Jaimie sometimes thought his father could see the colors because he watched the radio as he listened to it, as if he saw something more than the others. When Theo looked up, he was startled to see his son standing close. Theo unplugged the radio, yanking the plug from its socket by the wire. Theo gave a small, lopsided smile and took Jaimie’s hand to pull him outside.
“You should see this,” he said. “It’s something I haven’t seen in years.”
Jack was on her knees digging in a corner of the garden. Jaimie looked around but didn’t see anything different. Theo pointed up. The sky was azure, without a cloud. It was hard to imagine that anything could change under that sky or that anyone had anything to fear.
“I haven’t seen this since 9/11,” Theo said. “No planes, no jet exhaust. There aren’t any planes up anywhere, not even the military jets or drones,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t they fly the drones?” Jack asked. “Robots can get viruses, I suppose, but not the Sutr virus.”
Jaimie watched his father’s face and recognized the indigo and violets of a new thought’s inception. “They’re drones. The pilots…they’re um…social distancing the pilots, too.”
“Or all the pilots are sick,” Jack said. “It’ll ease up the global warming, I guess.” Jack clawed harder at the earth with her trowel.
“It’s pretty early to start thinking about the garden, isn’t it? There’s still frost to come.”
“It’s something to do,” Jack said. “The way things are going, we should be planting vegetables.”
“No azaleas? No petunias? You love petunias.”
“We’ll plant what we can eat. Cliff said to get some seeds if we’re going to hunker down. I got them. Cabbages are hardy, and I got lots of root vegetables. We’re going to get sick of carrots, I got too many of those…but who’s to say what’s too much now?”
“Think we can eat it all? The kids don’t even like that stuff.”
Jack looked at him sharply, a rub of dirt stuck under her left eye. Jaimie hadn’t seen her look at Theo that way before. “They’ll eat it and like it if there’s nothing else to eat. We’ll be eating a lot of soup, like my parents did in the Great Depression.”
“We don’t know that’ll be necessary yet.”
“Don’t we?”
“We need more data before we panic. I checked the radio. There isn’t an open border anywhere now.”
“Viruses don’t know anything about borders. They’re citizens of the world.”
“The problem could be solved or contained yet.”
“It could, but the people in charge don’t have a great track record for solving problems. Most people are B and C students. There are a few brainiacs working with microscopes, but they’re generally not the ones in charge. Think high school. The jocks ran the show. Same thing now. Get a bunch of people together to solve a problem and it’s not the smartest guy who does the talking. It’s the loudest.”
“We’re brainiacs,” Theo said. “We’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.”
Jack watched the ground and Jaimie wondered if she saw something there that he couldn’t see. Did the earth harbor answers, or just the cold future?
“Last night I did a lot of googling. I already knew that every empire falls. Entropy rules,” Jack said. “I’m not saying this is the end of the world but — ”
“You have to be careful what you read, hon. Lots of people are screaming now.”
“I’m not an alarmist,” she said. “I’m saying this could be the end of the world as we know it. Things are going to change. Everything changes and I’m scared of everything changing.”
“This isn’t going to be that bad. People recover.” Theo said. “Lots of people. Most people. We’ve seen this before. Spanish Flu killed 25 million, but somehow the world kept turning.”
Jaimie’s mother rose, bristling. The boy felt thick needles dance across his forehead and into his ears. It felt like tiny, sharp-toed ants scurrying. The light around her head went from a rich blue to a navy blue. “This isn’t panic. This is what planning looks like. It is precisely because we don’t have enough ‘data’ that we need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. By the time we have enough information, it could be too late.”
Theo crossed his arms and looked away. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying we already used the vacation budget for this.”
“If Cliff’s wrong and it all blows away, we’ll go camping this summer. It’ll be good for ’em. In the meantime, I need you to help me with the yard. I’ll get Anna out here, too, if I can drag her away from the phone.”
He hesitated. “How much do you want to dig up?”
