To the memory of Poul Anderson (1926-2001)
Science fiction Grand Master
for `Flight to Forever’
“The hunger of time devours the stars”
–Garrett Kalleberg
ONE
We think we seek ends, but those come to us unbidden. No, what we search for, all our lives, are beginnings.
`Talbot says if the holy war goes on much longer, people will start chucking nukes,’ I told my family. That sounded like the end of the world to me, or a good enough approximation. Still, I bit my tongue, angry at myself. Tal had walked out on me fully three months earlier. Just left me high and dry. So why the hell did the bastard’s miserable little obiter dicta keep popping out of my mouth? Actually I knew why. If a major global conflict really did happen—and the newspaper editorials, not to mention trash television, made it sound certain—the whole world’s burning would somewhat approximate this last year with my ex-boyfriend. I shuddered, and spread canola margarine on another wholemeal roll.
Certainly my father was convinced the world was about to end, and he wasn’t shy about saying so. Grace told him primly that he shouldn’t talk about such morbid topics at the dinner table.
`I don’t believe in hiding the truth from our daughters,’ Hugh said, `no matter how grim it is. That’s how we got into this goddamned fix in the first place.’
`Hugh, I’d rather you didn’t use that kind of language in front of Suzanna.’ Mom pursed her lips, then grinned and punched him in the arm. `With Natalie, of course, you can say whatever you fucking well like.’
She was a great kidder, but I could tell that she really didn’t like any talk about the end of the world. She said it made her nervous and spoiled her appetite. Grace was so lean and muscular from aerobics and Tai Chi classes that she didn’t need to be put off her food, because she always ate twice as much as me, which was saying something even though I’m on an endless diet and, okay, a few pounds overweight. But I don’t care. I’m not a slave to fashion, like Suzanna. That’s my sister, the young beautiful one. And no, I’m not all twisted up with envy and jealousy.
When I was a child, I’d given myself nightmares by skimming the books Father left lying around the living room. Hair-raising stuff from the 1980s when people like Hugh and Grace D’Anzso were expecting to be totaled at any minute. Anyway, that’s the impression you get. Awful, blood-curdling rhetoric. Let the words creep into the back of your mind and nestle there in the night: Ground zero. First strike capability. Hardened targets. Megatons of explosive nastiness in the multiple-warhead nose cones of missiles launched from attack submarines deep under the Arctic ice or cruising the Pacific. Plus the more recent nightmares: monstrous acts of terrorism, genomic engineered viruses, probably, and god knows what the military were doing in their containment labs with nanotechnology.
I’d woken up whimpering that winter morning, too cold to go back to sleep, scrunched up under the non-allergenic comforter. What I wanted was a warm body next to me; I lay shaking in my misery and anger, tears running down my face. It was too early to get up and light the old wood stove. The solar panels weren’t powerful enough, of course, to warm my parents’ house, so all they had were basic services like lighting, television—and the computers, naturally. Cooking and hot water were handled with a blend of 21st century retrofitting—ugly big drums of water to absorb heat during the daylight hours, rational placement of windows and bushes to catch or shade the Sun’s heat—and 19th century tried-and-true. My parents didn’t believe in using the public utilities, like gas and electricity, because you could never tell when the government might decide to turn them off or there could be a drastic oil shortage at any moment. Talbot had agreed for the sake of peace and quiet that these precautions made perfect sense, but my dearest friend Deb often insisted over a cheerful coffee latte and pastry that this was mad bullshit and I suspected she was probably right, but what would I know? (Ha!)
It still scared me. Other people weren’t forced to suffer this urban survivalist crap. Suzanna and I’d had to put up with it since I was small and she was smaller; it had quickly become apparent to me that if other kids’ parents took such precautions nobody talked about it in the playground, or after school. On the other hand, Suzanna and I hadn’t talked about it much either. It’s no fun if everyone thinks you’re some crazy loon geek with nutso olds, and when you crawl back to live with them at the age of 23 with your tail between your legs after your guy has taken the Toyota and your best friend to a new apartment, and you think you’re going crazy with sorrow, it’s even less fun. Still, there were the occasional moments of hilarity in the madness.
`It won’t be nuclear, Natalie,’ Hugh assured me absently, cutting the leafy head off a green crisp stick of celery and eating it without salt. I know salt is bad for your blood pressure, but I can’t stand raw vegetables without at least a bit of salt to bring out the flavor. On my 18th birthday I’d been informed by Grace (graciously, of course) that it was my choice henceforth. I might kill myself by slow poison at her table if that was the way I wanted it, since I was now an adult and got to make such vital decisions without any further interference from them. My dear best friend Deb, my really reliable best friend Debbie, had thought this was big of them, and I guess from their point of view it was a remarkably liberal concession.
`What will it be then?’ Suzanna said sulkily, not looking up from her copy of Rolling Stone which featured the Big Spew on the cover. She was twirling one golden springy strand of magical hair with her index finger, and I knew she didn’t really care about the end of the world, as long as she got to the Xmas dance with gorgeous Andy Compton who was only a year and a half younger than me for crying out loud, already finishing his engineering degree. What was a hunk like that doing with my kid sister? Why weren’t my parents throwing conniptions about the cradle-snatcher?
