Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  “Archie is sick.” Clay needed an answer.

  George understood why Danny had closed the door at his back. George had expected human communion, but he forgot what humans were actually like. “I thought it was the right thing to do. Seek medical attention.”

  Danny was not smiling. “That’s the old way, George. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  “My daughter is missing. We woke up this morning, and she was gone. She was in the woods with her brother, playing, when we heard that noise. Then last night, his teeth.” Clay didn’t know how to finish so absurd a story. “I don’t know what to do.” It came out of him as a confession.

  It wasn’t that Danny didn’t feel bad. There was only so much he could think about. “He’s your son. You have a difficult choice.”

  “He’s sixteen.” Help us, Clay was saying, in his way.

  There is no help, Danny was saying. They had misunderstood what kind of person he was. They had misunderstood people. “I don’t know what you’re going to do. I’d do anything I had to for my daughter. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m locking the doors. I’m getting out my gun. I’m waiting. I’m watching.”

  Was the mention of a gun a threat? G. H. understood it as one. “We shouldn’t go to the hospital.”

  “I don’t have any answers for you guys. I’m sorry.” This apology was mostly a remembered instinct. But Danny was sorry, for all of them. He shared what information he had. “Yesterday, I saw deer from the kitchen.”

  G. H. nodded. Deer were everywhere out there.

  Danny clarified. “Not deer, not a family of deer. A migration. I’ve never seen so many in my life. A hundred? Two hundred? I couldn’t even guess.” There were more than that. The eye couldn’t take them all in, couldn’t find them in the shadows of the trees. Only the people who knew such things knew there were around thirty-six thousand deer in the county. They were not the deer Rose had seen but were on their way to join those. A mass migration. A disaster response. A disaster indicator. A disaster unfolding.

  Clay wanted to tell him that the night before they’d seen a flock of flamingos, but it would have seemed like one-upmanship.

  “The animals,” Danny continued. “They know something. They’re spooked. I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know when we’re going to figure out what is. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is as much as we’ll ever know. Maybe we just need to sit tight and be safe and pray or whatever works for you.” They were animals too. This was their animal response.

  Clay felt they’d been talking for an hour. “You told Ruth you’d be back.”

  “We have time.” G. H. would keep his promise.

  Danny felt there was little point going on like this. “Guys, I’m going to go inside now. I’m going to say goodbye and good luck.” He meant that last bit. They’d all require it. “If you go back out. If you—well, you can stop by. But I can’t offer you much more than just conversation. You understand.”

  George felt foolish. Of course this was how Danny would be. All business. They were not friends, and even if they had been, these were extraordinary circumstances. “I guess that’s it then.”

  Danny offered some advice. “I think you should get back in your car and drive to your house.” Leave, also leave me alone. “That’s the only thing I’ve got for you. Hunker down, lock the door, and—” He didn’t have a plan beyond that. “Fill the bathtub. Store water. Take stock of your food. See what supplies you have.”

  “I think we’ll do that.” G. H. wanted to be back among his things.

  Danny nodded, kind of tossing his chin forward, authoritative. He extended a handshake. His grip was firm as it always was. He didn’t say anything more, went back inside. He didn’t lock the door. But he stood just inside to listen to the men walk away.

  In the car, Archie sat up. He looked better or the same. He seemed weak or strong. That moment was what counted the most.

  They sat in the idling car for a minute. Maybe two. Maybe three. It was Clay who broke the silence. “George. What are we doing?”

  G. H. had been foolish. People disappointed. He would do better. They would still be good, kind, human, decent, together, safe. “I don’t think we can go to the hospital, gentlemen. Do we agree? I don’t think we can go.”

  Archie understood. Archie had been listening. “I’ll be fine. I don’t think we should go.”

  Clay said it. “I want to go home. Can we go home? Let’s go home. It’s not far. We’re so close. Let’s go.” He meant George’s house, of course, and so they went, were back well before the alarm on Ruth’s phone told them that it had been an hour. Less than an hour, and everything was changed.

