Doctor jack bright (part 4)

10

Jack will learn, in another life, the importance of not letting one's guard down.

There is be endless safety videos in his future. There is even a future ahead of him where he, too, will be an enforcer; he will reprimand violations of human imperfection in a place that must by all lengths strive to remain industrial, clean, separated. He will learn to place a wall between people and things that only look like them. He will even learn- long into his future- to control himself, to be disciplined, and to fine-tune his sense of situational empathy. He will pick his battles and save what may be saved and move on, and some will call him heartless, clinical, stubborn, and others will call him Director.

But Jack is a child, and he can not see the consequences of these things. He cannot act fast enough. He does not yet have the eye to anticipate; to see where incidents happen. He is not dutiful to security, containment, protection because he does not need to be.

And so when TJ runs over and hugs Mikell, Jack does not stop him. He does not stop him when Mikell's fingers touch TJ's bare neck. And had he known that Mikell was unusually tired because he had been treated recently for a still-healing gunshot wound that had shot through his shoulder and sent him to a Foundation hospital for two weeks, he may have acted differently, although it is not likely; carelessness is not an easily avoided trait.

And when TJ's breath hitches sharply, and he falls into Mikell's arms as dead weight, Mikell makes a decision in the sharp, quick way that he does, that he will not let his youngest brother suffer. Some would consider what he does to be barbaric, and would scream and fight with him as he wordlessly loads their 14-year-old sibling into the back of the car as Jack does.

Others would consider it a necessary evil, as Mikell drives away and does not return for another several weeks, saying to him, do not let them take her, Jack, there's hope for her yet.

11

Summer day fades into hot, burning summer day. Jack's body aches in an endless haze. Claire plays outside with the neighboring children and he sits at the dining room table and feels cold and fuzzy, distant; his thoughts are a single, tired string, fraying, searing in the summer heat but cold against his skin. In the mornings, as he rouses himself from deep, dreamless sleep, Jack's body is heavy. Claire needs to eat. Jack doesn't, or feels like he doesn't. There's no appetite. The heat sickens him in a way he has not experienced before.

On stormy days, the water is hot, comes down in sheets that darken the sky, flood down the cracked road into old cement gutters. Droplets strike the pavement and Jack stumbles outside for the first time in weeks- blinking, body aching and dragging- sitting on the damp, sun-bleached porch just as birds chatter nearby.

The door creaks open- old, rusting springs that his father promised he would fix.

"Jack?"

Light filters out onto the porch and onto the back of his neck. Jack focuses his eyes on the afternoon rain pelting the sparse grass of the front lawn. He aimlessly wonders about the date- wasn't paying attention. Days and weeks slip together in a sort of disjointed, hazy way. Late June, maybe. Something like that.

"Jack, can I play with Sydney and Gabby?" Claire hangs to the door handle, red raincoat over tiny frame, rubber boots that were handed down through three Bright boys before they reached her coming up to her knees. Jack looks out wearily past the broken-down porch and the patchy front lawn to the girls splashing in mud puddles across the street.

"Mmm-hm, just stay where I can see you."

"I will."

Jack rubs his eyes as his little sister races across the street, greeted by cries of joy. June already- had been a month since graduation. He should be thinking about college.

But he can't.

A long ways away, in another life, a short, fat man would sprawl in a battered armchair at the training center he ran and would tell Jack all he knew about the births and birthings in a serious, lucid tone, a rarity preserved for close friends. Jack would tend the old brick fireplace and open some liquor and they would drink and the blond haired veteran would tell him about the myths in the field, stories of cattle dying and dogs being nailed on trees. The storms and violent winds. Cars flipped and people gone. Hume readings fading in, out, spatial anomalies. Kant counters breaking, phones not working. Guns jamming.

The child would be born within 5 miles, and when it would breathe- said the old rumors spread around GOC task forces- all the strange happenings would stop, and so no one would notice it; only lasted the mother's labor. The universe preparing for a new god. The star of Bethlehem.

Stranger things have happened, said the man with the rifle. No way to test it; would make sense if it was true, I suppose. The way they come and they way they leave, all these kids, not just the greens, the legends are the same. Always a little strange, 'post to get worse with the power and significance, all that kind of shit. I knew guys that used to peel out if they saw the cattle run, you know.