`Don’t encourage him,’ Grace said warningly to Suzanna, but it was too late. It was always too late.
`The ozone hole is still on the increase,’ Hugh said in his calm, prophetic voice. He never got wildly angry about the end of the world, just relaxed and determined to do something about it and fix the poor goddamned world up, as he’d say, before the jackasses and buffoons ruined it altogether. `The population explosion might be slowing, but the sheer weight of human numbers is still considerably above the planet’s optimal carrying capacity. Genetic engineering of crops is setting us up for the most horrendous food production crash in history, once some mutant insect or viral predator appears and wipes out the cloned crops in one foul swoop—’
`One fool sweep,’ I said.
`One fell swoop, dear,’ Grace said simultaneously.
`Fell?’ said Suzanna. `How can you swoop if you fell?’
`Fell?’ Hugh said. `I’m talking about factory fowls, all those poor chickens genetically bred for maximum tasteless flesh and big eggs and no brains. One swipe and those fowl are gone.’
I was indignant. `You didn’t say “swipe”,’ I cried. `That’s a foul!’
By then we were all falling about laughing, and Hugh got a bit of celery caught in his windpipe, and started choking and we stopped talking about the end of civilization as we knew it. But the topic was never far away. It lurked in the shadows at night, in my weepy bereft dreams, and our parents made their strange plans during the day, although Suzie and I actually knew nothing about that, even if we suspected that something pretty disturbing was afoot.
Hugh had sold the Subaru sedan a couple of months ago, which was one of his more insane moves. He claimed the family didn’t need three cars, since the Ferguson Institute was within walking distance and Grace worked at home. Not long after Hugh did this mad thing, my ancient Fiat bit the dust and Tal decided he was rightful owner of our Toyota (okay, he’d paid the deposit and it was registered in his name, but I’d dutifully shelled out half the monthly installments), or at any rate that his need was greater, so we were down to Grace’s sturdy old Volvo. It sat in the drive when I wasn’t using it to drop Suzanna by school and get myself to work.
Nonetheless, Hugh started securing the old-fashioned wooden doors of the garage with a heavy chain and lock. I knew there wasn’t anything inside except for all the usual tools neatly lined up along one wall in the wooden shelves that Hugh had built to hold them when we moved into the house five years earlier, a bit after Suzanna’s twelfth birthday, hammers and wrenches and cans for nails and screws in various sizes and handyman lengths of timber and metal pipe strung overhead out of the way, and along the back wall a rack of electronic gadgets with dials and monitor screens torn out of obsolete computers and wired together and none of us had the slightest idea what it was all for, except that Hugh refused to let us touch any of it. I had the idea, or maybe the romantic delusion, that he’d wanted to be a freelance inventor when he was a boy, but had to give up his dream when he married Grace and quite soon found himself saddled, perhaps to his surprise, with an expensive daughter and then, a few years later, with another. Luckily they came to their senses and stopped at that point.
But doing a Fort Knox on the garage was not what bothered me, not per se, I’d had plenty of time to get used to Hugh’s little eccentricities. Besides, Tal had explained to me that men prefer to have a redoubt of their own, well away from the domesticity of the household, especially one infested with three women. (Double ha!) It had started earlier than that, when the crazy man bolted on a substantial lock inside the garage doors.
Grace had put up a fight when that bolt was first screwed into place, saying that one of us might lock ourselves in and then faint from chemical fumes or hit our head and no-one would be able to retrieve us, and dear rational Daddy pointed out that this was a wildly unlikely eventuality since Suzanna and I were hardly children any longer.
Grace exploded. `Of course they are not kids any more, Hugh. I have observed my own daughters growing up.’
`Well, then—’
Hugh seemed to think he’d won the argument. And in a way he had. Mom just said, `Oh for heaven’s sake, Hugh,’ and left the room looking angry.
The point was, of course, that she couldn’t bring herself to express what she was really feeling. Or, at least, she couldn’t say it in front of us. Pretty weird for a card-carrying feminist of the old school, but somehow I’d managed to assimilate this behavior without questioning it deeply. What she really felt, I saw now, was the same thing that I felt: Hugh was starting to act batshit. Grace hated the idea of the bolt on the inside of the garage door because it was frankly insane. Who’d want to lock himself into an empty garage? Some sort of raving fruitcake, it seemed to me.
