Short Story: The World of Tomorrow

At first I couldn't tell how old Corry was. He had that disease where you start aging uncontrollably. I don't recall the name of it. You could tell by his clothes and the way he talked that he was a teenager. I met him in the seventies, when I was living in California.

Oh, yes: the "Streets of San Francisco." Every neighborhood's name seemed to paint a picture of itself: Chinatown . . . Sunset District . . . Cow Hollow . . . The Embarcadero. I lived in the Mission District. I loved that name – "Mission District" – it seemed sort of holy. I lived in an old row house converted into apartments, right next door to a greenhouse. The Mission District was quiet back then. A little like Petersburg, where I grew up.

Hard to tell if Corry was normal or not. He was real naïve and childlike. You'd tell him something and he listened, but usually he didn't say anything. He would just smile– smiled like he was seeing paradise. It was odd to see that smile, especially from a boy who could barely read and had a body that looked and moved like it was 80 years old. Corry smiled like he was looking through you, right down to your bones.

There aren't too many smiles like that in the world. Closest thing I can recall was Little Ma's face after she went blind. Little Ma always wanted me to go to church, but it didn't suit me. I told her so, too. She let it drop, but she would get me to read the Bible to her. And she would smile that smile -- and always look you right in the eye, even though she couldn't see a thing. Totally blind, but she never missed; always looked you in the eye. She looked at you like she was looking at God. That got me through Vietnam. Little Ma's smile made me stop being afraid of dying.

I moved to San Francisco when I got back from Nam and did a little bit of everything - private security, investigating. I mostly got home from work in the morning. Even if I were up all night on a stakeout or a security gig, I was keyed up when I got home. I couldn't sleep, so I sat on my balcony and read the paper to relax before I went to bed. That was about the time that Corry was coming to work in the greenhouse next to my building.

Corry would come around the corner, look up at me and say, "Top of the morning, Mr. Johnson!" Same thing every day - "Top of the morning, Mr. Johnson!" - like a leprechaun or something. I would always say the same thing to him, too: "What do you know good?" His answer never changed: "God is good, Mr. Johnson. God sure is good." I would just wave and go back to my paper.

One day Corry was coming to work as usual but before I heard his, "Top of the morning!" I saw him bend down to pick something up. I assumed it was a quarter or something. I didn't pay it any mind. But he called my name and asked me if I had ever seen anything like that before. I just knew that I was going to have to go down there. I didn't particularly want to but I did. When I got to the sidewalk Corry was holding a silver coin in the palm of his hand. He asked if I had ever seen anything like it.

I had. It was a 1939 World's Fair souvenir coin. My 1939 World's Fair souvenir coin. My parents saw that World's Fair when they were dating; my pop bought the coin as a souvenir. There were two buildings that were sort of trademarks for the fair that year. The Perisphere was a huge, round building built like a perfect sphere. The Trylon was an obelisk, like a sharp Washington Monument. Together they looked like something from the Emerald City. In fact, the sets of The Wizard of Oz were inspired by that Fair; both were in 1939. The buildings were on one side and the Fair's slogan was on the other: "The World of Tomorrow." It's funny today to think of people being so optimistic about the future, but they were back then.

When I was ten my pop gave me that coin. I was playing Little League - pitcher. I made the All-Star team that year. The morning of the big game, I was nervous. My pop came into my room and gave me the coin for good luck. He told me that the Perisphere was my baseball and the Trylon was my focus. "Keep cool and concentrate, son" he said. "If you do that, why, you'll throw that ball through the batter's strike zone, right into . . . The World of Tomorrow." I pitched a good game that day. Even though we lost I carried that coin around with me everywhere for luck. Carried it for years - had it in Vietnam, too. When I saw it in Corry's hand I knew it probably fell out of my pocket the night before.

I didn't have the heart to take it from him. Corry didn't read well, but he handled money and he knew it was different from regular coins. He said the words aloud like a secret message: "The World of Tomorrow". He asked me what it meant. I said I had heard of people finding unusual lucky coins and things. I said they were rare, each one intended for a specific person. Only that person could see the charm made for him. "Just think how many people passed this spot and never saw a thing," I told him. "You were the only one to notice." He asked what the pictures and the words meant. I said eventually he would know.

