World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  “The plague. The illness astride the land.” His face darkens further. He hates his lie. It eats at him, I can see it. “I gathered my people to me and I told them that the situation was severe and that we must remain isolated, even from our friends and from our church. And I said it will be a hard time, but we have God and with God’s grace we will survive.”

  And on he goes, off and running, a steady stream of low syllables. As if now that he’s given himself leave to tell me some part of his story he feels compelled to tell all of it. As if part of him has been waiting lo these many months for someone to tell this story to, someone to share the burden of his accomplishments. He has been on a desert island alone with his desperate act of conscience, wrestling with his awful decision and the work it has required of him, in exile in his own home, alone through the hard months. The only people he has had to speak with don’t speak English.

  He recounts gathering his people all around the family table, asking for and receiving solemn promises from everyone, from the eldest to the very young, to remain within the safety of their own land until the sickness should pass. He describes how God provided him assistance, in the form of a ragged starving troop of CIs, who had made it somehow from their Asian homelands to Newfoundland, and from Newfoundland down to this pocket of midwestern America. They understood each other well enough to make arrangements, a trade—Atlee provides shelter in tents and lean-tos in a barren field on the far side of State Road 4, and in exchange they provide labor and loyalty and discretion. They work under him, they share in the spoils, they walk the perimeter of Joy Farms at night, unseen guardians.

  It is a precarious arrangement. He knows that. Eventually, one of his children or one of his children’s children will break the promise, wander off the farm and discover the truth. Or someone from the outside world, a burglar or a madman or a refugee, will smash through the fencing into the private world.

  “It cannot last forever,” Atlee says. “But it does not have to. Just a few more days.”

  We’re getting close now, close to that bend in the road. The sun is halfway along its slow tumble down from noon to night, another day being burned down, sloughed away.

  “These are hard times, sir,” I say. “We’ve all had to make hard choices. God will forgive you.”

  He stares hard at the ground for a cold second and when he looks up I am expecting anger—how dare I speak for God, how can I?—but instead he is crying, his old lined face dissolved into childlike grief. And he says in a hollow voice, “Do you think so?” Steps toward me and grabs at my shirt front. “Do you think that it’s true?”

  “Yes,” I say, “of course,” and he envelops me in his grip and weeps into my shoulder. I don’t know how to handle this, I really don’t.

  “Because I feel that it must be true, that God meant for it to be me. I was at the Weavers’ before church, but it might have been one of the children at the school. It might have been one of the little ones who came back from town with this awful information. But it fell to me, to know, because I was the one who could keep them from it, to keep them in grace.”

  He pulls away from me, looks urgently into my eyes. “You understand that we don’t drive automobiles because they might bring us closer to sin. No cars, no computers, no phones. Distractions from the faith! But this thing—this thing that comes across the sky. It would have happened like that.” He snaps his fingers. “We would have fallen into grief, and from grief into sin. All of us. All of them.”

  He shakes his pitchfork back toward the farmhouse, his family, his charge.

  “The danger to this world is not what matters, do you see that? Do you see? This world is temporary—it has always been temporary.” He is reaching some sort of pitch, shaking with righteousness and pain. “God meant for me to protect them. For all the sin to be my sin. Don’t you see that He meant it for me?” Again, with fervor: “Don’t you think that’s what He meant?”

  He is not speaking rhetorically, he needs an answer, and I bite back my first impulse, which is to say I have no idea what God meant, any more than you do, and then to go on, to point out the narcissism skulking in the shadows of his revelation, in this performance of humility: I did what I did because I am burdened with understanding the intentions of the unseen hand.

  I don’t say any of this. There would be no reason to do so, from the perspective of my ongoing investigation, no reason to upset the apple cart of this man’s intricate belief system, to pull away at the world that he has built. I step closer and pat him on the back, sort of, feeling nothing through my bandaged hand and the rough thickness of his broadcloth coat. I wait for my galloping mind to find the smart thing to say. We’ve come now to the bend in the road, and it is the old man’s intention now that I continue on, and if I do I leave behind my last chance of finding her, of laying eyes on Nico before the end.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” he says. “I am sorry.” His affect has changed again, he is chastened now, becalmed, tilting his head down toward the dirt. “You would not go, you wouldn’t leave, and I felt I had no other choice.”

  “It’s all right.” I take his hands. I hold them between my own. “I was safe all along. I was not in danger.”

  Miller wipes his eyes with his big knuckles, pulls himself up to full height. “What do you mean?”

  I feel, deep down beneath my injuries and exhaustion, a quicksilver glinting of joy. I’ve got him. I push it. I keep going. “I was meant to escape from that barn. God wanted me to have your help in finding my sister. I have traveled the country cloaked in his protection. I was never in danger.”

  He looks down for a moment, closes his eyes and murmurs. More prayer. So much prayer. Then he looks up at me. “Do you have a picture of her?”

