by Lydia Millet
We didn’t get that, until, cramming, we came across it in the famous sayings of a dead Frenchman.
At times a parent would forget to eat for several meals running. Some of them let themselves get dirty and began to smell. Some floated in the pool on blow-up rafts for hours, even though it was cold outside, listening to music and speaking to nobody. One threw a tantrum and smashed her bathroom mirror with a crowbar.
We called a meeting.
“If this is where we’re going to stay, we have to whip it into shape,” said Rafe.
“Someone has got to get things organized,” said Jen. “It can’t go on like this.”
“And we can’t depend so much on the outside,” said Sukey. “Supplies from there are dwindling.”
“We’re going to need to take over,” said David.
WE TALKED ABOUT growing our own food, but winter was upon us so we discussed research Low and Rafe had been conducting on the how-tos of hydroponics. We decided the hot-tub building, with its glass walls and roof, could be repurposed. We talked about seeds, the availability of crop plants and grow lamps, the generators and the solar array. Whether David could figure out how to take us off the intermittently failing grid, with its brownouts and blackouts, and wire us up to be a closed system.
That was a tough brief, but he was cautiously optimistic. We talked about skills and divisions of labor.
One night, instead of playing the game, we called the parents to order.
“It’s come to our attention,” said Terry, who’d ordered new glasses and restored his grandiosity along with his vision, “that many of you are not doing so well. Let me be clear. What I mean is, psychologically.”
The parents shifted in their seats. Looks passed between them, less skeptical than guilty.
“It’s to be expected,” he said generously. “Much as we rely on you to sustain the needs of our material existence from a financial standpoint, so you, in turn, have relied on the sociocultural order. An order that, as we all know, has recently been egregiously disrupted.”
“Disrupted,” echoed a mother.
“Egregiously,” said Val.
“Nevertheless, your fitness to maintain order has been undermined,” said Terry. “So from now until the day when your collective is restored to its baseline competency level, we’d like to take on more responsibility. We’ve drawn up a plan for the property’s self-sufficiency, which is, of course, a work in progress. The situation and the availability of components are dynamic. We realize that. Your wealth will be of tremendous assistance, but resilience will be called for.”
“Resilience,” said Val.
She was standing behind Terry to one side, with her arms crossed. Seemed to relish the position.
“We’ve also drawn up a work schedule. In draft form currently, till we have all the information. You will continue to contribute, each in a manner appropriate to his or her abilities. Your contributions will be much appreciated. None is too small. You may be confident of that.”
“A palace coup,” muttered a father.
“Is Terry reading off cue cards?” asked someone in the back.
“We’re also passing out a survey. We’d like you to rank your skills, in order of proficiency. This will allow us to maximize efficient task allotment.”
“You’re just kids,” said a mother.
“But not mental defectives,” said Juicy.
“And seldom drunk,” said Rafe.
“Seldom,” said Val.
“Our vices are our own business,” said a father.
“Still, they have a point,” said a mother.
“You may review the schematics and the work plan,” said Terry. “Your feedback will be of special interest.”
“Very charitable of you,” said a father.
“Though it will not, of course, be treated as dispositive,” added Terry.
“What skills do you want us to list? I did a class in Japanese flower-arranging,” said a mother.
“Ikebana,” said Terry, unswayed by her cheekiness. “I’m familiar with it. Probably not a priority.”
So they took the plans under review. And the upshot was, they agreed.
Some fathers chafed, parading their superior knowledge in the realms of engineering or cash liquidity. We had to concede that not all of what they said was nonsense. We took their opinions under advisement, as Terry put it. Made modifications accordingly.
And then we started the projects.
A LONG TIME of industry followed. The parents were helpful, although they sometimes had to be encouraged. We used a bit of the carrot and a bit of the stick.
They tended to get tired as drinking and talking time rolled around, and there were instances when we had to withhold their libations until a job was completed (the stick). We weren’t punitive, only firm. Juicy stooped to mockery once or twice and had to be reined in. He also stopped spitting entirely, and though he’d never let himself be called Justin—the celebrity tie-ins were too embarrassing—he did start answering to Just.
At other moments we rewarded them with extra leisure or, in front of another parent, lavish praise (the carrot). They responded to both more or less equally, in terms of what they accomplished.
Even the bratty twins pitched in. In exchange for stale candy none of the rest of us wanted, they did menial jobs like diaper washing and folding.
Were we slave drivers? asked Jen at one point.
She sometimes worried about morality.
No, said David, because we worked so hard ourselves.
And it was for everyone’s benefit, said Rafe.
BY LATE WINTER all the vegetables we ate were coming from the hydroponic nursery and the indoor garden in the basement (which used to be the squash court). Fresh produce could no longer be ordered online—no refrigerated trucks were running, at least not for the average rich person in our neck of the woods—so we had to eat what we grew.
