Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  “Was it a plane?” Amanda was trying to reconstruct it, but a noise was like pain: your body couldn’t remember its specifics. It might have been mechanical, and planes seemed the highest form of machine.

  “A plane crashing?” Ruth didn’t know if that was what she meant and couldn’t guess what sort of sound it would make, a plane exploding like that one over Lockerbie or felled like the one that was destined for the US Capitol. Again she only had Hollywood films.

  “Or breaking the sound barrier. A sonic boom. Was that a sonic boom?” They had flown on the Concorde once, a lark, their fifteenth anniversary. François Mitterand had been on their flight. “I think you can’t break the sound barrier when you’re over land. But it gets lost over the ocean. I think that’s right.”

  “Planes don’t usually break the sound barrier.” Archie had done a report on it in sixth grade. “The Concorde doesn’t fly anymore.”

  He was right in that the Concorde had only ever terrified the whales in the North Atlantic. But these were extraordinary times. He didn’t know that the planes dispatched from Rome, New York, usually flew north, the most direct route to the open sea. But they were off to intercept something that approached the nation’s eastern flank. The circumference of the noise they created was about fifty miles—a rend in heaven right over their little house.

  Ruth had thought of it over their repast of strange sandwiches. “I noticed today—did you? There was no air traffic. Not one plane, not one helicopter.”

  G. H. knew, as his wife said it, that this was true. “You’re right. I mean, usually we hear so many. Planes, helicopters.”

  “What do you mean?” Amanda asked. “There must have been—”

  “Hobbyists taking lessons. Impatient people flying out from Manhattan. It’s a big issue in the local op-eds.” Ruth herself had become inured enough to the noise pollution that she noticed, instead, its absence. She didn’t know what this meant, but thought it might mean something.

  Amanda wanted to send the children out of the room, but there was no television to distract them. “Archie, why don’t you go put on your clothes.” Her hand on his gritty back. He was hot to the touch. “Drink more water. Maybe you should take a shower?”

  Ruth understood; maybe any parent would. “Rose, maybe you should go lie down.”

  The girl didn’t know if this strange woman was meant to be obeyed. She looked up at her mother to see what to do.

  “That’s a good idea, honey.” Amanda was grateful. “Go curl up in Mommy’s bed. Read your book.”

  “I’m going to go take a shower.” Archie was suddenly conscious of being undressed. He couldn’t confess this, but he’d pissed in his swimsuit when he heard that noise, like a baby. There was a point, when he was younger, where he’d dreamed of understanding grown-up conversation. Now he could, and realized he’d overestimated it. “Come on, Rose.” A big brother’s kindness.

  Amanda waited until the children were gone. “What was that?”

  Ruth looked past her husband to the window, the flat blue sky. “It’s not the weather—” Ideal day for swimming, and anyway there had never been thunder so loud, that lasted so long. If they lived in Hawaii, she might have said it was a volcano.

  G. H. was impatient. He was done with this. “We can agree that we don’t know what it is,” he said.

  “Where is Clay?” Amanda looked at Ruth as though the woman were responsible. As the noise changed the girl from teen to child, it left Amanda soft, helpless.

  Ruth had lost track of the time. “It wasn’t so long ago. It just feels that way.”

  “He’ll be back soon.” G. H. was making promises.

  “This settles it, though. Something is . . . happening.” The lack of a cellular signal was an assault. The absence of television was a tactic. “We have to do something!”

  “What should we do, sweetie?” Ruth didn’t disagree, but she was at a loss.

  “We’re being attacked. This is an attack. What are you supposed to do in the event of an attack?”

  “We’re not being attacked.” G. H. was not entirely certain, though, and it showed. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed?” Amanda was louder. “We’re just sitting here, like, I don’t know what. Is that what sitting ducks are? Ducks just sitting and waiting to be shot?” What a stupid expression. Why would a duck sit?

  “I mean, we still don’t know what’s happening. We should just wait for Clay to come back, and we’ll see what he’s learned.”

  “Should I drive into town and look for Clay?” She didn’t want to leave the house, but she would. Something had to be done. “Should we fill the bathtubs? Do we have batteries and Tylenol? Should we find the neighbors? Is there enough food? Is this an emergency?”

