Selection Event (15 page)

As he had left Curtiz', he knew it would do no good to go home and try to sleep — that would be hopeless. So what was he to do? Go home and sit up and brood? Drive around till dawn?

If I were the person I wanted to be, he had thought as he drove the empty streets, what would I do?

The answer lay before him as obviously as the empty rain-wet streets: With a ceremony he would celebrate the end of these past horrible days of gun- and person-collecting and Curtiz' idea of restoring civilization.

He stopped at a neighborhood market and got frozen bread. All the baked bread had turned hard and been gnawed by mice and rats, but since the electricity was still on, he got frozen dough from the store's freezer. In his neighborhood, he kicked open a few doors and found several unopened bottles of wine and some unopened packages of cheese. That night he was going to have a picnic to mark an ending and a beginning.

While the bread baked, filling the house with sweet yeasty smells, and Isha bounced around the house, he took his flashlight and went to the backyard of the Chhom's house and picked several bunches of seedless red grapes from the arbor. They weren't ripe and were very tart, but they were grapes and they were fresh and they were good.

Back at home, he got the picnic blanket from the linen closet — and stopped in mid-movement. Something had caught his attention — but what? Standing there, holding the blanket, he realized what it was: his mother's perfume. It was on the blanket. He buried his face in it, breathed in its faint trace, and remembered the name. Ivoire. As a joke, his father had always insisted, wide-eyed and serious, that she never wore perfume, that that was her natural smell and that since the day they were married, she had always smelled that way. With a smile, she always agreed.

He double-wrapped the hot bread in foil and then put it inside the folds of the blanket. Into the grocery bag he put a chunk of the cheddar he'd found, the wine, a cork puller, a glass... and a second glass, on the off-chance he met someone some lovely woman — why not? — and the grapes.

“Isha!”

She was ready and bounded past him, the cat skittering after her, and climbed carefully into the car, stepping across the driver's seat. She positioned herself in the passenger seat, panting a little and looking around excitedly. The manx climbed behind the back seat and looked out the window.

“Just like the old times,” Martin said, starting the car.

Isha made a “Hah!” noise in her throat as she panted. The cat leaped onto the back of the passenger seat and perched next to the headrest behind Isha.

He drove them to Arden Park, in the middle of Santa Miranda. It was past midnight when they arrived. In the middle of the park, surrounded by acres of high grass and trees, was what was called the Grace Outcropping, named after some early founder of the city. The fenced-off outcropping was a fifty-foot high ragged upthrust of sandstone, worn smooth by a century of playing children.

The gate, which in the past decades had been closed and locked, now stood open wide. With the bag and the blanket, and Isha happily leading the way, her thick tail swishing behind her, they climbed the winding trail to the flattened top, the manx following at Martin's heels. At the very top, in a shallow depression, dirt had gathered over the years and weedy grass grew.

He spread out the blanket, placed the bread in the middle of it and surveyed the city. Through the heavy foliage of the thousands of trees that grew throughout Santa Miranda, the streetlights winked and twinkled. He could see that a few houses had been left with porchlights on, and a few windows glowed, but he did not think there were people there. Even though the city looked as though it should be alive, it was as silent as a desert. No car lights moved on the streets, no lights winked on or off. The breeze here was a little stronger and cooler, and that made him think of the warm bread he had wrapped in the towel.

Martin tore off a piece of the bread, breathed in the smell, ate it and then cut open the cheese and gave a chunk of it to Isha. She chomped at it awkwardly and then bobbed her head and waited for more. She took the second piece and trotted into the dark and returned a second later, wanting more. After she ate the third slice, she lowered her head and began sniffing across the grass and happily wandered away, her heavy tail switching back and forth behind her.

Martin drew up his legs and sat cross-legged on the blanket, pulled the cork from the wine, and poured himself a glass.

“Well,” he said, “here I am.” He toasted the bright quiet city. The wine was tart in his mouth, making his cheeks ache, and tasted sweeter after he swallowed it. He tried to imagine what was out there across the world... what was in Los Angeles, what Diaz would be seeing in Reno and Denver and New York, if he ever got there. All those vast cities, millions of homes, the vacant highways, the world without people, the skies without airplanes, and the oceans without ships.... There would be life abundant everywhere, but the missing factor in the equation would be the disturbing hands of mankind.

A bird darted across his line of sight, a white bird, a gull perhaps, the underside of its wings faintly illuminated by the streetlights below.

Martin sipped his wine and ate the warm bread and let his mind wander. Across this continent and others, there would be silence in vacant temples and churches, places where no prayers would be spoken. There would be storms, rains, and hurricanes blowing that no one would hear.

The bird flew across his line of sight again, dipping low enough that he could see the tops of its wings flutter silver and gray. No human hunter would ever threaten its species again.

Around the world, there would be few words spoken to describe this moment. Words for the snakes and flowers, birds and moonlight would be lost. In the once-crowded squares, airports, and streets, there would be no laughter, no sadness, no crowds, no holiday dreams, no more martyrs, wars, rockets, or bombs, no justice bought and paid for — there would be only the brutal sanity of the law of the jungle, unused law books, and unread histories of terror and justification. The days of miracles were past. No more tear gas, no thieves, no traffic, no midnight freeway incinerations, no graduations or degrees, no concerts, no harems, no patriotism or armies or treaties made or broken, no bombs, missiles or submarines or public scoundrels, no more prisoners of kings, no telephone calls, cowboys or pimps or pilots or crayfish fishermen or bums or courtrooms or dentists or people who make cans, podiatrists, morticians, beauty queens or symbols. The bird he saw was only itself now, a bird, not a symbol of freedom, not a nuisance — it was only itself as it flew over the dead city, silver flickerings of light on feather wax, the needles and quills of its feathers locked tight as the night air sucked across it and lifted the warm-bodied blood-pulsing animal higher, over-looping, down and back across the face of the vacant city.

