what was directly ahead of them. Troy feared some irreparable damage to their relationship. He wanted to apologize again but worried it would only make things worse. He wanted some sign that things were okay. His dad kept walking.

They were on an elevated highway that was crumbling to ruins. Troy kept looking down at the places where the road had given way because every single time there was sure to be the wreckage of a few vehicles down there, always too ruined to identify, but he couldn’t help wondering if any of those cars had been special too. He kept looking for his dad to stop and admire another car. With how many they were passing there must have been a few good ones. His dad wasn’t interested though.

Troy would have a lot of time to wonder in the years to come if it was his father’s distraction that led to everything else that happened that day, if that was why he hadn’t seen the swarm of bodies coming towards them until it was too late to hide, until they had no choice but to fight against a crowd that outnumbered them by far too much.

His dad pulled their staffs from the cart. He could have just tossed one to Troy but instead he walked over to him and handed it over.

“You’re strong enough for this, son.”

“I know, Dad.”

“And I love you.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

It had been such a relief to hear him say that.

The bodies were the angriest Troy had ever seen. Their blood sizzled with hatred, and Troy could do nothing but swing his staff at every one of them, do even more violence to them, run his blood hotter than theirs. He thrilled at the crack of their skulls, felt a flutter of hope that they would get through this every time one went down and didn’t get back up. It didn’t take long before the bodies were scared of him. Their hatred outweighed their fear, but their fear was enough to slow them down. Troy never felt afraid, not when he knew his dad was there fighting with him. Troy brought down the last body and turned to his dad to smile about their victory, only to see his dad lying on the asphalt, eyes wide and unfocused, blood pouring from the back of his head.

“Dad!”

Troy ran to him, all too aware of his breath, his tears. He searched for some way out of the reality of what was in front of him, but its truth was inescapable.

He had no idea how long he was crouched over the body weeping. When he pulled himself away from the immediacy of his grief at all it was usually to become conscious of how much his behavior resembled that of the souls. He continued to cry over his dad’s corpse until he felt a hand on his shoulder. Troy shouted and spun around, grabbing his staff for an attack, but was greeted by the sight of a wide-eyed man in a preacher’s outfit putting his hands up in supplication.

“Woah there, son, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Troy wanted to hit him anyway for calling him son, but put the staff down. Standing farther off behind the preacher was a gathering of people, all of them kindly looking, all of them intact. There were three souls with them too, and none of them were crying.

The preacher insisted his dad be buried in the earth. Troy was against it. He didn’t like the idea of his dad being permanently anchored to one place, especially the place where he died, and even more he was frightened of the idea of putting his dad some place he’d never be able to find his way back to. But the preacher said it needed to be done, said it’d be sinful to leave the body out to rot but sinful too to burn it, for there was still to come the day when the bodies and souls of all mankind would be reunited to face the final judgment of the Lord. That mostly just left Troy wondering who the hell the Lord was to be judging his father, but he agreed to the burial.

He sat for days next to the plot, memorizing the land around it, memorizing the mound of dirt, memorizing the makeshift cross the preacher had cobbled together. He expected the band to move on in this time but they didn’t, nor did they pressure him to move along. They sat and waited patiently for him to mourn as he needed to, and through this patience he came to understand that, like it or not, he was part of this group now.

It was only when he was certain that he would know this land again if he ever came back here that he got up and joined them. He didn’t make much conversation with them along the way. He was too busy memorizing the landscape.

He had hardly been able to sleep since his dad had died, and when he did sleep he couldn’t conjure the dream space, even when he’d been sleeping by his father’s grave. It was enough to make him worry he had lost the dream space entirely, which only disrupted his sleep all the more. But the first night he slept with the group, that was the first night he had slept deeply, the first night the dream space came back to him.

He went to the good place, conjuring it as closely as he could to the last time he had been here—carnival and all—steadfastly moving forward with what he had in mind, fighting against the voice telling him this was a bad idea. He went again to the base of the Ferris wheel and tried to conjure his dad, no easy task when there was part of him trying to fight his efforts, but he brought the face forward, forming the head and body around it. The body was easy, but the face would not cooperate. Troy wanted the living face, the smiling face, the face that had said “I love you,” but his mind kept giving him the death face. He kept trying to shift it, the good place vanishing around him as he did, but he couldn’t get the face to stay. It was always the death face.

“You won’t be able to get any other face, son.”

Troy turned around, the good place rematerializing as he turned his back on his dad. The preacher was standing there, looking cleaner and more stately than he had in the real world.

“How did you…” Troy started to ask.

“All most of us have left are dreams now. Dreams and memories. Some belong in one place and some in the other. Do you have any photos of your father?”

Troy nodded.

“Then that is the best place for him.”  He stopped to look around. “This is a nice dream you’ve built here. In fact, it’s one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. Did you used to come here with him?”

Troy nodded again.

“Then that and your memories are enough to thrive on. Leave the rest where it lies. You’ll be much happier for it.”

Troy took a moment to absorb this, then asked, “do you want me to show you around?”

“I would like that,” the preacher said.

The bodies never attacked the caravan, not when there were so many people in it. Troy learned slowly to enjoy the company of those around him, learned to accept the preacher’s plan to wander until they found the place where they could settle down and build a new world. He began to share the good place with them, let them reshape it into something new, some place with a different kind of beauty to it, where only scrapes and touches of his dad’s work was left. In time the only sorrow Troy ever felt among them was in the absence of his dad, and whenever that sorrow came, it was enough to just grasp the locket in his fist and hold it until it was warm. He hadn’t opened it in years.