by Janis Ian
Somehow she knows she won't.
Hester sits on the deck, and the sun goes and evening descends. The world is sapphire then indigo. Stars appear.
Perhaps this aloneness is what, anyway, she truly needs. She'd craved solitude from all but one person. When he was gone, no one else could help her. Soon she longed to get away from them all, and from the hubbub of the city too, their nest. Get away from everything. Now though… Well, she's here. If she didn't need this, still she's got this, like all the rest she hadn't needed. She would have to face up to it.
All evening, night, she moves around the cabin, out on the deck, circles the house and slides back in again.
How entirely voiceless is this world on the ridge, only the rough silk barely-audible shiver of the pines, the clucking of the stream over its stones, her own footsteps, her breathing.
Eventually she goes back in and gets ready for bed. Hester lies, waiting for the owl to begin its eerie hoots. But the owl doesn't make a sound.
Does she sleep now? Perhaps. It's all confused, dreams washed over wakefulness, sleep dropping dull lacunas through her conscious mind. The clock's stopped. Why's the damn clock stopped? That happens when someone dies—childhood's there, in London, a grandmother looking pale with a no longer functioning alarm clock in her hands—"No, Gran, it's only because the battery's dead—"
What are you going to do?
Sleep, I'll sleep now.
I can hear a voice—
(Oh, it's me, I'm crying. It's me crying.)
A Wind blows along the edges of the earth, full of gathered sighs, and ebbs away.
~~~~~
Next day, you're up so early. Showered, dressed, scrubbed and ready for the world. You make a holiday breakfast, hash browns, eggs, orange juice. Then on with the walking shoes and out.
Hester swings through the woods.
The trees stand so tall and still. There are only the pines, though she was told there were other kinds of trees. Nothing, aside from Hester, moves. The sunlight showers profligate on the ground. Surely—just one single noise somewhere—some chattering bird alarm-call at her approach? A song? All right then, a distant car? None of the above.
No cars pass now along the road below. Yes, you've watched, haven't you, Hester, timed the time during which no car has gone by, when that first evening they had annoyed you so by passing three or four in an hour.
Another stream slips between ferns. She can hardly hear it, muffled in its own depths. She bends over the water and looks for fish, or insects. Nothing is there.
A faint sound makes her imagine a plane is traveling overhead, but craning up so fast her neck gives a snapping note, there isn't anything at all. Except, in the east, the sky blazes with erupting clouds, gold-white. Not like the dreams. Oh no.
What you gonna do?
"Drew—don't leave me—we can work something out—I don't care about anyone but you—nobody—nothing—"
When the silence—
When the silence…
In her head she's screaming there's no silence louder than the bomb-blast aftershock when love runs out the door.
Hester strides back the way she's come. Desiccated needles crunch under her trainers. In the cabin she prepares lunch. Why does the microwave work, and the generator, when the TV and radio and the CD-player don't? Superstitiously she won't consider this.
Instead she tries the cabin phone. The cheerful polite message plays back to her the voices of her successful-lover friends. O.K., she'll call them. Tell them how wonderful it all is and ask them where is the bloody town she hasn't been able to find.
She hears the phone ring. The sound of this—she goes on listening to it, maybe for ten minutes. No one picks up. They're out. No. They never go out before the afternoon, working in the apartment. What's happened? Don't be ridiculous. Probably they're making love, that's why the phone won't answer. They just forgot to unplug it. They wanted the world to know what they're at—Phones don't ring if something happens. It would be robot voices telling her the lines are down, or some sort of sinister whistling—or utter—silence.
Hester calls up numbers at random. Some she invents. All ring. None answers. Once she tries to replay the recorded message on the cabin phone, but now it too refuses to reply. As she always knew, everything is a conspiracy against her.
~~~~~
The next morning Hester goes to the car and checks the gas. The tank is still nearly full, though how can it be? The gauge too must be faulty. She wonders if she should drive back along the highway to the previous gas station, the one with the animosity of the man and the chained dog. Why do that, Hester? To see—if they are still there?
