SelectionEvent (2ed)

  She listened carefully. It was not a car she remembered hearing before. She had no sooner heard it than it grew fainter and was gone.

  She lowered her head again and kept moving, turning here, turning there, and suddenly she smelled something familiar. She raised her head and breathed in... yes, now she knew where she was.

  She broke into a trot, and two blocks further on, she turned and was on her street. When she got to her own front porch, shivering from the cold, she shook her hair out, nosed the door open, and went inside.

  The young cat came out of the bedroom and met her in the middle of the living room and sniffed her nose. Isha lay on her belly in front of the open door and the cat lay beside her and purred quietly.

  Perhaps the man would soon return. She would be here waiting if he did. Within moments, she was asleep.

  ....

  Some time later a car came down the street, growing louder until it blotted out all other noises. At its first sound, Isha's head was up and her eyes open. When the car turned into the driveway, its lights slashing across the front of the house, she banged open the screen and pranced out to meet him, wagging her thick tail and already panting with delight.

  He spoke to her and stroked her wet fur and then he knelt and looked into her face and stroked her some more and spoke nicely to her.

  This was so very good, as it always was when her people returned. She leaned against him and pressed her nose into his clothes. She remembered his smell; she breathed him in and everything was right again. He carried a metal thing that smelled bad and he carried another metal thing that gave off light.

  She remembered her pet and wanted him to know about it and bounded toward the house. He called her to him, but she ran only halfway back and stopped. He called her to him again, and Isha wanted to obey... she wanted to go to him... but she wanted to show him.

  She bounded away from him and clawed open the screen and nudged the cat awake and then pushed her nose under its belly and got it on its feet. Then she carefully put her jaws around it and carried it to the front door, pushed it open with the side of her head and put her pet down at her master's feet.

  It looked up at him with wide yellow eyes, and the man knelt and made soft noises and stroked it as he held Isha next to him and stroked her. This was good. The man liked her pet and he was there with her again and once more everything was the way it was supposed to be.

  Chapter 24

  “So you have yourself a friend?” he said, kneeling beside her.

  Isha threw back her head and licked the side of his neck.

  “A manx, even. I've never seen one before. Have you named her?” The young cat fell on its side and let him stroke its vibrating belly. “Have you two been having animal parties while I've been gone? Is that how you got so wet?”

  Isha pawed at his knee and licked him again. She couldn't hold herself still.

  “You have? Well, now we're going to have a human party.”

  Martin went back to the car and lifted out the bag of food he had collected at a neighborhood market on his way home. It had been only 10:30 when he had driven away from Curtiz', and on his way back, he had been haunted by the image of the dead Curtiz, his body blown across the corner of the room with his feet sticking out at an awkward angle, one shoe off. He had been wearing one brown sock and one blue one. And Martin kept remembering the woman's razor-sliced fingers — not the gash where she had cut at her neck. It was her lacerated fingertips he kept seeing.

  As he had left Curtiz', he knew it would do no good to go home and try to sleep — that would be hopeless. So what was he to do? Go home and sit up and brood? Drive around till dawn?

  If I were the person I wanted to be, he had thought as he drove the empty streets, what would I do?

  The answer lay before him as obviously as the empty rain-wet streets: With a ceremony he would celebrate the end of these past horrible days of gun- and person-collecting and Curtiz' idea of restoring civilization.

  He stopped at a neighborhood market and got frozen bread. All the baked bread had turned hard and been gnawed by mice and rats, but since the electricity was still on, he got frozen dough from the store's freezer. In his neighborhood, he kicked open a few doors and found several unopened bottles of wine and some unopened packages of cheese. That night he was going to have a picnic to mark an ending and a beginning.

  While the bread baked, filling the house with sweet yeasty smells, and Isha bounced around the house, he took his flashlight and went to the backyard of the Chhom's house and picked several bunches of seedless red grapes from the arbor. They weren't ripe and were very tart, but they were grapes and they were fresh and they were good.

  Back at home, he got the picnic blanket from the linen closet — and stopped in mid-movement. Something had caught his attention — but what? Standing there, holding the blanket, he realized what it was: his mother's perfume. It was on the blanket. He buried his face in it, breathed in its faint trace, and remembered the name. Ivoire. As a joke, his father had always insisted, wide-eyed and serious, that she never wore perfume, that that was her natural smell and that since the day they were married, she had always smelled that way. With a smile, she always agreed.

  He double-wrapped the hot bread in foil and then put it inside the folds of the blanket. Into the grocery bag he put a chunk of the cheddar he'd found, the wine, a cork puller, a glass... and a second glass, on the off-chance he met someone some lovely woman — why not? — and the grapes.

  “Isha!”

  She was ready and bounded past him, the cat skittering after her, and climbed carefully into the car, stepping across the driver's seat. She positioned herself in the passenger seat, panting a little and looking around excitedly. The manx climbed behind the back seat and looked out the window.

  “Just like the old times,” Martin said, starting the car.

  Isha made a “Hah!” noise in her throat as she panted. The cat leaped onto the back of the passenger seat and perched next to the headrest behind Isha.

