“Will you help her find them, like you’re finding mine?” the girl asked.
Calliope didn’t know how to answer. She cleaned Eunjoo with feminine wipes she’d found in the medicine cabinet, pulled Phoenix’s dinosaur chonies from the backpack, and helped Eunjoo slip each skinny, knobbed leg in, then lifted them over her nalgas and hips. The girl said nothing about boys’ chonies. Calliope figured that Eunjoo could do this on her own, but she helped the girl anyway, a pair of Phoenix’s elastic-waist jeans and a T-shirt, rolling the cuffs and sleeves. She checked the faucet. No running water in the South Valley either. She couldn’t wash Eunjoo’s pee clothes, so she took them outside and hung them on the porch, then handed Phoenix’s backpack to Eunjoo, who put it on her back. She was a miniature Phoenix, a beautiful, moon-faced impostor.
On the dirt driveway again, she implored, “Susana, can you talk to me now? Can you tell me what you know?” No response. Calliope wondered if shaking Susana’s shoulders would do any good. “Do you have any bottled water? Supplies? I need to get to my tía’s hacienda. Andres might be there waiting. Susana? Come on, amiga. Talk to me. What happened to Reina? Why are you in the dirt?” She pulled Susana’s arm, trying to lift her from the ground. Her uterine muscles ached with the strain, her back shrilled in pain. “We can’t stay out here on the driveway. It’s dark, it’s not safe. I can’t leave you.”
Susana sang again, absently. Calliope walked back to the car and strapped Eunjoo into her booster seat so she could pull closer up the driveway to force Susana from the mud. But when she’d pulled up, the mud woman was gone. “Dammit, Susana. What are you doing?” She flipped on the headlights and told Eunjoo, “Stay here.” Where would Susana have gone? Into the house to pack? Into the barn with the animals? This wasn’t normal behavior by any stretch of the imagination, and Calliope was so confused and frustrated she wanted to cry. “Susana?” How many silent, dead houses would Calliope scour tonight? “Susana?” How many surreal and twisted games of hide-and-seek? “Susana.” Her voice a command now, loud and urgent. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m trying to help.” She’d thought she was the one who needed help. Chickens screeched and flapped. Corn rustled.
“I’m not going into the cornfields to find you,” she yelled. “Where are you?”
An owl hooted in the distance. Then, a gunshot. Calliope jolted toward the barn, holding her stomach. No horses in their stalls, just those damn chickens. “Susana?”
Her friend lay on the ground in a pile of straw, soaked red.
“No. No-no-no-no. Oh god, please no. Susana?” She covered her mouth, everything inside her shattering. “Why? Why would you do this?”
She hunched over Susana’s body, lifted her friend’s head, cradling the dark mass of hair falling across her lap. Calliope pressed her fingers to Susana’s neck and waited for a throbbing to press back, but nothing came. Calliope couldn’t cry. Couldn’t scream. Could do nothing but cradle her friend’s lifeless body on the floor of the empty barn. The chickens were relentless in their squawking, feathers flying. In one lifeless hand, Susana’s gun. In the other, a clump of mud and rock, pressed to her heart. The place that should have been beating.
Calliope imagined Susana as a queen bee of colony collapse.
She wanted to bury her, wrap her in one of Reina’s sheepskin blankets beneath the cottonwoods. But she couldn’t dig into the ground with a shovel. Couldn’t lift her friend’s body. Besides, she wanted to leave her friend where someone would find her. When this nightmare was over and the rescue workers came.
She took the gun out of Susana’s hand and put it in the hip elastic of her own pants, the metal hot against her skin. She’d never held a gun. She took straw and pressed it into the wound. Susana seemed to be made of straw. She was sprouting.
Calliope thought of Shanidar Cave in Iraq, the first proof of deliberate burial of the dead, where Neanderthals left grave goods with their bodies—animal bones, boar jaw—beneath stone slabs. Johansen, discoverer of Lucy, saw it as a spiritual act. Calliope was never convinced. Art appeared in human evolutionary history only with Homo sapiens. She hypothesized the prehistoric burial was for hygienic purposes, to keep decaying bodies from contaminating campsites, perhaps even for respect. But love?
