In places there were cleared-out swathes, great lanes of rubble over which kids and scavengers swarmed. The tracks of hurricanes, probably, gaps in the urban landscape that would never be filled in. A coast is a place of erosion, uncle George used to say to me, a place where two inimical elements, the land and the sea, war it out relentlessly, and in the end the sea is always going to win. One day all these grand old buildings were going to just subside into the ocean, their contents spilling into great mounds of garbage in the patient water.
In the meantime, life went on. My pilot waved at rivals or friends, cheerfully yelling what sounded like obscenities. Everybody had some place to go, just like always. Despite all the dirty water everywhere it was still the Little Havana I remembered, a place I had always found exciting.
When we reached the coast I had the boat drop me at a small ferry stop a couple of kilometers from my mother’s house. I had decided to walk the rest of the way, my pack on my back.
It was the middle of the afternoon. The road, a northwest drag following the line of the coast, was good enough and had been resurfaced recently with a bright central stripe of self-maintaining silvertop. But you could see that the sea sometimes came up this far: there were bits of dried-up seaweed in the gutters, tide marks around the bases of the telegraph poles. There wasn’t a single car to be seen, not one, and the silence in which I walked was dense. That was a jarring discontinuity with my memories of childhood: on a comparable Tuesday afternoon in 2005, say, the cars would have been purring past, an endless flow. The housing stock had changed, too. The timber-frame houses I remembered, each nestling in its half-acre of lawn, were mostly abandoned, boarded up and in various states of decay, or they had gone altogether, leaving vacant lots behind, as if they had been spirited up into the sky. A few had been replaced by squat poured-concrete blocks with narrow windows: the modern style, fortresses against hurricanes, each an integral block, seamless from its roof to its deep foundations.
The air was bright and hazy, and the wet heat settled on me like a blanket. I was soon sweating, and regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no animals in the sea.
At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.
And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand. “Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.
I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke, I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.
John takes after our father. As always, he intimidated me.
“I flew in,” I said lamely. “Quite a journey these days.”
“Isn’t it just? Kind of hot, too. Not good weather to work in.” He clapped me on the back, spreading more Paint and sweat over my shirt, thus messing up my laundry and my conscience. He led me around to the back of the house. “Mom’s indoors. Making lemonade, I think. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what she’s doing,” he said with conspiratorial gloom. “Say hello to the kids. Sven? Claudia?”
They came running from around the side of the house. They’d been playing soccer in the yard; their ball rolled plaintively along the ground, chiming softly for attention. They faced me and smiled, their eyes blank. “Uncle Michael, hi.” “Hello.”
Sven and Claudia, in their early teens, were tall, handsome, well-fed kids with matching shocks of blond hair. They were the products of John’s second marriage, to a German called Inge, now vanished after a divorce; they had their mother’s coloring, though both had something of their father’s heavyset massiveness. I always thought they looked like Cro-Magnon hunters.
For a couple of minutes I tried to make small talk with the kids about soccer. It turned out Claudia was the keenest, and even had a trial lined up for her local pro club. But as usual the talk was strained, polite, a formality, as if I were a school inspector.
We were all wary. I’d committed a faux pas a couple of Christmases back when I’d sent them packages addressed to Sven and Claudia Poole. After the divorce my mother had taken to using her maiden name, as had I. But when he left home John switched back to my father’s name, Bazalget—I’d never known why, some row with my mother—and so these two were officially Bazalgets. John had a way of blowing up at me about such things at family occasions, spoiling the day and upsetting everybody.
I’d learned to tread carefully. We are an unusual family. Then again, maybe not.
I remembered how, when uncle George had come visiting, I would go running to him. But then George always brought us gifts. Smart man. Of course it wasn’t my insensitivity as an uncle that made these kids so bland. They were Happy kids, and this was the way Happy kids turned out. I’d never even dared challenge John about his choices over that.
John waggled his paintbrush. “I ought to get on. And you ought to go see Mom,” he said, as if I’d been putting it off.
So I walked back around to the front of the house, picked up my bag, and knocked on the door.
