The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  The noise of the restaurant is amplified in the silence that ensues. The clattering of machines shaking ice into paper cups, arrhythmic and anxious. A hand dryer turning on and off in the restrooms. The hum of the highway each time another guest comes in. One customer orders a soft serve and a small motor starts up, a deep tone like the lowest note on a piano, and once again he’s flung back to the substation, standing in front of the wall of current. He tries at once to rid himself of the images, and maybe he succeeds for a moment, but he knows they will come back. Each time he hears a loud, unexpected noise he will think of the explosion. Like when he flushes the toilet in an airplane bathroom and the valve closes with a bang. Bright lights have the same effect on him. When he’s driving on a highway through winter darkness and sees the sudden flash of oncoming brights, he’s momentarily paralyzed, remembering that final second when the room went pale just before the explosion. The cool floor and the damp darkness, waking up and orienting himself, squinting into the light.

  For the first time during their conversation Benjamin doesn’t avert his gaze when Pierre makes eye contact.

  “There’s one thing I never understood,” Benjamin says. “How could you just leave me there?”

  Pierre puts down his soda and presses his fingertips to a napkin, shaking his head and smiling.

  “Is that what you think?” he says. “I didn’t leave you.”

  “I woke up and you were gone,” Benjamin says. “How else am I supposed to interpret it?”

  “So you still don’t know what happened? I didn’t leave you. I ran toward you. I grabbed hold of you and the instant I touched you, I got a shock too.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “That can’t be right,” Benjamin says.

  “Well, you were unconscious. When you got shocked, you became like a live wire too, and I got a shock from touching you. I just passed out. When I woke up, I saw Nils running off through the forest. I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t. I thought Nils was getting help. So I took off after him. I caught up just as he got back to the cottage. He lay down in the hammock, and I had no idea what was going on.”

  “So?” Benjamin asked. “What did you do?”

  “I screamed at him that we had to go back. But he refused. I panicked, looked for Mom and Dad, but they were nowhere to be found. So I ran back by myself.”

  “No, that’s not true. I woke up alone in the substation.”

  “I got lost. I ran and ran, trying to find you, until I was all mixed up. I couldn’t find you and I couldn’t find my way home.”

  Benjamin brings his fist to his forehead.

  “Don’t you remember?” Pierre says. “When you got back to the house with Molly, I wasn’t there. I was out in the forest looking for you.”

  Benjamin closes his eyes. Midsummer Eve. He’s carried Molly back down to the house. She’s lying dead on the lawn in front of the stone steps. Mom picks her up and collapses on the grass with her. She hugs her, she screams.

  Nils.

  There he is, on the slope down to the lake, keeping his distance, observing in silence. Mom looks up at Benjamin. He remembers minor details, like that there’s a string of mucus between her upper and lower lips. That you can see her white breasts through her open robe. “What have you done?” she shouts at Benjamin over and over, shifting between rage and despair. “What have you done?”

  But where is Pierre? He tries to see him but can’t find him anywhere.

  “You weren’t there,” Benjamin says.

  “No. I was running around the forest. At last I gave up and sat down on a rock. Eventually I heard Mom screaming. I’d never heard her sound like that. She was repeating, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ And I set off in the direction of her screams. When I got to the house, everything was upside down. It was…” He shakes his head. “It was chaos.”

  “Yeah,” Benjamin says, gazing down at the tabletop. “Then what did you do?”

  “I don’t remember. I do remember that I wanted to wash up. I didn’t want Mom and Dad to notice what had happened. I had burns on my hands and arms. Don’t you remember, I had burns that lasted weeks?”

  “No.”

  “I went to the bathroom and my skin fell off when I washed my hands. I stood there looking at all the little pieces of skin on the porcelain and heard Mom screaming outside and it was ringing in my ears. It was like I was at war.”

  “I never knew this,” Benjamin says. “I never knew you tried to save me. I didn’t know you searched for me.”

  Pierre shrugs.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” Benjamin asks.