We didn’t have fruit, of course. We’d planted apple trees, but it’d be years before they were fruit-bearing: that planting was a Hail Mary. No citrus at all, and we missed our orange juice and lemonade. The parents missed their slices of lime.
And we had dry and canned goods, a trove far more extensive than the one in the silo. We had made sure of that.
When the day’s work was done we got into the habit of preparing dinner for everyone, with the help of some mothers whose highest-rated skills were cooking. We’d all sit around in the vast sunken living room of fake Italy, with its wall of glass that opened onto the patio and the pool. We held our plates on our laps, eating and talking about the things we missed. The peasant mother was allowed to recite a blessing. Nondenominational.
She’d turned out—just as Sukey had suggested, way back when—to be no one’s mother at all. All she had was the cat. But I still thought of her as the peasant one.
Then we’d go through our missings. That was what Jack called them. We figured it was healthy, for the parents especially, not to try to deny the fact of what had been lost but to acknowledge it.
Someone would mention a colleague or an ex, a grandparent or a bicycle or a neighborhood or a store. A beach or a town or a movie. Someone would say “ice cream” and someone else would say “ice-cream sandwiches, Neapolitan,” and we’d riff on it, go down a list of favorite ice-cream novelties that couldn’t be had anymore for love or money.
“Bars,” a parent would say, and they’d rhyme off the bars they’d been to, the dive bars, the Irish bars, the cantinas. The hotel bars, the bars with jukeboxes, the bars with pool tables or views of parks and rivers. The bars that revolved. The bars at the top of glittering skyscrapers far away. In the once-great cities of the world.
10
AFTER THE SYSTEMS were in place, and the parents’ tasks were complete save for basic daily upkeep, they were satisfied for a while. Proud of us all, of a job well done, for a brief period. We’d bought ourselves a good deal of time, and they knew it.
But soon enough they lapsed
into a form of depression, though many of them took a cocktail of antidepressants. The pills had never done much that we could see—no doubt their effects had been dulled by alcohol—and in any case the supply was running out.
We began to detect changes, subtle at first. You might call it weakness, but I’d say it was more like absence. Their personalities were fading.
As though, if you held the parents up to the light—if you could lift them easily, like paper—you’d be able to see right through them.
Unlike before, it wasn’t an attitude we could change. It wasn’t attitude at all. It was a mode of existence.
They stopped trying to entertain each other with so-called wit. They didn’t talk much or laugh, even when they were drinking. And they drank less and less, shocking us. They went to bed early and slept late, saying they liked their dreams.
The dreams were the best part, one of them said.
The only part, said another.
But often their sleep was troubled. Sometimes we saw one of them out in the garden at 2 or 3 a.m. in his or her pajamas, standing or sleepwalking.
Night terrors, said Sukey. She’d read about it. You couldn’t talk to them in that state.
We’d get up and throw clothes on and guide them back inside, for they never remembered to wear coats or boots and it could be below zero out there. They didn’t seem to feel the cold.
For them time had turned fluid. Before we started the projects, they’d skipped meals, as I mentioned—neglected themselves. Now there were no formal meals at all except the ones we forced on them. They stuck their hands into stale bags of chips, when it occurred to them, or jars of nuts left over from the time before scarcity. Or they might gnaw on a bean or raw potato, a mushroom from the mushroom cave in the nursery.
Low’s idea, and we were proud of that cave. Mushrooms grew in the dark. And they were nutritious.
Small children also suffered from night terrors, said Sukey. They also had a fluid sense of time. Maybe the parents were regressing.
She’d been studying up on how to raise babies. And toddlers. And five-year-olds.
No, they were just disappearing, said Rafe.
They were disappearing in plain sight.
WE CONDUCTED SOME interventions—tried to revive the game, and then board games and cards. Back in the day they used to love poker.
But they paid no attention. When they spoke, it was to tell us we could play our games without them.
“You don’t need us,” a mother said one evening, faint but certain.
Others nodded and went back to their dreaming.
We experimented with physical fitness, even using valuable electricity to put their old-time music on, dancing like fools to try to inspire them. It was humiliating, but we did it anyway. We figured maybe if they exercised, if they moved their bodies, life would return to them. We’d read that tip on out-of-date websites on the subject of emotional well-being.
We tried a drill-sergeant approach, forcing them to stand and walk in formation, but many of them got distracted and wandered off, then had to be corralled again.
We built an obstacle course and tried to push them through it. We injected false cheer.
We had bouts of hysteria, trying to rouse them from their lethargy. Days of exhaustion and embarrassment.
Our antics were ridiculous.
It did no good.
We felt a kind of desperation, then. For as much as we’d long felt harassed and condescended to by them, as much as we reviled them and all they’d failed to stand up for and against, we’d come to rely on their consistency.
For our whole lives, we’d been so used to them.
But they were slowly detaching.
ONE MORNING, WHEN we woke up, they were simply gone.
