The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  The secretary looked up and lost her professional polish as her lower lip trembled. Some employees called out for personal time, she said. Some quit outright, and others hadn’t contacted the office at all. The secretary motioned to a nearby desk.

  “That’s where my friend Shonda sat. I tried to call her landline after she didn’t show up at work, but it was off the hook.”

  After the breaking news on the comet’s initial trajectory, cellular service failed due to network overload. The vice provost’s secretary, whose name was Adelle, had to walk over to her friend’s apartment building and ring the buzzer for a good twenty minutes before she heard Shonda’s voice over the intercom.

  “She said she needed to be home to pray with her family,” Adelle said. “She wouldn’t even buzz me up.”

  Rivka was a secular Jew, a lazy agnostic who was suddenly envious of having something to believe in and somewhere to go. She went for a long walk that evening and lingered outside several houses of worship. The buildings were all packed with long lines of worshippers trailing out the open doors and into the crisp night air. Some held hands as they prayed, like a chanting paper-doll chain that wound around the block.

  When Rivka returned to her apartment, there were several automated emails from her commercial bank. One took the form of a letter from the chairman and CEO, asking customers to remain calm because their money was as safe as it always had been. The news reported on riots at dozens of division branches. It appeared that those who weren’t busy praying were panicking and making a bank run. The Federal Reserve issued a warning to the Associated Press that the stability of financial institutions was at stake.

  Rivka couldn’t help rolling her eyes, but it wasn’t just about money. Panic caused rampant hoarding as well. Rivka tried three different grocery stores in the course of a weekend, but the shelves were mostly bare. A vicious fight broke out when a man reached into the overflowing cart of another and took several boxes of cereal.

  “You don’t need all this,” the man yelled, with an armload of Cheerios. “You’re selfish. The rest of us got nothing.”

  The other man landed a punch with a sickening thud and sent the cereal boxes cartwheeling on their corners.

  The city’s supply chain couldn’t keep up with so much stockpiling. Rivka had to tap into her fancy camping food after she finished everything in her fridge. She opened a salty mix labeled “gorp” and stood by her window listening to the rumble of private helicopters. The New York Times reported that the president and his family had fled for Mount Weather in Bluemont, Virginia, with the rest of the civilian leadership of US government. They would all be safe in an underground city that could house thousands. The bunker had sewage treatment plants, reservoirs for drinking water, and an extensive computer system to keep communications open. Rivka imagined all the upcoming renovations from the president and First Lady: crystal chandeliers, gold lacquer walls, and enough ostentatious wealth to give the Vatican a run for its money. She fumed and picked out the tastier chocolate M&Ms and dried fruit, leaving the nuts and granola in the bag because Love wasn’t around to yell at her.

  Rivka felt abandoned as New York’s rich and powerful made their way to summer cottages in the Berkshires and Catskills or beachfront property in the Hamptons, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, seemingly safer places with better access to local farms. The modern world had always fled to the cities, but now there was a reverse course back to rural fields. The Midwestern states sealed off access to their borders through major highways. News coverage had aerial images of gridlocked traffic and abandoned automobiles. The governor of Indiana was rumored to have said, “Flyover country needs to take care of her own.”

  The streets in Rivka’s neighborhood remained functional, but delivery trucks had no entry access through the city’s outer limits, if they were even trying to operate business as usual—and that was a big if. Grocery stores in a fifteen-block radius were empty and locked. There was no one to ask when there might be food again, which was an answer in itself.

  On her way home from walking all day in search of groceries, Rivka passed two young men carrying desktop computers with the wires trailing behind them on the street. In a block, she reached a small office with a shattered glass front. As Rivka stood to gawk, three women approached. New York City wasn’t a place where you talked to strangers, but they were all suddenly in it together. Anyone could pick up the continuing conversation around the question, What the hell is happening?

  “Where are the police?” Rivka asked them, with her arms lifted and palms up.

  Two women were instantly furious on the subject, with lots of expletives and head-shaking. The third was more measured.

  “My friend’s husband is a cop,” she called back as she kept walking. “The ones that showed up for work got sent over to the Hell Gate and Harlem River Yards power plants.”

  The women were right to keep moving. A small mob was gathered on the same block as Rivka’s apartment building. They faced a lone gunman standing guard over a locked-up convenience store across the street. Several people in the mob tried to talk him into laying down his weapon. The loudest was a woman who shouted that she had hungry children at home with nothing to put on their plates. Maybe the gunman didn’t speak English, or maybe he had his own children to feed. When the loud woman broke from the others and stalked off toward the storefront, he fired a shot over her head. Rivka sprinted into her building and didn’t look back. We can all get away with murder from now on, she thought.

  Once Rivka’s apartment door was safely locked, she shed hysterical tears and screamed at the police through her walls like a crazy lady. But the more she paced around her small apartment and calmed down, the more she got to thinking that her overwhelmed local government had made a smart move. The modern world ran on power, right down to the basics that no one bothered to think about. What would happen to all these people in New York City if there was no drinking water? What about no sewage system? That’s when the oatmeal was really going to hit the fan.

