by Lucy Corin
They’d eaten cheese sandwiches for dinner, in his parents’ room, a picnic on the comforter. They thought about ordering pizza, but no one wanted to go wait at the end of the driveway. His mother cried for a while. “Your whole generation is shot,” she said to Patrick, and then tried to take it back. Patrick cried a little, too, at this idea of being part of a generation, but also because his mother was crying. She’d taken her suit jacket off and had her bathrobe on over her blouse and trousers. She fell asleep like that, among them. He wanted to talk it all through with Arbuckle, but because Arbuckle’s family resists technology as harmful, they have only one telephone and one telephone line. When Patrick called, Arbuckle said they weren’t allowed to tie it up. He said they had people in California.
Now, in bed, Patrick’s reading a superhero comic, one from years ago when he used to read them all the time. In this one, the main superhero girl is losing control of her powers, they’re just getting way out of hand. She’s hovering in space about to destroy an entire planet and she can’t stop herself. The bulb in his tiny lamp is flickering and then, just as she’s sure her head will explode, a soft beam of light slides in and out of his window and he hears a far-off impact. He gets to his knees and looks out the window. Far across the yard and up at the road at the end of the driveway there’s a streetlamp, and the lamp shines a diffuse oval on the ground. The black road and the snow divide the lit space. There’s a car in the light, crossing the line. Patrick gets his glasses from the night table and then he can see that the car has crashed into the mailbox. The silver mailbox itself is in the yard, shining in the car’s headlights, and the headlights stretch toward the house like the antennae of a bug from another world.
He listens for his father or mother to respond in some way, but they don’t. He puts on his slippers and pulls a big wool sweater on over the pajamas and sweatshirt he’s been wearing to bed every night. Then he trots across the landing and peeks into his parents’ room. His mother is there, still asleep. He trots upstairs far enough to hear the television still going, a newsperson interviewing a rescuer just off his shift, the sound of the fire like static behind their voices.
At the kitchen door he takes his father’s overboots and clasps the clasps over his slippers and the legs of his pajamas. He puts on a hat, a brown one with earflaps and strings, as if you’d ever tie them under your chin. He takes a flashlight from the utility closet and stuffs a pair of gloves into his waistband, but as soon as he steps outside, the cold smacks him hard enough that he puts them on. The driveway is densely iced so he jogs at the edge, where at least there are crumbled pieces for traction, but still he slips twice, catching himself on the snow bank. Even before he recognizes the car, he recognizes the fuzzy cloud of hair over the steering wheel. He’s worried for a second that he’s about to encounter something he’s not prepared for, something that could change his life. If her face is gone, he thinks, if I lift her hair and she has no face.…
But Sara raises her head and her face is intact, puffy though. She watches him approach and opens the car door as he nears. She shifts in her seat, putting her feet on the snow. He doesn’t come all the way up to her. She’s still older, she’s still a senior, and even though he’s feeling a softness toward her, part of him knows it’ll be short-lived because she is, after all, okay.
“So, you’re okay?” he says.
“Do you think it’ll go?”
He crunches a few steps around to the front of the car and there’s a place in its nose that’s pretty smushed. Still, the hood is down and intact, and although the bumper is twisted and part of it’s come undone, it’s not blocking anything that he can see. Part of the post that held the mailbox is sort of impaling it, between the body and the bumper, coming up across the radiator grille, which is bent back to accommodate it. If the post doesn’t hold to the ground, though, he thinks the car ought to go.
“Want me to try to back it out?”
“It’s my car, Patrick.” It’s a rebuke, and he almost snaps back at her, something about leaving his warm bed, but when he looks at her through the windshield the expression on her face stops him, and he watches her hear herself, and change her mind. Then she says, “Why don’t you get in? If we can get it going, I’ll show you something.”
He gets in. The car backs out pretty much immediately. He pulls the brake and then gets out and looks with his flashlight. The mailbox post is still wedged up there, but when he looks under the car, the end of it hovers over the pavement maybe half a foot. He gets back in. “I think it’ll be okay,” he says. “But go slow.”
