Those That Wake

THE WORTHY LIFE

BEYOND THE DOOR was a vast hall filled with ruined instrumentation, unidentifiable, like the components of some immense, secret mechanism. Man in Suit stood at its end, facing them.

“Christ,” Mike said to Man in Suit, striding past Laura, who had stopped dead upon going through the doorway. “I am so goddamned sick of you.” He leaned down as he walked and hefted a jagged metal bar from the forgotten and useless hunks of machinery that were the inner workings of Man in Suit’s ravaged world.

“You are not up to this confrontation,” Man in Suit said. “I assure you.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mike said, and whipped him across the face with the bar.

Man in Suit’s head snapped around, and he turned back with wide eyes, thunderstruck. Mike went at him again, bloodying him this time. Man in Suit’s arm rose weakly to fend off the next blow, but fell away as Mike battered it down.

Mike lit into Man in Suit with blow after blow, cracking bones and separating muscle as he did. Mal and Remak made it in to see Man in Suit torn and open on the filthy, jagged floor.

“Whoa,” Mal said. “Look at that.”

Remak stared in stark admiration.

Mike looked down at the little black things squirming feebly from Man in Suit’s wounds and flopping wetly onto the dirty floor to die. He continued with the pipe until there was only a smear of red and black, feeling an unburdening in his head that he had never known before. Turning around, he could see from the approval in their faces that the others felt it, too. They stood a little taller; their eyes were a little brighter.

“That was…’ Mal began, unable to find the right word to end on.

“Astonishing,” Remak said. “I think you just saved”—he considered for a moment and shrugged—”everyone.”

Laura was staring at him, too, something beyond simple awe in her slightly parted lips.

Who’d have figured? Mike thought, looking down at the smear. All you had to do was beat him up.



They walked out of the building to find people in the street staring at it, somehow aware of the thing that had finally left their private thoughts and given them back a sense of promise.

Mal and Laura stepped aside, knowing who these people needed to see. Remak hung back, watching the people approaching Mike, not crowding him, not crushing him with their praise, but silently coming forward and touching him gently, as they might a messiah. What he had done for them was beyond mere words.

A television crew had made it here already, perhaps having been called to the scene when the building had appeared. They accosted Remak, who began a lengthy explanation. Mike saw reporters talking to Mal and Laura as well. But they couldn’t reach him yet, surrounded as he was, and he was glad. These people needed him too much. He heard his three companions saying his name, though—saying it an awful lot. And it was the first time that he’d heard the Boothe name, his grandfather the war hero’s name, and it didn’t echo in his own ears like a taunt.

Exhausted and energized at the same time, Laura suggested that she and Mike slip away. She was understandably anxious to find her family and make them whole again, but there was something she desperately wanted to do with him first. But, heck, she was just a kid. Mike let her down easy, and when he had, she seemed even more in awe of him.



It took Mike about a month to drop twenty, twenty-five pounds, get into fighting shape. Mal offered to help, but as soon as Mike got into a gym it came easily and naturally, now that there wasn’t something black in his head holding him back anymore.

He did a lot of television talk shows, because people needed to understand not just what had happened but who Mike was and what sort of a man was capable of doing what he had done. When he walked down the street, people would come up and thank him quietly.

“What you did was so important,” they would say. “So important.”


They were talking to him about running for office, like mayor, maybe—start small—when one of the five models he was seeing on a regular basis told him she was pregnant with his child.

It was an unhappy shock to begin with. He’d never had kind thoughts for his own parents and thus never thought much of being one. But this wasn’t just a matter of having a child. In a sense, this was something for the entire world.



After nine months of running out for ice cream and pickles at all hours, the hero and the supermodel were in the delivery room. The mom-to-be was gasping away, and Mike watched the doctor gently lift a tiny little boy from between her legs.

“It’s a boy,” the doctor said. Nurses whisked the boy off to a small padded table, where they attended to him carefully. The mother was holding Mike’s hand tightly when one of the nurses came over and whispered something to the doctor.

The doctor went over and examined the baby briefly.

“What’s wrong?” the mother said.

The doctor looked at her, hesitated, looked at Mike, and made a decision. He stepped to the side, giving the parents a clear view of their baby boy.

“Oh, God,” the mother choked out, ripping her eyes away from the child and snatching her hand from Mike’s.

“What?” Mike said, stepping closer to look at his boy. “What’s wrong?” He couldn’t see anything wrong. The boy wasn’t even crying, just looking back up at his father thoughtfully.

“I’m afraid your son is…”The doctor breathed in, held it a moment, and let go. “I’m afraid your son is completely worthless.”

Mike looked from the doctor to the nurses. They nodded back sadly.

“He’s never going to amount to anything at all,” the doctor said, shaking his head regretfully and making an irrevocable notation on his clipboard. “Completely worthless.”

It was too much for the mother. She insisted on blood tests, knowing that she and her family were all accomplished, decent, and smashingly attractive, which made them incontrovertibly worthwhile people.

They rushed the results through, and sure enough, it had been passed down from Mike’s side.

“Why didn’t you tell us, Mr. Boothe?” the doctor asked reasonably. “After all this fuss, why didn’t you come clean that you were utterly worthless in every way?”

People seemed to know all about it without even being told. They scowled at him on the street now, punishing him for his deception.

After all he had done for them. He could barely even bring himself to be angry at them after a while. In the end, you couldn’t hide from your own shortcomings. Whether you saved every human being on the planet or not, worthless was worthless, and the only thing you could really do was just give in to it.