Not Dark Yet

by Berit Ellingsen

  “I can’t go there alone,” the dream version of Eloise said, looking too concerned and insecure to be the person he knew from his waking hours.

  “It’s not that far,” he said, but agreed to visit the lake with her, as he yearned to see it himself.

  He wasn’t certain when he last dreamed about the place, six months ago, a year, two years, but the journey there was more or less how he remembered it. A small train, its compartments more reminiscent of a funicular or a trolley in a city, climbed slowly upward. As the train ascended, the landscape changed abruptly from plains to mountains. One moment the windows were black, the next they were filled with tall white peaks.

  Eloise and he disembarked at an empty platform by the road, where the rail tracks continued to who knew where in his dreaming mind. Then they followed the road which wound through the pass uphill and around a curve. There, on the other side of the narrow strip of asphalt was a parking lot, and above it a pale wooden building with unusual angles and a ribbed steel roof. That was the local tourist center, where he had bought stickers and key rings in earlier dreams. But this time they walked in the opposite direction, to a cluster of houses nestled in the mountain side, private homes which looked surprisingly suburban, surrounded by lawns and flowering hedges. His dream view tilted like a camera, revealing a bright, warm sun in the sky. That had not happened before; during his earlier visits it had been dusk or winter.

  The lake was where he recalled it, its precipitous sides and looming cliffs the same as in earlier dreams. But when Eloise and he descended the graveled slope and reached the edge of the water, the lake had dried up and all that was left was an expanse of black mud.

  “My god, where have all the fish gone?” Eloise said.

  “They are still here,” he replied, sensing the trout and pike and eel and perch buried in the dark substrate. “See?” He plunged his hands into the silt. Beneath the dusty surface it was still moist and cold. He was soiled up to his elbows, but felt scale-covered bodies wriggle just beneath his fingers.

  The lake was gone, somehow drained and dried from his dreams. Who knew if the lake would return to its former state or whether, once changed, dream-locations stayed that way. He wanted to howl in sadness for the loss of the lake and the fish, but said nothing, rose, and took in the gray peaks above them. Now, with the liquid vanished, he felt the way he always did at the shore of the dream-lake, and until then, had forgotten; electricity crackled up his spine like a lightning rod, and a sensation of intense magnetism pulled at him from the surrounding crags.

  Despite Eloise, despite the presence of someone else, he did for the first time what he had always wanted to do there: give in to the magnetic sensation and let the electricity run through him while he fell to the ground, flopping like a fish on land. The water in the lake might not return, but it was the cliffs that had pulled him there, not the liquid, as he had thought when the lake had been covered with golden autumn leaves or black winter ice. Even with the water gone, the stone remained unchanged. As he lay seizing on the empty lake bed he remembered that the bodies of water which slept deep beneath the ice in the Antarctic regularly drained and refilled with time.

  34

  SEVERAL DAYS AFTER HE RETURNED FROM THE astronaut testing, the phone rang. He sat up, feeling a little moist as he always did in the sleeping bag’s nylon shell, and felt about for the object that was beeping and buzzing on the floor.

  “Yes,” he said into the phone, expecting the voice of his brother or Michael.

  “Meet me at the Plaza Shopping Center on the coast, tomorrow at eighteen thirty,” Kaye said. “It’s a private meeting, so don’t bring anyone else. And leave your mobile phone at home. I’ll be on time so there will be no need to call me.”

  “All right,” he said, puzzled by the immediacy and exactness of the request, but seeing no reason not to do as Kaye wanted. “I’ll be punctual as well.”

  Kaye hung up.

  The time until he could see Kaye again passed slowly. He wanted to push at it to go faster, but there was also a pit of apprehension in his stomach. Indoors, the air smelled metallic, and the water from the well tasted of marsh.

