The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel

by Eisele, Kimi

  A shallow grave, Carson thought. People were like dogs—they could sense your fear. Spin it, he told himself. Refocus. “Hey, so what about those chickens?” he said. “Ever cook any of them up?”

  “Funny you should mention that,” Daniel said. “One of them hasn’t been laying. And you know what that means.”

  Carson stared blankly.

  “Aw, c’mon bro.” Daniel pushed the box back onto the shelf and dragged his finger across his throat. “It means someone’s gonna get to kill something.”

  “Kill?” Carson said, his voice tight.

  “When they stop laying, we stop feeding them. So now she’ll feed us.”

  It took Carson a moment to register what he was hearing. He wrung his hands, which were still sweating. Better a hen than him.

  “You only feel bad about the first one,” Daniel said as they left the shed.

  Carson sighed, still not sure what Daniel’s show-and-tell was really about.

  In the chicken yard, the birds squawked, scattering to the edges. Daniel walked over to one of them, and the hen immediately sank to the ground, surrendering. Daniel wrapped his hand around the bird’s head, muffling her frantic clucks. “Hold here,” he said. “Like this.” He handed the chicken to Carson, folding Carson’s fingers around her head.

  The bird was warm in Carson’s hand. Its beak pressed hard and sharp into his palm.

  “Now, whip it around, firm and fast.”

  Carson hesitated.

  “You break its neck,” Daniel said. “It’s bloodless.” With his smooth, balding head, his biceps bulging, Daniel looked like he could kill the hen with his thumb alone.

  Carson could feel his forehead beading with sweat. The bird couldn’t weigh more than ten pounds. How hard could it be? He tightened his grip, counted to three silently, then whirled the bird around. The hen hung limp in his grip. That fast? He felt mildly nauseated.

  “Now bleed it,” Daniel said, pulling out a knife from his pocket that looked a little too large for the job. Had that knife been there all along?

  They gutted and stripped the bird until it was smooth and pink. “Just like a supermarket bird,” Daniel said, scraping the guts off the table.

  Naomi cooked up the bird in a pot, and they ate it for dinner with greens and corn.

  “Good to eat from your own hands, isn’t it?” Daniel said.

  “It is,” Carson said. He focused on the meat, trying to chew slowly despite a strange knot in his throat. These people were competent survivors, and generous. But something unsettled him. Did they not trust him? Or did he just not trust them?

  After the plates were cleared, Naomi placed a small windup radio on the table. “Cute little thing, isn’t it?” She turned it on. “We listen every night. Or we aim to, hoping there’ll be something other than this preacher. Someone left it here,” she said. “A traveler, like you. They’re always leaving things.”

  Carson forced a smile, wondering who would leave such a thing.

  “Some fool left this knife, for instance,” Daniel said, pulling out the big knife again and stabbing it into the table.

  “Daniel, please,” Naomi said.

  She turned the dial. Static cracked, then a woman’s voice came from the radio.

  “We came from Chicago. Walked for miles, hitched a ride. We are not hungry anymore. Farms, meat, milk. Like Blue said, abundance. We use our hands. We are plugging into the divine. We will rise.”

  Naomi sighed. “I keep hoping for music.”

  “Only one kind of music on the radio now,” Daniel said. “The ‘Blues.’” He looked at Carson. “You’re going there, aren’t you? To do research?”

  “The Center?” Carson said. Right, he thought. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  In the morning, Carson woke to an already-humid day. He raked the goat yard and chopped some wood, then gathered up his belongings. He gave the living room a once-over: cut flowers in a vase, three half-burned candles, a basket of eggs, goat’s milk in a bowl. The windup radio sat at the edge of the kitchen counter. He glanced out the windows and saw Naomi and Daniel conversing near the barn. Hastily, he grabbed the radio and slipped it into his pack.

  “Come back anytime,” Naomi said, once he joined them outside. She handed him back his gun then wrapped him in a big hug.

  “Or don’t,” Daniel said, winking.

  “Thank you,” Carson said, a strange clump forming in his throat. Was it remorse? Relief? He packed the gun, hoisted his pack, then headed for the tracks, westward.

