Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  “A blackout. Like Hurricane Sandy.” Clay recalled unfounded reports of an explosion, Superfund sludge from the Gowanus spilling into the water supply, every sip a carcinogen. They were without power a day and a half. It had been a kind of charming emergency; hunker down with playing cards and books. When the lights came back on, he had baked an apple pie.

  “Or in 2003,” Amanda said. “The electrical grid, remember that?”

  “I walked across the Manhattan Bridge. Couldn’t reach her on the phone.” Clay put a hand on his wife’s, nostalgic and possessive. “I was so worried. Of course, we were all remembering 9/11, but it was so much better than that day.” That parochial one-upmanship New Yorkers think their own, special remit, but everyone is possessive of the places they inhabit. You recount the disasters to demonstrate your fidelity. You’ve seen the old girl at her worst.

  “I thought of 9/11, of course.” Ruth washed the food scraps down the drain and switched on the disposal. “What if people are dying right now? Remember a few years ago, that guy drove his truck on the bike path on the West Side? Just rented a truck in New Jersey and killed all those people? It’s not even difficult. Like how much planning could that have possibly taken?”

  “The lights. All the lights—” G. H. knew that no one was interested in hearing about the dream you had last night. This had been real, but maybe some things you had to see for yourself.

  Clay believed if you said it, it would be true. “I think in the morning—”

  “It is morning, now.” Ruth met Clay’s eyes in the reflection of the window, a neat little trick.

  “I guess what I mean is that things always look different in the light of day. I guess self-help clichés are rooted in truth.” Clay sounded apologetic, but he believed it. The world was not as fearful as people thought.

  “I don’t know how to explain it.” Ruth dried her hands on a towel and hung it back where it belonged. A building lit up was alive, a beacon; dark, it vanished, like David Copperfield had made the Statue of Liberty do that one time. Ruth associated the sudden absence of light with something being extinguished, with a switch being flipped, with a change, and this invited the question: What had been extinguished, what switch flipped, what had changed?

  “You’ve had a scare.” Clay understood.

  Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order. “I was scared. I am.” This last part she didn’t quite whisper. She wasn’t ashamed, but she was embarrassed. Was this it, then; was she a fearful old woman now?

  “We’ll find out more tomorrow.” Clay believed this.

  “What if it’s the North Koreans? That fat one who fed his own uncle to the dogs.” Ruth could not stop herself. “What if it’s a bomb. A missile.” A year ago, was it, there was that false alarm in Hawaii where, for some terrible stretch, vacationers and honeymooners and dropouts and housewives and surf instructors and museum curators thought that was it, a missile was on its way from the Korean peninsula to obliterate them. How would you spend the last thirty-two minutes: looking for a basement or texting your friends or reading a story to your children or in bed with your spouse? People would probably monitor their own destruction by CNN play-by-play. Or the local stations wouldn’t cut away, and you could go out watching The Price Is Right.

  “The North Koreans?” Amanda said it like she’d never heard of the place. What if it was the Outer Mongolians? The Liechtensteiners? The Burkinabé? Did they even have the bomb in Africa? She’d watched Lorin Maazel conducting in Pyongyang. Some cable correspondent had promised détente, some previous president had promised them all peace. Amanda didn’t have time to think about the North Koreans, and had no idea, even, what Ruth was talking about, feeding people to dogs; she thought the rap on the Koreans was that they were the ones who ate dogs.

  “It’s not the North Koreans.” G. H. shook his head, but this was as remonstrative as he was willing to get. You didn’t scold Ruth. She was a Barnard girl: she had ready answers. He fiddled with the heavy watch on his wrist, a nervous tic he knew was a tic. He had his money on Iran, maybe Putin. Not literally so; that was against the law. But he was no fool.