“Fuck it,” Sara says.
They go fast, but he’s not scared. Her face is lit by the green glow of the instrument panel and it strikes him what a baby face she has. It’s a little thrilling, the turn things have taken, driving away from the house in the night. If it was Arbuckle, he’d have some pot, but if it was Arbuckle, they wouldn’t have a car.
Patrick doesn’t remember it, but the way his family met Sara’s was that when they’d first moved into the house, back when Patrick was seven, Sara’s parents came over. “It was so nice,” Patrick’s mother said when she mentioned it to Patrick. This was around when he started middle school and was worried about all the kids he knew from elementary who wouldn’t be there, and all the kids he didn’t know who would. He’d asked what it was like when they first moved into the neighborhood, after his father finished his degrees and finally had a real salary. Sara and her family were minor characters in his mother’s story about fitting in—it was their first real place, she said, a place of their own, but his family had roots here and hers did not, so it was a little uneven-feeling at first. Sara’s parents came over when there were still boxes everywhere. Patrick had pictured a dumpy mom in a kind of summery dress with strawberries on it, and a gray father in a warped fedora, holding a casserole with silver potholders. His mother said, “When I saw them, I thought, what a nice neighborhood this must be. But then they gave us flyers from their church and it didn’t seem like they were just being nice anymore.” Still, after it turned out that Patrick’s mother represented her company when it was a client of Sara’s father’s department at his company, sometimes the couples paired up at social functions, and a few times when Patrick’s family had a party, Sara’s family came. Once, they set up a buffet in the living room and Patrick and Sara watched from the balcony. Sara got bored quickly, and took her book to the third-floor TV room. Patrick stayed watching. He was ten, maybe eleven. From above, the grown-ups really did look like aliens, in their shiny clothing. Their arms were coming right out of their heads, the little nubs of their feet poking out the edges of their pant legs.
“I was going to California,” says Sara. Her hair glows warmly around her face in the black-green light. “Not tonight—I’ll show you where I was going tonight. But the whole idea was to graduate and then get the fuck to California.”
“You know people there?”
“No,” she says, annoyed. “I mean yes, like I have aunts there, and they have progeny. But I was going besides that.” She shakes her head as if that will get rid of being annoyed, but then stops, and he thinks it must hurt from the crash. “I mean, I don’t care if those people are there. It’s such a big place. It never even mattered that they were there. I could just go, you know, oranges, sunshine. Better people. I was going to go there and change my life, and now it’s gone.”
“Are you an actress?” he says, instead of asking if these are real biological aunts she’s talking about, which is what he wants to know.
“Fuck no. Jesus, Patrick, don’t you have any imagination?”
He can’t believe she has the power to hurt him, but when she says this, she does. He hears static. Even though he plays soccer, Patrick primarily pegs himself as an imaginative person. He reads a lot of pulp sci-fi novels, but he also reads a lot of books on history, intellectual things. He thinks of himself as an imaginative person in a school full of unimaginative people. A town of them, too. A whole worl
d. But when Sara accuses him, he can see, for a second, like a door opening in a room so dark you never knew there was a door, how he has no imagination at all.
Sara makes a fairly wild turn and the car slides a bit before settling into a more controlled bumping across the icy gravel road. “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”
He waits for her to go ahead and tell him, but she doesn’t, so then he says, “Yes.” She raises and lowers her eyebrows, something he can’t really see but still manages to picture is happening. When she still doesn’t answer, he thinks quickly and then says, “No.”
It turns out it’s a cave, and Patrick will not forget it.
They’d parked the car. They brought his flashlight. They pushed through bare thorny bushes to a tractor path so deep in sealed snow it could be a frozen creek. They hardly broke through at all. Somewhere in their American history, Patrick’s family owned a lot of land, and he wondered if they might have owned these woods, these mountains. In the darkness the side of a mountain rose. As they walked, the mountain shifted from brush-covered and snow-buried mulch to stony walls and what actually was a frozen creek running along it. Sara took his arm, the one not holding the flashlight, pulled him down the embankment, and they crossed the frozen creek. It was cold, but with no wind, so not cold enough to hurt. When they came to the cave he hardly knew he was in it until she had him seated on a mound of pine needles.
