The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “He won’t be far,” his mother said, jumping back to her feet and moving for the door.

  “Mom, he left hours ago. Last night. A long time ago.”

  She stopped, so easily deflated, and grabbed on to the door frame. She leaned against it as if trying to hold up the house, a structure that threatened to fall in on itself.

  “Leo,” she said again, this time not looking for an answer, simply looking for someone who would listen to her ask the question again. “Where did he take her?”

  8

  THE CHILD DRIFTED close to death.

  The air felt suddenly cooler as her father carried her into a deep darkness, away from the small fire. He stood there for a moment. Pitch-black. Not a sight, not a sound. It was the darkness that lives inside holes or endless caves. She heard and felt a grating sort of crash, like a landslide but without the gradual beginning and ending. The sound was abrupt and final. She tried to lift her hand to her face. She almost had to touch her eyes to prove to herself that they were open. The darkness was a tangible object that could be touched and tasted. She breathed in the darkness like air, and it left a coating on her tongue. The darkness transformed into a Person that whispered things to her in a language she didn’t understand.

  Darkness filled the space the same way water does, or smoke.

  The child wondered if she had gone blind. Her father began to walk. She swayed back and forth in his uneven rhythm and peeked in the direction they were going. A pinpoint of light existed far in the distance, like a single star in a vast sky. She laid her head against her father’s chest and drifted off.

  Time passed. Days? Weeks? There was constant movement and a long, straight road, the only road. It was dirt, interrupted occasionally by the breaking through of a large rock, and besides those breakthroughs the road was packed firm and flat and level, as if a hundred million people had traveled that way before her, made the dirt hard as concrete. There were glimpses of small, abandoned houses with spaces for windows or doors but nothing in them, like faces with eyes and mouths wide open. When she opened her own eyes at dusk or at dawn, when the light wasn’t so bright, she could see a city far in the distance, rising above the trees in the direction the road was taking them.

  The sky was always some shade of red.

  It was during this journey that her father started talking to himself, a whispering kind of mumble clear enough that sometimes she thought he was waiting for her to reply. The sound of his voice made her feel more alone, not less, and she wished he would stop. She knew she was dying. At five years old, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you that (she didn’t know the words for it), but she felt a gradual erosion, a slow passing away of something deep inside her, something crucial.

  The beautiful part of the sadness was that she did not know enough to be afraid of death. Her mind was not haunted with visions of angels and demons; there were no images of golden streets or bottomless pits of fire; there was no judgment or fear or uncertainty. To her, at that young age, death meant relief, hope for an easy breath, a dissipating fever, and she did not resist its coming.

  But her father did. He resisted her death with every ounce of his being so that even when she gave up, his will kept her going.

  “No, no, no,” he whispered. “Now’s not the time. We’re almost Over There, almost Over There. She’ll be okay. And then . . . and then . . . you’ll see.”

  He panted the words as if they were breath itself, and the black bag he carried banged against her leg. He argued with someone who wasn’t there. She didn’t know where they were going, and as they walked farther and farther along the road, she realized her father didn’t know either.

  “The tall building in the middle of the city,” he mumbled. “Put it there. ‘You will find all you need’—that’s what the doctor said. ‘You will find all you need.’”

  He spat at the ground, anger increasing his pace. They walked always until the red light in the sky grew dark, and her father would carry her a short distance into the woods and rest her back against a tree. He piled up dead leaves and the soft boughs of evergreens and laid her in the mound it made. The smell of earth and leaves and rich soil hugged her as her father laid fresh greens over the top of her.

  “To keep her warm,” he muttered. “To keep her warm. And if she doesn’t move we’ll make it. If she lies still and rests, everything will be okay.”

  He disappeared into the woods, leaving behind a complete stillness that sometimes made the child wonder if she had died or if it was all a dream and she would wake up in her bed on the third floor of her father’s house in New Orleans, warm rays of sunlight falling through the window, birds singing out on the ledge, her mother walking into the room, picking her up, taking her home. Her brother. Yes, her brother. Wonderful Leo. The bright, happy boy who listened to her.

  Ever since they went through the door the world felt empty. There was no other way of saying it. They didn’t cross paths with anyone else. They never even saw animals or insects. The sky was the same red quality all the time, the only difference being that it would brighten and fade as day came and went. Now a fiery red like orange embers, now a dull red like a sunset, now a crimson red, the color of the stripes in the woman’s headscarf. The woman she had seen over her father’s shoulder as they walked into the darkness.

  Her father returned carrying two handfuls of wild berries. They were the shape of blueberries but tart, and they filled her up like a loaf of bread. She only ever ate two or three before falling asleep, but as she drifted off she could hear the voice of her father droning on and on.

  “To the city. We have to make it to the city. Doesn’t make sense. We’re surrounded by trees now—here would be the place to plant it. But not here. Not now. In the city. Has to be. Wherever that is.”

  One night she woke up. They had not gone as far from the road that night. She heard a whooshing sound that reminded her of the cars driving past her father’s house in New Orleans. The sound started from far away, a gentle shushing, and it grew closer, closer, and finally it raced past. Once, she thought she saw something that went with the sound, perhaps what was making the sound, and it was a movement, a glimmer of light and dark.

  She woke up another time during the day to find that her father had grown weary and lain down in the middle of the road. She was facedown on top of him. The bag stood beside them, slightly open, and she could see the bright green, the brilliant white. Her father slept, his mouth wide open, and she took in the stillness around her. She tried to move off of him, to stand up, but when she adjusted her weight, he stirred, so she decided not to try to get up. She waited there, lying on top of her sleeping father, watching the small breeze move the leaves on the trees. She could hear his heart beating.

  There was no one around, no other person. She thought they might be the last two people. Or the first two.

  “The tallest building,” her father muttered in his sleep. “The center of the city.”

  Her conscious moments became fewer and farther between. When they had first entered, she felt better, as if the air there was helping her recover her strength. But it was a short-lived recovery. Soon she was wheezing again, feverish and weak.

  She opened her eyes to find they had arrived in the city. It was a large city, one that could hold far more people than she was seeing. Ten-story buildings rose around them. Thirty-story buildings gathered themselves and dashed upward. They passed warehouses and train stations and large universities, all empty. They walked through back alleyways and climbed to the top of apartment buildings so that her father could look out over the city. So few people. A handful. Or that is how it appeared.

  But she soon realized there were people everywhere if you knew where to look. In the panes of glass, for instance, when the light wasn’t glaring off, there were faces watching them. And at the top edge of every flat-topped building, she could see people peeking down at them. She saw them at the back of every alley, standing straight in the shadows.

  It
was sometime in the afternoon, and the light was beginning to fade. The shadows grew long, stretching out in front of them, running away. That’s when they saw one old woman sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of an old row home, leaning forward and back, forward and back. The chair whined when she came forward. The porch had iron rails, and the house was mostly made up of tan bricks with dark brown trim. It stretched up a full three floors.

  The child’s father stopped for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was tired and filled with snagging edges.

  “I’m looking for the center,” he said. “I’m trying to get to the center.”

  The woman laughed, the sound of a dozen crows cawing against the winter breeze.

  “Aren’t we all?” she managed to gasp out before laughing again. “Aren’t we all!”

  “Can you tell me which way to go?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Keep going. Just keep walking.” She spat on the porch in disgust. “But get off the street before dark.”

  “What happens after dark?” her father asked.

  The old woman’s face changed. She started to speak, then shook her head.

  “What happens?” he asked again.

  She laughed, but this time it was a dry, humorless laugh. She stood gingerly and walked to the door.

  “Trust me,” she muttered over her shoulder. “It’s getting dark. The Frenzies come out at night. Get out of the streets.”

  She walked into her house.

  “Frenzies?” her father called out. “What are Frenzies?”

  The door slammed on them, but his question was answered moments later, with what first sounded like rushing water, a lot of it. The child listened hard. Her father held his breath. They stood there in the middle of an empty street, in the middle of a quiet yet somehow full city, listening. The rushing clarified as it grew closer, splitting into individual sounds that she soon realized were people shouting. Wood splintering. Glass shattering.

  “Oh my,” her father said, walking as fast as he could, a movement that turned into a kind of trot. The girl’s head banged against his shoulder, and the heavy bag bumped their legs as he scooted along, faster and faster. He stumbled but didn’t fall. She heard a terrible scream come from all the sound, and terror rendered her suddenly very awake.

  “Can you run?” her father whimpered, and she realized he was talking to her.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” she replied, her voice scratchy from not using it.

  Behind them, the screaming and breaking turned onto their street. Her father spun into an alley and put her on her own two feet. Her knees wobbled.

  “Come,” he said. “Hurry.”

  They ran together farther into the dark alley, her father dragging her and the bag. They climbed over old boxes and beams. There were boards with nails sticking out and small piles of brick and stone. Broken glass was hidden in the dark. The alley dead-ended, but there was a black door in the side of one of the tall buildings that flanked the alley.

  “Hey!” a voice called from the street and down the alley. “Who’s that?”

  The girl knew they were talking about her father. About her.

  “Come, Ruby. Hurry.”

  Her father pushed open the door and they stumbled into the darkness. He blindly searched for a light, sweeping his hands in large arcs around the wall, and there was a switch that turned on a single, naked bulb hanging down from the ceiling by its cord. The room was full of junk. Her father managed to wedge the door in place with boards, then piled more and more things in front of it.

  Pounding. Fists on the metal. An iron bar breaking through the narrow strip of glass in the door, and crazed eyes and fists trying to come in, but the door would not budge, and the opening was too small.

  More banging. Her father grabbed her and the bag, scooped them both up, and ran farther into the building, following hallways and stairways, always up, always away.

