Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

One night on-call.

They watched an old TV-movie from the 80s when nuclear war was a big topic. The movie centered on what happens in this little California town after a nuclear attack. By the end, everyone is dead from radiation poisoning except for the mom, played by Jane Alexander, and one of her kids, Brad, and this mentally disabled boy, Hiroshi, they take in after his dad dies.

The scenario is bleak. There really is no hope. Brad’s dad isn’t coming back; his sister dies; his friends die. Over time, the town’s population spirals into the terminal dwindles. After she coughs up blood, Jane Alexander has Brad and Hiroshi pile into the family car in a closed garage and turns on the engine. (Not an original way to go out in that scenario: Fred Astaire did the same thing in On the Beach .) Only Alexander can’t go through with it .

Instead, they just go on living. Day after day, waiting for the end. They celebrate Brad’s birthday with a candle stuck on a graham cracker. When Brad says he doesn’t know what to wish for, Jane Alexander says they should remember everything, the good and the awful—and then she blows out the candle. And that’s when the movie ends.

When the movie was done, they were both quiet for a long time afterward. Then Roni, smearing tears from her cheeks, said, Would you have done that? Would you have kept going until the end?

He hadn’t answered right off the bat. Her question was valid. Honestly, what would it be like to know you were going to die and there was nothing you could do? All of a sudden, Death wasn’t a foggy something way in the future. You and Death were on a collision course, and Death wasn’t going to swerve at the last second.

He also didn’t reveal that he had watched that movie at least five or six times. He never understood why until Stan suggested that, maybe, what happened in the movie was a parallel to John’s past: No matter how many times you go back over it in your head, son, there’s nothing different you could have done. You got to just keep on keeping on. John often wondered if all federal marshals doubled as psychiatrists.

Anyway, back then with Roni, he’d turned the question around. This was something at which he excelled, this art of deflection and evasion. After all, he’d been doing it for almost fifteen years by then .

What would you have done? he’d asked. Killed yourself or kept on?

He never did find out. Oh, she was going to answer, had actually started to say something—but then they were both paged to the ER and just never got around to finishing up that conversation.

In a way, wasn’t the situation now the same? He wasn’t going to die, but there was no escaping reality. It was like what Elliot says when a friend wonders why E.T.’s people can’t just beam him up to the mother ship: “This is reality, Greg.”

Well, the reality here was very simple. Davila was done.

But the question: was he?