He shines the flashlight around, and when the beam hits her eyes they flash yellow. He tells himself she’s a girl, not an animal, but he can’t help it—it’s a cave, she’s immersed in it, and her eyes flashed. He can’t tell what she’s doing—touching the walls, looking for something she left?
“Cool,” he says. “I didn’t know there were caves out here.” It’s a small enough space that it seems stupid to ask if they can make a fire, but he asks anyway. “I know, I know,” he says, laughing. “But it’s a cave. I had to ask.”
“No,” she says. He can hear her smiling. “We can have a fire.” She makes a fire right outside the opening, so the smoke has somewhere to go but they can still catch some heat. It’s amazing that she can, that in the middle of snow she can just shove around and gather enough branches. She uses a cigarette lighter from her pocket, and a twisted-up receipt. It was dry before it snowed, and now that the snow’s frozen, the twigs hiss and pop but get it going fine.
Again, he feels cozy. He can’t help it. California is burning, the fire gobbling Eureka, all that marijuana up in smoke, people and animals are dying, the air is poisoned, the ocean is boiling, fishes making for Hawaii as fast as their flippers will carry them, rock tops exploding from sea cliffs like missiles, and he feels cozy, trying to figure out if maybe he’s attracted to Sara. He knows the one about how people have sex in the last moments before the end of the world, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. Is that why he doesn’t feel like he ought to be having sex? She has that black car, and she built a fire for him, and they’re in a cave in the night in woods that suddenly feel like his own. Nice contained crackling little shadowcasting world. Her puffy face is so soft-looking and her hair comes out of her hat like clouds from behind a sun. She takes her hat off and shakes the hair. Patrick takes off his overboots and sits there on his pine needles in his slippers in the cave, feeling at home. He holds his hat in his lap and ties and unties the earflap strings.
It strikes him that he doesn’t have to go back, not if he doesn’t want to. Lately Arbuckle has been becoming a Marxist. When Patrick said, “So you want to kill millions of people and make everyone poor?” Arbuckle said, “Marxism is a critique of capitalism.” Then when Patrick asked his father about it, his father laughed. He said, “Tell Arbuckle to let me know when he comes up with a better system,” and when Patrick went back to Arbuckle with that, Arbuckle said, “Not to disrespect your dad, but you don’t have to have all the answers to think there’s a problem, you just have to think there might be a better way.”
In the cave Patrick thinks, But I like my home.
“How’s it been at your house?” he asks Sara. He’s shining his flashlight around the space, sweeping the light along the walls. There’s not much space to cover but still, it feels like what he’s doing is sweeping, covering the space in a methodical way, the way a scenting dog covers a field.
“Dad’s out of town. Mom worked late because everyone went home. She likes the office quiet. She said keep a list of who calls to say they’re okay.”
“Harsh,” Patrick says.
“I guess she’s upset but you’d never know it. She says work is therapeutic. And otherwise you let them win. She says, gotta put food on the table. I hate therapy.”
“Like you’re going to starve.”
“I know, really.” Then she says, “I don’t think just sitting here is moral.” She’s saying words off-hand, but he has never seen anyone so stripped as she seems to be right now. She’s phasing in and out as he moves the light. Her hair keeps reminding him of things. The Smog Monster, of course. Then with the hat it reminded him of fried eggs. Now it’s the most silent explosion in history.
