The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

“Not much. What I said. And the talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Oh, sure. Jim and Bill. Nights. They talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Us.”

  “And what do they say?” Paula’s eyes were dilated with emotion.

  Bella stared out over the hot fields, her face filled with light, with trust and warmth and sensitivity. “They talk interminably, Paula. About what was wrong. You know.”

  “But I don’t!”

  “About, mostly, what a mess everybody has made of sex. They talk about how sex hungry they were and how ashamed they were of being hungry because they had been taught to be ashamed.”

  “I was ashamed, myself. We taught Edwin and Edwinna and Theodora, while we had her, to feel ashamed. Every time the children showed appetite for food, we fed them full. And every time they showed a sign of erotic appetite, we slapped them down. Made sure they were cowering and scared. That, we called moral training!”

  “What could we have done? If our kids had been erotic and show-offish they’d have suffered in another way.”

  “I know. Some people thought they were very modern about their youngsters and sex. So frank and candid, it was painful. But all of them were still so self-conscious about it that the kids knew it wasn’t really frankness and naturalness. Those kids were just balled up in a different way from their parents.”

  “Like the Eckstrom children at Coral Court School? Remember? The teacher sent them home because all they talked about was how grownups made love and how children were born. They were positively obsessed with it, and certainly that’s not natural!”

  Paula nodded. “You can’t change bad ideas ground into everybody by just changing a few children here and there. You can’t expect adults, either, to change overnight into honest, normal beings. Reading the facts on top of prejudices and fears you don’t even know you’ve got doesn’t made you normal. Practically everybody would have to decide, all together, to shift things.”

  “Some parents were trying, though—”

  “In a half-baked way. But ever since the men went and women have talked freely I’ve been hysterical with laughter sometimes, and more often just downright furious, to find out how much utter bilge almost everybody believes about sex. And how dreadfully superstitious they are about it. I mean, thinking cancer is caused by venereal disease, or adultery. Things like that! Ye gods!”

  Bella sighed. “It is awful.”

  Paula said resignedly, “We didn’t do anything, in any case. And now we’re whipped. Done for. That’s the proper reward, I guess, for being cheats and hypocrites.

  For trying to lick nature. It can’t be done. Whatever a person’s real morals are, they have to come from inside that person. Social morals just start underground fires that consume the person. And the people around that person.”

  “Before the men went I thought all the talk about the importance of sex was silly.

  Even kind of dirty. Now, being alone, hundreds of nights, thinking without caring where my thoughts go, I know about what they felt.” Bella looked wistfully at the hot field.

  “Just to live a day— really being the way we really are—would be worth a lifetime of most people’s lives! The truest feelings we have are some of the ones we called sin. We put thousands of people in jail for doing things everybody would like to do and most people do, sometime or other. It’s no wonder that we were all so scared and hateful and miserable. We do kind of hate our bodies. Hate being people. I guess it doesn’t matter that we’re destroyed.”

  “Did you get the feeling, ever, in your dreams, that the men might come back?”

  Bella shook her head. “No.”

  “Did they—have any hope?”

  She thought awhile. “No.”

  “And they thought that our failure to be honest and real about sex—”

  “—about love, they called it—”

  “—was the cause of the mess?”

  “That. Yes.”

  “Did you think they were dreaming about us?”

  “No. Not the way I was.”

  “That star you described. Did that suggest any kind of beginning point? Any method you and I might try to make them dream the way you were?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Paula lifted her highball, looked at it, and set it down. “Do you suppose there would be any way for us, if they came back, to try to feel and behave the way we think, now, that we should? Not to be possessive? Jealous? Envious? Hostile? Not to demand anything? To accept all. To want for them more than for ourselves?”

  “I thought I always did,” Bella answered, without immodesty.

  “But I guess where the things I was brought up to believe were concerned, I always really insisted on having my way.”

