by John Grant
There wasn't room between us for embarrassment to last for more than a few seconds.
She put her hand on my knee. "I know, I feel it too. Silly, isn't it?"
We laughed together.
"Have you found any others?" Marlene said. She didn't need to particularize: she meant anyone else who was conscious, like we were.
"No," I replied, drawing a nonsense diagram in the sand with my finger. "You're the first I've met."
"Me too."
After a sad silence I added, "But, if there are two of us, there must be more. It seems forever I've thought I was the only one."
"Me too," she repeated.
Another little silence, this one filled with memories of loneliness.
"You can't go around without a name," said Marlene, breaking it. She sounded businesslike. "I've got to call you something."
I shrugged. She was right. Once I'd resigned myself to solitude, the lack of a name hadn't seemed especially important. Now there were two of us, all of a sudden it was as if I were missing a leg or an arm.
"'Leonard' is a nice name," she said. "Oh, no, wait a moment. I knew a Leonard once and he was a complete bastard." Her chin dimpled briefly at the word. "You'll pardon my French, I'm sure. No, not Leonard. 'Lionel'?"
I giggled. How long since I'd giggled? "Sounds stuffy and pompous. What about just plain 'Bill' or 'Joe' or something like that?"
I became Joe. She watched me as I did the same as she'd been doing all this while, riffling through memories and infilling them with the name 'Joe'. It seemed to work until I got to the moment when Naomi put her head up out of the hatch and, in her terror, yelled, "Joe ...!"
That was when I broke down.
Marlene put her arm around my shoulder and held me tight as I wept. Wept in the embrace of my mother.
6
We found others like us, in due course. Early on, we came across a long-established band of them, but they'd become crazies, obeying the wishes of an absolute leader who'd set himself up as some kind of messiah, and they soon drove us off with shouts and fists. Eventually, though, we accrued a little band of our own. If the new person didn't have a name, Marlene bestowed one – some poor fool got stuck with "Lionel", and when he agreed to accept it she tossed a smug smile in my direction. Of course, there wasn't a whole lot for our group to do except talk incessantly, carry on the search for more people who'd retained their minds, and I guess be ready to offer defence in case the crazies came back our way again. Sometimes we engaged in half-hearted mock-sex games, but this was more frustrating than fun. If we had a leader it was Marlene, the giver of names, but I'm not sure any of us ever really thought that way. I was Marlene's sidekick in this nonexistent hierarchy: among other things, it was my job, along with a guy of roughly the same effective age as myself called Al, to step in and break up the occasional fight that threatened to break out among the others. Al was an easy-going sort of guy, which was a good thing: it meant we two peacemakers never argued between ourselves.
Twice we brought in newcomers from the sea, as we'd all at some stage been brought in, but both of the people we salvaged soon, despite our best efforts to keep them talking, became mindless – "deadies", as Marlene somewhat ruthlessly called them to distinguish them from ourselves. "Something in the air," said Marlene with resignation as we reluctantly abandoned the two we'd saved.
Aside from Marlene and Al and me, the ones I can recall in our band were Eileen (young and very pretty), Leonie (older than Marlene, but even prettier than Eileen), William (he laughed when Marlene gave him his name, because he came from the Gansiello Mountains region, somewhere in the Far Orient, apparently), Derek (an elderly man who liked to keep his emotional distance from the rest of us, frequently weeping over the wife he'd never see again), John, Barbara, Rita, Jefferson, Mike ... And then there were the children. I always felt a little sadness when I saw them, at the thought of the lives they'd not been allowed to lead. That didn't seem to concern Polly or Andrew much, though. Polly couldn't have been more than about eight. Andrew was in the early stages of adolescence, so perhaps there was a reason he showed few regrets about leaving his previous life. They were both luckier, of course, than the deady children we so often saw. To see a child's face completely robbed of animation ... It's not something you want to see as often as we did.
There were other people in our tribe, I know, and if I were there among them now I'd be able to reel off their names without difficulty, but ...