  By the time he left the cabin it was raining heavily and thunder rumbled in the distance, but the wind was gentle, so he brought the umbrella with him. Beneath its black shield, he took in the fields at both sides of the path. The slim wheat tillers now grew upright, making the moor look more like a wild meadow than a field. The sight made his heart jump and he laughed with joy, momentarily forgetting the trepidation that had been seething in him like an illness.

  Once, when his family had traveled to his father’s country and the rural town where his grandparents lived, his grandfather had been late to meet them at the station. From far away they had seen an umbrella move toward them on the road between the fields, the color of the fabric and the rhythm of the gait easily recognizable as that of their relative. Then, as now, the umbrella had been black and the fields green on brown.

  He caught a train to one of the larger cities on the coast which was nevertheless closer than the seaside resort he had gone to earlier. From there he took a bus to that population center’s extensive suburbs, and a massive shopping center with a wide food court and an anonymous cafe which served coffee and a long list of other caffeinated drinks, hot chocolate, soda, mineral water, sandwiches, and slices of cake. Inside the cafe’s small refrigerated counter the plastic bottles of water and soft drinks were scratched and matte. The sandwiches were pre-made, wrapped in smeared plastic, bulging with cheese and ham, shrimp and egg salad, and bacon and lettuce slices. The cheese cake, cherry cake, and chocolate cake on offer had been cut into triangles separated by sheets of white paper, the slices looking dry and hard and the paper stained with grease. The cafe claimed only a handful of small round tables and flimsy-looking chairs, separated from the adjacent businesses by dusty wood screens. The open, drafty space stank of the jumble of foods that were being served there, and was filled with the dry, distant sounds of footsteps and voices from the rest of the mall.

  He was half an hour early, but didn’t settle at the cafe. Instead, he passed the food court and ascended the stairs to the mezzanine above, then followed it back along the second floor while he glanced down at the cafes and restaurants, but saw neither Kaye nor any of the professor’s post-docs or graduate students. He entered a wide corridor that led away from the mezzanine and noted the way back. If Kaye had moved to the coast, why did he wish to meet in yet another city? Maybe the professor had found work, or had recently held meetings here?

  He scanned the brightly lit, carefully constructed shop exhibits. There was nothing unusual or noteworthy about the shopping center. The stores were neither high end, with designer brands at high prices, nor low end, with nothing but discounted goods, but somewhere safely in the middle. The businesses were a mix of national and international franchises, and what he assumed were local stores, selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, home electronics, garden appliances, children’s toys, books, films, music, crafting supplies, groceries, health food, pharmaceuticals, For Her, For Him, For the Children, For the Pet, For the Car, For the Home. A boundless collection of useful and useless objects made from materials that were all finite, but manufactured and sold like they would never cease, marketed to be desired and consumed by as many people as possible, only to be discarded after a few years of use. He suddenly felt sick.

  On the way back to the mezzanine he passed a home electronics store displaying a whole wall of TVs of various make and size. All the screens showed the same program: deeply spray-tanned people gaping in mute while they showed off their jeweled watches, brightly colored sports cars, luxury yachts and private jets, and doused one another with sparkling wine from oversized bottles. An on-screen counter registered called-in votes for each participant of the reality show, the numbers turning in the hundreds. Variations in color setting and scan rate made each screen a little different from the rest, some looking orange or delayed,
others bluish or slightly blurry, making up a glaring and confusing sight. Nevertheless, his attention was caught by a single monitor in the corner that had been tuned to another channel. At first he thought the image was that of a spiral galaxy viewed head on, the jet from the super-massive black hole in its middle shooting out, like a round from a rifled barrel. But then he realized that the animated vortex which engulfed the meteorological map of the coast was a hurricane, its extreme wind speeds displayed in bruise colors.

  When he returned to the cafe in the food court, Kaye was waiting for him at a table as close to the separating screens and as far away from the counter as it was possible to sit. On the silver laminated surface stood two steaming paper cups of coffee.

  Kaye lifted one cup in greeting.

  He pulled out the other chair at the table and sat down. “You’re here for a conference?”