  “I thought you knew,” Pierre says. “And Mom and Dad said you weren’t okay and that we shouldn’t talk to you about what happened.” The images overtake him. Staggering through the forest with Molly, coming to the cottage, seeing the calm lake. He sees Mom on the stone steps. Her half-open mouth, her vacant eyes, the instant before she realizes. But now he can see his little brother too, imagines him in the forest. He’s lost and has given up, but then he hears Mom’s screams through the pines. There he goes, the little boy, taking off with his burned arms dangling at his sides. There is the seven-year-old, running, the sound of his mother’s sorrow guiding him home.

  Benjamin and Pierre stand up and put on their jackets. Pierre brings Nils’s hamburger to the car. As they leave the table, Benjamin looks at the leftover pile of fries, the stubs of potato Pierre stacked in a neat pyramid, like a small manifestation of self-hatred.

  They get in the car. The freezer meals Nils brought along have thawed and the inside of the car smells vaguely of beef pierogi. They enter the E-highway, which narrows into a country road. The moose fencing ends here; the county highway narrows and its condition worsens, patched asphalt and unexpected dips and dead animals in the road, bloody fur and meat flattened on the pavement. No cars from the opposite direction, only the occasional silver semi hauling timber. Station after station fades out on the car radio. They’re on the other side of Sweden, heading deeper and deeper into the forest, and they speak less and less, and by the time they finally turn off the county highway they’re not talking at all. They are traveling through the wormhole again.

  | 15 |

  The Graduation Party

  Dad was standing at the window that faced the square and looking down. He checked his watch, took a seat at the kitchen table, gazed down at his lap. He was dressed up; his flesh-toned loafers had become one with his shins, his suit pants left hanging up in the kitchen until the last minute as always, so the creases would remain intact, a trick that often raised the ire of both Nils and Mom as he walked around the apartment in his underwear for hours before any sort of festivity. He was wearing his own old student cap, faded and shapeless, a yellowed scrap of fabric on his head.

  “Shit,” he whispered, returning to the window. He had to press his face to the glass to get a glimpse of the street below. Benjamin thought about how Dad would look from the other side, if someone happened to see him from the square: his hands against the pane, his flattened cheek, his wide, searching eyes inspecting the terrain. Like a zoo animal that has just now understood its captivity.

  “This is just about unreal,” Dad muttered. “How could you be late for your own graduation party?”

  The family had gathered that morning in the schoolyard to participate in the traditional greeting of their new graduate Nils as the students ran out of the building. Dad had let Pierre and Benjamin skip school to take part. This was important. Pierre got to hold the sign, a picture of Nils when he was three, in which he was sitting on a potty and smiling at the camera. The picture made Benjamin think of a family anecdote that Mom liked to tell, how Benjamin had once emptied the potty after Pierre was done. Mom had discovered him in the bathroom with a piece of Pierre’s poop in his hand; she described how Benjamin had been gna
wing on it from the side “as if it was a chicken kabob,” and she gave a long and silent laugh, and every time she told this story Benjamin left the room.

  Rain began to fall on the schoolyard and the family crowded under a big umbrella. Then some hype man, maybe the headmaster, took a megaphone and counted down from ten and the doors opened and the students poured into the small asphalt yard, all running around in confusion and looking for their families. All but Nils. Benjamin spotted him right away, smiling, walking calmly and steadily straight for the photograph of himself on the potty.

  “Bravo,” Mom cried, raising her fist tentatively as he approached. She and Dad embraced Nils. He had sprigs of flowers, teddy bears, and tiny champagne bottles on blue-and-yellow ribbons around his neck, front-heavy with other people’s love, proof of his entire cohort hanging against his chest, friendships Benjamin only ever caught quick glimpses of at home in their apartment. Nils often had classmates with him when he came home each afternoon, sometimes four or five guys tumbling into the entryway and roughhousing down the hall. Nils quickly herded them into his room and closed the door, but Benjamin observed them closely as they went by, these colossal humans, their faces erupting with pimples, quiet and long-legged, thighs up to their rib cages.