And then things changed.
I was walking on my own, trailing behind the others by a couple of hundred metres or so, taking a break from the constant banter – not that I disliked it, you understand: simply that from time to time I wanted to listen to my own thoughts, not other people's.
"Hey, you!" said a voice quite close by.
I started, looking around me. My first thought was that one of the others must have sneaked round behind me to play a prank.
"You!" said the voice, a little louder.
I was surrounded, as always, by a crowd of largely motionless deadies, as if I stood amid a fleshly version of one of the great megaliths of the warm world. I scanned their faces, but all were as vacant of expression as usual.
All except one, now that I scanned a second, more careful time.
She was sitting on the sand with her legs outstretched in front of her, her arms behind her as props to hold her torso erect. I'd walked right past her without even noticing her. The first impression I got, now, was of someone very fat, but I soon realized this wasn't the case at all: she was a big woman, constructed as if to a larger template than the standard for humanity. Her great head with its floss of grey curls was turned toward me, her lips drawn into a sly, conspiratorial smile, her eyes bright with alertness.
"What's your name?" she demanded.
"Joe." By now it had become completely mine.
"Same here."
I stared at her. "You're called 'Joe' too?"
"Without the 'e'. Short for 'Joanne'. Not 'Joanna'. People often think my name's 'Joanna' and call me that. I hate it when people call me 'Joanna'. It's 'Joanne' – got that, little man? But I prefer just being called 'Jo' anyway."
"Hello, Jo," I said stupidly. "I won't call you 'Joanna'."
"Good. You're a quick learner. Pleased to meet you."
"How long have you been here?" It was a question new encounters almost always asked each other within the first few seconds.
She grinned more broadly. "Who knows?"
It was the usual answer.
I smiled in response and squatted down in the sand beside her. Close up, I began to appreciate more fully quite how large she was. She had a cleft in her chin that would have seemed almost disfiguring on anyone else, but on her it was petite. Her breasts – there's little false physical modesty on the beach, because we're all so accustomed to nudity, and so I felt unembarrassed gazing at them in frank interest – were by far the biggest I'd ever been this near to, enormous by the standard of any other woman, and yet on that broad chest, between those great shoulders, they seemed if anything quite small, and they had the apple-like form of small breasts, too. She had a slight yeasty smell; smells, even bodily odours, were unusual on the beach, except for the omnipresent tang of brine. It was the breadth of her hips that had given me that initial impression of fatness; again, in proportion, they were perfectly normal. I guessed she was about the same age as Marlene, perhaps a little older.
"Seen enough?" she said after a while.
"You're ..." I began, waving a hand at her.
"Built to a generous scale," she filled in for me.
"Something like that."
"Or the rest of you are unusually small." She darted a significant glance at my genitals, dangling where I squatted.
I laughed. "Touché."
"I watched your friends go by," she continued.
"Why didn't you make yourself known to them?"
"Why should I?"
I shrugged. "Companionship?"
<
br /> "It's a good idea to find out what your companions are like before you commit yourself," she observed.
It was something I hadn't thought of. At the beginning I'd always been so glad to make the acquaintance of someone new that there'd never been any room to have second thoughts. Later, I'd grown accustomed to the fact that strangers on the beach were pleased to discover each other. And yet there'd been that band of religious crazies, and one or two others whom we'd met since ...
"So," she said when she'd finished watching these thoughts drift through my mind, "I waited to pick out the straggler."
For a moment I was frightened of her. She could have crushed me easily by folding me in one of those hugely muscled arms.
"Don't worry, Joe. If I'd wanted to harm you I could have done it a dozen times by now. I just want to get to know you a bit, find out something about your friends – I assume they're your friends. You're not just dogging them, are you?"
"No. Not at all." I told her I'd just wanted a little peace, and then I described a few of these people who'd become so vitally important to me – the same people some of whose names I now can't remember. I spent more time talking about Marlene than the others, and Jo noticed this.