I tried to raise the matter with her that evening. She was helping me with some loan amortization calculations I’d been having trouble with. I had been studying fairly ineptly for my realtor’s exams, using an old HP 12C calculator of Dad’s. Grace is a whiz at math; her Ph.D. was computer science, but she could add and subtract without using either her fingers or an abacus. Me, I can handle the greater and lesser obscurities of Jacques Derrida, Paul De Man and Edward Said, but I could never get my head around a simple calculator. We were alone, sitting at the kitchen table, which years ago had been one of my favorite places for doing homework, and the ambience remained comforting. Grace was wearing warm-ups, loose and comfortable, the kind of easy clothing she always wore around the house. On the rare occasions when she went to a publisher’s office, she groaned but reluctantly did herself up, so she left the house looking like one of those classy blonde anchor women on the news. You could tell in an instant that Suzanna was her daughter, and I was Hugh’s. Ah well, the mysteries of the genes—which was one of Mom’s other technical interests, since her thesis work had been in supercomputer computation that ultimately fed into the Human Proteomics Project. I shook the machine in frustration.
`This thing must be defective, Grace.’ In a minimal attempt to salvage my dignity after retreating to the ancestral home, I’d taken to using her given name, something I’d done as a small child then abandoned when I found it didn’t upset her. `Look. I put in 12 plus 5 and it says 252.20.’ I felt like throwing the damned thing through the window.
`Relax, Natalie. The HP 12C uses reverse Polish notation. That means you have to load your first number.’ Grace calmly entered the number twelve. `Then you put in your second number. Now you tell the calculator what operation to perform.’ She touched the plus sign. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the number seventeen on the display. Oh. Feeling like a fool, I scribbled it down, then took a deep breath. Carefully, I said, `Mom, don’t you think Dad’s maybe a bit, well, you know, obsessed—like with the bolt on the garage door...’ I trailed off.
`No, I don’t think your father is obsessed. He’s just...’ Grace paused, laid down her pen, obviously looking for the right word, the safe word. `He’s just cautious.’
I made a farting noise. `Give me a break. There’s nothing cautious about a bolt on the inside of the garage door. It’s absurd. Does he think the car’s going to escape? Oh no, that’s right—no car any longer.’
I could tell Grace was about to deny that there was anything out of the ordinary about Hugh’s antics, but she seemed to check herself. `Hugh sees the world in a different light,’ she said. `Everyone sees the world differently. You’ll get over Talbot and Deb sooner or later, Nat, and you’ll fall in love again—’
I repeated the noise.
`And you’ll find that your partner, that lucky man, whoever he is, never quite sees things the way you do. Then you’ll have children and sometimes they’ll seem like aliens from outer space, their values and their outlook on life will be so strange. Part of it’s genetics. Some genes that express themselves in you can be recessive in your parents—’
`Mom, I might be a klutz with a calculator, but I do know—’
Imperturbably, she went on: `So you really inherit less than half your personality from each parent, at least of what’s visible in them. And there are between thirty and fifty thousand genes, and they interact with each other in strange ways. It’s a wonder we get on with each other as well as we do.’
I was enthralled, actually. While I’d never been terribly good at most of my math and physics and chemistry classes, not as good as Suzanna anyway, I love this weird science stuff. Grace told me about studies of identical twins separated at birth; it didn’t seem to matter how different the environments were in which the twins were brought up, they managed to turn out remarkably similar. I could have listened all night—she’s really entrancing when she gets going on something she knows a lot about. But all this talk about twins and clones and genotypes and phenotypes was getting away from the problem of Hugh’s behavior and my mother’s compliance with it. I interrupted her.
`About it being a wonder that we get on with each other, I think you get on with Daddy as well as you do,’ I said in a rush, `because you don’t contradict him very much.’
`Of course I do,’ Grace said, taken aback. `I’m always telling Hugh he’s wrong about things.’
`I know,’ I said, `You tell him he is wrong and then he just claims that he’s right. And then you don’t say anything more, you don’t argue.’
She sighed, and took our cups and plates to the sink to soak, since we don’t have a dishwasher. `You might be right, Nat. I deliberately chose not stress the argumentative side of my personality. When I was a kid, I was always in deep shit of one kind or another. Staying detached helped me get through my math degrees at a time when girls weren’t encouraged to use their brains that way. The cost, admittedly, was unpleasant. However,’ she said with a pained frown, `I think I’d rather defer this conversation for now, darling. You’ve got to get all those really exciting numbers written down neatly or they’ll take away your skeleton key.’ And off she went to her computer to do some editorial work on some bigwig’s text book, leaving me wrestling with reverse Polish notation and the carpet to order for a room 14 ft. x 20 ft. and amortization payments on 30 year loans.
I watched her for several weeks to see if my subtle pep talk had given her pause, but if she took to arguing with her husband, about the lock on the garage or anything else, it wasn’t when Suzanna and I were present.
* * * *
There’s a small dirty window high in the rear of the garage that’s obviously been nailed shut for years, covered in grime and strands of spiderweb. It was too inconvenient to climb up to from the inside and clean, and Hugh had powerful fluoro-lamps on his benches so he didn’t care that there wasn’t any external light in the garage when he shut the door. But I’d discovered something odd, shortly before I was permitted to gorge myself on salt if that was my chosen pleasure, when I clambered up with a sponge and pail of water to wash the dusty photovoltaic solar array mounted on the old outhouse built on the back of the wood shed behind the garage.
