by Greg Hrbek
They took Noah in one direction and led Skyler in another. Down the hallway of an evacuated ward. Windows blown out. The young cancer and leukemia patients had gone to the fallout shelter or acute care; and now here Skyler was, with other parents and guardians from the red group, walking over broken glass and smeared blood. She held a towel and a gown. Every shower on the ward was streaming water. She went into a bathroom and shut the door behind her; removed her clothes and added them to a pile of contaminated clothes; then stepped into the warm flow. Bowing her head, she shampooed the tar out of her hair. She went down on her hands and knees and tried to vomit directly into the drain. She had seen a land line telephone in the outer room. If it worked, she had to call them. She wanted to talk to them. But from the very beginning, blindly and whole-heartedly, like someone under the spell of ageless superstitions, she had been afraid to. She laved every inch of her skin with liquid soap and stood beneath the water for a count of sixty.
“Sky. Oh, Sky.”
“I’m okay.”
“Where are you?” her mother asked.
“I’m at a hospital …”
“Skyler.”
It was her father now. Just as she had known. Their voices. Each so loving and terrified: she wasn’t going to live through this.
“Sky, are you hurt?”
She told him no and that she was safe where she was, but it was a children’s hospital and she couldn’t stay there.
“Why not, hon.”
She was wearing the gown and her tennis sneakers. Standing by an empty bed. In the bathroom a few feet away, the next person was showering and she could hear that person throwing up. She tried to explain to her father what the doctor had explained to her. That given her proximity to the explosion, the time of her exposure, and the presentation of symptoms—
“Slow down,” her father said. “Let me talk to a doctor.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Sky …”
She felt faint all of a sudden and the tears in her eyes seemed very hot. Her father was talking. Suggesting she do things that made no sense. He was too far away to understand. A hundred miles north—and the bridge between here and there didn’t exist anymore, the way from here to the town she’d grown up in, enfolded by hills yellow in summer (the arrow of the wildfire danger sign set to orange) and emerald green in spring; the river beneath the redwoods, flowing west, meeting the ocean at a shore where harbor seals came to pup every spring when the hills greened.
Outside the hospital, Skyler saw that the rain was coming to an end. The black rain, people had been saying, was in fact the water of the bay, drawn up into the cloud and fallen fouled back to earth.
She had heard a lot of things in the hospital.
What was true?
If we decontaminate now, we will probably live. No matter what we do, we have a week at most. There’s another plane. Another plane went down in the middle of the country. It wasn’t a plane; it couldn’t have been, it was too bright. It was on fire. No, not fire, a burning light. Her father said: just walk, walk south, Sky, and we’ll meet you, we will find you.
She thought of something she had read in Existential Philosophy. What if a demon came to you in your loneliest moment. Said: this life, just as you have lived it. Would you choose it over and over again for all eternity? Are you strong enough to want nothing more?
She had walked two or three blocks, under a brightening sky, when she suddenly believed herself to be missing something. The boy. She stopped short. As if to go back for him. Then remembered. Not mine anymore. Skyler felt the pocket of the hospital gown for her phone and the two small tablets of morphine.
Overhead: blue of noon.
The wind had changed direction. The plume of darkness sheering east. Away from the city, toward the other cities across the bay. And the university. Most of her schoolmates had gone home for the summer, but not all; and now Skyler thought of the names and faces of the ones who had stayed, as she had stayed, though her mother had not wanted her to. In fact had nixed the idea. If not for her father’s intervention, she would’ve been home for the summer. Would be home now. She felt her lips moving and realized she was speaking aloud, barely aloud. Saying in a whisper: Mom. Mom. Don’t blame Dad. It’s isn’t his fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.
