Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  “I have no reason to hurry,” Marisol said. “I can spend a decade coming up with the perfect wishes. I have tons of frozen dinners.”

  At last, she took pity on Richard and found a stash of PBS American Playhouse episodes on the media server, plus other random theater stuff. Richard really liked Caryl Churchill, but didn’t care for Alan Ayckbourn. He hated Wendy Wasserstein. Eventually, she put him back in his bottle again.

  Marisol started writing down possible draft wishes in one of the three blank journals that she’d found in a drawer. (Burton had probably expected to record his thoughts, if any, for posterity.) And then she started writing a brand-new play, instead. The first time she’d even tried, in a few years.

  Her play was about a man—her protagonists were always men—who moves to the big city to become a librarian, and winds up working for a strange old lady, tending her collection of dried-out leaves from every kind of tree in the world. Pedro is so shy, he can’t even speak to more than two people, but so beautiful that everybody wants him to be a fashion model. He pays an optometrist to put drops in his eyes, so he won’t see the people photographing and lighting him when he models. She had no clue how this play was going to end, but she felt a responsibility to finish it. That’s what Mrs. Garrett would expect.

  She was still stung by the idea that her prize-winning play was dumb, or worse yet, kind of misogynistic. She wished she had an actual copy of that play, so she could show it to Richard and he would realize her true genius. But she didn’t wish that out loud, of course. And maybe this was the kick in the ass she needed to write a better play. A play that made sense of some of this mess.

  “I’ve figured it out,” she told Richard the next time she opened his bottle. “I’ve figured out what happened those other times. Someone finds your bottle after the apocalypse, and they get three wishes. So the first wish is to bring the world back and reverse the destruction. The second wish is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But then they still have one wish left. And that’s the one where they do something stupid and selfish, like wishing for irresistible sex appeal.”

  “Or perfect hair,” said Richard Wolf, doing his patented eye-roll and air-swat.

  “Or unlimited wealth. Or fame.”

  “Or everlasting youth and beauty. Or the perfect lasagna recipe.”

  “They probably figured they deserved it,” Marisol stared at the pages of scribbles in her hands. One set of diagrams mapping out her new, as-yet-unnamed play. A second set of diagrams trying to plan out the wish-making process, act by act. Her own scent clung to every surface in the panic room, the recirculated and purified air smelled like the inside of her own mouth. “I mean, they saved the world, right? So they’ve earned fame or sex or parties. Except I bet that’s where it all goes wrong.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” said Wolf, arms folded and head tilted to one side, like he was physically restraining himself from expressing an opinion.

  Marisol threw out almost every part of her new play, except the part about her main character needing to be temporarily vision-impaired so he can model. That part seemed to speak to her, once she cleared away the clutter about the old woman and the leaves and stuff. Pedro stands, nearly nude, in a room full of people doing makeup and lighting and photography and catering and they’re all blurs to him. And he falls in love with one woman, but he only knows her voice, not her face. And he’s afraid to ruin it by learning her name, or seeing what she looks like.

  By now, Marisol had confused the two processes in her mind. She kept thinking she would know what to wish for, as soon as she finished writing her play. She labored over the first scene for a week before she had the nerve to show it to Richard, and he kept narrowing his eyes and breathing loudly through his nose as he read it. But then he said it was actually a promising start, actually not terrible at all.

  The mystery woman phones Pedro up, and he recognizes her voice instantly. So now he has her phone number, and he agonizes about calling her. What’s he afraid of, anyway? He decides his biggest fear is that he’ll go out on a date with the woman, and people will stare at the two of them. If the woman is as beautiful as Pedro, they’ll stare because it’s two beautiful people together. If she’s plain looking, they’ll stare because they’ll wonder what he sees in her. When Pedro eats out alone, he has a way of shrinking in on himself, so nobody notices him. But he can’t do that on a date.

  At last, Pedro calls her and they talk for hours. On stage, she is partially hidden from the audience, so they, too, can’t see what the woman looks like.