  Paula shrugged. “That’s it! When people believe that what they believe is the immortal truth there’s not much you can do. They’re born clay with a tendency to become lovely statuary. But some aunt, some mother, a sister, a schoolmate, a church, soon grabs them and bakes them into mean little bricks. And the bricks made a nation.

  And every brick is faulty and crumbly. And when the pile gets high enough it collapses.

  Every single nation did; and now, the world.”

  “That’s the sort of thing Jim and Bill say in my dreams!”

  “We’ve got to do something about your dreams, Bella!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Write them down in sequence and detail. Then get people studying what you’ve written. It could be the beginning of a way back.”

  “It hardly seems so to me.”

  “You maybe ought to be hypnotized,” Paula went on earnestly, “to see if anything can be found out that way.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be hypnotized.”

  Paula looked at her compassionately. “I know. Who would? But that’s beside the point! We should get your dreams publicized. Find out if other people are having dreams like them. Maybe they are. Couples that have real love between them.”

  “If that was the case, you’d be dreaming too, Paula.”

  The older woman was silent; slowly her eyes filled. “No,” she answered. “Not me. I was too selfish. Too mixed up to be in love. I liked Bill. I enjoyed him as a man.

  But love? I didn’t know myself well enough, then, to love anybody. I missed my chance.”

  The children came soon after that, shouting, hungry, glad to have finished not only school but the afternoon’s gardening to which all girls over eight were now assigned.

  Bella went home. . . .

  That night Paula gave thought to Bella’s dreams. They might well be “true” in a sense of truth neither of the women understood.

  Men, surviving alone, would undoubtedly grow short-tempered and finally violent. They would allow their yards to become overgrown, their cities tacky. But their cities would not have burned because they would have had the fire-fighting equipment and the firemen to cope with every situation, at any moment of disappearance of women.

  Also, their homosexuals might go about in bands for either (or both) of two reasons Paula could imagine. And the fact that Bella had dreamed of Connauth’s love affair, without any prior knowledge, was very persuasive.

  The possibility that, through dreams, some contact might be reestablished kept Paula awake until near daylight.

  At the same time, however, Bella was having another dream, one that proved to be her last.

  She saw her house on fire. She had a feeling that it had been robbed or raided. She thought she glimpsed strangers skulking away in the trees beyond the house. She then located her husband and her son. They were hiding in the thick hibiscus hedge, obviously in terror, watching helplessly as the flames rose.

  No one came to fight the fire. At length it burst from the windows of the upstairs bedrooms. Part of the roof fell. She saw, for a few moments, the rear of a huge, incomprehensible framework, in the living room. It was covered with different colors of tissue paper; there were electri
c wires leading to light bulbs, here and there. It made no sense to Bella and she did not connect the framework with the “star” of which she had originally dreamed. However, as the peculiar structure began to blaze her dream became dimmer. Toward its end she again saw the faces of Jim and Gordon—fading mistily. Her husband and her son were weeping.

  She did not dream about them any more, in the same way. When, some days later, she told Paula, that gallant woman also shed tears.

  “I guess,” she said, “that ends that! If they are alive and if you did ‘see’ them, they’re having as bad a time as ourselves. Such a bad time that it spoiled any chance of communicating, if that’s what you came near doing.”

  They forgot it, packed it deep in the Pandorean trunk of the events of that summer.

  Too much else happened.

  August again.

  Hot mornings, humid and still.

  The light-colored walls of the tropical city hurt the eyes; shadows, intensified by the sun, seemed as black as night; visibility was confined to surfaces. What would have been shade in a less torrid place here was an impenetrable gloom; a few trees or a clump of shrubs had the external glister and the interior murk of a jungle. At midday the sun heated the scalp through any hat or helmet.

  In the midafternoon a storm usually curdled over the sea or the glades and bore down on the region in eddies and promontories of gray, white and muddy-blue clouds.

  Lightning cracked, the rain came in torrents of coarse drops. Then it cleared and the sun set redly, leaving heat to steam on the land in an airless night loud with insects.