“A rectangle, from the swing set to the edge of what used to be my flower bed.” The swing set sat in the middle of the large yard.
Theo whistled and put his hands on his hips the way he did when he was upset. “That’s a lot of square footage, Jack.”
“We get awfully hungry. I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions and your brother’s got a lot of scary answers. He should know what he’s talking about.”
Jaimie watched his father’s healthy green colors slowly turn to that now familiar sour yellow, mixed with red.
“Are you with me?” Jack asked.
“Of course,” he said.
North Americans expected their doctors to have all the answers they needed when they needed them. They expected limitless supplies of all the basics and luxuries without end, too. They’d depended on technology and wealth for so long, North Americans had difficulty telling the difference between wants and needs. They had more illusions to lose, so they held on to them harder.
That afternoon, Jaimie dug in the ground for the first time. He pulled worms out of the dark, brown soil and arranged them in a line for sorting by size. He counted them and wondered what worms think about. Anna complained a lot at first and then retreated into a stony silence that felt warm and pleasant, at least to Jaimie. It was those times that he felt closest to his sister. The depth of her silence met his own, though her colors flared red around her head and in the center of her chest.
The family dug through the afternoon, overturning turf and softening the ground. Jack worked with a clawed hoe, Theo and Anna with spades and the boy with the small trowel. They broke the clumps of grass, taking turns with a new pickaxe. After half an hour, they were all shiny and wet with effort. The backyard was the family’s first farm and the first time they had all worked together.
Jack’s anger was a red that dulled to a blue-black bruise the harder she swung the pick. Anna stayed angry red. Theo was yellow but getting greener, like a lime.
The color around Jaimie’s hands went from purple to a deep violet. Jaimie decided later that those were the hues of his purest happiness.
Tomorrow's for promises we'll fail to keep
Jaimie got out of bed and listened at the crack at the bottom of the door. His parents whispered back and forth, but he could hear his sister clearly. “How bad?…How long?” More urgent whispers. Anna stomped up the stairs, passed Jaimie’s bedroom and slammed her door.
When Jaimie got up early the next morning, his parents were dressed in the same clothes from the night before. Both their laptops stood open on the dining room table and Jack had a pad of paper. Jaimie couldn’t read her scrawl, but Jaimie recognized the look of a list, each word or groups of words in a stack.
“I’m taking the day off work,” Theo told Jaimie. “You come with me and you can push the cart and help carry things.”
His mother looked to her husband, her face a question.
“He’s sixteen and strong,” Theo said. “We’ll take the van. Give me what you’ve got so far and we’ll go work on that. When Anna gets up, take the other car and fit what you can in it.”
Jack nodded and ripped several pages off her pad. She held them out to him, but looked in his eyes and didn’t let go of the pages. “Who should I call?”
“Call everyone in the family.”
“Really?”
“Everyone should know. Cliff might not have been able to warn everyone. He and I have had our trouble, but he risked a lot to get the word out to us about what’s really going on. He’d be in big trouble sharing some of those memos, I’m sure.”
“Just family? I have to call Brandy. She’s my best friend.”
“I count Brandy as family. Of course, tell her. It’s not that we keep it a secret from anyone. It’s just prioritizing who gets alerted first.” He looked like he was doing a difficult calculation in his head. “We’ll talk about coworkers later. I’ve called in sick, so we definitely can’t warn any of them yet. ’k?” They kissed quickly and Theo fed Jaimie breakfast at a drive-through. The tofu sausage patty was greasy and smeared the boy’s lips.
His father laughed as he wiped the boy’s face with a napkin, “You’re a shiny little ape.”
Jaimie watched his father’s aura. Theo was shiny, too. A halo of green and violet fire flared around his head as he gently wiped his son’s chin.
He caught new interest in the boy’s look. When he finished, Theo asked his son if he had anything to say.
The boy shook his head slightly.
“It’s okay, son. When you’re ready.”
