by Lydia Millet
Armies of creatures had gone to battle on those roads. But they hadn’t known. No one had told them it was war.
Crows and vultures lit up from the carcasses.
Maybe that many had always gotten hit, said Jen. But now no one was here to take away their bodies.
After Jack saw the first dead animals he got tears in his eyes. Stopped looking outside. He and Shel stared down at games on their tablets, where bright palaces stood on green hills.
Through the glass we saw signs of life: workmen ran around carrying loops of cables and shouldering ladders, yelling over their shoulders. We passed road crews wearing hi-vis jackets and hardhats. We passed a crane and linemen working on a utility pole. We passed other families in their cars, which were crowded like ours.
Children gazed back at us from their own rear windows.
The land had a different texture. Old and tired. Almost derelict.
WHEN WE STOPPED for gas it was all of our cars at once. The parents didn’t want to risk a separation. Men held up signs at the curb, GAS HERE. And NO CREDIT.
We pulled up to a pump in two rows. Only those who had to pee were allowed out, so I said I had to pee. Jen said she did too.
“Leave your phones in the car,” said my father.
He didn’t trust us, I guess.
Which was fair. We didn’t trust him either.
“Five minutes is all you get,” he said.
So we went to the bathroom for something to do. But it was filthy, with clogged toilets and clumps of soaked paper and soiled diapers on the floor, and we didn’t even care to use the sink. Instead we hung around in the mini-mart looking at the empty shelves. They were mostly empty. Still left were pork rinds, limón and chile flavor. Two rolls of breath mints.
At the cash register a very old clerk, his face like a fossil, watched us suspiciously. Maybe thought we were thieves.
“Tampons!” said Jen.
They were behind the counter with the chewing tobacco.
“How much for a box?” I asked the clerk, pointing. Out of curiosity. We had no money of our own.
“Forty.”
“Cents?”
“Dollars.”
“Forty,” whispered Jen as we left.
AS WE GOT close to Juicy’s neighborhood the streets were cleaner, the piles of dead animals tapered off, and there were more crews fixing the phones and electricity. Around us mansions were set back from the road, with elaborate landscaping. Massive rolling lawns had been mowed. Garbage had been collected.
“The other half,” said Jen.
“We’re the other half,” I said.
“At least for now.”
“It’s all for now,” said Jack.
He sounded eighty-three.
We pulled up behind the other cars at some tall metal gates. An initial in metal script at the top, tacky. We sat there waiting for the gates to open.
“Look! See? The promised land,” I said to Jack, and nudged him to glance up from his tablet.
“We already had the promised land, Evie,” he said softly.
“Hey, Jack,” said my father, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. Summoned a smile that looked fake. And a jocular tone. “Chin up, kid. Everything’s going to be OK!”
Jack switched his tablet off and flipped it over. Rested his hands on it, neatly folded together.
“That’s what you always said,” he said. His voice was still soft. “You’re my father. But you’re a liar.”
From the front seat there was only silence.
GOING UP THE long drive, we passed resplendent flowerbeds with purple-cabbage borders, abstract-sculpture fountains spouting clear water, groves of trees already turning yellow and red.
Jen whistled between her teeth.
“Not too shabby,” said my father.
“All this from a few shitty movies,” said my mother.
“They’re not all shitty.”
“Most of them. He says so himself.”
“You should see the spread in Bel Air,” said my father.
“You haven’t seen it,” retorted my mother.
“Have too. On social media.”
She snorted.
We parked. There was a shaded parking lot. I could see a lacy gazebo in the distance, and through some trees part of a giant, frilly white house that looked like a fake version of someplace in Europe. Maybe Italy.
“I’m going straight into the pool,” said my mother, unclipping her seatbelt. “And then the Jacuzzi. I hear it’s got a glass roof on it.”
“How can you have an infinity pool without an ocean?” asked Jen.
“I guess we’ll find out,” said my father.
“The bar had better be well stocked,” said my mother.
And got out.
“She’s not entitled,” muttered Jen.
WE CHOSE THE guesthouse for ourselves, for the sake of privacy. Except for Dee, who elected to share the servants’ quarters in fake Italy with the bratty twins. And Juicy, who wanted to sleep in his own bedroom.
The parents who hadn’t come to the farm had got to the mansion first, and one of them had been sleeping in Juicy’s bed and had to be ejected.
But living in the main house didn’t mean he’d hang out with the ’rents, he assured us. Fuck that.
We gave him a pass.
The guesthouse only had three bedrooms, but there was also a living room with a pullout bed in the couch. There were three other couches, one of them L-shaped. There was a small kitchen and two bathrooms. We let Sukey and Jen have a bedroom for themselves and the baby, so when the baby cried there’d be a door we could close.
Then we got warm, and dry, and clean.
“They tried to confiscate her on the way here,” Sukey told us, when we were setting up our sleeping arrangements.
“Confiscate? The baby?”
“They said they had to take care of her. That I’m too young for the responsibility.”
It sounded like a vacation to me.
“I said no fucking way,” said Sukey.
“I mean, you could use them for babysitting sometimes,” suggested Jen.
“Hmph,” said Sukey.
