When the snow shallowed, dead branches made it easy to trip. The ground was rocky and the wind whipped fiercely at his bare cheeks. Lenny worried it would blow snow over his tracks. He tried to reassure himself that while he might be lost, the trees were not; the owls were not; the moon was home.
He stopped and took out his phone to check for service. The screen was a moist pattern of sweat. He didn’t want to climb anymore. The summit was farther than he’d imagined, and the cold was inside his clothes. Lenny knew he had to be careful. Bodies were sometimes discovered in early spring by hikers—the result of a wrong step.
Lenny did not want to die and remembered driving upstate that night with Carolin and Jane beside him on the bench seat of the Ford. How good it felt with their bodies touching.
He stood tall now and held the device at arm’s length toward the moon. It was too far from his face to check, so he just held it there, waving slightly as though trying to get the attention of something in the sky.
All because he’d seen articles in those magazines. That was why reassurance was necessary. Lucky he and Jane hadn’t used them for the fire or else he’d never know.
When he brought the device back to his face, he could see that nothing had changed. Not a single bar of service. Lenny felt foolish suddenly, as though he was a child with no sense of the things that were possible and impossible.
Carolin would laugh when he told her how afraid he had been. Jane would have wanted to come. He would recount the story over black coffee and toast.
At some point on the way down his phone vibrated. He grabbed at it, clumsily pulling the device from his pocket. No bars, but a single text message from Carolin’s mother in Albany. A line of words. Some proof that life was taking place as normal beyond the mountain.
But when Lenny read it, there was not the flood of relief he had anticipated. So he read it again. Then over and over, even saying the words out loud, not moving an inch until he could grasp the meaning. He even considered each word on its own without the others, to see if that changed anything.
He began to feel weakness in his hands and feet. It was something he’d first experienced as a little boy, when his mother got beaten on the steps of their trailer by people she owed money to.
18.
It was peaceful the rest of the way. He tried to keep his worry at a distance, at least until he was in the house again. When the woods leveled off, the snow deepened, and Lenny found the trail he had made, a valley of ruffled white. He stopped to look at the phone. His face took on the glow of the screen as he moved, a small traveler, along the path of a single sentence. She could have meant something else, he thought. Her phone might have changed the words to what it thought she should say. That happened all the time.
When Lenny found the mouth of the driveway, there was his gleaming truck. He remembered Jane’s gloved hand on the fender earlier. Her voice counting down. Then holding hands as they ran across fresh snow onto a patch of bare ice, sliding effortlessly in their shoes.
As he stood there in the very cold night, it occurred to Lenny that the world had many good things.
It didn’t have to have anything good, but it did.
And he had felt them.
19.
Once inside the house, Lenny locked himself in the downstairs toilet and stripped to his underwear. With the light off, it felt even more like a dream and all he had to do was keep going until it was possible to wake up. The porcelain toilet seat was freezing. He could smell disinfectant from a plastic bottle on the tile floor.
He felt such a strong desire to go upstairs and wake his family—but what would they think, seeing him like this?
It was more than just the radio announcer’s voice now. It was the information he’d discovered in the magazines, and the text message.
He padded barefoot to the living room and stood shivering before the fire.
As much as he wanted to rip out and burn the articles he had found, they were physical proof that he wasn’t going crazy—that this wasn’t some kind of psychotic episode. The articles had been written and printed, without anyone knowing there was someone called Lenny from Nevada sitting in a Ford truck smoking with the radio on.
For a while he just walked around the house in his underwear, tidying up and looking through any window for the lights of a passing vehicle. If people were out driving, then it was definitely not real. Unless they were driving a certain way. Like trying to escape.
When the fire waned, he threw on fresh logs. Then he sat and waited for the wood to flame, letting heat from the coals spread over his bare chest and arms.
On the top of a neat pile next to his phone was the American Geographic magazine, dated two months back, with cover illustration of a blue planet colliding with the sun. In the pictures, the world looked small and insignificant. Inside there was a drawing of the sun’s fire reflected on the Earth’s watery surface—the way a human eye sometimes takes on a version of what it sees.
A TRILLION-TO-ONE CHANCE
OF HELIO-ERADICATION, EXPERTS SAY,
BUT THE RISK IS THERE . . .
At an impromptu conference in Geneva last month, scientists from the Brisbane Space Alliance, New Brunswick Observatory, London’s Greenwich Hub, and the Chinese People’s Party Institute for the Cosmos met to discuss the Earth’s recent change in orbit . . .
Underneath, Lenny had placed a copy of the New York Sun, where the idea had been front-page news a month before:
SCIENTISTS IN CHILE FEAR HOT END
Despite calls by government officials in Santiago for calm, and measures for information containment, several of Chile’s leading space experts have put forward their fear that the Earth is heading for destruction. Although Western cosmologists say this is a remote possibility, they agree that global warming has heated the planet so significantly, a change in the Earth’s orbit may be inevitable.