She opened Susana’s mud-clenched hand. Susana held a rock, one smooth stone in the mess of dirt and blood and straw. Calliope polished it on her tunic and placed it back in Susana’s hands, laying one atop the other across her chest. Now the rock was Susana’s graveless grave good. Calliope didn’t know what prayer to say. Her mother’s rosaries didn’t seem like enough. Where was God anyway?
She sang Susana’s song. “Los pollitos dicen pío pío pío, cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.” She felt cold. Who would discover her friend’s body in the hay?
She walked back to the car, trembling. Eunjoo’s door was open. Calliope had been such an idiot, leaving the girl alone. She whispered her name, unsure why she was whispering except that she was scared again, same as when she’d seen the hunter’s rifle in his passenger seat.
Footprints in the mud. She followed them back to the house. From the kitchen, the faint sound of rustling leaves, the crumpling of paper, or was it the scuffing of boots?
“Eunjoo?” Calliope pulled the gun from her hip, unsure how to use it but figuring she could hold it for effect. “Chica?”
In the middle of the kitchen floor, holding a box of crackers and dipping them into peanut butter, the girl smiled, her mouth full with crumbles and paste. “I was hungry.”
Calliope exhaled, relaxing, and replaced the gun in the elastic of her pants. All the digital clocks were blank, all the analog clocks stuck at twelve. Still, the darkness had taken on a hazy texture, as if light were nearby. If morning still existed, Calliope sensed it was approaching. “I’m sorry, chica.” Her stomach growled, but she was too upset to eat. “It’s probably breakfast time.”
Eunjoo nodded, stuffing another peanut butter cracker in her mouth.
Calliope handed her a bottle of water from the pantry, so she wouldn’t choke on the thick paste, and drank some herself. There wasn’t much.
When they left Susana’s house, Eunjoo still held her jar of peanut butter—and Calliope, a bag of food, a liter of water, and the gun her friend had used to shoot herself.
Outside, Calliope picked three ears of corn and added those to the bag.
“Look.” Eunjoo called out, pointing toward the sky.
Beyond the Sandias, a trickle of pink irrigated the skyline. Morning. The sun was rising. Calliope would find their families. She still had hope, and a girl with peanut butter on her mouth.
SIX
AMY DENVER
Susana the corn woman shooting herself replayed through Calliope’s mind, a film unreeling, as she drove toward the freeway. The stygian darkness around the car had blanched into an ashen dusk against the rising sun. How much of her beloved forests—Sandia, Gila, Taos—were ablaze? What was going on in the rest of the state, the country? Even before the flash of light and the disappearances, the news had become terrifying, the environmental agencies long-gutted, pipes everywhere exploding, not just on the reservations. Gunmetal gray emanated through the ash and smoke; she imagined Bisabuela watching this wreckage with her, whispering, When they destroy the Earth, they do it in the dark.
Calliope’s grief, palpable, rode in the passenger seat beside her; it guarded the gun in the glove box. That gun was the culmination of humanity’s toolkit, child borne of flint and core, borne of Clovis spearheads buried beneath riverbed. She merged onto the southbound 25, tangled with stalled, empty cars, piled into each other, some in pieces after catching fire. She wove through stopped traffic, twenty miles per hour to avoid crashing into the wreckage.
It would take forever to get to Tía’s.
On the edge of the freeway beside the guardrail, a figure hunched beside a rundown scooter.
Calliope slowed to a crawl. A white girl in hipster jeans, a sheer beige tank top with a faux leather jacket tied around her slight waist, and black army boots to her calves. She held a helmet at her hips, and bent over her bike on her haunches before standing and kicking the back tire. A petite young woman, jutting-wire skinny, ponytailed hair the color of summer squash, fawn skin with rose undertones. Her bare arms and shoulders were sleeved with colorful tattoos. Even from several feet away, Calliope could clearly discern Medusa, her snake-hair coiling the white girl’s bicep like bracelets. The artwork didn’t bother her; tattoo culture permeated Albuquerque. Years before, the fact that everyone and their grandma at church sported tattoos was a culture shock, but after a while she stopped paying attention.