FOR A SHORT while the days passed in that place as they might in a fairy-tale castle. For a while there were even servants—a housekeeper and cleaning team, gardeners, a pet groomer for the dogs. They came and went.
In the great house we’d been blissfully ignored, on the farm we’d been left to ourselves. Here, at first, we lived a mostly separate life. Juicy’s parents gave us clothes from their walk-in closets, each bigger than my room at home had been. And we had a budget for online shopping: Terry made a modest proposal and the parents accepted. We even ordered our own groceries.
There was no budget for alcohol or weed, obviously. Those still had to be pilfered. But Juicy knew the ropes—been doing it for years.
There were new rules on tech and the Internet, rules the parents imposed on themselves. One hour of news at night, one hour in the morning. At other times, they shut down the Wi-Fi and turned off the TVs. And they quarantined not our phones, but their own. It was unhealthy to wallow in everyone else’s misery, one mother said.
They made exceptions for money and work. The fathers said they had to watch their investments, and a few parents were still employed in some form. Part-time. A couple of professors were teaching online courses, including my mother, who said feminist theory didn’t rest.
But yeah, she admitted. Enrollment was way down.
Other than that, they followed their usual routine. At breakfast, Bloody Marys and Irish coffees. Beer at lunch, and when the clock hit four, open season.
JACK WAS POLITE to our parents. Polite but distant. He’d trusted them once, but they had let him down. I got the feeling he was trying to muster some of his old, faithful affection for them and not having much success. They were unreliable sources.
Myself, I’d never expected much. Not since I was even younger than him, anyway. I’d
stopped holding their hands when I was seven. And never done it again. I remember the last time clearly: we’d passed a large crowd in a square in Manhattan. Union Square, I deduced later. The crowd was pissed. Shouting protests. Waving signs. I don’t know what they said—I was too short to read them. Between my parents, each of my hands in one of theirs, I asked them why.
It doesn’t matter, they said. I pestered them. I wouldn’t let it go. They could read the signs. They were tall enough.
But they flatly refused to tell me. Be quiet, they said. They were late for a dinner appointment. Reservations at that place were impossible to get. I wrenched my hands out of theirs. Ran into the crowd, weaving between strangers’ legs. Tugging on the arms of people’s jackets. Asking them why they were so mad. A couple answered, but I couldn’t hear what they said.
My father chased me and finally caught up. His face red and sweaty and his teeth gritted. Now they were very late, thanks to me, he said. I was grounded.
Lately, whenever I felt a surge of resentment, I reminded myself of the recognition I’d had after I ate the moldy bread.
Because my mother and my father—they weren’t so different from Red. They’d functioned passably in a limited domain. Specifically adapted to life in their own small niches. Habitat specialists, Mattie might have said.
My father’s habitat had been the art economy. He’d moved there with ease, making and selling his looming, colorful sculptures of war-torn women. He’d known how to navigate receptions at galleries and museums, offer up to collectors and critics his offhand ironic pronouncements and eccentric behavior. Garnered six-figure payouts for the voluptuous breasts he’d covered with scenes of destruction from Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen. The asses that bore images of bombed-out homes and burning hospitals.
My mother’s habitat had been the university, her articles full of long words and the names of other scholars. Articles five people read.
When their habitats collapsed they had no familiar terrain. No map. No equipment. No tools.
Just some melted guns strapped to their waists.
BY AND BY we found ourselves getting bored. There was only so much cold-weather swimming to be done in the solar-heated infinity pool (a cascade of basins on a hillside, getting smaller and smaller as you progressed down the slope). There was a three-hole golf course, a volleyball pit, and even an indoor squash court in fake Italy’s basement, along with a small bowling alley.
Our interest in these pastimes waxed and waned. We started to learn sign language, co-taught by Jack and Shel. A little Spanish from Sukey. Jen let Terry sleep in her bed with her, and I even implied to Low I might make out with him the day he learned to dress. And regularly brush his teeth.
Right away he started borrowing clothes from Rafe. The pants were too short and his ankles stuck out of them.
Still. Maybe I’d cut him some slack.
TERRY PROPOSED A new game: we’d meet the parents before dinner and play in teams, us vs. the elderly. The team that won could claim a prize from the other.
Whatever prize they chose, within reason.
“But what can we give them?” asked Rafe.
“Our time, maybe,” said Sukey.
“Our labor,” said David.
“Bartending services,” said Juice, who was teaching himself mixology.
“They’d have to give us booze, if we demanded,” said Jen. “Let’s face it, props to Juice, but stealing doesn’t always cut it.”
“More is better,” said Juice.
“More’s better, typically,” agreed Val.
She didn’t drink, herself. She’d been melancholy without Burl but refused to self-medicate. No booze, no weed, and no evidence of libido either. Val was a straight edge all the way.
Or she hadn’t hit puberty. We didn’t know which.
So we told them what the game was—a simple one we used to play on road trips. One person thought of a word or phrase, and the other team had to guess it by asking a series of questions. The word could be a person, place, thing, or concept.
In some of these domains the elderly had a clear strategic advantage. Many of them, frankly, knew more facts. Plus they’d had professional development in their fields.
