Season 1, Episode 5 - The Boxtops XXXII - "The Secret Origin of Isaac Spallacio, Part 2"
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A year later, Isaac learned that the world could be a cruel when an outbreak of Crimson Fever swept through New England. Isaac came down with it for a week, but made it to the other side no worse for the wear. In contrast, his mother smiled weakly at him one morning, then collapsed onto the floor.
“The Fever’s worsening,” the spectacle-wearing Patuxet town doctor proclaimed as he examined Isaac’s bedridden mother. He gave a brief look of sorrow at Isaac, then his face resumed a medical professional's normal look of neutrality when they served as the bearer of bad news.
“Do you want to speak with me alone?” the doctor asked Isaac’s mother.
She shook his head. “He can hear as well.”
Isaac took a deep breath, trying to prepare himself for whatever came next.
The doctor wiped his glasses. “When the Fever gets this worse…the chances of recovery also get worse.”
Isaac just looked up at the ceiling, his thoughts drowning out the exact medical terms for “recovery not likely”.
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His brother returned home from school soon after news reached him of his mother’s condition. Having spent a full year at university now, his whole face seemed entirely consumed by that mixture of growing wiseness and weariness. But he no longer smiled.
Late one night, Isaac was unable to sleep, gripped by his recent habit of tossing and turning in bed. Looking to be anywhere but there, he slipped out of bed and silently made his way downstairs.
He came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs when he overheard his mother and brother talking. Talking wasn’t the best way to describe it though. Even though he couldn’t see them, Isaac could sense the intense air as the two went back-and-forth.
“It’s unfair,” Gregory proclaimed in the darkness. Judging from the distance in his voice, Isaac guessed the two of them were arguing in the kitchen with the lights out. “Crimson Fever. It’s just strep throat! That’s what they called it in the Golden Age. People used to see strep throat as little more than a childhood annoyance!”
Isaac heard a chair scraping against the kitchen floor. He could imagine his brother’s knuckles gripped firmly on it. “But now, people die from it. We’ve devolved as a people. We’re cursed by these times.”
His mother’s voice sounded soft, her usual gentleness mixed in with the damage to her throat caused by the Fever. But Isaac could sense some steel in the tone of her voice as well. “Gregory, I know what’s happening is unfair. But that’s just life.”
“Just life? How can you accept that it’s just life?” Gregory argued. “Had we been born two hundred years ago, things would’ve been different. We’d have been safe from all of this. But look around! A disease is ripping through our country, free speech has been dismantled, we’re ruled by a dictatorship-”
“Gregory!” their mother cut in. Isaac shivered, because even out here, the long arm of the Presidential Administration and State Police could be felt. Isaac and the kids in town always kept their distance when the men in fedoras and suits checked in at the Patuxet sheriff’s office.
Their mother started coughing, and Isaac could hear Gregory fumbling over to hold her. “I know we live in tough times,” his mother said, her voice now softer. “But we were born to these times. The best we can do is hold on and hold each other until good times return again.”
“You just think there’s a guarantee good times come back,” Gregory answered. “We know for a fact that good times once existed. We can’t know for sure whether we’ll ever return to them. Look at our country, look at the world. There’s no guarantee we all won’t destroy each other in the next few decades.”
“All we can do is be with each other and hope,” his mother said.
“Hope,” Gregory repeated. “I’m sorry, Mom, but we’ve gone beyond the time for just hoping.” Isaac heard his brother step away, and he got the feeling he was about to hear something he shouldn’t be hearing.
His brother spoke in a low tone. “The Professor let me in on more of his research. What if I told you that, through the Rddhi, there’s a way to restore the old times? To set the clock back to two hundred years ago - before war, before disease, before the Unleashing?”
“Gregory,” his mother warned. “Don’t do anything you’d regret.”
“I wouldn’t regret it at all,” Gregory said. “We’d been heroes. We’d bring peace back. Of course, it’s all in the theoretical stage at this point…well, more like the exploratory stage of the theoretical stage…but the equations and willpower are there. All we have to do is go for it.”
Isaac let out a tiny gasp, then clasped his mouth. Fortunately, it seemed like nobody in the kitchen heard him, as his brother concluded his thoughts.
“We could save the world, Mom.”
It took a moment for his mother to answer.
“Don’t blind yourself to the present, and don’t destroy yourself, just for my sake.”
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His mother’s condition soon stabilized. That’s not to say it improved, but it didn’t worsen either. She remained in limbo, bedridden. Though her job stopped paying her, the pension Isaac’s father earned by dying gloriously in war and support from Gregory’s professor meant that the family got by. Isaac wanted to quit school and go to work, but both his mother and Gregory stopped him.
