A Different Alchemy (20 page)

After all their traveling, the Canadians were just happy to be around another person. It didn’t matter that Jeffrey had a tank parked in the middle of 95, that he didn’t tell them anything about himself, or that he stayed in his house more than he spoke to them. They just liked knowing that another human was nearby.

As he sat in his new, inherited house, he looked around at the books and clothes scattered around the floor. It was amazing how quickly possessions built up, even on this trip. He had started with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing. Now, he had two backpacks full of items he didn’t think he could live without. He had four pairs of pants, three shirts, two sweaters, and a collection of socks and underwear. Books filled each corner of the room. Waiting back at the tank for him were his map, another pair of shoes, and some heavy winter clothes.

Once everything was loaded into the tank, he verified distances on his map, then started the engine. The Canadians’ house was far enough away from the highway that he would be gone before they could run out on the street and wave him down.

The two couples would wake up the next day by themselves. He didn’t think they would much care one way or the other. Just by the way they smiled when hearing bad news and good news alike, he could tell they had long ago learned that ups and downs were part of life. They were smart enough to realize they had settled into a nice town, a place worth living in if Jeffrey was there or if he was gone. Maybe they would attempt the walk all the way down to Cape Cod. If that was the goal they set for themselves, he hoped they achieved it.

Chapter 15

Men were still gathered in the conference room. There was silence now, however, as they all watched TV and ignored the cake and beer. A rally near the stadium had turned into a chance for the migration’s planners to store as many of the Blocks as they could gather in one place, to “get them ready for the trip south” as one person on TV had put it, by getting them organized at the stadium two days prior to when the busses would leave the city.

To Jeffrey, it was madness that someone could drop off their brother or sister or son or daughter at the feet of strangers. Maybe these people tried to convince themselves that their Block would get better care this way. What Jeffrey knew was that none of those people, back when society offered a semblance of normality, would have given something as trivial as their wallet to a stranger if the request had been made. So why would they now be willing to put the health and safety of their loved ones in the hands of people who made jokes about Blocks, degraded them? Some of the same people who now offered to load Blocks into the stadium had recently been holding cardboard signs reading things like, “Why should I have to worry about your Block?” and “No voice, no spot in my caravan.” They put these signs down to help load bodies into the stadium.

And the Blocks’ families let them. It would have seemed crazy if a man walked up to you and said, “Can I have your social security number?” or “Let me store your driver’s license in my wallet for safe keeping.” But a Block, a person who couldn’t watch out for their own self-interest, was given up as though a stadium was just as good as their own bed.

Surely, Katherine couldn’t be one of the people who would think that might be a good idea.

He dialed her cell phone to make sure she was at home, but it rang and rang without her answering. If she would have just answered, just been at home, he would have been able to go back to watching the scene play out on the television. When her recorded voice told him to leave a message, he imagined one of these random men, who didn’t even like Blocks, ushering Galen to a seat near the field, surrounded on all sides by other Blocks.

Had she been out running errands anyway, or had she seen the calls to bring your Block downtown and thought it a reasonable thing to do? As he walked toward his car, her phone went to the answering machine again.

If he could just hear his wife’s voice, be reassured that his boy was alive, everything would be better. It wouldn’t matter that the population was dying or that people seemed to have forgotten what was important in the world; holding his boy in his arms would make up for all of that.

His fingers rustled through his pocket as he ran, causing his car keys to fall out. Not wanting to stop running as he picked them up, he accidentally punted the keychain across the parking lot. A string of curses exploded from his mouth. His shoulder bumped into a Mercedes so hard that the side mirror tore off. Frustrated, he kicked it too. His keys were under the tire of an abandoned Porsche. He grabbed them and dashed back to his car.

As he raced off the base, he could already see, up ahead, that traffic was slowing. His car horn blared. He yelled. He banged on his steering wheel until he saw why the other drivers were slowing and staring: a small stream of smoke had begun to rise from the stadium. The man on the radio sounded alarmed.

Please, God, no.

