by Rumaan Alam
Clay did not ask if he wanted a drink. He pressed one into the man’s black hands: “George.” He’d found his swim trunks, drying on the railing. He’d found Archie’s hacked-at T-shirt, and it revealed his subdued middle-aged muscles.
“We all saw that.” Amanda had put on a robe. She had no idea whose it was, and forgot to pull the thing closed over her lap.
George thanked him through a mouthful of gummy cheese. He coughed a little. “I saw it.”
“We’re all hallucinating?” It was appealing to pretend that you were exempt from what was happening.
“They’re from a zoo. The electrical grid failed and couldn’t keep them in captivity.” George hacked at the cheese with a steak knife. “They must be tagged, you know, like those invisible fences that keep dogs on your property.”
“Zoos clip wings, don’t they?” Amanda had read this in The Trumpet of the Swan. She wasn’t sure it was true. “Those birds could fly. Those birds were wild.”
Clay took up George’s steak knife and sliced into the salami. “There has to be a logical explanation.”
“They weren’t wearing bands or anything.” Amanda closed her eyes to return to the scene. “I looked. I looked for them.”
George thought it hardly needed saying. “There are no wild flamingos in New York.”
“We all just saw it. What the fuck is actually happening?” The vulgarity didn’t possess the power she wanted. She wanted to run into the yard screaming at the birds to come back, to show themselves, to explain.
Ruth had showered and changed into the shapeless, expensive things she wore at home, freshly laundered. She emerged from downstairs and didn’t even feel undefended, as she would have if she’d encountered the doorman while dressed thus. She was at peace with these people. They knew one another now. Downstairs, she had tried to use her phone to be sure. Yes, she had flipped through the pictures in her album, out-of-focus shots because toddlers never stopped darting, giggling, squirming. She noticed that Amanda’s robe was parted so you could see her mons.
George had turned on all the lights, prophylactic against fear. “We’re having a midnight snack.”
“You missed something.” Amanda was not being sardonic but sincere.
“Sit down, darling.” G. H. was filled with affection for Ruth. G. H. was reportorial. He stuck to the facts. He mentioned even Amanda’s nakedness. Seven flamingos. If he’d been asked to draw a flamingo, he’d have come up with a triangle for the bill, and he’d have been wrong.
“I thought flamingos were flightless,” Ruth said. “I assumed. Maybe I never gave it a thought before.”
“They were the same size as Rose.” Amanda could see them, ascending like Christ was said to have.
“I knew they were pink, but I didn’t know they were pink like that. It doesn’t seem like a natural color.” G. H. made his wife a drink.
“You’re sure.” Ruth didn’t doubt them, though. There was nothing they might have mistaken for a flamingo. She’d abandoned her expectations.
“A flamingo is a flamingo.” Amanda wanted to be clear. “The question isn’t if we’re sure, but why—”
“You’ve got rich people out here.” Clay was inspired. “They’re someone’s private collection. A miniature zoo. Some Hamptons estate that’s actually an ark. Those billionaires are survivalists. They all have compounds in New Zealand where they plan to go when the shit hits the fan.”
“Is there something sweet?” Ruth sipped the drink. She didn’t really want it.
Amanda pushed the cookies across the island to her. “Maybe the noise we heard was thunder. Some kind of mega storm. I’ve heard of birds being blown off their migratory paths. There was that hurricane in the Atlantic, and the birds got lost.”
Clay tried to remember what he had never known. “Are they migratory birds? And if so, do they cross the ocean? Maybe that’s possible.”
“Don’t they congregate in lakes? Don’t they eat some kind of shrimp, hence their pink feathers? I think that’s true,” Ruth said.
“We’re just a bunch of adults who don’t know anything about birds,” said George. He was used to being able to explain everything. Could the curve explain the birds? There was a relationship, but he’d need days to work it out. He’d need a pencil, a newspaper, some quiet. “We don’t know anything about noises loud enough to crack glass. We don’t know anything about a blackout in New York City. We’re four adults who don’t know how to get a cell-phone signal or make the television work or do much of anything at all.”
The room filled with chewing, ice running up against glass.
“Funny how I was telling you about Swan Lake.” Ruth smiled. “Swans, flamingos. The same, but not.”
“I need it to be tomorrow.” Clay consulted the digital clock on the microwave’s face. “We should sleep.”
“You want to go home,” G. H. said. “We’re lucky to be already home.”
“Unless.” Ruth had no interest in dispensing platitude and comfort. She could not see a bright side. “This was a sign. You shouldn’t go. We can’t go with you.”
“You said you’d show us the way,” Amanda said.
“It’s not safe. Out there,” Ruth said. What if Rosa didn’t come on Thursday? What if something out there was coming for them?
“We have to take Archie to the doctor!” Amanda felt it in her body like a bird’s urge to migrate.
“What do you think is going to happen to us?” Clay wasn’t looking for reassurance, just an honest guess. “We’re leaving—you said you’d help us find the way.”
