by Liz Harmer
“I’m Brandon. I’m sorry I’m not—” He stopped talking and put his hands up again. “This is frustrating. I’m sorry I startled you. I’ll tell you everything.”
She was studying his face now, realizing that he was familiar, that his was a face she knew. “You’ve been watching me?”
“No. Well, yes. A little.” He laughed. “Let me start again. I’m Brandon.”
“You said that.”
Gus padded gingerly out onto the porch, and she followed him until they were both standing next to him.
“You don’t need to look at me askance,” he said. “I really don’t mean harm. You’re the one with the gun.”
A laugh came out, as sharp as her appraising eyes. She tried to stop laughing, kept laughing, held an arm tight against her heaving chest.
“What’s so funny?”
“Askance?” It made her laugh again, lips opening to flash teeth.
He blushed. “I like your house.”
Again she laughed. “This note wasn’t meant for you. I don’t know you!”
“Oh. I thought maybe you—”
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
She slid the glass door closed behind them with a metallic whoosh, exchanging dark living room for dark yard. The fire had been left to smoulder, and the smell of its burning filled the air.
“I don’t want to wake up Bonita. This is her house.”
He picked up his shoebox, causing the chicks, who were still sleeping, to shift slightly.
“I mean, none of these houses are ours, technically,” Marie said. “But we’ve all been living here for almost a year. Since they are some of the nicest houses in the city, and no one was using them.” She heard herself presenting the logic of thieves and stopped herself.
Marie started to move logs around. She lit a torch she’d made from newspaper, and once it was blazing, pushed it down under a teepee of sticks. “So, you’re Brandon. How long have you been lurking in the streets?”
“About four days.”
She stopped moving for a moment, stood unmoving before the fire. “For awhile we were keeping better watch on our perimeters. Someone would stay with the fire all night. We’d been keeping a guard. Let’s be honest, it’s a big city, though. And there are only—there aren’t many of us.” She turned, wiping her sooty hands on her thin shirt, and sat down next to him, still holding a long stick.
“It’s a lot of work to keep watch,” Brandon said.
“We’re pretty hard-working. We wouldn’t have made it this long if not.”
“I wasn’t accusing you of being lazy,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Well, actually, I’m not sorry. I don’t see that I owe you an explanation. But you don’t need to look at me askance.”
Fire smelled of camping trips, of Brandon’s summers with his parents. “I probably shouldn’t have been lurking for quite so long.”
She leaned toward him, bending to peer inside the shoebox on his lap. Stanley, Gertie and Bess were piled on top of each other, indistinguishable in their overlapping feathers. “Chickens?”
“Yeah.”
She poked a long index finger in, nudging them, petting. “Cute.”
The nearby wall of forested escarpment was only a little darker than the sky beyond, stars clouded over. As a child, Brandon had gone on many sleepy rides up the escarpment late at night, his parents driving him to his aunt and uncle’s, and from there the city had been like a basin filled with stars, as though he might dip a ladle in and pull up light. All the buildings and street lamps glittered, and the city was an encoded set of constellations. It had never been dark like this. This might as well have been one of the abandoned fields in the prairies he’d passed through. Now the sky above was laden with stars. The moon slipped coyly behind a fan of clouds, and the fire, now so loud it seemed to roar, was the only light for miles and miles.
“Nice night,” he said stupidly. She was still beside him, and they both faced the fire. He wanted to find the thing to say to earn her trust, her admiration. “‘When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be no wickedness nor sorrow in the world.’”
“What is that? Keats?”
“Jane Austen.”
“So you’re being ironic?”
“I try not to be ironic. As a rule,” he said. “Though, I suppose we’ve got our share of wickedness and sorrow here.”
“Sorrow, anyway.” Her breaths were light and fast. “Wickedness is a distraction from sorrow.”
“You think so?”
“You don’t agree.”
