True Heroes (102 page)

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              A dust storm kicked up as Alice was yanking the laundry down from the clothesline and tossing it into the nearest tent. She shielded her eyes as best she could and thought wildly, ‘Is everyone else inside? I can’t see anything. No, wait, there’s a group of people.’ She ran up behind them between two massive gusts and tried to shout, “Get inside, everyone!”

              Very few turned to acknowledge her as most were staring at the growing blue glow in the distance. It flared slightly higher, and the wind suddenly stopped; it seemed to curve around them all with the dust scrapping across some barrier mere feet above their head. Alice looked intently at the oncoming glow for long moments; each new stride, her mind attempted again to comprehend what she saw, but couldn’t. The crowd was eventually forced to part into two halves as her feet had grown numb. Between the two halves of the applauding crowd, Caleb stared into Alice’s eyes with an unconscious Stephen over his shoulder and a massive field of blue surrounding him. She kept her ground still. “Caleb?”

              “Yes, it is,” Caleb’s voice said despite the blue aura.

              “The Prince?”

              “I did it for you. That’s all that needs to be said,” said Power in a distinctly passive fashion.

              A few people took the limp body from his shoulder as him and her just stared; his eyes remained exponential while hers absorbed every bit of his inner lighting. “What happened?”

              As the wind slowed, Caleb lowered his shield around everyone and stood. The sun broke from behind a cloud as he straightened, and three blue shadows appeared on the ground. “Doesn’t matter. Everything is finally,” his chuckle echoed, “finally right, now.”

              His hands were held slightly up and open, and she gently walked until her body hit his and their arms completely surrounded one another’s body.

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              “‘I hope you have heard this story before.’ A man said that in a speech back in two-thousand-and-seven at his graduation. Perhaps he knew what those words meant, and perhaps he didn’t, but even in saying them, he caught the attention of anyone who listened. Why did he need it? Sure, it’s a great way to open a speech,” everybody chuckled, “but that couldn’t be the sole reason, could it?  What else could a man possibly say to come to the defense of such a statement?

              “Perhaps he did mean it one other way. It is possible that he meant it to say exactly what it says: ‘I hope you have heard this story before.’ That’s not something we’re used to hearing is it? People meaning exactly what they say…. Still, if he did mean it precisely as it is written, what does it mean? As the words state, it literally means ‘this isn’t about what I have to say.’

              “Again, why? Because this is a man of action, a man that didn’t hate, didn’t discriminate, didn’t seek fame or glory, didn’t want money, didn’t want a handshake or a ‘thank you.’ This is a true foreigner: someone I could never follow or understand. This is a man that did what he did because the world needed it to be done. There is no conclusive evidence that this man ever stopped a dangerous domestic terrorist, or single-handedly ended the longest war in our nation’s history, or ever saved a single life, but he did, and not a single person in this room knows his name.

              “What does this mean? I asked him that same question. His answer was so sublime, so simple, that I just wrote it down and allowed it to drift from my mind. The more I looked and the more I thought, the more I realized he wanted me to think. Allow me to read a quote from his answer: ‘The world has kept spinning without itself, and to the sky they’ve been screaming why, why, why, but the question that has always needed its answer will rain back with a steady fall.’ I suddenly found myself here, and I realized I was always here and always questioning. In this case, I didn’t even understand the question. I realized that was the point. It wasn’t about asking the question or seeking an answer. The only reason that this man was across from me is because he truly had no need to be anywhere else, which is unheard of in the world of psychology. He answered me in that fashion to ease my burden; he knew that it didn’t matter if I understood or not. He knew he was going to do the right thing either way, to save the world, no matter what.

              “This is a man that said ‘I truly hope you have heard this before, but perhaps it is for the best that you have not,’ and he said that because he knew it was the right thing for everybody to hear. Thank you.”

              The crowd stood and applauded with slight enthusiasm. Kain looked out past the first row to see many confused faces and absent stares for a few moments, but as he stepped from behind the podium, all eyes snapped back up to him and the applause grew slightly. He nodded and waved to them, to his proud wife, and found his eyes drawn to the back of a couple walking towards the exit in the aisle way; the man on the left wearing a brown coat and hat and the slightly shorter woman hugging onto his arm, brown hair flowing atop the back of a red hooded jacket.

Epilogue

June 6
th
, 2088

             
Nature saw itself glisten against a nacreous black in thirteen-foot by twenty-five mile snapshots. Along one direction the photographer moved; the lens never focused for more than two seconds, and never compiling more than thirty photos an hour. Fourteen photos clicked and passed. The fifteenth froze.

              Latched metal released into the weightless air and didn’t fall. A wooden obelisk, half of thirteen long, slid from under fifteen and into two hands. Fifteen couldn’t enjoy its view: the high maples, large in its image, to the small path between low brush, and the tiniest glimpse of a daisy, four stalks of lavender, and the sways of willows that combed the wind as it blew. Between the scene and its final print stood black and white and light brown; blue, lightly colored air disturbed the swirl inside the void, and darker shades circled nature and found a new way for it to create.

              Black, white, blue, and brown moved gently into the background. They did not saunter, gangle, waddle, speed, or cruise. They walked.

              “Why are we here?”

              “To do the right thing.”

              “This is right?”

              They stepped into the meadow. “This is how she lived. This is how she loved. She did not live for herself, and not for anybody else. Not confined in a room or open to nature’s bounty. She didn’t have the divine spark. She couldn’t always tell the truth, but never lied.” Their feet stopped at a hole. Their arms began lowering. “She never traveled east or west, never looked up or down. All the world was a level plane, and at her basest level, she was a pair of eyes, a voice, and a beating heart. Nothing more.” They went to their knees. The obelisk disappeared slowly into the hole. “She had everything a person was supposed to have. She did not shout or flutter her eyes or bear her heart. She simply told the world that they existed, showing it the greatest love in the smallest of ways. In the end, she was what saved the world. Not a single person ever knew about that, and that has made all the difference.”

              Bottom had struck. Both hands released and stood the bodies again. Blue lifted its clasp, carrying an earthly comforter without a grip. The white hand clutched a noble copper. From his hand it gently placed along the flat summit of the wood. The comforter tail was gently tucked before the rest of the brown bubbled clumps fell gently. “Sleep now. What did it say?”

              “It is not that my heart is cold, or my world is split, or that my feet will travel no more. It is that I have found through my endless march a path I must travel alone, and where your warm hand cannot reach. Farewell, farewell to Everybody, although Nobody will miss you so.”

              Nature was caught in the meadow with them, breathing against its shallow lungs while offering nothing but trustful sighs; the last waft of sadness left sensation, and they were suddenly caught in a moment without air, and here the collection of all that remained stood.

              “But….”

              “No.”

              “She….”

              “Is how she is.”

              “We….”

              “Will be what we are. No matter how much we loved her.”

              Nature caught its breath again, and suddenly the world moved. Trees wavered against an early season, gentle clouds covered the worst of the penetrating sun while fleeting into the pointed ocean, all the while the many feet on the many plains of the one world felt neither chill nor pause in their hastening of day light’s game.  

              “What about us?”

              “What was started will be finished. The end will never come. The world will never know the many things done. The right will be forever protected because it is right. Death will not come until it is meant to. Nobody will be here.”

              They walked back.

              “What about them?”

              “They won’t shed a tear, or raise a candle, or shovel a scoop, or pay a pound. They will live as she has died.”

              “Would you join her?”

              “Only if it was the right thing to do. She will be waiting and smiling, as everybody should.”

              They walked more, never realizing that the hidden photographer had captured every bit of this, from beginning to end.