  On such a day, after the rain had stopped Edwinna came home from the Everglades. She walked slowly with her head bent, from the place where she had been set down by the truck. A woman of angles and sinews, now, with an Indian’s skin color; her once-sleek hair was cropped short, disheveled, bleached ashen by the sun. Her eyes had a hunter’s squint and she came along the lane silently, not noticing that she avoided stepping on twigs, in puddles that might splash, on bits of coral that might produce a grinding sound. She smelled of wood smoke and laundry soap. A man, an old acquaintance, had there been one, would not merely have failed to identify the lithe figure in the lane with its pre-Disappearance original; he would have sworn they were not the same, on the grounds that such absolute change was impossible.

  Yet a man, any man, would have found this Edwinna attractive, as some woman in a Viking’s camp might be.

  She turned in at the drive. From a shady place amongst the oaks she stared toward the fields where Hester and her relatives and the school children were working patiently, steadily, not stopping any more even to slap at sand flies and mosquitoes.

  Then she went on into the house.

  From a faucet she drew a glass of water and drank it and another and a third. She savored the last, enjoying the absence of muckiness, bark acridity, and the slightly sulphurous taste of decayed vegetation. She hadn’t had water since morning. She was used to that-as used as the Negro women and the children to insects.

  She heard a motor, unfamiliar. Footsteps. The kitchen door opened.

  Edwinna sprang forward, smiling. “Mother!”

  Then she recoiled.

  Paula was wearing white, dirty white. Across here nose and mouth was a heavy mask. Gauntlets covered her hands.

  “Keep away from me,” she said heavily. “Just open the door to the maid’s bath.”

  Edwinna opened the door and Paula pulled it shut with her elbow.

  The younger woman sat down. Pretty soon she heard the shower and a sound of scrubbing.

  She went to a kitchen window and looked out. The truck her mother had driven was painted black and had red glass in its headlamps. Edwinna shivered slightly and opened the icebox door. There were some frankfurters and she ate them, one by one, uncooked, cold.

  Paula at last emerged in a clean cotton dress. She smiled and extended her hands.

  They kissed.

  “What the hell?” Edwinna asked.

  “Somebody has to.”

  “Has to what?”

  “Pick up the bodies.”

  “Ye gods!” Edwinna considered for a moment. “Why you?”

  Paula shrugged. “Because it’s the one job we can’t ever get enough volunteers for.”

  “Is it all cholera?”

  “Guess so. Mostly. Is that why, by any chance—?”

  Edwinna nodded. “We had three cases last week. Five, this. So they called off hunting till it dies down. Brought us in.”

  “I see.” Paula sat at the breakfast-nook table. “I’m glad you’re here. Mighty glad.”

  “Can’t anything be done to check the damn disease?”

  “Not too much. No drugs available yet. Washington just promises. Wells polluted.

  Rivers. Bay. Always were. Flies carry it. God knows what else. It’s awful!”

  Edwinna nodded again, silently. She asked, “How many—?”

  “I couldn’t say. I’m not at the executive end any more. We have fifteen trucks, fifteen teams. City divided up. We took twenty-four bodies today. About average.”

  “Took ‘em where? Cemetery?”

  “We used to.” Paula walked over to the stove, turned a switch, felt a burner and was evidently relieved to find it working. “We did that in July. Had bulldozers. They broke down. Now-” she shrugged again. “We pumped the water out of one of the rock pits. Keep it pumped dry. Burn the corpses. With what the forage squads can get. Wood.

  Some kerosene. Used car oil.”

  “I just ate four hot dogs,” Edwinna said.

  Paula nodded understandingly. “Okay. Extra food. For sandwiches for the kids in the evening. I’ve got some stew beef.”

  “I’ll cook.”

  Her mother shook her head. “You go take a hot bath. There ought to be water. My God, Edwinna, you look shot!”