That should have been Suzanna’s job, since she was lighter and nimbler, but she’d explained so convincingly that she was such a frail and artistic type that the chore fell to me, as usual. Grumbling and covered in suds, I noticed one time that I could lean over upside down and, without quite falling to my death, peek in through this little spyhole and watch my father at work on his inventions. He never caught me at it, probably because I only tried it a few times, and there was nothing much to see anyway, just this tall stocky balding man bent over a workbench watching fractal patterns in gorgeous light on his monitors and typing in code on his work station. Dull, really dull.
What made me climb up and peek in the day he disappeared? Some special gleam in Hugh’s eye, I guess, some sense I caught of his intense suppressed excitement. He got in a little early from work, light still in the hazy autumn sky. Grace had just arrived home herself after an afternoon meeting with the publishers and had gone off to get into something more sloppy. Suzanna was in her room, and I had my heels up on the kitchen table with Kylie-sings-Eminem on the radio and a book about zoning restrictions under my nose. Hugh grunted a form of greeting, slung his jacket over the back of his chair, swigged down some filtered water, and left the kitchen. As I say, there was something about Hugh’s expression that made me particularly curious. I heard him unlock the garage, open the doors just enough to squeak in, and push them shut from the inside—with a distinct click of the inner bolt being snibbed.
I went and stood outside watching the garage light. You could see it shining through the hairline cracks and gleaming through the high little window at the side. I heard my mother come in to the kitchen, switch radio stations to some horrible Golden Oldies station, and start rattling some crockery for dinner. I scaled the old outhouse and skinned over and stuck one eye against the dusty glass and looked down into the garage and no-one was there.
I mean it. The garage was completely empty, but the doors were bolted tight.
That gave me a small fright, because it meant he’d gone out again while I was climbing up on the roof of the shed, and when he crossed the back-yard to go inside the house he’d probably see my big ass stuck out over mid-air, if he paused to glance over his shoulder, and have a conniption and order me down and roust me for endangering my life & limb, climbing in this light, what’s the matter with you, young woman, they allow people like you to vote, haven’t you got more sense than that? I wriggled back, breathing hard, and got down with only one painful graze on my knee, and strolled into the house with a negligent air and the look, I hoped, of a young artist enjoying the evening air and the garden views.
Hugh wasn’t in the kitchen. Suzanna was twanging away in her room on the electric guitar she’d borrowed from school, which always sounded to me more like an industrial accident than the latest in retro acid Goth ska or whatever the child liked to think she was playing. She only did it to make herself attractive to goddamned Andy Compton. Grace was peeling avocados for a guacamole dip, ignoring the horrible racket, and asked without looking up, `Was that your father coming in just now, darling?’
`He went out back.’ I grabbed half an apple out of the fridge and a bowl of ice-cream from the freezer and three muesli biscuits.
`Nat, don’t spoil your appetite, dinner won’t be long. Sold any mansions today?’
`Ha. If only. They don’t let us rookies do the exciting face-to-face stuff. Credit this if you will—they wanted us all to do aerobics at the gym. They’ll have us singing a company anthem next.’
Grace shot me a look implying that I might do worse than aerobics. `And?’
`Fat chance. I laughed at them in a heavily wheezy way.’ I get asthma and for the whole of high school carried a doctor’s certificate to spare me the boring two hours every week when all the other hearty creatures pounded around the cinder track in their Reeboks or pumped iron to make their sleek bodies even more beautiful, hoping to become stars of Sexe Island or whatever was the flavor of the month. I’m the artistic type, as I said, and prefer to exercise my mind (by taking a snooze in the back office—there really just aren’t enough sleeping hours in the day for a young career person on the way up, if you ask me).
I put out the cutlery, plates and glasses, and slouched off to the living room to watch junk TV, expecting to find my father already sitting in his favorite armchair reading some fat book about the hidden perils of the green revolution or the promise of aquaculture in the Third World or the evils of nuclear power. He wasn’t there, and shortly thereafter I found he wasn’t in the upstairs bathroom when I headed that way for a quick pre-dinner wash-up because Suzanna was in there in a foul fog of her own making. I grimaced, and held my nose. It had to be the junk food she gobbled on her way home from school. Mmm, junk food. So where was the annoying man?
Ferdinand the dog started barking like a lunatic out the front, and I went to the door to haul him inside. He goes for the neighbor’s calico cat if the stupid thing is stupid enough to wander stupidly into Ferdy’s path, which it does all the time, being as thick as a brick. But Mrs. Mahoney detests this amusing custom, and I suppose I can’t blame her, although I’m sure Ferdinand would never actually eat the cat. Heaven knows, he’s had plenty of opportunity to do so, because as I might have mentioned the cat is peculiarly stupid. Ferdy never bothered Talbot’s cats, Mrs. Grundy and Daily Alice, when Suzanna brought him to visit our apartment.
