Happiness Man

The funeral was held on a cold Wednesday morning, it was raining. How hypocritical, Yulian thought to himself when sitting at the front, watching the priest reading from the collection of safe passages approved by the State.

That was the day he lost his son for the second time in his life.

Caleb was never a good kid in Yulian's eyes. He started too many fights and responded to his father's anger with silence, staring down his old man with those dark blue eyes as if daring him to push even further. His brother Leo, on the other hand, was the perfect kid everyone loved.

Leo gave Yulian way more headaches than he ever needed. He was reported missing three years before Caleb's body was found.

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal..." The priest read in a monotone, eyes blank and even bored. It was the third funeral he held today and with five more waiting for him.

There were always times to kill in your book, Yulian wanted to stand up and yell at the priest, yell at the police soldiers in black uniforms around the plaza, yell at the lady stood next to the priest watching him with a careful look. Who were you to decide when the time was to die? Who were you to decide whom to kill?

In the end, he hung his head low and sat there in silence.

He thought about the fury in Caleb's eyes the last time he saw his son.

Caleb came back to the cabinet in the late afternoon, two weeks before Yulian received the telegram from the Agency reporting the death of his only family left. The telegram was signed by the founding father Himself.

He could smell the faint scent of alcohol on Caleb's breath. Yulian was almost surprised to see him, they were not planning to spend the Holy Days together since Caleb had bought Vamir, his partner, over to the cabinet on the Harvest Holidays a few weeks prior. Before Yulian heard about the accident.

Caleb went straight to bed upon arrival and hadn't said a word to his old man until he emerged from the guest room with full gear and an army backpack late that night, handing him a plastic locket, the one you could win in a carnival or buy in some cheap Chinatown night market.

"Keep it safe for me, will you, dad?" Caleb had said after staring at nothing in the air for a good minute; he looked like a ghost compared to the trouble-making boy Yulian once knew.

He was surprised that Caleb would keep something so cheesy and cliche. "It was a silly gift, you know how he is." As if reading his mind, Caleb chuckled and warmth almost came back to his eyes. Yulian could almost see a shadow of his boy for a split second, before it was blown away by that haunted look again, Caleb caressed the locket in his hand and whispered, "Hsow he was."

"When are you coming back to get this?" Yulian asked, but he knew the answer. Caleb hadn't kept anything important under this roof since he was 15. There were always storage units and secret hideouts somewhere, in or out of the State, but never his father's house.

As always, Caleb had responded in silence. He put the last two bottles of standard purified water into his army bag and swung it over his shoulder. Yulian did not ask why his son needed to gather supplies here, did not ask where he was going in the middle of a cold November night, and he did not even ask where he was on the day of his partner's funeral.

Yulian put his hand over his chest pocket where he kept the heart shaped pink locket, as if he could still feel his son in it. There used to be a photo inside, before the police soldier took it out, along with everything Caleb touched in his cabinet. They did not think the cheap plastic toy worth the effort.

Yulian received a letter from the Agency offering their condolences and "regret at seeing you did not have a chance to attend the memorial for the late Vamir Delthir". A car accident almost sounded like a joke; Yulian had read the letter over and over again before he could finally believe his little shit of a son-in-law was gone. It was hard to believe someone like Vamir would have gone without a flame, without a decent fight.

He had been expecting a phone call, a card, a... something from Caleb since that day. When Leo went missing, Caleb called him in the middle of the night. It was late July two years before. Yulian was unable to sleep from the heat, maybe he had sensed something back then.

Caleb was drunk, Yulian could tell. He had caught both of his twins pretending to be sober and having "just finished a study group" while smelling like a rat drowning in the liquor store, more than he could count. Caleb did not say anything for the first few seconds, but Yulian knew it was him anyway. He leaned on the wall in his dark wooden kitchen, the phone on the wall flashing red lights in a hurried rhythm - maybe the Information Department was listening in on him, but he didn't care.

Yulian Timufeyev was a man that would die with all his secrets, but at that moment, on that heated midsummer night, crushed by the devastation of losing a son and watching another one rapidly drifting away, he found that he did not care about anything anymore.

In the end, Caleb had informed him the "unfortunate outcome" of his most recent quest in his commander's voice. Everything about the quest was classified and redacted, except for the fact that his son, Caleb's twin brother, was MIA.

How could you, Yulian had sneered, had accused, how could you lose my son, your own blood and flesh. He had spit venom on Caleb's face over the phone line, and as always, Caleb responded in silence.

It took a whole minute for Yulian to be suffocated by the void, for him to hang up the line and scream to the darkness and nothingness. Caleb did not call for a few months. When they got in contact again, nobody mentioned that phone call. Both the father and the son had chosen to suffer and mourn in silence, alone.

All his comrades, his friends, his partner, his wife, had been gone at that point and thinking backward, maybe they had been gone long before Yulian even realised.

Adelina was the first one to go in the old team. She was old and grey, older than what she should've been in the ten years that Yulian spent selling their research to the State in exchange for the safe harbouring of his then pregnant wife. She came to Yulian's doorstep after arriving at the State from refugee camp, half delusional and the artificial leg dragging behind when she walked.

Yulian had driven her to the shelter across the city, and she talked about the parties and dinners they went to back in the motherland, the drinks they had and laughs they shared, before their idealism and hopefulness became weapons in war.

She smiled and kissed his cheek goodbye. At that moment she looked like her younger self again, like that red-haired girl who greeted him in the lab the first time they met, like the optimistic scientist believing in the betterment of humanity through their research.

Adeline died four days later. Yulian did not go to her funeral.

Yulian stood up when the music started, as a few men from the Army Yulian didn't recognise walked through the field holding the flag-covered coffin. Suddenly the people surrounding him became too much to bear, it was too crowded and too cold at the same time, as if loneliness held a party in his chest and he couldn't breathe.

Suddenly he went back to the hospital room. He could smell strong disinfectant, with the noisy corridor outside and the PR system blustering the speeches of the father Himself and doctors and nurses trying to talk over it.

It was strangely quiet in the room, time had stopped and the only thing Yulian could see was the soft and warm babies in his arms.

Caleb grabbed his finger and giggled, blowing a nose bubble in the process.

Yulian just smiled; he was the happiest man alive.