by Rumaan Alam
Fear was private. It was primal. It was something you guarded because you thought you could defuse it that way. How could they continue to love each other, having realized that they could not save each other? No one person could stop a determined terrorist or the gradual change in the oceans’ pH. The world was lost, and there was nothing that Clay or Amanda could do about it, so why discuss?
In other words: The world was over, so why not dance? The morning would come, so why not sleep? An end was inevitable, so why not drink, eat, enjoy the moment, whatever it contained? “You know what I feel like doing?” Clay pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it to Amanda for the pile of dirty things, grinning and tumescent.
29
MAYBE AMANDA WAS GREEDY. SOMETIMES, NOT KNOWING what else to do, you had sex. Clay could make her feel better not psychically but physically. She let him carry her away from herself. In the body she was far from the mind. She opened herself to it, though maybe the vodka helped. She consented. More than. She wanted it. She pushed off her humid underwear. She lay back on the bright white duvet. The clothes she was packing up fell to the wood floor.
The shirt Clay wore remembered the sudden sweat, a fear response to that noise. She buried her nose in his armpit and closed her eyes. She traced the inside of his thigh and tasted salt. The sounds they made were close to screams. It didn’t seem to matter, nothing did. She let them rise from somewhere deep in her chest, like she imagined opera singers did. The clap of flesh against flesh. Hair lacquered to skin with spit. The opportunity to forget.
Amanda thought of the best worst things, that’s what sexual fantasy was. One dick, two dicks, three dicks, four! She thought of G. H. leering at her from the threshold, then coming into the room to offer some pointers, to encourage Clay in his fucking, to—sure why not—fuck her himself. Fuck, fuck, forget. She came once, twice. What was left on her stomach was enough to fill a shot glass, was the work of a younger man. It was enough to make a baby. You needed so little for that. They could make two, three, ten, an army of them, alternate versions of the children they already had, pink and clean and healthy and strong, a new world order because the old world was so out of order. Amanda propped herself up on her elbows. The stuff slid down her like a snail on a sedge, onto that beautiful white duvet.
Clay was out of breath. Fucking her like that was like inflating fifty pool floats. Sometimes he could picture a tumor blossoming in his lungs, black and terrible. Still, you couldn’t live without risk. He lay on his stomach, then rolled onto his back. The sweat on his skin had its intended, cooling effect. “I love you.” His voice emerged hoarse after all those exhalations and exhortations. He did not feel cowed by what they’d just done. He felt restored. He thought of Ruth and vowed that when they got back to their apartment, he would listen to Swan Lake. And he did love Amanda, he loved her, he loved. You endured as long as that was the case.
It felt insincere, to return a declaration of love. An echo was just a trick of physics. She felt free. “I’m worried about Archie.”
It was maybe the best sex they’d had, though of course pleasure, like pain, was so soon forgotten. “He’ll be okay. We’ll get home, we’ll see Dr. Wilcox.”
She prodded at the stain on the bedspread, worried.
“Who cares about that?” He dipped a finger into his semen like a quill into ink. He wrote phantom letters on her belly.
She’d strip this bed, too, leave the linens on the floor of the laundry room. “Maybe when we’re back we can do something special. It’s still our vacation. We could drive out to Hoboken and check into a hotel with a rooftop pool. I bet that would be cheap.”
“I want to stop at a diner on the way home.” Clay was hungry right then. “One of those old-fashioned places. Chrome. Jukeboxes. Corned beef hash.” The only things a person ever wanted were food and home.
“A staycation. The movies. Go to the Met. Dinner at a sit-down Chinese restaurant, with those silver pots of tea and orange slices when they bring the bill.” The life they had was perfect.
Clay imagined the end of summer city: the shimmer of heat, the drip from window units overhead, the chorus of ice cream trucks, office buildings leaking air-conditioning onto the humid sidewalks where fat tourists were wandering dumbstruck. It would be enough for him. Marble countertops and this perfect swimming pool and the touch-responsive light switches were all well and good, but be it ever so humble, etc.
