Not Dark Yet

by Berit Ellingsen

  The rain drenched and chilled their faces, the hurricane tore and pushed at them, the engines boomed and thrummed. He shoveled until his fingers became stiff from clutching the spade and his lungs and arms and back felt like they were on fire. When they ran out of sand, they filled the sacks with dirt dug from the trenches. The storm stank of perspiration, diesel fuel, and greasy, waterlogged soil.

  Mud and water rushed and swirled into the trenches, creating miniature waterfalls at each downward sloping compartment, then filling the sections that were somewhat level, until the flooding reached to their knees and threatened to sweep away all of the trenches and sandbags. They continued to stanch the flow. When they ran out of bags, they shoveled more channels to lead the water out of those that were already full, shallow troughs that paralleled the first. The hurricane roared and shrieked and rained down with greater intensity, no longer individual gusts but as a ceaseless cascade of water. The deluge soaked every garment and every boot, rubber or not, and if it couldn’t penetrate the fabric directly, it seeped in through seams and folds to soak the middle layers and finally drench the skin. The spade handles blistered and the sandbags scoured their hands, whether they wore leather or fabric gloves, and the storm howled like every hungry ghost had been brought to raging, battering life.

  It seemed like the rain would never cease, the wind never calm, and the night never end, but then, long after it should have become light, an almost imperceptible brightening of the sky above the summits in the east told them that morning was on its way. Moments later an avalanche of water mixed with pebbles and branches and plants tumbled down the hillock behind the farm. He watched the mudslide and hoped it hadn’t been strong enough to push down trees or pull fallen trunks along with it to ram the buildings or the sand walls. The swell surged across the trenches and the sandbags, before it pushed against the pale concrete foundations.

  In his early teens he had gone on a class trip to a small lake to collect organisms at its narrow shore: whirligigs, water striders, bowman beetles, snails, toads, and various insect larvae clad in pebble-encrusted tubes. The edge of the lake was covered with vegetation, as thick and dense as a carpet, floating on the water and undulating with it. When he noticed that the plants were solid enough to carry his weight, he fetched a plastic box and a butterfly net, and started out on the floating world, hoping to catch something the other students couldn’t.

  Unnoticed by the teacher, he moved far along the shore. With each cautious step the floating substrate rose and fell like breath, the sun warmed his face and hands, and the clamor of the others receded in the distance. Soon there was just him and the water and the sound of the tiny flies that hovered in the air. But suddenly the world shifted and he fell until the sky was just a blurry brightness above him, clouded with clumps of vegetation and the bubbles from his own surprised exhalation. The fear of being trapped beneath the plants like someone in the winter would be under ice, shot through him, but he forced himself to relax, hold his breath, and kick hard with his legs. That motion and the air still in his lungs brought him close enough to the surface to bob against the vegetation. Peering up into the brightness and feeling about with his hands, he managed to find the hole he had fallen through, and got his head above water again. From there he pushed his arms and shoulders through the opening and dragged himself up on the billowing surface, heaving and sputtering, reborn from the lake.

  He returned far more carefully and humbly than he had left, the box and the net lost beneath the surface. His soaked hair and clothes gained him pointed fingers and loud laughs from his classmates and a stern talking to from the teacher. As punishment he had to shower and then rinse and laundry his clothes in the washing machine in the basement, while the other students marveled at their catches through the magnifying glasses and microscopes in the science lab.

  Now he watched the flood with the same fear as when he fell through the hole in the lake, wondering when it would stop and what he should do if it didn’t. But the bags and the trenches and the foundations held, the flood slapped against them, before it bubbled and slurped back out into the trenches, and finally the last wave of mud rolled over the brown surface, into the dug furrows, and dispersed. After that less and less water arrived, the day brightened, and the rain almost stopped.

  When it was clear the flood had been diverted and someone’s radio announced that the storm was finally letting up, the neighbors smiled and cheered and hugged one another.

  They stood sweating and trembling inside their soaked-through rain gear, surprised that it was over, uncertain of what to do next.

  “Come with us, you can sleep on our couch,” Eloise said and touched his shoulder, making him remember the cabin and wonder if it had survived. Was there anything there that couldn’t be replaced? He didn’t think so.

  By foot and by truck they retreated slowly back to the farms and houses. He had no energy left for showering or cleaning, only for hanging up the wet clothing and rubbing his face and hair with a towel, then going to sleep under a large fleece blanket on a sofa that was only a little longer than the three-seater in the cabin.

  In the morning there were unstifled yawns and soft padding of feet upon wooden floors and smiles at the table in the kitchen. Somewhere on the farm a generator must be going, providing heat and light, with large pots of drinking water simmering on the stove, ready to be cooled in tall clay jugs with a snippet of parsley for freshness. Breakfast was thick slices of newly defrosted whole-wheat bread, scrambled eggs and bacon, fried sausages, canned herring, pickled cucumber, home-ground mustard, sweet tea, black coffee, and glasses of cooled, boiled water. He ate like it was his last meal.

