The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  All the living things everywhere made death’s impossibility clear. The escarpment in full forest loomed greenly at them. “Because of all the talk of environmentalism,” Marie said, “I always expect there to be no trees at all. Every tree is a miracle.” Death and decline had been a myth too much bandied about. The world teemed. Everywhere you looked, there was some human full of purpose, full of movement and yearning. “This isn’t denial,” Marie said. “It can’t be denial if you’re aware of the possibility that you’re in denial.”

  That was several months before the first miscarriage.

  His father had been a champion of their too-early marriage, their know-it-all love. “Why not get married,” Jason’s father, a schoolteacher, had said. “To hell with it!” He was a man you could imagine always popping a champagne cork. Marie felt now that all the good in Jason had come from this man, not from his mother, who had been a severely skinny corporate lawyer. Jason’s father used to make jokes about the cases that would take her all over the country. “The important lawyers in their suits are arguing about the sturdiness of pipes again. Who is blameworthy when it comes to the shoddiness of pipes? And more importantly, who the hell is going to have to pay?” Jason’s father with a mitful of confetti, his mother dour and hard.

  Zeno’s paradoxes famously showed that you could only advance across a distance by first going half way, and then you had to traverse half of the remaining distance, and half of the next, and the next, and soon you realized that there were an infinite number of halves nested inside each distance, and you’d never get to the end. Movement was impossible, and so was death. This is how it felt to watch him die. Each breath in would be followed by a breath out. Breath comes in, breath goes out, breath comes in: what could make out of small motions such an irrevocable change? Breath slowing, yes. But life ending? A thing happened one bit at a time. A thing happened slowly and then all at once.

  * * *

  —

  Marie waited so long for someone to come to the church that she began to think no one would. Gus had ignored the last toss of the ball, and it had gone rolling down the street. She watched it grow smaller, until it finally stopped. Gus let it go, distracted by a fat grey squirrel, which he chased up the brick side of an old house. Animals surrounded them. Cats slinked around corners, mice moved so fluidly she hadn’t at first noticed them. Now the squirrel clung from the eavestrough. It was about to try flinging itself over to a tree branch, which it would certainly not manage. Gus maintained his focus, growling, sitting back on his haunches in a threatening way.

  Marie pulled a book out of her backpack, a hugely popular novel called Julie in Wonderland set in a Brooklyn that must no longer exist and by a novelist who was probably gone named Nellie Young. There were long flâneur passages in which the protagonist considered the city; there were bars and bookshops and art galleries and coffee shops with strong coffee, and the novel comforted Marie because of the way it assumed there would be crowds of people everywhere Julie, the protagonist, looked. Julie got into complicated discussions about politics and art with men who were sometimes good and sometimes bad in bed. Julie, with her old Parisian ennui, her New Yorker neurosis, didn’t know what she wanted. At a certain point, Julie developed a condition in which parts of her body went numb, where she could not tell where her body ended and the world began.

  For months after the grid went down, some of them would reach for the phone no longer in the back pocket of their jeans. In Marie’s current situation, sitting bored on a stoop and waiting, a device like that would keep time from being a thing to be endured. You could scroll through messages and sites; you could ask PINA any random question that floated up; you would not wonder why the sky was blue, because you’d know. By not buying a PINAphone, Marie had resisted this new way of being in the world, in which one’s thoughts were never unknown to others, in which a person was always seen and always performed. She had been lonely all her life, had spent her life sticking in the mud—even the drugs to make you high brought Marie down—and maybe it was a sign of her wrongness that she was still here. There had to be some reason that this group of them remained, something to link them. A lack of daring, of normal human curiosity. She should go into the church. She would unzip the port the way a person braced for a shot of whisky. Down the hatch she’d go! And she’d find herself there, in a world filled with people and art and adventure. Wonderland.

  Why did it have to be sinister, the way the port read your mind and embodied your desire? Why was a promise like that sinister? As usual, they were fearful and knew nothing. It was just as likely that desire was good, that resistance, rather than being merely futile, was stupid. The port knew her. It regarded her, and it knew her. So she stood up. At the rear of the church were basement windows she could break clean open. There was one on which the old cage had rusted so badly, it would come off easily in her hands. She’d pull off the cage and just break the window a little. There was no hurry. No one was coming. She could break the glass slowly, knock out the jagged edges—it was as easy as that.

  * * *

  —

  “Marie!” Someone was shouting.

  Tiny in the distance, a bicycle raced toward her. Marie stood as still as a raccoon caught scheming about a garbage can, her hands in mid-air. The bicycle was topped by teeny Bonita in her kerchief, shouting, “Marie!”

  Gus barked loudly back. The squirrel saw its chance and threw itself into the air, fantastically managing to grab the tree branch, surprising even itself.

  Marie walked back up the weedy alley to the steps. Bonita braked and jumped off the bike and ran to her. “Have you heard from Philip?”

  Marie shook her head. “What did Rosa tell you?”

