by Nick Cole
The bearskin.
The pistol that was once a rifle.
Where did you lose that?
I cannot remember. Somewhere in the poisoned valley.
The Chinese colony at Auburn.
Escondido.
The Chinese at Sausalito.
Jin.
It was a lie.
What?
He had trouble remembering. He was crawling through chalky sand. He had been for some time.
It’s so hot now, but at least I’m not sweating.
I don’t think that is good.
It depends on what you want to accomplish.
What was a lie?
That you take everything with you. That was a lie.
Oh.
Where are they now?
Sergeant. Horse. Jin.
How can you take everything with you when it is all gone?
I was lied to.
In the end, I don’t even know who I am, where I came from. Who were my mother and father? What did it mean to be an American?
Sergeant Presley called me Boy.
The Chinese called me savage.
The savages called me Bear Killer.
All of it seemed to be something that never happened or happened to someone else, long ago.
Who am I?
Jin called you…
“Don’t!” he croak-screamed into the dry expanse. “I can’t take it anymore.”
Hours later, crawling on his knees and pulling with his hand, dragging the side that would not work, he stopped.
He gasped, “Not much farther now.”
You got to decide who you are, Boy. Not the world. Don’t let people ever tell you who you are. Some people tell nothing but lies. So why ask ’em anyways?
Yes. I remember when you said that.
I’m saying it now.
His hand felt the hard, burning surface of a road.
You’re dead.
I’m sorry about that, Boy. I never meant to leave you.
Tell me who I am.
I’m dead, Boy. Said so yourself.
Who am I?
Silence.
In the distance he heard a high-pitched whine and then a loud rumble beneath it.
He was alone in the middle of a desert plain, cracked and broken.
He laid his head down onto the hard dirt and felt it burn the side of his face as he closed his eyes.
My ears are buzzing. This must be death. It has been following me for some time. My whole life even. And now death is finally coming for me. What took you so long?
Who are you, Boy?
I don’t know. I never did.
The roar and whine consumed everything. It grew and grew, filling up the expanse of the desert and the sky. Everything was now shadow and heat.
Did you expect to find her in death?
He heard footsteps.
I was hoping to. But I think I will find only death. Who am I to think I might find Jin again? The world is made of stone. Who am I that it should be any different for me?
Death bent down and touched the Boy’s cheek.
Who am I? he mumbled to Death.
You should know who I am before you take me.
Or are you just a taker? A taker who doesn’t ask.
The Boy opened his eyes.
Death was an Old Man, thin and wiry, gray stubble. His eyes sharp and clear and blue.
“Who is he, Poppa?” A young girl’s voice from nearby.
“I don’t know. But he needs our help. He’s been out here for too long. He’s close to death.”
“I’ll get some water, Poppa,” said the girl, and the Boy heard the slap of shoes against the hot road.
The Boy began to cry.
Shaking, he convulsed.
Crying, he wheezed, begging the world not to be made of stone, begging the world to give back what it had taken from him.
“Who am I?” sobbed the Boy.
“I think he’s asking, who is he, Poppa!” said the girl as though it were all a game of guessing and she had just won.
The Old Man held the shaking, sobbing Boy and poured water onto cracked and sunburned lips in the shadow of the rumbling tank.
“He doesn’t know who he is, Poppa. Who is he?”
“He’s just a boy,” said the Old Man to his granddaughter, his voice trembling with worry and doubt.
“Who am I now?” sobbed the Boy.
The Old Man held the Boy close, willing life, precious life, back into the thin body.
“You’re just a boy, that’s all. Just a boy,” soothed the Old Man, almost in tears.
The Old Man held the Boy tightly.
“You’re just a boy,” he repeated.
“Just a boy.”
PART III
The Road Is a River
Chapter 1
Can you let go?
The Old Man is sick. The Old Man is dying.
His fever is high in him and the days pass long and hot, as though having no end to them. The villagers come one by one, and it seems to all of them that what’s left of the Old Man will not be enough. Though there are no goodbyes, there are words and looks that mean just as much.
Yet she will not let him go.
“No, Grandpa,” she says to him through the long days and even longer nights. “I need you.”
Can you let go?
He has told the villagers as much as he can of Tucson through the ragged flaming trench that is his throat. The security of the Federal Building. The untouched mountain of salvage. The tank. The villagers are going there.
That could be enough. They have Tucson now.
He lies back and feels that swollen, fiery ache within every muscle.
Just rest.
Most of them, most of the villagers have gone on to Tucson and all that he has promised them of a better life waiting there. A new life, in fact.
Can you let go?
The Old Man is sick.
The Old Man is dying.
My wife.
He thinks of her olive skin.
Will I be with her again?
Soon.
He is glad he thought of her when the wolves were beneath him and his hands were burning as he’d crossed over the abyss. He is glad he still loved her when he needed to remember something other than the burning pain in his fingers.
