Maybe he could learn emotions from Olivia Kay. She could be his time machine, giving him a glimpse at how a neurotypical’s emotional-empathetic palette developed from the ground up. They could be empathy buddies, she and he. He could watch her eyes as they looked at their mother’s face, learning to mirror it, smiling when she smiled, frowning when she frowned. “Let me try,” he’d say, and Lucy would turn. Smile. He’d look at the mirror, or imagine one inside his head, one in which Lucy was Dev, smiling back at himself.
“Up,” she’d say, twitching an index finger upward, pointing at one corner of his mouth. “Up a little on that side,” she’d say. “Good. And now the other.” And Dev would smile.
“Good,” she’d say, and smile, too, Dev and she, a mirror facing a mirror, their smiles going on forever in both directions.
49
Even though they probably had two years or more before the baby known as OK would start asking questions, Lucy and Dev saw no reason to wait. And so they started asking each other, on her behalf. What would they say happened to her father? Or would Dev step in and be a father for her?
“Huh,” he said, thinking about it. “I never made that connection before.”
“What connection?”
“Stepping in,” he said. “That’s what a stepfather does. He steps in. Get it?”
“O-kay,” she said, understanding but not thinking much of it. Of course, she had a real father before, so . . .
“I think I should just be Uncle Dev,” he said, preferring to keep things flexible—in this area, at least.
That he could pass as the baby’s actual, biological father wasn’t discussed, but it was there. They could see that for themselves. Though she’d come out Caucasian pink, as the lizard wrinkles smoothed in that mysterious process of a baby’s moving from an anonymous lump of protein that pooped and made noise to a stand-alone individual with a personality of her own—as that process progressed, her complexion caramelized, acquiring the pigment bequeathed to her by her father’s DNA. While she’d never be as dark as either Marcus or Dev, she’d also never be as cadaverously white as her Scottish mother. No, her mother’s contribution would be a pair of emerald-green eyes and the slightest hint of auburn in her otherwise black hair, visible only in certain angles of sunlight, while it was setting and cicadas shimmered in the trees.
Perhaps more important—or at least in more need of explaining—was where all the other stuff came from. The houses. The cars. The light bulbs, books, and DVDs. The people, spoken about and seen in the latter two. How had the world in those become the world out here? Obviously, her mom and Dev couldn’t have made all of it, gods though they’d be in her emerald-green eyes. How were they supposed to explain it without scaring her? How were they to explain what happened when all they had was theories about hormones, suicide, and irony?
So what was the kid-friendly version of doomsday? Aliens? Gods? Elves? They needed a maker myth in which the makers came, made, and then went back to wherever, maybe another planet, to go and make stuff there. Anything that didn’t end in the deaths of billions of people.
It was Dev who suggested they just say they got everything from Amazon.
“But what happens when she asks what Amazon is and where it got everything?” Lucy wanted to know. “We’ll still be stuck walking backward to the big bang and left shrugging when she asks what came before that.”
“The ylem, actually,” Dev said, going back to when astronomy had been his whole world, so to speak. “The primordial egg. That’s what there was before the big bang. It’s the thing that went bang.”
“You know what I’m saying,” Lucy insisted. “Every vague, pat answer leads to more specific questions.”
“You mean like God. How old were you when you asked what came before God?”
“I didn’t,” Lucy lied. “Not until everybody died, when I was sixteen. And even then, the question wasn’t what came before God, but what was coming after.”
“So you didn’t question God before?”
“No.” Another lie.
“Why not?”
“It’s a sin,” she said. “Was. Kind of.”
“So we just make it a sin.”
“What?”
“Not believing in Amazon,” he said. “Questioning its existence.”
“So you want to make up a whole new religion just so a kid will stop asking questions,” Lucy said.
Dev nodded. “That’s what religion was for, wasn’t it? That, and tax exemptions.”
Once the baby was weaned—and Dev had made progress in not handling her like she was a bomb—Lucy began trusting him with Olivia Kay more and more often. “Here,” she’d say, plopping her daughter down in front of him. “I’ve reached my quota. I’m all peekabooed out.” Dev, for his part, had no quota when it came to repeating whatever OK wanted him to repeat; apparently, a touch of OCD wasn’t necessarily a handicap when it came to proxy parenting.
In exchange for childcare services, Lucy did the shopping. She didn’t have nearly the qualms Dev had about going beyond the wall, plus Olivia Kay was the primary reason they needed more supplies in the first place, from diapers to baby food to whatever else caught her new-mother’s eye. She used one of the high-riding SUVs Dev hadn’t torched and brought along a semiautomatic assault rifle with extra ammo, just in case. Having learned just how easy it was to die in this germ-crudded, rusty new world of theirs, she also made sure to take along a first aid kit that was at least as well-stocked as a drive-through urgent care unit for the very good reason that that’s where it had come from, having been liberated during her first shopping trip post-Marcus.