  “You all think the port is demonic or something? It’s tempting you to go in, some kind of voice in your head?”

  Marie nodded, but Bonita’s skeptical tone was a pin to her bubble of longing.

  Bonita’s clothes and face were damp; she wiped her forehead with the bottom of her T-shirt, flashing for a moment the brown and slightly puckered skin of her belly.

  “Do you have water?”

  Marie led Bonita to the top of the steps and retrieved a bottle from her backpack. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “He slept on our couch last night. Rosa didn’t. Well…” Bonita stopped short of saying what was already clear to Marie. “And then I talked to him for a few minutes at breakfast. Just for a few minutes. And then he was gone. You know he likes to be alone. But that was the last time I saw him.”

  Gus trotted over to Bonita and lay between them at the top of the steps, just outside the church doors, as though guarding the building from intruders. The surreality lifted at Marie, as it sometimes did, this feeling that her body and her mind could no longer quite remain attached to each other. As though some outline of her body were only hovering over her, as though whatever helped her remain whole had double vision.

  There was something about the scene. Marie sitting on that top step, body turned slightly toward Bonita, Bonita mirroring her, Gus between them, the red doors to frame them: the picture mimicked a photo she had from her childhood, herself and her long-ago best friend Katrine, on a stoop, the red doors. Some part of her was dislodging and trying to rise, to lift.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll wait here for Philip, for one thing,” Bonita said.

  “Yeah?” Marie said. She moved to the top of the steps and lay back on the cold stone. Big puffy clouds moved over them. “It’s going to rain.”

  “Nah. Not for awhile,” Bonita said. “Those clouds are babies.”

  “You know that we’re pretty sure—we think—Philip is gone.”

  “You think so?” she said, pulling her red kerchief off and shaking it out, then flattening it on the step. The stone was covered with little green seeds that had flown off nearby trees. Gus stood up, suddenly, with a clink-clink-clink, his body directed southward, toward the green escarpment. Across the
street, the way a coming helicopter or roaring plane used to sound, hundreds of birds all at once pulled into the sky from a tree, their bodies synced so that the flock of them together had the effect of a single being, each like a node in a sheet of chain mail shaking into the sky.

  “We could migrate,” Marie said.

  Bonita finished flattening and folding her kerchief and began tying it back over her head. “We can’t go south without Philip.”

  “Did Rosa tell you that someone broke a window on my street? About the billboard?”

  Bonita nodded and assessed her with her dark eyes, and Marie felt pitied. It was unbearable; she turned away.

  “Remember a few years ago, just before port?” Bonita said. “Then the big thing was planning to start some kind of colony on Mars. Albrecht Doors was one of them, putting groups of private citizens into these mock stark conditions. Making them live in the desert for months together, to test their fortitude, I guess, and to help them prepare. You remember that? It was going to be one-way tickets. They knew people were going to die out there. Many of them would die. For the sake of humanity.”

  Marie remembered it well, because she’d known how excited Jason would have been about it.

  “Corporations to save us. Made sense to me. What else do you do with a billion dollars? I always felt they were just little boys playing. Should have made sure the little boys didn’t have all the economic power. Although perhaps a boy is preferable to a man. A man. Now there’s a pile of disappointments and bitterness and physical strength and hate.”

  “Not all men,” Marie said, laughing.

  “Yeah. Right. Anyway, they were going to send people up to Mars. To set up colonies. You had to petition for your spot. I heard this radio programme where they were comparing the Mars teams to the first Europeans in North America. The Puritans. All the people who didn’t make it through that first winter. And I remember thinking—I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought this—wait a minute, the Puritans are going to be our model for behaviour? The colonizers? European conquest is just a disease, an illness, something that wants to spread and spread without any desire beyond spreading.”

  “Not all Europeans,” Marie said.

  “Apparently it was all Europeans. And all men. Everybody, Marie! Every single person.”

  “Except us.”

  “The exception does not prove the rule. There is something inside of people; it comes along with us. Not just Europeans. We take poison with us wherever we go. We ruin things.”

  Marie winced. Was this directed at her, to do with all the windows they’d broken? No one had ever had a problem with it before; no one had ever said anything.

  “With port—it’s like with port, all of that disappeared. All those other trajectories stopped short. You remember that book? The one by the scientist who had been investigating UFO sightings?”

  “Right,” Marie said. It had been from Donnie’s personal collection. They’d pocketed all kinds of books like that in case they’d get any information from them, but many books from the seventies and eighties about aliens were laughable. Kitsch.

  “Did you read it?” Bonita said, shaking her head to scold Marie. “It was by a real scientist with credentials and all. Assuming there have been UFOs and even abductions, assuming we’ve been visited on this planet by other beings, he was—”

  Marie sat up, leaned on her elbows and stared at her friend. A slight déjà vu blurred in—the way Jason’s belief in it all had felt to her. She could not believe it—she would not—but she had liked that someone did.