“You don’t think anything’s wrong with Rose, do you?” A briefer moment of surrender than orgasm.
Clay began reflexively to say that everything was fine, but he did not believe it, and anyway, in matters of fact, belief was not salient. “She seemed okay to me. Did you notice something?”
“No.” Amanda swallowed, a hand at her throat. Was something wrong with her? “Do you feel okay?”
“I feel normal. I feel like myself.” Clay had never been the most observant of men.
Amanda stood. She wiped her stomach with a pair of his folded boxer shorts. Her arms, her legs, her waist—they showed her forty-three years. There was that sway, the gentle ripple of the excess flesh, the subtle give, though it felt nice in your hand, soft to the touch. Naturally, there were days she rounded her shoulders, wanted not to be seen. Mostly she was the kind of woman interested in blending in. The way she wore her hair, the kinds of clothes she favored. Amanda was a type. She was not ashamed of that. But there were moments—this was one—where she felt individual and perfect. Maybe it was just the barely perceptible reverberations of the orgasm. She was a thing beautiful to behold. Stained and sweaty and sagging, also smooth and ripe and desired. Humans were monsters but also perfect creations. She felt what is termed sexy but is really just an animal’s satisfaction in being an animal. Had she been a deer, she’d have leaped over a branch. Had she been a bird, she’d have lifted into the sky. Had she been a house cat, she’d have run her own tongue over herself. She was a woman, so she stretched and shifted the weight from one leg to the other like a statue from antiquity.
“Let’s go smoke.” Clay, adolescent, was proud of his performance, like he’d heaved a shot put or sunk a basketball. She’d soiled his underwear, so he stalked to the door naked. There was no grace to it; his dick disrupted symmetry, an insult to beauty.
“Put on your clothes.”
“What’s wrong with sitting naked in the night air and smoking?”
“Well . . . Ruth and G. H.”
“Who cares?”
Clay pulled open the door, but it was Amanda who noticed: interruption in the pane of glass. A crack that was more than a flaw. It was thin but deep, stretched for inches, a slash, a rent. “Look at that.”
Clay peered at the glass. He put his hand in hers.
“This wasn’t here before.” She dropped her voice, not wanting to be overheard.
“You’re sure?” A mumble, lips puckered around the cigarette.
Amanda traced the crack with her finger. It was from the noise. A noise big enough to crack glass. Noise as a tangible thing. She shivered from the cool air and the reminder too. She closed the door behind her, stood naked in the chill air, unprotected by clothes, a dare to the night and whatever else was out there.
30
STILL NAKED, NEANDERTHAL, ESSENTIAL, CLAY WENT TO FIX them drinks. They’d finish packing later. They’d finish packing in the morning. They’d skip packing, go directly to Target for new toothbrushes and bathing suits and books and lotion and pajamas and earbuds and socks. Or they wouldn’t! They didn’t need things. Things would not keep them safe from power outages or sudden noises loud enough to crack glass or any other unexplained phenomena. They were extraneous; things did not matter.
Amanda flipped open the heavy cover of the hot tub. The steam was waiting for her, vanished into the dark. There was light illuminating the trees, which made the view more satisfying. You could feel you owned them, though no one could ever claim to own a tree. She couldn’t see. She pressed where she knew buttons were, kept at it until the
machine whirred into life. The thing bubbled like the Weird Sisters’ cauldron. If only it had been. Amanda would have bargained for the health of her poor feverish son, of both her children, of course, even though she had nothing to offer a witch, just the same desire as every human alive. She should, she realized, get up, pull on a robe, tiptoe into the dark room and gauge Archie’s temperature with a touch of her hand.
It was G. H., answering the dare of her nudity. He wore his swimsuit, trim and conservative, the kind of thing white sons named for their great-grandfathers wore in Nantucket. There was not a trace of anything untoward in his smile, as though it were precisely what he expected, to find this woman he barely knew nude and obviously postcoital on his deck. “I see we both had the same idea.”