I had to call three times and then go and grab the animal by the hairy scruff of his mongrel unpedigreed neck before he’d leave the shrubbery alone. I was halfway back to the front door when I realized that Hugh really wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and the last of the light had faded from the sky. Maybe he was walking briskly to the store for a new bottle of cider vinegar for Mom’s avocado dip.
No, actually. He was just... gone.
He wouldn’t be back for three weeks, although we didn’t know that. Twenty-five days and six hours, 31 minutes and 41 seconds, to be exact.
TWO
Grace was frantic, of course, and so were Suzie and I. Once I’d explained about Hugh’s visit to the garage, and how he’d locked the door from the inside, Mom became convinced that he’d fallen and hurt himself and was even now lying inside there in a pool of blood, unable to cry feebly for help. Perhaps he was dying. Perhaps—she was really panicking by now—perhaps he was already dead. Suzie started to weep, and Grace got a grip and said that was very unlikely, your father is a highly competent individual, and I said we could break the little window and climb in if we borrowed the long extension ladder from Mr. Mahoney if his wife would let us in the front gate (Hugh’s extension ladder, of course, being locked inside the garage with him because you don’t leave a ladder lying around outside where thieves and burglars might find it—conveniently for them but not for you—and use it to enter your home and rob you blind).
This plan was not regarded favorably, and eventually a man came around from the locksmiths’ at prodigious after-hours expense to use his skeleton key (something I didn’t possess) to undo the lock to the garage door and was quite dumbfounded when he finally grasped, as we’d been telling him incessantly, that in this case the doors were bolted from the inside. He went away and returned with a long aluminum extension ladder of his own and climbed up and peered in through my little secret window and plainly saw the truth of what I’d been telling them all along—the place was completely empty. No father. Certainly no car, which we knew already. Just some lights flickering on makeshift consoles.
`He’s gone down into the cellar,’ the locksmith told Grace. `The trapdoor must have slammed shut on top of him. He might be lying at the bottom of the steps with a serious head wound.’ He looked thoughtful in a grisly way. `I’ll bet that’s what’s happened.’
Suzanna started sobbing noisily again, and Mom put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Dresden china, you know the type: she’s an emotional creature. I could feel my own lip trembling too, but I swore I wouldn’t cry and make a fool of myself, and I didn’t.
`We haven’t got a cellar,’ Grace told him, and simultaneously I said, `What cellar?’
`Well, there isn’t any other way out, is there?’ The locksmith shined his flashlight up and down the outside wall of the garage, which had no opening except for the grimy little window which obviously hadn’t been opened in years. We all trooped around to the outhouse and shed at the back, and banged on the wall separating it from the rear of the garage, but no secret entrance-way sprang open. I went back up on the roof, but nothing had been disturbed, the solar cells still perched there darkly—he hadn’t made his getaway up through the ceiling, unless he was a slicker escapologist than Houdini.
In a ragged line, we went to ring the bell of the Mahoneys, asked if we could go down along their side fence, which was right next to the remaining wall of the garage, received their grudging and slightly poisonous assent, and of course there was no hidden door or anything of the sort there either.
`We’ll have to break the glass,’ the locksmith decided. `Have to go in and to look for the cellar.’ Naturally, though, he was forbidden by his union rules from performing such a dangerous specialized climb and descent. He plucked out his cell phone and called some other guy from Emergency Services. About three hours later, long after the sky had turned as black as it ever gets when all the street lights are on and we were all absolutely starving and shivering in the cold evening air, a fat man in overalls and a thin man in overalls arrived in a large official van with flashing orange lights on top. The skinny man cut a smooth round-cornered square with a diamond tool and drew out the glass using a kind of plumber’s helper rubber suction-gadget he’d jammed against the glass before he started cutting. Suzanna was enthralled. Gingerly, he went in through the de-glassed window frame.
He didn’t find anything either, but at least he opened the bolt and let us all swarm in to switch on the fluoros, peer at every square inch of the floor, sniff at the old oil stain on the concrete slab, peer under benches, rap on walls. They even brought in an A-shaped aluminum ladder from the truck and the fat man in overalls heaved himself up it, breathing heavily and muttering about this had better be better than time-and-a-half overtime because he was missing the X-Files classic repeats, and probed at the ceiling. Nothing moved, although he did bang his ear painfully on one of Hugh’s lengths of handyman timber.
`Fuck!’
Grace said, `Sir, you really shouldn’t use such language in the presence of young unmarried women.’ He blushed. I pulled a face at her behind his back.
The awful, unthinkable fact remained: the cupboard was bare. Hugh really had gone.
`It’s like the Marie Celeste,’ said the skinny man in a cadaverous whisper. `This will probably be made into an episode of Famous Unsolved Mysteries.’
Suzanna wailed, and Grace gave the idiot a venomous look. `I’m sure the Mystery will be Solved, and quite soon, thank you very much.’
`Mary,’ I said, equally venomously, staring at the man through slitted eyes.
`What?’ he said, startled. His fat companion was lugging the aluminum ladder out again, banging it noisily on the now-open doors. `I’m not Maury, that’s the shift-supervisor.’