They agreed to the reward system, confident of victory.
But we had screens, we had time, and we were looking for a challenge. When each afternoon rolled around we set ourselves to learning. There were trivia websites, and those could be useful. There was Wikipedia. We crammed.
The first game ended in our defeat when the parents won three words running thinking of the names Bella Abzug, Christine de Pizan, and Margery Kempe. They crowed in jubilation and claimed eight hours of “tech advice” from David, which was what they called it when he performed fixes and workarounds for them.
“Advice” implied a back-and-forth, but they didn’t want to understand. They just wanted service.
As a reward for David, Juicy procured three full lines of his mother’s excellent cocaine. That was risky for Juice, since his mother monitored her coke stash like a harpy eagle with newborn chicks.
David was duly grateful.
The second game we lost as badly as the first. They made Sukey hand over her sister for a day, so they could “have some cute baby time” (gag). She protested, but we decided the prize was probably legit. Sukey submitted to the majority, then paced back and forth most of that day, worrying the parents would wreck the baby.
Her sister was barely two months old, said Jen. How much damage could they actually do?
Sukey retorted that they couldn’t be trusted with child-rearing. On that front we had to agree.
When the infant was returned, swaddled and diapered and fed, she looked and acted exactly the same, of course—lay there without doing anything, occasionally crying—but Sukey was still suspicious. They’d put a dumb-looking pink bow on her head, which Sukey ripped off with extreme prejudice.
In the third game the parents were drunker than usual, and arrogant. It ended in a draw requiring a tiebreaker. The elderly could barely believe it: we stymied them with Nicki Minaj, which would have been a shoo-in for us.
“And she’s a feminist,” I told my mother, sticking the knife in.
“Debatable,” said my mother, googling.
We took home beer and liquor.
OVER TIME, THOUGH, a new darkness settled on them. Crashing stock markets were a factor, and weather. It wasn’t storming where we were, but there were many storms elsewhere. Also droughts and heat waves. Cold and hot fronts, defunct trade routes. Everywhere seemed to be in flux. The weather shut down airports, and ruined crops were “destabilizing” the markets. The North Pole was far too warm. Parts of Europe were freezing.
Plus the domestic staff had quit.
The parents complained, indignant. It was so sudden, they said. They’d all been told there was more time. Way more. It was someone else’s fault, that was for sure. Not the scientists, said one. Those guys had tried their best. Maybe the politicians. And possibly the journalists.
We heard discussions about hoarding, and the pros and cons of stockpiling different commodities. What would the best currency be? The parents talked about this for hours on end. For a while it was their obsession.
Gold? Weapons? Ammunition? Batteries? Antibiotics? Arguments transpired, and we perceived unrest. Disputes and resolutions.
But no consensus. A diverse portfolio was safest, they decided.
So shipments arrived constantly. There were solar panels and dry goods and medicines. Sometimes the parents spent days unpacking them. Phrases like “disease migration” and “parasites” were bandied about, and trucks arrived loaded with bottled water. Not spring water in small bottles—oh no. Water in large barrels, water they stored in a corrugated-metal warehouse that workers had constructed while we were living in the great house.
Men came out to beef up the security system. And build. Where once the fence along the mansion’s perimeter had been a wrought-iron decoration, n
ow it was a concrete wall fortified with electrical charges. There were booby traps at the base of the wall, and no-fly zones. The no-fly zones were no-walk zones, in fact, but the parents called them no-fly zones, and we took their meaning. Construction workers walked the perimeter and set things into the ground, then built a fence inside the main wall as a buffer. We weren’t permitted to touch it.
“Land mines?” asked Juicy.
“Can’t be. Illegal,” said Rafe.
But we weren’t convinced. We didn’t think of stepping onto that grass. We never let the dogs off-leash.
AFTER THE WALL was built we held them to the game harder than ever. They needed the ritual to feel normal, was what we didn’t say but knew.
We were winning more and more, and the parents got so discouraged that now and then we lost to them on purpose. We’d pick an easy guess. “The rings of Saturn,” one of us might choose to think, or “naked mole rat” or even “cauliflower.”
The game might be interrupted by a parent getting a text from a friend or relative. When it began we’d had a strict attitude about such interruptions, not wanting a losing contender to cheat via search engine. But when a mother got weepy or a father white-faced over what they read in a text, increasingly we let it go.
One father wandered off the property—Jen’s—and when he came back was pretty much catatonic. He was missing his shoes, and his bare feet were bloody and frostbitten. He wouldn’t say what had happened. He squatted in the kitchen of fake Italy and rocked back and forth, his arms around his knees.
A mother went on a Skype bender, though connectivity was spotty. She looked up all the friends and family she’d ever had. The ones she couldn’t raise she made a list of and tried to track down by other means. The ones she could get hold of were almost worse. A few were maybe all right, others were panicked or seemed to be in a state of stunned confusion. Two asked to come live with us, and the mother appealed, begging, to Juicy’s father.
“No way,” he said. “You know we discussed this.”
“Don’t do this to yourself,” said my mother, always practical. “All we can do is cultivate our garden.”