If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O,
If ever I return,
All your cities I will burn,
Destroying all the ladies in the air-i-o.
***
John Schoffstall has published short fiction in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and other venues. He is always working on a novel. He lives in the USA, which is really not as bad as you have heard.
THE EYE OF JOB
DAN READE
illustrated by Richard Wagner
I am standing on the back deck of a home off Elkton. Not mine. I don’t know whose it used to be. The tiny yard is waist-high grass, and a stone’s throw away Keg Creek slips by on the other side of burr oak. The water gurgles sleepily in the coming dawn. Rising above it all is the Eye.
It waits out there. A column twenty miles high and ten in diameter. It covers most of Omaha. When it appeared, 500,000 lives were instantly gone. In this Midwest morning, the Eye lurks like a false sunrise, upon the wrong horizon but still bright enough that it’s never really night. Its color brings a memory some forty years in age. Shortly after my discharge and a week into our marriage, Nell and I left my parents’ place in Sandpoint and drove down to Vegas in our brand new Bonneville. At the border between Idaho and Nevada, amid all that scrub and desert, we came across the opening movements of a wildfire, orange flame licking the brush to the west of the freeway. We watched Forest Service helicopters dip massive buckets into the thread of a river then crawl skyward, water sloshing loose. We tried to see the pilots but they were hidden behind screens of darkened glass, and the sky was a smoldering red, fire against the smoke like the fungal petals of a dying rose. The Eye is the same red. Or at least that’s how Nell described it when we first became witnesses.
I listen to the cry of a jay. I listen to the sound of the creek. I think about throwing myself in. Instead, I hold tightly to the deck’s weather-beaten rails. The worn-out paint is like sandpaper. I shake my head. With effort, I turn and wander back through the deck’s French doors.
The house welcomes me. It feels almost grateful to once again hold someone after so many empty years. It, like most of those I’ve searched in Wabash and her neighboring towns, bears the signs of the hasty evacuation that was enforced upon the community when the Eye appeared. Dishes remain in the drainer. Cupboards and closets stand open. A desiccated bar of soap sits next to a faucet. Towels hang from racks and all the televisions are still plugged in. In one bedroom, the sheets are neat and tucked. In two more, decorated with cartoon dinosaurs, the bedding is thrown back, blankets on the floor, pillows in the crack between mattress and wall. There is raccoon scat in a bathroom, and the front door was never fully closed and seasons of rain and snow have caused an arc of carpet to blossom black. When I first entered, I checked the house for squatters, my headlamp sweeping each space. The poor from Lincoln and Des Moines and Sioux Falls have come to towns like Wabash, drawn by unattended dwellings. But while I’ve spotted squatters, I’ve never seen the same ones twice. The Eye seems to drive them on. And this house is empty.
I’m not sure why I went to the deck. Nothing I’m seeking would be there.
I start my search in the kids’ bedrooms. I push sheets aside, toss the closets, empty every container I find. Leaving a mess doesn’t worry me; even if someday the restrictions are lifted, I can’t imagine anyone would return. The bedrooms don’t have what I want, but then I get to what was a study or an office, a pressboard desk tight against one window, accompanied by a folding chair that looks like a refugee from a church basement. I find plastic crates filled with old tax forms, medical records, vinyl-covered photo albums. The pictures are mostly of a woman and two young boys, the three often separate but sometimes together. Some older people too. I guess they’re grandparents. I linger on those, but not for long.
In one without the old folks, the woman and the children hold a Siamese cat. That’s the one I take. Then I check the kitchen and garage for a food bowl. There is none, which I hope means that the family took the cat with them. At the end of the first winter and the snow melt, there were too many carcasses. And shortly after that, Nell left. We agreed it was best; her nightmares had gotten so bad, plus her mother’s senility was advancing. Nell got an apartment near her mom in Galveston. I would have done anything to leave with her. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now: anything.
I exit the house. For some reason, I lock the door behind me, a thing I haven’t done in forever. My car waits outside. When I first started this, nine months to the day after Nell left, I’d adopt a disguise, covering my cheeks and nose with a ski mask I hadn’t worn in thirty years. I’d also park my car behind the homes I was searching, out of fear that the SecFor sweeps Offutt always promised would finally materialize. But the base has more to worry about than what happens in these towns. Hell, at the start of the crisis, when Offutt was swamped with more airmen than it knew how to handle, it would send teams of them on maintenance detail, young men and women barely just adults chugging around on riding mowers to keep the lawns in check or hauling around dented toolboxes and buckets of paint, all meant to keep the houses presentable. But that didn’t last, such teams much less common now, and soon enough I started leaving my car in the middle of a block as I made my way through every home in sight.
Sometimes I’ve had on the same clothes I’ll wear to work. Once or twice, I’ve realized my ID badge is hanging from its lanyard.
I open the trunk of my car and put the photo in a plastic sleeve. That goes in one of the two nylon satchels, along with all the rest. Right there, staring at the satchels next to the jack and the first aid kit and the two sandwich bags I’ve forgotten to throw away, I’m certain that this is the last of it. I have found all I’ll need. Maybe this should be momentous. It’s not. I’m just tired. I feel like I’ve been this tired for most of my life. But now’s not the time to rest. The engine of my Lincoln is gruff as I head back home. To the northwest, the Eye remains.
