“He would do the same for me.”
“What if you’re seen? By the police. By others. You don’t know what they’ll do.”
Professor Cleave drew his keys from his pocket. “This is Desmond.”
“This is us.” She blew out the candle and disappeared into her bedroom.
Outside, Topsy was staring at the glow above the trees. He slid to the edge of the stoop to let Professor Cleave pass.
“I’ve already been up the hill. There’s nothing to see except that minister sitting in his chapel, talking to himself about the evils of drink. The only thing genuine about the man is his ignorance. I’ve had more to drink than that whole lot down there, and you won’t find me tossing matches.”
“I’m not going up the hill.” Professor Cleave started toward his cab. “Desmond’s at the terminal.”
“It’s too late to go down there,” Topsy said, struggling from the stoop.
A moment later, Professor Cleave looked into his rearview mirror and saw his father in crimson taillight, beating his thighs with his fists. He didn’t roll down his window until he’d passed beyond the reach of his father’s voice. With stinging antennae, we assembled on the dashboard, sickened by our sense of acceleration without flight.
Near Portsmouth, odd particulates accumulated inside the car. Some of us turned from the windows, tripping over one another in our haste to escape the stench of burning rubber. At a bend in the road, the trees parted to reveal the smoldering center of Portsmouth, scattered fires at the edge of town, and closer still, the wreckage of the Ambassador. Professor Cleave took in the Ambassador’s scorched face and the smoke trailing from its incinerated rooms. He rubbed his eyes, and in his momentary blindness grasped the enormity of the destruction ahead.
He had no sense of his hands on the steering wheel as he skirted overturned cars and the springs of burnt couches. He reached the first impasse at an intersection blocked by a burning mattress and twisted bicycle. He climbed from his cab, gripped a set of warm handlebars, and tossed the bicycle from the road. As three men emerged from an alley, a bottle shattered at his feet. With chunks of concrete raining down on his windows, he fell back into his cab and sped through the intersection. When he looked at his rearview mirror, he saw a fractured world coated in ash.
At the terminal, he tripped over a broken padlock and raced past ransacked stores, stopping to catch his breath only once, before a cracked window covered in streaks of pale cream. He looked at a bottle of tanning lotion on the ground, became aware of a profound silence filling the spaces between distant shouts, and started running again.
He found Desmond lying on the pier. He fell to his knees, tugged at Desmond’s jacket, and felt the sickening strain of dead weight. His fingers grew sticky when he slid them beneath Desmond’s head. He felt for Desmond’s pulse and then pounded his fists on concrete until his hands lost all feeling. Finally, he lowered his cheek to Desmond’s chest and beheld the world on its side, strewn with perfume bottles and shot glasses and plastic key chains.
“There is no reason,” he whispered.
For the rest of the night, he sat beside Desmond, remembering their secret pacts and countless disagreements. He gripped Desmond’s hand and felt the calluses crowning its palm and the jagged edge of a bitten nail. He remembered Desmond’s fingers moving nervously around a cigarette during their last conversation. Every abstraction had failed him.
With the ground still warm and the sky clouded over in the most infernal way, we were incapable of consoling him, or of comforting each other. Each of us existed, at that moment, in near isolation. We almost felt human.
ANTHROPOCENE
WE REMEMBER WAITING IN Professor Cleave’s cab in the hours before dawn. Smoke had obliterated every star from the sky, but in the light of dying fires, we saw shattered glass strewn across the deserted street and violent slogans painted on the walls of gutted shops. It was difficult to believe that kindness had ever existed, or that anything but hatred and mistrust could arise from the wreckage. Viewed through the cracked windshield, the world might have been extinguished of all human life. We sensed, not for the first time, that we were witnessing the end of the Anthropocene.
One commonly hears that cockroaches will survive any disaster that befalls the planet, that we’ll inherit and even thrive in what remains. In his influential 1897 study, New World Arthropods, Antonio Pelegri postulated that “cockroaches possess an incomparable resilience that will ensure their survival during periods of dietary deficiency and destruction of habitat.” Cockroaches, Pelegri added, “prehistoric in origin, will assuredly outlive Homo sapiens, thereby demonstrating the relative evolutionary advantage of physical adaptability over cranial development and brain mass, the latter nearly nonexistent in this order of arthropods.” Utter rubbish, to be sure.
