Ark

by Charles McCarry

  Suddenly the dogs froze. Their noses pointed west, their ears pricked. Their coats bristled. They growled in unison. As if on cue, they barked in many different voices. Elsewhere in the park, other dogs barked, hundreds of them. Behind this choir, another, larger one sounded, muffled but coming from every point of the compass. Every dog in New York seemed to be barking. Every human being in the city knew what this meant. I shivered though I felt the rising sun on my back. Henry turned around and ran backward for a few steps. I would have done the same, but I was transfixed by the look on his face. He was interested, not afraid. He knew he was about to observe something no human eyes had ever seen before and might never see again, and (I knew Henry) he was correcting the picture of this moment that he had stored in his imagination by substituting the actuality. Or maybe, since he was Henry, no corrections were necessary. Even if I had not already guessed the truth, his expression would have told me everything I needed to know about the moment. The Event was happening at last.

  It started to hail—small stones at first, then larger, jagged ones. They bounced off Henry’s Yankees cap and struck my scalp and shoulders with such force that I thought I must be bleeding. Henry stopped running backward and opened his arms. I staggered into him at running speed, knocking us both to the pavement. I twisted an ankle and skinned a knee. The pain was intense, the kind of pain a child feels because it is new to her. A woman screamed and scooped up her dog, holding it tightly against her body as if it were a child. The dog, barking shrilly, struggled to break free. Other dogs and humans did the same, like members of an incredibly clumsy ballet company performing a work by an absurdist choreographer. Some of the dogs did get loose. Their owners chased them, calling their names.

  Henry was squeezing the breath out of me. I twisted in his arms, and using only the one eye that could see the sun, half-saw it. Ever since the cluster quakes in the Pacific, it had been tinged with pink and tattooed with flecks of dark pigment, but now—maybe because of the way the scrim of hailstones refracted its light—it looked blue, and so did everything its light fell upon. The figures of the people and the dogs, the leaves on the trees, even the squat granite museum, which was the only building I could see, were the colors of gas flame.

  Every nerve in my own body seemed to be centered in my skinned knee. These distractions made it possible for a moment to refuse to acknowledge what I knew was happening. With my good leg, I kneed Henry hard, may he forgive me, and he loosened his grip. I heard a rumbling sound and saw Henry’s eyes, glowing with intelligence, as he recognized the sound. I, too, knew what it was. It grew louder. The ground shook. Dog walkers fell down, more or less in unison. The rumbling was very loud now. Henry turned me around so that we were facing each other, groin to groin, face against face. I felt him lock his hands on my back.

  He whispered, “Ssshh, ssshh.”

  Was I screaming, too? I knew I was. How was such a thing possible? I felt deep shame.

  A great dirty cloud of dust boiled over the western horizon. The ground beneath our feet shivered, then shrugged violently, like the hide of an animal tormented by flies. It trembled, froze, trembled again. Then, as it seemed, something broke beneath the surface. The ground jerked in the direction of the museum and Fifth Avenue. It moved maybe a foot or two, quite gently. We moved with it. So did the other human beings, some of whom were teetering for balance like tightrope walkers. Most of them fell down and were now sprawled on their backs, their arms crossed, their feet pointed in the direction in which the ground, which had detached itself from whatever had formerly fastened it down, was slipping and sliding. Up to this moment, everything had remained in place. But now the trees were bending. Already some were almost parallel to the ground. I heard a loud crackle as their trunks shattered, then a cacophony of explosions crescendoing into a single great explosion, and I realized—I don’t know how—that the roots of trees were snapping in two beneath the soil. Severed trees fell down, smaller ones first, then the big ones.

  Central Park, along with the rest of the city, was sliding fast now—accelerating—and Henry and I and everyone else along with it. There were no points of reference. Everything was moving, nothing was the same, the fallen trees traveled with us like jackstraws. Everything—trees, grass, buildings, creatures—was skidding, faster now, toward the East River. The rumbling was very loud now. Other noises intruded, every one of them composed of many separate noises that in the end coalesced into a single deafening roar. The sun was blotted out by the roiling cloud of dust. The city, the world, was sliding, just as Henry had told me it would all those years ago in this park. Not for a moment did I think that I was dreaming. This was real. I tried to free my arms so that I could throw them around Henry, but they were still bound to my sides by his arms. He was far, far stronger than I ever realized.