  “How do you know?” Now that they were safe—but there was a question mark there—Ruth could cede to the panic that had been in her throat as they drove. She could say what she’d been unable to in the car, afraid of jinxing them with an empty tank or a punctured tire. She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer. Muslim fundamentalists! Chechen true believers! Rebels in Colombia, Spain, Ireland, every country had its madmen.

  “Wouldn’t there have been a boom?” This was a familiar feeling for Clay, whenever he had to assemble furniture or the car made funny noises: how little he knew. Perhaps that was why, in his estimation, true intelligence was accepting how limited one’s intelligence always is. This philosophy let him off the hook. “You would have . . . heard something. Like if it had been a bomb.”

  “I was having breakfast at Balthazar on 9/11.” G. H. remembered the silky omelet, the salty French fries. “Can’t be more than twenty blocks from the towers, right? I didn’t hear a goddamn thing.”

  “Can we please not talk about 9/11?” Amanda was uncomfortable.

  “I heard the sirens, and then people in the restaurant started talking, so—”

  Ruth idly rapped her fingers against the countertop. There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?

  Without thinking, Clay gave his phone his fingerprint. The phone showed him a photograph of the children, Archie, then eleven, Rose, only eight, rounded, small, innocent. It was startling to look at this evidence of the selves now gone, though he often didn’t truly see this picture, obscured by little squares of information, the seductive glow of the phone itself. He felt phantom tingles when the phone was not at his side. Clay recalled that in January, in the spirit of resolution, he’d tried leaving his phone in another room while he slept. But that was how he did most of his newspaper reading, and staying informed was as worthy a resolution. “Still nothing,” he said, answering a question they all wanted to ask, even if none of them had bothered to. They decided to go to bed.

  12

  THEY HAD FINISHED THE BASEMENT FOR RUTH’S MOTHER, A dignified, withered creature, silk scarves and color-coordinated suits. She’d come to live with them when she turned ninety—much complaining, but the winters in Chicago were terrible, and there was no one left there to keep a close watch on her. Ruth had handled the sale of the house, sent disbursements to her sister and their brother, then moved Mama into the guest room. She liked to walk to the Met, look at the Impressionist paintings, then sit at the diner with a cup of tea and a Manhattan clam chowder. Had she not died, she’d be stranded in the dark three-bedroom on the fourteenth floor. Small mercy.

  G. H. led the way downstairs, where they almost never went—that city dweller’s fantasy: rooms you barely need—switching on the lights as he went. He had not realized how much light connoted safety, and how much dark its opposite. Even as a boy he’d not feared the dark, so this was a surprise. “Just watch your step,” he said, some tenderness for his wife.

  “This is my house.” Ruth was holding tight to the railing. She felt it important to underscore this fact.

  “Well, they paid for it.” G. H. had driven fast, but there were some things that couldn’t be outrun. His reticence was because of a very particular burden: he knew that something was wrong, truly wrong. “I can’t exactly throw them out.” G. H. didn’
t want to say that he had known something was coming. His business was clairvoyance. You looked at the yield curve arching and slumping like an inchworm making its inefficient progress, and it told you everything you needed to know. He had known not to trust that particular parabola. It was more than portent, it was a promise. Something was upon them. It had been decreed.

  “You saw how dirty they had the kitchen.” Ruth didn’t need to say What would Mom think of that? because Mom hovered around. The basement had been intended for her—an exterior ramp around the back of the house, easier than the stairs—but she died before she got to visit. Ruth knew she was evolving into a pale imitation of the woman. Another way of saying she was old. It just happened. You found yourself holding your grandbabies—twins!—and not saying anything about the fact that they had two moms. Clara was a professor of classics at Mount Holyoke. Maya was the headmaster of a Montessori school. They had a big, cold clapboard house with a turret. Mom would have got a kick out of her mocha-colored great-grandsons, made of the genetic issue of Clara’s brother, James, who did something in Silicon Valley. The boys looked just like both of their mothers, something you’d not have thought possible, but there it was, in black and white, ha ha ha.