  Nils was carrying the brown envelope containing his grades. An atomic bomb of disappointment detonated silently in the schoolyard when Dad slit it open and eyed the results. He handed the piece of paper to Mom, reading it once more over her shoulder, nodding as if this was more or less what he’d expected. He folded the paper and stuck it in his inner pocket. But Benjamin saw the discouragement in their eyes. There had been portents of this all spring, that Nils’s grades might not be as spectacular as Mom had always led the other brothers to believe. Nils quickly said good-bye again, because he would be riding around on the back of a truck with his classmates for the parade through town. He promised to come home as soon as he could, and then there was a mild commotion, he ran into a friend and they hugged and the champagne bottles around their necks clattered together. They wandered off with their arms around each other’s shoulders, heading for the long line of idling trucks, decorated with leafy birch branches and sheets hanging down the sides, spray-painted with cheeky messages. Dad called out as his son vanished into the throngs: “We’ll be waiting for you at home!”

  And Mom lit a cigarette and they walked back home, all under the umbrella, through the tunnel under the commuter train tracks, up to the main street, the small family with their sign in the air, like a tiny demonstration crossing the square.

  That was over two hours ago now, and since then Dad had been darting back and forth to the window in hopes of catching a glimpse of his missing son. He went to the sideboard and checked on the food. There were some platters with a few slices of mortadella and salted radishes. Four deviled eggs with lumpfish caviar on top. And, on its very own platter—Finnish Emmentaler cheese. This was the centerpiece of the party, what Nils loved most of all. He liked to cut a slice and spread a thick layer of butter on it, then roll the cheese into a tube and eat it in one bite in front of the TV in the evenings. Pierre and Benjamin couldn’t bear to watch, fatty butter on the fatty cheese; they pretended to gag and pointedly left the living room each time he started. And Nils sat there in the dark, in the cold light of the television, slicing his cheese down to nothing.

  Mom was curled up on the sofa, smoking, the ashtray in her lap so she didn’t have to lean over the table. She was reading a magazine, and when Dad fumbled the silverware and dropped a fork on the floor, she looked up.

  “Put the champagne in the fridge—it must be warm by now,” she said, going back to her magazine.

  Down on the square came sudden music as one of the trucks full of students crept by, and Dad hurried to the window, pressing up close. “Shit,” Dad hissed as the truck moved out of sight, and he changed position. Benjamin heard the sound of the elevator stopping on their floor and the doors opening, the jingle of a key ring approaching their apartment door.

  “Here he comes,” Benjamin said.

  “No, no,” Dad said, staring out. “That’s not his truck.”

  The door opened. “Hello,” Nils called.

  Dad rushed to the door.

  “Welcome!” he cried, looking around. “Benjamin,” he whispered, gesturing at him to come greet his brother, and then he turned back and roared at his other son—“Pierre!”—who immediately appeared in the door of his room.

  “Sorry,” Nils said. “The truck went all the way into the city and I couldn’t jump off.”

  “It’s fine,” Dad said. He fingered the bottle of champagne, peeling back the foil like a rose and twisting the cork with a grimace, holding it away from himself in case it shot up at the ceiling.

  “Pink champagne!” he called.

  The five of them gathered in the middle of the living room and watched as Dad filled three flutes. He took his glasses off and tapped them gently against the rim of his flute. He cleared his throat.

  “To our wonderful graduate,” he said, raising his glass. “We’re so proud of you.”

  Mom, Dad, and Nils clinked their glasses and drank.

  “It’s warm,” Mom said, turning to Benjamin. “Would you grab us some ice?”

  When Pierre grabbed a plate and took a deviled egg, Dad hissed at him: “Honestly. Let Nils go first, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s okay,” Nils said, his friendly tone both unfamiliar and affected. “He can go first.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Nils got ready to leave again. He was supposed to meet some friends, and then he would spend the evening going to parties. He stood in the hall, bent over his shoes, Dad by the entrance to the kitchen.