She walked miles that afternoon. Beyond the blast zone into streets where windows were still intact; through a neighborhood where someone had sketched upon forsaken vehicles—traced in the blanket of ash laid over hoods and windows (with a fingertip, she thought)—myriad peace signs; and along a wide commercial boulevard where the pharmacies and markets had been reborn as free medical clinics and food banks. She drank down a bottle of spring water. She passed a chain clothing store with its doors propped open; went in and found jeans that fit and a shirt, and rejoined the current of emigrating people. People. Seeing them at last. Complete with bloodied clothing, burned skin, cindery hair; holding hands; conveying each other in wheelchairs, shopping carts, and red wagons; helping to their feet the ones who fell; lending their phones; saying thanks to each other. So many walking together. Like the marches Skyler had been to and to which her mother had gone when she was young and her grandmother before that. Through the streets as one. Across roadways renamed for martyred leaders into the green world of the park, through the shadows and healing scent of eucalyptus trees, past the great Victorian greenhouse, into the maze of the arboretum where they seemed to hear someone, enfolded by the flora, playing a very old song on a guitar, and where Skyler offered to an elderly woman suffering the torment of beta burns one of the two tablets of morphine allotted to her at the hospital. The sun was going down over the ocean, ionized particles endowing the sky with the beauty of skies painted on the domed ceilings of cathedrals. She felt dizzy and feverish. Just for a little while, she thought, lying down on the grass, skin hurting, thinking that in a few weeks her brother would turn three. She had already made secret birthday plans. To bring him into the city, to a science museum by the bay with exhibits that played tricks on your mind and senses. There was one called the Listening Vessels. A pair of giant parabolic reflectors which focused sound in such a way that the whisper of a person seated in one reflector could be heard fifty feet away by a person seated in the opposite one, and vice versa: like reading minds across space and time.
1
Summer in the future. Third straight to be the hottest on record, and the first since Dorian’s birth to coincide with the emergence of the periodical cicadas. Brood X. Also known as the Great Eastern Brood. Magicicada septendecim. Dorian knows all about them from Science class. How seventeen years ago, they sang and mated by the millions; and the females, with knife-like ovipositors, scored the bark of tree branches and laid eggs in the slits. About two weeks later (by which time all the adults had died), the newborn nymphs dropped from the trees and burrowed underground—and that’s where they grew in secret, waiting for their time to tunnel to the surface … It happens one night in June, around sunset. Dorian and his friends are out at the old race track on Union Avenue. For more than a century, the town had been defined and made prosperous by the sport of thoroughbred racing. But that was back before the summers got too hot for horses to be pushed to the limits of speed and stamina. The track is in ruins now. Taken back by nature. The sandy loam and grass a jungle of weeds and brush, though a kind of trail has been forged alongside the running rail—and in the old stables still lay the bones of a racehorse named Strange Victory.
“When are you taking off?”
“6-13.”
“Shit, man. Sayonara.”
“I wish I was going to New France.”
“Why.”
“Because it isn’t a province of America the god damn Beautiful.”
“I sympathize, but the camp doesn’t allow intersexuals.”
“Suck me.”
“How about camel-fuckers. Do they let them in?”
“Jesus, look!”
They all stop talki
ng—Dorian, Zebedee (whose real name is Plaxico), Keenan, and Dean—and look to where Dean is pointing. They have been passing around a green; and each boy thinks, for a moment, that the motion before his eyes must be drug-induced, a trick of his own mind, in which case it’s strange for the others to be aware of it. Then they realize: The ground really is moving. More precisely, the soil (a sandy clay dried to a pale brown after rainless weeks) is trembling, as if the rocks below are subducting like tectonic plates. But it’s not that; it’s the cicadas. The nymphs emerging from their underground cells. At first, the boys think they can be counted. But no. They’re everywhere. Dozens of little heads rising up from the dirt, forelegs reaching up into the air like the arms of babies reaching for something suspended overhead. This is happening everywhere: in the yards, in the park at the center of town, on the campus of the college, in the woods and the nature preserve. The brood is emerging. Slowly and without sound. All across New York and beyond its borders, up and down the Atlantic coast, from the Province of Massachusetts Bay to the Virginia Colony and even west of the Proclamation Line. Dorian is kneeling and watching one of them struggle out of its burrow. Someone offers him the green and he takes another drag … “Just think,” Keenan is saying. (He’s got one of them in the palm of his hand.) “Seventeen years. Since before we were born this little guy has been growing and waiting and now here he is out of the dark ready to—what did Mrs. D’Angelo call it—‘continue the beautiful cycle of nature …’ ” He takes the nymph between two fingers and pinches until the abdomen splits and the gut-snot comes out.