20.
Lenny went to the kitchen again. He was shivering and starting to panic. If it were true, then his responsibility now would be to spare them unimaginable suffering—not seek comfort for himself by telling them.
He imagined himself with a pillow. Hovering as they slept. Arms might not be enough—he would have to press with his whole body. There might be a struggle, legs kicking, arms flailing—Jane’s small torso writhing under his grip like a pinned snake. But it was the lesser of two evils, as his mother might have said.
Breathing would cease in less than a minute. The brain is starved. The heart stops. Blood is still. Hours before the collective eye of mankind closes in pain and terror.
It must have happened before, Lenny thought, when the certainty of a painful death was known. The Second World War. Those camps where Jews were sent to be murdered, one by one, mother by mother, father by father, daughter by daughter, son by son. Every heart had belonged to someone, somewhere.
Lenny had seen films about it, but there were those who were actually present, those whose cries tore the air, whose bones are in earth, turning every thousand years. Those whose lives we still touch through the sadness of beautiful things.
21.
It reminded Lenny of a story from the Bible he’d heard in school on the reservation. About a king who sent soldiers to kill every male child under the age of two. Right in front of their parents and siblings, the soldiers just ripped open the small bodies with swords.
Lenny wondered how it would feel to see Carolin’s body after he’d done it. If he would hold her close or if he would feel nothing. She’d have to be first, for if she woke up while he was standing over Jane, she would attack him.
Once he explained, she would understand. They would sit down beside Jane’s body, knowing they had done their best as parents.
Jane had always been a heavy sleeper, but if she did wake up while Lenny was going at it with her mother, he could pretend she had a fever and he was trying some new treatment on her,
pillow therapy. They might even laugh about it.
Jane was so young. She would never get to have a first kiss. Her greatest love would have been for her parents and her doll.
Lenny remembered the first time he saw his daughter frightened for her life. It was in Pennsylvania a few years back when the roller coaster they were on suddenly stopped while they were upside down. Jane forced herself to laugh at first . . . thought it was part of the ride. But then there were people below running. Cars with flashing lights. Lenny tried to keep her calm, said to open her knees and wedge herself inside the car. If the bar released he wanted her to have a chance. He was heavy and would plummet like a stone. He got the belt from around his pants to tie her in—but she was getting in such a state he had to shout at her.
He found out later they were trapped for fifty-seven seconds. Not quite a minute, yet for Jane it was a major part of her childhood, something by which she would judge all future incidents of fear.
For the last twenty seconds of being trapped, some of the other people were really screaming. Please, God! I love you, my Lord!
The truth was almost too simple to grasp.
A tree limb had fallen on the track ahead. The girl working the controls saw it on her monitor and pressed the emergency stop. People were in a panic, Lenny thought, when the truth was they were being saved by an unseen hand.
An hour later the ride was running again. Lenny, Jane, and Carolin watched it from a bench, eating free ice cream, listening to the screams.
* * *
• • •
In the kitchen, Lenny turned the faucet and cupped his hands. The water was warm and went easily down his throat. The kitchen must have been where the original family spent their time. There was no table now, but the floor was marked where the legs had been. Back home in Albany, in their pink house on Calyer Street, there was a table where Jane did her homework. Once a week they watched a film and ate dinner on the couch. Going over his life now, there were things he wished he had done differently.
Times when he could have been kinder.
Last week, when Jane got up from the couch she knocked over her glass of lemonade.
“Why are you so clumsy?” he had said.
Carolin wasn’t home from work yet.
Jane just stood there, looking at the watery hand on the floor.
“Get some paper towels, Jane. It’s your mess, so clean it.”
He could see she wanted to cry, but it didn’t matter to him then.
“How old are you?”
She didn’t answer. He tried to stop himself.
“Almost eleven, Jane, and you can’t have a glass of lemonade without disaster?”
He wanted it to sound like an observation. But he knew, deep down, it wasn’t an observation—but fear of his own failure. And how that brought them closer to death.
Then Jane was on the floor wiping up the spill. After she had cleaned up the lemonade she ran to her room but was sobbing before she got there.
“Aren’t you going to finish watching the movie?” he shouted.
* * *
• • •
Lenny looked across the dark farmhouse kitchen toward the silverware drawer. Imagined taking a knife and driving it into his stomach.
Why did he make his daughter cry?
He wanted to rush upstairs now and wake her. Beg forgiveness. But she had already forgiven him. Because she was a child.
Lenny imagined carrying their bodies into the snow after. The cold might preserve how they had looked to him in life. He would brush the hair from their faces.
Lenny got up and rushed to the foot of the stairs. Cold air near the front door stung his bare skin. On the mat were Jane’s Doc Marten boots. They’d bought them on a trip to New England. Jane had wanted a pair for months. Lenny remembered seeing her walk out of the shop with her old shoes in a box. That was last year. She cut her hair then too. It used to be long, but she wanted it short because of a singer she liked.
