The End in All Beginnings

by John F. D. Taff

  Hopefully, she would.

  When I was through with the coffee, I washed the cup in the sink, set it onto the counter to dry, decided that, instead of showering on this fine morning, I’d swim a few laps in the pool.

  * * *

  I stirred when I felt her shadow fall over me.

  I opened my eyes to a backlit figure standing at the foot of the chaise lounge. I felt bleary, sleep-warm from the sun, smelled the chlorine of the pool.

  “Wake up,” she said, kicking the edge of the chaise gently with her bare foot. “Come on, you promised.”

  I dragged a hand over my eyes, through my hair. “That I did. What time is it?”

  “A little before noon,” she said, bringing a dark shape from around her back, holding it out to me. I shielded my eyes to try to tell what it was, but I could smell the sea on it.

  “No rations tonight!” she declared. “Fish is on the menu!”

  We spent a half hour cleaning and gutting the large fish, filleting it into long slabs, covering it with oil and spices and putting it into a covered dish to marinate. We didn’t speak, but I knew that she was antsy, eager to finish this task—which she knew we had to, with no refrigerator to let the fish sit in—and get down to the boat.

  Eager to get out of this building, out onto the ocean, out anywhere, doing anything but sitting for days and days on end with her boring, overprotective father.

  I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, bumping into my side amiably.

  I turned to her. “Oh, just wondering what your mom would think of you, fishing, gutting and scaling…whatever that is you caught.” I bumped her with my hip, smiled. “Washing your filthy, fishy hands in the kitchen sink.”

  Cassie turned to me, her hands still under the running water.

  “Tell me about her again, while we’re out on the boat.”

  I wiped my hands on a dish towel, nodded.

  I heard what she said, knew what she meant.

  Tell me about everything.

  * * *

  So, as we put the small boat out from a broken section of the building on what was once the thirty-eighth floor of Biscayne Towers, I told her the story, again.

  It was in the time when the ice caps melted, all of them, on both ends of the Earth. The North Pole became open sea, Antarctica a bare, sere desert, cold still but ice-free. And the waters rose all around the globe, finally reclaiming land that had reared up from the oceans millions of years before.

  The water rose and rose, and no one anywhere could believe it, could cope with it. In relatively quick succession, the major cities drowned—London, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Melbourne, Jerusalem, then entire countries perished, fell under the waves faster than most of their inhabitants could escape.

  Thailand, Madagascar, Egypt, Greece, Britain, Ireland, Iceland, gone beneath hundreds of feet of water. The Philippines, Japan, just chains of small islands now.

  And America? Split into five huge islands by the rivers that bloated horribly to accommodate the surging oceans. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Colorado, all seas now, swollen with the same water that took New York and Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Charleston and Richmond.

  They were gone, ghost cities. Goodbye, New Orleans. Goodbye, Memphis. Goodbye, St. Louis. Goodbye most of Mexico, all of Central America, California, Oregon, Washington. Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye.

  And, of course, nearly all of Florida. All that remained were clumps of buildings jutting from the waves like the skeletons of ships shoaled there or run aground long ago. All gone, submerged, lost beneath the sea, along with the people who once lived there, the governments that could no longer protect them.

  I told her all this as we rowed the boat through the canyons between the remaining buildings, told her as I’d told her a hundred times or more before.

  And she wanted to hear it, needed to hear it, though it often confused her. She was just a baby when it had happened. Too young to know cars and planes and computers and television, the Internet, malls, cell phones, school, the Pledge of Allegiance, hospitals.

  But all of that wasn’t what she really wanted to hear, never what she really wanted to hear.

  She wanted to hear about her.

  “I met your mother, Consuela, through an online dating site.”

  “Connie,” she corrected, pointing at a submerged obstacle, the top of an antenna array of some kind, poking up from a shorter building covered by the water.

  “Yes, Connie,” I said, smiling as I rowed around the spear of metal into clear water. “I answered her ad.”

  “She said she liked your smile.”

  I nodded.

  “And you took her to dinner at a restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard, a place called…ummm…”

  “Michael’s,” I said.

  “Mmmm,” I heard, rather than saw her smile. “And you had steak and she had a seafood salad that she didn’t eat much of. And you had drinks there until the place closed, and you took her home and she let you kiss her on the cheek.”

  I listened to my daughter tell the story—my story, our story—and felt the muscles of my heart get weak, watery, as they always did. Somehow, it seemed more real, more poignant coming from my daughter’s lips than it did playing and replaying itself through my mind.

  “What did she look like?”

  Those five words, which Cassie often asked, were all it took to bring her mother’s face into my mind.

  When the waters rose, they came quick. Connie and I had been forced to flee from our house on the outskirts of Miami with only the clothes on our backs and the baby. Not even any spare clothes, certainly no pictures, no mementos.

  Our family dog, Chester, stood in the doorway, wagging his tail as the water crept across the threshold, certain we were coming back, certain we would be back to take him.

  The soldiers in the small boat had screamed at us to leave, now.

  So, we grabbed the baby and nothing else, never came back. Not for stuff, not for pictures, not for Chester.