Do you believe it, was Jack's question. Something he knew the answer to.

The man sighed, readjusted slightly. Jack, science loathes coincidence. Ask any shithead on the street and they'll say they've seen something strange at some point in their life. For the sake of standing on solid ground- no, I don't think I do.

Jack on the rainy steps, pale and weak, decided he was too tired to think about it right now. Leaned his head so it rested on the splintering wood railing. Watched Claire splash in puddles with her friends under a sheet of rain.

Jack on the rainy steps was born with his umbilical chord wrapped around his throat in a tight death grip. They thought he was dead; didn't cry for minutes as they worked to loosen it off.

When Jack on the rainy steps was four, he caught pneumonia that landed him in the hospital for a month. They thought he would die.

When Jack on the rainy steps was eight, he ran into the street to chase a raccoon and was hit by a car; the impact sent him skidding on the ground, bleeding from his chest.

When Jack on the rainy steps was eleven, the top of their snow fort caved in on top of him.

Jack on the rainy steps, at 19, couldn't understand why he couldn't do anything right. Why TJ and their parents were gone; why there was no reason for him to really be here at all. He feels listless; he wants to hurt something. He doesn't know where to let the anger go. He wants to know why he feels this way, why he can't pull himself together long enough to be an adult for Claire. Why he can't just be like he was a year ago: happy and content and not barley functioning and exhausted.

Jack on the rainy steps doesn't want to die, but doesn't want to live. Jack on the rainy steps wants to fall asleep and not wake up anymore.

12

When the agents came like Jack knew he would- the tree falling in the forest agents with their bulletproof vests under stiff button up shirts- Jack crosses the house to the kitchen, reaches up on top of the refrigerator, and loops his fingers on the old iron revolver that clacks quietly in his hands, a dangerous weight. Jack has never been a terribly good shot, but his father had had him and Mikell shoot enough dead-eyed plastic deer that he was decent. The shiny dress shoes fitted with concealed steel-toes make the old wood of the front porch creak, and Jack has a sharp moment of panic like an electric shock at his holding a gun. What did he expect to do? Shoot them? A person in a stark black suit wasn't a pheasant or a squirrel-

"Jack! Someone's at the door!"

Jack whipped around to meet the tree in the forest about to fall, playing with her dolls. Her eyes widen when she sees the gun, and Jack fumbles silently-

"Go. Room." There's a sense of urgency in his voice that he hopes carries. "Now. Hurry, Clarie."

Claire abandons her dolls and bolts down the hall to their shared bedroom just as the knock comes on the door with knuckles that have been broken, healed, broken again. Jack's chest compresses tight again for a moment and he remembers tree in the forest, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, tree in the forest, tree in the forest, they're here for her and his chest swells as the constant anger he's felt burning inside him for a little over four months now suddenly blazes into hot fury.

He swallows, palms starting to sweat a little.

And when they took his little sister away, that hot Midwestern afternoon, her shrieks rang and echoed down the empty street and resonated in stagnant air and the buzz of lazy insects. Jack did not shoot. He did not shoot because they took her from her room, because there had been four of them, not two, and because he was foolish and sick and lost and didn't know what to do when they immediately grabbed him and threw him to the floor and knocked him out. He didn't know what to do when he woke up alone and wandered around the house in a daze looking, looking, looking as bats roosted in nearby barns and herding dogs barked in the distance.

He didn't know what to do and didn't know where to go. He felt frustrated and furious but empty and dull and sick with anxiety. He wandered out of his house and down streets with the hurried pace of someone looking for something they know they've lost. He ran until the street lights ran out and he hit gravel roads and long, endless fields of corn and beans, obscuring his vision into the clear, cloudless night sky and the lightning bugs that blinked among them.

And eventually, he turned around, because what else could he do? Where else could he go, to find the person he needed to protect? He walked until the sun came up and it hit his neck in a hot, humid haze of morning, and kept walking, walking. Sweating in the morning sun. He walked past his brother's horse grazing in Jamie's pasture. He walked into his neighborhood with the kids playing basketball down the street. He wandered back in with a pained sort of desperation settled tight in his chest, but his body felt heavy and his spine felt tight.

So Jack Bright slept, and slept alone.