During that first trip solo outside the wall, she’d also hit an army surplus place called Harry’s off Telegraph and gotten a couple of field-grade walkie-talkies and extra batteries. Like everything else she took with her “out there,” the walkie-talkies were for just in case. Not that she imagined Dev strapping the baby on and coming to her rescue should a just-in-case occur out there. The just-in-cases she envisioned all had to do with the other side of the channel and involved child-related crises such as diapers needing changing, a belly needing filling, or a broken heart in need of fixing only a mother’s voice could provide.
As it turned out, what she got was the equivalent of a baby monitor, listening in on the contented coos of a daughter apparently oblivious to her absence. Other than that, there were the sounds Dev made, especially once he stopped paying attention to the live mic and fell into playing with the baby to the exclusion of all else.
He seemed to become a different person with Olivia Kay—a more personable one, a sillier one, one she could almost imagine not just procreating with for the good of the species but maybe loving. The most striking thing about his interactions with her daughter was how seriously he took OK as a fellow human being. He didn’t stoop to baby talk, but had one-sided conversations with her, asking her questions and supplying what he imagined her answers might be.
“So what do you think about being the first in the next line of human beings?
“You’re frowning. I guess that means you don’t think much of it.
“I agree. It’s just a label. An accident of timing. If I hadn’t been born when I was born, I would have been something other than what I turned out to be. I don’t know if that would have been better or not. Probably not. Being on the spectrum got me a lot of special handling, I guess.
“A title? Yes, a title would be a lot better than a label. I suggest we call you OK the Queen of the Future.
“I take it from your giggling that you approve.”
And so on.
Lucy wondered if she should allude to any of these conversations, maybe ask how the Queen of the Future was behaving while she was out. But she didn’t want to break the illusion—didn’t want to remind them they had company, listening in. So instead, she’d ask, “Was she any trouble?”
“Nothing but,” Dev would say, a practice smile on his face while OK squeezed his pinky, lay
ing claim to it and everything it was attached to.
Time passed, and Olivia Kay’s baby fat got reallocated into making all of her bones longer, into making her baby’s brain brainier, leading to first words, including the usual suspects, like mama, of course, and deh, which could have been death, but Lucy assured Dev it was probably Dev.
And like Adam in the garden, naming was a way of taking possession, which is exactly what OK did with deh, a.k.a. Dev. And so he busied himself, introducing her to words, her acquisition of language his latest topique du annum, except this topique spread over more than one annum, the so-called formative ones, as Lucy and Marcus’s daughter became a real person, with thoughts of her own, and an active participant in the formerly one-sided conversations Dev and she had while Mommy was out shopping.
And then one day, on just such a trip, Lucy had to break in on playtime, interrupting Dev, who was hiding the “nose” he’d stolen behind his back as little hands slapped at him. “Um, I’m going to be late,” she told them over the walkie-talkie. “I’ve got a little trouble here.”
“What kind of trouble?” Dev asked.
“Rats,” Lucy said, a sense of déjà vu making the word echo in her head.
“Light them up,” he advised, borrowing Lucy’s own expression for whenever she needed to resort to firepower.
“I don’t have that many bullets,” she said, still echoing.
“How many are there?”
“Um, bazillions,” she said. “Give or take.”
Dev’s end of the conversation went silent.
“Hello?” Lucy said. “You still there?”
“I don’t like rats.”
“Join the club,” Lucy said back before clicking off.
So this was it; the end of the break that driving to the land of ice and snow had afforded them. Because it was obvious what these rats foreshadowed. It was the same thing she and Marcus had run from, the same thing that drove them together and pushed them as a couple north, to Dev and Devonshire. Though neither liked the winters the north promised, they’d hoped the pigs would hate the cold even more. The pigs, that is, and the mosquitoes bent on turning unborn little OK into not OK at all. They’d been right about the mosquitoes but wrong about the pigs, apparently. Perhaps the porkers were the victims of their own success as a species, having grazed and rooted themselves out of options. Whatever the reason, they were here or very soon would be, eating everything in their path, except for anything inconveniently wrapped in concrete, say, or maybe charred SUVs.
Once the tide of rats had ebbed to the point where she could actually plant her feet on pavement without stepping on one or more of them, she headed back. Stragglers still hightailing it after the pack had no interest in her, scurrying around her moving feet like little test drivers. Her tires splattered a few of these when she turned on the ignition and started rolling, slowly, fatally through their numbers as she caught up with the others, not aiming at them per se, but not going out of her way to miss them either.
As she got within eyeshot of Devonshire, she noticed that Dev’s broken bottles and SUVs were having the desired effect, the surging sea of rats parting like the red one in the Bible, the flow split in two, passing on either side of the barrier and underneath the railing bordering the river, where they borrowed the water’s current to carry them faster and farther away. By the time she was outside the gate, all but a few had ridden the slope down, the river now so full of rats the only water left seemed to be the shine on their wet and matted backs, their tails pointing straight back in staggered rows while they swam themselves ahead of their own overwhelming wet-fur stink.
“They’re coming,” Lucy announced upon her return.
“Who they?” Dev asked. “The rats?”
Lucy shook her head. “Something much, much worse.”