  * * *

  She was there. In Rotary, at the police station. This was four days ago. Wednesday, September 26; Wednesday, the day before Cortez and I arrived. My stomach tightens. I need to know he’s sure of the date, and he is, Mr. Miller has been keeping careful track of the time—careful track of each of his odd-job employments and the goods he receives for them—careful track of everything. He remembers the work at the Rotary PD, and he recognizes Nico’s face right away.

  I ask him to slow down. I ask him to start at the beginning. I take out my notebook and I tell him I need the whole day—would he mind going slowly and giving me the entire day?

  Atlee had gone out that morning as he goes out every day, leaving his people with their usual strict admonitions to remain on the property. In Pike, between here and Rotary, he met a young man with a long face and a nervous expression, who gave his name simply as “Tick.” The man promised him a crate of packaged meals in exchange for a small job of work at the Rotary police station.

  “What do you mean, packaged meals?”

  “Army food,” says Atlee. “He called it something.”

  “MREs?” I say.

  He nods. “That sounds right. Yes, MREs.”

  I write it down, army surplus rations … Army?… long-faced man, “Tick”?… and motion for him to go on. Atlee agreed to take the job and he and Tick traveled together to the Rotary station, arriving at approximately 2:30. He went alone because it was a simple job that Tick described: sealing a stairhead with a slab of concrete that had been custom-built for the purpose.

  When they got to Rotary, Tick told Atlee to wait, said it shouldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and Atlee said that sounded okay, although he wasn’t terribly pleased about standing around. He had other things he needed to be doing, there are always other things to do. But he waited, stood with crossed arms just inside the door of the police station, trying to stay out of the rain, and out of the way of a group of young men and women moving boxes and bags from the lawn down a flight of metal stairs into a basement.

  Besides Tick, Atlee communicated directly with only one of them, a man who appeared to be the leader: a short stocky man, older than the others, with bushy hair and dark brown eyes behind horn-rimmed gla
sses.

  “Did you get this man’s name?”

  “Astronaut.”

  “His name was Astronaut?”

  “I might guess it wasn’t. But that’s what they called him.”

  I write it down. Astronaut. Two circles around it and a question mark.

  This man Astronaut was quietly but unquestionably in charge, Atlee says, giving the orders and keeping the group on task as they rolled up sleeping bags and zipped up duffels, stacked boxes of food and jugs of water and tromped up and down the staircase. There were boxes, too, big square shipping crates that looked heavy, that had to be carried by two people moving slowly as they descended the steps.

  The contents of the boxes, Atlee doesn’t know. My mind flies out in all directions. A machine saw—guns, ammunition—fuel—computer equipment—building materials—

  I have arrived at the penultimate page of my slim blue notebook. I steady my hands. I am picturing these people: nervous, strange-looking Tick, Astronaut with the eyeglasses and the bushy hair. The kids, college-age kids like Nico, marching up and down the metal stairs like ants, hauling their food and their water and whatever was in those crates.

  Atlee guesses there were fourteen people in this group: eight women and six men. I ask him what they looked like and he shrugs and says “they looked like people,” and it occurs to me that it may be the same for Amish people looking at us as us at them: do we in our nonblack clothes and our ungodly accessories and haircuts, do we all look the same? I press him, though, get what details he recalls. There was a kid with bright blue sneakers, he remembers that, a tall kid, heavyset. One woman he remembers particularly, African American, unusually thin. I describe the sleeping girl, Lily, and he doesn’t remember seeing any Asian women, but he can’t say for sure. I describe Jordan, Nico’s pal from UNH. Just describing him brings up a boiling of anger in my gut; I picture him, sneering, a shape-shifter, hiding layers of secrets beneath sunglasses and a smirk.

  But Atlee doesn’t recognize the description; no one he recalls as particularly short, no one in sunglasses.

  But one person—one person he remembers distinctly. I still have the picture out—the ratty black T-shirt, stubborn expression, the studiedly unhip glasses—and I ask him to look again and he does, he looks again, nods again.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “This woman, she was in the group?”

  “I saw her,” says Atlee, “and I heard her speak.”

  After he had waited for over an hour for the group to be done with their packing and moving, Atlee was becoming increasingly impatient to do his job and be done with it. On the way there, he had noted a barn on Police Station Road, between the station and the town, and he was intending to stop there on his way home and sift it for what might be useful—animal feed, maybe, or tools, or propane. But now it was approaching four o’clock and his slowpoke clients were still moving their things up and down the stairs, and he was running out of daylight.

  So Atlee goes to ask Astronaut how much longer and finds him, in a hallway outside the garage, talking to a girl.

  “It was her,” he tells me, pointing to the picture. “Your girl.”

  They were speaking, Nico and Astronaut, in hushed voices, at the end of the long hallway that cuts through the police station. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and they were arguing.

  “Wait,” I manage. “Arguing about what?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How do you know it was an argument?”

  Atlee smiles slightly. “We are a gentle people. But I do know what an argument sounds like.”

  “What were they arguing about?” I can barely hear my own words, my heart is beating so loud; blood is rushing into my head like cold water in a cavern. I feel like I am there—coming upon them, huddled together in conversation in that narrow corridor. Was it already stained with blood, with two overlapping trails leading into and out of the kitchenette?