  “It’s a theme in your work, hmmm?” Richard Wolf sniffed. “The hidden person, the flirting through a veil. The self-loathing narcissistic love affair.”

  “I guess so,” Marisol said. “I’m interested in people who are seen, and people who see, and the female gaze, and whatever.”

  She finished the play, and then it occurred to her that if she made a wish that none of this stuff had happened, her new play could be un-written as a result. When the time came to make her wishes, she rolled up the notebook and tucked it into her waistband of her sweatpants, hoping against hope that anything on her immediate person would be preserved when the world was rewritten.

  In the end Pedro agrees to meet the woman, Susanna, for a drink. But he gets some of the eye-dilating drops from his optometrist friend. He can’t decide whether to put the drops in his eyes before the date—he’s in the men’s room at the bar where they’re meeting, with the bottle in his hand, dithering—and then someone disturbs him and he accidentally drops the bottle in the toilet. And Susanna turns out to be pretty, not like a model but more distinctive. She has a memorable face, full of life. She laughs a lot, Pedro stops feeling shy around her. And Pedro discovers that if he looks into Susanna’s eyes when he’s doing his semi-nude modeling, he no longer needs the eye drops to shut out the rest of the world.

  “It’s a corny ending,” Marisol admitted. “But I like it.”

  Richard Wolf shrugged. “Anything is better than unearned ambivalence.” Marisol decided that was a good review, coming from him.

  Here’s what Marisol wished:

  1) I wish this apocalypse and all previous apocalypses had never happened, and that all previous wishes relating to the apocalypse had never been wished.

  2) I wish that there was a slight alteration in the laws of probability as relating to apocalyptic scenarios, so that if, for example, an event threatening the survival of the human race has a ten percent chance of happening, that ten percent chance just never comes up, and yet this does not change anything else in the material world.

  3) I wish that I, and my designated heirs, will keep possession of this bottle, and will receive ample warning before any apocalyptic scenario comes up, so that we will have a chance to make the final wish.

  She had all three wishes written neatly on a sheet of paper torn out of the notebook, and Richard Wolf scrutinized it a couple times, scratching his ear. “That’s it?” he said at last. “You do realize that I can make anything real. Right? You could create a world of giant snails and tiny people. You could make The Facts of Life the most popular TV show in the world for the next thousand years—which would, incidentally, ensure the survival of the human race, since there would have to be somebody to keep watching The Facts of Life. You could do anything.”

  Marisol shook her head. “The only way to make sure we don’t end up back here again is to keep it simple.” And then, before she lost her nerve, she picked up the sheet of paper where she’d written down her three wishes, and she read them aloud.

  Everything went cheaply glittery around Marisol, and the panic room reshaped into The Infinite Ristretto, a trendy café that just happened to be roughly the same size and shape as the panic room. The blue-leather walls turned to brown brick, with brass fixtures and posters for the legendary all-nude productions of Mamet’s Oleanna and Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother.

  All around Marisol, friends whose names she’d forgotten w
ere hunched over their laptops, publicly toiling over their confrontational one-woman shows and chamber pieces. Her best friend Julia was in the middle of yelling at her, freckles almost washed out by her reddening face.

  “Fuck doctors,” Julia was shouting, loud enough to disrupt the whole room.

  “Theater is a direct intervention. It’s like a cultural ambulance. Actors are like paramedics. Playwrights are surgeons, man.”

  Marisol was still wearing Burton’s stained business shirt and sweatpants, but somehow she’d gotten a pair of flip-flops. The green bottle sat on the rickety white table nearby. Queen was playing on the stereo, and the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.

  Julia’s harangue choked off in the middle, because Marisol was giving her the biggest stage hug in the universe, crying into Julia’s green-streaked hair and thanking all her stars that they were here together. By now, everyone was staring at them, but Marisol didn’t care. Something fluttery and heavy fell out of the waistband of her sweatpants. A notebook.