  July 27

  C.,

  You used to write to me about knowledge. You wondered what kind would serve your students—your kids, as you called them. What did they need to know? I had quick answers back then. Get them beyond our borders, I said. They need to know how big things are. They are not the center of the universe. They need to learn other cultures and other languages, and how to discern between right and wrong, and how to stand up and not be afraid.

  Now what should they learn? How to be good neighbors? How to not trash everything? How to trust? The kids have turned violent is what I’m telling you. Back then, what did you do with the violent ones?

  Beatrix closed her notebook. On its cover, she had taped the drawing from the school bulletin board—that strange red crow with its tiny wings and funny human feet. Or was it a raven? A walking raven? She felt a heaviness in her stomach. Sadness? Dread? She wasn’t entirely sure.

  When she had traveled east to see Carson, they’d visited an art gallery in what had once been the meatpacking district, by then an ailing arts district. As they passed the empty galleries, Beatrix wondered out loud if the paintings had gone to the same place as the cow carcasses—some avant-garde slaughterhouse somewhere. Carson had laughed.

  She’d been overly chatty all morning. Since that initial meeting in the school hallway, she had learned so much about him. As they toured the galleries, she was close enough again to smell his woodsy scent, to notice more closely his hands, his mouth, his breath, his body.

  One gallery showed large photographs chronicling the photographer’s experience of a difficult romantic breakup. On large panels accompanying each image was the story of the breakup, the writing stitched in thread. Again and again, the story, slightly different in each telling. Each image showed a specific detail from the artist’s memory—a red telephone, the carpet pattern in the hotel room where she’d received her lover’s call telling her it was over. The visual details that had fixed in the artist’s mind at the moment of undoing.

  “Self-absorbed,” Carson had said, looking at the first panel. Beatrix had agreed.

  She moved along the wall behind Carson, glancing over the work. Nothing about the images particularly moved her. She stole glances at Carson, saw his eyebrows rise, his head nod on occasion.

  “She’s kinda stuck, isn’t she?” Carson said, shuffling to the next wall.

  But in the next room, a new series of panels began. The same format: an image accompanied by words stitched with a rust-colored thread. But here, each story was different, no longer the artist’s story, but others’ stories: A man whose brother committed suicide. A woman whose child was killed by a car bomb. A family whose house had burned down. The photographs captured these incidental details, the images that had lodged themselves in memory, forever attached to tragedy. A circle of pigeons in a cloudless sky, church bells ringing, a parade passing on the street. The icons of grief.

  Beatrix looked at each image closely, read each story. She felt a chill move through her. “The crows in the field the day June died,” Carson said. “They were still for a long time, like spilled oil. And then, all at once they flew away.”

  “They carried her, maybe,” Beatrix said. Carson nodded.

  Near the end of the exhibit, Carson and Beatrix stood in front of a single photograph, no story attached. A perfect boulder, the size of a small house, in the middle of a road at the foot of a mountain. Had it rolled down the slope? Or been placed there by a team of men?
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  “The heaviest object in the universe,” Carson said, reaching for Beatrix’s hand.

  His hand was warm and solid and soft all at once, and Beatrix suddenly felt buoyant, as if inside a quiet ascending elevator or hovering over the city in a hot air balloon.

  Carson lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of her fingers, his words finally landing in her ears.

  “What?” she said, letting go and stepping closer to the frame.

  “Grief,” Carson said.

  They both stood looking at the photograph but also not looking at it.

  Beatrix noticed something in the upper corner of the photo: an irregular dark mass above the boulder. Leaning in, she saw the shape was made of singular things, each with its own curve and arc. Birds.

  “Good thing for the lightest then,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  Beatrix felt her face flush. Warmth rushed into her chest. Love. Love was the lightest object, the thing that elevated you and kept you aloft. She fluttered a hand at the image and said, “Birds.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The August heat meant Carson carried more and sweated more. A few days west of Naomi and Daniel, he thanked God for a small lake and weighed down his pack with as much water as he could carry. With weary feet and sore shoulders, he repeated his mantra: Keep going. Keep going.