Before Gregory himself was to go back to school, he and Isaac threw themselves deeper into improvement of the self. The pace of their laps picked up, the weights they lifted got heavier, and the books they read grew longer (well, that was more Gregory’s area than Isaac’s. But Isaac was no slouch when it came to geography).
The morning of his train ride back to Wampanoag University, Gregory hammered in the last stake in the final part of the obstacle course the two brothers set up in the fields behind their house. Climbing walls, chicken wire to scrawl under, pipes to scramble through - when laps around town weren’t enough, the obstacle course would supplement it (and because it was a kick-ass thing to have).
Isaac drank from a canteen on the back porch as his brother set the hammer down and approached him. Isaac handed him the canteen; Gregory took a long drink then wiped his mouth.
“Have you thought about what I said a long time ago?” Gregory asked. “About the outline?”
Isaac nodded. He wasn’t good with explaining how he felt through words, but he had an idea.
“The outline…it means that I’m me,” Isaac explained, looking over the obstacle course he and his brother built. “Beyond the outline is the wider world, the machine. And inside that outline is me. My identity, my sense of self. That’s what fills the outline.”
Isaac sighed. “But I still feel like something is missing.”
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Gregory nodded, then sat beside Isaac. “What you’re missing is purpose. Your driving motivation. Your greater goal. We were born without meaning, so, assuming you even get far enough to realize its lack of existence, you have to invent your own. You can find your sense of self, but something will always seem missing in life until you find that meaning.”
Isaac recalled the newsreels he saw in the theaters, the speeches he heard over the radio. “Isn’t my meaning to die for the country in war? To save our people from the aggression of New York and the Unified Pact?”
Gregory grimaced. “That’s the meaning that the ruling class tries to instill in you. They want your meaning to serve their interests. You must resist that pull, Isaac. You must resist the pull of others. Your sense of self belongs to you and you alone. Don’t ever let anybody else influence it.”
Isaac drank slowly from the water. “But then, if my purpose isn’t that, then what is it?”
His brother ruffled his hair. Isaac squirmed away, now at the age when displays of familial affection seriously weren’t cool. But knowing his brother would be away for months again, maybe Isaac didn’t squirm away all that hard.
“Like I’ve said. You’ll know when it happens.”
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A month later, Isaac moved through the obstacle course with ease. With light feet he stepped through the tires, all ten of them; with strength he approached the wall, and in a single leap, his hands caught the top of it, and he pulled himself over. As he dropped back down on the other side, he caught a glimpse of the gray clouds on the horizon, the promise of an upcoming winter rain that would drench the entire city.
But then his feet hit the ground, and he was on to the next obstacle. Ignoring his inner germaphobe, he crawled through the muddy muck underneath tangled wires, inching his way forward. He came out the other side and scrambled back to his feet. Then it was up another wall, this one with black netting attached to it. It could either trip him up or make the climb upwards easier; Isaac had tripped plenty of times earlier, but this time, he felt confident in both his grip and his body itself.
He was growing into a young adult. No beard hair yet (but just you wait!) but the muscles were slowly taking shape. He now understood the difference between good pain and bad pain - good pain is what comes after a good day of work.
Pain formed the outline of the body because it signified his limits. To move faster than this, to lift heavier weights than this, to punch or kick harder and longer than this - pain and fatigue put a cork on it. Pain and fatigue formed the outline of his body, his talents, his training - it gave himself shape and a sense of identity, a sense of “this who is who I am, this is what I can do”. Limits were fluid. With continuing work, Isaac could change his outline, change his identity by continuing to train, enabling himself to do more until the pain and fatigue told him it was time to stop.
Isaac shimmied his way through a pipe, pushing himself out on the other side. When he came to his feet, he saw his mother arriving on the back porch, struggling to sit down onto a chair.
“Mom!” Isaac called out, immediately forgoing his train to help her. He arrived on the back porch and came to the startling realization that he was now taller than her.
Isaac eased his mother into the chair. “You shouldn’t get out of bed. The doctor says you need rest.”
“I want to see my son hard at work,” she answered with a smile.
Isaac rubbed the back of his head. Now that he had stepped away from the obstacle course, with the adrenaline and energy subsiding, it would be kind of tough to get right back into it. And he kind of wanted to talk to his mother, too.
She seemed to notice this. “Think you’re faster than your brother, yet?”
Isaac immediately raised his hands defensively. “I wish. I bet he can move through the course like nobody’s business.”