  G. H. put his brown hands on the Vermont stone countertops. “This is an emergency. We’re prepared. And we are safe here.” Those were the facts: his energy bars, his case of wine.

  “Is there a generator? Is there a bomb shelter? Is there— I don’t know. A hand-crank radio? One of those straws that makes it safe to drink dirty water?”

  “He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.” G. H. was trying to convince himself as well. “We’ll stay here. We’re safe here. All of us. We’ll stay here.”

  “It’s fifteen minutes to town. Then fifteen minutes back. That’s half an hour. At least.” Ruth fidgeted. What were they doing? “Maybe it’s longer if you don’t know the way. Maybe it’s twenty minutes. Forty, there and back.”

  Amanda was mad at all of them. “What if he’s not coming back? What if the car died, or that noise did something to him, or—” What did she envision? Clay, gone forever.

  “George is right. We’re safe. Let’s just sit tight.”

  “How can you say we’re safe when you don’t know what’s happening to us?” Amanda hoped the children could not hear her. She wept, now.

  “We heard that noise.” Ruth was logical. “We should just wait. To see what we’re going to have to do next.”

  Amanda was furious. “We don’t have the internet, we don’t have our phones, we don’t know what anything is.” She blamed it on these people. They’d knocked on the door and ruined everything.

  “Maybe it was like—what was that? Ten Mile Island?” Ruth wanted a drink, but couldn’t decide if this was a good idea. “There are power plants out here, aren’t there?”

  “Three Mile Island.” G. H. always knew that sort of thing.

  Amanda knew it from history books. “A nuclear accident?” The abiding fear of her youth: presidential red telephones, flashes of light, fallout. She’d forgotten all that at some point. “Oh my god. Should we tape the windows shut? Are we going to get sick?”

  “I don’t know that that would account for the noise.” G. H. tried to remember: the steam was produced by the sea water used to cool the material that produced the reaction that created the energy. An earthquake in Japan had shown the fallacy; the sea water could flow back, poison could travel across the ocean. They’d found debris in Oregon. Would a nuclear incident make such a noise? Did the nuclear plants out here supply the city, and would their damage account for the blackout?

  “A missile?” Amanda was thinking out loud. “North Korea. Ruth, you brought up North Korea.”

  “Iran.” G. H. said it without meaning to.

  “Iran?” Amanda said it like she’d never heard of the place.

  “We shouldn’t speculate.” G. H. regretted it.

  “Maybe this was. You know. The blackout then—the source of that noise, a bomb or whatever.” Terrorists were planners. The action itself felt like impulse, because televisions couldn’t show what preceded it: meetings, strategy, sketches, money. Those nineteen had practiced in flight simulators! Where would you even find a flight simulator?

  “We’re just getting worked up—” G. H. felt it was important to stick to what they could see.

  Ruth would have a drink. She found the wine key. She went to the cabinet and took out a cab
ernet. “But . . . Clay. What if—what if he found something?” What was worse: he was not coming back, or he was, and had found something out in the world truly unbearable, worse than they were able to even guess at, and had to come back with news of it and force these people to bear it with him?

  Amanda wept, more now. “But we won’t know what is happening until we do. We’re just . . .” She looked at the pendant lamps, new but made to look like something from a turn-of-the-century schoolhouse, at the clever cabinetry that concealed the stainless steel dishwasher, at the milk-glass bowl full of lemons. The house had seemed so alluring. It didn’t feel as safe anymore, it didn’t feel the same, nothing did.

  “Maybe the television will come back on.” Ruth tried to sound optimistic.

  “Or our cell phones will work again.” Amanda said it like a prayer. She looked down at the countertop, noticing, maybe for the first time, the beautiful abstraction of stone. It didn’t seem strong or solid, but it did seem newly beautiful. That was something.

