by Rumaan Alam
Archie ducked his head into the building, but did not enter it. “This stupid fucking place is so boring.”
“Yeah.” Rose dug into the ground with a toenail that had been painted pale blue weeks before.
Now Archie understood it was an improvisatory game. “Maybe this is just where he sleeps, though. Where he hides at night.”
Immediately afraid. “Who?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Whoever made that impression.” Archie pointed at the leaves, which had once been wet but had dried into a thick, contoured surface. “I mean, if you were in these woods with nowhere to go and no place to sleep—what would you do?”
She didn’t want to think about it. “What do you mean?”
“You couldn’t like—climb a tree, and sleep up there. But anywhere on the ground would be like—unsafe. Snakes and shit like that. Rabid animals. Four walls! And a roof. It’s basically luxurious. And there’s this window—” Archie gestured at the dirty pane cut into the side of the shed, which they had not noticed until they opened it.
“Yeah, I guess.” She definitely wouldn’t want to sleep outside. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in the branches of a tree. She didn’t think she could even climb a tree. They’d done rock climbing at Park Slope Day Camp a couple of years ago. She’d been tethered at her waist, had worn a helmet and kneepads, but still refused to go on halfway up the wall, hanging there shrieking until her counselor Darnell worked the rope to get her back down.
Archie paused meaningfully. “. . . So he can see.”
“See what?”
Archie bent back into the shed, looked through the window. “Into the house, of course. See for yourself. There’s a perfect view.”
Rose stepped forward, recoiling a little at the bare dirt under her feet. She did not have to bend, she was not as tall as her brother, but she did, her hand on his forearm to steady her. She could, in fact, see the house from that vantage.
He went on. “Isn’t that . . . the room you’re sleeping in? Wow. Correct me if I’m wrong. But I’m pretty sure it is. Just imagine, when it’s dark out here but the house is all lit up. Your little bedside lamp is glowing, and you’re reading, nice and cozy under the covers. He could just follow that light right up to you. I bet you could see right in the windows without even having to stand on tiptoe.”
She pulled her body back, knocking her head against the threshold. “Shut up, Archie.”
He stifled a laugh.
“Just shut up.” She folded her arms against her chest. “Listen. This morning I saw deer. Not a deer. A lot of deer. A hundred. Maybe more. Right here. It was so weird. Do they go around in big groups like that?”
Archie walked toward the tree in whose shade the little playhouse was nestled. He reached up and leaped just slightly, took hold of the lowest limb, lifted his knees to his chest, and swung, animal and mischievous. He dropped to the ground with a thud. He spat into the dust. “I don’t fucking know anything about fucking deer.”
Peach-colored, fuzzed, sticky, their bodies dissolved into the foliage; they couldn’t be seen, heard, spied, as they investigated.
They wanted something to happen, but something was happening. They did not know it, and it did not involve them, not really. It would, of course; the world belonged to the young. They were babes in the woods, and if the tale were to be believed, they would die, the birds would see to their bodies, maybe escort their souls to heaven. It depended on which version of the story you knew. The dark that had settled on Manhattan, that tangible thing, could be explained. But beyond the dark was everything else, and that was more vague, hard to hold on to as spider’s silk, there but not there, all around them. They walked farther into the woods.
20
IT HAD BEEN FOURTEEN MINUTES SINCE HE’D LEFT THE house. he remembered checking the display as he started the car. Maybe it was sixteen. Maybe he was misremembering. Maybe it was fewer! Then he’d stopped to smoke that cigarette, which he usually said took seven minutes but actually took closer to four. So Clay had been driving for ten minutes, which was not really so long, and meant he couldn’t truly be lost. He told himself to calm down, then pulled the car into the McKinnon Farms driveway to smoke a cigarette. He could, of course, continue down the drive, to the farmhouse or some other building where people would be, but that would mean he was truly panicked, which he was not. So he smoked and tried to find the relaxation inherent in the act, then stubbed the thing out before it was truly done, impatient. He couldn’t remember, when they’d driven to the house that first day, if theirs had been the only car. That first day seemed weeks in the past.
He closed the door harder than he meant to, though it was not exactly a slam. It was loud enough to underscore the general quiet. He told himself that this was normal, and it was. It would have seemed peaceful had he been prepared to find peace. It seemed irritating at best and menacing at worst. Symbols don’t mean anything; you invest them with meaning, depending on what you most need. Clay chewed a piece of gum and started the car. He turned left out of the farm’s access road and drove slowly, noting every possible turn on the right. There was one, then another, then, finally, another, but none looked familiar, and none were adjacent to a stand selling eggs. There was a sign that read only “Corn,” but this didn’t seem to indicate anything at all, and must have been old.
