With burning tobacco raining down on us, those of us beneath the porch decided to scuttle the house once and for all, little knowing what our future held (but having a good guess, for where there’s smoke, however thin and insubstantial, there’s often fire). We just wanted out. When Helen finished the last cigarette, we followed her from the porch to a patch of shade beneath a banana tree. We examined the ground as we gathered around her, helplessly drawn to the flesh of fallen fruit. Still, we like to think that noble sentiments, above all others, guided us, and that she felt less alone as she contemplated her future for the very first time.
“It will all come out in the end,” she whispered. We turned our antennae toward her.
She crouched down on her elbows, blew on our wings, and observed our movements. Perhaps she was testing some strange theory about cockroaches. Or perhaps she hadn’t ingested the sort of rot published in most entomological journals and could actually see something of herself in us. Maybe, after years of suffering, she’d finally surrendered to madness. Maybe she just wanted to impart to us the momentary sensation of flight.
With strange particulates starting to move through the air, we’d be taking flight again soon enough. But when she leaned back against the tree, we snacked on bits of soft pulp and waited. Her expression softened, and her legs twitched. She was dreaming, we knew, of herself as a gloriously failed suicide floating far above a gutted world. We left her to float on borrowed silken wings, looking down at the sea with nothing but birds beneath her feet. It had been years since she’d slept peacefully, so we nestled in the dirt and settled down for a nap. It seemed right, after so much horror, to doze, if only for a moment, in preparation for everything ahead. And we didn’t want to disturb her dreams. Insofar as her future was ours, our dreams were the same.
If Helen had actually been graced with flight, she might have seen some of us below, earthbound exiles in the prime minister’s car, fleeing with wheels instead of wings. Behind the vents, we batted our wings for all they were worth, trying to capture wafts of fresh air and dispel traces of something too terrible to countenance. Graham Douglas, the deputy, and the two remaining members of the security detail had been spared the smell of blood by the miracles of modern science. The plastic tarp had allowed them to close the windows, to mute the sun with tinted glass and flood the car with cool air. It had allowed them to ignore the dead man lying behind the backseat.
Professor Cleave, though, had at his fingertips the insistent memory of a beating pulse. He kept his eyes from the mirror, fearing he might see Tremor’s face upon the glass.
“We’ll need to inform certain people this afternoon,” Douglas said. “Did he have a family?”
“Being from Rocky Point, I assume not much of one. None of them do,” the deputy said. “You must know something of his circumstances. You worked with him.”
Professor Cleave didn’t realize he’d been addressed until he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I said you must know something about him. Whether he had a family.”
Professor Cleave considered how little he knew of Tremor, the person who had, more than anyone else, cast his own convictions into sharp relief. Tremor, he realized, had been little more than a mirror for his own moral vanity. “I don’t know anything about his circumstances.”
The deputy settled back in his seat and watched the withered landscape slip past. “He’s one more card in their hand. Bowden can be ours.”
“It would be madness to release Bowden now,” Douglas said.
“It could ease tensions. Those who arrested him worked for Buttskell.”
“Those men now work for me.”
Professor Cleave glanced at the rearview mirror. Douglas was struggling to loosen his tie with one hand.
“Rocky Point will always be Rocky Point, and Bowden will disappear into it,” the deputy said. “We don’t need to give them another martyr.”
“They said Buttskell was a terrible golfer,” Douglas said suddenly. “They laughed and said I would improve my game in time.”
Professor Cleave felt the deputy’s hand on his shoulder again and looked up to see Douglas pressing his fingertips to his lips. He pulled the car alongside a stack of concrete sewer pipes and then averted his eyes to spare the only dignity left to a gutted man getting sick in the weeds beside a ditch.
We dropped from the gaskets the moment Professor Cleave pulled the empty car into the lot behind the Hospitality Service Workers’ headquarters. For a long moment, he stood with a hose in his hand, watching oily water soak into the gravel beside the car. He thought of the hospital morgue, still without electricity, and the dark stain left in the back of the car, where Tremor’s body had been. He turned off the hose, then, and locked the prime minister’s car for the last time.