Hester makes a roster for herself. She even writes it down. Once on the hour, every hour, she will call various numbers of friends scattered over the vast continent of the USA. (Not Drew's number, of course, never that.) She'll even call her family in London, England. Won't that startle them, after a whole year?
When she's finished lunch, she'll walk. She will actively seek out cabins and shacks in the woods, and that trout stream the New York friends told her, along with a fruit farm, had been hacked out of the skirts of the mountains. She knows roughly where they are. They'd shown her photos, hadn't they.
If nothing—if she doesn't get anywhere, though she will, then tomorrow she must risk the gas and drive back along the road onto the highway. For one thing, the lights, look at them, keep blinking. The generator—failing? If it does, pragmatically she thinks, the freezer and fridge will go, and the heating. And then she'll just have to—well she'll have to—
Has something happened out there? A great hush of nothing, of vacancy—or only the battery of the busy world finally going—dea—
Now Hester has a phase of immaculately grooming herself again. She puts on a face-pack, manicures and pedicures and paints her nails. She washes and conditions her hair and applies make-up carefully to her fresh, stripped face. All dressed up—
In the fridge the light blinks too, on and off, then diminishes. The fridge is full of moist dimness. A little spill of water creeps from under the freezer.
Part of the roster for this day stipulates keeping watch for any animal activity in the pine forests, any birds heard or seen. Once she's sure there is something—she rushes out onto the veranda deck, and sees a small bough has fallen from a pine, its abrupt movement deceiving her.
There's another moment of deception, too. The call signaling through the phone is suddenly interrupted, and breathless Hester waits for a voice—any voice—to speak to her. But all that speaks to Hester is the silence.
Hester, says the silence, on and on. After she throws back into the car the mobile she's been using in desperation, Hester tries to eat lunch. Then she walks in the woods.
She walks all afternoon, climbing up and down vague tracks, over outcrops and slopes where the powdery soil rushes away in front of her. Everything is so large. The trees are giants. Between them the undergrowth is sparse. The mountains, the largest things of all, bar the sky, hang disembodied. She sees no one. No animal life. No cabins, shacks, not even the residue of any old camping places. From the exact high-pitched area she's had described to her as offering a view of the town, the one she tried to reach earlier, she looks over and around. There is no town there, only valleys full of pines. She's discovered too, or not discovered, rather, there is also no fruit farm in the other direction.
The sun goes. Tramping back, she notices the ending bars of brassy light, how flat they are, and everything they fall on seems for a moment two-dimensional.
Approaching, but not yet seeing the cabin, Hester has a horror it won't any longer be there. So she runs, tripping and jumping through the last trees, and finds the cabin still standing. But inside, the water from the freezer has become a pool. The lights are out, unresponsive to everything she tries to try to trick them to come on.
Hester lights oil-lamps. Tomorrow she'll drive back along the highway. Whatever has happened out there has now, like
an uncurling, noiseless wave, reached here. She seems positioned at its center, the eye of a storm that is not.
~~~~~
Why aren't you afraid, Hester? Oh but you are. You are sick and crazed with terror. It's only—you'd already learnt how to be always afraid. It's become your everyday life, this empty panic that goes continually on. Ever since he left you alone and everything else was made meaningless, and alien.
"Honey, you really do have to try—" "Baby, he's not worth it—" Worth what? Try what? To pull herself together, push the pain out of herself, out of this her of whom he's unworthy, and who wants only him. The kind, despairing friends, their chatter, their condolences—as if Drew had died. He had, for her—but no. It was Hester who was deceased.
What are you dreaming? It's about the girl in the restaurant, long hair down her back, so much more attractive than Hester, so much less available. Hester dreams she herself is in a teeming city, whose glass towers soar into the upper air, but no one teems there after all, and the glass scrapers-of-sky are really mountains, hollow, and also of glass.