The front door was faded by the relentless sun, and in places the clapboards were peeling back, the nails rusting and coming loose. The place wasn’t in bad shape, however. The coat of Paint that John was busily applying was a silvery scraping over layers of creamy old gloss.
My mother opened the screen door. “It’s you,” she said. She stepped back, holding the door to let me pass, with eyes averted to the floor. I stepped over rotting sandbags and dutifully delivered the kiss she expected; her skin was crumpled, leathery, warm as melted butter.
She said she would make me a cup of tea, and she led me through the hall. We passed the old grandfather clock that had come with her from England. It still ticked away with imperial resolve, even though the world in which it had been manufactured had all but vanished.
My mother was a stick-thin figure, upright and stiff and animated by a fragile sort of energy. She was still beautiful, if any ninety-year-old can be said to be beautiful. She had never dyed her hair, and it had slowly faded to white, but even now, tied back, her hair looked lustrous, soft and full of light.
In the kitchen she had ingredients for fresh lemonade laid out over the working surfaces. She made me tea, hot and strong and laced with milk, English style, and she sat with me at the breakfast table. We sipped our tea in cautious silence. I enjoyed it, of course; it brought back my childhood.
I hadn’t neglected my mother. But I’d mostly seen her when she’d made her occasional, loudly self-sacrificing pilgrimages to come visit me in my home with Morag, or later after Morag’s death in my small apartment in New Jersey, or at holiday times at John’s brownstone apartment behind the Manhattan seawalls. But those trips had got more rare as the years passed; Mother would say she wasn’t sure if it was her getting old, or the world, or both.
She opened hostilities. “I suppose John called you in.”
“He was concerned.”
“You didn’t need to come here.” She sniffed. “Either of you. I’m ninety. But I’m not old. I’m not helpless. I’m not gaga. And I’m not moving out.”
I pulled a face.
“You always did get straight to the point, Mom.”
She was neither annoyed nor flattered, and she wasn’t about to be deflected. “You can explain that to your brother. He’s just like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with this house.”
“Needs a coat of Paint, though. You’ll be able to make back the cost by selling solar power to the microgrid. And you have to comply with the sentience laws; a house of this age needs a minimal IQ-equivalent of—”
“I know the damn laws,” she snapped. “Just so we understand each other. I’m not moving out.”
I spread my hands. “Fine by me.”
She leaned forward and inspected me. I stared right back. Her face was hard, all nose and cheekbones and sunken mouth. It was as if everything else had melted away but this inner core, leaving nothing but her one dominant central characteristic.
But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.
Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in that shell, letting me see inside.
Not that she was about to let up on me. “Look at you. You’re round-shouldered, your hair’s a mess, you’re overweight. You look like shit.”
I had to laugh. “Thanks, Mom.”
“I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re still moping.” That was the only word she ever used to mean grief. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? Morag died, and your baby son died, and it was terrible. But it was all those years ago. It wasn’t the end of your life. How’s Tom? How old is he now?”
“Twenty-five. He’s in Siberia, working on a genetic sampling of—”
“Siberia!” She laughed. “Could he get any further away? You see, by mourning your dead son, you’ve pushed away the living.”
I stood up, pushing back my chair. “And your amateur psychoanalysis is a crock, as it always was, Mom.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, all right. Your old room is made up for you.”
“Thanks.”
“You might fill a few sandbags. The tide’s out.” She pointed to the cupboard where she stored empty sacks.
“OK.”
“It isn’t so bad here. Even now. We still have doctors and dentists and police. So-Be isn’t a ghost town yet, Michael.” She said absently, “Not to say we haven’t had our problems. You know what the most awful thing was that happened here? In one place the water table rose so high a cemetery broke open. Boxes and bones just came bubbling out of the ground. It was the most grotesque thing you ever saw. They had to bulldoze it all out of sight. And I miss the birdsong. Everywhere you go the birds seem to be missing.”
I shrugged. Birds were bellwethers of the Die-back. In 2047, their vanishing was banal. I said carefully, “Mom, maybe you really should think about moving away.”
She eyed me with a bit of humor in her expression. “You’re claiming it’s any better anywhere else?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then stop wasting time.” She sipped her tea, dismissing me.