  “Nils,” he called. He waved the Emmentaler. “Look what you missed.”

  “Ooh,” Nils said. “Yum.”

  “We can have it tonight when you get home. It’s your last night, after all.”

  “It’s a deal,” Nils replied.

  The door banged shut and Nils was gone. Dad stood there for a moment, looking at the door. He took off his student cap and placed it on the hall table. He went to his room. And so began another waiting period, for Nils to come home again. Each hour was important, because tomorrow he would leave for his trip, nine months as a volunteer in Central America. Benjamin took the fact that it was happening so swiftly, right after his graduation, as a dangerous provocation of Mom and Dad, a way to demonstrate that he didn’t want to live at home a day more than was necessary. But Mom and Dad seemed to believe him when he said he needed a break from it all, that he wanted to clear his mind and see the world. Benjamin walked down the hall that led to their bedrooms and cautiously opened the door to Nils’s room. His bags were already packed, three suitcases piled one on top of another. His CD rack was empty, as was the bookcase. All that was left on the walls were the symmetrical grease stains from the tacky putty that had once held up Nils’s movie posters. It was clinically done. Nils had said he would come home again in the spring, but Benjamin knew that someone who left a room in this condition, so thoroughly purged, was leaving for good.

  He went to his own room. It was afternoon, but it felt like evening. Mom was back on the sofa with her magazine. Dad was in an easy chair in his study, reading a book. Benjamin lay on his bed; he closed his eyes for a while and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was dark out. He looked at the clock radio: 10:12. He was cold, thanks to an open window, and he thought about getting up but he couldn’t quite bring himself to. He listened for sounds in the apartment. The TV was on in the living room, but he couldn’t hear any talking. Had Nils come home? Suddenly he heard Mom’s shrill voice:

  “Would you just quit that?!”

  Probably Pierre chewing on ice cubes—Mom hated that, and Pierre knew it but couldn’t stop. Benjamin heard steps on the parquet, Pierre leaving the living room and going to his own room. Pierre came back out
again, Benjamin heard the steps, and suddenly he was standing in the doorway of Benjamin’s room. He walked right in, held up the cigarette between his fingers, and stepped out onto the little balcony outside Benjamin’s room. Pierre had been secretly smoking for some time and was constantly growing bolder. Mom smelled his fingers sometimes, doing spot checks, and to keep from being found out Pierre put drops of vinegar on his hands after each cigarette. He always carried a bottle in his bag, and he scrubbed up in the elevator before he came home at night. Always that sharp odor in the stairwell, on his clothes. Mom never caught on, but she once remarked, puzzled, that it smelled like “food” when she went into his room.

  Benjamin watched Pierre out there on the balcony, his dexterous handling of the cigarette, his hand cupped so the match wouldn’t blow out in the breeze, how he could let the lit cigarette dangle from his lips like it was no big deal as he pulled up the zipper on his jacket, how he rested his arms on the railing, sucking in and blowing out smoke through his nose. He moved like a much older man sometimes, like when his gaze seemed to freeze as if he had suddenly thought of one of life’s sorrows, or when he stared out at the high-rises, his face wry after taking yet another drag. Benjamin no longer thought Pierre looked like a kid or a teenager; he seemed weighed down the way only someone with a lot of life experience could be. He was increasingly closed off, seldom wanted to talk about things that they’d gone through together. This was a change. Benjamin recalled one time when Mom and Dad were having a bad fight, shouting at each other in the apartment, it escalated and got physical, quick steps across the hall, yanking on a door, Mom trying to get away from Dad’s fury. He remembered Dad’s wild grin as he tore the door open, got a hand in the gap and lashed out. He remembered pulling Pierre into a closet and closing the door as the fight raged on outside, the sounds of bodies, shouting, sounds that fed unthinkable images into Benjamin’s mind, and they sat on the floor and held each other, Pierre crying, Benjamin covering Pierre’s ears and whispering, “Don’t listen.”