  40

  ROSE HAD WOKEN WITH CONVICTION. THAT’S WHAT IT WAS to be a kid, but also she had a mission. Her eyes sharpened their focus: bedside table, green porcelain lamp, a framed photo she hadn’t even bothered looking at yet, her own pale foot poking out of the bed linens, sherbet light melting onto the wall. Slack, damp mouths, pink shoulders, tangled hair. Another day, and those were a gift. Rose scooted free of her family and onto the carpet. The youngest child was used to not being noticed.

  She left the suite because she didn’t want to wake them. No one took her seriously because she was a kid, but Rose was not an idiot. That noise last night was the answer her parents had been pretending not to wait for. But Rose had read books, Rose had seen movies, Rose knew how this story would end, and Rose knew they shouldn’t panic, but prepare. In the bath off her bedroom, she peed, and it took a long time. Rose washed her hands and face. Though Rose wasn’t particularly quiet—letting the toilet seat bang, running the water, closing the door more noisily than was necessary—this all felt furtive.

  Shoes tied, a spritz of Off! on the ankle where the mosquitoes were most merciless, water. She pushed her refillable plastic bottle into the refrigerator’s built-in dispenser. Rose unwrapped a banana and listened to the wet sound of her own chewing. The garbage was overflowing: crinkled cellophane, stained paper towels, used-up hunks of lemon no one had thought to compost. They had almost nothing left to eat. Rose knew they needed things, but more than that, they needed people. She would find both, in the house in the woods. Rose put a nectarine into her bag, where it would knock around in the cheap nylon, be bruised and leaking by the time she got around to it. She packed a book, as you never knew when you’d need a book.

  Rose remembered. Into the woods and just in that direction, over there, that way, right there, kind of to the left, straight, under trees and over that little hill. She had an instinct that city living hadn’t dulled. An animal, damp on canvas toes, her steps barely registered on the leaves, just the tiniest protest amid birdsong and breeze. Her body knew there was no predator nearby.

  Rose and Archie had only been improvising, but maybe they hadn’t. Kids knew something, and the knowledge that they had was tacit or unspeakable. Rose recognized every marker: the swell of the earth, the moldering log, certain fallen limbs. If she had looked back, Lot’s wife, Rose might have seen a flamingo, pink and furious, flying through the air. The truth: they’d blown in on the winds. One of evolution’s old tricks. Stowaway lizards on a log, swept to sea like Noah and Emzara, might make landfall on some new shore, and get busy getting busy, their descendants devastating native foliage. The flamingos were as angry as the humans to find themselves there. But they’d have to make do. They’d have to suss out some algae. They nested once a year, but that was all it took, and maybe a thousand generations from then they’d be inbred and some other crazy color (antifreeze blue from sipping from swimming pools?), some new species. Maybe they’d be all that was left.

  Rose sang to herself, in her head first, and then she felt bold, or different, or fine, or happy, and sang out loud, a One Direction song, the kind of thing Archie would have mocked her for liking but secretly enjoyed. Rose felt a clarity that was hers by rights. She understood. Once she got to that other house, she’d be able to answer the questions that seemed to matter to everyone. T
here would be people there and they would have an answer, or at least her family would not feel so alone.

  The morning was cool, but you could tell the day would be hot. The leaves underfoot were barely damp: the tops of the trees were that thick. A time zone away, it was still dark, but then it was dark in so many places. Some people were committing suicide. Some people were packing things up in cars and hoping they’d be able to get a mile or two or ten or whatever it would take to reach wherever safety endured. Some people thought they’d cross the border, not realizing that such lines were imaginary. Some people didn’t know anything was amiss. There were towns in New Mexico and Idaho where nothing had happened yet, though it was odd how no one could seem to talk to the satellites overhead. People still went to jobs that in time they would see were wholly useless, selling potted plants or making up hotel beds. Governors declared states of emergency but couldn’t figure out how to tell anyone. Stay-at-home mothers were irritated that Daniel Tiger was not available. Some people started to realize they’d had a naive faith in the system. Some people tried to maintain that system. Some people were vindicated that they’d stockpiled guns and those filter straws that made any water safe to drink. However much had happened, so much more would happen. The leader of the free world was sequestered beneath the White House, but no one cared about him, certainly not a little girl tripping through the woods and thinking about Harry Styles.