“No, Grandpa. I need you.”
The Old Man thinks, in the darkest of moments when it seems as if he is crossing from this life to the next, that there are things worse than wolves snapping their jaws beneath you as you pull yourself across an abyss while thinking of your wife.
And he can hear the worst.
What is the worst?
His eyes are closed.
His granddaughter, Emily—she is his best friend, he remembers—is crying.
“No, Grandpa. I need you.”
And he is going. Almost gone. Fading.
He hears her sobs. Weeping. Weeping for him.
His failure to live just a little longer.
She needs him just a little longer. “Forever,” she tells him.
The worst is when you imagine the grief of your loved ones after you have gone.
‘When you are sick in the night,’ he thinks, ‘you imagine the worst. To hear my granddaughter in grief for me… that is the worst I can imagine.’
Can you let go?
‘Not yet,’ he thinks. ‘For her I will stay just a little longer, and maybe I can die later when it won’t matter so much. She still needs me now.’
That is the love of staying when you know you must go.
And the Old Man lives.
Chapter 2
What follows are moments.
Individual moments, each one like a picture. A photograph before there was digital. Just before the end. Before the bombs. Snapshots of the hot days that follow.
The Old Man lies in his bed. When his voice returns, he is surprised. He didn’t even know it was missing, he’d been so many days gone to the wasteland. He tells the
m of Tucson.
He tells them of the tank.
The wolves.
The Horde.
Sergeant Major Preston.
When he is finished, he is so tired that his words merge into a dream of nonsense. When he awakes, he sees stars through the openings in the roof of his shed. He hears the voices of the villagers outside. He feels his granddaughter’s tiny hand holding his old hand, and as he drifts back to sleep he hopes that he will not have that terrible nightmare again. The one in which he is falling and he can hear her.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
Snapshot.
It is morning. The cold wind blows across his face as they carry him out from his shed.
Am I dead?
But he can see his granddaughter. She is holding his rucksack, the one from the tower in Tucson, stuffed with the treasures that were once lost and now found.
They are taking me out to bury me.
“The book is for you,” he hears himself mumble across cracked lips. His granddaughter turns to him and smiles.
I love her smile. It is the best smile ever. There is no good thing like it.
Maybe her laugh too.
“I have it with your other things, Grandpa. Right here.” She pats his rucksack proudly.
All the villagers above turn and smile down at him hopefully.
The sky beyond them is gray. It is still monsoon season.
“We’re taking you to Tucson now, Dad,” says his son who has now bent down to adjust the blankets high about the Old Man’s thin neck. “Hang in there, Dad. You’re the last. We’re leaving the village for good.”
Sadness overwhelms the Old Man and then he thinks of his granddaughter and her smile as weapons against the darkness. Against a dragon that is too much for any mere man. He thinks of her perfect, lovely, best ever smile as sleep, fatigue, and a tiredness from so many days in the wasteland overwhelm him.
Her smile will keep the nightmare away.
Snapshot.
The red desert, east of Tucson.
We must be near the Y where I found the staked-out bodies. The warning the Horde had left. Please…
Snapshot.
He feels her hand.
It is a darkness beyond anything he has ever known.
Like the night I walked after the moon had gone down. The night after the motel.
It is quiet. Thick and heavy. Familiar.
He wakes with a start.
He is back in the office. The office where he found the last words of Sergeant Major Preston. He is lying in his sleeping bag.
I never made it back. I’ve been so sick I’ve stayed here too long.
In the hall outside he hears voices. A bright knife of light cuts the carpet on the floor.
“Dad?” says his son.
“It’s me,” replies the Old Man.
“Are you okay?”
Am I?
“Yes.”
“Are you hungry?”
If I am, it means I am well and that I’ll live.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get you something to eat. Be back in a few minutes.”
“Thank you.”
And he falls once more into the pit that almost took him and he does not have time to think of her, his granddaughter, or her smile. And so the nightmare comes and he has nothing with which to defend himself.
The snapshots fall together too quickly and soon become a movie.
He sees the blue Arizona sky, wide and seemingly forever, play out across the high windows. For a long time he watches the bright white clouds come and grow across its cornflower blue depths.
He hears an explosion. Dull, far away. It rattles the windows of the building. When he stands up and moves to the window, he sees a far-off column of black smoke rising out over the silent city. For a long time he stands watching the smoky, dark column. He feels unconnected and shaky. Occasionally he sees his fellow villagers moving down a street or exiting from a building. It is too far away to tell who each one is. But they are dressed differently than he has ever known them to dress. Almost new clothing, found here in this treasure trove, not the worn-out and handmade things of their years in the desert.
Time has resumed its normal pace. The sickness and fever fade. But not the nightmare. The nightmare remains, waiting for him.