Most people wore surgical masks or even carpenter masks and goggles. Some had cloth tied over their faces and the people who wore eyeglasses all seemed to be steamed up so much they maneuvered through the aisles of Target in a fog. A couple people wore winter scarves tied over their faces.
Theo held Jaimie’s hand. The boy stuck close to his side. No one wanted to bump into another person, but it was so busy, the crowd’s press was inevitable. Theo said Jaimie “heeled like a terrier.” Target was too full and only one line was open to a cashier, so they left for the mall’s grocery store.
The shelves weren’t as full as usual and the aisles were packed. Theo stuffed the shopping list into his shirt pocket and didn’t look at it again. Instead, he grabbed a cart for Jaimie to push while he pulled another. With one hand on his son’s shoulder, he guided Jaimie through the crowd and down the aisles. Instead of looking at what he was buying, Theo swept cans into the cart with one arm.
The freezers were almost empty. When Theo looked at the vegetable section he said in a low hiss, “Locusts.”
All the milk — regular and powdered — was gone. Down one aisle, Theo jumped up and spotted something. He climbed the shelf to reach a big bottle of hand sanitizer covered in dust at the back, almost out of sight.
At the end of the cracker and snack aisle, a thin old woman in a black dress blocked the way. “You’re taking too much,” she said. Her lined face made Jaimie think of the pictures of witches he’d seen in fairy-tale books.
“Excuse me?” Theo said.
“You’re taking too much,” she repeated, and coughed without covering her mouth. She sweated heavily and looked flushed.
“Please,” Theo said softly, but his hand clamped down harder on the boy’s shoulder and Jaimie pushed the cart forward. She gave them a hard look. As they brushed past her, there was an acidic smell that came off her mottled skin. It reminded Jaimie of a dead squirrel that had been run over in front of his house last summer. The old woman glowed with fever.
The boy couldn’t take his eyes off her as they pushed on. He thought of witches who kidnapped children, who pushed them into ovens and tricked them into eating poisoned apples. He watched the black dots, bigger and greasier, swallow up the woman’s reds and yellows. Jaimie could barely see her face, as if the black dress was getting bigger, enveloping her in thick gauze. When she curled her thin lips back in a sneer, she revealed long, yellow teeth and bloody gums. She coughed again and Theo twisted away, turning his head, but his hand didn’t leave his son’s shoulder. Instead he squeezed tighter until Jaimie’s shoulder hurt, urging him to walk faster.
“You’re taking too much!” she yelled again.
“You don’t get to say how much is too much, ma’am,” Theo said. “You don’t know how much I need.”
Her voice followed them around the end of the aisle. “Selfish!”
Jaimie knocked a box of steel wool pads from a shelf. When the boy stooped to pick up the boxes, Theo pulled him up and urged him on.
“I see you,” the old woman called. “I seen what you done!”
“Go home!” Theo yelled back. He wanted to sound commanding. Instead he felt weak, yelling at a sick, old woman. He wasn’t sure she was wrong. Maybe he was taking too much.
In the next aisle, the old woman shuffled around the end, still watching. To Jaimie’s eyes, she looked less like a witch and more like a seething black mass, a swarm of black insects. Jaimie recognized the word he saw as he gazed at her. It was an ominous word that had sharp edges at the ends but was soft in the middle. He had often turned to the Ws to look at the word, to feel its danger. The word was “wraith”. That word tasted of bitter almonds.
Before he closed the dictionary, Jaimie looked at different words that made him feel safe and to wash away the sour almonds: “Gesture” tasted of fresh sprouts; “pastoral” tasted the way grass looks; “cheery” was a brave, golden color that tasted of orange sorbet.
* * *
They waited in line a long time. Behind Jaimie, a scared Asian woman with bright, glassy eyes held a baby in her arms. She cooed to her child in a singsong language Jaimie couldn’t understand, though he understood her colors. The sugary sweetness she used with the baby covered her lemony fear.