  He drove them to Arden Park, in the middle of Santa Miranda. It was past midnight when they arrived. In the middle of the park, surrounded by acres of high grass and trees, was what was called the Grace Outcropping, named after some early founder of the city. The fenced-off outcropping was a fifty-foot high ragged upthrust of sandstone, worn smooth by a century of playing children.

  The gate, which in the past decades had been closed and locked, now stood open wide. With the bag and the blanket, and Isha happily leading the way, her thick tail swishing behind her, they climbed the winding trail to the flattened top, the manx following at Martin's heels. At the very top, in a shallow depression, dirt had gathered over the years and weedy grass grew.

  He spread out the blanket, placed the bread in the middle of it and surveyed the city. Through the heavy foliage of the thousands of trees that grew throughout Santa Miranda, the streetlights winked and twinkled. He could see that a few houses had been left with porchlights on, and a few windows glowed, but he did not think there were people there. Even though the city looked as though it should be alive, it was as silent as a desert. No car lights moved on the streets, no lights winked on or off. The breeze here was a little stronger and cooler, and that made him think of the warm bread he had wrapped in the towel.

  Martin tore off a piece of the bread, breathed in the smell, ate it and then cut open the cheese and gave a chunk of it to Isha. She chomped at it awkwardly and then bobbed her head and waited for more. She took the second piece and trotted into the dark and returned a second later, wanting more. After she ate the third slice, she lowered her head and began sniffing across the grass and happily wandered away, her heavy tail switching back and forth behind her.

  Martin drew up his legs and sat cross-legged on the blanket, pulled the cork from the wine, and poured himself a glass.

  “Well,” he said, “here I am.” He toasted the bright quiet city. The wine was tart in his mouth, making his cheeks ache, and tasted sweeter after
he swallowed it. He tried to imagine what was out there across the world... what was in Los Angeles, what Diaz would be seeing in Reno and Denver and New York, if he ever got there. All those vast cities, millions of homes, the vacant highways, the world without people, the skies without airplanes, and the oceans without ships.... There would be life abundant everywhere, but the missing factor in the equation would be the disturbing hands of mankind.

  A bird darted across his line of sight, a white bird, a gull perhaps, the underside of its wings faintly illuminated by the streetlights below.

  Martin sipped his wine and ate the warm bread and let his mind wander. Across this continent and others, there would be silence in vacant temples and churches, places where no prayers would be spoken. There would be storms, rains, and hurricanes blowing that no one would hear.

  The bird flew across his line of sight again, dipping low enough that he could see the tops of its wings flutter silver and gray. No human hunter would ever threaten its species again.

  Around the world, there would be few words spoken to describe this moment. Words for the snakes and flowers, birds and moonlight would be lost. In the once-crowded squares, airports, and streets, there would be no laughter, no sadness, no crowds, no holiday dreams, no more martyrs, wars, rockets, or bombs, no justice bought and paid for — there would be only the brutal sanity of the law of the jungle, unused law books, and unread histories of terror and justification. The days of miracles were past. No more tear gas, no thieves, no traffic, no midnight freeway incinerations, no graduations or degrees, no concerts, no harems, no patriotism or armies or treaties made or broken, no bombs, missiles or submarines or public scoundrels, no more prisoners of kings, no telephone calls, cowboys or pimps or pilots or crayfish fishermen or bums or courtrooms or dentists or people who make cans, podiatrists, morticians, beauty queens or symbols. The bird he saw was only itself now, a bird, not a symbol of freedom, not a nuisance — it was only itself as it flew over the dead city, silver flickerings of light on feather wax, the needles and quills of its feathers locked tight as the night air sucked across it and lifted the warm-bodied blood-pulsing animal higher, over-looping, down and back across the face of the vacant city.

  The Earth is here, he was thinking, and it is not a symbol. It was a thing he could sit upon and feel with his hands and the air of which he could smell through his nose and breathe with his lungs. The Earth was not a symbol, it was an organism, which, for mysterious reasons, he was allowed to live on.

  Night surrounded him with cool rain-washed air and in all the world there seemed to be only Martin, a piece of the Earth made ambulatory, sitting there, his half-filled glass of wine, juice of the fruit of the soil, looking across the bright dead city, the bird fluttering silver-gray in the pale light, everything only itself, nothing more, and that was more than enough, world without end.

  He sat quietly, witness to the moment, afraid to take the next breath. At that instant he was right there, nowhere else, at the center of now, breathless, filled with air and light.

  There was a movement on the blanket beside him. The manx touched his wrist with its nose.

  Martin turned his head slowly, the spell melting away but the meaning still there.

  Isha sat at his feet, and the kitten curled and still on the blanket beside him. Isha turned her head and looked up at him once, and then looked back out across the city.

  All my family, he thought.

  After a while, when he stood up to fold the blanket, something, a flickering in the east, caught his eye. He had just enough time to turn his head and look. From the east, a darkness spread across the city in a sudden flooding tide — the electrical grid had failed — and around him, below the outcropping, section after rectangular section went dark and in only seconds he might as well have been surrounded by forest or desert. There was not one glimmer of light anywhere.