He was relieved to find his cab where he’d left it. When he took his place behind the wheel, we gathered on the dashboard. Our only regret about the cab was that it didn’t have a cylinder to spare. We fluttered our wings, knowing Professor Cleave would exercise his usual caution pulling away from the curb. We wanted to speed through every intersection, to accelerate until it seemed that gravity held no sway. He turned a worn key over in his hand and peered through the windshield at trampled flyers lying in the gutter.
“They’ll be washed away when it finally rains. Rain will bring relief, but it will bring forgetting, too.” He slid the key into the ignition. “I know you dream of digital displays and satellite radio. Of tinted windows to shield your scandalous behavior.”
We must have confirmed his impression by skittering across the radio dial.
“Let me tell you, few can survive in such a car. There is no future in it, my students. It reeks of corruption. That car is a damnable hearse.”
He drew The Wonder That Was Ours from his jacket and placed it on the seat. Several of us rounded its edges, brushed its loose pages and fluttered our wings, as if we might fan the flames of so many years ago.
“You have no need to fear a lecture today.” Professor Cleave rubbed his eyes. “Perhaps you want to know where I found a book in circumstances such as these. I admit taking liberties in the Plantations’ library. Their disregard for learning is more shameful than anything you have devised in your rudest moments. They have a wealth of knowledge at their disposal, and they are happy to dispose of it.”
We dipped our antennae into weak currents of recycled air, content with the sound of Professor Cleave’s voice.
“If it eases our conscience, we saved this book from obscurity. It was once in our library.” Professor Cleave faltered. “I sound like he used to, and you are right to think so.”
He hung his head between his arms and listened to a rattle beneath the hood. When he lifted his face, he considered a burned couch upended on a sidewalk and pulled away from the curb.
Out of respect for his feelings, we remained quiet until we reached the harbor. At the sight of the Celeste churning jetsam and belching smoke, we crowded against the windshield to watch policemen overseeing the disembarkation of sallow forms slumped in wheelchairs.
“For them, it’s over. I almost expected to see Des standing there, smoking his cigarettes.”
We flattened ourselves on the dashboard. Professor Cleave left us to our ruminations and regrets, and we left him to his.
At the edge of Portsmouth, he grew animated at the sight of a man limping along the road, holding up his pants with one hand. “Already they’ve released him.” He leaned forward to better see through the dusty windshield. “That he’s still standing is the wonder. We can’t pass him without offering a lift.”
He snapped his fingers and gestured toward the vents. We scurried out of his reach to behold one of our few human connections to Mary. John Bowden had always brought salted fish to Mary’s house in the middle of the night, and while he’d never paid us much heed, he’d never menaced us with anything beyond his stare.
“Damn you to the last,” Professor Cleave said. “I would not be using such foul la
nguage but for such foul behavior. The man has suffered, and this is no time for your provocations.”
We barely registered his words as he pulled to the side of the road and pushed open the passenger door. As if his bones had been fused, John Bowden turned toward the car in tiny increments. He considered Professor Cleave through the slits between swollen eyelids.
“I can take you to Rocky Point,” Professor Cleave said.
John Bowden took a halting step forward and lowered himself into the cab. With his working hand, he reached over his lap and pulled his door closed. “I remember you. From years ago.” He rested his broken fingers on the threads spanning a tear in his pants. “In the prison yard. Before the storm.”
He regarded those of us gathered on the dashboard. We drew our wings close and remained perfectly still.
“I saw the light when it burned,” he said, once Portsmouth had disappeared. “It filled the cell. But seeing it in the day. His name everywhere.”
“He’s dead,” Professor Cleave said.
“I know. He was with me. They took him. They’ll say he did it to himself.”
