Worlds War One

xii [Treyvon]

Trey had been only ten. It might've been a Tuesday afternoon when he found himself side by side with his father, on his knees, head bowed, but it was Sunday every day in the Fox house. His father praised God in a booming baritone, a garrulous, melodious monologue that went on long enough to qualify for a Shakespearean soliloquy. Pastor Malcolm Fox loved to listen to himself pray. Trey hoped God had some almighty ears.

Pastor Fox was a talented orator. Trey had often heard the ladies in the congregation talk about how he could give a speech that would turn the heart of a heathen. Later, when Trey completed Air Force Academy, the 44th President himself had addressed the graduating class in Colorado. He remembered thinking as he listened to Mr. Obama's poetic cadence that maybe the President and his father were brothers separated at birth.

Long before, on that Tuesday, Pastor Fox finally finished after a rousing prayer that lasted longer than some sermons. Father and son knelt before the altar, before the cross, before the beautiful messiah carved into flawless cherrywood. After all his bombastic bluster and animated effusiveness, it was a quiet moment of supplication. Even someone as big as Malcolm Fox became small in the shadow of the Lord.

Trey, ever intimidated by his father's confident conviction, questioned. How could a man so big and bold and braggadocios balk in the presence of the immaterial and unverified? Why would someone assiduously assured and pretentiously proud kneel humbly?

"How do you know, sir?" Trey asked, the question getting loose before his tongue could corral the query. "Are you sure you believe in the right thing?"

"Right and wrong are not my things to decide, Treyvon," his father declared. "As far as what I know, I know about God and the Son as much as I know about anything else."

"There are facts," Trey observed, wading into depthless waters, "and there is faith."

"Faith is favoring a certain set of facts," Malcolm Fox said. "The truth is a personal perspective."

"There are things you can prove, sir. Otherwise, I could challenge Mrs. Magpie on my C- in geography last week."

His father stood, towering over his ten-year-old son. He'd seemed big in those days. He'd seemed like everything.

"Stand up. Be still," his father commanded. "As still as you can."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't move."

"Not moving, sir."

"Do not move a muscle," his father instructed. "Are you still?"

Trey didn't even move his mouth. He didn't answer. He was as still as his father had been in silent supplication.

"You think you are still. Motionless. Completely stationary. But the Earth spins, and you are moving at about seven hundred fifty miles per hour. You think you are standing still, and yet you are moving at roughly the speed of sound," his father said. "Also, we orbit the sun, flying at 66,000 miles per hour. At that speed in the minivan, we could cross America in about three minutes. Plus, the solar system moves at 44,000 miles per hour through the galaxy, and we spin with the sun in orbit inside the Milky Way at 486,000 miles per hour. And our entire galaxy moves through the universe at another 1.3 million miles per hour. Still think that you are still?"

Trey blinked. He didn't have an answer.

Fifteen years later, he knew that what his father believed was as credible as anything else incredible. Faith is favoring a certain set of facts. Trey had entered a whole new realm where the truth was from the perspective of a body that had become immaterial and amorphous.

The distance was indistinct and shapes shifted. Color became indiscriminate. Perspective was irrespective of position as sounds slithered like aural snakes through the haze, input originating from somewhere and everywhere at once. All the wheres were nowheres. Trey was incorporeal, the sensation of hands and head and body but an illusion, like thinking he was standing still when he was flying through the cosmos at a half-million miles an hour. This sensation was something else, something bigger than anything Treyvon Fox could understand.

Then he understood that this was faith.

He was accepting the unknowable right in front of him. All around him. And he was a part of it.

"Treyvon?"

That voice. Trey hadn't heard it in five years, and he sometimes wondered over these last few years if he would recognize it if he heard it again. Now it echoed in the endless expanse, a haunting whisper he knew well. It was his mother, lost to cancer. She was here, in the Great Nothing.

"Mom?"

His voice echoed as if he'd hollered off the edge of a cliff into a canyon. He had no body, no ears to hear, or mouth to voice. Yet somehow, he sensed the other Misfits who had come through with him—Callie, Ji, and Quest. Beyond them, he could feel Lieutenant Robinson and Drill with the two civvies. Autumn Loloma was something else now, a change Trey could feel rather than see.

The entities that had been flesh and blood in the pueblo on the other side of the doorway were now incandescent miasma, like glowing phantoms in the vague form of people. The shape Trey knew as Saanvi Laghari came closer, and her words formed in his head, or where his head ought to be.

"Beware the Great Nothing, Airman Fox," Saanvi warned. "If you let your thoughts wander too far, they can dissipate, and you'll cease to exist. Be vigilant, lest your consciousness drifts away and become a part of the universe."

"My mother...," he started.

"She is a long way from being alive, Airman," the civvie declared. "But she's closer here than she was there. This plane of existence is closer to Heaven than when we are on Earth."

Trey gazed with eyes that weren't there, searching for something too far to see. He was desperate for one glimpse of her. A few moments together again. There was much that he hadn't said before she'd passed because he'd thought that she could never die. Now, she called to him.

Again—"Treyvon?"

"Keep your thoughts coherent, Airman," Saanvi ordered before she moved away, rejoining Lieutenant Robinson. "We need everyone together if we hope to capture Wang Mot."

It was big. It was everything then some. Trey thought about his father and how he'd tried to understand God's unparalleled reach. But Trey saw what his father never had. It's impossible ever to comprehend it all. No one besides the Almighty could ever truly understand everything. Everything was too much.

"Treyvon?" his mother called again.

And Trey considered it. He thought about chasing her down, talking to her, trying to take her in his arms. But Trey didn't. His mother was somewhere out there, Beyond even the Great Nothing, and he was here. Besides, Trey wanted to get back. He wanted to go home. To Aliyah. To his father, so he can try to explain the immensity of it.

He wanted to get back.

And to get back, he had to get through it.