  And what about nuclear power plants? By design, they needed power for cooling systems—this she learned from the radioactive spill in Fukushima, Japan, after an earthquake. How many nuclear power plants were there in North America, and did they have a way of shutting down without emitting radiation?

  Rivka intended to look it all up on the internet, but next thing she realized was that her mouth and eyes were very dry. The sky outside her window was dark when it had been light only moments earlier. The clock on her microwave read 3:06 a.m. Rivka decided not to think about the subject again.

  The last time she left her apartment alone, Rivka set off at the break of dawn. She hoped to find food or even someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t hurt her. Loneliness wasn’t a cause of death, that she knew. But Rivka was starting to lose her shit, and that could lead to death in times like these. White pillowcases hung from some of the windows in her neighborhood, signaling hope of rescue. Others had cardboard signs with letters scrawled in black marker:

  Looters will be shot.

  One sign was made from plywood and painted with brushstrokes:

  I have a big dog a big rifle and a staple gun.

  It was a nice touch at the end. Rivka turned a corner and found two sleepy men smoking cigarettes and sipping from steaming travel mugs. Aside from the handguns tucked into their belts, they could have been taking a break from a morning shift at a regular job on a regular weekday.

  “Fuck off,” one of them yelled.

  Rivka forced her feet to quickly step one in front of the other. They took her south. She hoped to catch a glimpse of home, but as Rivka neared the Harlem River, clouds of smoke blotted out the brightening sky. She checked the New York Times website when she got home. It still posted fresh content, although it was more like shocking announcements than in-depth coverage.

  The first article under the nameplate reported fire barricades on all the bridges connecting to the New York City boroughs. There wasn’t mu
ch detail. Rivka could only imagine what earthly possessions the Manhattan residents had to sacrifice to feed the flames day and night: designer clothes, top-of-the-line sound systems, leather interiors and floor mats from luxury cars, New Yorker magazines, novels and plays in progress, Ivy League diplomas, original Picassos…and in with them, the sweat and blood shed for the best of everything. Manhattan was spared the looting of the outer boroughs, but at a high price.

  By mid-September, there was no food left to steal, and the real violence began. The president declared a national state of emergency from his bunker and sent troops to occupy thirty major cities to restore order. Paratroopers dropped into Manhattan with food and medical supplies, but the outer boroughs were left to themselves.

  Rivka was alone in the dangerous chaos of the Bronx. Her door stayed bolted, but her windows couldn’t bar the sounds of gunfire, shattering glass, car alarms, and screaming. She cowered in the corner of her bedroom and blamed Love for her banishment from Manhattan. She blamed gentrification—not the gentrification that attracted her to a Harlem apartment in the first place, but the gentrification that kept her from being able to afford it with an adjunct professor salary. Most of all, Rivka blamed herself. Perhaps she really did have a choice about Love and had made the wrong one.

  What if Rivka had chosen from the string of nice Jewish boys her parents pushed on her at every family function? Her mother grew so frustrated. Here was a woman who married a successful lawyer before she could legally drink alcohol. I was married with two babies at your age, she kept harping. Rivka’s mother didn’t understand the value of a lover who made your body temperature rise. She didn’t understand wanting to get wrapped up in someone and something too wonderful and crazy to last.

  FIFTEEN

  Ice at the End of the End

  Healy in the Arctic Ocean

  September 16

  T-minus 138 days to launch

  ICE DRIFTS WIDENED to 82 percent coverage at one week’s distance to the North Pole. Healy slowed and fired up a second engine. Her 420-foot flanks were brightly colored but tough as a battering ram against the floes. Deep vibrations could be felt in the ship’s walls and floors. Rooms in the bow of the ship, like the cafeteria and galley, were especially shaky and loud. In an email to her parents, Maya tried to describe it as a constant crunching and sandpapery static. During the quiet concentration just before sleep, she could feel it in her inner ears, lungs, and teeth.

  Maya gave this latest email the same closure as all the others written in the three weeks since IMPACT IMMINENT! had stretched across her monitor: she loved them both and hoped to hear from all of her family and friends in California once things settled. There was always the panicked urge to write more. Three weeks was a long time to endure silence from the people you loved, followed by the lack of internet at such high latitudes. Maya worked long hours, ate food she couldn’t taste, overslept because she didn’t want to be awake, and stared at her inbox until she could see its glare of pixels when she closed her eyes.

  Healy’s tight-knit crew was better off; they had each other to stave off the aching loneliness. Malcolm tried to console Maya by offering to coach her at the gym and spot her bench pressing. Members of the Morale Committee stopped her in the corridor to ask how she was feeling, just like those TV news reporters back in California: How do you feel after losing everything in that wildfire? Maya wanted to answer them: How the hell do you think I’m feeling? But what she actually said was, “It’s hard. I haven’t heard from anyone back home. And without internet, I don’t know what’s going on with the comet.”

  The Coasties on the committee offered their sympathy and tried to relate. They had all heard from their families in rural Washington and Oregon. Most of their towns had imposed a mandatory curfew to combat looting and gas siphoning. Store shelves were bare, and vehicles were stranded. “My infant niece hasn’t had formula or milk,” one of them told Maya. “They’re pushing solid foods at her, but she’s still dropping weight. See, we’re in this together.” Maya nodded and rubbed at her teary eyes.

