by Liz Harmer
Philip pulled at his beard. “I believe we’d be better off without having to depend on electricity at all. We’re not exactly experts in the re-establishment of the grid. And time is not with us. Sooner or later the gasoline won’t be usable, and we’ll be stuck.”
Philip claimed not to consider himself a leader. In his past life, he’d been a librarian stationed on the arts floor of the Main Library, and had been known by his colleagues to be overly attached to the collection in his charge. He was supposed to cycle the books more. Nonfiction was becoming obsolete, they said, as the Internet age advanced. The twenty shelves sorted into the 800s of poetry, prose, speech-writing, Shakespeare, et cetera had contracted first to fifteen, then to ten and then to eight. But Philip had refused to weed out books that were still in good condition, and this made him a fossil. The librarians were unionized and he couldn’t be fired or reassigned, so younger library assistants were tasked with tossing out books behind his back. His natural setting was in a dusty place, alone, oriented to the past. But in the new era, no one else in the group had wanted the job of speech-making and organizing. No one else had seen the importance of having a central location, regular meetings and an agenda. And Philip had learned to like giving speeches.
“Look, I’m not the kind of person who would suggest doing something rash just for the sake of it. I have really been thinking about it, and I’ve been talking to some of you—and you know what?” His question echoed into the crowd. “You know what?” Again he paused. “I’m pretty sure life is short, and we might as well be comfortable. That’s all we’ve got now. I mean, why not live on the beach?”
The crowd sipped soup, remained silent. The stillness was punctuated only by the occasional scream or laugh from the small children, who were situated in farther-back pews with their parents.
“Well, think on it, pray on it, do what you do. I think if we’re going to go, we need to be on the road by September. Let’s say five weeks or so.”
Philip moved his hands over his head and face, first ruffling his hair, then removing his glasses, pulling at his beard.
A few people tentatively raised their hands.
“Philip?” Bonita said.
“Hmm?”
“There are questions.”
“Okay. Well?”
He pointed at one of the raised hands—Donnie at the back, bad leg splinted and set down, good leg tucked under him in a half-lotus. “What’s under the sheet?”
Marie realized she was clenching her hands so tightly that her bones seemed about to splinter. “They can all leave,” she whispered to the dog. “I’m not leaving.” She was a child with an overpacked suitcase threatening to run away. Her mother would have enfolded her, while Marie cried, I can live without you! That phrase had always come too easily to her lips.
“Before we get to what’s under the sheet, let me just say, in support of my argument, that we need a longer growing season. This isn’t just something we can choose to do. Stay in this city, that is. We’ll freeze, or we’ll run out of food.”
“This is not a dire situation, pal,” Mo said softly, tapping his hands on the taut skin of the drum. His words weren’t loud enough for Philip to hear. Mo spent most days in the garden and greenhouse, and he was convinced they’d soon be growing too much food. He had spent many winter days on the streets with his friends and did not fear the cold. “We just gotta gear up again.”
“Normalcy is sanity,” Bonita said.
“And novelty is loss,” said Louise, another older woman. Marie recognized these phrases as slogans that people had once used in an attempt, unsuccessful, to counter those spread by PINA, who had proclaimed: The present is over! And, Why only live once?
“You will all have a chance to voice your concerns. I’ve set a date for voting on it, and the results of the vote will be unassailable. A week from today.”
Marie looked at her clasped hands. She knew—they all knew—such a vote would not be final.
There are no rules! PINA had once told them. In the new universe, there are no rules.
“We don’t know what’s out there!” a male voice shouted from the back of the church. Everyone shifted to see who the speaker was.
“A very good point,” Philip said. “Thanks for that, Marcus. It’s why we need the five weeks to get ready. We should probably have guns, just in case. We need to all be on the same page. But let’s move on now, to—” He swung around and gestured at the covered dome. “Consider this. If we do decide to stay for the winter, which I strongly urge us not to do, I’d like to start work on our information-retrieval project.”