He thought of the mental and actual preparation they’d put in to prepare Archie to ride the subway alone. The way they’d insisted the boy memorize their phone numbers, in case his telephone was lost or broken, the plan they’d agreed upon should he find himself on a rerouted train bound for some part of the city where he’d never been. Now he rode the subway all the time. Clay rarely thought about it. That was how it worked, maybe. You prepared your child to sleep through the night or wield a fork or piss in the toilet or say please or eat broccoli or be respectful to adults, and then the child was prepared. That was the end of it. He didn’t know why he was thinking about Archie, and he shook his head as though to clear it. He would have to turn around and take one of the three, four, five turnoffs he’d passed, determine where they led, see if they were the right way. One of them had to be. He needed only to be methodical. He’d trace the route back to the house, then begin again, more cautious, more attentive, and work his way to town, where he had intended all along to end up. He really wanted that Coke now. His head hurt from lack of caffeine.
Their vacation was ruined. The spell had been broken. Truly, what he should do was drive back to the house and have the kids pack their things. They’d be back in the city before dinner. They could splurge at that French place on Atlantic, order the fried anchovy, the steak, a martini. Clay was only decisive after the fact. And now he was—well, he would say turned around, not lost. He felt a strangely powerful desire to see his children.
He took the first left, and drove only a few yards before understanding that this was not the route; it pitched uphill, and he knew the road had been level. He turned the car around and turned back onto the main road, barely slowing, knowing there was no traffic coming in either direction. He took the second left, and this seemed like it might be the way. He drove on, then turned right, because he could. Perhaps that was it, and the painted egg shack was just up that road. Everything looked familiar because trees and grass only ever looked precisely as you’d expect them to.
He turned the car around again, went back to the road onto which he’d turned from the main road, and there, across that main road, he saw a woman. She was wearing a white polo shirt and khaki pants. On some women it would have looked like leisure wear, but on this woman, her face a broad, indigenous shape (ancient blood, timeless dignity), it looked like a uniform. The woman saw him, raised a hand, waved at him, gestured at him, beckoned him. Clay pulled into the road, more slowly now, and glided to a stop. He lowered the passenger window and smiled out at the woman, the way you’re taught to smile at dogs so you don’t betray your fear of them.
“Hello, there!” He wasn’t sure what he
’d say. Would he admit to being lost?
“Hello.” She looked at him and then began speaking, very quickly, in Spanish.
“I’m sorry.” He shrugged. It sounded, he hated to admit even in his private thoughts, like gibberish. He didn’t speak any other languages. Clay didn’t even like to attempt it. It made him feel like a fool, or a child.
The woman continued. The words poured out of her. She barely took a breath. She had something urgent to say, and had maybe forgotten what English she possessed—hello and thank you and it’s ok and Windex and telephone and text and Venmo and the days of the week. She talked. She kept talking.
“I’m sorry.” He shrugged again. He did not understand, of course. But maybe he comprehended. Oh, that was a word: comprende. They said it in movies. You couldn’t live in this country and not know some Spanish. If he’d had time to think about it, if he’d forced himself to calm down, he could have communicated with this woman. But she was panicked, and she was panicking him. He was lost and wanted his family. He wanted a steak at that restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. “No Spanish.”
She said more. Something something. He heard beer but she said deer; they sound alike in both tongues. She said more. She said telephone, but he didn’t understand. She said electric, but he didn’t hear. Tears welled at the corners of her small eyes. She was short, freckled, broad. She could have been fourteen or forty. Her nose was running. She was weeping. She spoke louder, hurried, was imprecise, maybe lapsing out of Spanish altogether into some dialect, something still more ancient, the argot of civilizations long dead, piles of rubble in jungles. Her people discovered corn, tobacco, chocolate. Her people invented astronomy, language, trade. Then they’d ceased to be. Now their descendants shucked the corn they’d been the first to know about, and vacuumed rugs and watered decorative beds of lavender planted poolside at mansions in the Hamptons that sat unused most of the year. She forgot herself, even, put her hands on his car, which they both knew was a violation. She held on to the two-inch lip of window that was sticking up out of the door. Her hands were small and brown. She was still talking through the tears; she was asking him a question, a question he could not understand and anyway would not have been able to answer.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. If his phone had worked, he might have tried Google Translate. He could have urged her to get into the car, but how would he have made her understand that he was lost, not driving in circles because he meant to kill her or lull her to sleep, as suburban parents did with their infants? A different man would respond differently, but Clay was the man he was, one unable to provide what this woman needed, one afraid of her urgency, her fear, which did not need translation. She was afraid. He should be afraid. He was afraid. “I’m sorry.” He said it to himself, more than to her. She released the window as he started to roll it up. He drove farther down the road, quickly, though he’d intended to investigate all those driveways. He needed to be away from her more even than he needed to be with his family.
21
IN THE WOODS YOU HAD THIS SENSE OF SOMETHING YOU couldn’t see no matter how you tried. There were bugs, dun-colored toads holding still, mushrooms in fantastical shapes that seemed accidental, the sweet smell of rot, inexplicable damp. You felt small, like one of many things, and the least important too.
Maybe, maybe, something had happened to them. Maybe something was happening to them. For centuries there was no language to describe the fact that tumors blossomed inside lungs, beautiful volunteers like flowering plants that take root in unlikely places. Not knowing what to call it did not change it, death by drowning as your chest filled with sacs of liquid.
Rose felt eyes on her, but then she pretended, often, that she was being watched. She saw herself at the remove of a cell-phone camera. She was young and didn’t understand that was how everyone saw themselves, as the main character of a story, rather than one of literal billions, our lungs slowly filling with salt water.
