They did not pursue him because they figured he would soon fall down and they could reach him more easily when the earthslide came to a halt. However, he did not fall, but just kept staggering on. By the time they realized they were losing him, they had already lost him, because another great slab of bedrock, glistening with moisture and smeared with mud, burst from the ground between them and Henry, hiding him from them. Afterward, they spent hours searching for him, turning over the bodies of the many dead and injured people who wore blue jeans, but he was nowhere to be found. They never saw him again.
All the chaps were trained battlefield medics in addition to the many other things that they were, so they knew exactly what was the matter with me—I had a concussion—and how to stabilize a person in my condition. After treating me, they carried my inert body, a dead weight, over mountains of rubble—on their backs, presumably, though they were too taciturn ever to describe this flight to me. The bridges and tunnels were gone, but this didn’t matter because the Hudson and the East River had been dammed and filled in by dirt and debris, so they simply walked across, climbing over the obstacles they could not skirt. By some sort of chaps’ magic, they knew exactly where they were going, even though their destination was no longer where it used to be. The outpost Clementine had set up was several hundred miles away. We walked—and after I came partly to my senses, sometimes ran—the whole way. At such moments, my head ached terribly as my bruised brain bounced against bone. The chaps foraged in the ruins of supermarkets and houses for food to eat and water to drink and pain medicine for me, which I refused to take because of the baby. For the moment, there was still plenty of everything. Sometimes they slaughtered and cooked chickens or livestock from the flocks and herds that roamed the countryside. The dead, human and other mammals, lay everywhere, covered with flies, crawling with maggots, oozing disease. Birds including escaped poultry and small animals including dogs and cats fed on them. Rats scampered in multitudes, a great gray moving carpet. I turned my face away from such sights and put my hands on my belly as if shielding the baby’s eyes. Since waking up I had been absolutely certain that I was pregnant. At moments I was sure that Henry was speaking to me, reassuring me, through the child in my womb.
We also encountered living people. They stood beside the roads—or what used to be roads—staring at us dead-eyed as we jogged by, as though we had roused them from a collective sleep and they were not yet entirely aware that they were awake and walking. Sometimes the chaps sang cadence as they ran. Once in a while, gangs of younger survivors attacked us. The chaps, in their offhand way, neutralized them with expert brutality, hardly breaking stride as they made the kill. As a child on my grandparents’ farm I had seen their three dogs attack a woodchuck and tear it apart in an instant. Watching the chaps at work was like watching that.
My concussion was a blessing of sorts. My memory of the last hour of Manhattan, my memory of Henry, my memory of practically everything, was blurred. My speech was slurred. Words eluded me. If asked a question I chased the answer around in the half-darkness of my mind like a name I couldn’t quite recapture. I was tired to the bone, though my body did not seem to realize this and kept on functioning. Nothing to worry about, the chaps said, the feeling will go away. It never did—not really, not altogether. In my heart I didn’t want it to. Nothing else was as it used to be. Why should my brain be different?
Our commune grew. People joined us, especially the educated who wanted to be useful and young women who had no one to protect them from the gangs. If rape had made the women pregnant, as was sometimes the case, our doctors and nurses delivered the babies or performed abortions. Some of the women brought children with them. More had lost or abandoned their families. Clementine, as Henry’s viceroy, interviewed each applicant. If they were suitable—that is to say, intelligent, strong, free of disease and illusion, possessed of a skill they could practice for the common good and teach to an apprentice (Clementine loved farmers, carpenters, craftsmen of all kinds, engineers, nurses, physicians and surgeons, dentists, soldiers), they remained. If not, she sent them away. She was coldhearted about this. It was her job to put together a team that would not merely survive, but thrive and breed itself up into a thinking and doing class. Over time, this social Darwinism of hers resulted in a miniature raj, with the lucky elite living on the green and pleasant island that was a flawed replica of the perfect Blighty of their dreams. This paradise was a replica, a symbol, a fancy, but a reality nonetheless. As before the Event, everyone else existed outside the cantonments in dust, stench, and desperation. In early days we saw these people when they fell on our commune like Stone Age war parties, looking to steal women and weapons and animals they could take home and eat. Some of them named themselves after the fiercer Indian tribes—Comanche, Apache, Mohawk, Cheyenne, Shawnee—and were said to practice a religion whose eucharist was marijuana, just as they had done before the end of civilization. Stoned or not, they were no match for the chaps or for the new chaps the original chaps adopted and trained. Our warriors punished them in battle and drove away such survivors as they chose not to kill. After a while, the raids dwindled and finally ceased altogether.
