by Liz Harmer
Now Gus jangled next to her as they walked. On a heart-shaped glint of metal his former address and phone number were engraved, but no name. His meaty breath, the soft sounds of his paws on the sidewalk, the damp coarse heat of his body—all this provided comfort. She’d always wanted a mutt like this, loyal and smart, and this too felt vaguely familiar, as if from a dream or a movie she couldn’t recall.
For months she’d had to remind herself that no one was watching her from the windows or the streets or the CCTV cameras (which, though powered down, still seemed pointed and vigilant), or from the PINA satellite camera system, the PINA maps, or any of the PINA projects that many had suspected were surveilling more than was precisely legal. Despite the cold and telling feeling on the back of her neck, the certainty that she was being watched, she’d told herself over and over that her paranoia was mere residue—left over from a habit, like the fresh coffee smell she was convinced, every morning, she could catch whiffs of.
Looking at the billboard now, she wanted to feel what she had that afternoon when she’d first seen it. But the sensation had faded. Her first foolish instinct—that it was Jason come back for her—was as improbable as the idea that any of those stars above were the UFOs he’d once believed in. And now she longed to be the person she’d been then, ten years ago—twenty-four, twenty-five years of age—on her back in the grass, wanting to believe in anything. She wanted that Jason back, shouting, pointing, wild: “There! Don’t you see it? Don’t tell me you don’t see it!”
The day when the door to the store no longer signalled its opening with the chiming heave-ho, it had seemed an unbearable loss. But all was loss, so she locked her door behind her, and she and Gus went upstairs to bed.
* * *
—
Sometime later, Marie woke up in total darkness. Gus’s eyes, regarding her from the end of the bed, were glints of reflected moonlight. Faint lines and pricks of light also dazzled on the glass frames of her art prints, and on her watch’s face, which she slanted toward the open window. Ten past three. Without the light of passing cars or street lamps, without neon signs and twenty-four-hour Laundromats, the intensity of the darkness was unwavering, as though this were a still point around which everything else turned. And nothing was so unchanging as the middle of the night.
Something had woken her. She quieted herself, held her hand out to Gus, and they stared at the window, listening. Had it been a bang or a shout? The darkness seemed to smother sound. She heard a distant clattering, that was all, the raccoons in the midst of their ongoing and unending mission to scavenge.
Gus jumped off the bed to the floor and stiffened his body so that it seemed to point.
“You heard something?”
His body remained rigid, trained on an invisible target. She climbed down beside him, peeping out the bottom of the window. The only other sound was a kind of scuffing. Footsteps? It might have been litter pulled down the street in the wind.
She reached her hand back for her binoculars beside the pillow and stared through them out the window. It was useless. There were only shadows and deeper shadows, the few reflections of light too small and faded to make a form. She willed the clouds to open.
There it was again, outside in the street. Scuff, scuff, scuff.
She stood as slowly as she could and, unclipping Gus’s collar, led them both through the kitchen to the back door, thinking to go down to the store, where she might see better from the wider windows. She got as far as the door. Stood with her hand on the knob and then slid the chain lock closed and double-checked the deadbolt.
People had managed to survive before central heating, before central air, before cars. This was how the argument went in their group. There was a certain courage and creativity in facing the lonesome largeness of the world. But at this moment she deeply regretted the lack of a phone. With a phone she might have called a police force; a phone would have meant there still was a police force and that she wouldn’t need to be so brave, need to have the gun. With a phone, she might have called Rosa to bring everyone and come get her.
Why? Rosa would have said.
I’m scared, Marie would have pleaded.
She went back to the bedroom with the heavy gun held in one shaking hand. She comforted herself with the sharp metal shucking sound as she pulled on the top to reassure herself that a gold bullet lay inside. She sat up on the bed with her head resting on her knees, while Gus sniffed out some small moving thing she couldn’t see. There were no lights to send away the vermin.
Why did she think she had to do everything herself? Another question from her ruined marriage. Why couldn’t she let him? She’d given him everything after the divorce, forced boxes of books and CDs and all the cassettes into his arms. Later he brought things back to her, hidden in the pockets of his pants, carried in one grocery bag at a time. The only piece from that old Sears registry that remained with her was the workbench, upon which sat her long-unused paints and brushes.
Hysterics were pointless, she reprimanded herself, and she needed to think. Whoever was out there with cans of spray paint was potentially menacing. Like a big clown smile or a snake, the red S could as easily be horrific as friendly. Whoever was out there might be the same person who had scuffed his feet, who would again scuff his feet.
They had been living in a dream world, a bullshit utopia. All utopias were bullshit. They had believed they were the only ones, as though this city were the centre of the universe and these forty-odd its most special denizens. They thought something had selected them—if not a deity (they’d never agree to one), then an evolutionary force, some teleology. They, with their haplessness and innocence, with their decency to each other, would rebuild this world.
But a few months ago someone had raised the question of the psychiatric hospital, where inmates must now be unmedicated or overmedicated and no longer restrained by gates or surveillance.