  Kaye shook his head. “Just a quick errand. I also thought it would be closer for you to meet here. How are things in the mountains?”

  “Good,” he said and rose the cup in a reciprocal toast. “Quiet, but good.” The hot liquid seared his fingers through the paper, more than warm enough to scald his mouth. He put the cup down without drinking.

  Kaye took a sip, then grimaced. “Supposedly, the best coffee comes from beans that have been shat out by a small tropical mammal. Its digestion processes change the beans in a way artificial methods can’t. Of course, the animals are now being farmed in battery cages and force-fed coffee beans for commercial purposes.”

  “That’s terrible,” he said.

  “How is the agricultural project going?” Kaye said.

  “Splendid,” he said. “The winter wheat has already tillered. It looks as if we shall be able to harvest in the spring.”

  “Unbelievable,” Kaye said.

  “How are the lectures going?”

  “There’s been a lot of interest in them, which is good,” Kaye said. “But all of us who are arranging the presentations want to do something more, something concrete, not just talk.”

  He had intuited as much from Kaye’s conviction and secrecy, but had still hoped his suspicions were wrong. Now hearing the assistant professor put it into words made his stomach knot and the skin at the back of his neck feel tight. “Such as?” he finally said.

  Kaye leaned closer to him across the table. “The scientists, the policy-makers, and the public have known about the destruction of the environment and the destabilizing of the climate systems for years. The warning signs were there decades ago, but we kept on like it didn’t matter. We’re paying the price now, all of us. But it’s not too late to do something, it’s not too late to change.”

  “It’s not?” he muttered.

  Kaye’s eyes narrowed. “It’s never too late to change,” Kaye said, meeting his eyes. “But governments will rarely do so, corporations never, not the money, not the power, so we have to do it, we, it’s up to us.”

  Now he understood why the assistant professor’s recent life changes looked like a new beginning, or a clean ending. “Why isn’t it enough to vote, to elect the right politicians, the right parties?” he said.

  “That’s what we’ve been doing for the last decades and look where it’s gotten us,” Kaye spat. “Another thirty years and we’ll still be in the same place, I can guarantee you that.”

  “So what’s the solution, then?” he said, feeling like he was in a spacecraft that was spinning out of control.

  “You’ve utilized your personal initiative for a higher cause before,” Kaye said, leaning even closer, breath sour with coffee and the sickening stench of blood on wood wool. “You know what it takes,” the assistant professor continued. “A strong mind, clear eyes, steady hands. Why else did you go to the cabin and join that project? How else did you have the stomach to kill the owl?”

  This time he simply nodded, but inside he was frantically going over what he had told Kaye about himself, and how much was available online. He had stupidly talked about his service, but how much had he revealed? “I understand,” he finally said. “I see the reasons for what you’re saying, and I agree with them. But I can’t be a part of your plans.”

  Kaye’s face suddenly hardened and his voice lowered to a hiss. “Most people can’t do what we’re going to. They don’t have the skills or the experience, so they don’t. But we do, and because of that it is our duty to do it.”

  “I can’t,” he said and stood.

  He pulled on his jacket with a hard shrug that rattled the keys and the coins in his pockets, and started walking. In the corner of his eye he saw the assistant professor lean back in the hard chair.

  “The offer is open,” Kaye said calmly behind him. “You have my number.”

  35

  THE HURRICANE REACHED THE CONTINENT A FEW nights later, its storm front sweeping far inland, even to the mountains. The precipitation pelted the roof and the walls and the windows of the cabin, coming from every direction at once, with no leeward side, no respite, while the wind rattled the old wood and made it creak and squeak and whistle. The solar-powered lantern flickered twice in the same hour, then went out without another warning. To the west the orange light from the sodium lamp above the door of Eloise and Mark’s barn disappeared and the fields lay black before him.

