by David Arnold
“Never found what?” asked Loretta.
“Big Alma.” Then, quietly: “She loved that sleeping bag.”
There was a lot Kit wanted to tell Monty, things he knew from personal experience: that while it certainly wasn’t Monty’s fault, the feeling that it was would never go away; that when you lost someone, the best thing you could do was plant a purple flower; that looking for signs where none existed—say, in the absence of a sleeping bag—would drive you crazy.
But Kit didn’t say any of this. Monty’s eyes were already shells anyway.
On the outskirts of town, they walked across a bridge that was also a road. Kit didn’t bother looking over the edge.
THE DELIVERER
There are days when I wonder what happened to ambition. It was valued, at one point or another. Maybe not by the world, but by me.
Before the Red Books, before the House by the Solar Cliffs, my life was confined and my mind free; I understood less, but wanted more, and so maybe a prerequisite for ambition is ignorance.
A sad prospect.
And yet sad logic still holds.
According to the Red Books, some of my Lives have been more ambitious than others:
My 7th, for example. Immediately after discovering the house, I went out, rounded up those I loved, and brought them here. I tried this again in my 23rd Life, and once more in my 100th (the spirit of the centennial celebration being too much to pass up, apparently). In all three Lives, I watched from different places—through the upstairs bedroom window; from the garden out back, running to stop them; once, even, from the bottom of the cliff—as they jumped to their deaths. The entries that followed these occurrences were, in all three Lives, a bizarre and only partially recorded account of motherhood.
It was very, very fucked-up.
By my 9th Life, I was ready to take on the world. Literally. The cycles began four months prior to the arrival of the Flies, and so I’d decided it was on me to stop them from ever coming. Recalling vague memories, and going off vaguer information, I attempted to locate and travel to the Flu-flies’ country of origin. The idea being, I suppose, if I could somehow contain or eliminate the first Fly, voilà, apocalypse avoided. Alas, traveling from one point to the other, apparently, required all sorts of paperwork and documentation, of which I had none. Nor did I have the time to acquire or forge such documents. It was an enormous waste of time.
I never made it out of New Hampshire.
My 10th Life had been slightly more realistic, though not by much. It involved a few strongly worded letters to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, when left unanswered, compelled me to tackle the problem on a regional level. “Tackle the problem” here meaning “low-key harass a half dozen federal agents at the Department of Health and Human Services in Concord.” With no phone, I tried making an appointment at the front desk, and when that didn’t work, I camped out in the parking lot and waited for the employees to leave, and when no one listened, I waited until after dark and then climbed a drainpipe into their offices, setting off a silent alarm and getting myself arrested.
I was in the Merrimack County Jail when the Flies hit. Luckily, a nice guard named Warren released me once it was clear the world was ending.
There are a few other accounts in the Red Books, Lives where I’ve attempted to flex my omnipotent muscles. None of them work out.
And so, I have learned that it takes living in a circle to think in one. I have learned to trust my own handwriting. I have learned how to help people help themselves. And on those days when I wonder what happened to my ambition, I reread the accounts of my 9th and 10th Lives, my 7th and 23rd and 100th Lives, and I am content with my place around the foggy edges of fate.
The Law of Peripheral Adjustments, I call it.
It is my code.
NICO
Voids
The boy in the road had a large birthmark on his cheek in the shape of Alaska, with the tip of the state’s tail ending at his chin. He wore no mask, metal or otherwise. Light brown skin, dark wavy hair, he was taller than Nico but not by much. He stood there, maybe twenty feet away, and they stared at each other, neither speaking nor moving.
The whitetail and Flies, the road, the Metal Masks, the station: it was, all of it, eclipsed by the simple act of standing in front of a person. Of seeing them and letting them see you.
“You don’t want to be near here when that goes up,” said the boy, pointing to the station and the swelling fire inside.
His voice broke the spell, and slowly, Nico pulled her knife from her coat pocket, opened it, held it in front of her. “Fuel went bad ages ago.”
“It’s still a building. In a field in the middle of the woods.” He took a step closer; Nico raised her knife, and when he stopped, she felt surprising power at his lack of weaponry.
“Was this your place?” she asked.
“No.”
There was a look her parents used to get when the swarms came. The three of them would hunker in the cellar, and while her parents’ mouths could hide their fear, their eyes could not: it was the fear of experience, of having seen something and not wanting to see it again.
“You know what draws them,” she said to the boy.
At first he said nothing, just the cellar-look in his eyes. And then: “No. But there were six in our group. And there are only four now. They took two. And I watched it happen.”
An image: the hide of a whitetail hanging in a tree, emptied of life.
“Do you?” he asked, the cellar-look turned to feverish curiosity. “Do you know what draws them?”
They come like a thunderstorm, she wanted to say. Gathering in far-off places and for reasons we will never know.
“No,” she said.
Beside her, a low growl rose in Harry’s throat.
“Listen.” The boy backed away, pointed to the station. “That fire will be visible for miles. I’m going now. You should too.”