  “We heard on the long-wave band that the hurricane’s hit the towns and cities further south so hard the number of dead and injured is still unclear,” Eloise said. “The roads are closed, and air and rail travel has been suspended. The phone and internet are also down and millions of homes are without power. It’s nearly a complete black-out on the whole coast.”

  He closed his eyes and thought of Michael, Katsuhiro, and the rest of his family, but said nothing.

  “Will you be all right?” Mark asked when he had pulled his still-moist clothes and boots back on and stood in the hallway, ready to leave. “Do you need help with the cabin?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, convinced that he would be.

  “We’ll come by and help you clean up as fast as we can,” Eloise said. “We just need to see to the youngest children first.”

  “Thank you,” he said and did not insist on being alone.

  The morning was still and quiet, dusted by a thin layer of fog, which softened the cuts and wounds visible from the storm. The flagstones that had lined the flower beds and kitchen garden outside Eloise and Mark’s house had been pulled along with the water and strewn out on the pitted, still partly submerged lawn below. Only bits of the garden plants remained, shreds of crocuses, snowdrops, and daffodils, branches of apple and cherry trees scattered on the grass, some jutting out of or floating on the shallow lake created by the flood, along with roof panes and planks that had been torn off the house and barn. In the scars dug by the flooding in the gravel between the buildings water still ran, beneath small overhangs of soil that threatened to collapse. A red and yellow toy lay muddied and squished against the corner of the ramp to the silo tower. The air smelled of mud and smoke.

  Along the path to the cabin the vegetation had been flayed, revealing soil or jagged bedrock where the earth had been washed out into the ditch on either side of the trail. In the fields that flanked the path, water was no longer frothing and churning, but stood still and dark like a new sea. The winter wheat had been bunched up into uneven, lopsided stacks, then flattened from every direction, or stood snapped with the head in the water. It looked like someone had gone over the stalks with a broad, dull scythe, harvested nothing, yet trampled everything. From where he stood he couldn’t see a single square meter that wasn’t broken or drowned. Even if the water
drained from the fields, there would be no crop this spring. And who could say what the weather would be like the following winter, or when the next flood would come? Their project was over. When he realized that, his feet stopped by themselves on the disarrayed, overturned substrate, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

  He feared that the cabin had collapsed either from the wind or runoff from the nearby hill, even if the cabin stood some distance away from its slope. As he passed the slight dip in the path where it started to curve up toward the cabin, the fog thinned sufficiently to see the red-painted structure. At least it was still there. He hurried the rest of the way, his breath catching in his throat.

  The door was still in its frame, but hanging askew on the upper hinges, with the bottom of the sun-bleached wood brown with mud. The deck was littered with grass, leaves, and branches from the hill. He kicked the worst of the debris away from the door and stepped over the rest. Inside the cabin’s single room the water had smashed through the panorama window on its way back to the heather. Some of the glass remained on the floor by the gaping opening, the rest had scattered like a glittering stream on the mud outside. The walls were moist and spattered like the cliffs in a river gorge, and banks of dirt and vegetation had been deposited along them. In the northwest corner the rain had leaked in through the roof and streaked the wall with moisture. A small stream still trickled on the hardwood floor, filling the hearth with mud. The sofa lay outside the window, overturned and at an awkward angle, and the middle cushion sailed further afield. His small backpack and sleeping bag lay soaked in the east corner, just inside the broken glass. Of his treadmill, laptop, and mattress there were no signs; he assumed they were buried in the shallow flood lake somewhere. Only the kitchen had escaped substantial damage. The stove and the sink were still in place, but when he turned the faucet on it trembled and spat only brown water. The well must have been flooded too. He opened the powerless fridge. Inside the rubber-sealed darkness his phone and wallet lay dry and safe on the shelf where he had left them.

  He took out the phone and was surprised to see that it still had service, although a barely detectable signal. At the edge of the drowned hearth he sent a short note to Michael, saying that he loved him and that he hoped everyone at home was all right after the hurricane. Then he deleted the email account, the phone’s contact list, and reset the phone to factory settings. Finally, he dialed Kaye’s number and texted a single word: “Yes.”

  36

  FURTHER NORTH ALONG THE COAST SAT A POWER plant, the spider in the center of a web of gently curving power lines held aloft by a forest of steel pylons, every tenth tower reinforced to prevent the ice in winter storms from pulling them down. The plant was large enough to provide the region with electricity, but not new enough for modern coal scrubbing methods, or important enough to have advanced security measures. Instead, it seemed to have been partly left to anonymity and civil obedience not to obstruct the giant and its humming supply of power and normality. There had been plans to decommission the plant for years, but the public dislike of nuclear power and the lack of properly developed alternatives, coupled with a sharp increase in the price of power from abroad, no matter the source, secured the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases along that part of the coastline a continued existence.

  Kaye had blueprints, door codes, key cards, showed him everything they needed to do, in the illumination from a single light bulb in the basement of a house that was identical to all the others in the streets and courts and crescents around it, all of them empty and unused, owned by a financial institution that was holding out for better times and higher prices that never seemed to happen.