“Well, is that true?” he said. “Wickedness masks sorrow? Wickedness is a distraction?”
“Wickedness is awful but easier to deal with. There’s nothing to be done for sorrow.”
A series of trite responses presented themselves to Brandon, things people say to the grieving, to the depressed, to do with silver linings and the passage of time. Things Doors might say. He searched inside himself for poetry and found none, so they fell into silence again. He knew what the not finding of poetry meant; certain women struck him dumb, blocked his mental archive. Perhaps she felt awkward, but Brandon did not, and he was a man who’d never been able to keep from falling in love. He was a fool, always having just finished drinking love potion, always succumbing to the nearest possibility of a future.
“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,” she said finally.
“Keats?” Brandon said.
“Joyce,” she said. “So where’d you get those chickens?”
“Portland.”
“Maine?”
“Oregon.”
“Oregon? You came all the way here?”
“I grew up here. But I was most recently in Palo Alto, and before that, New Haven. My mom grew up here and I grew up here, and I just wanted to come back. So I travelled for a few weeks and…”
“You found gasoline?”
“No, no. I’ve got a Turing.”
“You have an electric car and three chickens,” she said. “Maybe you’re our saviour.”
“Your group seems like it’s functioning just fine.”
“Ha. Right.” She laughed. “I should have seen more of the world. I meant to see more of the world. I was busy being married, and then I was busy with the store, and now it’s too late.”
“You’re still young. You can still do all that.”
She laughed again. His gut twisted.
“It doesn’t matter, though, how young I am, does it? The world has ended! I’m never going to get to Paris. I’m never going to see the Louvre.”
“Well, you could,” he said. He moved slightly to be closer to her. He could see her small breasts moving under her t-shirt. The pale length of her sinewy forearms seemed an invitation to anchor.
“I guess I could learn how to drive a steamship,” she said. Her eyes were an animal flash in the dark.
“Or you could go by port.”
“Go by port,” she said, laughing again. “Have you gone anywhere by port?”
“No.”
“Have you known anyone who came back?”
“There was a woman. But—” He pulled in a hard fast breath. “I knew Doors. I know Doors.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” she said. “Palo Alto.”
There was a sound of someone moving in the dark. Brandon put his finger up to silence her, and they both listened.
“It’s a person,” he whispered. “Definitely.”
“I used to think they sounded like people,” she said. “Raccoons. You knew Doors?”
“When PINA still stood, I was his PR guy.”
Her face registered her realization, and he felt the flare of excitement at being famous, that old feeling of importance.
“PINA isn’t standing anymore?”
“It still is, sort of. We lost a lot of people, of course. We—they—have managed to keep things basically running. Doors is pre
tty excited about this new world.”
“Doors is still there?”
“Yup. And he pretty much considers himself King of the Good Life.”
“Sounds like the CEO of a fitness chain.”
He laughed.
“But you left,” she said. “Why did you leave?” She didn’t pause long enough for him to answer. “How many of you are out there?”
“The place I was in, there were close to a thousand,” he said.
“Close to a thousand! And you have chickens and cars. You have electricity?”
“Solar.”
“Do you have phones, too?” Her voice cracked. “But why aren’t you doing anything to help us?”
“No phones,” he said. None of them had thought about anyone who might be left behind. Not even Brandon, really. They’d only thought about Stable, about themselves, their tribes and families. “I thought the army was doing something,” he said quietly. “And we really didn’t even know if there was anyone left out there. And a thousand people aren’t really enough to change things. But I’m here.” He heard himself and cringed. “I can help.” He couldn’t stop. “There aren’t very many people out there anymore. Anywhere.”
The animal sounds seemed closer, seemed hostile and wet.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve got Gus.”
Gus was sitting there, not harassing the chickens, not addressing the threatening sounds around them. “Okay. Yes.” He smiled. After having sweated through his shirt all day, he was cold, even by the fire. “We’ve got Gus. Who was that note for?”
