“I didn’t complain.”
“I don’t see you walking any farther, either.” Bay dropped her knapsack and untied a sleeping bag from the bottom.
“I don’t suppose you have two?”
Bay gave Gabby her most withering look. What kind of fool set out on this walk sick and unprepared? Then again, she had been the one who had driven the woman out, too afraid to interact with an actual person instead of the ghosts in her head.
“We’ll both fit,” she said. “Body heat’ll keep us warm, too.”
It was warmer than if they hadn’t shared, lying back to back squeezed into the sleeping bag. Not as warm as home, if she hadn’t set out to follow. The cold still seeped into her. Bay felt every inch of her left side, as if the bones themselves were in contact with the ground. Aware, too, of her back against the other woman, of the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she had come in physical contact with a living person. The heat of Gabby’s fever burned through the layers of clothing, but she still shivered.
“Why are you living out there all alone?” Gabby asked.
Bay considered pretending she was asleep, but then she wanted to answer. “I said already we used to picnic out here, my wife and I. We always said this was where we’d spend our old age. I’d get a job as a ranger, we’d live out our days in the ranger’s cabin. I pictured having electricity, mind.”
She paused. She felt the tension in the other woman’s back as she suppressed a cough. “Debra was in California on a business trip when everything started going bad at a faster rate than it’d been going bad before. We never even found out what it was that messed up the electronics. Things just stopped working. We’d been living in a high-rise. I couldn’t stay in our building with no heat or water, but we couldn’t contact each other, and I wanted to be someplace Debra would find me. So when I didn’t hear from her for three months, I packed what I thought I might need into some kid’s wagon I found in the lobby and started walking. I knew she’d know to find me out here if she could.”
“How bad was it? The cities? We were already on the ship.”
“I can only speak for the one I was living in, but it wasn’t like those scare movies where everyone turns on one another. People helped each other. We got some electricity up and running again in a couple weeks’ time, on a much smaller scale. If anything, I’d say we had more community than we’d ever had. But it didn’t feel right for me. I didn’t want other people; I wanted Deb.”
“They told us people were rioting and looting. Breaking into mansions, moving dozens of people in.”
“Would you blame them? Your passengers redirected all the gas to their ships and abandoned perfectly good houses. But again, I can only speak to what I saw, which was folks figuring out the new order and making it work as best they could.”
Gabby stayed silent for a while, and Bay started to drift. Then one more question. “Did Debra ever find you? I mean I’m guessing no, but . . .”
“No. Now let me sleep.”
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: You know what happened. There is no you anymore. No reality television, no celebrity gossip, no music industry. Only an echo playing itself out on the ships and in the heads of those of us who can’t quite let it go.
Bay was already out of the sleeping bag when I woke. She sat on a rock playing a simple fingerpicking pattern on her guitar.
“I thought you didn’t play,” I called to her.
“Never said that. Said I’m a lousy singer, but didn’t say anything about playing the guitar. We should get moving. I’d rather get to the city earlier than late.”
I stood up and stretched, letting the sleeping bag pool around my feet. The sun had only just risen, low and red. I could hear water lapping on both sides now, beyond a thick growth of brush. I coughed so deep it bent me in two.
“Why are you in a hurry?” I asked when I could speak.
She gave me a look that probably could have killed me at closer range. “Because I didn’t bring enough food to feed both of us for much longer, and you didn’t bring any. Because I haven’t been there in years, and I don’t know if they shoot strangers who ride in at night.”
“Oh.” There wasn’t much to say to that, but I tried anyway. “So basically you’re putting yourself in danger because I put myself in danger because you made me think I was in danger.”
“You put yourself in danger in the first place by jumping off your damn boat.”
True. I sat back down on the sleeping bag and inspected my foot. The blister looked awful. I nearly wept as I packed vest-stuffing around it.
I stood again to indicate my readiness, and she walked back over. She handed me the guitar, then shook out the sleeping bag, rolled it, and tied it to her pack. She produced two vaguely edible-looking sticks from somewhere on her person. I took the one offered to me.
I sniffed it. “Fish jerky?”
She nodded.
“I really would’ve starved out here on my own.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thank you. I mean it. I’d never have guessed I’d have to walk so long without finding anything to eat.”
“There’s plenty to eat, but you don’t know where to look. You could fish if you had gear. You might find another crab. And there are bugs. Berries and plants, too, in better seasons, if you knew what to look for.”
As we walked she meandered off the road to show me what was edible. Cattail roots, watercress. Neither tasted fantastic raw, but chewing took time and gave an excuse to walk slower.
“I’m guessing you were a city kid?” she asked.
“Yeah. Grew up in Detroit. Ran away when I was sixteen to Pittsburgh because everyone else ran away to New York. Put together a decent band, got noticed. When you’re a good bass player, people take you out. I’d release an album with my band, tour that, then tour with Gaga or Trillium or some flavor of the month.”