In the woods, the light was different. The trees interfered with it. The trees were alive and felt like Tolkien’s majestic creatures. The trees were watching, and not impartially. The trees knew what was up. The trees talked amongst themselves. They were sensitive to the seismic reverberations of bombs far distant. Trees miles away—where the ocean had begun to breach the land—were dying, though it would take years for them to be reduced to albino logs. The trees had all the time the rest of us do not. The mangroves could outsmart it, pull up their roots like a Victorian lady’s skirts, sip the salt from the ground, so maybe they’d be fine, with the alligators and the rats and the roaches and the snakes. Maybe they’d be better off without us. Sometimes, sometimes, suicide is a relief. That was the right noun for what was happening. The sickness in the ground and in the air and in the water was all a clever design. There was a menace in the woods and Rose could feel it, and another child would have called it God. Did it matter if a storm had metastasized into something for which no noun yet existed? Did it matter if the electrical grid broke apart like something built of Lego? Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux? Did it matter if some nation claimed responsibility for the outage, did it matter that it was condemned as an act of war, did it matter if this was pretext for a retaliation long hoped for, did it matter that proving who had done what via wires and networks was actually impossible? Did it matter if an asthmatic woman named Deborah died after six hours trapped on an F train stalled beneath the Hudson River, and that the other people on the subway walked past her body and felt nothing in particular? Did it matter that machines meant for supporting life ceased doing that hard work after the failure of backup generators in Miami, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Annapolis? Did it matter if the morbidly obese grandson of the Eternal President actually did send a bomb, or did it matter simply that he could, if he wanted to?
The children couldn’t know that some of this had happened. That in an old-age home in a coastal town called Port Victory a Vietnam vet named Peter Miller was floating facedown in two feet of water. That Delta had lost a plane traveling between Dallas and Minneapolis during the disruption of the air traffic control system. That a pipeline was spilling crude onto the ground in an unpopulated part of Wyoming. That a major television star had been struck by a car at the intersection of Seventy-Ninth and Amsterdam and died because the ambulances couldn’t get anywhere. They couldn’t know that the silence that seemed so relaxing in the country seemed so menacing in the city, which was hot, still, and quiet in a way that made no sense. Nothing matters to children but themselves, or perhaps that is the human condition.
Barefoot, bareheaded, bare-breasted, the children moved gingerly, feet arching, toes recoiling. Branches grazed their skin, and you could not see the marks they made. The illness of the planet had never been a secret, the nature of it all had never been in doubt, and if something had changed (it had), the fact that they didn’t yet know it had no bearing on the matter at all. It was inside them now, whatever it was. The world operated according to logic, but the logic had been evolving for some time, and now they had to reckon with that. Whatever they thought they’d understood was not wrong but irrelevant.
“Archie, look.” It came out as a whisper. She’d lowered her voice, assuming respect, as you might inside a holy place. She pointed. A roof. A clearing that became a lawn. A brick house, like the one where they were staying, a pool, a sturdy wood swing set.
“A house.” He wasn’t even derisive, just declarative. Archie hadn’t been expecting to find anything. Ruth had told them there was nothing out here, but they had gone farther than Ruth ever had, were curious about the world in a way Ruth was not. This was a satisfying discovery. Other people. Archie had left his phone charging in his bedroom. He wished he’d brought it, tried to borrow these people’s WiFi.
“Should we go up there?” She was thinking of the swing set and that maybe the kids had outgrown it. She was thinking that not talking to stran
gers was a matter for the city only.
“Nah. Let’s go.” Archie turned toward what he believed was the direction from which they’d come. He didn’t feel the tick burrowing into his ankle any more than he could Earth’s deliberate daily rotation. He didn’t feel anything in the air because it felt unchanged.
They walked, not slowly, but not in a hurry. Time passed differently in the woods. They didn’t know how long they’d been gone. They didn’t know what they’d intended to do. They didn’t know why it felt satisfying, just strolling through the shade of the trees, air and sun and bugs and sweat on skin. They didn’t know that their father was even then driving past, less than a half a mile away, less than a quarter mile, near enough they could run to him, save him. From where they stood they couldn’t hear the road, and they weren’t thinking about their father, their mother, anyone.
As they walked, Archie and Rose barely spoke, mucking through the leaves, shivering a little. Their bodies knew what their minds did not. Children and the very old have this in common. Born, you understand something about the world. That’s why toddlers report conversing with ghosts and unnerve their parents. The very old begin to remember it, but can rarely articulate it, and no one listens to the very old anyway.
They were not afraid, the children, not really. They were at peace. A change was upon them; a change was upon it all. What you called it didn’t matter. Overhead, the leaves shifted and sighed, and there was the sound of Archie and Rose saying something to each other, something impossible to make out, something that existed only between them, the private language of youth. And save that there was only the gentle rustle of the trees adjusting their limbs and the susurrus of unseen insects. Those would settle, soon, the way that things grow quiet before the sudden summer rainstorm, because the bugs knew, and would hold their bodies tight to the stippled bark of the trees and wait for whatever was coming.