by Wren, M. K.
“Mary, what did you and Rachel do after . . . after your friends were killed?”
This may not be a sanctioned lesson, but Stephen is still curious, and I’ve never limited my teaching to the hours designated for school.
“Well, we barricaded ourselves from the outside world, Stephen.”
“Because of the Rovers?”
“Partly, although the local Rover population had been drastically reduced. No, what really drove us into isolation was Lassa fever.”
“Isolation? What do you mean?”
“Just that we made ourselves entirely self-sufficient so we wouldn’t have to go out among other people for any reason. We were already nearly self-sufficient. We had land and water and livestock. We pooled our money to buy everything we’d need to keep going for—I don’t know. A year or so. We never committed ourselves on the length of our retreat.” And never imagined it would, in a sense, be permanent.
“What kind of things did you buy?”
“Well, nonmotorized farm implements, for one thing, like the plow we still use. Of course, training Silver to pull it wasn’t so easy. We bought seed, everything from clover to squash, canned goods by the case, flour, rice, and beans by the sack. Canning jars, kerosene, gasoline—for the chain saw, not the van. Medicines, veterinary supplies, clothing, and many more things I can’t remember now. In a way, the preparation for our siege was good for us. It gave us something to take our minds off the grief, and we needed that, especially Rachel.”
Stephen’s dark eyes are clouded. He nods and pulls in a deep breath. “How long did it take you to make all your preparations?”
“About a month and a half. By then the edge was off our grief, and even in our isolation, life returned to a kind of norm. There was more work without Connie and Jim to help, but I still did some writing, and Rachel did some painting. It was an oddly peaceful hiatus, yet we were never free of fear. We were living through the death throes of a golden age.” I look down at the blank sheets of fine rag watercolor paper, and Stephen waits patiently.
“It was reaching critical mass, Stephen, all the deadly factors coming together. We still had our window on the world. The television. We knew about the riots and revolutions and the cities surrendered to anarchy. We knew about the failure of the monsoon in India for the third year in a row, the locusts in the Mediterranean and Africa, the killer smogs in Europe and on the East Coast of this country, about the Sino-Russian War, the nuking of Jerusalem, the droughts all over the world. And, of course, there were always stories about the Lassa epidemic and starvation. It was falling apart out there, and yet Rachel and I kept hoping. Now I can’t imagine why. It was too late for hope.”
Stephen seems to be watching the children, but his frown tells me his thoughts are elsewhere. “Miriam says it was prophesied, all the . . . falling apart.”
I make no comment on prophesies. “We were also aware, through our window, of the crisis over that Russian fishing fleet. Some American admiral decided they were too close to our coast and sank all twenty ships. There was a furor in the circles of power, and all the charges and countercharges had nothing to do with the fishing fleet. In fact, we’d been on fairly good terms with the Russians for a long time. But most wars began with a triviality. What was really happening was a kind of mass madness—the same kind of madness that developed in animal studies when a confined population increased past a crucial point. But we were supposed to be smarter than white rats. And yet . . . it finally happened.” I feel my eyes ache with tears even after all these years. That grief can’t be salved by time, not for those of us who lived through that ultimate human catastrophe.
I wonder how many of us are left in the world now.
Stephen asks, “What was Armageddon like here at Amarna?”
I look out at the clear, brilliant sky. “September fifteenth. Indian summer. That evening, Rachel and I watched the six o’clock newscast—the one that came to us via the new Federal Information Broadcasting System. I always wondered what bureaucrat came up with that title, if there was one among them who had a sense of humor. I mean, I can’t believe no one realized it would inevitably be abbreviated FIBS.”
Stephen smiles, but uneasily. “What did the newscast say?”
“Well, FIBS lived up to its acronym. Two days before, it had reported that cities were being evacuated in Russia, but on September fifteenth, Rachel and I—and the rest of the nation—were assured that negotiations were under way with the Russians, that the crisis was in fact over. So, we went out to the garden to pick zucchini and butternut squash. I remember a storm was coming in over the ocean from the southwest, but the sky was still clear in the east.”
“What did you see? How did you know what had happened?”
“We didn’t know. We only assumed. First we heard the FEMA warning siren from Shiloh Beach. It was so far away, we could barely hear it. Then suddenly it stopped. That’s when I looked at my watch. My digital watch. It had stopped, too. The numbers vanished. And in the eastern sky we saw the strange colors.”
“What . . . what were they like?”
I hesitate, trying to call up the words for those evanescent colors. They were no more amazing than what I see now in this sunset sky and in the mirrors in the sand. But before I can speak, I hear hurried footsteps behind me. Stephen turns, and I watch wariness take shape in his face.
“Stephen, what are you doing here?”
I look up at Miriam, and she looks down at me. She seems to expect me to answer the question. I remain silent, and Stephen rises.
“I’m just talking to Mary.”
“I can see that. You don’t have a lesson today. It’s the sabbath. Anyway, it’s time for bed. Go out and tell the other children.”
He nods, glances uncertainly at me as he goes to the door. When it closes behind him, Miriam asks, “What were you talking to him about?”
