Jack And Anna - Back To Winnipeg

4. Well, This Place Hasn’t Changed-3

With an exasperated sigh, Jack strode past her and continued up the sidewalk. It didn’t take long to find a little park with a jungle gym that he used to play on when he was a boy. They had updated it at some point in the last ten years, but it still had swings, and that was what he wanted.

He and Anna sat side by side in companionable silence, listening to the crickets chirping, watching the cars whooshing past on the road that bordered the park. One or two of those had loud music blasting from their open windows. On a Wednesday night? He wouldn’t have expected that, but then most of the kids were still on summer vacation. It amused Jack to think that he was turning into the kind of old man who complained about everything those young whippersnappers got up to.

“Okay, sweetie,” Anna began. “You’ve been Reverie Guy for the last half hour. Are you gonna tell me what’s on your mind?”

“My mind is on my mind.”

“Hmm. How meta of you.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “So, a year ago, in the middle of the most intense war humanity has ever seen, I found out I’ve been living with undiagnosed autism.”

“Yeah?”

Breathing deeply through his nose, Jack gazed up at the stars. “I made a lot of hard choices, Ann,” he said. “Choices that I thought were the product of bravery and integrity. But now, I’m not so sure.”

Hunched over with an elbow on her thigh, Anna dug her fingertips into her forehead. “Oh, Jack, only you would worry about that.”

He was on his feet before he even realized it, gravel crunching under his shoes as he paced across the playground. “No, really think about it!” He spun around and backed up until he was standing next to the jungle gym. “Do you remember what everyone said to me when the government started rounding up immigrants?”

Anna was just a shadow to his eyes: a silhouette framed by the light of a nearby lamp. But he could tell that she was frowning. “They told you to wait and let the courts sort it out.”

Falling back against a metal post that supported the slide, Jack trembled as he worked through those terrible memories. “But I didn’t. I threw my badge away, and I freed those people myself.”

“And you were right to do it.”

“Do you know why I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing?”

“Because you’re a good person?”

Jack allowed himself a small smile. “Maybe,” he said with a shrug, starting across the playground again. “But I’m not sure I have the best motivation. There’s a lot of anger in my heart.”

His wife sat on the swing with both hands gripping the chains. Though it was dark, he could sense every inch of her face with Spatial Awareness. He could feel the concern in her eyes. “You’ve got plenty of good reasons to be angry, love.”

“Yeah, but sometimes I think I’m mad at the wrong people. This little park right here has witnessed some rather epic smackdowns. Many of them involved me becoming intimately acquainted with the dirt. I was a bit of a target growing up, you know?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t the bullies I hated most,” Jack went on. “It was the kids who stood there and watched. The ones who laughed, the ones who cheered, the ones who turned their faces away because they knew it was wrong. I swore I would never be like them.”

Anna rose from the swing, slowly walking toward him. She stood up on her toes and brushed his lips with hers. “I’d say you succeeded.”

“Did I?”

“What kind of question is that?”

Closing his eyes, Jack hung his head. “These last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands,” he began. “I’ve done some reading on autism. Turns out a lot of us feel the same way. We’re more loyal to a principle – like justice – than we are to any particular group. So, I have to wonder, was it really me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I threw my badge away,” Jack said. “I went rogue, and I freed the immigrants. The other Keepers didn’t want to do that because being a Keeper is part of their identity. It’s not part of mine. So, I have to ask: Was it bravery and compassion that motivated my actions? Or was it just a quirk of atypical neural architecture? If I had been born neurotypical, would I be one of the kids who laughed while someone else got beat up?”

Anna regarded him for a little while. He could feel the weight of her scrutiny as she searched for an answer. “No,” she said at last. “You wouldn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I guess I just have faith.”

“And that’s what I’m lacking, Anna,” he muttered. “These days, I don’t have much faith in anything. For the longest time, my life was defined by the war. Now, that’s over, and I have no idea what to do next. I ask myself what I want out of life, and I keep drawing a blank. So, I just keep doing what I’ve always done. We go on missions. We have our cute, little date nights. But doesn’t it feel like we’re going through the motions?

“They asked us if we would give our lives to save the people of Ezryn. We thought it meant dying, but instead, they just made everyone forget us. But in a way, that’s worse! We’re the ghosts of people who no longer exist, lingering in a world that no longer has room for us! And I don’t know what to do!”