The Earth is here, he was thinking, and it is not a symbol. It was a thing he could sit upon and feel with his hands and the air of which he could smell through his nose and breathe with his lungs. The Earth was not a symbol, it was an organism, which, for mysterious reasons, he was allowed to live on.

Night surrounded him with cool rain-washed air and in all the world there seemed to be only Martin, a piece of the Earth made ambulatory, sitting there, his half-filled glass of wine, juice of the fruit of the soil, looking across the bright dead city, the bird fluttering silver-gray in the pale light, everything only itself, nothing more, and that was more than enough, world without end.

He sat quietly, witness to the moment, afraid to take the next breath. At that instant he was right there, nowhere else, at the center of now, breathless, filled with air and light.

There was a movement on the blanket beside him. The manx touched his wrist with its nose.

Martin turned his head slowly, the spell melting away but the meaning still there.

Isha sat at his feet, and the kitten curled and still on the blanket beside him. Isha turned her head and looked up at him once, and then looked back out across the city.

All my family, he thought.

After a while, when he stood up to fold the blanket, something, a flickering in the east, caught his eye. He had just enough time to turn his head and look. From the east, a darkness spread across the city in a sudden flooding tide — the electrical grid had failed — and around him, below the outcropping, section after rectangular section went dark and in only seconds he might as well have been surrounded by forest or desert. There was not one glimmer of light anywhere.

When the lights went out, he had just been thinking how it had been another day of goodbyes. Now it was goodbye to the electric blood that powered civilization.

And after all these goodbyes, Martin thought, what was he going to save? What was worth saving in this dead world?

Chapter 25

Isha loved the car ride with the window open. Again at home, the man went to the sofa and heavily dropped himself on it. He patted the cushion beside him, inviting her up, but she didn't want to get up there yet.

Isha nosed the drowsy kitten off a chair, took it in her mouth, and went back to the sofa and climbed up.

The man made the throaty noise humans made when they were pleased and then stroked both her and her pet. Very quickly, he was making long slow breathing noises,. That meant he would be quiet for a while.

Isha didn't feel like sleeping. She stayed awake and watched him and listened for human or car noises in case others came again. She would let him know sooner this time. Even if she slept, she would listen. That was what she was supposed to do.

It felt good to do something for him. This, she knew, was her purpose.

Part Three

 
Old Eden
 

Chapter 26

Martin awoke hearing Isha barking in the living room. His grogginess vanished in a moment, washed away by adrenaline and the recollection of the last time he had been awakened by visitors. As he got to the door, he heard the pickup coming down the street.

Martin watched through the screen door as it U-turned in front of his house and pulled up at the curb. It was Ryan, but by then Martin had the shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm, the safety off. Ryan leaned on the horn for two long blasts and then leaned over and yelled out the window.

“Martin! Hey! Good news!” He honked again.

Martin pushed open the screen and stood on the porch. He held it aimed just below the pickup, his finger on the trigger.

“How you doing, Ryan.”

Ryan's narrow face cracked open in a grin. “Hey, thanks for not blowing me away last night. You coulda done it to me and you didn't, so I wanted to say thanks.”

“Never been thanked for that before. So what's the good news?” Martin called back across the yard.

Ryan laughed. “You're a closet hard-ass, Marty. That's good — you live longer that way. I underestimated you. Like Curtiz must've. Well, the good news is I'm going to LA, gettin' outta your town. I got Curtiz' stash, but I need to go someplace with a bigger supply. You can have this place all to yourself.”

Martin could see Ryan reaching down to turn on the ignition.

“Ryan!”

“Yo!”

“Thanks for the education.”

He looked embarrassed. “It coulda killed both of us.”

“Take care of yourself, Ryan.”

“Yo!” He turned on the pick-up, gunned the engine and spun the wheels. In a few seconds, all that was left was a haze of dust hanging over the street, the faint smell of exhaust, and Martin was alone.

“Well,” he said to Isha, “now it's just you and me. And your pet.” He stroked her head and looked around the room... his parents' living room. “Time for us to do something for ourselves.”

....

He got his list and looked over it. Food would be no problem for a good while. He could scavenge people's gardens during the summer — if summer ever got here. Antibiotics — he needed to attend to getting more antibiotics. The electricity was off now, so the pumps that kept the water towers full wouldn't be working again for a long time, probably never — and the water flowing through the taps would soon dribble and cease altogether. And in addition to that, there was what Diaz had told him about the mass burials and their likely effect on the ground-water. He might have to depend on bottled water in the grocery stores, and that wouldn't last forever.

Martin went into the kitchen and turned on the tap. The pressure was definitely dropping, so he couldn't stay here much longer. He was drawn out of his thoughts by the sight of the two coffee cups his parents had left beside the sink. He didn't touch them; he wouldn't touch them.

To the list he added, “A house with a well. Away from any city.”

But it might not be wise to be too far from the food supply he could find in the city. And having a well meant having an electric generator and a source of gasoline. Both were limited commodities, but in the next six months he would have time to find out how to deal with that. Many bridges to cross, and all of them going to be burned.

Thinking again about what he would be eating, he wanted a dependable source of fresh food — like his own garden. To the last line on the list he added, “An enclosed area for gardening.”