**

In giant letters, a billboard told him, “Leaving the United States. Canada welcomes you.” Behind it, another billboard had fallen over, its message forgotten in mud. An immigration guard shack was covered with bird shit, all of its windows missing. The practice of checking passports into and out of the country hadn’t existed for over a decade. For all intents and purposes, the invisible border between the two countries wasn’t even imaginary anymore—it wasn’t there at all.

Just off the road, only a few steps from the guard shack, a rope was swaying back and forth in the breeze, a noose at its end. Below it, bones were scattered on the ground. The body must have been hanging from the rope until the flesh rotted away and the bones fell. A white ribcage was intact, but a piece of faded brown cardboard was still tied around it, as it must have been back when the body had flesh. Any message that had once been written there, either of vengeance or threat, had long ago faded away in the sun.

It wasn’t long before he came to the end of I-95 and had the option of going north on Canadian Highway 2 or taking it slightly south and then east. Already, the leaves were orange and red and falling off the trees. At the first sign of snowflakes, he pulled the tank into an abandoned neighborhood and used another house as his temporary home.

The snowstorms were bad. For a week straight he couldn’t open the front door to his house because drifts of snow blocked him in. The tank, protected under a tarp, contributed to a snow bank two stories tall. Without plows to clear a path for him, it would be months before he could think about continuing on the roads again.

It seemed like it was almost summer by the time all the snow cleared. He drove for hours without seeing a single house. At the end of the first night he slept on top of his tank, next to the swollen banks of a river he didn’t see on his map. After all the snow, he was surprised there wasn’t more flooding. He wondered what happened to the rest of the world in places where no one was around to control the water level at dams. Entire cities would vanish under water. Was Hoover Dam still controlling water flows, or had it crumbled away to flood everything in its path? Had the dams in Kenya gone back to being nothing more than sand? How much of the world would go from being covered by water to being covered by land and vice versa, just because mankind was no longer around to direct its flow? What would the world have looked like if man had never come along and learned about irrigation or hydroelectric power? Where would rivers have flowed over and created new rivers? Which parts of the world would be desert?

He spent the next evening in a city called Fredericton. Beautiful stone cathedrals could be seen in the distance, but both bridges connecting the two sides of the city were washed away, so he left without being able to get close to them.

He almost never saw what he considered to be real cities anymore. What he came across could barely even be considered towns. He passed places along the map that sounded as though they would be towns or cities—Washademoak, Dubee Settlement, Kinnear Settlement—that turned out to be a collection of three or four houses followed by miles of fields.

On one stretch of road, he went thirty miles without seeing anywhere to sleep under cover. In these areas, there was no discernible difference between now and before the Great De-evolution. In some parts, the roads blended in with the forest; there were sections of road where he couldn’t tell if he was still on the original path or in the brush next to what had been the road. In other parts, the passage had completely sunk into the marsh surrounding it. For what appeared to be a hundred yards, the road vanished and was replaced by green water so dirty that not even birds dared land near it. The swamp stretched on either side for as far as he could see. Parking lots were gone. Soccer fields were gone. There was no telling what nature would do next. Maybe a thousand years from now the entire section of earth would be a vast desert. Maybe it would be a series of lakes. Maybe something else.

It was getting dark by the time he approached Halifax. Immediately after the skyline came into view, he saw a puff of smoke rising in the air from the far corner of some outlying houses. He thought for a moment about turning around, but eventually continued toward the tiny stream of smoke and whoever lived there.

Chapter 16

An incredible amount of smoke was rising from the stadium. His senses deadened as he watched the sun get blotted out behind the black cloud. He saw the smoke, but not the birds flying away from it. He smelled the burning chemicals from miles away, but not the exhaust of the truck next to him on the road. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the cars blaring their horns right next to him.

The man on the radio was saying something, but Jeffrey didn’t hear this either. “There are thousands of people gathered around the stadium… The fire is getting out of control now. There were thousands of Blocks in that stadium.”

Each time he tried calling Katherine, both at home and on her cell, it rang until her recorded voice picked up. All around him, cars were rear-ending each other or drifting into abandoned vehicles left in random places, all because everyone was staring at the spectacle in the distance rather than the road in front of them.