“They let him out of jail,” Professor Cleave said. “He was shot this morning.” Over the next few minutes, he related what he knew of Tremor’s last hours, fearing his composure might dissolve. “He made a bad bargain.”
“They made him look death in the eye,” John Bowden said. “And he had nothing to bargain.”
For the rest of the way to Rocky Point, Professor Cleave and John Bowden remained silent. We studied John Bowden’s crooked fingers and remembered so many traps, so many corners we’d backed into, and all the sewers we’d called home. At the Rocky Point bypass, Professor Cleave turned onto a dirt road. He stopped at a dip where the road had washed out years before. John Bowden gathered his pants at the waist and pushed against the passenger door with his shoulder.
“They always take your belt,” Professor Cleave said.
“I didn’t have a belt. I had one, once. A long time ago.”
Without another word, John Bowden struggled from the car and started toward Rocky Point. As he disappeared into the trees, Professor Cleave tried to imagine the village at the end of the overgrown path—the polluted beach, the rusted trailers and splintered boats, the children in shapeless clothes.
“I never knew a thing about him,” he whispered. “About any of them.”
Professor Cleave was talking to himself. We’d been driven to distraction, but not for the reasons he suspected: hints of rotting fish and washed-up garbage. We’d glimpsed Mary’s house through the trees. It had been emptied by then, sanctified and then stripped. Still, as Professor Cleave backed onto the ring road, we scaled the windows and crowded one end of the dashboard, straining our antennae in the direction of Mary’s door, desperately hoping to recapture the sensation of her rough fingers brushing our wings.
“Gravity has no sway in this car, I see. Your holiday has hardly restored your intellectual energies, and you’ve lapsed into your usual mischief.” He eyed the dashboard. “Much to your distress, my students, classes will soon resume.”
The announcement, however couched in needless offense, drew us from the edge of despair. Those of us given to sober reflection mingled the tips of our antennae in quiet dialogues. Some of us paced, contemplating the intellectual exercises that would invariably impinge upon our noontime slumbers. All of us, admittedly for reasons not entirely laudable—boredom beneath the hood and a strange sort of nostalgia—felt roused, if not entirely rallied. Professor Cleave sensed our mood and rose to the occasion.
“We are all facing lean times now,” he said. “We’ll be turning stony ground full of weeds, but let me tell you, we will treat it with care, as if there is no other.”
He spent the rest of the drive home reimagining Geoffrey Morrow’s splendorous garden. For our part, we dreamed of clear puddles and soft pulp and the most incredible weed ever known spreading across every hillside, the smoking ruins of plantations and the end of all pesticides, of Mary whispering to the tips of our antennae. We dreamed of paradise.
At home, Professor Cleave found Topsy sitting before the house, trying to light the tobacco shreds clinging to a cigarette butt. As he stepped from the cab, Topsy moved his cane and shifted to the side of the stoop.
“I can get past you well enough,” Professor Cleave said.
“I wasn’t moving for that reason. Sit down after a day driving that miserable bastard around. You look terrible. Worse than ever.”
Professor Cleave drew the tattered book from his jacket and placed it on the stoop.
“Where did you get this thing?” Topsy took the book in his hands.
Professor Cleave planted his elbow on his knee and rested his forehead on his upturned palm. “The Plantations. They have a library there.”
“I don’t understand. It didn’t belong to them.”
“I know. There’s a stamp. It was in the Portsmouth library.”
“I was talking about the title,” Topsy said. “It doesn’t make a bit of sense. The Wonder That Was Ours. My father always said this man Markeley was a real monkey’s ass. Nothing of this place ever belonged to him. But Markeley, all of them, acted like it was theirs to raise or ruin.”
Topsy leafed through the book, picking out loose pages and discarding all but those with photographs. “This is a good one,” he said, holding up a page. “It shows you how they lived. What sort they were.”
Professor Cleave looked at the photograph of a sprawling estate house.