  When the lights went out, he had just been thinking how it had been another day of goodbyes. Now it was goodbye to the electric blood that powered civilization.

  And after all these goodbyes, Martin thought, what was he going to save? What was worth saving in this dead world?

  Chapter 25

  Isha loved the car ride with the window open. Again at home, the man went to the sofa and heavily dropped himself on it. He patted the cushion beside him, inviting her up, but she didn't want to get up there yet.

  Isha nosed the drowsy kitten off a chair, took it in her mouth, and went back to the sofa and climbed up.

  The man made the throaty noise humans made when they were pleased and then stroked both her and her pet. Very quickly, he was making long slow breathing noises,. That meant he would be quiet for a while.

  Isha didn't feel like sleeping. She stayed awake and watched him and listened for human or car noises in case others came again. She would let him know sooner this time. Even if she slept, she would listen. That was what she was supposed to do.

  It felt good to do something for him. This, she knew, was her purpose.

  Part Three

  Old Eden

  Chapter 26

  Martin awoke hearing Isha barking in the living room. His grogginess vanished in a moment, washed away by adrenaline and the recollection of the last time he had been awakened by visitors. As he got to the door, he heard the pickup coming down the street.

  Martin watched through the screen door as it U-turned in front of his house and pulled up at the curb. It was Ryan, but by then Martin had the shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm, the safety off. Ryan leaned on the horn for two long blasts and then leaned over and yelled out the window.

  “Martin! Hey! Good news!” He honked again.

  Martin pushed open the screen and stood on the porch. He held it aimed just below the pickup, his finger on the trigger.

  “How you doing, Ryan.”

  Ryan's narrow face cracked open in a grin. “Hey, thanks for not blowing me away last night. You coulda done it to me and you didn't, so I wanted to say thanks.”

  “Never been thanked for that before. So what's the good news?” Martin called back across the yard.

  Ryan laughed. “You're a closet hard-ass, Marty. That's good — you live longer that way. I underestimated you. Like Curtiz must've. Well, the good news is I'm going to LA, gettin' outta your town. I got Curtiz' stash, but I need to go someplace with a bigger supply. You can have this place all to yourself.”

  Martin could see Ryan reaching down to turn on the ignition.

  “Ryan!”

  “Yo!”

  “Thanks for the education.”

  He looked embarrassed. “It coulda killed both of us.”

  “Take care of yourself, Ryan.”

  “Yo!” He turned on the pick-up, gunned the engine and spun the wheels. In a few seconds, all that was left was a haze of dust hanging over the street, the faint smell of exhaust, and Martin was alone.

  “Well,” he said to Isha, “now it's just you and me. And your pet.” He stroked her head and looked around the room... his parents' living room. “Time for us to do something for ourselves.”

  ....

  He got his list and looked over it. Food would be no problem for a good while. He could scavenge people's gardens during the summer — if summer ever got here. Antibiotics — he needed to attend to getting more antibiotics. The electricity was off now, so the pumps that kept the water towers full wouldn't be working again for a long time, probably never — and the water flowing through the taps would soon dribble and cease altogether. And in addition to that, there was what Diaz had told him about the mass burials and their likely effect on the ground-water. He might have to depend on bottled water in the grocery stores, and that wouldn't last forever.

  Martin went into the kitchen and turned on the tap. The pressure was definitely dropping, so he couldn't stay here much longer. He was drawn out of his thoughts by the sight of the two coffee cups his parents had left beside the sink. He didn't touch them; he wouldn't touch them.

  To the lis
t he added, “A house with a well. Away from any city.”

  But it might not be wise to be too far from the food supply he could find in the city. And having a well meant having an electric generator and a source of gasoline. Both were limited commodities, but in the next six months he would have time to find out how to deal with that. Many bridges to cross, and all of them going to be burned.

  Thinking again about what he would be eating, he wanted a dependable source of fresh food — like his own garden. To the last line on the list he added, “An enclosed area for gardening.”

  With people gone, the animal population would increase dramatically, and a single cow could ruin months of work in an unprotected garden.

  The black manx wandered into the living room and began nuzzling Martin's ankle.

  “And you,” he said, putting the cat on his lap. He felt its ribs when he handled it. “Eventually you'll have to learn to hunt when the canned food is gone.” The cat climbed off his lap and stood in the floor, looking back at him and mewing.

  “Now that you mention it, we're probably all hungry.”

  The pantry was a shambles where Isha had pawed through it, and on the back porch he saw the bag of food she had brought in. Next to it was a can of condensed milk she had bitten a hole into with one of her canines. The milk that had leaked out had been lapped up. He turned and looked at her in amazement.

  “You did all this? For your pet?”

  Isha came and stood next to him.

  Martin hoped he could be as resourceful.

  ....

  After their breakfast, Martin and Isha got in the car and drove through the outlying neighborhoods, searching for a new home. Several times they saw full-racked tule elk grazing in front lawns, along with the inevitable cows, three and four in a group, growing full-bellied on their forage. Isha perked up her ears at a dog pack that crossed in front of them, and Martin noted another reason for finding a place with an enclosed yard.