  “Are we talking alien invasion? Are we talking, like, extraterrestrials?”

  Bonita looked at her. The air was thickening up; they both shone with sweat.

  “I’m sorry,” Marie said.

  “About what?”

  “About my tone.”

  “Oh, it’s all right. I like you well enough by now.”

  Up the street to the south, they saw two figures walking toward them, a bit too far away to make out. Then another three behind them.

  “Everybody’s coming,” Bonita said.

  “I’m sorry that I interrupted you. Go on.”

  “Maybe it does sound ridiculous. The scientist who wrote that book said that if we were to grant that these UFOs were actually visiting, maybe they weren’t coming from outer space. Maybe there was some other explanation. You know. If this is a multiverse, or there are many worlds—which there probably have to be—then the ports are part of that.”

  “But PINA made the ports.”

  “If PINA made the ports and knew what they were doing—which they must have, given that the Testifiers said they were coming back, but no one the hell comes back—there was a lot more going on than anyone in the public knew about. That, or PINA was just a bunch of little boys with toy planes, and they were having a laugh and a lark.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know whether to believe more strongly in malice or incompetence,” Marie said.

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “At times I feel we’ve made a good life here and then at others I feel like, just—”

  Bonita sighed, and leaned toward Marie.

  “I don’t know why I’m talking about Mars right now. No one’s going to Mars. We’re set back centuries, here. Maybe millenia.”

  Despite the humidity of the day, the sun scorching overhead, Bonita’s arm felt cold. “Maybe he didn’t go in. Maybe we’re wrong,” Marie said.

  Coming up the street were Joe pushing Yasmin, Andrea and Steve and Regina and the kids, and Donnie on his crutches, now hollering, “Ahoy! Ahoy!” And so, in turn, they stood and lifted their arms like deserted islanders trying to get the attention of a ship.

  * * *

  —

  They decided it was better not to go inside to get the ledger, but they knew the numbers, and within an hour, all of them were there except Philip. Most sat on the curb or on the steps as they waited for him to get back; some dragged lawn furniture out from the nearby houses, grimy chairs from a porch, the old plastic pieces they kept under tarps near the slaughterhouse-garage next door. Steve with his three kids went in and out of that garage, full of unnecessary inventorying purpose, as though they’d been burgled instead of abandoned. He harrassed Mo about the hammer and nails, which still sat on the stoop there, and glared at the others suspiciously. “Everything’s accounted for,” he said finally, sitting down on the bottom step next to frail Regina, who hugged her legs to her torso.

  Each of them was stuck in a private set of thoughts. One would say, “There aren’t any chickens out there,” and another would say, “It was awful. Just feathers here and there, stuck to things. Cattle carcasses, bones. Nothing survived the winter.” Another voice: “Of course they didn’t; we hardly did. Philip was right, we should leave.” Philip’s name was enough to create a momentary silence, and then someone would ask again how they could be sure the port had been used, and then Rosa would describe the scattering of business cards, how Mo and Marie had both felt it pulling at them. “It was like a beautiful woman,” Mo would say, another point to silence everyone. Were beautiful women really so irresistable? Then they’d circle back to the chickens, to the question of whether they all had died, whether they ought to have gone south, whether they themselves were like sitting ducks—“sitting chickens,” said Donnie ruefully—and how difficult it was give up all hopes, even absurd ones…and then who had left…had someone left?…had it been Philip?…Let’s retrace our steps…and….

  Behind them, the church doors were still shuttered, their shiny red paint faded long ago and splintered, now further destroyed by those planks that that morning had seemed a necessary precaution and now that everyone was there and accounted for looked like the hack job of a paranoiac. The shadows again had deepened, the sun dropping west behind the church, and they sat in growing darkness. The empty street was in stark chiaroscuro.

  “I could almost taste those scrambled eggs,” Donnie said. “I could taste the butter,
I swear to God.”

  “Mind over matter,” Mo said. “Like maybe your fantasy could make it come true. Maybe some dairy farmer had stayed behind.”

  “It’s not impossible. Maybe we didn’t go out far enough,” Regina said.

  “Gotta create your reality,” Mo said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Regina said.

  Steve was handing out jerky and opening cans of brown beans, passing around spoons.

  “You think he’d just leave without saying goodbye?” Rosa said.

  “They all left without saying goodbye,” said Marie. “Why should he be different?”

  “He should be different,” Rosa said. “He was different.”

  “Let’s not start giving eulogies just yet,” Bonita said, but their carved faces did appear grieved, helpless as children at a parent’s funeral.

  Marie watched Steve climb the stairs, and she understood the moves he was making. Philip’s departure was an opportunity. He stood with one foot on the top step, so that one leg was higher and his legs were spread. “Okay, wow,” he said, running his hand through his hair in an angry gesture none of them recognized. “Let’s get the facts straight, here. First, we have a sign on a billboard near Marie’s apartment and nobody knows who did it.” He paused. “Right?”