It wasn’t a bad life—not much different, really, from the one led by the whole of the human race until quite recently. The obsession with time went away. The lust for possessions intensified because there was so little to possess. Lust ruled the world, which was, on balance, a good thing in a world that needed to be repopulated. For the first time since the Middle Ages, people lived entirely in natural light, and so close together and to the other animals, that the idea of privacy simply perished. The apocalypse was, in a way, a victory for the Greens to an extent that was almost comical. Pollution diminished to almost nothing. Colors that had not been seen outside of paintings since the Industrial Revolution reappeared. Quicker than anyone expected, the land healed. Flowers bloomed. New kinds of grasses grew. The trees came back. The ones that had fallen in the quake provided an inexhaustible supply of firewood and lumber. The hunter-gatherer stage quickly ended, though the tribes never disbanded, just huddled together as in the past, and continued to prey on one another. Commune by commune, agriculture was rediscovered. We raised food from the seeds Clementine had stockpiled, and from the seeds of those plants. Feral animals were captured and domesticated again. Inside the commune, we ate a healthy diet—grass-fed, free-range meat, vegetables and fruits fertilized with urine and manure. The demanding monotony of producing food and keeping nature at bay provided plenty of exercise for everyone.
Culture lived on. Like Marx’s money, it seemed to have a life of its own and the ability to feed on its own body. Children were taught to read, write, figure, and conform. Books—long regarded as artifacts of a lesser civilization—were salvaged from ruined libraries and schools, musical instruments from schools and houses. When books, or memory, did not provide the necessary data, Clementine looked it up on Henry’s sphere. Synthetic drugs disappeared. Quite soon the medicines collected from pharmacies were all gone. Except among small children and the very old, this didn’t seem to alter the death rate very much. Others believed that the kids who survived would transmit their immunity to their own children and the species would end up being healthier and sounder genetically. Until the middle of the twentieth century, after all, mankind had demonstrated that it could increase quite handily in the absence of antibiotics. Meanwhile, there seemed to be fewer crazies than there used to be, and who knows but what the disappearance of pills had something to do with that.
For music, we sang, all together, usually at night, under the moon and stars that were gradually becoming brighter. Gradually the sun, too, stopped being the wrong color and went back to being the blinding star that human eyes were not designed to look upon. The planet was beautiful again in a way that most living people had never realized it was meant to be. The dust of the hyperquake dispersed quicker than had been thought possible, and the ash and smoke of new volcanoes were less of a problem than Henry had
thought they might be, partly because most of them were bubbling away underwater, attracting fishes to their warmth, instead of releasing dust and ash into the atmosphere. Tiney and her playmates took the only world they knew entirely for granted. Thanks to Clementine’s storytelling, the planet she lived upon was, to her, a Neverland in which children flew over the housetops in their nightgowns, holding hands with happy fairies that rang like bells, and a flying boy played the flute in his calmer moments, and nothing that was naughty or nice ever came to an end.
Because I was Henry’s wife, I lived as a vestal. No male dared to look at me with lust. To my great surprise, chastity suited me. All my sexual memories had to do with Henry. Other lovers, even the ones who had been more expert than Henry, even Adam, dissolved. Henry was the love of my life. I fantasized about finding his grave and lying down beside him one last time. Only my love for Tiney kept me from wandering off in search of his unfindable sepulcher. Gazing at our daughter as she played—golden hair, golden skin, golden hints of her father’s mind—I understood at last the meaning of the word seed as it applies to the begetting of children. From Tiney or her descendants, another Henry would sooner or later be born. I was sure of this. It was a banal thought, but what difference did that make? As time went by, I had fewer and fewer visitations from the past. My memories faded, my dreams about what used to be ceased. Though I remembered them, I never wondered whatever happened to Melissa or Adam or my abandoned child. Even Bear sank irrevocably into the mists.
Henry would never appear at the gate. I was sure of that. It was too unlike him. It was possible that somebody else would come, and though the visitor looked nothing like Henry, would insist that he was Henry. If that happened, would I play along like the wife in that medieval tale of impersonation? Would I sleep with the imposter, would I talk to him in the dark, would I make this absurdity into an idyll?
I didn’t think so, but how could I know? Maybe impulse—my oldest friend, mon semblance—was not so withered after all.
If Henry was alive, the best thing he could have wished for, the most desired thing, was that he might at last pass through the world unnoticed. We did nothing that might cause him to be remembered. The last thing Henry had said to Clementine, she told me (why hadn’t he said this to me?), was that the commune should not be named for him, that there should be no monument, no biography, no gossip calling itself history. In accordance with his wishes, our commune did not bear his name. No child born there was ever named Henry. The formula worked. Quicker than even Henry might have hoped or thought possible, he was forgotten outside the tiny circle that had known what he looked like, sounded like, or how sometimes he loosened his grip on his singularity for a fleeting moment and smiled a whole, delightful smile instead of the furtive semi-smile that was nearly always on his lips.
I remembered everything. How Henry was, how he looked, how he had found all those grails and carried them out of the labyrinth and into the light. In the deepest recesses of my self, I thought, even while scoffing at the possibility, that he might sooner or later turn up. One morning just before I woke, he would call. Even if he came back as an old, old man, as ancient as I myself would be by that time, I would know him, as no one else could, for the Henry he was inside his disguise of raddled flesh and twisted bone. I would know what worlds spun behind his rheumy eyes.
Even if he looked me in the eye and smiled that unfinished smile and swore that he was Henry.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Charles McCarry
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3253-8
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