  I had no pictures to show my daughter of the mother she’d lost, we’d lost.

  That was the night, as we weaved our way through the flooded city, the weather changed for good, or rather kept changing. The amphibious landing craft that had rescued us, that held the twenty or thirty people left in our little neighborhood, was making its way back to the U.S. Navy vessel moored just off where the Port of Miami had been.

  But the craft never made it back to the ship.

  The weather went from clear and in the eighties, to stormy and in the thirties in a matter of minutes. Clouds rushed in, billowed liquidly across the sky, as if in a Spielberg movie, and the wind ratcheted up to near hurricane force. The boat, while designed for rough surf, was no match for the fury of the wind, the water, and it was swamped, somewhere just west of where the Palmetto Expressway had been.

  The swelling, crashing gray of the ocean reared over us, fell onto us. I was thrown from the boat as it lurched over, still holding the baby, clutching her in the crook of my arm while trying to maintain contact with my wife.

  But as the water crashed down onto us again, cold, relentless, like iron, I lost her grip. I called her name, but the roaring wind was so loud that I couldn’t hear my voice in my own head. I watched her spin from me, swept along by the wind, by the still rising water.

  Behind us, the amphibious landing craft’s stern shot upright, then slid beneath the waves. I saw no one around it, no bodies living or dead where it disappeared.

  Spray lashing my face, I peeked at the baby, her face pressed against my shoulder. She was alert, awake, not crying but clearly distressed by the cold water splashing her.

  Pressing her to my neck, I pulled us desperately toward my wife, now only a tousle of dark, windblown hair twenty feet or so away, rising and falling with the swell of the waves.

  I reached her just as she slipped beneath the water.

  I grabbed
for her, caught her hand, felt her fingers slip against mine, slide away.

  Saw her face become darker, vaguer, smaller as she descended.

  All of this played through my mind in the second Cassie asked about her mother, as it always did.

  “She was beautiful…precious,” I said, careful not to let my voice crack. “Just like you.”

  * * *

  We found the building after another hour of rowing. My arms hurt from the effort, but I insisted on this part, leaving Cassie to steer and keep a look out. Besides, I spent a lot of time checking the sky. Weather was no longer a thing to be trusted based solely on the look of a calm sky or a gentle breeze. Maybe it was due to all the water, maybe to something else, but the weather could now turn on a dime, and I was uncomfortable being exposed like this, out in a small boat, if it should happen.

  The building was listing slightly when we found it, perhaps five or six floors still above the water. Something, another building perhaps, had struck it, conveniently gouging a wide rent in its skin, exposing two floors and giving us relatively easy entrance.

  When she had tied the boat off to a piece of bent rebar, Cassie boosted herself up into the rent, removed a crank flashlight from a clip at her side and prepared to go in.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” I cautioned. “Shoes.”

  I held a pair of water shoes with thick, corrugated soles, raised my eyebrows.

  “Come on, Dad,” she responded, knowing that it was pointless to argue with me and already moving back to the boat.

  “If you step on something in there and cut your foot, it could get infected.”

  She nodded in exaggeration as she took the shoes, slid them on her feet. “I know, I know. But what if I touch something dangerous or fall or…”

  “I can only protect you from so much.”

  Cassie turned to give me a funny look, climbed back inside.

  I knew she no more believed what I’d just told her than I did.

  * * *

  Inside, still relatively intact, were four floors of a hospital, probably The Sisters of Mercy, a smaller one just northwest of downtown. Luckily, there were no bodies, at least none that we saw, and we were able to move about on the slightly canted floors with ease.

  The mesh bags we’d taken from our own building’s gym—the kind that normally held basketballs, volleyballs, soccer balls—came in handy here. I carried a list of medicines caged from a survival guide, and we were able to find a locked drug closet that yielded to our break-in attempts after only twenty minutes.

  Our bags stuffed with medicines, syringes, gauze, tape, bandages, scissors, scalpels and other odds and ends, we made our way back to the boat, slapping against the rough edges of the hole we’d entered earlier.

  On the return trip, Cassie wanted me to describe hospitals, the way they were when people were still around and water was where water should be.

  Later that evening, when we’d unpacked the day’s finds, cleaned them, assembled them on the dining room table to go through another day, I went with a glass of water to the southeastern edge of the building. Setting the glass on the railing, I stared out across what had once been Miami. The weather, again, was clear and cloudless. The moon was butter yellow in the sky, a suffuse, nebulous ring around it.

  I’d never lived here, in the penthouse apartment on the sixty-seventh floor of Biscayne Tower, before everything changed, but I knew Miami, had lived here all my life. To the north, the Venetian Causeway, Jungle Island, Bicentennial Park, the Port of Miami, the thin peninsula of Miami Beach, all gone. To the west, Little Havana, the airport, the cemetery, our own little suburb, all gone.

  All gone, everything in the world I knew, the world into which she’d been born, gone.

  I heard the slap of bare feet behind me, felt her hand on my shoulder.

  “Whatchya doin’?”

  I turned, saw her blonde hair scatter in the breeze, the earbuds of her iPod hanging from their cord around her neck. I could just make out something dim from them. Pearl Jam, maybe Foo Fighters. Classic rock.