If Pelegri’s present-day acolytes routinely overstate our resilience, Hollywood filmmakers fuel regrettable forms of sensationalism by depicting cockroaches as enormous mutants ravaging radioactive landscapes, picking over the steel bones of dead American cities and trampling crowds in Tokyo. One need only think of Infestation and Roach Rampage!, which some of us saw as a double feature at Cine Internationale in Guadalajara. Perched beneath the dusty beam of an overworked projector, we consumed stale popcorn and cheered our takeover of the world’s subways. It was all just entertainment, though, at odds with our realities, or more to the point, our vulnerabilities. That, we knew at the time. That, we knew the morning after the riots.
Many of us had died during the night. Some of us didn’t make it from the Ambassador’s roof. Some of us suffocated within the walls of burning houses. Others escaped the flames, only to be trampled underfoot. People never account for times like those when they write of cockroaches’ limitless resilience or concoct stories about roach triumphalism in the wake of humans’ demise.
Pelegri (remarkably, an Endowed Chair of Natural Sciences at the University of Turin) and his ilk failed to attend to symbiosis, which bears upon our species no less than any other. Even if we survive some oddly selective apocalypse, what sort of life will we have? We imagine we’ll live on the contents of cupboards until the cupboards are bare, and then off the rot of dying plants. We’ll eat through wallpaper and books and ingest dollar bills found in the streets, scraping by in the meanest of ways. When the last paper disappears, we’ll sift through dirt for edible matter, hoping to avoid whatever poison has wrought the end of all others. Then, in the long days of slow starvation, when only dust and ash remain, we’ll reign over a kingdom of silence, for there will be no radio—just orphaned transmissions moving between dead satellites.
How quickly it’s passing, the Anthropocene.
Humans sense their end coming and seem to accept it as a given. This might explain their predilections for films about catastrophic events. We suspect they’re trying to envision the new order that will arise after the wars and floods. As we’ve been troubled to observe, the new order projected on screen seems much like the old one, between cruel leaders controlling scarce resources, widespread slavery, and marauding motorcycle gangs clinging to outdated ethnic identities. Humans seem unable to imagine the world transformed by a period of chaos. Talk about limited cranial development! What might Pelegri have written had he foreseen the development of modern cinema?
Rhetorical questions aside, we’ve spent enough time sneaking into movie theaters to know that post-apocalypse films of the “Roachploitation” genre are of the lowest possible grade—little more than training videos for sadists and barbarians committed to vilifying insects. If Hollywood has any predictive value, “hordes” of cockroaches will continue to serve as scapegoats for feeble-minded and emotionally unsound individuals long after the world, as we know it, has passed. If it were within our biological capabilities, and if the implications weren’t so disturbing, we’d yawn.
Arguably, humans’ inability to conceive of the future as anything but an exaggerated version of the present suggests not only a preponderance
of pedestrian intellects, but a troubling resignation. Even if humans (and cockroaches) have passed a tipping point, there’s an argument against fiddling and filming while Rome burns. Willful ignorance and despair are unaffordable luxuries, and for us, unattainable, for cockroaches are extremely sentient beings.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN easy to fall prey to despair the morning after the riots, as daybreak revealed Portsmouth’s ruins and the harbor deadened by a stratum of ash. Helen considered her filthy sweater and the flies swarming above it. Dave touched his cheek and struggled to sequence the events of the night before. Over and over, his fragmented thoughts returned to Tremor.
“The kid. How bad is it?”
“You had a concussion. Have one, maybe.”
She pulled her sweater from the sand and carried it to the water’s edge, rocked on her heels, and sunk into silt and soft mud. At the sound of a helicopter sweeping the harbor, she looked at the Celeste and contemplated the possibility of succumbing to thirst within sight of a shopping mall and a stock of airlifted supplies. She dragged her teeth over her parched lips.