They nodded a strange goodbye, and the boy turned and ran. Nico watched him until he disappeared into the woods, and at her feet, Harry’s growls turned to whines. Behind them the flames were fed, growing brighter and hotter, and now, in the absence of the boy with the Alaska-shaped birthmark, the truth of his words sank in.
She checked the compass. “Okay. Let’s go.”
They ran. Across the clearing, back into the woods, headed east toward the Merrimack, away from fire, garbage, tomb. She half expected the ground to shake, half expected a deep boom to rumble at any moment, as if the very guts of the earth had ruptured, and maybe they had, maybe whatever sludge of underground fuel had survived evaporation and oxidation all these years was still capable of boom—or maybe, as the boy with the Alaska birthmark had pointed out, it was just a structure on fire in the middle of a field. Either way, they ran, putting distance between themselves and the station. They ran because he’d said he was part of a group, and a group was more than a harmless whitetail. They ran hearing the old stories whispered in their ears, of bandits and ruthless villains, people turned animal by loss of money, purpose, loved ones. Some of those villains, Nico knew, were fluent in the language of tracking, understood the subjects and objects, how where a person went was punctuated by where they’d been. They ran because the station was Vesuvius, and while Nico had no problem screaming into the void, she would not suffer the same fate as the people of Pompeii.
Audiologies
“The Flies spread overnight,” her father had told her many times. “But not the darkness. That was a process, a spiraling down.”
Nico’s father called the earth a balloon, and the darkness a slow leak. He spoke of overpopulated hospitals, riots in the streets. He spoke of rusty pipes and leaky tanks and no one there to repair them. Whole cities going up in flames, craters where buildings once stood, ash-snow, mountainous piles of soot and metal, stone and bone. It wasn’t the first virus the w
orld had seen, but it was the most enduring—and the first whose carriers were somehow strengthened by the virus they carried. He told her about a global economy that hadn’t collapsed so much as imploded, dead leaders replaced by the less qualified, dead replacements replacing them, and so on, and all those invisible cables (so impossible to imagine) bridging oceans and continents and history itself, cables that pulled together the widest corners of the world until everyone’s pocket was worldwide—those cables were severed, history shattered, pockets gone dark.
“But again,” her father would say, gazing out over the treetops. “Not overnight. Things are fine, people said. The state of our Union is strong. Keep calm. You’ll scare the children. That’s the thing about slow leaks, Nic. Some deny any leak at all.”
There were those, like her parents, who understood the true price of blind consumption, of humankind’s predilection to swallow and digest, to take a shit and declare it gold. “We were Listeners, from the beginning,” her parents told her, and Nico would imagine what a world her world had been: a place of transportation, of people going where they wanted, living where they pleased, all under the grand illusion that geography was meaningless, that humans were untouchable, that the world was small.
“There was anger, in the early days,” her mother said. “Finger-pointing and Band-Aid policies. But there was also a strange sense of community. The world was a sinking ship. Like it or not, we were going down together.”
In time, roads became wild, the frontier all over again. Horses were a currency people killed for. Food, clean water, medicine, solar panels, things people needed to survive became the things that cost them their lives.
Things are fine, the leaders said.
Keep calm.
You’ll scare the children.
“When you were a baby,” her father said, “I kept one hand on your back as you slept. I called you ‘my Voyager,’ and stayed awake long into the night, listening, thinking of ways to survive.”
“When you were a baby,” her mother said, “I prayed over you as you slept. I called you ‘my snowstorm girl,’ and thanked God for our survival, listened closely for word of His will.”
Here, in the Listening—somewhere between the science of her father and the faith of her mother—Nico ran, Harry beside her, the fires of Vesuvius at their backs. The woods were thick and unforgiving, the darkness multiplied, breeding one on top of the other until she could see almost nothing, and though details of her parents’ stories changed each time they told them, the endings were always the same: “Will you be a Listener, Nic?”
She imagined her father standing on the attic deck now, looking out across the wooded world, wondering where Nico was in all of it, and she could almost hear him say, “Eight days, Nic,” could almost hear him ask, “Can you do it?”
“Yes,” she said, running as fast as she could. “Yes.”
Rituals
That night, they made camp at the base of a fallen tree trunk. As Nico shook a generous portion of cinnamon around the site, Harry trotted off into the woods, and at first she was concerned, called out for him, whistled. He came back, but only briefly before trotting off again. Something about the look in his eyes was trusting, and she suspected that his earlier squirrel hunt was no fluke, that his primordial instincts had kicked into high gear.
While he was gone, she rolled out her bedding, and briefly considered going without a fire. Everything was wet—there would be no shortage of smoke, announcing their location for miles.
They took two, the boy had said. And I watched it happen . . .
Still. An overnight with no fire in this cold was unthinkable. She would light a fire and hope for the best, or maybe pray to the trees, Dear brothers and sisters, may the smoke of our fire be tapered, the tracks of our feet be hidden, amen.