“I thought I was waiting for someone.”
“You should be careful.”
“You mean in case some chicken farmer comes tapping at my back door. Some chicken farming graffiti artist with a penchant for surveillance.”
“I wouldn’t say penchant.” He moved so that the back of his hand was touching her arm. “What graffiti?”
“Sport.” She didn’t move away.
“You mean the billboard?”
“Pretty fucking creepy. You have to admit.”
“That wasn’t me,” he said. “I thought you had done that.”
“It wasn’t you?”
They were close enough that he could smell the fruity sweetness of her breath.
Chapter
14
THE FAMILIAR
Steve and Regina had been planning to leave that morning without telling anyone. Quietly they had collected all the things they’d need to move south and away, in hopes of finding friendlier climes and perhaps a port-free place, a place where things had not collapsed entirely. They weren’t extraordinary. They weren’t so strange, and so there must be others, many others, somewhere out there.
Steve and Regina had been cautious in their previous life, but not extremely so. Risks taken included the time they decided mid-coitus to try for a child and got pregnant immediately; the decision in college to move to Australia for a year to spend all their savings on a trip through the continent; the time Regina had taken LSD at a concert and ended up walking into the lake in the middle of the night in April, the water to her neck when Steve finally found her and fished her out. He’d stripped off her wet clothes and wrapped her in blankets, and they’d sat there on the dirty beach, where she shivered out the rest of her hallucinations. “That was the moment I knew I loved you,” Regina said. “Because you looked for me and made sure I was okay.”
Now Steve was required to do as Steve did—he had to be rational and take care of his own.
They had been thinking hard about their relatively long marriage, all these moves that they’d made, and though they did not want to go near any ports, staying here was no longer working. Philip had been right to encourage a migration—if they’d listened to him instead of to Marie, they’d already be well on their way to settling elsewhere and safe for another winter. Still, now, Marie’s interests and Marie’s allies decided everything.
Gasoline made them wary, so they packed saddlebags and attached their bicycles to a pair of double strollers, and each bicycle would form a train. Steve’s would pull their oldest son Garrett on his own bike, and behind him would trail a stroller filled with food and supplies. Regina would tow the smaller children. They included as little as necessary, which was as clarifying as any paring down: first aid, tents, sleeping bags, one change of clothes for each, knives, a gun, food for three weeks, can openers, bike repair kits, one toy or game for each child, who would have to learn to enjoy playing with sticks and rocks. Regina had a map, pink-, green- and yellow-highlighted with routes. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. How romantic, Regina said that morning, leaning into Steve’s body. How fun. How fun.
The sun rose, a trick of beauty. Steve stood on the deck and stared into the trees. Their bikes were in the lane next to the house, and Regina had taken the children into the woods for a final bathroom break, like any family on their way to a campground.
They’d written a long note. Families stick together through hard times. If you choose to follow us, here is where we plan to arrive. It had the feel of a treasure map, the unreal sheen of a game. It would take a day for their absence to be noted, and this would give them a head start. They didn’t want to be pulled back or forced to sit through another meeting.
“You ready?” Regina said. Behind her, the kids had found a soccer ball, were running and alternately screaming at and shushing each other. “We’ll hit the road in five minutes.”
“We’ll be able to grow avocados,” he said, as she fit her body next to his, held him by the waist. “And mangoes.”
“Do you think it’s weird that Marie’s already sitting by the fire?”
“Up before noon, you mean? Who’s with her?”
“Maybe it’s Mo. I dunno.”
“If she and Mo were having an affair, they wouldn’t be sitting where just anyone would see.”
“Your mind goes immediately to an affair? People can just sit together.” Regina pulled away from him. Marriages sparked with accusations; misunderstandings kept the thing alive.
“I’ll go check it out,” Steve said.
“Okay, but we need to leave in five minutes,” she said, spreading out her fingers as she would have to one of the children.