  By now I couldn’t see much because I was crushed against Henry, but I could see the museum. Though blurred by the dust, it looked the same as ever, solid and gray. Like everything else, it was about the same distance away as it had been before the ground began to move. Then it collapsed—in an instant, thousands of tons of stone just came apart and fell down.

  Within myself I was calm, but who knows what noises I was making? Henry kept on whispering, “Ssshh, ssshh.” I wanted to talk to him but I couldn’t find my voice. Suddenly the ground jerked violently, propelling me at great speed. The movement tore me from Henry’s arms. In front of us, a huge rock rose from the earth. It was sharp at one end, raked like the prow of a sinking ship, squeezing out of the ground as if two gigantic, invisible thumbs were extruding it. I was going to be flung against this rock. I had no idea how fast the ground was moving, and me with it, but it was moving much faster than before. The rock seemed to be stationary, earth furrowing around it, wet and yellowish. I tried to run. I couldn’t even walk.

  Henry picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, stood up, and began to run on a diagonal. Somehow I understood the geometry. It was impossible to run away from the rock, so he was trying to use the momentum of the earthslide to get off to one side of it. To do that, he would have to run slightly faster than the ground was moving. I didn’t think this was possible, because the grass, the soil, and rocks of all sizes and shapes that were oozing to the surface all around us were moving far faster than any human being could run, let alone a man of forty-five with a hundred-pound woman slung over his shoulder. Henry lurched, he stumbled on a round stone and somehow kept his balance. He gasped—wheezed—for breath. He retched. I thought his heart might stop at any moment. He stumbled, then stumbled again. His cap fell off. I made a futile grab for it. He ran jerkily among the stones, which were rolling around like misshapen croquet balls and click-clacking against each other. As he tried to outrun all this, Henry’s bony shoulder stabbed into my stomach. Panic, the like of which I had never felt before, detonated inside me. This had nothing to do with what was happening beneath Henry’s feet. I had stopped using birth control a month earlier. I was late. I had meant to do a pregnancy test today, I had to fight myself to keep from fighting Henry—pummeling him, kicking him, screaming into his ear—to protect the child I might be carrying.

  Henry was staggering almost to the point of falling to the ground, which seemed to be on the point of breaking apart. Cracks formed on its surface. These cracks, caused by the shifting of the incalculable weight of the entire crust of the planet, were going to widen. They were going to become the huge fissures every human brain could instantaneously picture as if they were a collective memory from the prehuman past, or in some incomprehensible way, a long-gestating memory of the future whose moment of revelation had finally come. The Tarbosauruses and Oviraptors Bear had dug up in China had been swallowed in their time by just such an earthy mouth, and in my mind’s eye I saw Bear being covered up, too, like the specimens he had disinterred, and his own fossilized bones, all that was left of him, being dug up and exposed to air again millions of years from now.

  We had seconds left to live. The child I was carryin
g would die before it lived. How could this nonsense about the damnation of Bear be my last thought?

  Henry fell. I was thrown clear. I reached for him, clawing the ground as though groping for him in darkness. My body rolled as if tumbling down a steep slope. I couldn’t get control of it. It rolled over stones, which dug into my flesh. My bones were going to break, I knew this, and the memory of another fracture admitted Bear back into my consciousness. He became the earthquake. Tiny as I was, huge as he was, I fought back. His strength was too much for me, as I had known it would be. He pulled me toward death.