They’d left their phones, their wallets, all their personal belongings. They were nowhere on the property.
We combed the empty streets nearby, first on foot, then in the only car that still ran. The electric one.
We couldn’t find them.
VAL PICTURED THE parents climbing to the tops of the tall trees that grew along the garden’s edges, cedars and Lombardy poplars that were almost impossible to scale, even for her. She saw them perched on the pinnacles of those slender trees until a breeze swept in and carried them off.
Juice pictured them stepping onto the forbidden strip of ground between the fence and the wall, vaporized one by one.
Jen saw them getting into a stretch limo and being driven off to live in a colony all their own, without the burden of children. Or even the memory.
Low saw them ride away like shepherds on the steppes, atop dark horses that appeared from nowhere. And faded into nothing the farther from us they got.
Myself, I pictured them walking down the cascading steps of the pool, their fingertips tingling. Down, down, and down, to the narrow end of infinity.
WE KEPT THEIR names on the schedules for a while, performing their assigned chores for them. We kept their bedrooms how they’d left them, until gradually we began moving in.
We labeled their phones and billfolds and purses and locked them in a cabinet in Juice’s father’s study, for the phones and numbers and cards and cash might one day be needed.
For some time we expected them every day. Then weekly we’d consider them, talk about how they might act when they returned. The state they might be in, injured or hungry. Whether they’d be their old selves or the changed ones.
We waited for them to come back, but they never did.
“WHAT HAPPENS AT the end?” Jack asked me.
He was sick by then, but I was going to make sure he got better. Whenever I wasn’t at his bedside, I was researching symptoms and diagnoses. How to repurpose the medicines we had. Home remedies.
I wished the angels were still with us. Luca. And Mattie.
Or even the owner. Descending in her black chariot. Where was the owner when we needed her most?
Still I was dedicated. If it was the only fine thing I ever did, the single worthwhile thing, one day he’d be all right again.
“The end of what, Jack?”
“You know. The story. After the chaos time? It wasn’t in my book. But all books should have a real ending.”
“They should.”
“She said the real end wasn’t even in the kids’ version. She said it wasn’t nice. Too violent. She said that children couldn’t handle relevation.”
“I think she said Revelation.”
“So what happens after the end?”
“Let me think. Hold on a minute. I’m thinking.”
“Think better, Evie.”
“OK. Slowness, I bet. New kinds of animals evolve. Some other creatures come and live here, like we did. And all the old beautiful things will still be in the air. Invisible but there. Like, I don’t know. An expectation that sort of hovers. Even when we’re all gone.”
“But we won’t be there to see them. We won’t be here. It hurts not to know. We won’t be here to see!”
He was agitated.
I held his hot hand.
“Others will, honey. Think of them. Maybe the ants. The trees and plants. Maybe the flowers will be our eyes.”
“Flowers don’t have eyes. That’s like something Darla would say. It’s not science, Evie.”
“You’re right. It’s more like art. Poetry. But it still comes from what they used to call God, doesn’t it?”
“What they used to call God,” he murmured.
He was happiest when I was there talking to him, but he was getting so tired in those days. So very tired.
“You had it in your notebook, right? You wrote it down yourself, didn’t you.”
“I wrote it down.”
“I think you solved it, Jack. In your notebook. Jesus was science. Knowing stuff. Right? And the Holy Ghost was all the things that people make. You remember? Your diagram said making stuff.”
“Yes. It did.”
“So maybe art is the Holy Ghost. Maybe art is
the ghost in the machine.”
“Art is the ghost.”
“The comets and the stars will be our eyes,” I told him.
And I went on. The clouds the moon. The dirt the rocks the water and the wind. We call that hope, you see.
Acknowledgments
Deepest thanks to Maria Massie, my agent, and Jenny Offill, my reader. And to Aaron Young, for all the dinners he made for my children while I was writing. I’m very grateful to Tom Mayer and Elizabeth Riley, my best friends at W. W. Norton, and everyone else at Norton who helped with this book: Nneoma Amadi-Obi, Julia Reidhead, Brendan Curry, Nomi Victor, Julia Druskin, Don Rifkin, Ingsu Liu, Alexa Pugh, Steve Colca, Meredith McGinnis, Beth Steidle, and Steven Pace and his team, especially Karen Rice, Sharon Gamboa, Golda Rademacher, and Meg Sherman. Finally, thank you to David High for a beautiful cover.
ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET
Fight No More
Sweet Lamb of Heaven
Mermaids in Paradise
Magnificence
Ghost Lights
How the Dead Dream
Love in Infant Monkeys
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Everyone’s Pretty
My Happy Life
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
Omnivores
FOR YOUNG READERS
Pills and Starships
The Shimmers in the Night
The Fires Beneath the Sea
The Bodies of the Ancients
A Children’s Bible is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Lydia Millet
All rights reserved
First Edition
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