  24

  MASCULINE RESPONSIBILITY, CLAY REALIZED, WAS UTTER bullshit. the vanity in wanting to save them! That noise made him want to be at home. He didn’t want to protect; he wanted to be protected. The noise brought tears, frustrated, irritated tears. He was turned around and felt utterly lost. He didn’t even want to smoke, but he was slowing the car to a stop when it happened, when the skies opened up and this intangible thing fell all around them. He didn’t notice if it startled the birds and squirrels and chipmunks and moths and frogs and flies and ticks. He was paying attention only to himself.

  Clay idled there, because there was no traffic to block. He waited eight minutes, sure the noise would come back. It did, but over Queens; distant enough that he couldn’t hear it. Solitude made the noise unbearable for Clay, but so did its opposite. In Queens, crowds formed and panic metastasized. People ran. People wept. The police barely bothered to pretend to do anything.

  Then: Clay found the way. It was like the previous forty-four minutes had never happened. He turned right and saw the sign promising eggs. It was too ridiculous to think about. Clay had no information, no cold Coke. Minutes before, he had decided that when he got back to the house, he’d bundle his family into the car and leave this place. He’d never wanted to see the house again.

  Now the painted brick greeted him as an old friend. He cried from relief instead of fear. He turned off the car. He looked at the sky. He looked at the car. He looked toward the trees. As he ran toward the house, he began to recount what he knew.

  The seas were said to be rising. People had been talking about Greenland a lot. Hurricane season was particularly bad. The forty-fifth president of the United States seemed to have dementia. Angela Merkel seemed to have Parkinson’s disease. Ebola was back. There was something happening with interest rates. It was the second week of August. Classes would begin soon enough that you could measure the distance in days. His editor at the New York Times Book Review had probably emailed back with her comments on his review.

  If the noise returned, say tonight, once the sun had set—once the profound dark of the farmland all around them asserted itself—he wouldn’t survive it. You couldn’t. That was the nature of the noise; it was horror, in some distilled way, in a single, very brief moment. He was rough with gooseflesh just revisiting it, trying to remember what it had sounded like as a means of deducing what it had been. He feared even going to sleep. How was he supposed to drive away?

  Clay thought of his father. It seemed all too possible that his father, at home watching television in Minneapolis, knew nothing of a cryptic noise over Long Island. Something had to be truly big to affect life. When he was a teenager, his mother had suffered from what she assumed was the flu, a sleepiness she couldn’t shake. She was dead of leukemia a few months after. Fifteen-year-old Clay had learned to cook Hamburger Helper and separate the white laundry from the colored laundry. People dropped dead, but you still needed to eat dinner. Maybe a war had begun, maybe there’d been some kind of industrial accident, maybe thousands of New Yorkers were trapped belowground in subway cars, maybe a missile had been fired, maybe some thing they’d never conceived of being possible was unfolding—all this was more or less true, as it happened—but Clay still felt like smoking a cigarette, or worried about the children’s manners, and thought about what they would eat for dinner. Business as usual, the business of being alive.

  Amanda, G. H., and Ruth were inside. They looked at him like people in a play, like they’d rehearsed this moment—you stand here, you stand here, you stand here, you come in. He felt like he should wait for applause, then wait for that to die down before he spoke. What was his line, anyway?

  “Jesus Christ.” Amanda did not race to hug him, did not shout it, it only fell out of her, a thud of relief.

  “I’m back.” Clay shrugged his shoulders. “Is everyone okay?”

  G. H. looked vindicated. He looked pleased.

  Amanda embraced him. She didn’t say anything. She pulled away and looked up at him, then embraced him once more.

  He didn’t know what else to say. He’d heard the noise and winced and then the noise had abated and he could hear the blood thrumming through his body. “I’m okay. I’m here. Are you okay? Where are the kids?”

  “We’re okay,” G. H. asserted. “Everyone is here. Everyone is okay.”

  “Maybe you’d like to join us.” Ruth pushed the wine bottle in his direction like a bartender in a movie. She was more relieved than she had thought she would be. She realized it with shame, and then a sense of horror: she hadn’t actually expected Clay to come back.

  Clay scraped the chair’s feet on the wood floor and sat. “Did you hear that?”

  “Did you go into town? What happened?” Amanda held her husband’s hand.

