Everyone was close-quartered, kept to themselves. Wary of anyone passing through or asking too many personal questions. Especially about food or ammunition. To ask someone their name, let alone what they had to eat or where they had to sleep, was starting to get people killed by then. But just about anyone would stop for a moment to talk to you about Leadville. That’s when it had really started mixing into our plan—the idea of the place where it wasn’t raining. I know Russell had heard about it first in Philadelphia, but I don’t think he really knew why we were heading out west until we lived in Indiana. That’s when the legend of Leadville became a part of him, really became his reason to keep moving. At least that’s what I tell myself when I think things weren’t really that bad in the East. Because there had to be a reason to keep going.
And once we got to the first deep seas, right where they shouldn’t have been, Russell told me—though I’d never seen the country otherwise so it didn’t seem anything special to me except for the enormity of it all, an endless stretch of muddy brown churning ocean that tasted like metal and salt—he was out of hope for people. For anyone in humanity. The Jennifers and Dellys of the world were gone forever, too many miles behind us, and we both knew it. But then, just when all that hopelessness settled in, we came to live on the Sea Queen Marie.
And old Cap’n. It comes into my mind that I can’t even remember his real name anymore. And that he’ll always just be a memory of a man named Cap’n who for a moment, just a real short but full of passionate life moment, restored our faith in humanity. A living community of social people who cared for each other. But there were still storms. And that’s one thing Cap’n must have known all along, the whole while as we floated past the great tower of Chicago, which rose like a stripped flag pole from the rolling seas. That sooner or later the storms would wear away our glowing community. Or drown it suddenly and altogether, like they did.
And the storm came like it had to, swallowing the short flashback of what the veneer was. And that fast it was all cast down to the muddy depths where Russell told me lay the sleeping graves—the millions of homes and electric wires and bodies and cars and churches and hospitals and schools and police stations and government buildings and fields and museums and everything else that people had managed to build up for themselves. To set themselves apart from nature as a tangling mass of fertility and adaptation. But on we went.
We went on to find out just how wrong we had been to travel west—wronger and wronger—from Souix Falls to Rapid City. And by then, it was so wrong that Leadville had to be true. Because if it wasn’t, nothing made sense.
But after it all, and through it all, I think of Jennifer and Delly for some reason, that one night, so long ago, when they first told us not to leave yet. And I wonder just what happened to Philadelphia. To them. And if it really is different in different places. The rain didn’t seem to stick there, after all. And it still wasn’t sticking in Pittsburgh. As if all the water could do yet was make things muddy, but the good old Earth would absorb everything right up. No seas in the wrong places.
As I scan the shifting bergs, realizing I’ve lost count of the swells again because of my daydream, I remember the craziest story of them all. It was the man—the face eater—on the aircraft carrier. He’d told us—the night before we snuck right down off the side of that ship like quiet spiders and stole the boat and left—about what he’d heard from the great North. The last radio broadcasts out of Canada, something from fifteen years ago, he’d said. Russell had quietly nodded his head, no smile, no disapproval either, just nodded and listened and kept quiet. Acknowledging that the man had his own theory and we had ours. But by then, Russell had already caught on that the man was a face eater, and that meant he wasn’t to be trusted with information anyway. But for some reason, it pops back into my head as I lie dying here on the floe, waiting for the signs of my friends to reappear from watery graves somewhere amidst the dotted and endless stretch of cold canvas ocean. Just exactly what the aircraft carrier face eater had said: The oceans have all slid from their old places. They’re still sliding, too. And the atmosphere is screwed up forever and getting worse, until everything is gone. And the old oceans, their old floors, are dry. Mountains and deserts now.
I try to imagine it—all the schools and homes and hospitals and people and everything—all of it underneath me right now, thousands of feet down, lying frozen in place, surrounded in darkness, suffocated by thousands of pounds of pressure. And the water all rushing away, sliding, revealing everything again. Like it had never been here all this time. As if all of it would just snap back to life once the ocean left, resuming things the way they were before the great washout, before everything was covered. And then, I imagine some strange part of the world, like the great oceans on the world maps I’d seen plastered on the walls of some of the stores we’d been through in the cities: the Atlantic and the Pacific, dry as a bone. All of their water slid away to other parts on the map.