`Mary,’ I said again. `Mary Celeste. That’s the correct name of the ship where all the crew disappeared and they found it later floating all forlorn, without any explanation for the missing people. Oh shut up, Suzanna.’ But then I started crying myself, and the men closed the doors on the empty garage but didn’t put the chain up or lock it, which was just as well as it turned out, and Grace rounded us all up and took us in belatedly to dinner and we tried to console ourselves with an old Mel Gibson video but by that time our hearts really weren’t in it. I went to bed and read some Harold Bloom for old times’ sake. If you traveled the world seeking literary sages to put you right on the relationship between cultural theory and reality, almost the last place you’d bother with would be Yale, where golden boys once cavorted with Y’s on their breasts and until recently the expiring tentacles of textual empire could be seen threshing away through the office windows of Jacques Derrida, on frequent loan from Paris, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller. But I liked one thing Bloom had to say, which had encouraged me during the arid stretches of my dissertation: `Reading, writing, teaching, being taught: the experience of literature is the experience of an isolate and solipsizing glory... It is the greatest and most superb of narcissistic self-indulgences: and why should it not be?’ Only one drawback with that theory: there’s not a lot of money to be made at it. Not as much, at any rate, as in real estate, which is as real as you can get. Once you pass the exams.
Two nights later, after I got home from work, three police officers came around and went through it all again, but with less enthusiasm. `Domestic,’ I heard one of them say. A young policewoman took Grace in to the living room and sat her down for a private chat, and I heard Mom’s voice get very sharp and perhaps angry, although she hardly ever lost her temper. The policewoman emerged a few minutes later with little red flushed spots in her cheeks, anger of her own or perhaps embarrassment, I couldn’t tell.
On the third day Grace finally got it together enough to return to work (have I mentioned that she’s a freelance text editor, which might be where I get those bookish genes from?) and turned on her computer to get her email messages. There was a queued post waiting for her from Hugh, sent to her on the afternoon of the day he’d vanished. Whatever it was that he’d sent her calmed her down immediately, but she wouldn’t tell us where he’d gone or why.
`It’s all right, girls,’ she said, brushing Suzie’s beautiful blonde hair while my sister sat on the floor on a cushion in front of her. `Your father is perfectly safe. It was all my fault for not looking at my in-box before I let everything get out of hand.’
I didn’t think it was her fault at all. I thought it was one more proof of how ratty Daddy had become in the last year or two. I loved him, of course, but sometimes I got frightened by his intensity and his thoughtlessness. This was a prime example. How could the man just up and leave for... well, what turned out to be three entire weeks, although we didn’t know that then... without explaining his plans? Didn’t he have a clue how upset we’d be? Didn’t he know how this heedless vanishment would tear my heart, so close to Talbot’s desertion?
Maybe he did. He just had different priorities. After all, he believed that he and the family might be the last people left on earth following the catastrophe that he was convinced would very probably erupt any day.
And then at nearly midnight three and a half weeks later he walked quickly in from the back yard, after we’d heard a screech of metal as the garage doors opened from the inside and the metal chain fell to the concrete driveway, and he stepped briskly into the kitchen. We’d taken to dozing late with Mom in front of the TV, wrapped in blankets, flipping numbly from one news program to the next, finally getting to sleep anywhere between eleven at night and one in the morning, then waking convulsively at first light. This wasn’t doing our mental health or Suzanna’s school marks much good, but I could tell Grace was quietly devastated, despite her assurances, and needed our company. Suzie and I were gulping down our late-night OJ and muesli-cake snack before finally heading off to bed, but from the look of Hugh as he came in you’d have sworn he’d just come back from a quick amble about the garden checking the organic produce, never mind being away in limbo for the best part of a month.
Grace gave a hugely deep, relieved sigh, which showed me how much strain she’d really been under despite her claims to the contrary, and put her arms around Hugh and hugged him as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone hug anyone else. Suzanna gave a shriek and dropped her orange juice and the glass shattered on the cork tile, and I reached down to pick up the broken pieces of the glass and cut my thumb quite badly, and then everyone was everywhere, mopping up OJ and blood and hugging and I started crying again, with the sting of my hand and the bitter confusion of my feelings and my happiness at seeing the patriarch home and okay.
Of course, being Hugh, he didn’t explain what he’d been up to, or where he’d been, or how he’d got out of the locked garage three weeks earlier, or how he’d got back in from wherever he’d gone. I assumed Grace knew, and was okay with it, but had no idea what he told the police when he went around to report that he wasn’t, after all, missing. It was just an amazing conundrum, and you had to put up with it, because that’s the sort of guy he was. The weird, weird sort.
Thereafter he kept up his nightly visits to the garage, the evening-to-midnight tireless fiddling with his mysterious gadgets and circuits. His face grew more and more drawn, and whenever he watched the television news his mood grew ever more bleak; he would shake his head and mutter about the world coming to an end.
* * * *
And then the world did come to end, and we were the only ones totally prepared for it.