  When he thought of Beatrix—often—he sometimes indulged the longing. Other times, he scoffed at it. Surely she’d forgotten him by now.

  One afternoon, he came upon a cluster of people on the tracks. It was some kind of brawl, with a circle of onlookers shouting, cheering. One man had his boot on a younger man’s neck, calling out, “He’s a thief! He’s a thief!” A woman clawed at the man’s shirt and yelled, “Let him go.”

  Two other men were locked in a hold. Carson considered trying to tackle one of them, or pulling out his gun and shooting it into the air to make everything stop. He wanted to have this kind of courage. But he also remembered Ayo’s warning about bandits and their staged events. You watch out for you, Ayo had said. Only you. Carson hurried past the group quietly.

  “Where you gettin’ off to?” said one of the men, lunging toward him. Another man joined in, and Carson took off running.

  He tripped on a clump of weeds, and in seconds, the men were on him, their bodies wild and heavy. There would be no reasoning here. Carson swung quickly and hit one, knocking him to the ground. Another man pounced, and Carson managed to block the punch while kicking hard at the man’s shins. The man buckled forward and sliced at Carson’s biceps with a blade.

  The pain came instantly, as air hit the gash. He kept running then, adrenaline propelling him away from the group.

  “We’ll kill you, motherfucker!” one of men shouted after Carson, but none of them followed him.

  When he stopped to look back, the men were far behind, small toylike figures on the tracks. He assessed the wound on his arm—his shirt was sliced open, but there was too much blood to see how deep the cut was.

  His adrenaline now turning to exhaustion, he came to a fallow field and turned down a long road toward a white farmhouse, its black shutters tired and peeling. He peered in one of the broken windows to an empty darkness.

  He dropped his pack on the porch, tore off his sleeve, and poured water on the wound. The gash wasn’t as deep as he’d feared. He rested his forearm on top of his head to elevate the wound, then sat on the ground against his pack. He wished for a human sound: a song being hummed, a kitchen cabinet closing, the clip of shears on a hedge.

  He picked up a fist-sized rock and hurled it at the window. The glass shattered.

  He pulled out the windup radio he’d taken from Naomi and Daniel, and stared at it until he felt a burn inside his chest. We’ll kill you, motherfucker!

  He wound the crank on the radio and turned the dial slowly—no weather report, no music, no voices. Just static. He turned it off and heard only silence.

  Carson camped there for the night and woke early to walk again. At midday, he met a young farmer pulling carrots. “You a Pilgrim?” the farmer asked. “Goin’ to the Center?”

  “Not a Pilgrim, no,” Carson said. “Is it nearby, the Center?”

  “Depends on your definition of ‘near.’ Cross the Plains and go north, so I’m told. Eastern Wyoming. Where are you headed?”

  “West.”

  “You’ll pass the silo then,” the farmer said. “Big cement bunker behind chain link. A billionaire took it over a few years before the collapse as a safe house for him and his family. I heard other billionaires did the same thing elsewhere. Rumor has it, they still have caviar. But no one’s seen a sign of them in months. My guess is, they went mad from isolation.” He handed Carson the carrots he’d pulled. “Good luck to you.”

  Carson thanked the farmer and continued on. Billionaire bunkers. A strange new world.

  That evening, he added the carrots to a salad of dandelion, amaranth, and clover, all more abundant now. He set a deadfall trap and later was euphoric to find he’d caught a squirrel. Until he realized the animal was still alive. Injured, but alive, its limbs and tail twitching, a flutter in its eyes. Definitely alive. Shit. He needed this meat. He lifted the rock and brought it down hard on the squirrel’s head. It had to be done. His hand trembling, he touched the squirrel’s fur, a small cloak covering a form. No life inside. The squirrel was gone, empty.

  Carson sighed. He had not asked for this power.

  His stomach growled. He got to work skinning and cleaning. Then he built a fire, cooked the squirrel, and ate it.

  Beatrix went outside, where Rosie was lying on her belly at the edge of the garden. She joined her there, and together they stared at the small, wispy beet greens.