  Smiling, I kissed her hand, held it.

  “Just looking out over the backyard. I think the weather might be rough tomorrow.”

  Cassie leaned her head on my shoulder, transmitting the tenseness of her body into mine.

  “You know,” she said slowly, softly. “We’re going to have to get out of here…eventually.”

  I am going to have to get out of here.

  I said nothing, looked back out over the moon-dappled waters.

  “You saw when we got back. The water’s coming up again. We won’t be able to get the boat out of the thirty-eighth floor anymore. It’ll be underwater.”

  I sighed, heavily. “I know.”

  “And everything up to the forty-fifth is mildewed, waterlogged, rusted.”

  “I know.”

  “Dad, we’re collecting all this stuff, stockpiling it here. Why? We can’t stay here forever. And we don’t have a big enough boat to take it all.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t like to think about what she was saying, didn’t like to admit, particularly to her, that she was right.

  “Why can’t we look for another boat, something bigger, go west?” she asked, lifting her head from my shoulders and standing next to me at the railing. “You told me that the United States broke into five islands. Why not find one, settle on dry land? Maybe there are people…”

  Still, I said nothing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid,” I breathed, not wishing to acknowledge this in front of her, not wanting to make her afraid, too.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Afraid of the world out there. Of what’s left. Of what isn’t left.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “What’s out there…what’s left…it’s all I’ve got.”

  I took another deep breath. “I know, baby. And that’s what I’m afraid of most. I’m afraid the only thing I have left to give you is a broken, dangerous world.”

  Cassie turned to me, but I didn’t—couldn’t—look at her.

  Brushing the hair from her face, she walked back toward the penthouse. When she’d taken three steps, though, she turned.

  “I only know the old world through your stories. But this is my world now, Daddy. I can’t know it only through you. Even if it is dangerous.

  By the time I turned to her, she had already entered the penthouse and drifted away into its darkness.

  * * *

  The next morning dawned dimly, and I heard tapping at the window.

  I threw back the cover—Lord, it was cold!—and went to the blinds. Outside, it was sleeting, the icy pellets driven nearly perpendicular to the building by a ferocious wind. Letting the blinds fall back, I ducked into my darkened closet, pulled out a pair of flannel-lined jeans, a t-shirt, a heavy canvas shirt and a hooded sweatshirt. A glass apartment at the top of a Miami high-rise doesn’t hold heat well, and there was no functional furnace anymore, if there ever had been.

  In the kitchen, I smelled cooking—eggs, coffee. The fiftieth floor of the building, still clear of water, had hosted several restaurants in its day, and the larders were packed with all sorts of dried, canned and packaged foods. The fresh stuff had rotted away years ago, but there was enough down there to feed two people indefinitely.

  “Good morning,” Cassie said, stirring the powdered eggs in the skillet as several other pots bubbled and boiled. She wore sweatpants and a bulky down parka. “Hope you’re hungry. I’ve got scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff and hot cinnamon apples. Oh, and coffee.”

  My stomach lurched, happy to eat but a little dismayed at the combination. She’d grown up in a world of canned rations, MREs and freeze-dried camping food. A world where you ate what you had. And if you had beef stroganoff for breakfast, that’s what you ate. So, the combination didn’t seem strange to her.

  She brought me a hot cup of coffee, set it down and kissed my head.

  “The barometer is
sinking fast, so the low’s gonna be a big one,” she said, stirring the other pot, tasting a spoonful.

  “You’re gonna use up all the solar,” I chided, sipping the coffee and smiling at my daughter as she buzzed around the kitchen.

  “So?” she said, ladling eggs and a gloppy gray substance that I knew, from bitter experience, was the dehydrated stroganoff. “Gonna be cold today. You need something hot inside you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said as she set my plate before me, went back to prepare her own.

  We ate mostly in silence, but I knew my daughter well enough to know that she wanted something.

  “So, I was thinking,” she said. “I’m pretty familiar with the area around the building, right?”

  I set my fork down.

  Here it comes.

  “I suppose.”

  “And I’m pretty good with the boat, right?”

  “Okay”

  She gained steam as I appeared to agree with her assessments.

  “And you’ve taught me a lot, right? You’ve taught me really well.”

  “Sure…”

  “I was thinking that maybe, once in a while, I could take the boat exploring, just to get out, just a little, close enough to stay in contact. I mean, not today. But, you know, sometime…”

  Cassie looked at me with such unbridled enthusiasm, such hope that I found it hard to deflate her.

  “Stay in contact how exactly?”

  “Those walker-talker thingies we found a few months back,” she answered, her cheeks flushing. I realized that I’d fallen right into her trap.

  I looked at her for a moment, measuring her.

  “Walkie-talkies,” I corrected.

  “Whatever. The ones with the rechargeable batteries. The ones we never use because you never let me go anywhere. Those. I could have one, you could have one.”

  “And what happens if you get into trouble?”

  I already knew the answer to this, already knew what she’d say.

  “The extra boat, the one you’ve been working on. If I get into any trouble, you can come and get me.”