by Liz Harmer
He nudged off the lid, found three yellow chicks inside. “I can’t take these.”
“Sure you can.”
“You need them.”
“We’re okay.”
“But what do they eat?”
“Birdseed!” Denis said, holding his small belly as he shook with laughter.
Clementine handed him a baggy of that too. “He’ll be back. You’ll be back, won’t you? Go, find your people, but you can always come back.”
“I think you’re right to stay away from the ports,” he told them. Probably they had already sussed out that he’d been in tech. Maybe they recognized him from his heyday. He was driving a flashy solar-electric car, for another thing. He was wearing yoga clothes.
“Yup,” Denis said, watching him back out of the driveway.
* * *
—
The lonely prairies of the Midwest, with their shining silos, ominous as sentinels, their endless golden fields, had always seemed desolate to a lifelong urbanite like Brandon. Now that they were rising up and filling the air with seeds, now that cornfields were dry as hay, they were more desolate than ever. He had no one with whom he could debrief, no one to tell about the eccentricities of Denis and Clementine, so he talked to the chicks, embarked on long monologues during the drive. The chicks cheeped and shat, were robotic in their quick movements.
“They really liked me,” he said to them. “Clementine and Denis. Maybe I will go back to Portland. I can’t go back to PINA. I’m never going back there. Can I?”
A few days later, he was looking for signs that might provide an answer: “Shouldn’t I make sure my friends are okay? What about Benji and Zahra and Suzanne? What about the rest of the twelve? I can’t just let Doors be in charge. Should I have taken a record, some PINAkey as proof?” But proof for whom? All of the agencies of investigation and intelligence and prosecution and punishment are gone.
He let their squeaks become a complicated eight-ball. Sometimes when he finished asking his questions, he glanced over at the passenger seat to see that they were all asleep in the cardboard box, which he had outfitted with straw. The three were piled on top of each other, their eyes slitted into crescent moons, so catlike he half-expected them to purr. When they slept like this, he saw them to mean: Relax, don’t worry. So he pressed on the gas.
Nights were too dark. He was aware, while driving, of his headlamps as the only source of light aside from the patterns of stars, the sliver of moon. The world might be empty, it might be nothingness; there was only the car and the chickens and the hundred feet in front of him that lay illuminated. Once he nearly hit a deer, swerved and had to push the Turing out of a ditch. He decided to drive only during the day, to sleep at nights. Several nights in a row he’d stopped at motels. Each was foyer-darkened and unmanned, its drawers full of inert room key cards he couldn’t override without electricity. He finally found a motel called Fantasia Inn that still used cut keys, but even so deeply alone, he felt conspicuous there. There must have been some other people out there in that expanse of prairie, just as there had been people in Portland, just as there were people leaving PINA. A working solar car would make him a target for thieves, and they were all thieves now. Clutching the box of chickens to his chest, he stared at the line of gold keys hanging in the oddly named Fantasia Inn, its decrepitude making the name seem a sick joke. The light dimmed there, hiding what had been visible a moment before: tears in the yellowing wallpaper, stains in the carpeting.
“Wish I’d never watched Psycho,” he said to the chicks. “Let’s go.”
So instead, he slept in the car in fields. He had to stay with his assets. In his nightly rush of paranoia, he wiped the car with handfuls of mud and stuck it with hay, trying to blinker the shiny aquamarine. He looked in all directions before folding himself into the dirtied car, wary of those pockets of civilization quarantining themselves, hiding just outside view.
In the glovebox he found his old PINAphone. All the CarbOskin that had promised they’d be able to change anything, anywhere, using their own bodies had been repurposed for the ports. Still, he was able to give it a small charge using the car’s hookup; when he held the power button, it briefly flared up, lighting that old pic of himself and Zahra framed inside the PINA logo, paired lips and eyes and noses an emblem of their love. Then the cascade of PINapp buttons bounced in and settled onto the screen. A robotic “we’re sorry,” and it went black again, leaving for only a moment the pulsing white flare that used to tell him he had a message. It breathed in, breathed out, breathed in, died.
He had parked in a field, and the grasses were grey-blue in the moonlight. He wanted to stargaze but was afraid to leave the car, and when the phone went dead, he thought of the tiny pulse-beats of his chicks’ hearts. How tiny their organs were, smaller than a mouthful, delicate. He put his finger to his throat to feel the surge of his own blood, still flowing.
It had been a long time since he’d had to think of the loss of all these distractions. That there had once been a day when an hour could not pass without the buzz or chime of the phone, when a day could not pass without new information in e-mails and newsfeeds falling like water. All that urgency and the device always held before him, its pleasing sounds and colours, how it responded unfailingly to the press of his thumbs. It had been magic, and time had gone so quickly, and there had been so much to do.
Now time had slowed like the old game show “Wheel of Fortune” coming down to its final tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It was as if all that time he’d been an ant working underground, full of purpose, and had now discovered his ant-hood. All had been fruitless burrowing. He no longer had the old Timex—had forgotten it on the coffee table back in Portland—and when he woke every night into blackness, unable to fall asleep again, time seemed hallucinatory. There was nothing by which to measure it, and so it wasn’t there. He was trapped in an inky soup; he couldn’t breathe; no one knew him, and so perhaps he did not exist. Go to sleep, he urged himself, go to sleep. No matter how long he drove, he’d never find an all-night diner where he might stop for coffee. No matter where this road trip took him, there were no plots to come, and there was no new information.
* * *
—
Every rest stop was deserted. He couldn’t figure out how to harness any gas without swiping the card and was forced to rely on the always draining charge of sunlight. Could he siphon gas if he found a tube or something? Finally, once he was through South Dakota, he heard human life. Passing Chicago he heard what sounded like an explosion, and at one gas station, he found fresh footprints in the dirt outside. The old automatic doors were all clamped as tightly as a seizing jaw, but this one had recently been bashed open. Glass shards and drips of blood on the ground outside. He took what was left, very little—a handful of coffee creamers, a bag of gummy worms. He was now accustomed to lines of black or white mould, to the buzz of flies, to rainforest smells of dank and rot.
Crossing the border near Detroit, where he drove slowly and warily over teetering overpasses, he felt odd and uncomfortable that he was able to drive right through each checkpoint without being asked about his intentions. He decided before going home to stop at Niagara Falls for an hour, eating sugar candy and wishing for a sandwich, wishing he hadn’t finished all of Clementine’s bread, as he listened to the water roar endlessly down its cliff. If he jumped, no one would mourn him. No one would ever know what had become of him.
* * *
—
By the time he got to his hometown, he was not expecting much. It was apparently as deserted as the rest, and he thought it would be like a joke, with the city’s degraded reputation among other Canadians, that anyone would think to stay here, of all places. The chicks were getting bigger, and he felt strange stabs of grief at their outgrowing babyhood. Their wings were longer, yellow tufts replaced by grey and white striping. True feathers.
He parked on Bay Street South near the escarpment where his mother had last been living. Houses huddled
there together like a group of people with a chill. He got out of the car with the shoebox under an arm. Stood on aching feet and stiff knees and stared up at her porch. His shins and calves hurt. On his last visit, three or four Thanksgivings ago, its posts and railings had been newly painted in aquamarine, almost exactly matching his car’s paint job. Planters hanging from the trim, which was badly peeling now, were empty or trailing dried tendrils of former ferns and geraniums. These were not good signs. The front door was locked. He put the chicks down on the grimy seat cover out there.
Well, what had he expected? He knocked. He pushed the doorbell. and it rang distantly.
Finally, and with great effort, he pulled open the front window to the living room and went on in. She’d neatened before leaving. There was no clutter, only dust, particles suspended everywhere. There were bite marks on some of the wood trim, tiny brown mouse droppings collecting in spoons and bowls in kitchen drawers and cupboards, in corners.
He returned to the living room. Tried not to look at the port, the final proof, which stood in the corner near his father’s old leather La-Z-Boy, its footrest still propped up. Framed photos on the mantel on the bricked-over fireplace included Brandon in his graduation regalia, clutching diploma; Brandon in his track uniform, clutching silver medal; Brandon skinny in the oversized cheap suit he’d worn to prom, clutching girlfriend’s hand. This last one he took down, wiping its dust on his yoga pants.
The clock still ticked. It was the only sound. He strained to listen for the port’s hum, heard nothing. He stepped closer to it, climbed onto the La-Z-Boy and leaned in, and there was the faint purr of its music. Had it gone dormant? He hadn’t yet found one this quiet.
Either way, if it called to him now, he could resist it. Of this he was certain. He put his hand on the nub of the zipper, felt it thrum against his palm, then let go. He climbed back out through the window and, out of respect, pushed it firmly closed.
He sat on the porch seat and tried to think. Already he felt the weeks of isolation working on and against him, a kind of crowbar wedging between who he had been and what he was becoming: a person with an unkempt beard, soothed by the smell of chicken shit.
“Hey, little guy,” he said, picking up the smallest chick and holding it to his face, nuzzling it against his nose, his cheeks. His mother was gone. His mother was definitely gone. This little guy pinched his lip with a beak. Maybe he’d go back to Portland. Maybe he’d stay here to wait and see. He knew the waiting would make of him a superstitious gambler: he’d be sure the moment he left that they’d return, perhaps in waves, the way they left. He’d be a man unable to leave his slot machine.
Winter here would be brutal. In Portland he could shave and launder, and supposedly there were women, plenty of women. He had to do it now before he began to wait, to know himself to be waiting. Here, he’d have to shave in a birdbath or stream, would become a mountain man.
He was about to stand, when he heard something. A cyclist sped down the hill past him. Then another. Two cyclists with long hair, bare legs. They were past him when a large mutt came running, too, collar jangling. The dog stopped at the house and nosed the air. Brandon stilled himself, hoped that his face was hidden by the parched plants. The dog let out a bark. It seemed to look right at him.
“Come on, Gus! Come on, buddy!”
The dog barked twice more, hard little warnings, and then sped off running toward the cyclists.
Chapter
12
THE PESSIMISTS
“Well, what did you expect?” Donnie said now as he said at least once every day. His leg—always spread out straight, braced by its sticks—was no better. It was possible he was healing all wrong and that the improper set of his leg would be the first victim of their lack of expertise. He sat on the ground, back against one of the large logs, a few feet from the fire. For two weeks, the fire had been tended, flickering or blazing, but never left to cool.
At the end of every day, they circled around the same topic. “Are we still going to wait?” and “Well, what did you expect?”
There were no farmers left, not within a hundred kilometres. After that first disappointing trip, the crews had gone out in every direction, and each time came home disheartened, having seen in those huge metal barns only bloodied messes of feathers, occasionally the decaying carcass of some dead bird, rejected by all but the maggots and flies crawling out and over its body.
“Well, what did you expect?” Donnie said.
Fear was beginning to outweigh optimism. Soon animals would no longer fear humans, would no longer keep away from highways or babies; creatures would appear out of the woods as though from a long hibernation. Everyone would need to have guns. Fear was as palpable as a mist foretelling autumn. Autumn, too, was on its way, and with it the old cynicism creeping drafty through the cracks. They had begun to worry about cars and gasoline, so getting to Virginia or anyplace else would require a strength none of them had. Their belief had been a spell, now broken, and they had to face facts. They’d never see their loved ones again. They were terrible hunters. They’d run out of canned goods and foraged fruit, and then maybe they’d starve.
People talked less about the things they had once been thrilled by. A resetting of the circadian rhythm, for one, so that, as a few of them knew from an article long ago read in The Atlantic—no, Scientific American (they could agree to disagree on small points like this)—they would begin to wake in the middle of the long dark night, their bodies naturally breaking into two dark respites with an hour or two of quiet consciousness in the middle. Some of them had theories about the lunar cycle, how the moon dictated moods, swayed energy and joy, controlled electricity.
Now all discussions returned to the only question left: leave or stay. Have we been foolish? Are we still, now, fools?
The constant fire blazed from the centre of the long yard of lawns, with the feeble barrier of wood fencing and brick homes, each with a narrow gap between them, as their only protection. They, too, were chickens in a coop and unprotected from whatever might come down out of those woods beyond those thin fences. Some of them longed for the return of all those they’d once disdained: MBAs, lawyers, politicians, tycoons, anybody who might point and order. Party’s over, they wanted someone to say, as though they were unsupervised kids at a sleepover that had gotten out of control.
“We’ll figure it out,” Bonita said. “We’ve been caught off guard, but we’ll manage this winter, just as we did last winter.”
Marie remembered those jars of olives and pickles, the burning roof of her mouth. The smell of ashes and woodsmoke hanging on clothes and in hair was no longer noticeable to any of them. “I’ll teach you all to shoot.”
Steve pulled his children and wife closer. His long arms were everywhere touching a member of his own family. His arm around Regina, who held Lulu, their daughter, on her lap; his other arm pulling close the two small boys. All of them shining with sunburns. People retreated into the intimacy of their smaller tribes. Steve was a forceful person but lacked kindness and tact, and Marie hated him for a leader. Why was it still always men?
“Anyway, we’re not leaving yet,” Bonita said. “We have to wait for Philip.”
Marie and Rosa murmured their agreement. Mo nodded.
“Do we need to wait for Philip?” Steve said.
“Why do we repeat ourselves every night?”
“We’re like people trapped in a bad marriage.” Donnie sighed. “Already exhausted all topics of conversation.”
“Well,” Bonita said, “that’s when one person takes up golfing and the other learns to knit. Not the end of the world.”
They glared at her. Even at Bonita, whom they loved, they glared.
The sun was finally setting, its heat an ordeal to be forgotten until the next morning, and the fire’s bright colours flamed prettily in the bluing twilight, an echo of the sinking sun.
Bonita tightened her little hands into fists. “We’re not leaving him behind.”
There were only thirty-eight of them now. In two weeks, they’d lost two elderly and little Zev, all, they presumed, through port.
“But why do you think we’re here if not to wait for them all to come back!”
“We thought,” Steve said, then paused as Regina whispered into his ear. “We were building something here. A life. Pioneering.”
“We were never going to leave,” Marie said. “Of course we’ve all been waiting for everyone to come back. That’s why we’re all still here. Philip was the only one who wanted to leave. The rest of us have somebody we’re waiting for already. We all know this, Steve.”
Rosa and Mo were seated next to her, closing their bodies into a cocoon. His hand on her back, her arms draped over his legs, their posture leaking whispers and the wet smacks of kisses. Marie was alone. Donnie was, and so was Bonita. The old ties were the same as the new ties. People maintained monogamy and left each other out. Gus remained her only tether.
“You still think your ex-husband’s coming back,” Steve said. “But you’re dreaming. He’s got his own people now.”
The cruelty of one who has toward one who has not.
“When did you become such an asshole?” Bonita said.
Regina stared at them from her big, darkly rimmed eyes. “Don’t talk to him like that.”
They couldn’t hide from one another. There was no privacy to dive into; there were no obsessions or workplaces in which to be enclosed.
“Sometimes it takes an asshole to tell the truth,” Steve said.
On that day two weeks ago, Steve had insisted that they keep the church nailed shut, and then had gone into the police station for a gun, grabbed up all the rolls of yellow caution tape and started wrapping every building he knew had a port inside. The church was his main concern, the scene, as it were, of Philip’s crime, and now he’d taped up the buildings along four full streets. Then he moved onto wrapping other buildings, sometimes wrapping a house without even checking for a port, and all of this was supposed to be for the sake of the children, though they were never let to wander out of sight. It had been a blow to lose Zev, the only other child for their children to play with.