  G. H. flicked on lights, forgetting to pause in gratitude that they still worked. There was a big closet: a cache of Duracells, a flat of Volvic, some bags of Rancho Gordo beans, boxes of Clif Bars and Barilla fusilli stored in a heavy-duty plastic bin because there were mice in the country. Cans of tuna, a gasoline canister’s worth of olive oil, a case of a cheap Malbec that was not half bad, bed linens in those vacuum bags that sucked out all the air. The two of them could be comfortably housebound for a month, if not longer. G. H. practically dared a snowstorm to arrive, but thus far none had. They said that was global warming. “Everything in order.”

  She murmured something to show she heard him. They’d spent too much remodeling. Improvement was an addiction. G. H.’s business was money’s preservation. Actual spending was so abstract to him that he did as the contractor said. Danny was one of those men other men didn’t want to seem a fool in front of. He had a power over men that was almost sexual, in the way that sex always ends up being about power. You’d do what he said, and maybe in your worst moments you’d worry that Danny was laughing at you. Their checks had certainly paid for Danny’s daughter’s year at private school. That’s why they rented: to recoup.

  “It smells down here.” Ruth made a face, but it didn’t really smell. Rosa cleaned the place, her husband tended the lawn, and their kids came out and assisted. It was a family affair. They were from Honduras. Rosa would not have left a smell. The carpet’s nap said that she vacuumed even the unused basement. There was a bedroom, with a sofa and a table and a wall-mounted television, the bed made up and expectant. She sat and slipped off her shoes.

  “It doesn’t.” G. H. sat on the edge of the bed, more heavily than he meant to. He couldn’t stop himself sighing when he did things like that. He tried to imagine the morning’s relief. The funny news on the radio—a band of raccoons broke into a substation in Delaware and knocked out power all over the East Coast, or some subcontractor’s most junior employee had a terrible first day. What were we worried about, what were we afraid of? Market confidence would be restored; there would be a windfall for certain stoic bettors.

  Ruth was at a loss. Their normal routine was to first unlock all the cabinets filled with their special and necessary things: swimsuits and flip-flops, Shiseido sunscreen, a wool Hermès picnic blanket, and in the pantry, a tin of Maldon salt, a bottle of olive oil from Eataly, the horrifyingly sharp Wusthof knives, four jars of Luxardo cherries, Clase Azul, Oban, Hendrick’s, the wines guests had brought as hostess gifts, dry vermouth, bitters. They’d reunite with those possessions: rub them on their skin, scatter them around the rooms, and feel truly at home. They’d pull off their clothes—what was the point having a home in the country if you couldn’t walk around mostly naked?—and make Manhattans and slip into the pool or the hot tub or just into the bed. They still went to bed with each other, aided by those most effective blue tablets. “I’m scared.”

  “We’re here.” He paused because it was important to remember. “It’s safe here.” He thought of his canned tomatoes. There was enough to last them for months.

  There were unopened toothbrushes in the bathroom drawer. There were fresh towels, rolled jauntily and stacked in a little pyramid. Ruth showered. Feeling clean made such a difference to her. In the bedroom dresser there was an old T-shirt from a charity run she couldn’t remember, a pair of shorts she could not identify. She put these on, felt immediately ridiculous. She didn’t want the people upstairs to see her in these cheap clothes.

  G. H. tried the bedroom television, because he was curious. It showed nothing, just a blue screen, channel after channel. He undid his tie. When she’d been alive, G. H. had felt Mom’s presence as an indictment. G. H. was so accustomed to being who he was and had come to believe that was success. When Mom had come out to inspect Maya, she’d rebuked him for his fourteen-hour days, for living so high up (unnatural!), for the delusion of their New York lives. It had shaken him. They changed their lives. They bought the place on Park, sent Maya to Dalton, and lived prudently. Sometimes he did miss the ground underfoot. The wisdom of the elders.