My old room was small, but it looked out to sea, and I’d always loved it.
Of course it wasn’t really mine anymore, and yet there had never been a precise date when it had ceased to be mine. I just slept in here less and less frequently, and at some point my parents had had to make decisions about sorting it out without consulting me.
Well, they had stripped it. Now, replacing my turn-of-the-century gadget-age décor, it was done up in the faux-naturalistic style that had been so popular in the 2020s, with a bamboo-effect wallcovering and a green carpet of soft-bladed artificial grass. In those days, before I had started to work on the commercial development of Higgs-energy, I was a consulting engineer for the nuclear-energy industry, and I had stayed in a lot of hotels. This style of decoration had been everywhere, endless lengths of tropical-parrot wallpaper and crocodile-skin-effect floor covering, adorning anonymous concrete blocks in Warsaw or Vancouver or Sydney. It was as if we were mourning the loss of all the green stuff, even while the real thing was imploding into the Die-back all around us.
I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.
But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all carefully stored inside their boxes.
It was, to my eyes, an eclectic mix; parents sorting out their children’s middens are a random filter. It seemed my mother had selected objects not of sentimental value but that might be worth money someday: a toy survived the cull only so long as it was in good condition and if she could find its packaging. But those mint-condition auction candidates, of course, were precisely the toys I had spent the least time with. Still, her eye for value had been good. A lot of the computer games could have raised some cash; there was a whole industry of silicon-chip archaeology turning out readers for such things, gizmos several electronic generations old and yet still precious to sentimental old fools like me.
I did come across one chance fossil that had escaped the cull, despite having no discernible value. It was a small tin, slotted so it served as a money box. Here I found newspaper clippings and collector cards and Internet printouts, mostly to do with the space program, and a little leather pouch full of pennies dated the year 2000, and loose postage stamps, and fast-food stickers and button badges from TV-show promotions, and a tiny travel chess set on which I had taught my brother to play, late at night when we were supposed to be asleep. All of this junk had been handled and pored over endlessly. That little box was a screen grab of my mind aged ten or eleven, the stuff so small and worked over it was almost like scrimshaw. But it was also a little off-putting, grimy with the handling. I probably ought to have got out more, I thought.
I closed the box and put it back on its shelf. But as I did so I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. It hit me like a physical blow, a punch in the neck, and I had to sit down. It was just that the kid who had filled that box had gone as if he never existed, the whole rich complicated texture of his life unraveled. Life was so rich, but so transient: that was what made me sad.
But moping over this junk wasn’t filling any sandbags. I closed the cupboard, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, threw on some fresh sun cream and bug repellent, and headed down the stairs.
The porch with the swings was still intact, though it would benefit from some TLC. I walked across the backyard, where John’s kids were still playing. It used to be a lawn; now it was just a concrete slab. The kids gave me polite Happy smiles, and I waved back and walked on, with an armful of empty bags.
From the back gate the old gravel path led down toward the coast, as it always had. But before I got to the dunes I found myself walking across dykes and culverts and drainage ditches, a
nd the rotting remains of many, many sandbags. I imagined my mother laboring here, determined, stubborn. But all her hydrological systems had failed, and when I looked back I could see the lines of sandbags retreating ever further up toward the house. You couldn’t drain away an ocean through a five-centimeter culvert.
I walked through the dunes and came to the shore. There was still a beach here, of sorts, but it sloped sharply away, soon disappearing under the restless sea. The erosion here had been relentless. Even the dunes seemed to have been eaten away. Here and there I saw stretches of a grayer mud, like a stretch of sea-bottom, not a beach at all. Driftwood and scattered bits of plastic garbage littered the shore, and I passed great reefs of dead seaweed, dug out by storms and stranded. The reefs were the source of that salty smell of decay I’d detected earlier. Bugs swarmed everywhere, not just mosquitoes but tiny little bastards that threw themselves at my exposed flesh. Insects, the great winners of the years of the Die-back.
The sea looked beautiful, as it always did, even if, stirred up by the endless storms, it was not quite so blue as it used to be. It was hard to believe the sea had done so much damage.
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