“About the End,” I answer flatly. “About Armageddon.”
“What do you know about Armageddon?”
She’s thinking of Saint John, of course. “Miriam, I know a great deal about it. I lived through it.” And she was born of the next generation. What I lived through is to her as much a legend, a mythic event, as Saint John’s revelation. To her it is Saint John’s revelation, whatever our Elder says, and however difficult it might be to explain the obvious discrepancies between revelation and reality. I wonder how she explains the fact that I survived. Only the blessed were supposed to survive her Armageddon.
Miriam’s lips part to speak, and I read in her eyes a rankling rage unmasked. I don’t know what I expect her to say, but I am for a moment afraid.
But it is never said. The rage is hidden behind cool indifference.
The children are coming in, faces flushed from their games. They each pause to wish me good night and kiss my cheek, then hurry past the kitchen and through the dining room to the basement door. Miriam turns and follows the children. I watch her until she disappears beyond the door, then I close my eyes to listen to the sounds of voices from the kitchen, the grinding of Bernadette’s pestle, the crackling of the fire, but there’s no warmth or peace here now.
At length, I look out at the beach. The color is almost gone. And I think about Stephen’s question: what was Armageddon like?
I don’t know what it was like anywhere else. I can guess, but I don’t know. Here, it was a day much like this one, except at the other end of the year.
And it was a day of terror beyond comprehension. After all these years, I still grieve for it.
But I don’t understand it. I will never understand it.
Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness. . . . Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile. Not a single one but has at some time wept.
—HERBERT GEORGE WELLS, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY (1920)
When had night come?
Mary Hope tried to remember. Minutes ago? Hours? How much time had passed, and what time was it now?
Mary’s hand stirred abortively under the comforter. She didn’t make the error—again—of looking at her watch. It had stopped, its minuscule circuits burned out in one silent millisecond. In that same millisecond it seemed the circuits of her mind had been destroyed, grids of perception and comprehension charred to inert threads of ash.
Rachel’s old mechanical watch would still be working. They could be grateful for that.
Why?
What difference did it make what time it was now?
This was the end. Time didn’t matter. Or perhaps it was only the beginning.
What is it when there is no time?
No, that was ridiculous, to say something didn’t exist because the means to measure it had ceased to exist. . . .
For all the time Mary couldn’t now measure—a few hours; it couldn’t be more—her mind had functioned erratically on two levels she couldn’t integrate. Neither the events of the last hours nor her thought sequences had imprinted themselves coherently in memory.
What am I doing here?
Did she ask that aloud? No. It only seemed like a question that should be asked aloud.
She knew the answer. One part of her mind knew it. The other part couldn’t make sense of it.
The lithium-cell emergency light glowed atop a stack of cartons. Foolish to leave it on. They should save the batteries. At the foot of the basement stairs, like the debris of an avalanche, bedding, clothing, food, tools lay in shadowed mounds. Something pathetic about the light falling on a ceiling of cobwebbed floor joists; on pocked, concrete walls where the peeling whitewash made blighted patterns; on the yellow, sawed ends of stacked firewood; on the cast-iron Franklin stove; on shelves jumbled with dusty tools and scraps of lumber and pipes and loops of electrical wire and rusted paint cans wearing their colors in serrated collars of old drips—the detritus that basements collect over the years, the kinds of odds and ends that Rachel never threw away.
What were you keeping it for, Rachel?
At least the old mattress and springs had proved useful. Mary made herself aware of herself, of exactly where she was, and knew that was what she’d been avoiding all these hours, wherever she was and whatever she was doing. She listened for her own heartbeat, for the sound of her own breath, and she thought, I am alive, I am here, this is now, and it is real.
Images flickered in the nether reaches of her mind: fire and blinding white caldrons of light, black bones of girders, towering monoliths warping, splintering, disintegrating.
She was alive, but her mother was dead. Everyone she had known in Portland was dead. The city was dead, and how many cities with it?
But she was alive.
At this moment, in this place, she was huddled with Rachel on the old mattress, buried under a down comforter, propped with pillows between them and the concrete wall. Rachel’s right arm was free of the comforter so she could stroke Shadow’s head, while Shadow panted her fear, ears back. Sparky lay at the foot of the bed, outwardly calmer, yet his eyes shifted constantly from Mary to Rachel. Beneath one of the small, high windows, sealed with boards except for the taped hole for the intake hose, Jim Acres’s filter pump thrummed like an insensate pulse. The air seemed heavy, turgid with the smell of dust and mold.
And beyond the window, the night raged. It had its own pulse.
Mary had to think about that sound, and she found it acidly ironic that it was only the howling, lashing roar of the storm that had swept in from the horizon where it lurked this afternoon.
It was only the storm.
At this moment she had no proof that anything worse than a sou’wester had occurred beyond the sealed windows.
No proof except a watch that had stopped—along with every electrical appliance in the house—and the fact that Jim’s radio, the one that had been stored in the basement in its lead-sheathed box, had offered nothing but stuttering hisses of static.
And the fear and despair that finally came into focus in her mind shook her body, choked off her breath while she strained to stop a cry.
Why?