  Ruth returned in a billow of steam.

  “I tried the television. Same thing.” He had to share this with her, though he had not expected otherwise.

  She shifted and adjusted under the clean bedding. The wind was noisy. “So, what do you think it is?” She didn’t want to be humored.

  G. H. knew her. It had been decades! “I think it’s something we’re going to laugh about when we hear what it was. That’s what I think.” He didn’t think this. But it was right to lie sometimes. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought about their apartment, their home, the suits in his walk-in closet, the coffee maker he’d settled on after spending weeks researching. He thought about the planes over Manhattan and how it must have looked to their passengers as the place went dark. He thought about the satellites over the planes over Manhattan and the pictures they were taking and what they would show. He thought about the space station over the satellites over the planes and wondered what the multiracial, multinational crew of scientists would have made of the whole thing from their unique vantage. Sometimes distance showed a thing most clearly.

  G. H. understood electricity as a commodity. This wasn’t some vicissitude in the market. You couldn’t pull the plug on the nation’s financial capital. Insurance companies would be in litigation for decades. If the lights went out in New York City, that was act-of-God stuff. Act of God. The kind of thing his mother-in-law might have said.

  13

  YOUR KID’S VOICE COULD WAKE YOU UP, YOUR KID’S PRESENCE could wake you up. Amanda felt Rose’s fat little body rock into the gulf between her and Clay even before she felt the girl’s wet breath too near her ear.

  “Mom, Mom.” A soft hand on her arm, gentle but also insistent.

  She sat up. “Rosie.” The previous year the girl had declared she was done with the ie. “Rose.”

  “Mom.” Rose was wide awake. Rose restored by the night. Rose, abloom. It had been this way her whole life. Mornings, she was dying to do. She opened her eyes and jumped to the floor. (Mrs. Weston, the neighbor downstairs, had raised two daughters in the same eleven hundred square feet, so she never complained.) Rose didn’t understand how her brother could stay asleep until eleven, twelve, one. Mornings, everything seemed thrilling to her—wash face, choose clothes, read a book. Rose was enthusiastic. Everything was possible. When you’re the younger child, you learn to fend for yourself. “There’s something wrong with the TV.”

  “Honey, this is not an emergency.” Then she remembered: This is the emergency broadcast system. Amanda slapped the too-slack pillows into obeisance.

  “It’s all messed up.” The first few channels were black and white, dancing light. After that, a
ll white, just nothing.

  They’d forgotten to draw the blinds. Outside it was light, but indirect. Not clouds but the early hour. The storm they’d thought was coming wasn’t after all. As she looked at it, the squat clock bedside ticked from 7:48 to 7:49. So: electricity. Some blackout. “Honey. I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you fix it?” Rose was just young enough to believe her parents could do anything. “It’s not fair, it’s a vacation, and you said on vacation we can watch as much television or have as much screen time as we want.”

  “Daddy’s sleeping. Go wait in the living room, I’m coming.”

  Rose stomped away—that was how she walked—and Amanda picked up her phone. The screen woke up, happy to see her, and she was happy, too: not one news alert but four. But just as before, she couldn’t see more than the dispatch. She pressed on the alert and the screen tried and failed to connect. The same headline—“Major Blackout Reported on the East Coast of the United States”—then “Hurricane Farrah Makes Landfall in North Carolina”—then “Breaking: East Coast of the United States Reports Power Failure”—then a final “Breaking” followed by nonsensical letters. She hoped the television would work. But they’d stopped listening to NPR when four-year-old Rosie had intoned “I’m David Greene,” and seven-year-old Archie asked about Pussy Riot. They’d protected the kids from so much.

  Amanda smoothed the sheet under her hand, bumped Clay’s ass. “Clay.” He mumbled, and she shook him by the shoulder. “Get up. Look.”

  His mouth was sour, eyes unfocused. Amanda had her phone in his face. He made an unintelligible sound.