  Like him, I was one of the damned. What else could this mean? Henry was saved, I knew it. Old teachings came back to me. He was in the hands of another, more kindly captor. As in the past, I believed this while refusing to believe it. I was afraid to speak Henry’s name, in case whatever was carrying him off to eternal bliss might hear me and change its mind. I could feel movement, not a falling sensation, not flight. I couldn’t see. Why? Had I closed my eyes, had the sun been blotted out, was I going to be blind from now on, was I dead but not yet brain-dead? Any one of these possibilities was perfectly believable. I stopped asking questions. At last I had enough answers. I heard voices but could not make out words. I was rolling toward indecipherable sounds over a bed of stones. Pain was being inflicted on me. Would it never stop? I had never believed that such an end really lay in store for sinners. I had believed in oblivion. I let go of life, as the dying are advised to do as a signal of submission to the Almighty in the hope of light and silence and mercy. Something strong—stronger than Bear—grabbed me with many hands. It fixed me in place. I was wrapped in a storm of noise, all kinds of noise—explosions, screams, groans, crashes, sounds I could not name. If that was damnation, it was a brilliant cruelty, and how wise its designers had been to keep its true nature a secret from us.

  Or most of us. Henry—I was sure of this—was, for the second time, hearing a choir of counter-tenors singing songs new and beautiful to the human ear. He was hearing the church bells. The caveman was smiling back at him again. If the elect knew everything, he must know what I was hearing, too, so even though he was the lucky one, how could he be in a state of gladness, knowing that neither of us could ever break through this impassable barrier of unbearable noise, one to the other. Whether saved or damned, we were marooned.

  2

  “IT’S ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL, OF COURSE it is,” Clementine said, “but not so very much worse than what British and American bombing did to German and Japanese cities in the Second World War. Those half-starved, utterly defeated, guilt-ridden people—and to a certain extent, the British, too, by the bye—cleared away the rubble, stone by stone, and built up new cities, far better though perhaps less beautiful ones, in less than two generations. And so shall this generation and the next do the same.”

  Yet even Clementine, in whom the Event had reawakened the spirit of the Blitz, conceded that the damage done by the hyperquake was far greater than the devastation inflicted by any past war. Nevertheless, she regarded the outcome as a happy one. Before the batteries in our telephones went dead, we learned what happened from the mother ship, whose crew had observed the Event in its entirety, and measured it and photographed it and calculated its force. We now knew that most of the energy released by the core of the earth had been absorbed by the oceans, because it burst through the planet’s crust along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a fifty-thousand-mile-long underwater mountain range with a rift along its spine that runs down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic to a point midway between the Cape of Good Hope and the coast of Antarctica, then turns east and passes south of Australia, putting out several branches along the way and bending gradually northward along the coasts of the two American continents. Colossal volumes of lava burst through the mid-ocean rift at temperatures of more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Volcanoes and other mountains were formed beneath the sea all along this line, creating tsunamis that caused many deaths but did little damage to cities along the coasts that had already been transformed into heaps of stone and concrete and metal and glass by the slippage of the planet’s crust. In fact the tsunamis served a useful purpose by washing many of the dead out to sea, thus lessening the severity of the epidemics caused by millions of rotting corpses. In Northern California, the detritus of coastal cities was deposited forty miles inland. Fragments of the Empire State Building—and, one supposes, the stones and crumpled masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—were carried all the way across Long Island and deposited in the Atlantic, whose ash-gray, gritty waters washed the island’s shores.

  The fact that the Mid-Oceanic Ridge was located on the bed of the ocean meant that most of the damage was inflicted on the Americas and Europe, which were closest to it. An offshoot of the ridge that runs up what used to be the Red Sea devastated most of the Middle East, so neither of the great religions that had been attempting to obliterate each other when the planet convulsed could plausibly claim that the deity had chosen sides. They did so anyway, but since electronic communications and even paper mail no longer existed, they were forced to rely on ragged, wild-eyed pilgrims who wandered the scalped land dressed in robes and hoods, to spread news of the aftermath by word of mouth. The interior of Asia (though not the islands along its Pacific coast) escaped catastrophic damage. Ng Fred’s factories were unscathed, the herdsmen of Mongolia felt only a slight tremor. The destruction of most of the United States and nearly all of the European Union meant that the wealth of those two manufactories of sin had evaporated, and along with them, international trade and the very idea of wealth and its relentless conscience, philanthropy. Asia, therefore, was in no condition to come to the rescue of the ruined half of the world even if its culture could have produced such an impulse. The destruction of the dollar and the euro demonstrated the inconvenience of bad luck in a world that now lacked an America ever poised to come to the rescue of those who hated it. In what used to be the United States, central government was in hibernation. It still existed, or so we sometimes heard, but the pillars and domes and cupolas of the alabaster city that had been Washington, D.C., were now strewn over the bottom of Chesapeake Bay like a deconstructed Atlantis. Naturally, those who fancied themselves the rulers of what was left of America, whoever they were, issued decrees. However, their commands and proclamations traveled from the capital, wherever that was, to the people at about the same rate of speed—that of a man on foot or mounted on a horse—that had applied during the administration of George Washington. The smart thing was to ignore them.

