“That’s because I am.”
“You like grapes?”
VIII.
Her name was Irene, “This job was all I had,” she told me as we had a meal of grapes together. “I loved my job, I loved the people I worked with. They’re all gone now, I don’t know if they’re dead or what. I was afraid you would kill one of them, or all of us, two years ago.”
“There were no bullets in the gun,” I told her.
“If you’d had bullets, would you have shot anyone?”
“All I wanted, needed, was some money.”
“Funny thing is,” she said, “I understand that. I would’ve done the same if I had no job.”
IX.
The fallout was beginning, giant white pieces of debris, and a smell that’s hard to describe.
“Nuclear winter will be here soon,” I said.
“I must ask a favor of you,” she said, “and a gentlemen would never say no.”
“Anything.”
There was a handgun in the desk she’d sat under. It had belonged to the bank guard.
“Do you know how to use this thing?”
I nodded.
X.
“It was nice meeting you,” Irene said, and gave me a quick kiss.
“Do you have a boyfriend, a husband?” I asked.
“No.”
“If things had been different.…”
“Maybe,” she said, looking out the window. The debris was getting thicker. “Get on with it, please.”
I pointed the gun at her head.
XI.
I did as I promised, gave her that favor. The plan was that I would kill myself after and our bodies would lie next to each other, maybe hand in hand.
I couldn’t do it.
I tried.
I put the gun to my temple.
I couldn’t do it.
Let the radiation do it.
XII.
I drove fast, getting ahead of the fallout. I had three grapes left on a stem. I would save them for the last moment. I would at least have something delicious in my mouth when the time came.
—March, 2011
Los Angeles
TROUT FISHING ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF OBLIVION
I.
I spend most of the time trout fishing at Old Duncan’s Lake because there is nothing else to do here. There might not be any people, but there are plenty of trout. I am wondering if the trout will over-populate and starve. Maybe that’s why they bite so easily when I take the rowboat out to the center of the lake. I know I will eventually get sick of frying up trout for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I woke up one day—there is no morning noon or night—and I was alone. There wasn’t a single person in town. Town is Mount Henderson, even though there is no mountain named Henderson anywhere near.
My parents were not in the house; both their cars were in the driveway and this was not like them. I called for them. I looked for them at several neighbors’ homes and the neighbors were gone. There were no kids playing in the streets; their bikes, Frisbees, and toys lay scattered on driveways and lawns.
I was planning on leaving when I graduated high school in May, I would get up and go and never look back—New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, anywhere but here. I wouldn’t tell my parents or buddies anything, not until I made something of myself; I would return home a success and people would say, “That Tommy Temple, he sure fooled us, we all thought he was a Big Nobody, and now look at him.”
Now look at me: in an empty town where there is nothing but a dull gray void of sky.
I adjusted well and quickly to all this; the biggest blow was when I went to my girlfriend’s home. Dee. Her folks were not there and she was not there, of course. I had to check. I took this opportunity to go upstairs to her bedroom and explore a world I had never been: Dee’s private things. I looked in her closet, at the dresses and skirts and jeans; I looked at her collection of three-dozen shoes; I looked in her dresser drawer and pulled out a variety of bras and panties, smelling them. They smelled like her. I was surprised she had a black thong panty tucked away deep under her regular, typical underwear. When and for whom was she waiting to wear this? We had never gone all the way, and I was planning on breaking up with her one month before I headed off, so not to break her heart too much; Dee was a tall, pretty blonde, but she was not in my future, no matter what plans of marriage our parents had for us. I found her diary and read through it; mundane stuff like “went to the movies with Sammy” and “talked to Beth about Billy.”
Then I came to this:
“I will break up with Sammy after graduation and before I go to Stanford. I have not told him I was accepted. It’s for the best. There is no future with Sammy. He will stay here in Mt. Henderson and work at a garage or construction and never amount to anything.”
That was the blow, but it was also a relief—and I would have had the last hurrah because I had intended to dump her first.
II.
I did the expected thing: I helped myself to food and property; I entered into homes and took what I wanted: jewelry, guitars, clothes, and money. I smashed windows into stores and raided cash registers. In three days I amassed $40,000 in Federal Reserve notes and I felt rich…but, of course, where would I spend it? What use of it was to me?
I slept in different homes, different beds every “night,” or when I was tired and needed sleep. I slept in the beds of friends and enemies, of that hot Ms. Allison who taught Senior English and all the guys wanted to date, of the coach and his young wife, of the mayor of Mt. Henderson. I went though their things, their folders, and their photos, and learned all their secrets, sweet and nasty.
After a while that became boring so I went fishing.
I love trout fishing.
At least the trout remained; sometimes I talked to them after I caught them, my own voice now a stranger.
III.