She built a little house of twigs, tucked the driest leaves she could find underneath, and crouched on hands and knees with her lighter. The wind and cold made it difficult; with all the wetness, the fire kept starting, then extinguishing. By the time she got it going, she’d used up almost a whole lighter’s worth of butane. Plenty of lighters left, but still, it was a special kind of frustrating, wasting finite resources in the middle of infinite unknowns. Even after the kindling caught, it was a while before the larger twigs got in the game, and—as predicted—smoke.
Just as she was finished with the fire, Harry returned. “There you are.” She dug the granola and jerky out of her bag. “Where’d you go, bud?”
He sniffed the rations in her outstretched hand, then turned away, uninterested. And her question as to his whereabouts was answered, her suspicions as to his primordial instincts confirmed: Harry was providing for himself now.
She shook her head like a proud mother, good-dogged him, and then settled into the sleeping bag with her own dinner. “Why did the lady sing lullabies to her purse?”
Already, he was tucked beside her, in a particular space she hadn’t realized was cold until he’d warmed it up.
“Because she wanted a sleeping bag.”
Later she would wake in the cold to prod the fire, but for now it was warm, and it was comfort, their consolidated pulse a winter cradlesong. Nico drew a third tally on her hand, and nearly fell asleep before recapping the pen.
PART FOUR
IN
THE
DARK
ORB
NICO
Fins
She woke to voices, and somehow had the presence of mind not to move.
“Should we let her sleep?” a girl whispered.
“Why wouldn’t we?” A boy’s voice.
Under the cover of her sleeping bag, Nico gripped her knife.
Be the Listener.
“What about the dog?”
Harry. The spot at her side was cold. He was gone.
“What about the dog?” asked the girl.
“Can we keep him?” This third voice sounded younger, like a kid.
“Kit. Be serious.” Nico recognized this fourth voice as the kid with the Alaska birthmark.
“I like him,” said the kid.
“We’re not keeping the dog. Just leave him, let’s go.”
“Wait.” The older boy’s voice.
“What?”
“I think she’s awake.”
She tried to stay as still as possible, breathe in and out, up and down—but then Harry’s warm breath was in her face, his tongue on her cheek, and it was no use. Slowly, pretending to wake, she kept her hand on the grip of the knife under the sleeping bag, sat up, and looked around.
“Good morning.” The girl looked older than the others, with dark hair and bright blue eyes peeking out from under her bangs. “Smart, isn’t he?” She bent down, pet behind Harry’s ear. “I can always tell with dogs.”
A younger kid with freckles and a dirty-looking knit cap joined her, the two of them lavishing her dog with praise, while between them, Harry lapped it up.
Real ferocious there, bud.
“What’s his name?” asked the younger kid.
Nico didn’t move. Gripped her knife under the bag.
“Harry,” she said.
“Hiya, Harry. I’m your new friend, Loretta.” She looked at Nico, and then went around the group. “This is Kit. Monty. And Lennon.”
All four of them had some version of the cellar-look in their eyes.
The kid with the Alaska birthmark—Lennon—said, “This is the one I told you about. Lit up the gas station.”
“Oh, you mean the reason we had to get up two hours early to circumnavigate the giant fire in the field?” Monty nodded toward Nico. “What’s your name?”
She whistled for Harry, who trotted over, head down, all, If I must.
“Nico.”
Monty pointed to Nico’s sleeping bag. “Whatever you’ve got under there, you can let go. We’r
e not going to hurt you.”
Given the small ax in his hand, Nico remained on edge. But there was no use hiding anymore, and so she emerged from the sleeping bag, still holding the knife, unopened.
“You live around here?” asked Loretta.
“Not too far,” lied Nico. “You guys?”
Lennon said he and Loretta had been headed to Boston when they ran into Monty and Kit. “We’re all going the same way for a while, figured we’d join up. There’s a river not far from here. One day, maybe two. Rett and I head south from there—”
Monty tossed the ax into a nearby tree.
“—Monty and Kit go east.”
Visibly irritated, Monty pried the ax from the trunk. In the short amount of time they’d been standing here, Nico sensed some brewing irritation on his part, not even at her, necessarily, but something had him riled up. “What about you?” he asked.
Nico began rolling up her sleeping bag. “What about me?”
“For starters, why’d you set that place on fire?”
Because covering the blue-lipped family with a blanket wasn’t enough. “I was keeping a promise.”
Monty was about to toss the ax again when Loretta stepped closer, laced her hand into his. The effect was immediate: Monty’s shoulders lowered, his eyes warmed, and Nico could almost see the frustration seep out of his pores. If they really were a day or two from the Merrimack River, from Monty going one way and Loretta going another, the catalyst behind his irritation was clear.
“Lennon says your tracks are headed east,” said Loretta. “You can walk with us, if you want.”
Quickly, Nico finished gathering her things, slipped on her backpack, then stood and faced Lennon. Was it her imagination, or did he look a little ashamed?