That was the word she wanted to shriek against the hammering of the storm. But she held it back, because she felt Rachel trembling, too. They clung to each other as if each were paradoxically both the drowning victim and the rescuer. And Rachel said in a sibilant whisper, “Those ignorant, arrogant bastards!”
Mary didn’t attempt a response to that. She knew that anything she tried to say would come out in a scream of rage and chagrin.
It would be a long night, and she wondered how they would know when it was over.
And yet, hope pursues me; encircles me, bites me; like a dying wolf tightening his grip for the last time.
—FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, DOÑA ROSITA (1935)
Like all our meals, breakfast is served at the long cedar table in the dining room. There are thirteen of us at the table; enough for a coven. Today we are treated to eggs scrambled with goat cheese, and I am treated to a duet by Little Mary and Deborah, since I missed their debut as a vocal duo at morning service. They sing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” with enthusiasm and an attempt at harmony on Mary’s part. I respond with applause and words of praise. I’m always glad to hear the children make music, whatever the message in the lyrics. And I like to believe they respond to the music more than the message.
Miriam, of course, values the message above the music, and while the girls sing, she watches me as if to be sure I get that point. I smile and after the duet tell her how sweetly the girls’ voices blend.
An hour later the same table serves for another activity: school. Six days a week, three hours a day, the time determined by the Seth Thomas, the only timepiece that still works. I’m not sure how accurate it is by now.
I have the children for these three hours because I once made a bargain with Jerry.
So, again I sit at the table with my children waiting. My children. At least, when it comes to their education, their humanization, they’re mine. I look at them and think how beautiful they are, as simple and as accessible as the iridescent skin of a soap bubble, and as fragile.
I sit at the west end of the table with the blackboard on one of Rachel’s easels behind me, and in my hand is a precious stump of chalk. There’s one box of pastels left, but I’m always trying pieces of soft stone as a substitute. None I’ve found so far have worked. Nor have I found substitutes for paper and pencils for the children’s use. What little paper is left I hoard like a Scrooge. Enid and Bernadette are allotted a share of the precious sheets, but only the machine-made notebook or typing paper. Still, that suffices for Enid’s garden and livestock breeding records, and for Bernadette’s formulas for her herbal medicines. The pencils are long gone, but there’s still some of Rachel’s India ink, and we make a passable ink from twinberries.
Instead of paper, the children use slates of sorts—small rectangles of untempered Masonite that Rachel had prepared for encaustics. The smooth, white gesso ground takes well the marks of the vine maple charcoal sticks I make, for which Enid knits minuscule sleeves to keep the children’s fingers clean. Enid considers cleanliness next to godliness, but the children blithely smear their hands and even their faces with charcoal every day. But it’s easily removed, godly cleanliness restored.
Jonathan sits on my right today. He’s fourteen, Jerry and Miriam’s first child, and inbreeding has shown no deleterious effects in him. He is in every way his father’s son, even to Jerry’s tendency to naiveté and his intrinsic dependability. And like Jerry, Jonathan isn’t particularly good at reading and verbalization; his forte is mathematics, and in that he’ll soon surpass me.
Isaac sits next to
Jonathan, his half-brother. My sweet Isaac with his asthma and club foot. He’s a little slow mentally, and I don’t expect much of him in school. I’m just glad to have him here, this loving, fey child. He teaches me, I think, more than I can teach him.
On my left, Stephen occupies his usual seat. My scholar, my hope for the future of humankind—or this small colony of humankind. He is also the family’s hope genetically. His father was an Arkite, so he carries neither Miriam’s nor Jerry’s genes. All the other children do, and sooner or later, that will cause problems.
But sooner or later, this colony will find other survivors or be found by them. That’s inevitable. And necessary, although I wonder if the family will survive discovery intact. Yet change is also inevitable.
Next to Stephen on my left is Little Mary, Stephen’s half-sister. She has Jerry’s blue eyes and brown hair, but her skin is darker. Mary is eight, the first child born at Amarna, and Esther named her for me. An honor, I know, but I hope she won’t have to be called Little Mary too many more years. Probably not. She’s not a scholar like her brother, but she’s extraordinarily adept with her hands. Now she’s drawing cats on her gessoed slate, and for an eight-year-old, her drawings catch the lithe essence of catness amazingly well.
Next to Mary is her singing partner, Deborah, who has also begun scrawling on her slate. She’s six, Miriam and Jerry’s youngest, and Miriam’s image, with her copper hair and fair skin. She’s vivacious and flirtatious as I suspect Miriam might once have been. Or wanted to be. I suppose I encourage that in Deborah even at the risk of spoiling her.
The youngest of the children isn’t here. She’s only three, and hasn’t yet become one of my children. Rebecca’s child—the one whose birth killed her. Rebecca’s last wish was that the child should be called Rachel. A fitting memorial, I think, to Rachel Morrow.
“All right, children, let’s begin.” I lean forward, pick up the damp rag in its plate in the center of the table, and hand it to Mary. “You and Deborah clean your slates. Now, today we’ll start with numbers. Specifically, the number one million. I’ve talked about millions of things before, but do any of you really know what a million is?”