  “Be all right tomorrow.” Her eye had moved to one of the windows and focused there. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “A quail!”

  “A lot, these days,” Paula answered. “And doves. Only, nobody to shoot them—”

  “From now on,” Edwinna answered, “there will be. My stuff’ll be brought by truck in the morning. I’ll cadge some ammunition. Also, till we start hunting again out there, I’ll get on one of your burial parties.”

  “Thanks.”

  Edwinna walked through the living room to her own room and as she went she began to remove her clothes. She was thinking about beef stew and a hot bath, not about epidemic and its charnal chores. . . .

  The people of the Miamis—the people who still stayed there, the people who had not yet died and not yet Bed-learned that if they came out of their homes and apartments, their shacks and hovels, in the late afternoon, and if they looked toward the northwest section, they could see against the sky a pillar of greasy smoke. This was the smoke that rose from the rock pit, the open-air crematorium. The people came to learn that they could gauge the intensity of the plague by the volume of that swirling, sticky column.

  They came to know, also, that in certain weathers the smoke would beat downward and back upon the city. A particular horror would then be added to the febrile moaning of the afflicted, to the fatigue and the universal fear, to the rumble of the black trucks with the red lights, and to the swift visitations of the women in gruesomely soiled white who carried empty stretchers into houses and brought them out sheeted and freighted.

  No one knew where the plague had come from or exactly when it had reached Miami. The first dozen dead, or the first score, were buried without diagnosis. A rare traveler from Asia might have brought it, or one of the occasional planes from Latin America.

  As the panicky populace fled from it, they fled with it. So cholera burned its way up the east coast of Florida, through the rolling heartland, into Jacksonville, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston and onward where the women went, with their girl children. Ahead of it a shaky cordon formed, a leaky barricade that retreated week by week as it found itself infiltrated or by-p
assed. The radio, and such newspapers as were printed, incessantly advised people to boil water and to take other sanitary measures. But there was no means to cope with the flies in those days; and the small supplies of effective drugs were now hoarded.

  September came.

  One of the quota girls at the Gaunt house had died of it. Three Negroes had also been trucked to the soot-encrusted inferno and jettisoned by Paula, Edwinna and two helpers—robed, masked unstricken.

  In September, Washington took steps.

  South Florida was evacuated.

  Healthy groups and families were carried as far north as Minnesota, which was where the Gaunts and their people arrived finally.

  They were quarantined for a time and then assigned a deserted farmhouse.

  There, in the waning autumnal warmth, they took up life again.

  They canned and preserved fruits and vegetables. They stored the extra rations supplied by the government. They chopped wood in preparation for Minnesota’s winter.

  They fished and salted down their catch. They gathered nuts. They started their ration of hogs on acorns and garbage.

  Nearby was a village where a dozen Russian technologists advised and aided the area in the autumn farm tasks. For these women Paula often acted as interpreter, though most of them had already learned some English.

  In October, all the Gaunts’ colored people and most of the quota girls had their first glimpse of snow.

  In November, Edwinna brought down two deer.

  When the lakes had frozen and the drifts began to pile up, they ate sparingly, once a day. They worked then on the repair of the old building and the refurbishing of their clothes. Gradually, they grew used to zero temperatures. And slowly they began to realize that this would be where they would live, always.

  There was no way to get back any more, no good reason to go back.

  At Christmas, and again at New Year’s, Edwinna went to her room and opened a Bible in the center of which was a brown and brittle pressed flower that once had been a yellow hibiscus. She had picked it from Alicia’s bush the morning the evacuation buses had come for the Gaunt party. Those two days, she cried.

  The remainder of the time she was known, in all that large, scattered community, as a rock among rocklike women. And a mighty hunter, like another whose courage and energy had saved a similarly destitute colony in the winter of its plague and hunger: Captain Miles Standish. He saved the Christians though he was not one of them; Edwinna resembled that man in what she did and how she did it. . . .