There was only one cashier here, too. He looked like a manager. He was an older man with wispy hair that looked like it needed combing. He looked tired and harassed.
In front of Theo, a burly man in a big camouflage coat stood very straight. Many people spoke in an excited staccato, voices full of chaos, but the big man grinned through his red bushy beard as he watched the crowd. He was a blob of red and blue in a sea of yellow fear. It occurred to Jaimie that the man was enjoying himself.
The man must have felt Jaimie’s stare because he looked down at the boy for a moment before giving Theo a smile. “Never think you’d ever see anything like it, eh?”
Theo shook his head. “Nope. Sure didn’t.”
“I did!” the man bragged. “Saw this coming a mile away.”
Theo gave him an encouraging nod, glad of the distraction.
“Remember that huge power outage a few years ago? The gas pumps didn’t work. I lost everything in my freezer, including twenty pounds of moose meat I’d shot the previous fall. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I drive for a living. I couldn’t work and I hate warm beer.”
“I remember,” Theo said. “Our power was out for three days and it was really hot. We slept in the basement and by the third night we were laying on top of the sheets as the heat settled on us. It felt like a wool blanket on a hot August night. We opened all the windows, but there wasn’t a breath of wind.”
“Yup, no air conditioning. The power was out for eight days up where I live. I had a lot of time to sit in the dark in my underwear and think. I decided I’d be ready to take care of things myself if anything happened again, hurricane, tornado, pestilence, whatever.” His colors came far out from his body and Jaimie stepped back a little, feeling overwhelmed.
“You know why we gotta take care of ourselves, mister? ’Cuz nobody’s coming. Like Obama said way back, we’re the crazy fools we been waiting for!” His laugh shook his belly.
Theo smiled with half his mouth.
Jaimie hadn’t seen his father talk with other men much at all. Theo watched the stranger, his chin close to his chest but his body faced to the side, away from the big man in camouflage.
“Things are getting kind of crazy around here. Looks like you were right to get ready. What did you do to prepare?” His father sounded casual, but his colors took on a thin feel that told Jaimie his father’s interest was serious.
“Got two kinds of ge
nerators. That’s where I started. It kind of grew from there. I was raised in the woods, so I already knew a bunch of what I had to know, but the deeper I got into self-sustainability…well, the deeper I went.”
The line advanced a few steps. “I knew people when I was a kid who had an old house with a bomb shelter built in,” Theo said. “That sounds fancy, but to lock yourself away in there would be kind of like hiding away in a small root cellar or something.”
“Yeah, all that duck and cover bull — ” The big man glanced at Jaimie and leaned closer to Theo, his voice low. “Survivalism gets a bad rap. The movement has been full of a lot of wackos and their macho racist bull. It was a good idea that was hijacked by a bunch of guys with a military fetish who get a little too excited about pictures in gun magazines, if you know what I mean. You listen to me on this ’cuz I’ve given it a lot of thought, I kid you not. They’d have been better off learning how to can their own beans and jar their own jellies instead of stocking up on more and more guns. Can’t eat a machine gun and there’s not much left of the bird if that’s how you shoot it. The green movement has gotten more into the nature appreciation part. That’s what sustainability is about. We’re in for a long storm, friend. You can bet on that.” The man stood straight again and looked around, as if, too late, to make sure no one had heard him.
“You really think it’s going to be that bad?”
“Look around you.” The stranger gestured to the crowd. “We’re always nine meals away from anarchy. Grocery stores don’t have more than three days of supplies on their shelves thanks to just-in-time delivery. I’ve been a trucker since I was twenty. I know all about just-in-time. Nobody keeps anything stored away anymore. Nobody’s putting stuff away for the winter. Not like a couple generations back. People are softer now and used to so many conveniences. I don’t think they’ll handle it so well as our grandparents or even our parents could have.”
Theo nodded, encouraging him, and the man’s colors enveloped them again. The bearded man smiled broadly, glad of an audience.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 3