What will become of us now?
Down the street, he sees a man pushing a grand piano out onto the sidewalk.
Chapter 3
Sam Roberts leans his blistered head against the hot steering wheel. Every ounce of him feels sunburned and sickened. He’d torn off the rearview mirror of the dune buggy three days ago. He couldn’t stand seeing what was happening to him.
The dune buggy rests in the thin shade provided by an ancient building, part of some lost desert gas station. Now that he’s running on electric, the gas within the buggy’s small tank is useless, dead weight now that he has escaped. He’d only needed it for speed in the brief run through the gauntlet of crazies lying in wait outside the blasted main entrance of the bunker.
The sun hammers the dry and quiet landscape of hard brown dirt, blistered-faded road, and sun-bleached stone. The yawning blue of the sky reaches away toward the curvature of the earth. There is no wind, no movement, no sound.
Sam Roberts has spent the morning allowing the solar cells to recharge while patching the large rear tire. His sweat pours through the radiation burns on his skin. He feels it on his head where there was once hair. His eyes are closed. Even with the visor down, it is too bright at noon.
‘But I can’t drive in the dark,’ he thinks.
He was born underground.
He has lived his entire life, other than the last three days, underground.
He is dying of severe radiation poisoning.
He is twenty-three years old.
He is a captain in the United States Air Force.
He moves his bleeding fingers to the ignition. The act of grasping the key and simply turning it feels as though it will kill him.
“I was dead the moment I left,” he says to the dry air and the southern nothingness he must find his way through. “I was dead the moment someone turned on that radio station.”
He laughs to himself and begins to cough and that leads to the rusty blood he spits into his glove.
He looks at the charging gauge. The plastic cover is melted. Even the seat vinyl is peeling.
He moves his hand to the switch that will engage the electric motor.
“Well, I’ve got lots of solar. Lots of that…” And he stops himself because he knows he will laugh again.
Chapter 4
The Old Man has been up for a few weeks. In the mornings he tries to help at breakfast. Tries to see if anyone will need assistance with their various projects. But when he does, they smile politely and tell him he needs to rest more. Then they disappear when he is not looking.
He returns to the office and watches them working in the streets below. Fixing up their new homes, salvaging in the afternoons farther out.
He takes walks at the end of the day. After the heat has given its best to destroy them all. He always walks first to see where his granddaughter is working. He tries to remember how thirteen-year-old girls spent their time when he was her age. In gymnastics and soccer and… boys? No, that was later. Or maybe I didn’t notice when. Finally, he decides, maybe they, all those long-gone girls from his youth, didn’t want anyone to know how they felt about boys when they were just thirteen years old. Her father, his son, is trying to start a farm. Their community will need fresh produce. Most of her work is done by the early afternoon and together they walk the streets and see what each neighbor has done that day. A new fence. A newfound treasure. A new life.
Look what I found today…
An antique double-barreled shotgun with scrollwork engraving.
Fifty feet of surgical tubing.
This beautiful painting. Each day at breakfast there are fewer and fewer of the villagers who come and eat in the
dining hall at the Federal Building.
They are making their own lives now behind their fences in the houses where they store their treasures rescued from Before. Not like in the village where we all ate together in the evenings and the sky was our painting.
At night he returns to the Federal Building. The sentry gun, waiting on its tripod, its snout pointing toward the entrance, waits like a silent guard dog. He pats it on the head-like sensor, like he might pat a friendly dog, and returns to his room.
For a while he listens to the radio, their little station that Jason the Fixer had up and running in a day, playing the old programmed music from Before. Even Jason cannot figure how to change that. But, if they ever need to, they can interrupt the program and broadcast a message. Each night one of them takes a turn at the station. Watching the ancient computers. Just in case there is an emergency. Then all the radios in all the new homes of the once-villagers can be used to summon help.
We can still help one another that way. We are still a village.
So the Old Man leaves the radio playing softly through the night just in case there is some kind of emergency that will bring them all together again. Every so often he hears the voice of the villager whose turn it is to watch the station, saying something as the long dark passes slowly into dawn.
And he reads.
He has read the book once more.
He is glad he had his friend in the book, Santiago, there with him out in the desert. When he reaches the end of the book he is glad for Santiago, that he made it home to his shack by the sea and for the boy who was his best friend. Again.
He thinks of his granddaughter.
She is my best friend.
But for how long?
Girls become women.
He remembers being sick and hot and hearing her voice calling him back from wherever he was going.
If I think of the sickness, I will think of the nightmare and then it will come while I sleep and I will wake up to get away from it.
So he goes down to the library.
He tries to pick a new book. But so many of the modern books, books from right before the bombs, seem like they might remind him of people and times that are now gone.
I’ll pick a classic.
How will you know which is and is not a classic?