THREE
The world we knew ended at seven twenty on Thursday evening. We were just about ready to sit down to eat in front of the television. Grace had drifted in from the kitchen to watch the weather report which would be on in about five minutes. She didn’t get to see it, because the moment the newsreader said, `Here’s Mike Wallace with all the sports news,’ Hugh flicked the remote. The screen went dead. Looking very bleakly at Mom, he said, `Well, that’s it, time to quit.’ Grace gave him an unreadable look in reply and then, to my amazement, without a word, left the room and went into the kitchen. By the sound of things, she started busying herself in the open-shelved pantry.
`Hey, Dad!’ Suzanna said, annoyed, `I want to know if the Broncos beat the Green Shirts.’ When she reached across for the remote, he pushed it impatiently away from her hand.
`It doesn’t matter who beat whom,’ Hugh told us. `The world’s effectively at an end.’
`What madness is this?’ Suzanna said, `The world’s doing all right. I want to know about the Broncos.’
`You saw the news,’ Hugh said. `It’s all over.’
`What’s all over?’ I asked him, completely bemused. I hadn’t been watching closely, but nothing terribly earth-shattering had been mentioned, I was sure of it. No asteroid headed our way to wipe out the dinosaurs, no nuclear war imminent.
`That virus in Manila is spreading exponentially,’ he said. `For every thousand people who’ve got it today, ten thousand will have it next week. The week after that, one hundred thousand. Do the calculations. Two to what power makes six billion?’
`Huh?’
`Don’t grunt inarticulately, darling, it’s not attractive. Think. Two to the ten is...?’
I screwed up my face. What on earth was Hugh on about now? Oh. Hang on. Two squared is four, two cubed is eight, and that’s the same as saying two to the two and two to the three, so two-to-the-ten means two multiplied by itself ten times— How was I supposed to know the answer to that? I tried to do it in my head, using my fingers to keep count of the doublings, hiding my hands behind my back. Two twos are 4, then 8, 16, blah blah, two hundred and something, 248? No, don’t be stupid, woman, 256, and what doubling point had we got to...? My mind shut down and my tight fingers sprang open. I never do well on mental arithmetic and those stupid tests. I mean, that’s why God gave us reverse Polish calculators, isn’t it?
`One K, obviously,’ said my irritating sister. `One thousand and twenty-four.’
`Exactly.’ Hugh beamed at her. `Two to the tenth power is 1024. Call it a thousand, approximately. So two to the twentieth power is a million, because that’s just two to the tenth power squared, and two to the thirtieth power is a billion, and since the whole world’s human population is only six times that many, a virus that spreads from one person to another like wildfire can infect the entire planet’s population in just over thirty jumps. That’s been true since every place got connected by jet airliners to every other place—it wasn’t so fast once, when diseases took months or years to reach another continent.’ He paused and regarded us very, very seriously. `Even if each doubling jump of the Manila plague takes a week or ten days, the whole planet could be dying in less than a year.’
`Theory, shmeary. What’s all that got to do with anything real?’ said Suzanna, looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world. `The virus is restricted to the Philippines, they said so on the news. Quarantine, all that.’ I was impressed, I’d missed that report because I was helping with the salad but it didn’t seem like the sort of thing Suzie would care about. `I mean, sure, it’s sad for all the poor Filipinos and everything—but that’s no reason why the rest of us can’t watch the Broncos pulverize the Green Shirts.’
`The world’s one big village,’ Hugh said, `you know that, Suzanna. What affects the Philippines now will affect everybody in a few months, as I just demonstrated. It’s time to quit.’
`Quit what?’ I said. `Quit watching sports? How’s that going to save us from the Manila Flu?’
`It’s time to quit the world,’ he said. `Everyone into the garage.’
I suddenly felt very cold inside, as if I’d just had a freezing bucket of water thrown over me.
* * * *
I’d seen the footage. I’d watched enough television, read enough social theory. I knew about weird cults and anomie, I knew about the Jonestown suicides, and the poor self-castrating Heaven’s Gate loons and the Waco Dravidians and the Jihad suiciders. And I’d listened to Hugh going on about how stupid and gullible they all were. Of course, I agreed with him, although sometimes I wondered why he was so obsessed. I mean, aside from the terrorists what’s it matter to us if some lunatic decides that he is going to lead his chosen Darwin Award flock into paradise? Why should we care if they get so worked up that they gulp down the poison while yodeling to their gods? Presto, they’re reborn in a new world. Except that when you see the footage, when you see all the dead disciples lying round the poison tubs with their Styrofoam beakers of funny cordial all spilled on the ground, you know they haven’t gone to some better place, they haven’t gone to another planet. They’re dead because the head maniac has induced a disgusting mass hysteria. They are dead because they were foolish enough to allow themselves to be brainwashed to the point where their brains weren’t just stripped of any sensible thoughts but rinsed and spun dried and hung out in the sun. Any fool knows this, I knew it, certainly Grace did. So why did Hugh get so obsessed by these post-millenarian cults? And what was this crap about quitting the world? Because, quite frankly, I was no millenarian disciple, I was Natalie D’Anzso and sure as shit wasn’t quitting this world just because the television screen showed a few horror pictures of a flu epidemic in the Philippines.