"She's special?"
"Yes. She was the first ... person I met after I'd got here. For a long time there were just the two of us, before we met Eileen, and then John. But I think Marlene would be special to me anyway. I just like her a lot. I guess it's lucky we didn't meet back in the ... in the real world. Here, love doesn't get in the way of things, or find itself gotten in the way of by things, the way it does there. We might have ended up having a wild May–September love affair and destroyed the friendship, the real love, we had. You know what I'm talking about?"
"Yes," she said. "It's easier when you can keep everything shallow."
I gaped at her. That wasn't the way I'd have thought of it.
"You ever told her how you feel about her?" said Jo.
I spread my hands. "There's no need to. She knows."
"Does she?"
"Well, yes."
Jo sucked her lips, stared at the hated sea. I began counting the breakers, a habit all of us had when there was nothing at all else to think about. There were twelve of them before she spoke again.
"Ever wondered why you all speak the same language? Me too?"
I hadn't. I said so.
"Why not?" she said.
It hadn't ever struck me as being curious. It had just seemed ... natural. I told her that, too.
There was another pause, this time for fourteen breakers.
"Remember," she asked me at last, "I said I wanted to sus you people out before committing myself to joining you?"
"Yes."
"I meant it. I'm not interested in becoming a part of your merry little tribe if it's just to have my ears filled with small-talk. I can do without small-talk – if I'm desperate, I can always talk to myself, and I sometimes do. No, what I'm wondering is if you people are worth my fellowship. It sounds to me as if, somewhere along the line, you've forgotten that notion of commitment."
"If you mean are we loyal to each other, then ..."
"What a quaint term, 'loyal'. It's good to hear it from someone your age. It gives me hope." Her smile this time was slow and reflective, as if she were remembering something, someone, from long ago. "But I was meaning more than just dutiful loyalty."
"We accept each other for what we are."
"Better."
I was at a loss for words. On the beach, where there was so little else, what we were to each other was our entire world. I attempted to explain this, but I knew the explanation was clumsy.
"Would you kill for each other?" Jo said. "Die for each other?"
I let out a bark of laughter, and shoved myself to my feet, holding out a hand to help her up. God knows what would have happened had she taken it. She had to have a mass at least twice mine. "Kill?" I said bitterly. "Die? How could we kill or die here, where we're all dead already."
A strange look crossed her face as she clambered upright, but I lost sight of it as this giantess began towering over me. Jo started to say something, then said instead, "It's not whether you can do either of these things. It's whether you would."
"Then I guess yes, we would."
"But you're not prepared to tell Marlene you love her?"
"She's the one I'd be readiest to die for."
"Interesting." She put a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Introduce me to your friends, little fellow."
7
Jo fitted in remarkably well with the rest of us. She and Marlene hit it off from the outset, and she made no attempt to take over or subvert Marlene's unofficial leadership role. Soon the three of us were virtually inseparable, which could have caused difficulties among the others had it not been for Jo's personality – or, at least, the personality she revealed after she'd joined the troop. Gone was the intense, knowing, cynical, slightly bitter, darkly laughing woman I'd initially met; in her place was one who was always game for a joke or to talk – as we did, in endless circles – about our past lives and our philosophies of life. Even Derek – shy, retiring, sorrowing Derek – warmed to her, coming out of his shell to the rest of us as well. And Jo's size had its advantages, too. Once we saw the crazies, or another group of zealots very much like them; they kept their distance, throwing a few religiously flavoured obscenities in our direction but then retreating rather hastily back down the beach, trying to pretend this wasn't with their holy tails between their holy legs, pursued by Jo's laughter. And the laughter of the rest of us.
There was a lot of laughter now, more than there had ever been before.
We laughed when we found the stone.
It was the first time any of us had found anything on the beach that wasn't just sand – or a deady, of course. No driftwood came in with the waves. There were no shells or mysteriously intact bird skeletons as you'd find on an ordinary beach. Just neverending sand.
