Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  22

  SO HE’D BEEN GONE FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. IT MEANT he’d stopped to smoke. It meant he’d stopped for groceries. Amanda: What, me worry?

  Ruth put a bowl of cherries, more black than red, onto the table. It had the air of ceremony.

  “Thank you.” Amanda didn’t know why she was thanking the woman. Hadn’t she spent eleven dollars on these cherries?

  A cloud, one of those soft, cottony ones, all curves like a child’s drawing, seeped across the sky. The change was severe enough that G. H. shivered. “I could almost use a minute in the hot tub.”

  Amanda took this for an invitation. She left the table, sank into the froth beside the strange man. The water made you buoyant, and so it made it hard to sit. Amanda leaned forward to look toward the trees. She could not see the children any longer.

  “They’re fine, I expect.” George understood. You had a child and were forever vigilant. “There’s nothing back there but more trees.”

  Ruth looked at the two of them. Wine with lunch had made her drowsy. “I might make some coffee then.”

  “That would be nice, love, thank you.”

  Amanda smiled. “Can I do anything?”

  “You relax.” Ruth went back into the house.

  “The pool. The hot tub. They cost a fortune in electric bills. We’re going to have solar panels put up. I didn’t want to do it during the season, when we use the house. I’m waiting until September, October. My contractor told me he generates enough that he sells power back to the grid. More people should do that.” G. H. was almost beginning to enjoy this woman’s company. He liked an audience.

  “Clean energy. Should save the planet. Should be a law.” Sometimes at the movie theater or on the sidewalk Amanda would see wind energy proselytizers with pamphlets and free buttons, but it always seemed like a scam. “How did you get into your line of work?” More small talk.

  “I had a mentor, in college. It was him who made me—I mean, I didn’t know what people did for a living. My mother ran a hair salon.” His tone conveyed his respect for his mother’s work. She died of cancer—liver, stomach, pancreas—probably from handling the chemicals women like her used to make their hair respectable. “Stephen Johnson. Gone now, but what a life.”

  “I guess it’s like having a green thumb. Or being good at doing the Rubik’s cube. Some people can make money, some people can’t.” She knew who she and Clay were.

  This was one of G. H.’s hobbyhorses. “That’s the conventional wisdom. You have to ask yourself why that is. Who wants you to believe that it’s not possible to get, if not rich, at least comfortable? It’s a skill. You can be taught. It’s just about information. You have to read the paper. You have to listen to what is happening in the world.” Of course, he thought you had to be smart, but he considered that a given.

  “I read the paper.” She was a woman of the world, she believed. She wanted to say something about her work, but there was little to say.

  “You only have to understand the patterns that govern the world. Did you ever hear about that guy who beat the game show Press Your Luck?” G. H. looked down at her over the rims of his Ray-Bans. He wanted a newspaper now. He thought of the numbers. He wondered what had moved.

  “Whammy? No Whammy?”

  “All he did was pay attention and learn that the Whammy wasn’t random at all. It always appeared in a certain sequence. That information was just there, but no one had ever bothered to look for it.” Rich people didn’t have a moral authority. They just knew where the Whammy was.

  “That’s interesting,” she said, indicating that she did not find it so at all. Where were the kids? “I’m glad to be away from my work, for the moment. Don’t get me wrong—it’s interesting, to me, anyway, helping people tell the stories of their companies, helping them find consumers, make that connection. But it’s a lot of diplomacy. It gets tiring.”

  George went on. “My mentor was one of the first black men at a Wall Street firm. We had lunch one afternoon—lunch! I was twenty-one.” How to communicate that he’d never previously considered eating lunch at a restaurant, never mind one like that, carpeted, mirrored, brass ashtrays and solicitous uniformed girls in ponytails? He’d showed up without a tie, and Stephen Johnson took him to Bloomingdale’s, bought him four from Ralph Lauren. G. H. hadn’t known how to put them on; the ones he’d worn at Christmas were clip-on.

  “I’ve always thought that women need to stick together in the workforce. Or maybe everywhere. I’d be nowhere without my mentors.” This was not entirely true. Amanda had worked for women, but secretly preferred working with men. Their motivations were so simple.

  “He said to me, ‘We’re all machines.’ That’s it. You get to choose the nature of the machine you are. We’re all machines, but some of us are smart enough that we get to determine our programming.” What he’d said: Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything. You can either calibrate yourself to that or think you’ve rejected it. But the latter, Stephen Johnson said, was a delusion. You were either going to get rich or not. You only had to choose. Stephen Johnson and he were the same kind of person. He was who he was—patriarch, intellect, husband, collector of fine watches, first-class traveler—because he’d chosen to be.

  Amanda was lost. They were talking around each other, not to each other. “You must love what you do.”

  Did he care about it, or had he come to care about it, as the spouses in an arranged marriage find, over time, a transaction settled into something like affection? “I’m a lucky man.”

  The heat was clarifying in the way of orgasm, akin to blowing your nose. The hot sun, the hot water, but still this energy: she could have run around the block, or taken a nap, or done pull-ups. She was waiting for Clay to drive up the road. It had been an hour, right? She listened for the sound of the car.