•
I am eleven, going on twelve. I am Dorian. Don’t get me confused with Keenan. Our names have the same last syllable, but we are nothing like each other. He lives on my street. I was in third grade with him and this last year in fifth. But we were never friends until the thing at the mosque. After that, while half the world was harshing on me, Keenan was on my side. To say he hates Arabs is an understatement. It’s like saying Hitler didn’t prefer the Jews as a people. But what I did at the mosque—
Well, I didn’t want to go to the mosque in the first place. What I wanted was for my parents to not sign the consent form. I knew that Keenan’s wouldn’t. I figured half the class wouldn’t be going. “Then you’ll be in the open-minded half,” my mother said, scribbling her signature.
In the end, twelve of twenty got on the bus. My class had been to Albany before. The provincial museum is there: a windowless maze of passages and galleries with everything from combustion-engine cars a century old to the taxidermied corpses of extinct birds whose archived souls call out from speakers in the ceiling. I remember feeling a cramp of anger when I saw the mosque. The imam was standing at the entrance in his long white robe. I was not angry at the imam. He wasn’t very tall and his voice was soft and his skin was black. As he led us through the place, showing us all the things we’d read about in our textbook (the wall that faced Mecca and the mimbar from which the khatib delivered the khutbah), I thought about how most Muslims in America were probably like him, even the Arabs. Despite all that, in the bathroom (in a toilet stall that looked like every other toilet stall in the world, containing a toilet that looked like every other toilet), I unzipped my backpack and removed the magic marker and wrote on the metal partition:
FUCK ISLAM
•
They live now in the Province of New York, not far from the Proclamation Line and Crossing No. 6. Every morning, Kathryn commutes by electric car from their small suburban town to the provincial capital. Albany is a city that appears to her, in these globally warmed days, to be a scale model of itself enclosed in a transparent sphere aswirl with photochemical smog. She takes the exit for the government buildings and brakes at the security scanner of the subterranean garage. Clearance is indicated by a green glow that floods the interior of the car like alien moonlight. Her office is on the twelfth floor of Agency Building 3. A window overlooks the plaza. Down there, she can see the sky, clear as a painting of the sky, in the rectangular surface of the reflecting pool. Once, last winter, she had been staring down into that sky and saw a jet plane crossing the blue, a tiny unreal thing, and she’d been filled with a terror she didn’t understand.
What was it?
San Francisco. Of course. Because a lot of people believe it was a plane. Though others believe very different things. And yet that tragedy was not the source of the fear. The source was harder to trace. Something about a reflection of a thing very far away. The sky facing up. Things turned upside down or inside out … Summer now. Only June, but already very hot. Kathryn plays her voice mails; and while listening, stares down at that mirror of water (upward-facing sky the hazy gray of amnesia) and thinks about her son, the younger one, Dorian, whom she and her husband have been worrying about for months—who, all of a sudden, just when they’ve begun to think that maybe the whole weird thing is finally fading away, comes downstairs at seven-thirty, sits at the counter in the kitchen, fills a bowl with dry cereal, and, while adding milk, as if challenging all of them, her and Mitch and Cliff, to a duel with pistols, says:
“I had a dream about her.”