  Rose wasn’t brave. Kids were merely too young to know to look away from the inexplicable. Kids stared at the raving schizophrenic on the subway while adults cast eyes down and thought about podcasts. Kids asked questions they didn’t know were deemed impolite: why do you have that bump on your neck, is there a baby growing in your tummy, did you always have no hair, why are your teeth silver, will there still be elephants when I’m all grown up? Rose knew what the noise was, but no one had asked her. It was the sound of fact. It was the change they’d pretended not to know was coming. It was the end of one kind of life, but it was also the beginning of another kind of life. Rose kept walking.

  Rose was a survivor and would survive. She knew, by some instinct (maybe just the human connection), that she was in the minority. Somewhere south, levees had ceded to the river. Waters rose into second-story bedrooms and people made their way to attics and rooftops. In Philadelphia, a woman delivering for the third time—a son, to be named for her brother, killed while deployed in Tehran—felt the baby on her chest just as the hospital lost power, so it was like the blackout was due to the shock of his skin on hers. All the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit died within hours. Christians gathered in their churches, but so did nonbelievers, thinking their devout neighbors might be better prepared. (Not so, alas.) In some places people were panicking about food, in others they were pretending not to. The staff at a Salvadoran restaurant in Harlem grilled food in the street, handing it out for free. Only twenty-four hours in, most people stopped listening to archaic radios and expecting to understand. Was this a test of faith? It affirmed only their faith in their ignorance. People locked doors and windows and played board games with their families, though a mother in St. Charles, Maryland, drowned her two daughters in the bathtub, which struck her as far more sensible than a round of Chutes and Ladders. That game required neither skill nor strategy; all it had to teach was that life was mostly unearned advantage or devastating fall. It took unimaginable courage to kill your children. Few people could manage it.

  Damp at her neck, her forehead, her upper lip with its nascent mustache, Rose marched on. A few miles away, the herd of deer that Danny had seen had found another, strength in numbers, and were walking in the direction that instinct told them, an astonishing sight, like the buffalo on the plains before white people killed them all. People in nearby houses couldn’t exactly believe it, but were more credulous than they’d been a week ago. The next generation of these deer would be born white as the unicorn in those Flemish tapestries that Rose and her family would never see. Not albinism, the one geneticist who worked it out would discover, but intergenerational trauma. Life was like that; life was about change.

  Some of the nearby locals got into their cars and drove toward the city. There were no police, so they sped. Brooklyn smelled: spoilage in refrigerated cases gone warm, garbage accreting on corners or wherever, plus the trapped commuters—the bipolar homeless man, the press secretary to the mayor, the optimists who’d been heading to job interviews at Google—slowly becoming unclaimed corpses.

  There, in the woods, the air was sweet and rotten, as summer air tended to be. Rose wondered: Would they be a mother and father and one or two children? Would they be white like her family, or black like the Washingtons, or Indian like Sabeena’s family, or from Saudi Arabia or Taipei or the Maldives? Did they know, in Saudi Arabia and Taipei and the Maldives, what was happening in Waycross, Georgia, where the staff of forty jailers had left fifteen hundred men to the elements? Unexpected liberty: the sodden ceiling yielding, trapping bodies in the rubble, forever behind bars, but maybe their souls got out? None of those forty believed wind and rain could undo the work of man. None of those forty mourned those dead even one bit. They were bad men, they told themselves, not knowing how little it mattered whether you’d spent your life being good or bad.