  They should leave. If they timed it right, they’d be home for dinner. They could treat themselves to one of the neighborhood restaurants that was just slightly too expensive to be a regular haunt. She didn’t know, of course, that Clay had the same thought. She didn’t know this bespoke how well suited to each other they were.

  The yard was quiet but for the steamy undulation of the tub. She looked at the woods, and she thought she saw something moving but couldn’t pick out their bodies. She thought a mother should be able to do that, once upon a time, but then she’d actually taken the toddlers to the playground and lost them immediately, a sea of small humanity that had nothing to do with her. She was happy the children had each other, were still children enough to get lost in their games, tromping through the woods like she imagined country kids did.

  She was sitting there, not doing anything more, when it happened, when there was something. A noise, but that didn’t cover it. Noise was an insufficient noun, or maybe noise was always impossible to describe in words. What was music but noise; could words get at Beethoven? This was a noise, yes, but one so loud that it was almost a physical presence, so sudden because of course there was no precedent. There was nothing (real life!), and then there was a noise. Of course they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after. It was a noise, but it was a transformation. It was a noise, but it was a confirmation. Something had happened, something was happening, it was ongoing, the noise was confirmation even as the noise was mystery.

  Understanding came after the fact. That was how life worked: I’m being hit by a car, I’m having a heart attack, that purple-gray thing emerging from between my legs is the head of our child. Epiphanies. They were the end of a chain of events invisible until that epiphany had been reached. You had to walk backward and try to make sense. That’s what people did, that’s how people learned. Yes. So. The thing was a noise.

  Not a bang, not a clap. More than thunder, more than an explosio
n; none of them had never heard an explosion. Explosions seemed common because films so often depicted them, but explosions were rare, or they’d all been lucky to be spared proximity to explosions. All that could be said, in the moment, was that it was noise, big enough to alter forever their working definitions of noise. You’d cry if you weren’t so scared, surprised, or affected in some way impossible to understand. You might cry even so.

  The noise was quick, maybe, but the air buzzed with it for what seemed like a long time. What was the noise, and what was the noise’s aftereffect? One of those unanswerable questions. Amanda stood up. Behind them, the glass pane of the door between the bedroom and the deck cracked, a fine but long crack, beautiful and mathematical and something no one would notice for a while yet. The noise was loud enough to make a man fall to his knees. That’s what Archie did, distant, in the woods: fell to his bare knees. A noise that could make a person fall to their knees was only nominally a noise. It was something else for which there was no noun necessary, because how often would one use such a word?

  “What the fuck?” This was, maybe, the only proper response. Amanda was not talking to George. She was not talking to anyone. “What the fuck?” She said it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, it didn’t matter. She kept saying it, and it was unanswered, as a prayer.

  Amanda was trembling. Not shaken but shaking, vibrating. She went quiet. A noise so big, how could you meet it but with silence? She thought what she was doing was screaming. The feeling of a scream, the emotion of a scream, but in fact she gasped, like a fish flipped out of its pond, the noise deaf-mutes make in moments of passion, the shadow, the silhouette, of speech. Amanda was angry.

  “What—” She didn’t feel any particular need to finish her sentence because she was talking to herself. “What. What. What.”

  George had leaped from the tub, didn’t even cover his body with a towel. Everything in the world was quiet, except, maybe, that sense of afterglow, the void where the noise had only just been. Perhaps her ears were damaged, and it was an illusion. Perhaps her brain was damaged. There had been that story, about consular employees in Havana who developed neurological symptoms believed to be linked to noise. It had never occurred to Amanda that a weapon could be sonic, had never occurred to her that a noise might be something to fear. You told kids and pets not to worry during thunderstorms.

  Amanda was shaking. There was a sharp taste, like she had a Kennedy half dollar sitting on top of her tongue. If she moved, the noise might recur. If it did, she was not sure she would be able to bear it. She never wanted to hear it again. “What was that?” This was more to herself than anything. Was it localized—inside the house, within the perimeter—or was it something related to the weather or interstellar or the parting of the heavens to herald the arrival of God himself? As she asked, she knew that the noise would never be satisfactorily explained. It was past logic, or explanation, at least.

  It was very slow at first. She walked and then leaped down the steps. She had just been looking out at the trees. She tried to find their bodies in all that green and brown. She should call for them, and it seemed like she did, but she did not. Her voice did not work, or couldn’t catch up to her body. She just moved. Slow, then fast, jog then run, Amanda went down past the pool, shoving open the gate, and into the grass. Her children, their perfect faces, their flawless bodies, were there, somewhere. She could see only the single mass of the landscape. It looked to her as it might had she been nearsighted and without her glasses, indistinct, bright, impossible.

  She ran farther. The yard was not so big, there was not so much to run into. Still she did not call, only ran. There was a little shed in the shadows. She pulled open the door and it was empty. All in one movement—she didn’t truly stop running—she continued to the edge of the yard, soft dirt and dry leaves. The noise was over, but there was still a noise, her blood in her veins, her heart resilient enough. She needed her children’s bodies against her own.