It would have been disingenuous to feign shame. She was released from that. Didn’t even blush. “Turned out to be a nice night, I guess.”
He gestured toward the tub. “After you, please. If you don’t mind the company.” Nothing felt strange to him anymore. “We had the same idea. Ruth didn’t want to join me, but I’m glad not to be alone out here.” As close as he could come to admitting fear.
The water was very hot, but the bubbles the tub was frantic with were cold, popped against her skin, staccato relief. G. H. sat across from her, a decorous enough distance, though what did that matter? She might have been his daughter. They were nothing to each other, naked strangers. “There’s a crack in the door.” She gestured toward it. “I noticed it just now. I think it must be—”
He had done his own investigation. “There’s one in the door downstairs. They call that a hairline crack, right? A nice turn of phrase. The shape of the letter Y. If I push, really push, I bet I can break the thing.” He would not push on the glass. He would not break it. He needed it, though glass provided only the illusion of safety.
“Do you think it was from—”
He let his face say it. Why were they still debating this? “I have always thought of myself as a sophisticated man. Someone who had seen the world as it was. But I have never seen anything like this, so now I wonder if this thing I have always thought about myself was a delusion.”
Their silence was not unfriendly. They had said everything there was to be said. It was like a love affair ended amicably. They needed only to wait for the sun to rise and the whole thing would be over, relief and regret. In the house, Ruth lay on the bed, thinking of her daughter, and Archie slept dreamless, and Rose slept dreamful, and Clay filled glasses with ice, thinking of nothing.
“I just want everything to be okay.”
G. H. looked up at the stars. It was dark enough there that you could truly see them. It never made him feel any which way. He liked being in the country, but not because it was good for his soul. Did the stars make him feel small? They did not. He already knew he was small. That’s how he’d got rich. He just said her name, nothing more.
“I didn’t believe you. I was wrong. Something is happening, something bad is happening.” She could not stand it.
“The quiet is so noisy. That was one of the first things I noticed, when we started spending nights out here. I found it hard to sleep. At home, we can’t hear anything. We’re high up. Sometimes a siren, but even then, the wind kind of carries that away.” The world from their apartment looked like a silent film.
“We still have power.” She could see the steam, a veil over the dark.
“I was telling you, earlier, that with information anything is possible. I owe my fortune, humble as it is, to information.” He paused. The tub burbled. “I saw it, you know. Before the lights went out. I looked at the market and knew something was coming.”
“How is that possible?” This sounded not financial but spiritual.
Clay opened the door. “Are you okay?”
“We’re just talking.” G. H. waved at Clay.
He walked toward the tub as though it were not odd, to be seen naked like this, to find his wife naked with a stranger. Clay would pretend.
“You learn how to read the curve. You spend as long as I have doing it, and you understand. It tells you the future. It holds steady and promises harmony. It inches up or down, and you know that means something. You look more closely, and try to understand just what it means. If you’re good at it, you get rich. If you’re not, you lose everything.”
“And you’re good at it?” Amanda took the glass her husband was offering her.
Clay slipped into the water, making too big a splash. “What are you talking about?”
“Information.” G. H. said it like it was simple.
“He says he knew something was coming—,” Amanda explained. She believed him. She needed to believe something.
“You saw—what? What’s happened, anyway? The power went out. Amanda got some push notifications from the New York Times. We heard a loud noise.” Hearing himself enumerate it, Clay realized it was enough.
“Did you see the end of the world?” Could numbers really predict that? The glass in her hand was cold and perfect.
“It’s not the end of the world,” G. H. said. “It’s a market event.”
“What are you talking about?” Clay thought G. H. sounded like a madman with a placard marching around the financial district. You saw that, often, on Wall Street, the actual street, which was closed off by bombproof bollards.
“I think I know so much.” G. H. was apologetic. “Maybe not everything can be known.” The steam clouded his glasses. He could neither see nor be seen. Every day was a gamble.
“Maybe everything is fine,” Clay said. They were getting carried away. They were saying things they shouldn’t say.