I realized that was more than she had asked for, but she hadn’t told me to shut up yet, so I kept going. “The funny thing about being on a ship with all those celebrities and debutantes is how much attention they need. They throw parties or they stage big collapses and recoveries. They produce documentaries about themselves, upload to the ship entertainment systems. They act as audience for each other, taking turns with their dramas.
“I thought they’d treat me as a peer, but then I realized I was just a hired gun and they all thought they were bigger deals than me. There were a few other entertainers who realized the same thing and dropped down to the working decks to teach rich kids to dance or sing or whatever. I hung on to the idea longer than most that my music still meant something. I still kinda hope so.”
A coughing spell turned me inside out.
“That’s why you took my guitar?” Bay asked when I stopped gagging.
“Yeah. They must still need music out here, right?”
“I’d like to think so.”
I had something else to say, but a change in the landscape up ahead distracted me. Two white towers jutted into the sky, one vertical, the other at a deep curve. “That’s a weird-looking bridge.”
Bay picked up her pace. I limped after her. As we got closer, I saw the bridge wasn’t purposefully skewed. The tower on the near end still stood, but the road between the two had crumbled into the water. Heavy cables trailed from the far tower like hair. We walked to the edge, looked down at the concrete bergs below us, then out at the long gap to the other side. Bay sat down, her feet dangling over the edge.
I tried to keep things light. “I didn’t realize we were on an island.”
“Your grasp of geography hasn’t proven to be outstanding.”
“How long do you think it’s been out?”
“How the hell should I know?” she snapped.
I left her to herself and went exploring. When
I returned, the tears that smudged her face looked dry.
“It must’ve been one of the hurricanes. I haven’t been out here in years.” Her tone was dry and impersonal again. “Just goes to show, sooner or later everything falls into the sea.”
“She didn’t give up on you,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No.”
I was quiet a minute. Tried to see it all from her eyes. “Anyway, I walked around. You can climb down the embankment. It doesn’t look like there’s much current. Maybe a mile’s swim?”
She looked up at me. “A mile’s swim, in clothes, in winter, with a guitar. Then we still have to walk the rest of the way, dripping wet. You’re joking.”
“I’m not joking. I’m only trying to help.”
“There’s no way. Not now. Maybe when the water and the air are both warmer.”
She was probably right. She’d been right about everything else. I sat down next to her and looked at the twisted tower. I tried to imagine what Detroit or Pittsburgh was like now, if they were all twisted towers and broken bridges, or if newer, better communities had grown, like the one Bay had left.
“I’ve got a boat,” I said. “There’s no fuel, but you have an oar on your wall. We can line it full of snacks when the weather is better, and come around the coast instead of over land.”
“If I don’t kill you before then. You talk an awful lot.”
“But I can play decent guitar,” I said. “And I found a crab once, so I’m not entirely useless.”
“Not entirely,” she said.
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: I was nearly lost, out on the ocean, but somebody rescued me. It’s a different life, a smaller life. I’m writing again. People seem to like my new stuff.
Bay took a while getting to her feet. She slung her bag over her shoulder, and waited while Gabby picked up Deb’s guitar. She played as they walked back toward Bay’s cottage, some little riff Bay didn’t recognize. Bay made up her own words to it in her head, about how sooner or later everything falls into the sea, but some things crawl back out again and turn into something new.
— The Low Hum of Her —
Father built me a new grandmother when the real one died. “She’s not a replacement,” he said, as if anything could be. This one was made of clay and metal all run through with wires to conduct electricity, which Father said made her a lot like us. At her center, where we have hearts and guts, she had a brass birdcage. I don’t know how he made her face look right. He put my real Bubbe’s clothing on her, and wrapped one of my real Bubbe’s headscarves around her iron-gray hair, and put Bubbe’s identification papers into her skirt pocket, and told me to call her Bubbe.
“Does it cook?” I asked him. “Does it bake, or sing?”
“She can,” said Father. “Those are exactly the things she can do. You just have to teach her. She can look after you and keep you company when I’m working.”
“I won’t call it Bubbe.”
“Call her what you like. Maybe you can say ‘the new Bubbe’ and ‘she’ when you’re around me, though. I worked hard to make her for you.”
He had spent months at his workbench. Long evenings after days spent teaching, and then long days after he was no longer allowed to work at the university. I had heard him cry sometimes, when he thought I was asleep. “She,” I repeated, eyeing the machine.
That night, it offered help as I prepared beets for soup.
“Just stand in the corner and watch,” I said. “You don’t know how.”
It followed my instructions. I stained the kitchen red with my messy chopping while it stood in the corner. How strange to see something that looked so much like Bubbe lurking in the dark corner where Bubbe never would have been found. “Too much to do,” she would have said. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” Now she was dead, and her absence was an ache in my chest.
The fake Bubbe was quiet for a while, then spoke again. “Teach me the songs you’re singing, Tatiana. We can sing together while you cook.”
I hushed it and sang the old songs softly to myself, imitating my grandmother’s quavering soprano. There was no “we,” I told myself. There was Father and there was me and there was the hole that Bubbe had left. No machine could replace her, even one that looked and sounded like her. It didn’t even know to call me my nickname, Tania. Or perhaps Father told it that would be too familiar.