Now Philip, who was walking backwards as he spoke, pulled down the dropsheet, and for a moment, it seemed as if he’d done a magic trick. There appeared to be nothing there. Then Marie’s eyes adjusted, and she saw the slight shimmer in the air, like wavering heat. She saw the small silver tattoo printed in the corner of the shimmer: port. And then, of course, even smaller, the logo, the machete-split graphic of half a pineapple.
They’d all seen one before. Most had stumbled upon one, still humming in the naked corner of an abandoned living room. None of them understood how port functioned, how their batteries still worked, where their batteries even were. Everyone left behind was hopelessly backward: Luddites or late-adopters or conspiracy theorists. Outsiders, outliers, outcasts. Yet they had all lived through the history of this product, from the rumours of its existence first trickling in, to the explosion of its popularity, to this, now, this newer and lonelier Earth. None of them understood the point of its creation. Unless it was simply this: the extinction of humanity.
Marie had watched it all. At first, plenty of journalists and academics and politicians had contested the buoyant claims of PINA’s spokespeople, and especially of its founder and CEO. His name was Albrecht Doors, as though from birth he had been foreordained to produce openings to other realms. Doors always seemed to be fitted with a thin mic in the ear, had always seemed to be doing TED Talks about why children should not go to school, about how reading literature was more important for his programmers than learning to code. But soon there were no experts to weigh in, no experts to dramatically examine the ports like monkeys perplexed by a new toy dropped into their cage, like dogs surrounding and sniffling them.
Now, by all accounts, Doors too was history.
A breeze whistled through the cracks around the stained-glass windowpanes, and the candlelight flickered. Chin resting on the floor, Gus curled his lips and growled.
“You can’t just bring a port in here!” someone shouted.
“Why would you do that without consensus?”
“Goddammit, I’m leaving. Fuck this.”
But no one left.
“Please, please,” Philip said, raising his hands palm-down as though addressing a room filled with second-graders.
“He is out of control,” Rosa whispered to Mo and Marie. “I can’t believe this.”
“How’d you get it all the way over here, Phil?” Andrea asked. “I mean, without getting sucked into it.” Andrea was young, and to Marie she seemed silly and therefore an unlikely holdout. She was a frequent object of Rosa and Marie’s gossip.
There were no ports in any of the houses where they were squatting, since the army had removed them the summer before. They had rumbled through the city with canned and dried goods, motivating them to clear up grocery stores and cafeterias until they left in open-backed trucks, in their camo and helmets. That had been a harrowing time of accidental burns and paranoia, of too many men with too much armor. It was then that most of the remaining people had decided against carrying guns, though Marie thought this had been foolish, and her own insistence on being armed was another reason some of the others in the group were frustrated with her. There was a greater proportion of bleeding hearts in this crowd than she was used to. The artists and anarchists she knew saw beauty in violence and struggle.
“It’s not a vacuum,” Philip said, pushing his glasses up his sweat-slicked
nose. “It’s not going to just grab you up and out of your seat.”
This did not satisfy Andrea. “But they always had to be installed by a portician.”
“There are ways to move them,” Philip said. “Before he left, Lionel showed me how to unstick the bottom layer from wherever a port was located. I can de-install, and I can reinstall. And they aren’t heavy—you just have to be careful.”
“Anyway, we’re not supposed to take them,” said a woman from a pew farther back. “What if whoever owns it needs to come back?”
Unlike the PINA people—unlike almost everybody else—Marie and all those left behind were overly scrupulous. They had not forgotten how to shudder. They were superstitious about what you should and should not do regarding the machines, which seemed not quite really to be machines. So despite their prodigious looting, every one of them feared taking a port, or even touching one—the way one wouldn’t touch a baby bird lest it be rejected by its mother. Had this bit of bird lore ever even been true? Fifteen months ago, Marie might have asked PINA for the answer, but now they were left to their bickering. Above all, no one wanted to interfere with any traveller’s ability to come back, if coming back were possible.