They should have left in the night, Steve thought, his strides long in his anxiety not to sabotage their slipping out less than half an hour before the rest of their people woke and trickled out into this outdoor living room, this place they would not be able to use for the months that would dump cold rain and snow, those quickly coming months. He hated having no access to meteorology, no idea how long a storm would rage or when the temperature would warm. Now it was only a little dewy, wetting his socks through the meshed bits of his sneakers. He glanced at each house as he passed it, now seeing Donnie at his door, wrestling with the lock while standing on his one good leg. People didn’t easily give up their programming. Donnie locked his house as he left it, even if he was only leaving to go to the fire. Steve lifted his hand; Donnie waved back. It’s okay, Steve thought. So we’ll wait until they’re distracted by whatever nonsense, and we’ll slip out the front. We’ll wait until Bonita is busy.
“Ahoy, Marie!” Steve said. Ahoy? In his nerves, he was turning into one of them, becoming an idiot. The man sitting next to her was hunched like a person used to hunch over a PINAphone. “Do I know you?”
Both were shy as children caught stealing. “Steve, this is Brandon Dreyer,” Marie said. “He came all the way from California, from PINA.”
“What?” Steve turned back. Regina was small in the distance. “From PINA?” he said again, shaking his head.
“You all right, Steve?” said Marie.
He sat down on the log and picked up a loose stick, peeled off its charred and moulting outer layer. “Yeah,” he said. Donnie was limping up the hill, would refuse help if it were offered. “I guess you have a lot to tell us, huh?”
“Another one of Steve’s hyper-masculine understatements,” Marie said.
Steve lifted his eyes to Brandon, to Marie, and shook his head again.
“I shouldn’t tease you, Steve,” she said. “Sorry.”
Donnie heaved his body and sat down, momentarily counter-weighting Steve into the air. “What. The fuck. Is this? Brandon-motherfucking-Dreyer?”
“You know him?” Marie said.
“Everybody knows him,” Donnie said.
The sun was coming up, and a series of sounds creaked out of the box sitting on the ground between Marie and Brandon. Gus jumped onto his feet and sniffed at Stanley, who reached out his tiny neck and puffed up his tiny chest.
“You have chickens?” said Donnie. “Am I dreaming?”
“I have chickens,” Brandon said, lifting them out of the box.
Steve’s kids clambered over, the youngest, Lulu, climbing into her father’s lap, while the boys went over to the chicks.
“Go tell Mommy,” Steve said to Garrett.
“Look at these furballs,” said six-year-old Lulu.
“They aren’t furballs,” returned slightly older Mac. “If anything, they’re featherballs.”
“They’re so cute,” the children cooed, and Brandon let each of them hold a chick in their hands.
Marie wound her camera, focused the lens and clicked a picture, and another. They were the first on the roll with any people in them. One by one, the rest of the group arrived surrounding Brandon and Marie.
“They’re little yellow suns. They’re signs of a good future,” Bonita said, picking one up and holding it to her face.
“We all know who you are,” Donnie said to Brandon. He sent Rosa with a key into his house to grab his personal collection of scrapbooks. She came back carrying these in her arms as awkwardly as one carries a large dog, and Donnie coughed instead of thanking her as she laid them at his feet.
“The odds of Brandon Dreyer, the so-called man-behind-the-man arriving in our little city by the bay, are slim to none.”
“The odds of anything are zero until it happens,” Rosa said.
It was the sort of thing Jason might have said.
“And here he is,” Marie said.
“I grew up here,” Brandon said. “Not that odd. No pun intended.”
“Oh, right. Actually I did know that.” Donnie rustled through the pages, quoting Brandon’s old statements back to him. “PINA has been at the fore of all technological developments over the past two decades.” And “Port was inevitable.” And “We are talking about a megaverse, a multiverse, where everything is possible.” Donnie put the pages down. “Do you really believe all that? No bullshit. What do you really think?”