  He leaned forward and blew into the birch log that was smoldering in the hearth. Then he closed the powerless laptop, pulled out the cord in case of lightning, and returned to the sleeping bag on the mattress where he had been lying. The darkness made the cabin’s complaints about the battering from the hurricane louder, even above the roaring of the wind and the gushing of the rain.

  He fell asleep imagining himself a sailor lying in a hammock in the crew quarters below deck on a tall ship hundreds of years in the past. In the last moments before the dreams claimed him, he wondered if the cabin might unmoor itself and start following the rain toward the ocean while he slept.

  A loud, persistent noise woke him. He sat up on the mattress, fearing that a part of the roof had been pried loose by the hurricane and was slamming against the rafters, or the storm had gotten hold of a board in the wall and was using it to bang an even larger hole in the wood. But it was neither. Someone was knocking at the door and shining a sharp bluish-white beam through the diamond-shaped window. He was at the door before he registered that he had untangled himself from the sleeping bag, gotten to his feet, and crossed the room. The person outside was shouting his name. He took hold of the door and pulled it open, while he clutched the old handle to prevent the hurricane from yanking the door off its hinges.

  Outside were several figures in rain jackets, rain pants, tall rubber boots, and headlamps, reminding him of people wearing hazmat suits. No hardshell fabrics of fancy fibers with chemical waterproofing here, but thick PVC, the same material fishermen’s waders and southwesters were made of. His neighbors’ faces were hidden by deep hoods and thick scarves. The beams from their trucks and terrain vehicles were as bright as floodlights, yet the thrumming and rumble from the engines was barely audible above the swell of the hurricane. Maybe we’re already at sea, he thought, we just don’t know it yet.

  A face moved close to his to shout over the din of the wind and the engines.

  “Come with us, the farms are flooding!” Eloise yelled.

  “Where to?” he shouted back. Were they evacuating? That had not been in his plans.

  The green-hooded head shook vigorously. “We’re not leaving! We’re putting out sandbags. We must divert the water from the houses. We need every hand we can get!”

  Wool underwear, fleece sweater, the hardshell jacket on top. Running pants covered by the mountaineering pants, the artificial fiber would retain some warmth even if the fabric was rained through. Then knit scarf, knit hat (homemade birthday gifts from Beanie), and leather gloves. Before he left, he scanned the cabin’s interior for the safest and sturdiest place. The fridge, it was heavy, solid, and had a rubber seal around the door. He opened it and wedged his phone and
wallet behind a packet of organic pork chops and a bag of baby asparagus.

  Outside, Eloise directed him to the back of a four-wheel terrain vehicle whose bundled-up driver he recognized as Mark. While he clutched the cargo rack behind him, the storm pushed and buffeted them, stronger than the bouncing and bumping of the vehicle itself as they advanced toward the red buildings of Eloise and Mark’s home. The hurricane had already deluged the fields and turned them into a shallow brown sea. Water streamed down the buildings and the sloping courtyard, and had already gouged long tracks in the gravel. By the barn a tractor was rumbling and biting into the earth with its front loader, digging trenches to channel the water from the fields away from the buildings. Behind the trenches, figures in green and orange rain-gear heaved sandbags to raise walls against the flood. Mark stopped at the corner where a mound of sand had been deposited by the wall, and they dismounted.

  “Take this!” someone yelled over the storm, holding out a shovel and motioning at some cloth that was shivering on the ground. He took the spade and saw the fabric was empty sacks, for grain or from animal feed, judging by the labels. He squatted down, rolled a bag open, prepared two more, and started filling them with sand. Eloise and Mark joined him, Mark shoveling while Eloise tied the bags together with nylon twine she cut from a large roll with a knife. Other neighbors in the chain stacked the sandbags up around the walls of the house and barn while the tractor continued digging trenches to divert as much water as possible. At the farm to the south, he could see the floodlights of other vehicles, some stationary and others moving about, and knew there was similar frantic activity there. He wondered how Michael and Beanie and his family were, and if the city was being flooded too.