Hester wakes up, gets up, goes to stand on the deck. The black-blue night is massed with blazing planets and the misty milk of stars. It's not cold any more, not warm. There's no breeze, the scent of the pines is slight. Nothing moves or stirs or makes a sound.
Hesst—ahhh breathes the silence into both her ears.
Somehow, before she knows it will happen, she is seeing a shadow multitude of figures descending all the hills and the mountain-edges all around. They're not there, these shades, nothing is there. They are tall, with long hair down their backs, these peoples of the past, these memories. They glide down all the slopes the way water runs off, and then, as water does, they're gone, sinking into the earth.
Hester can't hear the stream. She picks across the hard floor of the land on her bare feet and stares into the streambed. Like water runs off—
The stream has vanished from its bed. Nothing is there either, to glimmer, or make a sound.
~~~~~
It's fall—that's English autumn. But more than that. Fall. Call it fall. Things call and fall. Skies fall down. They come away in huge masonry sections, crashing noiseless on the crushed world.
High above, pitiless, the planets sing and spin. Can you hear them?
Is this a dream now? Or real now?
Hester stares up at the sky. Cloud must be invisibly passing. One bright star has winked out, gone like the light inside the fridge.
She retreats into the cabin. She puts her hand on the wall. Solid, it's solid.
Through the windows, clouds cover more stars. The night darkens.
All the oil-lamps are alight now, and no moths come to them.
Hesst-ahh calls the silence, Hessz-tahrr.
She falls (falling) asleep at the bar in the kitchen area, sitting on the stool, head propped on her manicured hand.
Something is going through heaven, not an angel, not anything that has wings, or a form, but, like the lamp-lighters of old, it's putting out the lights.
Instead, daybreak somehow arrives. A dull morning, as if rain were expected, yet cloudless. The sky's blue—but dead. Battery expired.
Hester, waking up, removes her stiff numbed hand from under her neck-twisted head. It takes a while to restore circulation. Only then does she really see out of the windows.
She runs to the bathroom, voids herself. She sits there, crying now, telling herself, but only in whispers, that she's lost her mind, that's all it is.
But you're brave, aren't you, Hester? You were brave before. When he left you, you didn't just lie down on your face in the dirt, and you don't now. You attend to yourself, wash your hands carefully at the faucet which will barely play a trickle of water. Then you go out again and take another look.
"It's me. That's all. I've gone off my head. It has to be me."
It isn't you.
During the fall of the fall night, something has also visited the earth. It's rubbed out all the trees. Every one. They're gone, the pines on the ridge, the woods, the forests that spread their shaggy miles of pelt below for deer, bears and wolves, gophers and yellow jacks. Gone.
There are no trees. There are no forests.
The ridge stands bald as a desert rock with its cargo of car and cabin, solitary above the bare slopes. And behind, the mountains, nailed on the dead sky, unclothed and ephemeral as no mountains ever are. But now, they are.
So this is how it's to be. Proverbially without any explosion, screamless and unvocalized. Not even the predicted whimper, for who would dare accost this torrent of nosound—
When the silence falls.
~~~~~
That night's sunset is the last one. She knows this. She watches. The sky flushes a lifeless red and folds away. A kind of twilight comes, resembling the twilight the day had been. No stars, no planets remain.
Once she thinks she hears a wind blowing, but it's some noise of her own breathing, and Hester sits listening to it.
She has no way to mark the hours. What would be the point of marking them?
She lies down.
She listens to the silence, and it calls out Hess-staar over and over again. This continues. How long? She doesn't know. No one could.
~~~~~
She dreams the car is driving again across the sky.
Then she's up and running. Hester flies through the cabin, flings open the door, flings herself down the steps, then stands frozen, petrified. One more rock. She's awake. The car isn't in the nothing-sky above. It's on the track. Gradually it pulls itself nearer. It creeps up the ridge and moves in beside her own vehicle, quite naturally, as if in a crowded parking lot. The car-door comes undone, and he gets out.