Calliope hesitated. Talking to the last stranger on the side of the road had made her feel like a rag doll, toxic on the floor of a defective fallout shelter. She’d felt unstable. Or insane.
She didn’t need insanity, she needed answers.
But as she approached the scooter, she caught the young woman’s eyes, cerulean and lucid, the kind of natural response that implied I’m normal and stranded. I’m so glad you came along. Calliope stopped, shifted to park, and glanced back at Eunjoo, who was also staring at the woman. “Should we help her?” Calliope asked, aware she was ridiculous, asking advice of the six-year-old.
“Yep. We need her,” Eunjoo answered, matter-of-factly, startling Calliope.
“Why do we need her?”
“She’ll help us later.”
Calliope smiled, bemused. Still, it would be useful to travel with another woman, an ally in this mess. Staring at the white girl, Calliope’s hand on the locked car door, she imagined prehistoric people hunting and gathering across North America, what it might have been like when the last ice age hit, when those who survived did so by sharing resources and knowledge. No fossil record supported violence until resources became sparse, much later. Violence was taught. The natural instinct in crisis, evolved into the genes, was help each other.
Calliope opened the door. “Hey there,” she called as she padded out of her car. “Need some help?”
“Oh my God, you’re the first normal person I’ve seen all morning.” She embraced Calliope in an awkward sideways hug, the skinny girl making Calliope feel even more massive, her belly bloating between them. “Look at you, momma,” she said, laughing. “You’re about to pop.”
Calliope stiffened, defensive. “It’s twins,” she responded, pulling away from the white girl’s embrace.
“Picked a hell of a time to be pregnant though, didn’t you? In this nightmare.”
Calliope breathed a sigh of relief, glad the white girl had acknowledged aloud that something horrible was happening. She extended her hand, introduced herself as Calliope Santiago, omitting the “Dr.” title she usually prided herself in affirming.
“Amy Denver,” the white girl said, shaking her hand.
Calliope was glad to have something to call her other than the white girl.
Amy said, “Seriously, momma. Do you know what’s happening? Where everyone went?”
Calliope shook her head. “My family’s gone, my friend is dead, and you’re the first person I’ve met tonight who isn’t insane. Where are you coming from?”
“Santa Fe. I’m a student at the art institute. I mean, I was. Now I’m a survivor on Lost, waiting for the polar bears. I’m just glad you’re not a zombie.”
“What happened up in Santa Fe? Same as here?”
“Same, yeah. Disaster scene from a zombie apocalypse. Except instead of zombies, it’s just no one. Kind of freakier this way. It’s a ghost town, only we’re the ghosts …”
“What were you doing when it happened? That light? Could you see it in Santa Fe?”
Amy shook her head.
Calliope shifted her weight from one sore foot to the other. “You didn’t see what happened at all? I slammed my car into the bridge, blacked out, and woke to this wasteland.”
“You think it was the government? A conspiracy, like the FEMA concentration camps?”
Calliope had heard this conspiracy theory before—that FEMA had built internment camps like those used for Japanese American citizens during the Second World War, which they would again use for citizens after a natural or self-made catastrophe, when they’d gained Constitutional control toward a new world order. Each time her students had written about this conspiracy or asked her opinion, Calliope had said it felt like a misuse of history, from which we could glean real truths and predictions. Misguided as the 2003 then 2012 Mayan calendar end-of-the-world forecasts. The massacres of the ancient peoples had occurred earlier than that.
She told Amy as much.
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t see how they could disappear entire cities that quickly. I mean, without a ray gun or something.” Amy laughed ironically, then said, “Hey, you think it was nuclear?”