“People do it all the time,” she whispered.
She sloughed off her bandages and cast them to the ground, wet the sleeve of her sweater, and walked back across the beach. When she knelt down and dabbed the side of Dave’s face, bloody water fanned across her wrist, and she realized she knew nothing about the man, a stranger even to himself, staring at her with unfocused eyes. She lowered her hand to her lap and rubbed her fingers together until a gritty red seal formed between them. Then she considered the damage she’d done to herself, the irony of her fear, and began wiping crusted blood from his cheek. After she wiped down his face and neck, she lifted her face to the sky.
“We need to find clean water,” she said.
They trudged across the beach, stopping at short intervals to catch their breath. At the top of the bluff, she looked once at the Ambassador’s scorched face and then continued walking, using her back teeth to scrape saliva from her inner cheeks and leading Dave with impossible promises of relief.
In Portsmouth, they found roof beams collapsed into blackened foundations, houses and ransacked shops spared the ravages of unpredictable fires, signs announcing a sundown curfew, and groups of women sifting through bits of broken jewelry and pausing, without fail, to stare at two strangers covered in dirt and the marks of disease. They identified the grocery store by its trampled sign. Helen approached a door hanging from loosened hinges, called out, and hearing nothing, stepped inside. In the spare light passing through a small window, they made their way around toppled shelves and a rifled cash register upended on the floor to a dark cooler with open glass doors.
Helen pressed the back of her hand to her nose. “Something’s gone off.”
“I can’t smell anything,” Dave said.
While he struggled to open a bottle of water, she started gathering plastic bags, small boxes, and foil packets from the floor. A moment later, she sensed a movement and jerked upright. A man stood in the doorway, adjusting his grip on a cricket bat.
“Get out of my shop.”
“We just needed water,” she said.
The man looked at the bags straining her fingers. “Take what you touched and leave.” He entered the store and stepped behind a counter. “Just go. Please.”
“I can pay you,” she said.
“Please. Just go away.”
The man placed the bat on the counter and lowered his face into his hands. When his shoulders began to shake, she took Dave’s arm and staggered into sunlight.
They sat on the steps of a padlocked church and ate in silence. Dave studied six letters spray-painted on a billboard advertising beachfront condominiums.
“It’s his name,” he said.
She heard a question in his voice and nodded.
“I’m having trouble reading,” he said. “I feel sick.”
“The smell is probably making it worse.”
He looked around, as if he might recognize some odor by sight. “I can’t smell anything.”
“It’s burnt rubber. It’s everywhere. In our clothes.”
He lifted his collar to his nose and shook his head. The bruise on his face had assumed a dark purple cast.
“There must be a hospital.” She looked at an overturned car blocking an intersection. “How far can you walk?”
“I don’t know. Not far.”
“We need to keep moving.” She touched his shoulder and he flinched.
“He’s a hero,” he said, staring at the billboard. “These people are savages.” He was still staring at the billboard when he started down the steps.
Near the terminal, she crouched beside a tangle of clothing in front of a souvenir shop. She pulled several shirts from a pile, shook glass from their folds, and read the decals emblazoned on each. We shrank beneath our wings in mortification. It’s impossible, sometimes, not to feel an affinity for females of the human species, even if few entertain affection for us. Between Mean Girls Suck and Nice Girls Swallow! and Body Police: Flat on the Ground and Spread Them!, we shuddered, truly, and crossed every set of legs. Helen and Dave, though, desperately needed something to wear.
While Dave stared at a single shoe lying in the street, Helen held a shirt to his shoulders.
“‘Surrender the Booty.’ It’s awful, but it should fit.” She gathered another shirt from the sidewalk, fingered Bob Marley’s airbrushed image, and then sifted through beach covers patterned with tropical sunsets. A moment later, she looked down at a spliff visible through the parting in a pastel sky and collected two packs of cigarettes from the gutter. She was pulling a small flag from a storefront display when a man passed on a bicycle. Dozens of watches encircled his arms and a lopsided stack of straw hats upon his head swayed from side to side.