I had started a notebook of recipes and songs back before my real Bubbe took ill. She hated that notebook. She said I should remember with my hands and heart and not leave a book to do the remembering for me. Each night after she was gone, I flipped through the pages and chose something to make, trying to re-create her recipes precisely. I made new notes to myself when the recipes went wrong, trying to recapture the little details that hadn’t made it to the page. On the page for challah, my original transcription said “knead.” “Use your back to knead,” I remembered Bubbe saying when she first showed me how. “Your hands will get tired without the help of your back.” She threw her whole body into the effort. Her whole front was coated in flour by the end. “Bosoms,” she sighed in false despair, dusting herself off.
I wrote “use back” next to “knead.” Still, the dough never worked out as well for me as it had for her. The other recipes were the same way. My father ate each meal without complaint, but I longed to make us something that tasted as good as my grandmother’s cooking. I tried and tried, with the new Bubbe looking on from her corner.
And then Father came rushing home early one afternoon. “Tania, we must leave the house now as if we are going for an afternoon stroll. We can take only what we can fit into Bubbe.” I started to correct him, to say “new Bubbe,” but something in his tone silenced me.
The new Bubbe unbuttoned its blouse and opened the birdcage for us. For the first time, I understood what it was for. Father filled it with what little gold we had: my real Bubbe’s rings and necklaces and the shabbos candlesticks, all wrapped in headscarves so they wouldn’t rattle. Father’s prayer book. I put in the picture of my parents at their wedding, and a portrait of Bubbe with the grandfather I never knew, and my book of songs and recipes.
I saw my father glance back, just once, and I looked back too. The house looked sad. The eaves drooped and the window boxes sagged empty. Father had been too busy to fix the eaves, and I had not known when to plant seeds for spring flowers. Bubbe had always done that. What if my memories of my mother and grandmother were so tied to that house that they stayed behind? I whispered one of Bubbe’s songs under my breath, to show the memories they could come with us.
We walked away. The trees still had more flowers than leaves, but rain the night before had driven some of the petals to the ground. The petals were soft underfoot and muted our footsteps on the cobblestones. The streets smelled like lilacs and rain and I listened for screams and jackboots that I never heard and the three of us strolled down to the river and along its bank as if there were no hurry in the world. We walked away from home, just like that, just kept walking with nothing but the valuables that traveled inside the cage of the new Bubbe’s chest.
One of Father’s friends met us outside the city as evening fell. He gave us black bread and cheese and drove us through the night. We stopped once to show papers. A soldier shined a light into the car and looked at our documents while another held a rifle at the ready. They opened all of the doors and the boot of the automobile.
“Where are you going, Grandmother?” the one soldier asked the new Bubbe. I held my breath.
“My son, he has all the answers,” she said. It was something Bubbe had always said. I didn’t even know this one knew how to say it. I didn’t hear Father’s explanation for our travel over the pounding of my heart. The light lingered in our faces another moment, then went out.
“No bags,” said the one soldier to the ot
her. They raised the gate to let us through.
We drove on. I wished Father had sat in the backseat with me, to stroke my hair and reassure me. Instead, the new Bubbe reached for my hand in the darkness of the car; for the first time, I let it. I fell asleep on its lap listening to the low hum of it and pretending it was a lullaby.
Father’s friend left us in a strange city in the morning. There, Father purchased a small trunk and a suitcase and clothing for us, then tickets aboard a steamship for the following day. He only bought two tickets. I watched from our hotel room’s single sagging bed as he dismantled the new Bubbe.
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said to it. It shrugged and sighed a very Bubbe-like sigh, weighted with suffering and understanding. I shivered when the light went out of its eyes.
“Why didn’t you just buy it—her—a ticket?” I asked.
“There will be closer quarters on the next part of our journey, Tania, and inspections. She can fool anyone who is not expecting a person to be something other than a person, but she would not pass a medical examination.”
He separated it into several parts, tying and braiding wires back in on themselves in neat bundles. I averted my gaze when he took its face. He left the torso intact, like a dressmaker’s form, with its birdcage core and all of our valuables hidden within. Disassembled, she fit into the small trunk he had purchased that afternoon.
At the docks, we were assigned numbers and a group. We descended a steep staircase to the steerage compartment, pushed and prodded the whole way like cattle. Father needed both hands for the trunk that contained the new Bubbe, so I gripped his coat with one hand and the suitcase with the other, trying not to get separated from him in the crush of people. Two more levels down we found the family quarters, where we were permitted to claim two iron bunks and the narrow gap between them.
That night, Father placed the trunk at the foot of his straw mattress. He slept curled up like a baby in the space that remained. I tried not to think about the collection of parts in the trunk, which had once seemed so close to alive. Life was a fragile thing. I had seen my grandmother’s body after her passing, but I was not there to witness the light leaving her eyes.
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea Page 6