Calliope had thought about it. Andres had once told her about a patient he’d picked up in his ambulance outside of Albuquerque. An older woman had called emergency services because her sixty-eight-year-old husband was behaving bizarrely—he hadn’t returned from his walk along the bosque so she went looking for him. She found him near a dry arroyo, writhing on the sandy ground. He was nearly mad from pain and kept screaming, The witches are burning me, the witches are burning me—make them stop! When Andres got him to the hospital, believing he would be a psychiatric patient, the nurses had found red burn marks all over his body. Andres had felt such guilt for missing them. The burns matched those of radiation. Toxic waste. In the land.
She decided against telling Amy this. She didn’t want to speculate about end-of-the-world theories. She wanted evidence. She wanted truth.
Besides, if it had been nuclear, that meant her family was …
“No. You and I wouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that too.”
Calliope sighed heavily and leaned against the broken fender.
Amy said, “You really smashed that thing. You get hurt?”
“Not much,” Calliope answered, wondering why she wasn’t more hurt from her crash on the bridge. “So, what’s your story? What were you doing before … whatever happened?”
Amy’s cheeks and neck blotched a deeper shade of rose. “I was indisposed.”
“Meaning?”
Amy shuffled, stuck her hands in her back pockets. “I was, um, giving a private dance to this older guy. A client of mine.”
Calliope blurted out before she could censor herself, “You’re a prostitute?”
Amy rolled her eyes, sighed loudly. “No, an exotic dancer. There’s a big difference.”
Calliope’s face heated with embarrassment. “I’m not judging. I have a friend who put herself through school dancing.” This girl reminded her of one of her undergrad anthro students, and for a moment she wanted to believe they were discussing an assignment and not the end of the world.
“A lot of dancers go to college. It’s no big deal.” She pulled a cigarette from her bra, a lighter from her back pocket, lit, and took a deep drag. Calliope didn’t mean to cough. Amy turned her face away to exhale. “Sorry, you’re preggo. Should I put this out?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
Amy nodded, took another drag. “So I was at this guy’s place, near campus, and everything was normal. I finished and was in his bathroom changing into my street clothes so I could walk back to the dorms, when there was this, I don’t know, earthquake, I guess. I came out to see what was going on, but he’d left. I figured he was trying to stiff me ’cause he hadn’t paid me yet. That wasn’t like him, though. I’ve danced for him a few times, no problems. But you never know people for real, so I was pissed and tried calling my friend to come get me. I was too mad to walk. But my phone was dead. I tried using his landline, but that was dead too. No dial signal or anyth
ing. Outside the apartment building, it was like this.” She nodded toward the chaos surrounding them, the accidents and grayness and ash. Calliope recalled what Eunjoo had described, her parents fighting, then an earthquake and they were gone.
“And the dorms?”
“Only one other person. Some girl screaming her head off, screaming bloody murder. I kept telling her to shut the hell up, but she wouldn’t. Like she was catatonic, only screaming.”
Calliope’s chest hurt. “Wasn’t there anyone else coherent like you and me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t stick around to check. I grabbed my roommate’s keys and took off with her scooter. It took me all night to get this far, fucking thing won’t go faster than forty and keeps stalling out. Now it’s outta gas too, but I’m not going back to a gas station alone, no fucking way.”
“What happened at the gas station?”
“The pumps didn’t work. And then some lunatic tried to grab me, so I took off.”
Calliope shuddered involuntarily. A lunatic? Why were they abandoned to a world of the mentally unstable? She cleared her throat, tried focusing on the solvable issue at hand. “The pumps didn’t work?”
“Nope. Fucking everything’s a wreck.”
“Where I just came from, the Westside, my neighborhood burned to a crisp.”
“Jesus,” Amy muttered sadly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry.” She nodded beyond Calliope, toward the side of the car where Eunjoo was standing, so quietly Calliope hadn’t even realized she’d gotten out of her booster seat. “Just you two get out? You and your daughter?”
Trinity Sight Page 4