  “I have something amazing to tell you, Jools,” Marisol breathed in Julia’s ear. She wanted to ask if Obama was still president and the Cold War was still over and stuff, but she would find out soon enough and this was more important. “Jools, I wrote a new play. It’s all done. And it’s going to change everything.” Hyperbole was how Marisol and Julia and all their friends communicated. “Do you want to read it?”

  “Are you seriously high?” Julia pulled away, then saw the notebook on the floor between their feet. Curiosity took over, and she picked it up and started to read.

  Marisol borrowed five bucks and got herself a pour-over while Julia sat, knees in her face, reading the play. Every few minutes, Julia glanced up and said, “Well, okay,” in a grudging tone, as if Marisol might not be past saving after all.

  Ramsey Campbell

  AS Val plants two mugs of coffee on the breakfast table she says “We haven’t any children, have we, Phil?”

  “I don’t believe so, Val. I expect they’d have been in touch by now.”

  “They’d have remembered us, Phil, you mean.”

  “You’d hope so, Val.”

  “I’m keeping all my hopes for us today, Phil.” Her forehead grows ridged in a bid to clench on her thoughts. “But we’re married,” she says, “aren’t we?”

  This throws him so much that he neglects to use her name. “Remind me.”

  “That’s what this meant.” She points to a ring on her left hand. “Don’t you remember putting it on?”

  He strains his mind until it feels close to blotting out the moment. “I wish I could.”

  “I can remember for us.” Her brows relax, letting her eyes widen while her small neat face regains some peace. “We had to register the marriage.”

  “In a—” An effort that feels like scraping the inside of his head lets him say “In a registry office.”

  “A room full of chairs and people on them.”

  “Didn’t they join us afterwards for drinks?”

  “I’m sure they did,” Val says and clasps his free hand while he swallows a fierce jolt of coffee. “See, it’s coming back.”

  He hasn’t remembered the wedding. He simply guessed that was how such occasions worked, though isn’t that a memory too? When he tries to trace it back to their experience it leads him into empty darkness. “Do you remember any names?” he risks asking.

  “Only ours. We’ll remember them together,” she says, squeezing his hand to confirm her determination. “Shall we put it on the app before we have breakfast to make sure we don’t forget?”

  “We said last night we wouldn’t eat much. You remember what today is.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Philip.”

  The name she uses makes her resentment plain as she brings up the ReMind app on her phone. “Good morning, Valerie Elizabeth Devine,” it says with relentless cheerfulness. “What do you have for me today?”

  “I’ve remembered I’m married to Philip Anthony Devine. I knew we were together, but now I know we’re wed.”

  When she ends the recording the face that lent the app its voice appears—the head of Guv’s round chubby face flanked by a pair of fists with their thumbs stuck up. “Thank you for adding to our memory store,” it says. “Together we’ll put it all together.”

  It’s a new slogan. When did he stop saying “Thank you for your thoughtfulness” and “Every day you’re more yourself”? A few seconds later Phil’s phone starts to buzz and crawl about the table like a rudimentary toy while the ReMind icon, a tiny brain lanced by a zigzag of lightning, develops a pulse. The sight prompts Phil to remark “Shelley.”

  “He wrote, didn’t he? Don’t tell me, wait a minute, he wrote verse.”

  “Poems. Poetry.” Producing the words feels like regaining more language. “But he wrote a book about a brain as well,” Phil says. “They send it up a tower to catch the lightning and bring it back to life.”

  “I think I remember something like that.”

  He shouldn’t have given her more to attempt to recall, today of all days. “I’ll keep it in my mind for you,” he says and pokes the ReMind icon.

  “Philip Anthony Devine, can you confirm you are married to Valerie Elizabeth Devine?”

  Mustn’t it be on record somewhere? Has nobody recaptured enough competence to check? That isn’t the point of the question, which wants him to add recollections to the online mind everyone’s supposed to share and perhaps unlock someone else’s memory, but Phil can only say “Happy to confirm.”

  The site rewards him with the fisty face and all its words while Val consults the Rational Rationing app. “We haven’t had this week’s yet,” she reminds Phil. “Maybe we’ll be able to drive to the shops later.”