And now this stone. It was more of a rock or a boulder, if one can make that distinction. It was about the size of a basketball, and not smoothed by the water but lumpy, prominently layered, sharp-edged and flaky, half-embedded in the sand, giving the illusion that it was still in the process of a long, slow emergence at the end of a subterranean rock-factory's production line. (We'd several times dug down a few metres with our hands to see if we could find a rocky substrate, but all we'd discovered was ever more tightly packed wet sand, until we'd given up in a welter of bad language and torn fingernails. The fingernails regenerated within minutes, but they hurt like hell until they did so.) I tried to pluck it out of its sandy nest and couldn't: it was far too heavy for me, and far too secure in its sandy socket. Jo, of course, picked it up easily enough – and raised it over her head with a childish look-I'm-a-weightlifter grin on her face. But she dumped it back down on the sand quickly enough.
"Where the heck can it have come from?" said Marlene as we gathered around.
"Reality," said Jo, rubbing her hands together. "It's an igneous intrusion of reality into this joint."
"You're saying this isn't reality?" I squinted along the beach, with its listless occupants, then out to sea. "It all seems real enough to me."
"It would, wouldn't it?"
I couldn't argue with that. Besides, I knew what she meant. What this rock signified was that the beach and the ocean weren't the entirety of things. We'd come to accept them as being all there was to the universe – to the pocket universe we'd somehow landed ourselves in – but now we had a clear indication that it wasn't completely cut off from the rest of existence. There was an outside. However the rock had reached here, it hadn't simply been rolled up from the seafloor by an unusually powerful surge. It had come from somewhere else.
Which led to an obvious question.
"Do you think someone brought it?" Eileen was the first to say it.
"You see any footprints?" said Marlene.
We couldn't, but that didn't mean anyth
ing. In their aimless wandering, the deadies trampled just about every square centimetre of sand fairly uniformly. Trails of our own, more purposive footprints would remain for a while, but inevitably be overscuffed by the others until at last there was no trace left of our having been there. Towards the sea, of course, the languid lapping of the water erased everything much more quickly. For all we knew, somebody – perhaps another giant like Jo – could have come staggering up out of the waves and planted the rock where we'd found it. It'd have to have been a long time ago, though, because of the way the rock was embedded, and anyway the whole scenario seemed pretty ludicrous.
No, whatever had brought the rock here must have been a natural force at work. But what were the natural forces in this world, this universe, of the beach? Gravity: of course. We stayed rooted to the sand, didn't go floating off. I supposed the nuclear forces, electromagnetism – all that stuff – were operative as well. We could hear sounds, see sights. At a less arcane level, geologic forces like erosion must be in play, or else where did the sand of the beach come from? But other natural forces which I'd taken for granted clearly weren't a part of this world. Conservation laws, for example. My own body, in moving, must use up energy, yet I didn't eat anything and I wasn't shrivelling away. Wherever the energy was coming from, it wasn't being produced in any way I could even guess at.
"It's a gift," said Jo, her tone implying there was no possibility of contradiction. "We've been sent it. It's a tool, something for us to use."
"For what?" I must have sounded worried, as indeed I was: worried she was talking like one of the crazies, with their certainties of belief in the irrational.
She looked me directly in the eye. Hers were soft brown, I noticed for, surprisingly, the first time. "You know what I mean, Joe."
I didn't, and yet I felt as if I did. It was like the sensation you have when some tinpot demagogue persuades you to believe in whatever he's marketing; you have that self-satisfied feeling of completely understanding what is after all only obvious commonsense ... and it's only later you realize, picking it over in your mind, that it's absolute balls. The only difference was that now, looking into Jo's eyes, there were no red alert signals springing up in my mind to warn me I might be being conned. She was telling me the truth. I did know what she meant ... only I'd somehow mislaid the knowledge. I'd be able to find it again later, I was sure.