“There are no rules, remember?” Philip said. He pulled out an envelope full of what looked like business cards.
“But, she’s right—what if the others try to come back?” said Regina. “We agreed we wouldn’t touch the ports until we know for sure.”
“How are we going to know for sure? How long will we wait?” Philip shouted. “Forgive me.” He lowered his voice. “But it seems like people can’t just come back,” he said, pacing now. “I mean, clearly. Surely we’ve learned this much.”
Marie frowned. This wasn’t exactly true. Although they had proof that a person who went into a port disappeared, some of the group thought it was possible that the travellers were frequently reemerging and sinking back into the world: perhaps they just couldn’t yet be seen by those left behind. The world might be overrun by people again someday. That perhaps the port was a mouth that could spit you back up as if from the belly of a whale.
Marie looked at Rosa; Rosa looked back at Marie, and nodded.
Marie stood up. “We saw something today, on my billboard, and I think, Rosa and I think, maybe there is someone who has come back.”
Philip looked at her impatiently, with irritation, and she found his posture vaguely attractive. Blushing, she continued, “Someone painted a big red S on the billboard so it looks like it says ‘sport.’ And I think—”
“You think what?” said Philip. “That it’s proof of something?”
“I think it could be.”
“It was just one of us, surely. Someone who knows about your project was trying to prank you. Someone trying to get your attention.”
Marie turned around to look out at the others. “Well, was it one of you?”
A few people shook their heads.
“Marie, we’ll talk about this later,” Philip said.
“But if there are others…” Marie paused.
“Later,” Philip said.
“Yeah, we will talk about it later,” Steve shouted from the back of the church, thick arms crossed over his tarpaulin-aproned chest.
But Philip had already moved on, his hand on the port just at the spot where they all knew the zipper pull to be.
* * *
—
At first, the public had been told that port worked like a revolving door, that it went both ways. PINA quoted people who reported that they’d evaporated and come back, and that the experience was glorious. Carpe diem, they said. You haven’t lived! Someone claimed to have been among the Arawak people before Columbus. Someone claimed to have witnessed the cave painters in Lascaux.
Marie had snorted in disbelief, sitting in front of her TV with the chopsticks in her hand hovering over a bowl of noodles. These so-called travellers had been in the Bahamas before Columbus, and they’d gone prehistoric, and yes, they were wearing appropriate costumes and had unruly facial hair, but they didn’t give any information about those times and places. What was it really like? Marie chewed sardonically, pointed her chopsticks at the screen. No. It was not believable. These people were awestruck and dumbstruck, but they knew nothing at all. Or they were manic for environmentalism. “You have no idea what it’s like with all the trees!” they said. Green so green it made your eyes hurt. Green so green it will make you grow leaves and buds. Contagious green.
This talk of colour had come close to tempting Marie. It was pathological to not be tempted at all. People around her had acquired a missionary zeal. “I want to see everything.” Marie’s sister Claudine’s eyes had gleamed. “I want to see the Mayans! The ancient Egyptians!” Gasp. “Shakespeare!”
So time and space was just an enormous sponge cake you got absorbed into? PINA—through Doors or his favourite mouthpiece, Brandon Dreyer, who was said to be the source of the corporation’s weird poetry—claimed that this new tech had broken through the shell of perceived reality, which was like an egg they’d all been fertilized in. Now they ought to—had an obligation to —poke their heads through and look around. “The present is over!” PINA proclaimed.
Claudine had gone, and not come back. Marie imagined her—when she felt optimistic—walking around Elizabethan streets in rags.
“The present is over!”