  “I cannot say what their subject was, but I could tell that the girl was the angrier of the two. Shaking her head. Poking the man in the chest, like this, with one finger. The man Astronaut, he says that the situation is what the situation is. The girl says, I disagree.”

  I let out a gasp of laughter. Atlee looks at me, perplexed. Of course she said that. That’s my sister, that’s Nico, stubbornly rejecting the most uncontroversial statement of plain truth—The situation is what the situation is. I disagree.—that’s Nico, up and down and all around the town. I can see her saying that. I can hear her. I’m so close to her right now. I feel so close.

  “And—okay. Okay, what else did they say?”

  Nothing, says Atlee, and shakes his head. “I cleared my throat so they would see me standing there. I had been told half an hour, and now had been waiting three times as long. The man apologized. He was very polite. Very soft in his manner. He asked if I could come back at five thirty. He assured me that by that time they would have completed their move down below, and the concrete piece would be waiting for me to shift into place.”

  “And that’s what happened?”

  “Yes. I went and searched that barn as I had intended, and returned at the appointed time.”

  “At half past five.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they were all gone and the concrete floor piece was waiting?”

  “Yes. Along with the food I had been promised. What you called them.”

  “MREs,” I say absently, and chew for a moment on my lip.

  “You didn’t pour the concrete?”

  “No,” he says. “It was built when I got there.”

  I don’t write any of this down, I have run out of paper, but I think I will remember. The timelines, the details. I’ll remember. “And so by five thirty all of them were gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “They had gone under?”

  “Well. I don’t know. But they were gone.”

  And that’s it, end of story, end of the day of September 26. Atlee and I stand together in thoughtful silence, leaning on a fence in the darkness at the far edge of Joy Farms.

  After a last moment of standing side by side, Atlee turns away from the fence and wordlessly hands me the one thing that was missing from my pockets, my department-issue pistol. He has no more information to give me, but there is one thing I still need. I describe my request and he readily accedes—tells me where I have to go and whom to talk to. He takes my notebook and writes on the back of it. I bend my head gratefully. I feel genuine sadness for this old man, the mantle he has laid on himself, the Herculean task of making believe that the world is still more or less what it has been. He has acted like a Secret Service agent leaping in slow motion, hurling himself in the path of the information.

  As I step at last off the fence and begin to say goodbye, Atlee Miller cuts me off, holds up his pitchfork at shoulder level.

  “You said, I think, that this girl is your sister.”

  “Yes.”

  He looks me over again, seeming to decide something. “The man, Astronaut. Mild, as I said. Polite. But on his belt, a workingman’s belt, he wore a long-barrel pistol, and a sawtooth buck knife, and a claw hammer.”

  Atlee’s expression is set and somber. A chill drifts down over me like snow.

  “He never took off the belt, never used it. But there it was. This is what I noticed about him, this man, the leader of this group,” he says. “A quiet man, but with one hand always on this belt.”

  * * *

  I see Houdini on my way out, still in that muddy spot he picked out behind the shed. Wallowing, practically inert, head tilted, asleep. A couple of the Amish kids are nearby, playing jacks on a patch of hard dirt. Houdini will like that, when he wakes up, he’ll like to hear them laughing. It happens the same way Atlee described it, in the crack of a moment—I don’t call to the dog. I don’t even get close enough to wake him. I move quietly past with my head down, looking back once and then moving on.


  It isn’t easy, because he’s a good dog and he has been good to me and I love him, but I leave him behind in this big green place that smells like animals and grass, among these people who will take care of him into a good old age, at least as far as either party knows.

  * * *

  “Wait, please.”

  A girl’s voice, just loud enough to be heard. I stop and turn around and there’s Ruthie, the one I caught cheating on the blessing, with the big blue eyes and the plaited strawberry blonde hair. One of the oldest of the giggling Amish girls, but she’s not giggling now. Grave-faced, cheeks flushed from running, her plain black dress dusty at the hem. She has caught me at the crook in the path, where the farm turns into the road. Staring at me, intent, her anxious fingers reaching for my sleeve.

  “Please. I have to ask you.” She glances once nervously back at the house. I almost say “Ask me what?” but it would just be buying time. I know exactly what she means as soon as she says it.

  The radio, up there in the barn. An innocent child alone in the moontime darkness of the loft, listening to forbidden music and enjoying a rare breath of independence, a respite from chores and sibling responsibilities, when she hears the baffling news, and at first she is confused, and then it slowly sinks in, what it means, what all of it means.

  Pretending since then. Putting it on. Poor young Ruthie knows about Maia, just like her grandfather she knows, but she has not told him. Not wanting him to know that she knows, not wanting him to know that she knows that he knows. Hide-and-seek at the end of the world.

  But here she is. Standing and waiting for me. Her fingers clutching at me. “How much longer?”

  “Ruth,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  She tightens her grip on my sleeve. “How much longer?”

  I could give her a reprieve: there’s a plan in motion, actually. Department of Defense Space Command, they figured something out. A standoff burst, a nuclear detonation at one object radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface … everything is going to be fine.