  “How much longer until we can pull them out?” Rosie said.

  “Just have to keep the soil damp, and in forty to seventy days, Rog said, we’ll have beets,” Beatrix said.

  “That’s, like, forever far away,” Rosie said, pushing herself up to her knees.

  “I don’t know why we never planted a garden here before,” Beatrix said.

  “Because you were gone all the time,” Rosie said.

  Beatrix nodded. She thought of Hank and Dolores. They were probably pulling full-grown vegetables out of the ground on whatever land they were farming. She pictured Hank, his tall, thin body stooped over thick bunches of greens, Dolores with her hands full of squash. They’d be singing, probably, making up some song about what they were doing.

  “Beets schmeets,” Rosie said. She made a snowball of dirt in her hands, then tossed it across the yard. “Abuela says we’re going to Jonathan Blue’s place, the Center.”

  “What?” Beatrix said. She felt like she’d been socked in the stomach. “No. No, you’re not,” she said. “We will not let that happen.” She offered Rosie a hand and pulled her up.

  The front bell rang, and they found Anita at the door. She’d come to help chalk sidewalk advertisements for Halcyon Radio. “I have gifts,” she said, handing each of them a small container, a contact lens case cut in half.

  “Open it,” Anita said. “Remember those resourceful young DIY neighbors? We’ve been working on some lip balm. While supplies last, at least.”

  “Oh my God,” Rosie said. She had already opened the case and was streaking the red-violet balm across her lips. “This is amazing.”

  Beatrix did the same. Although it was the least of her worries, her lips had been painfully chapped for months now. “The color—how’d you do that?”

  “Berries,” Anita said.

  “Incredible,” Beatrix said as they headed out. On Maria del Carmen’s orders, they would stay within the Perimeter.

  “And we’re sure people have radios now?” Rosie asked.

  “Well, more people do, thanks to what the PBB found. And Gary and his ham radio buddies built some radio receivers, apparently.”

  “Built radios?” Rosie asked.

  “Yeah, with wires and old telephone c
ord,” Beatrix said. “I don’t get it, but I’m glad they do.”

  On a brick wall, Beatrix scrawled out a list of upcoming shows—Anita’s program on DIY women’s health care, Rog’s gardening segment, a short show on beekeeping, another on canning and preserving. Rosie made simple drawings of bees, rainwater, and mason jars to accompany them, stopping every now and then to put on more lip balm.

  “I’m thinking this lip balm is the official sponsor of Halcyon Radio,” Beatrix joked. “Today’s programming brought to you by”—she thought for a moment—“apocalyp-stick!”

  Anita let out a loud laugh, which made Beatrix and Rosie laugh, too.

  “Are these all news shows?” Rosie asked, reading over the list they wrote up at their next stop.

  “Music doesn’t transmit that well over AM radio, sadly,” Beatrix said, as Gary had explained early on.

  “When we had a TV,” Rosie said, “Abuela would watch evening soap operas on the Mexican station. I watched them, too. They were dumb but addicting. Maybe you could do something like that?”

  Beatrix set down the piece of chalk and looked at Rosie. “A radionovela?”

  She remembered one radio drama, El Caballero, that everyone listened to in Ecuador. Beatrix had first heard it in one of the cacao farmers’ homes. All the family members crowded into the dark house, and someone set out dried plantains for snacking. When a man’s voice came through a backdrop of syrupy violins, the youngest child bounced on the sofa, squealing. The room filled with the sound of horse hooves and the show’s signature introduction: “Desde el pueblo más lejano, sobre las montañas más altas y nevadas . . .”

  Beatrix did her own rendition of the intro, then stopped to translate, and continued in English. “From the farthest pueblo, over the steepest snow-capped mountains, brandishing his handsome smile, his thick mustache, his yellow wool poncho, and his leather chaps, comes . . . El Caballero.”

  “The perfect superhero,” Anita said, after Beatrix had explained the show.

  “Exactly,” Beatrix said. “El Caballero did it all. He restored fish to the ocean and saved factory workers from burning buses. That last one was actually a nonsmoking message.”