One by one, sometimes in groups of two, sometimes whole families together, the people disappeared. The slogan was meant to persuade them that it was passé to live in the here and now, but it had ended up being prescient. This present, this reality, the original reality, was kaput. All things had ground to a halt. You didn’t notice people disappearing until one day the streets seemed hollowed out, the space between one person and the next walking down the sidewalk had grown too long. The gaps were everywhere. Marie’s shop door stopped chiming its happy heave-ho. The newspaper in the stand outside was three days old. Then four days. Then five.
Everyone in the group had reasons to grieve. At first the gatherings at the church had been like AA meetings. Hi, I’m Marie, and I’ve been left behind. Today I was thinking about how much I miss the smell of street meat. Hi, I’m Lillian, and I’ve been left behind. Will I ever get another letter in the mail? Hi, I’m Bonita, and Hi, I’m Philip, and Hi, I’m Rosa, and Hi, I’m Mo.
* * *
—
Philip unzipped the machine. Everyone knew about the zippers, which were like long slits into empty space, so nearly invisible that one had to strain to see.
“If I didn’t know better,” Bonita said, “I’d say that the emperor has no clothes.”
“Philip, come on, what the hell?” Donnie had already been, in his rotund middle age, perpetually annoyed. He was huffier and scoffier now that his leg was broken, possibly beyond proper repair. But he was not alone in his fear. Portophobia: it was like an allergy, or a genetic adaptation.
“What I want to know is why the present isn’t changing furiously.” Marie didn’t bother looking in the direction of the voice; it was Andrea who had said this. She was hung up on the belief that people were time travelling, which the rest of them had established was impossible.
Philip stopped his delicate unzipping and stared at Andrea, this small, thin twenty-something girl with limp brown hair. He put his hands through his own greying hair and frowned, then held the back of his neck, elbows drawn wide. An aggressive gesture, Marie thought, to mark his dominance.
“We’ve been through this, Andrea. Clearly things don’t work the way we thought they did.”
“I don’t feel like you’ve adequately answered my objections.” Andrea had a stack of books, all of them popular accounts of physics.
Philip pointed a finger at her. “Do you know any physicists? Got any physicists lying around?” He went back to the pulpit, where he leaned over his own arms in the prayer-posture of a fervent preacher.
“A physicist really would come in handy,” Rosa said.
&n
bsp; “It’s just that if everyone who’s disappeared was, like, in the past, we’d all be dead, or buildings would crumble before our eyes, or something,” Andrea said.
Donnie cough-scoffed. Mo tapped his fingers on the drum, hit it softly with the side of his palm.
Philip returned to the port to complete his theatrically slow unzipping. “It doesn’t matter if I can’t answer your objections, because here we are.”
Marie thought of the word yawning and then the word gaping. It had been a very long time since she’d seen a port wide open like this. Obscene as an open mouth. Or worse: the opened body of a surgical patient, skin curling away from the incision.
“It is a vacuum, Phil,” Bonita said, then put a bony knuckle between her teeth.
Philip stepped back a few feet. “I need someone to go. Preferably a team. If we’re staying here for the winter—although I still do not think it is necessary for us to do so”—he stared pointedly at Marie—“I want us to at least make a little progress on the information-gathering front.”
Steve stood, opened the back doors and propped them, letting in a gust of hot wind to make the candles flicker again. His apron and sleeves were still blood-soaked from his work preparing the meat from the deer in the shed, and he wiped at his arms and hands with a cloth. He watched Philip, shaking his head. Only then did Marie realize how hot it was. The church was hushed, as though in prayer. Even the children and animals were quiet.
Philip stood calmly, waiting for volunteers. The business cards, he said, would act the way a rope around the waist works for a person lowered into a well. Something to catch them. Marie put her hand on the coarse fur of Gus’s back and felt those steady breaths come in, go out, come in, go out. The expression on his grinning dog-face seemed to say, Don’t worry.
“We all need to contribute,” Philip said. “I’m developing a theory that you can come back if you can only remember where you came from. I’m calling it the amnesiac theory.”
“So, it works like an addiction,” Marie said. “They’re like lotus-eaters.”