  * * *

  THE CREW STATIONED on the bridge began their search for a wide and thick enough floe for ice liberty. Everyone was itching to get out and stretch their sea legs, but the floes were still so thin and new, not the solid multiyear ice they needed. According to satellite imagery, it was another record-breaking year of the lowest ice extent in history. When Charlie recruited Maya for the expedition, he told her that computer climate models projected that the North Pole would fully melt to open water in less than a few decades.

  Healy finally came to rest beside an ice floe strong enough to hold their collective weight. The crew lowered the steep metal gangway onto the frozen surface below, placed orange cones at the edge of a safe work area, and conducted rescue drills. The remaining science party attended a safety on ice briefing before they were allowed to don insulated dry suits and head out. Maya looked at the snow-covered expanse as she descended the gangway. It looked like a windswept desert of white sugar with aqua melt pools in the recesses.

  Almost everyone disembarked for ice liberty. It was the first time any of them had been off the ship in more than a month. Several Coasties stood guard on the perimeter with harnesses over their shoulders, ready to assist with any necessary rescues. Maya looked for Charlie but didn’t see him. Instead, she spotted Ned with a rifle slung over his back. She heard he was a Coast Guard sharpshooter on polar bear patrol, although there had been no sightings to date.

  The scientists took photos of the experience, posing in clusters and with the Coasties. Ned and Malcolm, the meathead bro duo, each posed with two snowballs in front of their real testicles. Maya wondered how many times they had made that joke, but she still laughed. The day’s venture wasn’t for standard operations or for science but for fun and, more important, morale.

  She walked lightly across the snow. Not land, Maya had to remind her feet. Beneath the drifts was a sheet of ice more than two meters thick, forming continuously in layers, like a crustacean shell. Below the ice lay two miles of ocean. I am walking on an ocean, she thought, feeling so big and so small at the same instant.

  Charlie had tried to describe the northern edge of the world, or “the end,” as some called it. There wouldn’t be another human soul to the north until you passed over the pole and headed back south to a military base on the tip of Greenland. But Maya didn’t look north. She looked up to the sky, because up was now “the end.” Maya usually avoided thoughts of mortality, but they couldn’t be avoided here on the Arctic Ocean at the end of the end.

  Her boot slid on refrozen ice. Maya fell and heard a crack beneath her. Jack broke from the crowd and ran toward her.

  “Stay back!” Maya yelled, as she scrambled away on all fours.

  Jack kept running but skirted the crack and lay down as he stretched out a hand.

  “You run straight into danger,” Maya said, angry. “How are you still alive?”

  But Jack gave her that brilliant, beautiful smile and shrugged. “Luck?”

  It felt like Maya’s heart traveled painfully up and then had to be swallowed down; a gulp of something too large for her throat. She cursed herself silently in Spanish, then grasped Jack’s hand.

  * * *

  CAPTAIN MARTIN WEBER stood by the windows of the bridge, watching ice liberty with binoculars. He searched for smiles and found a few here and there. One of the red-suited scientists loped around the ice in circles, probably to remember the feel of running. We needed this, Weber thought.

  The Morale Committee was already getting a jump-start on the North Pole celebration. They hung ropes of tinsel and candy canes in the mess deck while Christmas carols played on the pipes. The committee didn’t know that Healy would never reach the North Pole. In a matter of hours, the ship would make an about-face only three days short of 90°N latitude and cut its way home at a steady three knots.

  That morning, the ship’s commanding officers received an email brief stating that Cong
ress had initiated an immediate transfer of the entire branch of the US Coast Guard to the Department of the Navy. Weber had to read the email several times to believe his eyes. This transfer had only happened twice in history, during the First and Second World Wars. All Coast Guard missions were canceled, and all ships were ordered to return to port for reassignment.

  At least one of the captain’s prayers had been answered. According to the brief, the majority of nations had agreed to make a defense effort imperative. The world’s best engineers had already been summoned to South America along with astrophysicists and nuclear physicists. (Weber supposed hostile countries would now come together to use the very weapons they created for one another.) The US government backed the Effort with full support and now called upon its own specialized resources: interpreters, helicopter pilots, drone technicians, loadmasters, canine squads, and so on.

  Weber immediately emailed his wife, Karen, with news about the brief. She was grateful but also wanted to know about any plan to address the country’s immediate food and fuel shortages and the violence that came with them. Karen was patient (she was always patient with his long voyages) but said it would be easier to bear if she knew what steps were being taken if the crisis progressed. Their neighborhood watch had organized an armed patrol. Karen and the kids could be all right for a while, but the canned food in their basement larder wouldn’t last forever.

  Weber confided that he was just as much in the dark. Eventually Karen’s patience wore thin:

  But you’re a captain in the military! How can you not know what the government’s going to do?

  Karen taught fifth grade English. In her controlled sentence structure, Weber had never seen an exclamation point. He typed out:

  I don’t think the government knows what the government’s going to do.

  He deleted the sentence. After three more attempts, he finally ended with: