Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  It is snowing now, from a sky that has no clouds. The snow doesn’t stick. But it snows this way some days, heavy flakes that fill the air, conjured by a madman trying to trick the world into believing the impossible is real.

  She stands in her yard, letting the snow touch her face, feeling it evaporate almost immediately, thin, barely visible wisps of steam now rising from her cheeks, then crossing past her eyes.

  This happens for a few minutes. Sometimes it goes on for many hours. Once it went on all day.

  Then the fires on the hillsides nearby will start again. And the sky will turn dark, and the horizon will be heavy with thickly orange and brown and awful smoke, and she’ll be left to watch as homes in the near distance erupt in flames that the fire trucks don’t even attempt to stop.

  “Come inside,” her husband says.

  She ignores him.

  He says it again, and again she’s ignoring him, “Please come inside.”

  She knows, though, that if he didn’t ask, that would make her angry.

  Their oldest child died. The other ran away. It’s been two years since this happened.

  Pictures of children on their walls that seem to her like the glossy, perfect photos supplied in the picture frames when she first bought them in a store. She doesn’t recognize the faces. She has only her memories. Mental images of her children when they were very young.

  The oldest son died at sixteen. The youngest son ran away the following year, when he reached sixteen too.

  Her husband is a surgeon. She is a corporate lawyer. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Nothing like this. Not at all.

  She knows, of course, that she herself is sick. As a result of what has happened.

  But she won’t admit it.

  To admit it would only make the pain pour out. But this way, now, it’s contained.

  Her oldest son’s illness grew and grew. Depression, manic outbursts, steady self-abuse. Finally, an overdose. She fought to stop each step.

  But in the end the mental illness simply passed to everyone else inside their home. Her. Her husband. Then her youngest son.

  Sometimes, she can’t blame her boy for running away.

  Many days during the midst of it, the worst of it, she woke up tired, with her eyes tight from a night of crying and her throat raw from a night of screaming, and all she would want to do is finally run away.

  Water laden with lead and chlorine and huge quantities of benzene.

  Water that runs brown throughout the summer, emitting the smell of plastic or oil or rot.

  Water that can’t be found in remotely sufficient quantities.

  People in some cities can’t cook with their water or bathe with it or wash their clothes or clean their dishes in a way that they are confident their kids are safe.

  Bottled water must be shipped from hundreds of miles away.

  Reservoirs hit critical levels earlier and earlier in the season.

  Farmland for hundreds of miles is no longer cost-effective to be planted.

  Vast ranches where the irrigation ditches long ago went dry and the deep wells were drained completely. Ranches that are eventually abandoned. The livestock slaughtered. What’s left of the land soon occupied by angry survivalists barricading themselves away from the worst they’re sure will come.

  And the communities farther upstream, all of which supplied irrigation for so long, they have all determined it is best to keep the remaining flow for themselves.

  She wakes and realizes that she needs to drive to the coast.

  She drives through fog in early morning light, seeing the outline of the sun through the heavy mist behind her. She sees bare, black trees emerge then disappear in front of her. The highway bends slowly, almost beautifully. Left, then right. Over a rise, then down. Cars disappear from her view, as if sinking into some abyss.

  The fog gets thick. Dissipates. It gets thick again.

  She feels for a moment as if she doesn’t move, that it’s the sun that moves behind her, the trees that hurtle toward her. But, of course, they don’t. It is nearly silent here, in the car, the fog seeming to absorb the noise her vehicle surely makes, so quiet that she can hear her breath only as it escapes her mouth.

  Sunlight breaks through the fog, then the fog takes the light away.

  A world stripped down to just four tones. White and gray. Black and brown.

  It will take two hours to get to the ocean. She follows a route that avoids all cities. Because she hates all cities. Her entire life. The filth and the crowds. The homeless people everywhere. Crime at every turn. Break-ins, rapes, and murder.

  She needed to raise her children in the safety of a suburb. The safety of a new community carefully fenced off from the rising danger. The protection of a security system on their doors and walls and windows, a guard who patrolled their subdivision, and the safety of new schools built on vast, stripped-down tracts of land. The knowledge they were surrounded by people of endless means, well-educated, every possibility arrayed before them.

  And all of it far from everything going wrong in the city an hour from their home.

  The highway bends, she enters fog, thick; she can see only thirty or forty feet in front of her.

  Something went wrong with her oldest son. She can’t identify it. When it started. Why. Her son turned on her, slowly, hints of anger, a deeper disdain. Just teenage stuff, she thought. Until it turned to near violence. Angry at others. Angry at himself. He was suddenly always angry. And most of all, angry at his mother. Angry that she made him angry. Angry that she tried to help. Angry that she said a word. Angry when she said nothing.

  The fog is thicker, a heavy mist that lets her see just her hood, thin glimpses of the road, none of the brown forests around here. She drives, though, forward, feeling the highway turn. Feeling the highway sink.

  The therapists tell her it’s as if he had a hole so deep and painful. A hole he couldn’t possibly bear or live with or control. And so he had to fill it. With anger, with alcohol, with driving cars a hundred miles an hour down narrow, suburban roads. But those things filled the hole for only a very limited time. So then he needed to find a reason for it. Find a reason for the sourceless, endless pain.

  That’s when he decides, they said, that the source is you.

  The fog breaks, suddenly, the sunlight so bright behind her, lighting up the ocean, blue, the coast, a beach.

  Mothers bear the worst of it, they said. No matter what they do. We have no answer why, they said. It is simply a great unfairness.

  But even blaming her wasn’t enough. Her son’s anger wasn’t enough. Drinking, speeding, fighting with strangers and students at school. None of it was enough. And so he turned to stronger drugs. They’re everywhere, she learned. He bought them at the grocery store. At a dance. In the classroom. On a playground. And so, he just kept using them. Trying to fill that hole.

  She parks the car along the side of the road, tires in the sand. She walks down to the beach. Forty steps, fifty. Waves are crashing toward her. The air smells thick, low tide, like the seaweed and foam and driftwood all across the beach have been left here just to rot.

  Mothers are targeted. By their troubled, sinking children.

  She knows that now.

  Mothers bear the worst of it.

  In almost every circumstance.

  Fathers are only crushed. Abandoned. Left vacant and destroyed.

  For mothers, it’s much worse.

  She reaches down. Touches water.

  Cold.

  There was a hole, bottomless, that he had to fill.

  Even in the wind, the morning air is so hot that it’s hard to breathe.

  She turns around. Walks back to her car. And begins her long drive home.

  Dogs move in packs through sprawling neighborhoods of poorly built, identical homes. Seven and eight dogs at a time, rising at night, when the heat relents, and they roam in search of food, in search of mates, knocking over trash cans, killing feral cats by the dozen. The p
acks of dogs inevitably run into other packs, much growling, some barking, all of them circling warily. If there’s food in play, or a bitch in heat, the circling soon turns violent, clouds of dust rising as dogs scream and dogs bite and dogs tear into the flesh of one another.

  You can hear it, from windows half a mile away. The frenzied desperation of wild animals in the street, all simply trying to live another day.

  She rises in the evening in her hot and sun-dried neighborhood. A sprawling, hillside subdivision cooked to brown and red. Too hot to sleep. No electricity at night. The power will turn on at some point in the morning, in advance of the highest heat of the day to come. A daily allocation of what power can be generated.

  It’s a region slowly turning its clock upside down. More people working at night in order to sleep during the day. Schools convene at three in the afternoon, sports played only in the late evening of the weekends, under lights paid for entirely by donations from the wealthy.

  Power is limited. Brownouts are common.

  And as people move away from the failing services and the fires that consume so many homes, the problems just get worse. Fewer people to pay for the many needs that now remain.

  But she doesn’t care.

  She wakes at night and goes to her porch. Drinking gin. Looking up toward the subdivisions on the nearby hills. No flames tonight. Just the smoke from fires from a week or more ago, still lingering in the air above her.

  “Can’t sleep?” her husband asks. He’s on the porch, in a chair.

  She doesn’t answer. Of course, she cannot sleep. Neither can he. Why would we talk about this?

  Gin touches her teeth. As she exhales, she feels its vapor escape her nose.

  She drinks again.

  Their neighbor runs his generator. His house is a hundred yards away. But she hears it running. The wife had a baby. She saw an email somewhere.

  “We should bring a gift to the woman next door,” she says.

  “I did,” her husband says. “Last week. We talked about it.”

  She turns to him. Staring. “I’m sorry. I forgot that. But I’ll be sure never to forget such a thing again. Actually, I won’t forget anything. Nothing. Ever again. But if I do, if I manage to forget one thing, you be sure to tell me. Right? Make sure you point that out. As quickly as you can. So that I apologize. And repent. Okay? That’s what I should do. Repent.”

  He looks away. There’s a moon through the red sky, turning a burning orange amid the haze.

  “Or is it,” she says now, armed with a new breath, “that there’s no point in my apologizing? Right? It’s a sin. Like all my failings. They are sins. And all of them unforgivable.”

  He stands. “I think I’ll walk.”

  “I’ve reacted badly,” she says. “Right? Again. Always the overreaction.”

  He moves down the steps, into the yard, walking carefully away as he soon disappears into the dark.

  But she only stares at that moon. Breathing gin through her open mouth. Burning fire through her blurring eyes. Shooting flames in all directions from her mind.

  Her house is filled with ghosts. The ghosts of children who once lived here.

  But ghosts aren’t just born of the dead, she’s realized. Or the absent. Or the missing. The living can be ghosts as well. Her sons became ghosts even as they still occupied this house. Fragmentary beings, mere shadows of what they’d been, they moved like ghosts through her home’s wide halls.

  Her husband, too, became a ghost eventually. He once yelled. He once screamed. He once stormed through the house, in a voice so angry it was physical.

  But now he sits.

  On the other side of the room.

  The other side of the porch.

  Saying little.

  Watching.

  Watching her.

  In no way trying to reach her.

  He’s a ghost too.

  Just like she is.

  She knows all this. He does too.

  They’ve been this way for years.

  In other cities, cats roam everywhere. Along streets and on the roofs of stores, and they emerge four and five at a time from sewer drains and broken vents leading into tall, abandoned buildings. Some are feral cats, generations in the wild; their coats and teeth and eyes speak to years and years of self-survival.

  The cats eat whatever scraps they find in the alleys behind stores and restaurants. They swarm garbage cans put out on trash day. They swarm trees to kill the nesting birds. They descend frantically into sewers and under homes, feasting on rats and mice and even roaches, the tiny rodent bones and the empty shells of the large insects strewn along gutters and in alleys and in the backyards of homes in every neighborhood.

  In the evenings, the cats cry out, howling to one another.

  In the mornings, the sunrise is free of the sound of birds.

  He has forgotten, as always, the ways in which she’s pretty.

  He’s never forgotten that she’s pretty. He couldn’t.

  He’s tried.

  But he forgets the many ways.

  Her eyes. The way she holds a glass. The way she sits near him on this sofa.

  Falling in love with her is many years in the making.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Father

  People on small and cheap computers connecting instantly across oceans once insurmountable. Camera phones better than the telescopes that first studied the stars. Games so totally immersive, so thoroughly intoxicating, that people pay to watch them played.

  Meeting women, meeting men, seeking children, seeking sex.

  Faces lit blue and white, in the windows of buildings across the cities, window after window, smiling and crying and so many of them carry an expression somehow suspended, waiting, hours they’ll wait, as they stare into their screens.

  Days later, the water has receded. Slowly returning to the Gulf, to the rivers and lakes from which it had escaped, but also it lingers in newly formed bodies of water. Lakes where there’d been lifeless farms. Creeks where there’d been streets.

  The surface of the highway and the farmland around their hill has become visible again. But the ground between the hill and the asphalt is still soaked with water.

  Mud so heavy and deep that it’s obvious it will envelop anyone who tries to cross it.

  The smell of chemicals and rot, carried here by that water and mud.

  The rain has weakened. An intermittent drizzle from a sky low and gray and uniform except for the darkly swirling clouds that float underneath the gray. The dark clouds move rapidly, racing across the flattened landscape, pouring impossible amounts of water until the clouds finally drain themselves.

  His kids sleep in the backseat.

  It’s morning, early. He’s slept a few hours in the front seat.

  Two different helicopters have flown past them in recent days. One of them was military. It didn’t vary from its course. The other was from a TV station, and it circled for a few minutes as everyone on the hill waved their hands and arms. Disaster footage. Captured. Ten seconds of video to give color to a discussion of the scale of the destruction.

  But at least people know they’re here.

  In his mind, he catalogs their remaining food. Enough for four more days. We’ll be fine, he says to himself. There’s plenty of water, collected in a plastic container he made from a large bottle that he sets out on the hood of the car.

  In his mind, he pictures fleeing their apartment, putting food into a duffel bag. They’d grabbed items in a barely controlled, nearly frantic state. “Get your sleeping bags,” he ordered his kids. “Get your blankets. Grab clothes. Grab one stuffed animal.”

  The kids had been screaming at first, crying and panicked, and so he took thirty seconds, thirty precious seconds, to kneel down. Hold them both. Calm them. “I’m not mad,” he said quietly. “Don’t be scared. I’m not mad. It’s just my work voice. Okay? Just a work voice. But we have to go. Listen. Don’t be scared. But listen to every word I say.”

/>   He grabbed more blankets. He grabbed the tool box. Grabbed two kitchen knives. Grabbed flashlights. Grabbed batteries. Grabbed a bag of kids’ books. Grabbed his computer. Grabbed his phone.

  He had no shovel. No axe. All the outdoor tools were in storage.

  He had no matches. No means to create a fire.

  But don’t panic. Just focus. Grab what you need. Get the kids in the car. Get the kids in the car and flee.

  They’d felt the earthquake in their apartment. But there was also the hurricane centered south of them. Over the Gulf. And so, as the earthquake ended, he had a sudden thought. Fear, but something rational. The hurricane was massive. The biggest yet. And even though the worst of it was bypassing the city, the storm was also pressing down on the Gulf at highest tide. Levees and flood controls far to the south had already been breached by the storm.

  And now an earthquake. In the Gulf.

  He’d seen news reports of past tsunamis in other countries.

  Can that happen here?

  “To the car,” he told the kids. “Quickly. Stay in front of me. We’re walking fast. Don’t run. We’re walking fast.”

  That he had a full tank of gas was just dumb luck. That the new apartment was near the highway was just dumb luck. That it was Sunday, afternoon, minimal traffic, that was dumb luck too.

  As he got onto the highway, he saw a few cars like his, packed up, frantically prepared, running from what they feared would come.

  Once more he catalogs the food that’s left in the car.

  He’s shared much of their food with the others on the hill. Other people have shared food too. For him, though, he’s only done so because he didn’t want his children to see otherwise. Had he been able to save all the food for his children, he thinks he wouldn’t have shared it. Not in order to save himself. But to save his children.

  That’s all he’s thought about for days. How do I save my children?

  Outside the car, people are emerging from the church. Men, a woman alone, sometimes couples. They walk out onto the small porch, then into the yard. Some go to the cemetery, once more standing on the tombstones leaning forward in the grass.