His mother spoke softly. “Do you miss Gregory?”
It wouldn’t be good to show emotion, he needed to be strong, but in the presence of his mother, Isaac relented.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Only two more months until he gets back. It can’t come soon enough.”
“I miss him, too,” his mother said. “I know you heard us yelling when he came back to check on me a few months ago.”
Isaac tried to lie. “Uh…no, I didn’t hear anything-”
“A mother can always tell when her son’s lying,” she cut in, a faint smile on her face. “Do you know why we were fighting?”
Isaac shifted his weight to either foot. “Well…it was something about what he was studying at school.”
His mother sighed. “I worry about your brother, Isaac.”
“Worry?” he repeated. “What’s there to worry about?”
His mother started coughing, bringing a hand to her face. Isaac tensed up and went to grab her a rag.
“It’s okay,” she said, wheezing and wheezing until she finally caught her breath. She looked up at Isaac, sadness in her eyes. “Your father died right around the time you were born, so you never got to meet him. But you feel his presence around here, right? Or rather, his presence is formed by his absence.”
Isaac recalled times his mother stood a little hunched over, as if the weight of his absence literally pressed down on her. His brother’s shifts with the town construction crews, earning money in his father’s place. The fact that Isaac could look up to Gregory, but Gregory could only look up to the black-and-white photo of their father in uniform on the mantle over the fireplace. And Isaac himself felt that absence, too - all the times in school, when students’ fathers came in to talk about their work, his own friends talking about playing catch and fishing and hunting and late nights with their fathers, Isaac seeing them relax on porches together while he ran around town.
“I know what you mean,” Isaac admitted.
“And soon, you’ll feel my absence as well,” his mother said.
Isaac’s eyes widened. “Mom! Don’t go saying things like that. You’ll get better.”
His mother never looked away, but the sadness left her eyes and she gave him a small smile. “We’ll see. But I’m afraid that once I go, your brother might do something he regrets.”
“Regrets?” Isaac looked back at the obstacle course, his brother’s parting gift for him. “I don’t get it.”
“What do you think of the world, Isaac?”
“Gregory says it’s a shadow of what it used to be.”
His mother shook her head. “Not what your brother thinks. What do you think?”
“Me?” Isaac repeated. “Well…I guess I like it.”
“What do you like about it?”
Isaac wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but when he thought about it, he realized he liked a lot of things. “I like seeing my friends. I like playing in the sandlots. I like walking home under the gaslamps at night. I like seeing the trains pull into the station. I like hearing the crickets at night. I like…well, there are a bunch of things I like.”
“Are all those things you like worth the sadness you see?”
Sadness? But then for every little moment he liked, a sad moment appeared in his head as well - the absence of his father; his mother, sick and bedridden; alcoholics and the homeless sitting under those gaslamps; the empty faces of those in town as Scarlet Fever ripped through it, new headstones at the town cemetery.
“I…uh…”
But then he thought of running with his brother. “I think, even with the sad moments, I still like the happy moments. I’d put up with the sadness to see the happiness.”
His mother closed her eyes and her voice dropped off. “That’s a good answer. You must feel the same way when I leave you.”
“Mom!”
“Not right now, I mean,” she corrected, opening her eyes back up. “But it’s alright. I’ll fight my hardest to live, but the writing is on the wall for me.”
She looked back at Isaac, her face serious. “When that time comes, Isaac, spend some time shedding tears and mourning me. It’s okay to be sad. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. It’s okay to be honest with your feelings. But there’ll come a point when you need to move on from me, and start living in the new reality you find yourself in. Promise me, Isaac.”
Isaac let out a deep sigh, then steeled himself.
“I promise.”
His mother smiled again. “Good. There are times when life will be far sadder than happier. When most of the moments in everyday living will be filled with sorrow rather than joy. But don’t spend too much time reminiscing on what you’ve lost. Grieving is good. But at some point, you’ll need to find the resolve to live through the sad times. Life’s a big cycle. Happiness will come around at some point or another - but only if you let go and accept that cycle.”
She sighed. “I’m afraid that your brother won’t be able to accept the new reality. That he’ll do everything in his power to make the earlier times return.”
Isaac shifted his weight on his feet again. “What are you talking about?” he asked, unsure.
“You’ll understand when the time comes. Just, please, Isaac…let go and move on. When that new reality comes, don’t reject it in favor of an old reality that can never be again. Even after I’m gone, if you stop and look around once in a while, you might just find some new happiness within it.”
Isaac slowly nodded. “I’ll try, Mom.”’