He keeps moving the light from the flashlight along the walls. It’s hard to see past its dim concentric circles to the rock itself. It’s impossible to tell what color anything is. He thinks about how it feels in his bed in the dark, the house like a layer cake, like geographic time. He thinks about generation after generation. Sometimes his parents say “When this house is yours,” and sometimes they say “The world is your oyster,” or “When you leave the nest.” Meanwhile, beyond what Patrick will ever know, Sara’s having a fantasy. She’s running through a field of dry summer wheat with a guiding moon, holding a lantern high, near her head. Within the lantern’s light is only wheat, her head, her invisible pounding heart, but her mind is reaching. In her other hand, she’s carrying a message with a wax seal. It’s something she expects to have to eat once it’s delivered. She’s wearing a billowing white shirt and a leather vest that laces up the front. The fantasy takes place during the Revolutionary War. Or it’s a vision of the future.
At some point, Patrick realizes he’s been looking, all this time, sweeping the walls, for ancient drawings.
They stay in their round little cave and look at their little half-in, half-out fire. The harder they look at the fire, the closer it seems to get. At some point Sara notices that for one thing, she’s basically trapped them in the cave. If something came from behind, like a wild animal, they’d have to go through the fire to get out. But there’s nothing behind them except the back of the cave. Something would have to come to life from nothing in order to get them.
Two weeks and two days later California is kaput. It’s a heaving, flattened, blowing, billowing mass of ash and soot and toxicity. It’s Saturday morning, and Patrick’s parents are eating breakfast side by side in bed, kind of an ordeal because they had to go downstairs, make it, and then carry it up on trays. The cat and the terrier are off somewhere, hunting. Patrick comes in with a cup of coffee and sits in the walnut armchair between the door and their bed, sipping. He has a clear view of the room, the antiques that furnish it, his mother and father floating among comforters, the line of their sight that leads to the news. The television beams steadily from a converted armoire with shutters poised like wings to contain it. Televisions should be popping and fizzling out all over town, but they are inexhaustible.
Sara’s gone. After the cave, Patrick had felt bright and awake but she was sleepy so he drove the black car. He had never driven a car with a sleeping person in it. Along the way, the post fell from its nose and rattled to the side of the road. At the top of his driveway, he stopped the car and had a few moments of looking at Sara. He touched her right where the edge of her sweater met her neck, to wake her up. Then they both got out, crossed paths wordlessly, and she took her place in the driver’s seat.
She yawned. She said, “The snow’s pink,” and then drove away.
A few days later her parents called his parents. Pa
trick listened on the TV room extension. Now it’s two weeks and she still hasn’t been back to school, just hijacked the disaster for him and disappeared. The parents think she’s gone looking for her real family. Her mother’s reported it to the police. She’s making posters. She said, “We tried to give her stability in this crazy world.”
Patrick keeps expecting the disappearance to show up on the news, but he can’t even remember if this is the kind of thing that would be news before California. He keeps having dreams they’re in the cave, that it’s the end of the world and he’s seducing her. He can’t help it. Things get pretty pornographic. Now, now, now, she says. Now, now. No. Now. Sometimes there are cave drawings on the wall of horses and buffalo, arrows flying, and sometimes the drawings come to life and trample them with delicate massaging hooves while they’re fucking. Why is it surprising, he wonders, that drawings made of outlines, drawings that are translucent, worn over thousands of years, have almost no weight? Why is he so sure they ought to be able to kill him?
He tried to talk everything through with Arbuckle at lunch on the tree stump at school, surrounded by old snow. Footprints were everywhere, even though there was no reason for anyone to go out in the field. He tried not to do what he’s seen boys like him do in movies, movies that he can’t tell if they’re about him or making fun of him. He didn’t say, “She was hot and I could of fucked her,” the way he would in one of those movies. He said, “She took me to a cave, and I felt like I was moving through time.”
Arbuckle said, “If she didn’t get kidnapped it’s irresponsible to take off like that.”
Patrick felt his insides grow taut, heat up. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “One thing about Sara, she’s deep.” He knows California doesn’t exist, but the way he imagines it, that’s still where she’s gone. He knows the coast is a soup of ash and mud from what’s left of the ocean, but he still thinks of her there, swooping over this primordial glop, as if to witness the emergence of something like a whole new planet, as if she could be the one creating whatever will become of it.