I wonder what’s down there, beneath them. But it’s impossible to think about because those bottoms have been frozen much longer than nineteen years. It’s been millions and millions. But I go with what the face eater said, and in my mind, I see it all—it’s finally dry down there.
My mind starts telling me that this is what it’s all about. It’s all so that those places get a break. Because they deserve one, after all these years under water. And whatever wants to return to life under there is going to get its chance after all. I try to wake myself up from the madness, and tell myself I’m falling asleep, and that if I do I might not wake up, or even worse I might miss Russell or Voley floating by. So to wake myself up, I start yelling again.
I yell at each slap of the swells. The suction sound hits under the shelf, and the spray launches up at me from the edge, and I call their names. I do it in rotation. One slap—Russell! Two—Voley! Three—Russell! And on the tenth slap, I twist again, just to make the sure that Spots isn’t coming up from behind me. Or even down into the water. But he’s just lying there, eyes closed, facing me, not stirring at all. Like he’s sleeping until the moment he hears a splash—not a slap of a swell against the ice, but the splash of a body. Something warm and filled with blood trying to wade through the surf. And then he’ll wake up, and like magic I know he’ll roll off into the cold sea, full of energy again. And satisfied that he’s not trying anything just yet, I turn around and look to the flats of ice: Eleven—Russell!
I can only keep it going till one hundred, and then I lose count. But as I start over, it comes to me that I can’t even keep my eyelids open. Even as strangely warm as the air is getting, and as dark as the sky looks off to my left—a hanging blot of black ink—and as much as I’m convinced the swells are growing again beyond my last levels of comfort, I can’t help but fall asleep.
When I wake from a dead dreamless sleep, it’s to the sound of a bark. And then, when I open my eyes, expecting to see the seal towering over me, ready to drive its fangs down into my throat, and drink itself back to health from the warm gel in my veins, I hear it again and know it’s not the seal’s voice.
My body jerks up to a painless pop in my knee. I don’t pause to check what it was, but a burning reminds me that I also have muscle exposed, and it’s open right into the wind, because a whipping gust blasts across the floe and almost knocks me off-balance. Ice grit stings as it digs into the scab, but I manage to hold myself up and see him. Terrified and ready to dive from the edge of his floe, because it’s been pushed so close to my own that they’re going to smash, is Voley. My eyes check for the seal, and I tell myself if he’s gone I’ll jump right in. But there he is. Still asleep. Watching us somehow, even with his eyes closed. Get back, get back, get back! I yell to Voley. And when Voley retreats just a little, I call for Russell. But the wind drowns my voice out, and reminds me to check the ink blot in the left part of the sky. The night is so close that I can’t tell how much of the sky is storm and how much is the steel blanket that covers everything else. B
ack Voley! I yell at him again. And as his berg pushes in with another swell, testing our proximity, a high wind shovels grit from his floe up into the air like a blanket. And then, the floes retreat from each other just as fast as we descend into the trough. He barks and whines and scurries again near the edge, but I keep telling him to back off, and stay back, because it’s too dangerous to jump in. Too dark. And I’d never get him out of the high swells. And the shelves on both floes are too high. And it hits me now, I know for sure: The bergs have to crash. Because there’s no other way to reach each other.