“And what about the prison?” Donnie had said.
“We have to look behind every door,” Marie said.
“All the doors were automatic,” Mo said. “All the locks were unlocked when the system went down.”
“That seems unlikely,” Marie said. How could everything be so fragile? “Aren’t there failsafes?”
“Don’t forget about Y2K,” Donnie said, and they all laughed.
“Maybe some kindly officer unlocked everyone. Some kindly nurse,” Bonita said.
“Or else shot them all,” said Rosa.
Before they got to the bottom of this, the discussion had turned ideological, had turned to a dispute about statistics: you were more likely to be killed by your own father than by an undermedicated schizophrenic. That criminals were only criminals because society had deemed them so, and not because there was such a thing as real evil. Philip had assured her they’d investigate, but hadn’t followed through.
She should have been stockpiling weapons and training dogs. She should have done it herself.
They had thought that in this world everything was perfect, because anytime you wanted to, you could just leave. The port was always going to glow with that possibility, and that was how you knew you wanted to stay, since every day you chose to do so. But right now, there was no getting out. There was only a long night and its darkness, and she would not be able to sleep.
Gus jumped up and let out two loud barks.
“It’s alright,” she cooed. But then she heard it. Too close—clink, clink, whoosh. And this time, glass shattering.
Chapter
5
THE LOTUS-EATERS
The daily work, even in these extreme circumstances, was mundane. First: food, shelter, hygiene. The incredible labour involved in fending off decay. Then: information. Just as people, in leaving, had revealed something about the nature of humanity, so too the world they left behind was revealed as something new to those left behind. Without its disguises of commerce and ambition, of self-important news stories and distractions, the Earth was stark.
&nbs
p; The wall of maps the survivors had made included pictures of the Earth from space, that glowing Gaia of blue and green, its billowing clouds like sheets hung outside on the line. But it wasn’t this beauty they were conscious of daily; it was Earth’s hostility to man. Water eroded. Vines, trees and weeds aggressed. Things smelled of mildew. Clothes washed by hand and left to dry in the beating sun quickly faded or greyed. Vegetation and rot were enemies now. Raccoons gazed at you slant-eyed and chattered ominously all night.
And yet, despite the robust vegetation, so little was edible. Those who remained learned things they had never before needed to know. How to make a seed poke its little mole-head out of the ground to take a look. Which wires led where. How to dry out food to make it last. That a stain often could not be removed. The physical cost of sugar and coffee. The unknowable subsystem of pipes and sewage. The conveniences of the modern age, which had once held humans aloft in a hammock, now left them splayed on the ground.
People behaved in leaving as they had in life. A man would leave without finishing his leftover lasagna or unplugging his fridge, and the pasta would go hard, then soft, its rot eventually indistinguishable from ricotta, the cheap plastic container buckling as the bacteria grew. The situation became worse when the power went down, smellier, organic matter turning fecal where it sat, then neutralizing again when the bacteria, having done its job, moved on. A woman, before leaving, would make sure everything she owned was unplugged and that a window was cracked for the cat. Such a cat would be long-neutered, declawed—easy prey. Biological cycles meant more than news cycles once had.
To those who remained, it seemed that there was a spectrum of leaving behaviour, containing every variation you could imagine. The only thing the travellers had in common was that they had gone.
And now, despite how everything had changed, there were so many good reasons to stay. There was no one around to watch the survivors. No one to accuse them of idleness, of not doing their jobs. After all, how many buildings and roads could forty people be asked to maintain? They took breaks and did as they pleased. In the rash, chaotic early days, they had broken many clocks. There was no one to measure their credit ratings. No one to demand taxes. The long list of things that seemed to have ended were wars, poverty, marriage, careers, capitalism, the Internet, television, hospitals.
The problems of greed were now abolished. Perhaps someone’s child would one day say, But there must be more to life than this. History would begin again. Perhaps ambition lay like a spark inside each person, waiting for the right fuel, for a bit of tinder.
Still, there was not much ambition in this bunch. These survivors always settled on stay.
* * *
—
Marie could see nothing from the upstairs window, even when the faint light of dawn brightened to day. She would have to go downstairs. Gus had given up his vigil, but when she rose, he stood up anxiously. For a while in the night she had lain in bed certain that she’d hear steps coming up her stairs, or a pounding on her flimsy door, but eventually she had dropped off. Sleep had not been enough to soothe her shattered nerves. She was sure what she’d heard was her storefront window being destroyed—possibly by a member of another group as bored and fearless as her own. Perhaps the act was not malicious, but she could not reason away her worry.
Now it had been hours since the noise; it must be safe to go down and assess the damage to the store, to count what had been lost. Worst-case scenario, the intruders had interfered with the photographic record of the billboard, whoever they were—not monsters but men made menacing by darkness and mystery. Men—or maybe women—just like she was, she thought reasonably. People who had a desperate need for specialty art supplies. She herself had done the same thing yesterday with Rosa at the music store. Yes, people with guns and baseball bats were people exactly like her.