The other cars were also probably listening to the radio: “I don’t know what’s happening—the fire is everywhere now—oh my God—there’s fire everywhere.”

A driver was crying hysterically as she gazed at the fire. She took her hands off the steering wheel long enough to tear strips of hair off her scalp. Her car, only barely moving because of the traffic jam, angled slowly toward the metal guardrail.

Katherine’s phone rang and rang, but there was no answer. As if in response to his calls, the man on the radio yelled, “Everything is on fire! The entire stadium is on fire! Everyone outside is leaving the area. The police are just walking away. The entire stadium is burning to the ground.”

Blaring his horn did no good. None of the other drivers took their eyes off the dark cloud that was hypnotizing them.

The fire raged and raged.

Dear God
, he thought,
please don’t let my boy be in there
. But part of him, without having spoken to Katherine, without seeing his boy’s burned flesh with his own two eyes, already knew that was Galen’s fate. His lips didn’t stop mumbling the prayer, but he knew everyone inside the stadium, his boy amongst them, would be dead.

Some of the cars were ramming each other in an attempt to get ahead faster. One car’s bumper flew across two lanes into the guardrail, the driver oblivious to what was happening around him. Another car over-compensated after being side-swiped and veered off an embankment.

Why wouldn’t Katherine answer her phone?

Some of the drivers were getting out of their cars because they could walk faster than the traffic. A man took three steps before the car behind him ran him over by accident. His crumpled body remained motionless on the highway as other cars passed by.

Jeffrey was surprised when Katherine answered her phone.

“Where are you?” he asked before she could say anything. “Are you at home?”

“No.”

“Where are you?” he said again. “Tell me. Tell me you aren’t near the stadium.”

He was walking as he spoke. He passed a Mercedes with two flat tires, the old woman behind the wheel still trying to make her car move forward along the concrete.

Three helicopters were hovering above the stadium to get better footage of the fire.

Katherine was saying, “The guy on TV said everyone should bring their Blocks down to the stadium. He said they would help get all the Blocks down to Washington. He said—“

His phone fell to his side. A man ran past him, headed in the direction of the stadium. There was nothing left worth running to, but the man would need to learn that for himself.

When he brought the phone back to his ear, he asked, “Did you know what was going to happen?”

But Katherine was crying too much to answer. Finally, when she could speak, she started to say something about when they were younger—always with her, it was about the past. And that was when he tossed the phone away rather than hear an excuse for why their boy was dead.

He turned and started walking back to the base.

**

Past the city center, beyond a tiny bay lined with houses, the smoke’s source came into view. The active fireplace belonged to a house located just before a giant wooded park. A man, roughly the same age as Jeffrey, was at the end of the driveway, an arm already waving hello as the tank approached. The man was by himself. Not even a dog by his side. Jeffrey climbed out and said hello.

“You must be really lost,” the man said, smiling. “Where are you coming from?”

“I’ve been traveling up the east coast. But I’m originally from Philadelphia.”

“Awful thing that happened there,” the man said. But before Jeffrey could offer a response, the man had turned back toward his house. “I was just about to fix some coffee. You want some?”

As they drank, the man said his name was Art and asked Jeffrey what his name was. But in between every question, Jeffrey kept looking out the windows for somebody to sneak up to his tank and steal it.

“Trust me,” Art said, “it’s just me and the animals. There hasn’t been another person through these parts in a very long time. Nova Scotia wasn’t exactly a popular place to visit once everyone was trying to get down to New England, or even further south.”

“Why did you stay?”

“I’m still not sure,” the man said. “The only answer I can come up with is that it has something to do with being stubborn and dumb. I’d like to have a better reason, but I think it boils down to that. I was thirty when my sister, her husband, and my parents all decided to head south. As soon as they said I had to go with them, my dumbass decided I had to stay. I had a lot of reasons why I thought I had to stay, but looking back, none of them really mattered, and all of them must have sounded painfully naïve when my parents and sister listened to me. They only left without me when I convinced them I would eventually head down too. I still have no idea why I felt like I had to make the trip by myself instead of with them.”