  He walked there with the hood of the sweater beneath his short wool coat up to shield him from the gaze of surveillance cameras on the train station, bus station, and the bus. The sky was white and heavy and the cold wind flurried with snow flakes, several months late for Christmas. The roads south were still closed, and air and rail travel there suspended, to the rage of the crowds of passengers now stuck on other parts of the continent. However, north of the hurricane’s path of destruction, life continued more or less like before, with travel interrupted for only a few days after the disaster. He didn’t expect to hear anything from Michael or Katsuhiro until phone and internet communication was restored.

  The neighborhood in the northern city he traveled to had been developed, but not yet inhabited, so there was no bus nor tram line close to the address Kaye had texted him. He exited the bus at the nearest possible stop, crossed the road and an incomplete sports field with an expanse of newly planted, but already yellowed grass. Even here signs of recent bad weather were clearly visible: drains clogged with branches, fresh cracks and pot holes in the road, roof tiles and wayward planks on the pavement. The seating in the putative arena had only been partly completed, leaving broken scaffolding and plastic nets scattered about, torn loose by the elements. The evening wind rose and shrieked through the unfinished structure.

  Past the sports field the residential streets were flanked by small gardens with gable-roofed, semi-detached houses in various stages of completion. The first properties were unfinished, lacking roofs or top floors, with pallets of shingles and paving still wrapped in plastic in the driveways. Further inside the neighborhood the houses had been roofed, painted a peachy yellow, and equipped with white Palladian windows in the fronts, showing off hardwood-floored halls and stairs inside. A few of the future homes even had brass chandeliers shining behind the windows and cone-shaped juniper bushes bounding their gardens, but no curtains, furniture, nor cars, so he assumed those buildings were marketing displays for selling. He wondered, if he continued in the same direction, whether the houses would become more and more inhabited, until rooms furnished with beds, closets, and chairs, tables set with meals, tubs filled with water, and hallways cluttered with shoes and clothes would appear, like landlocked ships abandoned by their owners. Or had he already reached the apex and the properties further in would only be less complete, with the roofs, walls, and floors vanishing in an inverted sequence from the structures he had already passed, until only concrete foundations and the burrows created by rock blasting to cradle them were all that was left of the houses? He had no desire to witness that and did not plan to walk further into the neighborhood than he had to, yet nevertheless experienced a small flash of regret knowing that he would never see what the houses farther inside looked like and that he might never return to find out.

  Daylight lingered for much longer than in the depths of winter, but the milky sky remained opaque and dusk arrived as a jaundiced glow above the rooftops. This far into the residential area the streets were named and the houses numbered, enabling him to find the address he had memorized.

  The house was identical to all the others: peach-colored, gabled roof, Palladian window, double garage. In the modestly sized garden, instant lawn had been laid out, some rolls only half way or still constricted by plastic string. A small pool yawned in concrete, holding no water, only sand, pieces of greasy plywood, and brown and yellow leaves. The house looked finished, but the one behind it had all its windows broken, dark shards gleaming in the patchy lawn. Past that structure torn tarpaulin was whipping in the wind, like prayer flags above a desolate mountain pass.

  The white six-paneled, brass-handled front door was unlocked and led into a spacious hall lit only by the fading illumination from outside. The floor was tiled with textured, honey-colored ceramic rectangles and the walls painted a standard eggshell shade. The interior was new and unused, but dust had settled on every surface, like snow, and the stale, musty air signaled that the house had skipped past habitation on its way to dereliction. Every single house for at least a kilometer in all directions was as empty and abandoned as this. It was like being in a desert.

  In the back of the hall a door-less opening and a short flight of stairs led down to the basement. Here, walls and floor-covering were in place, but had not been spackled or painted. Like the rest of the
house the basement had already acquired the tang of decay. A single light bulb illuminated the subterranean space and he was not surprised to find Kaye, dressed in a thick down parka, waiting for him there.

  Standing over Kaye’s plans, which were laid out on a table improvised from a piece of drywall on two fuzzy sawhorses, they looked like new homeowners trying to agree on which task to tackle first. But their business was less constructive and required much more care.

  “You’re a bit late to join in the preparations,” Kaye said, “but with your prior experience I’m certain you’ll manage to keep up.”

  Kaye told him everything, and he confirmed that he had retained the information by reciting it from memory. During his brief narration of the story Kaye desired, the assistant professor nodded approvingly, as if he were listening to a graduate student verifying observations or recounting a long-established theorem, something that had already become reality.

  He glanced at Kaye and although he imagined that his horror must be fully visible on his face, the assistant professor said nothing. Kaye only met his eyes calmly, as if he knew, as if any resentment was safe with him, inside their now mutual, monumental secret.

  Finally, Kaye handed him a new mobile phone and told him not to use it, only to keep it on and charged, and remain ready for the call that would come “in a matter of days.” Then the assistant professor lifted a dark leather bag onto the makeshift table and zipped it open. It had been years since he’d smelled the scent of oil and propellant which rose from the glistening, disassembled object inside, yet he recognized it instantly.

  “This is yours,” Kaye said. “We will most certainly need it, so take good care of it.”

  He stood numb, his thoughts a tangle, his worst fears having been confirmed all at once, and with it the vertiginous knowledge that the outcome he had tried so hard to avoid had finally caught up with him.