A New Kind of Living

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

I called her. She wiped her eyes. “Yes, hon’, in a minute.” His room was our son Lockman “Scorsese” Farmer’s space. With his brown skin, and bright eyes, he saw wonderment in anything and lived up to his nickname in showing stories. He had died a year earlier from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was fourteen. His mother’s name was Calista. She possessed deep black skin. Blue black. Her flowing hair had been in a bun so long, I almost forgot what it looked like going down her back. Her attire that day consisted of a gray sweater and blue jeans and butter colored boots. She was a major like me in the United States Marine Corps. I was six feet three inches tall with walnut brown skin. I wore a blue sportcoat with a green turtleneck that morning.

We were on leave when it happened. A nuclear bomb burst in Wilmington, Delaware, leaving tens of thousands dead and more dying everyday. It locked up roadways, airports, bus and train terminals, and rental car locations.

I packed up the rest of our gear: my trousers, her trousers; my blouses and her blouses all had to be squared away. I heard her come downstairs.

She looked down at a cross section of underwear and pajamas, dresswear, our uniforms, and anything we could fit into the luggage without it being too weighty.

“We should make good time,” she said.

I just shook my head. To be an officer in the United States armed forces, you better be on time all the time. Calista knew how to be twenty minutes early because you’re expected to be fifteen minutes early. She wanted to defy and transcend expectations.

“Marcus, we’ve got to keep the weapons here. If we’re going on the plane, even under these outrageous circumstances, there’s no way we can bring our pistols and rifles.” She breathed. She was like a microprocessor delivering bits of information at lightning speed.

“I’m going to make some calls,” I mentioned to her.

“Alright,” she replied and rustled up a breakfast of a grapefruit slice and black coffee. It was 4:44 in the morning in Delaware. We had been up for at least two hours and would require all the strength in the world to get through this uneasiness.

We were miles away from the blast site. We considered the radius of what debris and radiation could do even with the amount of space we existed in away from ground zero.

“We’re going to need to bring something of his,” Calista mentioned. I looked up and narrowed my eyes to the point I almost lost vision. My mouth was as straight as a knife.

“Yes, I agree with you, dear,” I replied. I said it in a lower register for some reason. Was the trauma of seeing our little boy in such pain only to be relieved of it through death taking a toll on my psyche? I looked about. I grabbed his digital camera and wrapped it in packaging wrap to protect it.

Calista kept her mind cool and her thoughts slowed. She could see through the matrix of items that had to be packed and those ready to go. I packed my gear as well as hers…and the camera.

“What is it?” she asked me.

“I wondered what was happening,” I said.

“Happening to what?”

“I was wondering what was happening to us,” I finally blurted out.

“It’s nothing. Don’t sweat it. We’re a team. We know how to process grief and how to seek therapy and take pills. All of that is settled!”

Calista got ticked at the end. I could see the major melt away and the mom system engage once again. She had packed her dress uniform already but counted it twice. There seemed to be an unraveling occuring in her.

“Marcus, did you pack your Corfams?”

“Yes, I did,” I reminded her.

“Then why are they not with my shoes?”

I became sullen. I wanted to scream, to punch the wall, but I found no way of expressing my anger except to say, “You’re doing too much.”

“ I’m doing too much? You’re not doing enough. I’ve been sitting here all morning trying to pack for the apocalypse and you’re shuffling along like a damn donkey. Marcus, what’s that all about?”

“Woman, you will see that you are still running on anger and bitterness. It has not totally consumed you, but you are experiencing the beginnings of a nervous breakdown.”

“Nervous…Marcus we’ve been over this. I’m fine. You’re fine. Everybody’s fine.”

I wanted to press the gas pedal on the conversation but I knew that would send us out of control.

“What we need to do is continue the packing.”

“For what?! We can’t even take our weapons, we're abandoning our arms.”

“Then let us forget about the plane. Let us just take the truck down to the beach house. I don’t think there'll be any future attacks but who the hell knows?! We’ll wait for our orders there.”

I went to grab our guns. It seemed like Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory with the melting clocks as time seemed to bend and almost be liquid. It was 5:23. I came upstairs from the weapons closet and packed extra ammunition and cleaner in a baggy.

With Calista, she moved a bit slower with our agreement not to travel by plane. I could feel a barrier lifting between us. She warmed up with jokes. The gallows humor, so common among Marines and other military men and women, spilled from Calista’s mouth like water. She laughed. It was a hard fought, yet jovial peal which sprang from her throat. In it, there was a year of pain, sadness, loss and fighting through all of this.

I packed up the bags and stuffed them in the rear of the truck and shut the hatch.

After I returned to the house, I noticed Calista just staring. We had taken a good percentage of our belongings and readied for this grim adventure.

“I want this house to still be standing. I want it in the same condition in which we left it.” I wanted to promise her that that would be the case. I wanted to appeal to her sense of knowledge that this was a new kind of living. That America had been attacked by an H-bomb and nothing was certain now.

She picked up her bag with the camera in it. Calista kept strong with this lasting piece of our son’s inimitable mind.

I started the truck and we sent our goodbyes to our three story home and found solace in the thought that Calista was by my side.