I looked across at Hugh, my skin chilly. He was very serious. He was talking earnestly, rationally, reasonably. And I don’t trust serious, rational, reasonable people. I don’t trust them at all. Even my own father. I trust people who smile and tell jokes (which my father did too, quite a lot of the time, when he was being the Good Father instead of the Remote and Scary Bad Father). I trust people who take the world and its flu epidemics and its pathological fear of salt with, like, a grain or two of salt.
This time it was the Bad Father, and it scared me badly. He just said flatly, `All right, everybody can bring one item of a personal nature. A photograph, or a soft toy, or a favorite book. But there’s no need to drag the whole house in. Everything we need for our journey has already been loaded.’
`Loaded where?’ I said, staying put in my chair, not budging a muscle. `We haven’t got a car. You sold it, remember? There’s nothing in the garage.’
`Don’t argue, Nat,’ Hugh said. `We are leaving now. Everybody into the garage.’
Look, this is my own father we are talking about. My own flesh and blood. But I swear, I had this vision: four shotgun blasts and we were all in cultist lunatic heaven. And heaven help the poor cops and paramedics this time, called by the shocked Mahoneys, who would break down the garage door and cart away our earthly remains. I said as quietly and as reasonably as I could, `It’s okay, Hugh, we don’t have to leave right now. Tomorrow will do. The epidemic is still in the Philippines. Even with exponential growth it’s not going to arrive here tonight.’
`I said not to argue, Nat. Everyone into the garage, now.’
I looked at Grace. I thought, Maybe she’ll be able to stop Hugh from marching us all to our doom in the empty garage. But Mom didn’t say a word. You could sense that she knew it was impossible to argue with him. She wasn’t saying anything wry about not being morbid or not talking about the end of the world in front of the children. Without a word of dissent, she got quietly to her feet, gave Hugh another look I couldn’t read, nodded again, and returned to the kitchen, where to my total disbelief it sounded as if she had decided to empty out the fridge and give it a good Spring-clean. In the middle of winter.
Time to make a run for it. Once I was out of the house and into the night, there’d be no catching me. But I wasn’t going to run away alone, I wasn’t leaving without my sister. I tried to catch Suzanna’s eye, but Suzanna was oblivious to what was going on. She’d decided to switch the TV back on, clearly determined to see the Broncos’ clash. She knew better than to try to grab the remote out of Hugh’s hand, so she stood up and went to the set and started fiddling with the switches. The sports report came on. Hugh didn’t say anything. He walked up behind Suzanna and put his arms round her waist and picked her up as if she were a seven-year-old, not a decade older, and started carrying her in the direction of the door that leads out into the garden, near the garage. Suzanna yelled and said, `Put me down, Hugh, you big oaf.’ But she said it in fun. She giggled. She had no idea what was happening.
I watched my sister being carted off. Grace came back in with a huge picnic basket full of what looked like most of the food from the fridge—assorted cheeses and a couple of dark green crinkly mignonette lettuces in plastic clingwrap, and Lebanese cucumbers and the half chicken left over from the night before and a whole frozen chicken from the freezer section, and a huge ham-bone, and some tomatoes, and heaven knows what else under all that. She followed Hugh and Suzie out into the back yard.
`Mom!’ I yelled. I was numb. The air had congealed. It was as if she didn’t hear me. I stood there with my mouth open, terrified. The end of the sports news was still muttering on the television, something about the Broncos having licked the Green Jocks or some crap. I heard the door to the garage opening. I swung round, unable to make up my mind, to grasp what was going on. The front door and the safety of the night were ahead of me, and my mad, dangerous father behind. (Or was he mad and dangerous? You can’t suddenly decide your sober middle-aged father’s turned into a secret axe-murderer, can you? But some fathers do.) I couldn’t move, couldn’t make my get-away, couldn’t leave Suzanna. I couldn’t leave Mom. And the funny thing was—though it didn’t seem funny at all—I couldn’t leave Hugh. I turned again and walked out of the empty house after them to the garage.
Ferdinand almost knocked me over, rushing from the back of the yard where he’d been posted in his secret sentry duty patrolling the movements of the calico cat.
`Oh, you hairy fool,’ I yelled, and crouched down to hug him wildly against my chest. His long salt-and-pepper hairs stuck to my shirt, and he panted with delight. I looked into his brown eyes with tears in my own, and saw a brief horrid future flash of the poor beast whining over our stiff, dead bodies in the darkness of the garage. Ferdy barked right in my ear then, nearly deafening me, and gave me a huge slurpy loving lick up the right side of face and in my eye. I couldn’t help laughing, jerking back and swiping at my face with my sleeve, and Hugh called out in quite a sane, friendly voice, `Nat, will you please round up that damned cat-chewing pest and bring him in here pronto. Time for us all to get a move on.’