  So that was a Frenzy, she thought as she passed out.

  When she came to, she was on the roof of a building. The sky faded as she sat there. It was the highest building yet, and her father wandered around the edge of it, staring off into the distance, mumbling to himself before finally coming and sitting beside her. He seemed nearly as weak as she felt. She thought he must be exhausted—he had carried her all that way, and they lived only on the berries he had found in the woods or strange scraps they found in the alleys.

  There were no suburbs—she was close enough to the edge that she could look out over the city in the direction they had come from. The forest grew right up to the edge of the buildings. There were no other streets outside the city apart from the dirt road they had walked in on, and that was a thin, straight sliver through the woods, like a thread pulled tight. She thought she saw something moving along the road, and she sat up straighter. She was sure of it. A cloud of dust rose far in the distance, growing ever closer.

  Her father saw it too. She saw it reflected in his eyes.

  But before they could see what caused the cloud, they heard the most terrible noise: screaming and moaning and shouting, all coming from that cloud. She realized these were the glimmering shadows and light she had seen a few nights before. They were in one long, streaming group, like runners in a race, and when they arrived at the city they didn’t stop—they kept on going. The whooshing sound was loud and flooded past the base of the building on which she stood with her father. She thought the building might collapse under the force of their passing. The whole red sky trembled.

  “There!” he gasped. “Yes. Yes. I see it now! I see it.”

  He picked her up, snatched up the black bag, and ran-stumbled to the stairwell. Her body jarred against his, as if they were wrestling. He repeated the same words to himself, a spell or a mantra, and his voice echoed through the stairwell, lulling her to sleep.

  “The tall building. The tall building. The tall building.”

  9

  RUBY WOKE UP ALONE, in a strange place, and two things drew her attention. First of all, she felt a pain in the tip of her right ring finger. When she looked at it, she saw a tiny red dot, like the hole a splinter leaves behind. But there was also something else: the most glorious smell.

  “Daddy?” she whispered. “Daddy?”

  Dim red light filtered through constellations of dust specks. She was in a large, dark building. The walls looked to be made of brick. The ceilings and floors were bare wood planks. The entire floor she was on was empty—she could see from one end to the other, deep into the shadows. Except in the middle. There was something solid in the middle of the room.

  She felt energized. She stood up and walked. She took a deep breath—even in all that dust, her breathing was clean and clear. In the middle of the room, her bare feet came down on broken, brittle leaves and they crunched under her as she walked. It was strange to her, these leaves inside the building, and soon she realized that was where the smell was coming from—the leaves. Ruby took another deep breath and found her energy came from the leaves. She felt health moving through her veins.

  She got down on her hands and knees and stuck her nose right against the floor, against the precious dust of crumbled leaves, and took a deep breath. Instead of clogging her nose, it somehow expanded her airways. She felt like she could run a hundred miles. She felt like she could fly if she tried.

  Ruby stood and walked closer to the thing in the middle of the room. It was round, so thick that she would have had to hold hands with three or four friends in order to reach all the way around it, and it stretched from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like the outside of a powdered piece of chocolate, brown and dusty and warm. She touched it. The surface was leathery and gave way like a very firm sponge.

  It was the trunk of a massive tree, one that had grown up through the floor, but the ceiling had not been able to stop it. She peered through the ceiling where the boards had split and cracked to make room, and she could see the tree had already grown through two or three more floors. She wanted to see how
far up it went, so she ran to the edge of the room and found a stairwell.

  The next level was empty too except for the tree growing up through it, and at each level the trunk grew smaller. She went up two floors before seeing branches split off from the main trunk. She ran over to one and felt the silky leaves. She plucked one off and it broke in her hands, fragile and tender. A substance like aloe oozed out, and the smell filled her with a heady kind of joy, a feeling that nothing would go wrong ever again. She licked it, and it satisfied her hunger immediately. She knew she was cured in the way a child who wakes up one morning after an extended period of sickness somehow knows they have turned the corner.

  She sat down with her back against the tree, and she slipped into the deepest sleep she had ever experienced. A dream came and it felt thick and slow, the way dreams sometimes will. In her dream, a breeze blew through the building, rustling the leaves. That’s when she saw the fruit—it had been invisible to her at first because it was the same color as the leaves, but it moved differently in the wind. Now that she saw it, she realized it was everywhere in various shapes and sizes.

  “Who are you?” a voice asked from one of the shadowy corners of the building.

  “I’m Ruby,” she said in her little girl voice, and in the midst of that empty floor and in the midst of that massive tree, her voice sounded far away and tiny. Lost.

  “Ruby,” the voice said, tasting the word. “Ruby. That’s a beautiful name. You can call me B.”

  A woman came out of the shadows. A beautiful, small woman with reddish-brown hair and soft features. She looked so kind and caring. Without thinking twice about it, Ruby ran to her around the tree, dust clouding up at each step. She threw herself into the arms of the woman.