  Amanda leaped over a stick, small enough that she could have stepped over it, and her feet were in the carpet of humus, here catching a pebble, pointed bark, a thorn, something wet and unpleasant. She should call out to them but didn’t want to drown out their voices should they be calling to her, urgent Moms, as convicts were said to utter upon their executions.

  The kids, where were her kids? The trees barely seemed to move. They just stood, indifferent to her. Amanda sank to the ground. The touch of leaves, bark, dirt, was almost a comfort. The mud on her pink knees was almost a balm. The clean soles of her feet were blackened and pocked but not painful. At last she found herself. She intended to call out for the children, to call out the names they’d chosen so lovingly, but instead of “Archie” and “Rosie” (for the diminutive would surely have emerged, love and longing), Amanda only screamed, a terrible, animal scream, the second most shocking noise she had ever heard.

  23

  THEY SPOKE MORE QUIETLY THAN NORMAL. THEY WERE DEFERENTIAL, of course, to the noise. They were waiting for it to come back. They didn’t want to be caught unawares, but how could you anticipate that, even having heard it before? All the same: there was disagreement.

  G. H. did not wholly believe what he was saying. “It could have been thunder, I suppose.” Sometimes you could will yourself to believe what you said.

  “There are no clouds!” Amanda’s fury was blunted, a bit, by relief. She had found her children, wide-eyed and filthy as mendicants, and would not let them go. She had Rose’s right hand in hers as she used to, years ago, when the girl was misbehaving. On the girl’s left hand the palm was etched red, a perfect, unbroken line. Abraded skin on her left knee, smudges on her chin and shoulder and the soft midriff—she’d campaigned for months for a two-piece swimsuit—and greasy hair and red eyes, but otherwise the girl was fine. The children looked fine. They seemed fine.

  Amanda had plunged headlong into the woods and found them by some instinct she’d forgotten she possessed, or perhaps it was dumb luck. The noise sent the three of them running, and their paths happened to intersect. The noise saw Clay stop the car beside the maddeningly empty road, open the door, and consider the heavens. The noise startled Ruth, filling the coffeepot, dropping a spoon to the ground. The noise bade those deer, more than a thousand in number, already heedless of the property lines drawn by men, to stampede through gardens without even stopping for a nibble. Homeowners were too distracted—by the shattered windows, by the screaming children, by the infant eardrums, irreparably affected—to gawk at all those animals.

  Amanda and the children emerged from the woods, and though they were strangers there was real joy at their reunion. Ruth had put an arm around the boy’s bare shoulders. G. H. had squeezed Amanda’s forearm in paternal relief. The aftermath of the noise—a hum, a sense of vibration—seemed to linger. It was like a swarm of persistent insects, the biting flies you sometimes encountered at the beach. There and not there. Dogged. Amanda suggested they go inside, articulating what everyone was feeling. The sky was quite blue and very pretty, but the out-of-doors seemed somehow untrustworthy. The noise seemed to belong to nature, but as Ruth knew, the bricks had not been enough to keep the sound away. “Was that a bomb?” Visions of mushroom clouds.

  “Where’s Dad?” Regressing as you did after a trauma, Archie’s voice broke, high and awkward, on Dad. Where was Dad?

  “He ran an errand.” Amanda was terse.

  “I’m sure he’ll be back any moment.” Ruth filled glasses with water. The children were filthy and sweaty. She wasn’t sure how to help, and that was what she wanted to do. She couldn’t hold her grandchildren close. She could get this stranger’s children a glass of water.

  “Thank you.” Archie remembered his manners. That was a good sign.

  “Why don’t you go wash? I can stay with Archie.” Ruth bent to pick up the dropped teaspoon with which she’d been measuring the coffee grounds. She wanted to help, but mostly she wanted a distraction.

  Amanda took Rose to the b
athroom, cleaned her wounds. They were minor. The ritual was a comfort to both of them: damp toilet paper and Neosporin, her child’s face close enough that she could smell her hot breath. After the genocide, beauty parlors helped Rwandans cope. Touching another human being was a curative. She swabbed the child’s face with a damp washcloth, dressed her in a sweatshirt and shorts. Rose, who no longer wanted to be seen naked, did not even protest that. The noise had terrified her.

  Ruth had to do something. “Drink your water, sweetie.” The blandishment did not come naturally. At school, they called every child “friend.” Even in trouble they were not subjected to “ma’am” and “sir” but “friend.” Friend, we need to talk about your behavior. Friends, please lower your voices. It was holy in a noncommittal way.

  Archie’s hairless back was coated with a paste of sweat and dust. You could have inscribed a word in the filth on his skin, the way pranksters wrote “Wash me” on untended cars. Dutiful, he took a sip. “My ears feel weird.”

  “It’s probably normal.” Ruth’s ears didn’t feel weird, but her everything else did. “That was—loud.” It might have damaged their eardrums.

  Amanda returned, the clean little girl holding her hand, made a child again. “Oh Archie. You’re a mess.” She stroked his grimy back, reassured and reassuring.

  G. H. peered out the window, suspicious of everything he could see, the pool, the rustling trees. That was all that was out there, that was all he could see, but he wasn’t expecting to see—what? A bomb? A missile? Were those the same thing?