Her …
Kathryn can remember very clearly where she was, what she was doing, when she heard. Eight years ago now, but like yesterday in memory. They lived in California then. In the Russian River Valley about a hundred miles north of the city, a few miles inland from the Pacific. Dorian three years old. Cliff nine. Dorian at preschool. Cliff at camp, just down the mountain, and Kathryn was home working on a brief in the study when she got an alert on her breaking news app. Something had crashed into San Francisco Bay and exploded. The bridge had been destroyed. The Marina District was on fire. For some reason, she hurried through the house to a door that gave onto a small brick patio: a trellis threaded with bougainvillea; a bird bath; and then a wooden gate that opened onto a side yard windbroken by a line of eucalyptus trees. She went into the grass and stopped. Like she was looking for something and had suddenly forgotten what. She stood there. On the distant hills, the cattle stood motionless, too. Hills the color of straw. Sun. The fog bank melting overhead like a polar cap. Great shelves of fog falling into the sky and fading into the blue. Next thing, she was in the car driving down the mountain and into town. She passed the firehouse and saw that the dial on the wildfire sign was set to orange. On the radio, they were saying intercontinental missile. So she was thinking about where to go, where to take the kids, where to hide. She didn’t know. Because no one had thought about this for many years, much less prepared for it. Nuclear war. Words from a language she didn’t speak, because she hadn’t learned it growing up. No one in her generation had learned it. As she drove, she tried to remember where in town she had seen the sign—yellow and black, three inverted triangles: FALLOUT SHELTER—the kind of thing you’d buy in an antique store, evocative of another time and irrelevant to your own.
When the phone rang, it was not her husband, who was up in Mendocino at a cabin in the forest beyond the reach of wireless signals. There wasn’t even a land line. She touched the answer button.
“Kate,” her mother said. “Do you know what’s happening?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in the car.”
“I’m getting the boys.”
“They’re saying there’s another plane.”
“Plane?”
Kathryn told her mother what she’d heard and her mother said she hadn’t heard that. What she’d heard was a passenger plane with the words AIR ARABIA on the fuselage—and that every airborne flight in the country had been grounded, but there was one not responding to air traffic control. And then she was at the camp and Cliff was running to her under the redwoods by the river, teary-eyed, smartphone in hand, saying an asteroid had hit the city and soon a cloud of dust would encircle the planet and cause our extinction. By the time they got to Dorian’s daycare, Kathryn had convinced him that his online source was not reliable: No one knew yet what had happened. It was about eleven o’cl
ock. The little parking lot was full of cars; parents were carrying children in their arms or securing them in safety seats. Inside, she found Dorian in the story corner listening to Danny and the Dinosaur. It seemed to Kathryn that she was watching the sun of his childhood going down. She didn’t want him to see her until the story was over. Didn’t want the story to end for him.
“Kathryn.”
Beside her stood the director of the center, a woman, maybe fifty, whom the children called Miss Izzy. She asked Kathryn:
“Do you have family in the city?”
“No, not family.”
Dorian turned as if he had heard her voice, though she’d spoken in a whisper. He got to his feet, slowly. Before coming to her, he glanced once more at the open book.
“He doesn’t know?” Kathryn asked.
Miss Izzy shook her head. “We haven’t told the children anything.”
Dorian says he had a dream about her; and then he waits, like someone shipwrecked and marooned who has fired a flare into a dark sky. The colors of distress light up the room. His parents make believe they don’t see. “I have to get to work,” his mother says, and hurries upstairs. Cliff is earphoned. As for his father: It’s summer, classes have been over for weeks, and he is in between writing projects, lost and miserable, convinced he will never conceive another fiction. He has nowhere in particular to be, but he turns to the stove clock as if the sight of the time will create an imminent deadline. 8:02. Dorian eases a spoonful of granola and milk into his mouth. His father removes his eyeglasses and holds them with the silver arms folded into an X. It is hip to wear glasses, to look like you come from another century, but no one actually has prescription lenses in the frames. There isn’t a pair of eyes in the world whose imperfections haven’t been corrected by laser beam—except for those of his father. When Mitchell Wakefield takes his glasses off, he literally can’t see more than a foot in front of himself.