Boy Scout training on how to build a fire came in handy; there was no other way to cook the trout or any other food I found in the stores. The meat lockers contained rotting beef and chicken, so that was no good. All the milk was sour. I started to really crave a steak, eggs, a tall glass of milk, all the things I took for granted when life was normal. I yearned so much for the return of that life that I couldn’t believe I had planned on leaving it. It is only when something is taken away from you that you begin to appreciate how valuable it is to your existence.
I missed my family: my mother and father and aunts and uncles and cousins. I especially missed my grandfather, as I had missed him since I was ten and he died.
IV.
Grandpa taught me how to fish for trout at Old Duncan’s Lake like he did with my father; Grandpa’s father had also taught him; it was a tradition among the men in our family; and of the women, the women would fry up the trout for a family dinner. My mother didn’t seem particularly keen on cooking trout, but she would do it when my grandpa and I, from age seven to ten, would bring trout home. I was proud of my catches and my mother did not want to take that feeling away from me, despite her own impulses toward fishing and game hunting: she felt such activities were not necessary in this age when one could easily go to the store and buy food.
My father only went with us twice, as I recall; he had outgrown fishing and was too busy with the hardware store he owned and ran in town; he expected that I would one day take over the family business, something I did not intend to do—at fifteen, I had vowed to never wind up trapped in Mount Henderson, and now here I was: with nowhere else to go; Mt. Henderson was my universe.
V.
There was no way out, there was nothing beyond the gray walls and skies. Oh, I tried. I went to the end of the roads leaving the town; I went into the deepest parts of the woods and the county lines of Mt. Henderson; I met a wall of gray fog that, when I entered it, would take me straight back to my house. Of course I wondered how this was possible, and I continued to walk into the gray fog and I continued to wind up at my house, always the same place: my bed
room. I eventually accepted it; accepted that Mount Henderson was my personal lonely hell—and that’s what I started to believe: I had died and gone south, paying for my sin of hubris, my desire to leave my family and life and seek fame and adventure elsewhere.
VI.
One time I jumped out of the row-boat and into the lake; I had the notion there was an exit point at the bottom of Old Duncan’s, but all I found was water teeming with trout of every possible size.
VII.
Things changed at my father’s hardware store. I went there feeling nostalgic. I had worked there for three summer vacations, learning the trade and hating it; now I was wishing for it back, to see my father leering over paperwork, keeping an eye on employees; I wished for the stockroom, the register, the customers. Especially the women customers; hardware stores get few of those, but every now and then a woman from town, some pretty, married or single, would come in; some college age and my age—as a healthy teen lad, my eye was always on the lookout for all kinds of women.
And it was a woman I found in the store.
It could have been two days or two years or two hundred years I had been alone in Mount Henderson, I had no idea, and I had resolved that I would never see another human being again: yet there was one in my father’s store, in the hammer and nails aisle. She was around five-foot-five with very long light brown hair, hair so long it went to her ankles; the longest hair I had ever seen on a girl—and girl she was, not yet a grown woman, a girl my age or younger, sixteen at least, small round face with big blue eyes and crooked teeth. She was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.
She ran.
I went after her.
“Hey!” I said, my voice a curious creature, not having heard it in quite a while.
She ran out of the store and I chased her.
“Hey, come back here!”
I was not going to let her go. She was fast but that long hair held her back the way a cape would on a super hero. I caught her, wrapped my arms around her; she tried hitting me, she kicked me and I lost my balance and we both tumbled to the ground. I was on top of her and she knew she was defeated.
“Please,” she said, “don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, breathing. “Don’t fight me, I promise, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Then let go of me.”
I released her from my grip, expected her to jump up and take off again. No, she lay there on the ground and stared at me.
I sat up. “See?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“Was going to ask you the same.”
“How did you get here?”
“I thought maybe you would have the answer to that,” I said.
VIII.
Her name was Elaine. She was sixteen, as I figured, and she knew as much as I did: one day she woke up and she was in Mount Henderson and alone. Like me, she went to the two grocery stores for food. Why had we not crossed paths until now? She kept to herself at her grandmother’s house; she needed to fix something, needed a hammer and nails, and went to the hardware store.…
“I wish I knew you were here,” I said.
“Ditto,” she said.
“Do you think there are others?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we should go house to house and look.”
“They may not be friendly,” she said. “They might be scared, they might have guns.”
“They might have answers,” I said.
“Is it so bad, just the two of us?”
IX.
I wondered why I didn’t know her; I knew almost all the teen girls in town: we had only one high school. Elaine told me she and he mother had left Mount Henderson to live in Charleston, South Carolina when she was thirteen, to live with her new stepfather. “That didn’t work out between them,” she said, “so Mom and I came back here just a week ago—or a week before everyone vanished. I was about to register for the last semester,” she went on, “even though I didn’t want to. No one would have remembered me. You don’t remember me, do you?”