  Clay couldn’t reckon with that noise; he had to reckon with his own shame. He didn’t know if he could admit it. “I didn’t.” He just said it, flat, no intonation.

  “You didn’t?” Amanda was confused, but they were all confused. “Where have you been?” She was angry.

  Clay grew red. “I didn’t get very far. And then I heard that noise—”

  “But what were you doing?” Amanda was confused. “We’ve been waiting for you, I was going crazy—”

  “I don’t know. I had a cigarette. I was just gathering my thoughts. I had another. I started to drive, and then I heard that noise, and I came right back.” He was lying because he was ashamed.

  Amanda laughed. It came out cruel. “I thought you were dead out there!”

  “So you didn’t see anyone. Or anything that might help us figure out what’s happening.” G. H. wanted to keep them focused.

  “You’re here. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home!” Amanda wasn’t sure if she meant it, or if she wanted to be persuaded otherwise, or what.

  Clay shook his head. It was a lie. He had seen that woman. She’d been weeping. Had she found someone to help her? He couldn’t bear admitting what sort of man he was when tested. It was easy enough to tell himself that that woman didn’t matter. He could barely remember what she looked like. He wondered what she’d done when she heard the noise. “I didn’t see anything or anyone. No cars, nothing.”

  “That’s what it’s like out here.” G. H. tried to be rational. “That’s why we like it out here. You often see no one.”

  They were all quiet.

  Ruth was looking out the window, toward the pool. “It’s dark out. It was just so clear.” She stood. “Storm. Maybe that was thunder.”

  “That was not thunder.” The sky was now, it was true, fat with clouds, gray fading to black. But Clay knew that much.

  Ruth turned to look at them. “Years ago, G. H. took me to the ballet. Swan Lake.”

  The kind of thing Clay claimed was the reason to live in New York to begin with. But it was a logistical nightmare. Tickets for a mutually agreeable night, a place to have dinner at 6:30, eighteen dollars an hour for the sitter. They were too busy, c
ommitted to the notion of their own overcommitment. Could they not spare a few hours for transcendence?

  “I remember thinking at first, oh, this is so odd. People in spangled costumes. They’d dance for a few minutes, then scurry off the stage, and then they’d do it again. I thought it was a story, but a ballet is just a bunch of short things loosely organized around a theme that doesn’t make much sense to begin with.”

  Like life, Clay didn’t say.

  She went on. “Birds in white and birds in black, big sweeping music. I got interested. I think it was the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard in my life. There was this one dance I’d never heard before, and I don’t know why they don’t use it in movies and commercials, it’s so beautiful. I bought the CDs. Swan Lake, conducted by André Previn. I remember the name of the piece. ‘Pas d’Action,’ ‘Odette and the Prince.’ “ You never heard anything more—sweeping and romantic and then so sweet and alive.”

  “Probably.” Amanda had no idea about ballet. She was happy the woman was talking, filling the silence.

  “Tchaikovsky was thirty-five when he composed Swan Lake, did you know that? It was considered a failure, but you know—it’s the very idea of ballet: a dancer dressed as a bird.” She hesitated. “I remember thinking—well, it’s a maudlin thought, but I suppose we all have thoughts like this from time to time—if I had to die, and we all do, if I could hear music, as I was dying, or have a piece of music that I knew would be the last thing I heard before I died, or that came to my mind as I was dying, even just the memory of it, I would want it to be that. Tchaikovsky, this dance from Swan Lake. That’s what I’m sitting here thinking about. Though perhaps you won’t like to hear it, but I was thinking, goddamn, I have those CDs in my apartment.”

  “You’re not going to die out here, Ruth.” Here? In this charming little house? Impossible. “We’re safe here,” Clay said. It was like that childhood game of telephone. They were talking amongst themselves and had lost track of things.

  “How do you know?” She was calm. “The fact, the unfortunate fact, is that you don’t know that. We don’t know what is going to happen. I may never hear ‘Pas d’Action,’ ‘Odette and the Prince,’ ever again. I think I have it.” She tapped a temple. “I think I can hear it. The harp. The strings. But I might be wrong. What I have in here is beautiful, though.”