After all those years of holding onto that coin, I was surprised at how good it felt to let it go. It was like what my pop said all those years ago about pitching the baseball came true that day: I finally sent something into The World of Tomorrow.

After that, Corry started looking over every inch of that sidewalk like a hawk. I left little things for him. Never anything significant like the World's Fair coin, just little things every once in a while that I thought would catch his eye. Gumball machine toys, a key ring, good-fortune money from Chinatown. Corry just picked them up and smiled. Sometimes he would show them to me; most of the time not. It came to him naturally now.

A few weeks later, I saw an old lady walking toward the greenhouse one night. As she got closer, I realized that it was Corry's grandmother. She was looking for him. He didn't come home from work. She asked if I had seen him, and I hadn't – not since that morning. I had to get to work, but I said that I would keep an eye out ask around. I didn't find him. Not until the next morning.

"Top of the morning, Mr. Johnson." There he was walking down the street in the same clothes he had on the day before. It looked like he slept in them – or worse. I told him to wait right there. When I got to him, he smelled like cigarettes and stale beer. I asked where he had been, and he told me that he met some boys from Mobile who were in town for one night. They asked him if he wanted to join them, and he said sure. Probably never been "out with the boys" before in his life. They hit the bars in the Sunset District. He said that he had one beer in each bar. For a boy his size who never drank, that was more than enough.

Corry smiled and rolled up his sleeve to show me the circle and skinny triangle on his arm: the Perisphere and the Trylon. The pictures on his lucky coin. He said he never had to worry about losing his lucky coin anymore because the pictures were painted on his arm forever. I asked him where he got the money for a tattoo, and he said that his buddies chipped in for it. We got to his grandmother's house and I had him tell her what happened and made him show her the tattoo. She cried and then got furious and started trying to swat Corry, and I got between them. She sent Corry to his room and I tried to make her understand why he had done it.

That was the last time I saw Corry walking down the sidewalk in the morning because his grandmother drove him to work every day from then on. But if I were there as he was getting out of her Buick in the morning, it was still the same routine: "Top of the morning, Mr. Johnson" "What do you know good?" "God is good, Mr. Johnson. God sure is good."

That was the summer of 1978. By December, Corry began to miss work. When I did see him, he looked thin and worn. I saw him on the sidewalk one day and when I shook his hand I noticed something on his wrist. I asked him about it and he showed me six or seven purple spots on his arms. He asked me if what they were. I didn't know.

When Corry stopped showing up I went to the greenhouse to ask about him. They said that he was in the hospital. The cashier said they didn't know what was wrong but Corry's organs were slowing down and his lungs were full of fluid. Today it is pretty clear what happened, but back then the word didn't even exist. People didn't think much about sterilizing needles in those days - particularly not in a Sunset District tattoo parlor.

One cold, sunny day in February I saw the owner of the greenhouse wearing a suit and tie and locking the shop at about ten in the morning. I knew what this meant. I went down to the sidewalk to get the details. When I got to the church, the organ was playing "Blessed Assurance." I paid my respects to his grandmother and she told me that the coin was in his pocket. She said Corry told her how he found it a thousand times, and that I told him that the words and pictures had a meaning for him to discover.

I asked her what he said about them. Corry told her that the circle was the world. The long, skinny triangle beside it was God, coming from Heaven like a beam. When she asked him why the beam was next to the world and not touching it, Corry said that the beam of God's love was too strong for people in this world; it would just burn us up. So it stayed there, just beside us, watching and keeping us warm. After this life, he said, we would go to be with God and live inside that beam. That was what the words on the other side meant. That was the World of Tomorrow.

I went up and looked at Corry in his suit. For the first time he looked grown up, not old. I felt a strange sort of excitement knowing that my old coin was in his pocket. It was like he was taking it there for me, letting it finish its trip to the World of Tomorrow. Before I sat down I touched his hand – small as a child's but wrinkled like an old man's. And I told him what he had told me so many times before: "God is good, Corry. God sure is good."