“We met before?”
“Middle school, silly, and sixth grade,” she said.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“I remember you, Tommy.”
“I’m sorry.…”
“I looked different, I was younger and geeky, and my hair was really short. My grandmother always cut my hair short. She said long hair only got the women in our family in trouble.”
“Oh yes, I remember you now.”
She smiled, showing her white but crooked teeth. “No, you don’t. You’re just saying that.”
“I don’t mean to lie.”
“Well, it’s okay,” she said.
X.
We spent a lot of time together. We were the only two people in the universe, so what else would we do? We stayed in the same houses but did not sleep in the same beds. One night she joined me and asked if this was okay. I said of course. “I don’t feel like sleeping alone right now,” she told me; I could tell in her voice that she was disturbed by something. I wasn’t sure what to do; while I had had plenty of experience with sexual intimacy with girls, I had never actually spent a whole night with one; I wasn’t sure what was appropriate in these moments. I put my arm around her and she reacted well, she moved toward me, we spooned as they call it. Her body was soft and warm. Her long hair was pulled into a massive pony tail; it was thick and amazing, like it was an entity all of its own. The tail found its ways around my torso, hugging me; the sensation was like the feathered wing of a bird protecting a hatchling. It was the best six hours of straight sleep I’d had since this all began and seemed to be the same for Elaine.
XI.
But something was still bothering her. When we had dinner later the next “day,” a dinner of canned spaghetti I cooked up after making a campfire, and we ate outdoors like we were camping in the wilderness, she spoke up. “Do you miss her?” she asked.
“Who, my mom?” I said. “Yes, I miss her a lot.”
“No, Dee.”
I had not mentioned Dee. “You know about her?”
“The second day we came back, I saw you in town with her. I remember Dee going back to fourth grade. She always got the attention of boys.”
“Yeah, she has—had a gift for that.”
“She got your attention.”
“She did,” I admitted.
“You were steady for almost a year.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I asked around. People said you two were an ‘item.’ Talks of marriage.”
“I never talked about marriage.” I told Elaine about my plans to break up with Dee and leave Mount Henderson; and how I read in Dee’s diary that she also wanted to break things up with me.
Elaine seemed pleased with that information. “So it was mutual, no one gets hurt.”
“Yeah.”
“Not like my mom and stepdad. He found another woman and just said, ‘I want a divorce,’ not even thinking about how much that would hurt her…and hurt me. Are all men like that?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Were you hurt? Was he like a real father?”
“My mom was hurt the most; she thought they would live happy until old age. Me…yeah…I wished he was a better father, like a real father, but it wasn’t in his makeup.”
“I guess some things never work out the way you hope,” I said.
She asked again, “Do you miss Dee?”
“I miss the way everything was, this simple, small town life.”
“But you wanted to leave.”
“I thought there was a better world out there.”
“Beyond the gray,” she said. “Now there is no world out there anymore. All gone.”
“We don’t know that for sure, right? Millions, billions of people.”
“All gone. I feel it.”
“So there is just us, here,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.
”
“Nothing ever really makes sense,” she said.
We discussed the possibilities of what may have happened: from this was hell to aliens did it, we were in some kind of zoo and being observed; to it may have happened to towns all over the world, and for whatever reason, maybe DNA, only a handful of people were not affected; to an extended dream, mine of hers.
“Or we’re both dreaming,” she said, “sharing it.”
She joined me in bed again and I held her close and her long wrap wrapped around my shoulders, moving on its own. She ground her rear, tenderly, into my crotch. I wondered if she knew about sex, if she was a virgin; I had not felt a reason to ask. I did not respond to her movement; sex with her was not on my mind, which was unusual, I was like any other seventeen-year-old who was often preoccupied with sex. There was nothing wrong with Elaine that would make me not feel an attraction toward here; she was no Dee, she was petite and had crooked teeth, and had I met her at a beer party I would not turn away an opportunity to go down in the basement or park the car for a quick moment of satisfaction.
I just wasn’t feeling it, and I knew she was expecting me to make a move. I wasn’t feeling a need for anything beyond the cuddling.
“Maybe,” she whispered, “we are in a virtual reality game.”
XII.
We went fishing. She was quiet. She sat in the boat staring at me.
“You should cast your line,” I said.
She held only the fishing pole and said nothing.
I was feeling uncomfortable. “What’s wrong, Elaine?” I asked.
“This,” she said.
“What?”
“This whole situation, here with you. It isn’t going the way I had hoped. You don’t love me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, but I did know.
She said, “You didn’t make love to me last night. I was ready and willing and you do nothing. Am I ugly to you?”
“Look, Elaine,” I started.
“This isn’t working,” she said, “because you still love Dee. Don’t lie. It’s the only explanation. You’d rather have her here with you than me.”
The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions Page 14