  Rose had been walking for an hour or her entire life. She unzipped her bag and bit into the bruised nectarine. Some flying insect, sensing the sweetness, hovered nearby. She ate the white flesh in one, two, seven, fourteen bites. The fruit pulled away so neatly from the stone at its center. A fruit’s stone was something like a miracle, rutted and rough. She let it fall to the ground, hoping that, years from now, it might yield a tree.

  She was not dumb. She did not expect salvation. She understood that alone, they had nothing. Now they would have something, and it would be thanks to Rose. She saw the roof through the woods, just where she knew it was going to be.

  But the house was just like theirs! That seemed to mean something, even if, in a way, all houses looked the same. Rose was heartened by this, the echo of the Washingtons’ house, the way a baby’s babble sounds like reassuring speech. Brave, she made her way around to the front door. Rose walked right up the brick path meant for visitors. She knocked firmly, fist tight and confident.

  Careful not to crush the plantings, she stood in the mulch and pressed her face against the windows. A field of flowery wallpaper, an oil painting of a brown horse, a brass sconce, a closed door, a mirror reflecting back only her own face—her face, resolute and optimistic. She couldn’t know, would never know, that the Thornes, the family who lived there, were at the airport in San Diego, unable to make arrangements since there were no flights operating domestically because of a nationwide emergency without precedent, as though precedent were required. The Thornes would never see this house again in their lives, though Nadine, the matriarch, would sometimes dream of it before she succumbed to cancer in one of the tent camps the army managed to erect outside the airport. They’d burn her body, before they stopped bothering with that, as the bodies outnumbered the people left to do the burning.

  Rose walked to the back of the house and knocked on the sliding glass door. The room was different from the Washington’s: the furniture heavier, the walls darker. The house was not made to welcome vacationers but appointed according to the tastes of the people who lived there. Maybe those people were huddled in the basement, waiting with guns; maybe those people had heard the sound and got into their car and driven as fast as possible. Rose went to the detached garage and found cardboard boxes and pegboards hung with tools but no car. There was, though, a boat, sheathed in dirty canvas.

  “You’re not home.” She said it out loud, but was talking to herself. She rang the doorbell, and heard the tinkle of it through the cheap, hollow door. She was not going back without what she had come for.

  There were ornamental stones marking the flower bed alongside the house. Rose weighed tossing one against the back door, then noticed that the panes bedside the front doo
r were already cracked. She stood back and threw it. The glass spilled into the house, the stone fell back at her feet. The noise was brief; there was just the sound of nothing. Rose pulled the sleeve of her hoodie over her hand, held a smaller rock like it was a hot pan, and banged into the points of glass that clung to the frame. She reached inside, and the dead bolt was right there. It was that simple.

  The house smelled of cat. She’d find the cat food and the litter box, but never the animal itself, which had gone off to do whatever the animals were doing. She turned on the lights as a concession to her own fear. Rose knew, in that way you do, that she was alone. But she went into every room, opened every closet, pulled back the shower curtains, knelt to look beneath the beds. There was a pink-carpeted bedroom, the wooden bed with its floral spread angled to catch the full view of the treetops. There was a den, cabinets full of board games and puzzles, wide sectional in a standoff with the biggest television Rose had ever seen. There was a dining room, the vacuum cleaner’s path marked on the immaculate blue carpet, the table polished and lustrous.

  The refrigerator was a cacophony of magnets and notes and recipes and holiday cards, smiling families barefoot at the shore or posed against autumn foliage. Rose opened the door, and there was more there than at the Washingtons’: salad dressings, ketchup, a glass jar of cornichons, soy sauce, one of those cardboard cans you pop to reveal biscuit dough. There were little plastic bottles of some medicine, an open stick of butter, some white cranberry juice. There were clean glasses in the dish rack, and she helped herself.

  Sitting at the kitchen island, Rose saw the telephone, the fruit bowl with two lemons in it, the jumble of papers and mail. She opened a drawer in the kitchen, and it was that drawer: rubber bands, dimes, an old battery, a pair of scissors, some coupons, a wrench. In the powder room off the hallway, Rose admired the little dish of soaps molded to look like seashells.