  “Henry was spot-on about what was going to happen and how it would happen,” said Clementine, “and I’m sure he’d be quite happy to know that he overestimated the effect. By the time the mother ship returns, the rescue of humanity will be quite unnecessary. Civilization will be up and running, and glorious human folly will rule the planet once again.”

  QED. One could admire or be revolted by Clementine’s optimism, but there was no gainsaying that she had the right attitude. She was the only person in our little commune who ever mentioned Henry’s name in my presence. The chaps and others who had attached themselves to us took great care not to upset the grieving widow. Clementine refused to look on me as a Victoria that had lost her Albert. In her tidy bureaucratic way, she regarded my husband as missing and presumed to be alive. That was the MI5 rule—always had been—when no corpse had been identified. Whatever his fate, Henry was still present in all our minds. It would be unthinkable to classify him as one of the dead, an affront to put him into the wrong drawer in the absence of proof that he was one of the uncounted millions that had perished in the cataclysm. Quite possibly he would turn up one day at the end of the lane, and a lookout with exceptional eyesight would recognize him and cry, “Henry is back!” He knew where we were because Clementine had established our commune on land that Henry designated for the purpose. For him, it would be no problem to calculate how far that property had moved and where it was now. It would be like him never t
o show up. In any case, Clementine was right: He deserved to be counted among the living as long as we didn’t know for certain that he was dead. Clementine insisted on it for his child’s sake. How else could the girl grow up with the necessary mental picture of the father she had never seen?

  Clementine delivered my daughter with her own hands. As a young woman she had taken a night course in midwifery. Afterward, as a way of doing her bit, she had birthed many babies as a volunteer in a shelter for distressed young women. Even if it was she who said so as shouldn’t, she remarked in a mock Cockney accent moments after the child’s birth, no one knotted a neater umbilical cord than she, and indeed little Clementine—called Tiney because neither Clementine nor I could bear the thought of her being known as Clem—had a lovely belly button. The child spent more time on her namesake’s lap than mine, and surely absorbed more sensible vibrations. In her gruff contralto Clementine sang her nursery songs. She also read to her—stories I wrote and Clementine illustrated. Because batteries had temporarily vanished from the world, photographs were a thing of the past, so she recorded Tiney’s childhood by sketching her in charcoal or watercolors at least once a month. In these portraits, as in life, she looked just like the half-smiling, lama-like portrait of Henry that Clementine had painted and hung on the wall of Tiney’s room. The child, after learning to talk in sentences, spoke in a voice in which fugitive Cantabrigian vowels skittered like trout.

  It was Clementine who told me what the chaps had told her about my rescue and the disappearance of Henry when she debriefed them. I remembered nothing after the moment when he dropped me at the feet of the chaps because I had knocked my head against a rock. While I was out, according to the chaps, Henry had kept running with the skidding earth beneath his feet. It was, the chaps said, like watching a man as he ran down a steep hill. To me, as I listened to their description, it seemed like the Quasimodo from Henry’s nightmare, now invisible, had wrapped his arms around him. Henry could not stop himself. It looked to the chaps like he was trying to regain his balance—trying to catch up with it, reaching for it as a kid will do when in danger of falling on his face.