Voley finally starts to calm down, and I talk to him as calmly as I can, trying to maintain eye contact as we bob, telling him everything is going to be okay. We just have to wait it out boy. And as the next swell hits Voley’s berg before mine, raising him up nearly above my head, I can see just how small his floe really is. And as the torque of the lip carries him aloft and drops him, I see his paws dig along the ice just so he won’t slip too much and skid into the water. I walk back to the center of my floe, eyeing the seal, trying to figure out what to do. I have to decide now. Whether or not the seal will come in after me. Whether or not I’ll be crushed trying to get to Voley’s floe. And then, as I watch Spots, he slides a bit as the crest finally catches his floe. Up and down it rides, and somehow, even though he sleeps through it, I know the waves are too much for me. Nausea crawls through my stomach. But it’s something else—I know the feeling from the past—a panic attack. And I need someone to talk me down—just to tell me it’s going to be okay. But the only voice I hear now is my own, the one that tells me it’s not going to be okay. That very soon I’ll be gulping water, or my throat will cinch shut to protect me from swallowing the sea, and then I’ll suffocate and fall asleep, and become a bouy for Voley to watch, bobbing back and forth on the swells, banging against the shelves of every floe in Colorado.
The tingling feeling creeps up through my arms and into my cheeks and I tell myself to breathe slower. Breathe slowly. I try to talk to slow down my exhalations, and I walk back to Voley.
“Hang on boy. It’s going to be okay. Just stay back!” I tell him with a quivering voice. But he doesn’t know I’m talking more for myself than for him. To try to slow everything down again. Because the rise and fall seems to grow, and the waves are growing too, and the first bits of rain hit my head, even as I try to convince myself it’s not happening—that it isn’t really raining again. And then the noise comes, and its undeniable. That fast, the sky unleashes on us, and the great pattering starts to pound down all around us.
A long arc of white crosses the sky, bright and powerful and sideways, flashing over the bergs to make it look like daytime. I see a hundred of them, broken floes, lit white and scattered over the ocean, and then I drop to my belly, and crawl about another foot, and puke onto the ice. The slush takes it away, and it rolls off, but the smell nauseates me more, so I force myself away and to my knees. And then, when I look to Voley and see him sitting down on his floe, right in the center, it brings a brief sense of relief through me. For a moment the nausea stops, and above us, against a strand of pure black, I see stars. On just the opposite part of the sky, as if they’re from a different world, twinkling brightly and calmly. I fix on them—the calmness and the stillness. The flashes keep lighting everything up but I don’t look at the bolts anymore. I can’t. I try to ignore that it’s even happening. I ignore the swells, and even Voley, because I am no use to him, and I watch the stars. They sit way up in the sky, so far removed from the turbulence, and my stomach stops consuming itself. And very gradually, my panic slips away. And just as I think it’s gone, even with the pouring rain and the flashing lightning, there is a great crash. It trips me and my face smacks hard into the ice, and feeling like my skin has been smashed off, I turn around to make sure Voley is safe: he’s right there—just a few feet away—his berg retreating from where it rammed into mine. His claws dig into the ice and keep him from skidding all the way down and off the ice, and I know that with the next wave, the floes will smash again, and he will fly right off. I brace myself, racked with pain but numbing my mind against everything but him, and I open my arms.
“Jump boy!” I tell him. And I ask Poseidon quietly in my mind whether or not he can help me again. If only for this one last thing. A leap. Just one more leap. And even though it’s a leap that leads to nothing, Voley can’t die in a storm on the ice. Not after what he’s done for us. I tell all of this to Poseidon, who lies frozen in the snow back in the Rocky Mountains. And I know, somehow, that he hears me. But the wave rocks Voley back in the wrong direction, and his floe never rams mine again. He just sits, watching me patiently, frail and shivering, and after a time, when the waves kick and fight higher with the increasing wind, I think I see his head go down. At first I think he’s licking the ice, and it reminds me how thirsty I am too, and that I need to drink. But as I paw at the ice, and find a pocket of slush, I realize that Voley is vomiting. I hear the choking sounds. And then I know that Poseidon won’t do it for me. None of the gods will. They’re all buried with everything else, down a mile below on the sea floor. And I have to do it myself. With one more look at the seal, whose eyes remain closed, and whose body is sliding around more and more with each wave, closer and closer to the edge of the sea, I turn and face the edge. The swells. The beating rain. The long shafts of light that flash, brightening the sky and casting terror into me. I put them all aside, and I study the rise and fall. The closeness of the foam. The rise. The fall. The closeness. And wait for my chance. I tell him to stay back, because I’m going to jump.