“Look at that, two white niggers looting,” he called.
When he rounded a corner, Helen wrapped St. Anne’s flag around Dave’s head and knotted it. “Let’s keep walking.”
They headed south, along the harbor road, until they encountered an overturned van blocking the street. Three men in sleeveless shirts stood beside the van, watching their approach. As Helen and Dave neared, one of the men hurled a bottle in their direction. Helen stepped away from a spray of shattered glass, took Dave’s arm, and turned around.
“Maybe there’s another road south,” she said. “Further inland.”
In the center of Portsmouth, Dave took a sip of water and retched. He cast an empty plastic bottle to the ground and sat down on a curb. Helen blinked salt from her eyes and measured the sun’s distance from the treetops.
“Our cab driver. I think I could find the road to where he lives. He said he lives in a place called Stokes Hill. He might give us a ride. We won’t make it anywhere else before dark.”
Dave rested his forearms on his knees and lowered his head. “I can’t get up yet.”
She sat down beside him. To the buzz of circling flies, they closed their eyes and drifted in and out of waking nightmares. When a barking dog startled her, she prodded Dave, and they started walking again, announcing themselves to every stranger with a desecrated flag and looted shirts emblazoned with a vulgar demand and pirated lyrics about one love.
We rested on beds of singed newspaper and turned our antennae toward Stokes Hill, wondering how Professor Cleave would react to their arrival. He was in bad form that morning, and in fact, hardly himself, which might not have been the worst thing. No one had the patience for lectures, and he didn’t have the energy or conviction to deliver them.
All morning, he’d been sitting on his stoop, staring at the cracked earth between his feet or looking at the sky with closed eyes and letting the sun bleed through his skin. He barely heard the door open behind him. Topsy coughed once and shuffled past, cradling a radio.
“I just picked up that program out of Kingston.” Topsy fiddled with the radio to steady his hands. “They say your man Butts is stepping down.”
“He’s not my man.” Professor Cleave lowered his head.
“No, he wouldn’t be.” Topsy softened. “He was his own man, out for himself and no one else. He was never a communist. He was just like the rest, getting fat at the feedbag.”
Professor Cleave lifted his face. “He wasn’t a socialist, either.”
“No, he wasn’t.” Topsy started down the walkway. “I’m going to see Morris’s daughter to get some batteries for a few cigarettes. She’s desperate with addiction.”
“Bring your cane.”
Topsy brushed aside a fly. “I always stick to solid ground. I’ve never fallen once.”
When Topsy disappeared down the road, Professor Cleave contemplated his surroundings with bloodshot eyes. He formed fists and then stretched his fingers, felt skin cracking at his knuckles and the stiffness of swollen joints.
“Desmond showed me a few things back in the day, when he and I used to spar.” He envisioned himself as an old man in a baggy suit, attending never-ending funerals and growing more alone each day. “You won’t find the likes of him anymore.”
In one night, he’d grown mortally afraid. As difficult as things had always been, he thought, perhaps the truly lean years and loneliness had just begun.
He struggled to his feet and walked around the house, appraising grapefruit trees and bartering their fruit, in his mind, for a host of imaginary goods. He surveyed Cora’s garden—tomato plants with yellowed leaves, shriveled pea pods, squash warming on cracked clay, and so many thriving weeds. He peered into a small shed and considered a crate filled with sprouting potatoes and the jars of honey and pickled vegetables crowding a sagging shelf. He took a potato in his hand, inhaled its earthy scent, and placed it back in the crate.
He felt his chin and considered shaving. Then, as he walked back toward the house, he stiffened at the sight of his battered cab. There would be no work for a long time, and no reason for routines beyond a hopeless search for normalcy. As quickly as he’d been calmed by Cora’s providence, he felt stricken by the thought of empty months and years stretching before him. He stood beside his cab and studied its dented roof and pocked hood. He drew a line across its cracked windshield and considered the soot clinging to his fingertip, opened the door and collapsed on burning vinyl. Soon, sweat began to pour from his body, and his kidneys throbbed.
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