***
In our driveway, I don’t lock the car. The front door I barely remembered to shut when I left four hours ago. Before she moved away, Nell came home more than once to find that door hanging open, “just like you wanted to welcome in the neighborhood.” If we’d had neighbors, I would have welcomed them. I would have thrown the biggest party I could arrange.
Inside, the lights are on. I have trouble being alone in this place, particularly in the dark. I amble creaky-kneed to the kitchen. I pour myself a cup from the coffee maker, using a mug with the words LAKE OKEECHOBEE slashed across the ceramic in blue. I have never been to Florida. I wonder if the people who lived here ever went themselves, or if this was a gift from a friend or an item picked up by chance at a thrift shop or swap meet. What story might it tell. When Nell and I first moved into this place, this one over any other because she liked the roses creeping up a trellis on the home’s south side, there were pictures of the family before us still up on the walls, abandoned like everything else in their haste to escape. When we took them down, the pictures left behind faint square outlines. Those remained on the paint no matter how we scrubbed.
It’s cold. The air smells of ragweed. Thankfully the plants haven’t started releasing their pollen. I take the cordless phone from its cradle hanging next to the kitchen sink; Offutt has at least maintained those lines. I dial her number and stare out the window, the coffee cooling next to me on the countertop.
Nell picks up on the seventh ring. “You don’t have work for another two hours,” she says by way of greeting.
“It’s never a bad time to hear your voice.”
“That’s a decent line. It almost excuses you waking me up again.”
“Sorry.”
“Sure. Apologize. You’ll do it as well tomorrow.”
“Probably will.”
“I at least respect the honesty.” I hear her stretch, hear the rustle of blankets shifting. She’s sent a few photos of the apartment she found, some basic unit with
white walls and carpets the color of oatmeal. Other than those, I have no way to picture what’s happening. I don’t even know if she’s decorated; in the pictures, the apartment is bare.
“Are you going in early today?” she says.
“No. Normal time.”
“Why are you up then?”
“Couldn’t sleep. You know how it is.”
There’s a pause. She says, “I suppose I do.”
I lean on the edge of the sink. I see the house next to this one with its cluster of maples and hackberry. Behind all that towers the Eye, its red making the trees look demonic. Nell installed blackout curtains in our bedroom the same day we moved in. Soon enough, she installed them on every window in the house. I removed them all when she left. I don’t know why. Sometimes she would find me standing near the empty shell of the home’s above-ground pool, staring at the Eye. I wouldn’t be able to tell her how long I’d been there.
“Don?”
“What?”
“You’re looking at it now,” she says.
“No,” I tell her.
“Don, stop it.”
“Okay.” I ease myself away from the sink and shuffle to the dining room table. Nearby are large glass-paned doors that lead out to the back yard. The Eye is just as visible here as it is in the kitchen.
“Anything special planned for today?” she says.
“Listening to more airmen.”
“That isn’t good for you anymore.”
“Was it ever?”
“No.”
I want to ask if she’s found someone else. We may be old and may still be married and we talk every day, but I can feel the distance growing between us. There is something unexplainable yet undeniable about physical presence, in the soft sounds we make, in the scents we know but don’t notice until they’re gone. All that feels left to me are great confessions of my love; that’s the only way I can think of to rekindle what’s dying. Perhaps that’s why I’ve chosen to do what I have, all the nights through those homes, the sorting of lives, the collection in the Lincoln’s trunk. I’ve wanted to tell her about it every single day since I thought of it, but she would tell me to stop, or worse call the base and have them take me in. She’d do that because it’s right. It’s one of the reasons I love her.
“Are you going to be okay?” she says.
“I’ll be fine.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Old and cranky.”
“You’ve been that way for twenty years.”
“Then I feel twenty years more of it.”
“I guess there’s no good reason for you to change now.”
I can’t tell if she’s playful or frustrated. It scares me that I don’t know. In desperation, I choose playful. I say, “Cranky’s gotten me to sixty.”
“You say that like we’re ancient. We’re not that old. They say sixty is the new forty.”
“I’d settle for the new fifty.”
She chuckles. The sound makes my jaw ache. She says, “Maybe you can find some kids to get off your lawn.”
“I would love kids on my lawn. I would love anyone here.”
She grunts. The ache is immediately gone, or now worse. I used to know what her grunts meant; I could interpret them. This time they’re just a noise from a stranger.
She says, “I guess I better go feed Julius.”
“Give him a pet for me.”
“You be good, okay?”
“Sure.” I listen to the pause and then I hear the click. I keep the phone pressed to my ear. Then I get up and put it back in its cradle. My mug goes in the sink with the dishes from last night’s dinner. People on the base have offered MREs, tell me it’s the easier way to go when you’re flying solo. Maybe I should have taken them up on it, but at this point, it doesn’t matter.