“We were mostly drinking, but you could say it was the first headquarters of the United Gravel Grinders. We started the labor movement there. We didn’t have your man Marx, but we had a manifesto. We had class in every sense of that word.”
“I never saw a manifesto. Nothing of the sort existed.”
Topsy picked a shred of tobacco from his pants. “Your ma started the first fire. I was up there with her. We drank some beer and she kicked over a lantern. We weren’t married, but it was love. That was the night you came into it.”
Professor Cleave drew his tie from his neck and tossed it onto a pile of cigarette butts.
“She was extravagant when it came to hats and shoes,” Topsy continued. “Otherwise, we scraped the bottom of the bowl. But we got by. That was the wonder. Let me tell you, the union led this country to independence, and the wonder became ours.”
“To raise or ruin,” Professor Cleave said.
Topsy braced his hand on his knee and stood up. “I’m going to get a few cigarettes off Morris’s daughter. She always spares a few. She’s not a bad sort, underneath it all.”
Professor Cleave lifted the cane from the grass and handed it to his father. Topsy wrapped his stiff fingers around its handle.
“Morris didn’t raise a fool,” he said. “And I didn’t either, even if he thought he knew something about everything. Now you know something about yourself.”
Professor Cleave listened to a fading soliloquy about professors and pulpits until his father disappeared down the road. Alone, he leaned forward and lowered his head. His father’s story had loosened something inside him. For the first time in years, he wept. He felt himself losing definition, giving way to grief and exhaustion. He lifted his face and examined the cut on his thumb and the cracked skin around his knuckles. He longed to wash himself clean, to lie down in a shallow stream on a cool evening. He tried to imagine the stream and realized his memory of rain had nearly evaporated.
He considered the book lying in disarray beside him. He picked up the grainy image of the plantation house and envisioned the first members of his father’s union drinking in an abandoned drawing room and conceiving manifestos inspired by a clouded sense of possibility. He imagined his mother kicking over a lantern, stunned by the sight of flames eating away the polish on hardwood floors, and then laughing with his father, once the smoke dissipated, at the destruction that would stand as a testament to their first love. He imagined all of their wonder as the same he’
d felt flying down a road on a rusted bike overloaded with books, carried aloft by fantastic ideas. He rested his face in his palms, and in the quiet space folded within his hands, tried to capture something of the wonder that still remained. We sat with him, our useless wings resting on our backs and our antennae raised, listening to Mary and waiting for rain.
LOVE
WE ENTERTAIN FANTASIES OF flight, still. Who can blame us? How could we forget perching at the very edge of the Ambassador’s rooftop, at the edge of the known world, it sometimes seemed, with wind stirring our wings and the sensation of flight stirring our imagination? That sensation carried Professor Cleave through the long hours and days he bartered for books. It allowed Trevor Prentice to imagine a weightless body liberated from hunger and hard stares. It recalled, for all of us, something of innocence, as we imagined it, right before a terrible fall.
Now that the Ambassador is gone, we sometimes perch on the ramparts of the deserted Fort, lift our antennae to the breeze and recapture something of that sensation. We catch the scents of distant shores, knowing there’s no escape from the damage that’s been done, that paradise has been lost, and that it might always have been an illusion. We sit above the courtyard, which has been silent for some time, and dream about what might have been and what could someday be. We look up at the clouds and remember what it was like to fly so long ago, in bygone eras forgotten by most. Eventually, we always crawl back to Professor Cleave’s cab, our classroom and air-conditioned sanctuary.
One day we’ll inherit the Earth, they say. They’ve been wrong before. However resilient we become, insecticides will kill many of us, and so much else. For now, we’ll continue to live where we can, in houses built upon our homes, sewers and drainpipes, deep cupboards and fast cars, and landfills and luxury resorts. Some of us might just survive to inherit the shell of the Earth, with all its jetsam and ruin, and if we do, we’ll fill it with whatever love remains.
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