Chapter 14
All at once the sea bucks the floe up, thrusting Voley into the air. He lands and slides along the edge of the ice, but then, stabilizes and keeps rising with the wave. And from below I watch him and the belly of the shelf, a rising mountain, until he’s almost out of sight. The spray flies into curving winds, and the slapping rain and clapping thunder prevent him from hearing my calls. I yell to him to hold on, and keep telling myself I’m still going to swim to him, but my floe sinks lower, like a great suction is taking me right down to the bottom of the sea, and I won’t even be able to drag myself over the edge and into the churning froth without tumbling back onto the ice. The shelf of Voley’s floe freezes above me, like it’s pausing for the sky to kiss it, and then, as if the time for all of us to die has pushed the raging waters into their last fury, the swell passes invisibly through, lifting me back up, and down comes Voley again. The sound is like a thousand skeletons grinding along a reef and shattering.
There’s a popping crack and Voley is level with me as his floe batters mine. I rock back, sliding and twisting in a full circle and then another half, clawing into the slush but finding nothing that holds. All I can do is yell to him, like he could help me now. Voley!
When everything is still, and ice feels flat again, I face the dark silhouette of the seal. Silent and eyes closed, even with the chaos of the raging sea, and the pummeling rain. He slides back and forth, a puck, and in that instant, when I realize that the terror of the great splitting roar isn’t over yet, I realize that Spots is dead. And as it sinks in, I hear the bark.
When I turn around the sight of Voley jolts me to my feet. I steady myself, crawling along, trying to reach the center, but not too fast because everything is turning to slush now as the sea sweeps over and the ground is too slippery to test standing. The rain bores down into tiny pockets and I roll around them, thinking each one will unleash another fracture within the ice if I press my weight on it. By the time I stand to my feet and take five real steps, ignoring the flashes of pain in my calf, as bright and sharp as the lightning, Voley’s already bounding toward me, all too fast. Slow down! I yell at him, and we meet and fall into each other right in the center of the floe. Just as I get a hold of his body, a wall of spit lands on us as the floe smacks through the bottom of a trough and begins to battle up another crest. I grip his soggy fur and chest and coil him tightly against my body, so tight he whimpers and
I let go a little. My eyes glare, glued to every other floe around us, waiting for the sign of the wave that will bring them down on us and crush us. Voley’s old floe looks like it’s split in half, and two twenty-foot long shelves ride behind us, smoothly rising and falling over every wave just before we ride them. Another long lightning bolt cuts the sky in half, lighting everything like day, and I think that maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of Russell. I scan the bright blue and white tables that litter the black ocean. Before I trace the shapes of more than a few of them, surging up and down in the distant pack, the lightning fades and everything returns to gloom. We’re okay, I repeat to Voley, over and over, as I wait for another lightning bolt. I just keep on squeezing him and telling him we’re okay.
My mind runs through the fear that, even as smoothly as the floe manages the swells, and the ice seems to be resisting the driving rain, we’ll be electrocuted dead. And I tell myself electricity doesn’t carry through the ice. Only through water. And we’re safe. Safe as Russell used to say it was to be in a building when it was storming bad. Camped on the rubber wheels of a car. But I can’t peel the feeling away, and it creeps in that I’m not sure. I really don’t know if lightning goes through the ice—if all it will take is one strike next to our floe, and then we’ll feel the shock. Running right through our nervous systems. The shock right into the last convulsions.
My eyes turn to Spots. I feel like it was a daydream that he died. But he’s dead. Sliding around the middle of his forty-foot wide floe, never so close to the edges that he falls in. I wonder if it was us that did it. Russell and me—and Voley. One of the gunshots finally bled him dry, or Voley’s bites. But something gnaws at me. Something that tells me it wasn’t us at all. We didn’t even hurt him. It was this place. There’s nothing to eat. No way to survive even for a creature built for this hell.
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