They decided they needed more glass. And screws and nails and anything sharp and piercing they could add to the broken bottles on the other side—whatever it took to keep the inevitable stampede from coming too close to the wall of charred trucks. The wall had been enough when all it had to keep out were deer, cheetahs, a bear or two. There’d been elephants in the Detroit Zoo, Dev remembered from past school field trips, but they’d never made it from Royal Oak to Devonshire, leading him to suspect they’d either died in their cages or been run down by one big cat or another. And none of the other animals—exotic or domestic—had the sheer weight needed to do much damage. But a stampede of thousands of wild hybrid hogs, anywhere from five hundred to a thousand pounds each, might shake the ground enough to jar apart a truck here, a truck there. And next thing they knew, the flimsier walls much closer would start coming down, no match for the battering of giant, tusked, porcine heads.
So yeah. Broken glass. Screws. Nails. And beyond that, loose bullets scattered like little land mines. And beyond that, rags soaked in motor oil and gasoline. And beyond that—with any luck—a lot of pigs learning a valuable lesson about getting any closer to the world’s most unwelcoming welcome mat.
The sound of squealing traveled faster and farther than the earth-rumble of hooves, and OK’s young ears, still fresh to the highest frequencies humans can hear, heard them first. “What’s that?” she asked, looking up from the dictionary she’d turned into a coloring book.
Neither Dev nor Lucy had heard them yet but were on standby, waiting. The rats had given them fair and early warning—about a day’s worth—during which the bigger two of the world’s three humans busied themselves breaking glass, scattering bullets, soaking rags, trading off babysitting duty and trying to act like they weren’t terrified.
“What’s wrong?” OK asked Dev, who said nothing.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” she tried with Lucy, who didn’t fall for it.
They’d agreed to make up something when the fact that something was up was undeniable—perhaps when the walls were caving in—but had opted for denial in the meantime. When the time came, Dev planned on saying ground thunder, a hitherto unexperienced weather phenomenon OK had no reason to fear (he hoped). Lucy thought she might try out God or, you know, Amazon—also a hitherto unexperienced phenomenon on the child’s part—but with the same punch line: fear not, little one.
Unfortunately, they’d forgotten all about the rest of the pig sounds, beyond the trampling hooves. They’d forgotten about the squealing and grunting and how far they might carry, multiplied over a thousand times. But then OK asked her question and they remembered just before they could hear it too. “Is that pigs?” the little girl asked, and they wondered, fleetingly, before they remembered the See ’n Say they let her play with to their regret at the time and even greater regret now. They’d heard what the cow says, the horse says, and, yes, what the pig says until their dreams smelled of manure, but at least she wasn’t playing with matches.
So yes, the child knew what pigs sounded like; there was no tricking her on that account. But as far as what they were capable of or even how big they were, all she had was that little pink Porky on the See ’n Say, the one that could be any size at all. The one with nary a fang nor tusk nor appetite for little girls named Olivia Kay.
“Yes,” Lucy admitted. “It’s pigs.”
“Can I see?” the little girl asked, springing up from the floor where she lay like something spring-loaded.
“Let’s hope not,” Dev said as the squealing got louder and his body iced slowly around his joints.
Books fell, and crashable things crashed, though in an eerie, noiseless way caused by the louder, enveloping noise of stampeding hooves. Lucy’s mouth made mouth shapes in her daughter’s and Dev’s directions, and their mouths made mouth shapes back. Ground thunder would’ve been a good description of the general din if anyone could hear Dev say it. As it was, the noise sounded like being inside a crack of thunder, slowed down and amped up, recorded and played back on eighteen tracks at different speeds, over and over. The sound became one with the shaking, with the squeals on their own separate track, riding high overhead.
OK faced it all with an innocent kind of awe. The experience of something bigger than her wasn’t new; that’s what her mom and Uncle Dev were. But the experience of the pigs—even at a distance, even held successfully at bay—was bigger than her whole world until that point. Not being able to see them as they shook the house that had heretofore protected her from everything and seemed immovable—the very anonymity of all that power bestowed on it a kind of mystery that (but for the nonbelievers who fed her) could have easily morphed into its own religion, headed by a pigheaded god who shook your house when you failed to worship him in the manner to which he was accustomed.
Which is where the word just came in handy. As in, just pigs.
“It’s just pigs,” Lucy assured her daughter once said pigs had dwindled to the point of allowing conversation again. She’d said it because she recognized in OK her own gullible girlhood, Bible-polluted and impossible to live up to.
But the seed was planted. Whether there were pig gods or not, one thing was absolutely clear to the child, now that the pigs had come and gone: there was something enormous out there, on the other side of the don’t-go-there place, the one with all the bones, just like inside her, just like inside everyone, meaning, so far, her mom and Uncle Dev.
50
Olivia Kay stayed OK for as long as it took her to learn how to misbehave. That’s when the wisdom of a nickname that was synonymous with permission showed its dubious side, as demonstrated in exchanges like:
“Can I go shopping with you?”
“No, OK.”
Followed by the predictable disobedience, followed by the even more predictable, “But you said it was okay . . .”
And there Lucy was, turning the truck around and heading back to home base before advising Dev to use duct tape if the kid got within ten feet of any door that led outside.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 36