  Maybe sums up too much of their lives just now. As Phil saws through the thin remnant of a loaf for toast he sees Val trying to hide her concern. He knows what he’s about, he isn’t going to forget halfway through, and only her scrutiny makes the serrated blade splinter the tip of his thumbnail. He withholds a wince, but once he has dropped the slices into the toaster he sucks his thumb, a surreptitious gesture that feels like reverting to infancy. He gives Val the crust from the loaf, and she insists on cutting it in half to share. When did she first do that? A room you could have lost half a dozen of their kitchen in, tables draped with white cloths that almost touched the floor, chandeliers dangling elongated drops of frozen light—but he can’t see how young Val was, he can’t even make out her face, and the memory fades into the dark.

  Breakfast doesn’t take long, and they stow the used items in the washer, leaving it dormant in case the power fails while they’re out of the house. They can’t turn the alarm on either. They’ve forgotten the code, and if they ever wrote it down they have no idea where it is. At least the metal limpet on the outside wall may warn off looters, though the village has yet to attract them. The Devines step out beneath a grey April sky as blank as a scrubbed mind, and Val says “Good luck to us.”

  Their cars are parked on the concrete that has erased the front garden. Both roofs bear a sign proclaiming VAL AND PHIL’S VP TUITION – COME TO PASS! “That’s us,” Val declares and barely hesitates at the gate. “Left,” she says. “Left to the village hall.”

  “Left like your hand with the ring.”

  “Yours too, look. If we’d realised, we wouldn’t have had to spend all that time thinking up ways to remember.”

  “Whatever keeps our minds alive must be good for us, don’t you think?”

  “I’d rather we used them to find ourselves and each other. What did remembering our wedding feel like?”

  The reminder enlivens Phil. Even the sky and the street lined with immobilised vehicles, all labelled STOPPED BY GUV, seem to brighten. “Like getting married again.”

  “I thought that too. Didn’t people do it sometimes?”

  “Careful what you think up,” a voice says, though not Phil’s. “Remember what Guv told us. Beware of false memo
ries, Valerie Elizabeth Devine. We mustn’t undermine anybody’s progress.”

  Eric Craxton has poked his head above the hedge of his terraced cottage opposite. His garden looks like a determined bid to win a competition, and Phil hopes he’ll continue tending it, but Craxton tramps across the road. His drooping jowly face has reddened with the effort or with dedication to his mission. “I didn’t hear you use each other’s names,” he complains. “Watch out nobody reports you to Guv.”

  “Is that necessary, Eric?” The man’s heavy stare requires Phil to add “Craxton.”

  “Names are, Philip Anthony Devine. If you’d used yours you might have noticed you were married.”

  “We knew we had the same one,” Val protests. “I could have taken Phil’s without a wedding. I’m sure people did.”

  “Guessing’s not remembering. You know we’ve been warned not to speculate.” Craxton moves aside, but not far. “Well, I shouldn’t keep you,” he says. “You’re on your way for testing, are you not? Quite a few of us are hoping you’ll be assets to the village.”

  “I believe we were,” Val retorts. “Not just to the village either.”

  “Then perhaps you should devote yourselves to restoring that.”

  Val doesn’t bother waiting for him not to hear her say “We’re devoted to each other.”

  The hall is on the far side of the village. As the Devines hurry past the produce shops, several of which look erased by shutters, a delivery truck the length of half a dozen cottages pulls away from the supermarket that has summarised its neighbours. Its towering slogan says EVEN MORE HELP FROM YOUR FRIEND GUV. A laugh that sounds like a search for a reason for mirth makes Phil look back. A stumpy close-cropped grey-haired woman is gripping her extensive hips while she glares at the slogan. He’s met her before, and he has to know her name. “Mrs Lomax,” he succeeds in retrieving, and then the rest. “Rita. Mrs Rita Lomax.”

  “Leave out that nonsense.” Her glare intensifies as if it’s finding room for him. “One more way they’re trying to reduce us all to children,” she says, apparently about the slogan on the truck. “No friend does that to anyone.”