When they arrived at the house several hours ago, Carolin said it must have belonged to a farm family. Lenny imagined horses outside waiting to be stabled and fed.
After getting their things from under the blue tarp, Carolin went upstairs. Lenny and Jane still had their coats on and went out to look at the barn. Once they had kicked away enough snow to get the door open, they went in. It smelled of cold water and rust. They saw children’s bicycles stacked against one another, with flat tires and cobwebs in the wheels. Jane wanted to know where the children were now, where they had gone without their bikes.
22.
Then suddenly, Lenny fell to his knees with a gasp of relief. He understood what was happening. The preacher must have gotten his information from the news and written it into his own agenda—hijacked the uncertain and made it certain while presenting the only defense against annihilation: a love for God.
Why had he not seen it before? The blind worship of a being for whom destruction of Earth was not only necessary, but an act of love for human beings, His creation. He’d done it before with water, the preacher said, and now He was doing it again with fire—so be ready for the Lord’s love, and accept Jesus Christ as your only true savior before it’s too late.
Lenny rubbed his face into the carpet of the first stair. Imagined the preacher’s face scanning the magazine articles with glee. They were saved. They were all saved. It was a miracle.
23.
He bounded into the living room and got close to the flames, stretched his whole body out.
The preacher had seen warnings in the media and used them as a way to peddle fear. It was obvious. Lenny read the message on his phone again, hoping for another rush of insight.
We’ve just now found out from the police what’s happened. You may not be able to read this, but know I love you all, and am praying for you. Be with you soon, Mom.
It was the last sentence that baffled him. Was she driving up to the rented house? How would she know where it was? Or did she mean they would be together in general?
Without the preacher and the magazines to worry about, Lenny assumed she meant the heavy snow. It must be worse in Albany. Roads closed. Salt trucks out.
He imagined a patchwork of flickering lights.
Maybe snow was part of the end? Lenny snatched up the newspaper and began to read. People in regions near the Arctic and Antarctic could burrow away from the surface of the Earth and live longest. But only by a few hours. Then the Earth’s crust would sizzle to wisps of smoke. Nothing about snow in Albany.
But the American Geographic story said something that made Lenny stop reading, and just sit cross-legged by the fire.
It was that, before the universe, there was nothing.
Not even time.
Lenny pictured his wife upstairs. Carolin had come from a place where there had once been nothing.
But why was there not nothing now?
He thought of her body in the bed. Eyes behind still lids. Head on the pillow, chin tilted up in gentle defiance of sleep. Then Jane. A warm bundle of child and doll.
Lenny felt their lives as miraculous and small. But the smallness was more valuable to him than things he could not imagine. A universe with endless patches of hot and cold.
They were at the mercy of flesh and bone. Things he could not comprehend would never be greater than his daughter’s hands, his wife’s hair on the pillow at night like black rivers.
24.
Lenny held up his watch. He could hear the springs, the wheels, and the cogs that measured time—but which were really counting the cycles of Earth circling that great fire humans once believed was a God.
It was almost five now. The watch was made in Switzerland. Why had time never been worshipped? It seemed important enough, and existed without being visible. Maybe it’s God of the future, Lenny wondered. The first nonhuman God. A force that moves wit
hout moving.
Carolin had bought the watch for Lenny nine years before, in Las Vegas. He could see her now at the craps table in fancy black shoes. Lenny had promised his mother never to gamble, so he watched with a plastic cup of Sprite because he had been sober six months.
Then came the lucky roll.
Carolin screamed and everyone looked at them. They looked at each other.
“We’re on our honeymoon,” Carolin said to all the people watching, as though trying to explain her good fortune.
Lenny hadn’t thought about that trip to Las Vegas for a long time. But it was an important memory now. It was the first time he’d felt certain of another person’s love.
In the afternoon Lenny had made Carolin get the three-stone diamond ring she wanted. When she asked what he wanted, he told her a tattoo. She got him a watch instead. Lenny kept holding it up to his ear.
On the last day, they saw the Elvis chapel.
“Let’s get married again,” Lenny said, then held up his watch. “We have time.”
It was silly but made her laugh.
* * *
• • •
Sitting before the fire, a hot speck in the universe, Lenny could feel the happiness he would lose when his life ended. Memories bombarded him then, as though trying to find their way back into the world. Maybe that’s what ghosts are, he thought, feelings so strong they get away.
25.
It was time to sleep. Lenny felt his eyes were closing. He was ready to lie down and disappear.
It would be light soon, and everything seemed clear now.
The preacher had taken things from magazines, and the message from Carolin’s mother was about the snow. They would wake up tomorrow and go about their lives.
The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories Page 9