I shuffle to the bathroom to shower and shave. My closet is all clothes she bought me, shirts and pants hung with the precision the Air Force drilled during my enlisted days. Dressed, I go back to the kitchen. The Eye is waiting. Scientists say that its exterior is effectively featureless. They say it’s perfectly smooth and chromatically uniform. I don’t believe them. How would they know? The Eye devoured those people and in the three years since, it’s devoured every single probe sent in, those machines totally gone. And I see shapes swirling in the Eye’s surface, like those that find you when you close your eyes.
I see those shapes now, motes drifting. The Eye and I watch each other until it’s time to go.
I leave the cul-de-sac and take 5th to Locust. I follow that down to US-34 which will lead me to the Interstate. I pass ballfields, their backstops overgrown, and stores with their wares still in their windows. I pass a church, its signboard dingy, the long forgotten letters proclaiming HE COMES TO CLAIM THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. I’ve often wondered if the sign maker wrote that before the Eye appeared, or after. Deer wander the streets. They barely move when I pass, their eyes aglow in the Lincoln’s headlamps. This town is now more theirs than mine. I do seventy along narrow roads and never once think about the brakes. As I drive, the Eye appears here and there in the distance, a string of homes or abandoned businesses hiding it until the string is broken by an empty lot or park and then there it is, the same shape as the grain silos that dot the land. I have almost gotten in accidents staring at the thing on roads with no one around.
The only way into what used to be Omaha is I-29 with its multiple gates and check points. I reach the first in fifteen minutes. I can already spot the fighters and bombers and surveillance drones that circle the Eye, on constant watch for whatever it might do. I hope the enlisted at the check point doesn’t ask to look in my trunk but the guard, a woman I don’t recognize, just glances at my ID before waving me through. I think she stares more at the Eye than at me. On another day, I would remember her name and have her CO send her for evaluation. But not today. I speed on. Once you get close enough, the Eye takes up everything you see.
***
The airman’s fingers drum the armrests of the chair. His knees bounce up and down. He’s wearing glasses, much better than the requisite birth control glasses we were stuck with when I was first in. His expression makes me think of a boxer going into a fight he knows he’s going to lose. I realize I’ve forgotten his name. I see so many. The Master Sergeant who showed up with my recall papers told me he doubted I would be too busy. Just routine in times of emergency, he said. I knew even then it was a lie.
I glance at the airman’s name tag, then down at the folder on my lap. Suarez. He came voluntarily.
“…and so she said she had to stop emailing me,” he says. “Me being that close to the Eye, it freaked her out.”
“Did you ask her about that? What freaked her out? What scared her?”
He’s twenty-seven but his hair is graying. His eyes are narrow and flat. “I asked but she wouldn’t talk about it. At least she wouldn’t email me back. I tried calling too. I even had a ticket to go see her. I have leave scheduled next month. You know how hard it is to get leave around here?”
“Yeah.”
He rubs one hand across his scalp. “I liked her.”
I shift in my seat. I’m sitting at a desk. He’s on the other side. I’d prefer two chairs facing each other with no barriers between, but the office doesn’t have that much room. “Remind me,” I say. “Have you ever met her?”
“No, sir, just online. But it feels like I have.” He chews his lip. “I get lonely here.”
He looks at me. I’m his cornerman. I need to stop this fight, call it off. But the best I can do is salve his wounds and send him back in. “I see lots of people,” I tell him, “many for relationships in trouble.”
“Because of this posting?”
I nod.
“And what do you say to them? How do you explain it?”
“I tell them we’re all suffering.”
“That help?”
I shrug. It is a motion that feels wholly inadequate. “Not as much as I’d like. But most people
take a bit of comfort in knowing they’re not suffering alone.”
He sighs. He looks at his watch. I mirror the movement.
“We’ve got a bit more time,” I tell him.
“I think I’m done if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s your nickel.”
“All my nickels belong to the Air Force.” He pushes himself up. “Any homework?”
“Maybe write this woman a letter. Tell her everything you’re feeling. Bring it in next week and we’ll talk about it.”
“Should I send it?”
“Up to you.”
“Okay, sir. See you next week.” The office is so small he has to crab walk the slit of floor between my desk and his chair. From there, he angles his way past the metal frame bookshelf the Air Force insists should be here. When he reaches the door, he stops and turns, his fingers lingering on the knob.
I wait for him to confess what’s really eating him. They always do when they’re about to go.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
“Sure.”
“How long have you got?”
“Until they tell me I can leave.”
“You think you’ll make it?”
“Any other questions?”
“No, sir,” he says. Then, “Thanks.” Then, “See you next week.” And he’s gone. I should write notes in his folder, but I don’t. Really, for every client, my notes are all the same.
I wait a minute for Suarez to clear the lobby, then stick my head out to see who’s next. Amos is standing before the reception desk. He’s wearing his flight suit, the bars on his shoulders a somber black thread. He and I met in the O-Club. The bartender introduced us, saying Amos needed a friend. Unspoken was that I needed one too. We run into each other maybe once a month and when we do, we swap the same six stories and get drunk and go home. Amos is married. Like Nell, his wife left the area. She took their children too. I don’t fully remember his wife’s name or the names of his kids or even how many children he has or whether they’re daughters or sons.
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 6