Standing there, she can see him so plainly, because there's really nothing else left to look at. Is he a shadow? No, solid like the cabin, made of flesh and blood.
"Drew," she says, somehow says, or some voice in her body says it.
It's Drew. He comes towards her at a stumbling run. He takes hold of her, and she can feel his hands gripping her, and smell the electric smell of him, heightened by adrenaline.
"You're here," he says. He holds her, holds on to her. She puts her arms about him, experimentally. "You're here," he says again. "I've driven three nights. I think, nights. Can't tell. The car ran out of gas—empty—no gas station. Car just kept going anyhow. Christ knows. The sun went. It just went away like every other goddamn thing."
"Yes," Hester murmurs.
Their voices hang there in vast silence, lost, tangled up together.
~~~~~
"It's something they did—that great governmental They." This is what he says next. They are sitting in the cabin, sipping water from the bottles, eating cookies. Although the stores have deteriorated, there are still lots of things to sustain them. "What?" he questions, not her, but something, someone else. She recalls, it was his habit to do that. "We thought it'd be a war, right?" (still not to her) "or some accident—or terrorism. We had some cause to think it might be that. But not—this. What'll they do now, those blind self-righteous bastards? Those great generals? They're gone too. Every single one, maybe, with the rest." He looks at her. She, staring back at him, tries to relearn his features, tries to feel all the seething of her love. "Where did it go, Hester?"
"I don't know. I don't know where it went."
Like love, she thinks. It's what you said to me, back then. You didn't know where love had gone—
"I guess," he says. "Maybe there could—be others like us? I knew I'd find you here."
"Why?"
In her head, her voice adds drearily, why find me? Surely there were all those others you preferred. Shouldn't you have found them? Perhaps you tried. I'm all, this time, you could get. Poor Drew, she thinks, unkindly. But she doesn't feel unkind. She doesn’t feel—anything much.
He doesn't answer her anyway.
He says, finally, "I guess you're real?"
"Are you?"
"I don’t know," he sa
ys.
They sit in the twilight, a little apart,
~~~~~
Later, they eat something else.
Sometimes they talk, not very much. What can they say? He keeps telling her how glad he is to find her. She says the same. She feels—only faintly surprised—surprised? Is that what she feels?
The horrible movie scenario of their situation begins to offend her. They are, perhaps, the last man and woman left in a compulsorily evacuated world. The last things—for this world will have very little else. Possibly they could survive. Possibly… Had she, long, long ago, ever fantasized about such an idea? Alone with him, and no other to intrude or lure away? Drew has to want her now, she's all there is. And for her, how many times she had cried out, he was all she wanted. Fuck all the rest. Now see—now see what you've done.
Somewhere on the roads, while the kids threw stones and the dogs snarled and she hated them all, and the sunsets flamed unloved—somewhere, had there been some kind of eldritch crone, who took note. Atropos, maybe. You shall have what you desire.
She had it. All was gone, and Drew was with her, for the rest of their lives.
They sleep a while, side by side, on the two beds, not touching. She had suggested doing it like this. They don't make love. Does love have any role in this? Or does it have the only role?
When she wakes, and sees drew still there, sleeping, a gush of fury, like poison, goes through Hester.
She turns on her side, away from him. She remembers places they've been, the cities bright with lights and lives. Even lying close then, lost in each other, beyond them the murmur of the highways, the passage of the sun, the moon and the planets over the sky. Had being with him made the world more beautiful—or—Oh Christ, Christ—the beauty of the world reflected back on Drew, changing him into the god he never was. The world. The first love. Mightier than mother or father, mightier even than oneself. Not backdrop—the wellspring of life—
"What are you seeing?" he asks her, waking as she does her sentry duty at one of the windows.
"The mountains," Hester says. She no longer whispers. "They're starting to go."