“I hope for our sake that it is.” G. H. didn’t like to have nothing but hope. That was something he’d disliked in Obama; the nebulous, almost religious promise. He preferred a plan.
There was, below them, a loud splash.
Amanda was afraid, immediately. She sat up in the center of the tub, turned to the yard behind them. “What was that?”
G. H. reached out of the tub to silence the jets. The machine responded immediately, a low hum instead of that laundry churn. The silence made it seem more dark, somehow. There was a splash, a definite, deliberate splash in the pool. Yards away, but it could not be seen.
It was one of the children, sleepwalking to their drowning. It was a watcher from the woods come to kill them. It was a zombie, it was an animal, it was a monster, it was a ghost, it was an alien. “What was—”
George shushed her. He was still capable of fear.
“What is that?” She was not whispering, and she was panicking. “Maybe it’s a deer.” She remembered the fence. What would a deer in distress sound like, what would a deer’s tears sound like?
“A frog.” Clay thought this was obvious. “A squirrel. They can swim.”
G. H. pushed up out of the tub and walked toward the house, where there was a switch to light the pool from within. It was a nice touch when they had a party. The abstraction of light through water dancing in the treetops. They both saw, there in the pool below them, a flamingo, pink and absurd, elegantly splashing. It beat its wings, impatient, on the surface of the pool.
“That’s a flamingo.” She said it even though it was obvious. A pink bird was a flamingo. It was so specific—the comma of its beak, the forte mark of its illogical neck—that a toddler would know it. “That’s a flamingo?”
“That’s a flamingo.” With his fingertips, G. H. rubbed the steam from his glasses. They did not know what was happening in the world, but they knew that.
The flamingo beat its wings more. They let their eyes adjust, and they could see another flamingo, no, two, no, three, no, four, no, five, no, six. Strutting on the lawn with their backward gait. Bobbing and sinewy. Two of the birds took flight as birds do: balletic. Lift over the fence, touch down in the water. They dipped their heads below the surface. Did they imagine it held food? There was a disarming intelligence in their eyes. Their wings were wider than you’d think. At rest, th
ey held those so close to the sack of their bodies. Unfurled, though: they were majestic. Their beauty was astonishing. Logic fell away.
“Why—” Why didn’t matter. Did how or did is this real or anything else matter? Amanda could see that George Washington could see these birds too, but there was documented evidence that delusion could be shared. She got out of the tub, rubbery with the absorbed heat. She stood naked as the day she appeared on this planet. She watched three flamingos cavorting happily in the swimming pool, their compatriots on the grass beyond. “Just tell me you see this.”
George nodded. He didn’t know this woman at all. But he knew his mind and his eyes. “I see it.”
Clay went cold, deep inside himself. Tomorrow they’d set sail in their car, and here was an omen. Their trip would displease the gods. They were being given a sign. Whisky sloshed into the tub as he stood. The birds started.
Three flamingos lifted out off the pool’s surface with a masculine flaunting of wings. Any flamingo, seeing this, would have wanted to incubate their issue. These were flamingos, the best of flamingos, hale and powerful. They rose into the air, a simple trick, and above the trees. The flamingos on the grass followed, seven human-sized pink birds, twisty and strange, ascending into the Long Island night, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
They were silent for a while. Good old-fashioned awe. Religious feeling. The stars above didn’t cow them, but these strange birds did. Amanda shivered. George blinked behind his glasses. Clay held on to the glass in his hand because it was cold and reminded him that he was alive.
31
G. H.’S FAMILIAR OLD FRIDGE YIELDED NOTHING BUT SURPRISE. he’d not have filled it with such things: cold cuts in folded paper, the curls of leftover grilled zucchini, hard white cheese in greasy cellophane, a Pyrex mixing bowl of strawberries someone had thoughtfully hulled. He felt insane with hunger, or maybe only insane. He found a box of crackers, an open bag of chips, a cardboard tube of cookies. He put everything on the counter. Someone else would have arranged this bounty, complementary items together, but he didn’t bother.