George had never believed in unknowns. Algebra showed that they were easy to figure out. Math didn’t pertain anymore, or it was a math he could barely work. “Nothing will happen to us if we just drive down the road,” he told his wife.
“You think traffic will flow. That there’s food. Water? I don’t trust people. I don’t trust the system.” Ruth was sure. “Maybe Archie will get better if we stay put. Maybe tomorrow he’ll wake up, fever gone, and want to eat everything in the house.”
“Maybe he just needs antibiotics or something?” Clay didn’t want to go now. He was terrified.
“I feel safe here.” Ruth knew that this family’s safety was not truly her problem. “All I want is to feel safe.”
“You could stay,” George said.
“We can’t do that.” Amanda was decisive.
Could they not, though? Clay was not so sure. “We could—we could go downstairs. You could have your bedroom.”
They were quiet, like they knew it was coming. It came. The same noise? Sure. Yes. Probably. Why not. Who knew. Once, twice, three times. The window over the sink cracked. The pendant light over the counter did too. The electricity probably should have turned off, but it didn’t. No one would ever be able to answer precisely why. The noises overlapped, but were discrete, the sound—they didn’t know this—of American planes, in the American sky, speeding toward the American future. A plane most people didn’t know existed. A plane designed to do unspeakable things, heading off to do them. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction, and there were more actions and reactions than could be counted on the party’s eight hands. What their government was up to, what other governments were up to; just an abstract way of talking about the choices of a handful of men. Lemmings were not suicidal, they were driven to migrate and overconfident about their ability. The leader of the pack was not to blame. They all plunged into the sea, thinking it easy to traverse as a puddle; so human an instinct in a bunch of rodents. Millions of Americans huddled at home in the dark, but only thousands of them heard these noises, and comforted children and one another, and wondered just what they were. Some people got sick, because that was just their constitution. Others listened and realized how little they understood about the world.
Ruth did not cry out. There was no sense in that. Tears welled, but she blinked them back. Hands on the edge of the countertop, she crouched down, as maybe, decades ago, she’d been taug
ht to, in case of nuclear annihilation. She just hovered there in a half squat, the pull of her muscles not an unpleasant thing.
Amanda screamed. Clay screamed. G. H. screamed. Rose screamed. The children threw themselves from their beds and found the adults, and it was their mother they ran to—always was, in these situations—and they pressed their faces against the foreign robe that covered her nakedness and she held them tight to her body, trying to cover their ears with her hands, but they had four ears between them and she had only two hands. She was not enough.
That noise again. It was the final one. It was one of the last planes. The insects outside fell silent, baffled. The bats that hadn’t succumbed to white-nose syndrome fell from the sky. The flamingos barely paid it mind. They had enough to worry about.
32
THEY DID THE SENSIBLE THING. THEY HUDDLED TOGETHER in that big king. Family bed—Amanda hated the idea. Thought it was for antivaxxers and mothers who breastfed their five-year-olds, but she couldn’t bear Archie and Rose being away from her. They turned the lights off because the children were exhausted, but privately wished to leave them burning to keep the night away.
“You can—” Clay wanted to invite Ruth and G. H. to bed with them! It almost made sense.
“Try to sleep.” G. H. held his wife’s hand, and they descended the kitchen steps once more.
Neither adult could sleep. Soon, though, the children began to snore. The curve of Rose’s body made Clay think of those natural bridges on the California coast, hollowed out by the ocean over millennia. Eventually, though, those collapsed. They said the ocean was coming for them all. He appreciated the persistence of her lungs. It was incredible that you didn’t need to tell yourself to breathe or walk or think or swallow. They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children—do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes—but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew. Clay felt blameless. It was George Washington and the men of his generation, their mania for plastic and petroleum and money. It was a hell of a thing to not be able to keep your kid safe. Was this how everyone felt? Was this, finally, what it was to be a human?
He kissed the worn cotton on Rose’s shoulder and regretted that he did not believe in prayer. God, she looked like her mother. Nature was fond of repetition. Did one flamingo know another from yet another?
Amanda kept reaching for Archie’s arm. He flinched a little, each time, but did not wake. She wanted to ask her husband something but couldn’t think of the right words. Was this it? Was this the end? Was she supposed to be valiant?
Clay couldn’t see his son in the dark. He thought of how he still sometimes crept into the children’s rooms. They never woke during these nocturnal visits. You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie. Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.
He couldn’t imagine his own mother anymore; she’d been dead most of his life. His father must have performed this office. It did not square with what he knew of the man, but that was how a parent loved.
Amanda touched the boy’s cheek and found it was hot. She tried to distinguish between fever and summer, mammalian adolescence and illness. She touched the boy’s forehead, throat, his shoulder, pushed away blankets to cool his body. She touched his chest, the steady drumbeat. Archie’s skin was soft and dry, warm like a machine left on too long. She knew that fever was the body’s distress signal, a pulse from its emergency broadcast system. But the boy was sick. Maybe they were all sick. Maybe this was a plague. He was her baby. He was their baby. She couldn’t imagine a world indifferent to that.
Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise. Amanda whispered her husband’s name.
“I’m awake.” He could not see her, then he could. He needed only to look more closely.
“Should we still go?”
He pretended to be thinking this over, but the dilemma was already plain to him: no, they shouldn’t, yes, they must. “I don’t know.”
“We have to get Archie to a doctor.”
“We do.”
“And Rosie. What if the same thing—” To say it would have been to risk it. She didn’t bother. Rose would have loved the flamingos. Maybe they should feel only awe at life’s mysteries, as children did.
“She’s fine. She seems okay.” She did; same old Rose. Reliable, implacable, really, that strength of the second-born. He wasn’t even thinking wishfully. Clay had faith in his daughter.
“She seems okay. I seem okay. Everything seems okay. But it also seems like a disaster. It also seems like the end of the world. We need a plan. We need to know what we’re going to do. We can’t just stay here forever.”
“We can stay here for now. They said so.” Clay had heard the offer.
“You want to stay here?” Amanda wanted him to say it first.
He tried to think how many cigarettes he had left. He did want to stay. Despite the sick teen, despite the nicotine withdrawal, despite the fact that this was not their beautiful house. Clay was afraid, but maybe they could pool courage between all of them and find enough to do something, anything, whatever that was. “It’s safe here. We have power. We have water.”
“I told you to fill the bathtub.”
“We have food, and a roof, and G. H. has some money, and we have one another. We’re not alone.”
They both were and were not alone. Fate was collective but the rest of it was always individual, a thing impossible to escape. They lay that way for a long time. They didn’t talk because there was nothing to discuss. The sounds of their sleeping children were relentless as the ocean.
33
A DRY HEAVINESS ON THE TONGUE AND IN THE THROAT, A wince that made it hard to see, the brute stupidity of hangover, and God they were too old for this. When would they learn not to be this way? Amanda hurried from the bed to drink at the bathroom sink, accidentally licking the metal faucet. She knew she’d vomit, in that way you always do. Sometimes you just need to admit to yourself what you know. Salt on the tongue. She bent at the waist like a yogi contemplating the toilet, then something that felt like a belch but burned in the back of the throat, and the release. The vomit was thin and pink as a flamingo (get it?). She let it leave her. Her eyes watered, but she did not look away from it. Her stomach contracted once, twice, three times, and the vomit leaped from stomach to throat to water, and once that was done she flushed it down and rinsed her mouth and felt ashamed. That was how all people the world over ought to have felt that morning.
Clay heard her terrible retch. You couldn’t just doze through something like that. The room was too warm from too many bodies. At some point in the night, the air-conditioning had switched off. The kind of hangover where you yearn to throw open windows, strip the beds, clean your way back into virtue. A noisy, wet revolution inside his stomach. It would not be pretty.
Archie sat up and looked at his dad. He mumbled like his mouth was full of something. “What’s happening?”
“I’m going to get us some water.” Did he notice that Rose was not there? It seemed to make sense in that moment.
Clay filled glasses. He sipped his, relieved, then refilled it. “Rosie.” He called out to the empty house. There was no answer. The refrigerator’s icemaker made its periodi
c whirr. There was a trick to carrying three, but he managed it.
Pallid Amanda sat on the edge of the bed. Archie had pulled a pillow over his head. “Drink up.” Clay put the glasses on the table. Whenever you were sick with something undetermined, you were supposed to drink water. Water was the first line of defense. If there was something in the air—if the storm had blown in more than just tropical birds—and that something was in the water, the whole system a closed loop, he didn’t know it.
“Thanks, honey,” his wife said.
Clay moved urgently, trot down the hall, quick slam of the door. The bathroom redolent of Amanda’s vomit and his own shit, that postmidnight binge pouring out of him in seconds. He stood in the shower as penance, asshole burning, rinsing his mouth over and over again, spitting the water against the tile wall, angry. Did he know if this was hangover or a symptom of something worse? He did not.
On the other side of the wall, Amanda opened the door to the backyard—ugh, the smell of their bodies—where the sweet air was alive with light. She wanted to undo the bed, but her boy still lazed. “How are you feeling, baby?” She thought he looked more himself.
Archie tried to come up with the right answer. He felt strange or weird or sleepy or whatever, but that was how he felt whenever he woke up before noon or so. He was mad or something in that moment, turned away from his mother and pulled the covers over his head.
“I should check your temperature. We were so worried, I was planning on taking you to see Dr. Wilcox this afternoon, after we get back, but maybe we don’t need to.”
Archie made an irritated little groan. “We’re going back?”
“Come on. I know you’re sleepy, but sit up, let Mom look at you.” Amanda sat on the bed beside her son.