She loaded the gun, enjoyed its weight in her hand, then inched down the stairs with Gus beside her in her best imitation of a TV cop. Back to the wall, hand on gun, thumb on lip and ready to aim. Her breath came out choked and wavering. The wall was cool on her back as she moved down the stairs.
At the bottom, she nudged the door open and stared into the gaping maw of the store. All the paint pots were where they belonged, shining like gemstones. Red, green, yellow, blue. Not a single canvas was awry. Stacks of paper in every shade of white, black, grey, beige, ivory. Brushes, pencil sets, clay, pastels, tubes of watercolour, markers with their sampling pages still inscribed with the curlicues of long-gone strangers. On the back wall, the rows of photos still hung on their twine. Finally, she came to her water-dulled and fingerprint-streaked panes of glass. The decalled letters she had designed: FRANKINCENSE & MYRRH: ART SUPPLIES. Her now unnecessary chalk A-frame leaning against the wall. She had spent the night imagining the floor littered with glass icicles and floes, her gorgeously cared-for window ruined forever. She touched the glass, then burst into tears. What if she had lost this? This last good thing from before.
Her arms went limp, the gun now loose in her hand. “Gus? Come.”
But then she paused. She had heard something last night. Scuffing like footsteps, the whoosh and shatter of glass breaking. She unlocked the door and went out into the street. Hot wind whirled the debris that was always present now, the leaves and papers and bits of plastic recycling. Outside the Chinese grocery, glass glittered on the sidewalk and in the long-empty bins. So her prowler had been hungry and had not noticed the unlocked door. In the dark, the now faded invitation for visitors to help themselves would not have been visible.
Inside the grocery, the empty shelves were cast in darkness. She knew without a doubt that there was no port inside the grocery, but as she stood there she felt certain that if she were to turn her back on the store, one would appear. She could almost hear the loud humming buzz of it, like a low-hanging telephone wire. So she did turn, and felt it—the certainty that something was pursuing her, watching her, and that she and Gus were not alone. She’d felt the same thing in the church the day before. But there was nothing to be done.
She left, grabbed a metal pan and stiff broom from her own store, returned to sweep up pebbles and shards, and poured everything into her wagon, which she tugged to the Dumpster in the alley. Her arms and legs hurt, and twice she sliced a finger on a piece of glass and had to run home to bandage herself, but out of loyalty to those she’d known in the neighbourhood, she went through with this laborious project.
Finally, she went down the street to gather cardboard at convenience stores she’d long ago jimmied open, and carried off the few boxes that remained. She sealed the grocery behind this cardboard, though she knew the barrier wouldn’t last.
Returning the duct tape and box cutter to her own shelves, she again felt a warmth on the back of her neck, as if she was being watched. She looked up at the small brick apartment building upon which her billboard perched. Sport. She went in for her camera, came out again and took her photo. Then she wheeled her bicycle out from behind the counter, whistling for Gus.
* * *
—
In the morning, the survivors were like bears coming out of their caves. People sat around the fire and boiled a mixture of cloves and cardamom and cinnamon and different kinds of tea, which they pretended to love. They passed around jerky and berries, and observed how much like cowboys they were. Like pilgrims, like settlers, like cavemen. And this was another point they frequently made to each other: they were doing their own kind of time travel just by staying here.
There had been discussions early on about relocating to a farm out in Binbrook or Jarvis, but however reduced, the group preferred the feeling of being close to an urban setting. They preferred, they told themselves, a little haphazardness, the adventure of disorganization. Even Philip, the ex-librarian. “Librarians,” he would sometimes explain, “are neither quiet people nor necessarily organized.”
But this morning, Philip said nothing. Marie noticed he was pale and sweaty, as though he were coming down with
the flu. She parked her bike and walked over to him.
“You okay?” she said.
“I think so,” Philip said.
She picked up a stick and tossed it into the woods for Gus. Watched as Bonita ladled out some of their improvised chai—admittedly, the spices were growing stale—and took a cup to Philip. “Hey. You feeling alright?”
“Why is everyone asking me that?” he said gruffly. “Just hungover. Getting old.”
“Is that all?” Bonita put the back of her hand to his forehead and then sat down and blew on her watery tea.
Almost everyone was here now. The kids were running around in dizzying circles behind people’s seats, whooping with their hands hitting their open mouths, while Donnie, from the back deck of a house, shouted, “That’s racist! Hey! Tell your kids to cut that out! That’s racist!” They did not cut it out. Marie noticed that one of the boys had even tied feathers to his head. Yasmin was behind Donnie on the same deck. Her husband, Joe, was helping her to get her wheelchair over the lip of the ramp Philip had constructed, somewhat awkwardly, using a wooden plank. Tiny six-year-old Zev—Jack’s grandson—ran with the others. Zev hadn’t had an asthma attack in months.
Marie glanced around for Rosa and Mo. “So you had a rough night?” she said to Philip.