Jeffrey thought back to all the dumb things he had said and done when he was younger. It still surprised him that Katherine had put up with him in high school and college, back when he had been at his most immature and selfish. Half the things he had done in his life had only been carried out because someone else told him not to do them. No better reason.

“Did your family go to Boston or New York?” Jeffrey asked.

Art shook his head. “The folks around here took their boats. My parents and my sister went straight down to Florida on their thirty-footer. I was going to do the same thing, but of course that was when Hurricane Tori wiped us out. There wasn’t a single sea-faring ship in these parts after that storm. It gave me a lot of time to wonder why I’d been so adamant about staying here by myself.”

Jeffrey looked in the direction of the water. “This part of the world is beautiful.”

“That it is,” Art said. “That it is. I’ve been here all my life and I still smile every time I step outside because of the hills and the trees. We went on a field trip to New York—the city—when I was a little kid. It was really neat for the first couple of hours, but even as a kid I got tired of it pretty fast. I imagine every other city to be the same way. But then again, I wouldn’t really know.”

“You’d be surprised,” Jeffrey said. “Places blend together. Especially these days.”

They didn’t say anything for a while. The longer Jeffrey looked out the window the more cats and dogs he saw wandering the streets and the forest.

Art followed Jeffrey’s eyes. “I used to take care of them. I had five pets at first. Then ten. Then twenty. After a while I lost count. Then I realized I was just encouraging them to stay around my house instead of going off on their own. If you ever go over to Big Indian Lake, you’ll be amazed. The entire area has turned into a cat sanctuary. There are thousands of them there. They’re nice mostly, but a couple of them are starting to get too wild. They eye you up like you’re the next meal. Poor little things don’t know how to take care of themselves either. I find hundreds of them over there each spring that have either frozen to death or starved to death. I tried to set a giant bonfire for them one year, so they would have a source of heat during the coldest months. Stupid me, I almost burned down the entire forest.”

Art asked if Jeffrey would like to stay for lunch, but he shook his head and said he didn’t want to overstay his welcome.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen in more than a decade,” the man said. “You could piss on my kitchen floor and you wouldn’t be overstaying your welcome.”

On his way back out the front door, Jeffrey paused and said, “I’ve been traveling a lot. Do you mind if I stay in a house down the road?”

Art laughed. “Do I mind if you stay in a house down the road? You can stay anywhere you want.”

That night, as he was walking around from empty room to empty room in his new house, Jeffrey found himself thinking about the people who used to call this very place their home. A husband and wife would be in one room. Their sons and daughters in other places throughout the house. Each room sat empty now. He spent the night there, but in the morning he packed what few things he had and explored the area.

He walked to Art’s house again the following day.

“Welcome, neighbor,” Art said with a smile. “You like Atlantic whitefish?”

Jeffrey noticed there were too many fish on the grill for one person. There was even a second plate ready to be served with food.

“Of course I do. Who doesn’t?” Jeffrey said, even though he didn’t know that kind of fish from any other.

While they ate, Jeffrey asked if Art still kept in touch with his family. He had no idea why he was asking; it wasn’t his business and it wasn’t his nature to pry into others’ business.

Tiny flakes of fish fell out of the man’s mouth when he spoke. “My mother passed away three years ago. But I still talk to my father every week. And of course I’m always talking to my sis.”

And then it was only natural that Art ask about Jeffery’s family. He could have lied and said he didn’t have any family at all; that would kill the conversation
or get it onto something else.

But instead, he said, “I write to my mom and dad every once in a while. They’re down in Florida too.”

“That’s good,” Art said.

“Would you mind if I settled down around these parts?”

The man chuckled again. “You ask some really funny questions. Do whatever you want.”

A couple of days later Jeffrey decided to go north to see the rest of Nova Scotia. It was getting cold again so he packed an extra blanket and sweater. He still took peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with him whenever he went out for the day. As he left, he wondered if Art would think he was leaving for good and if it mattered either way.

It took Jeffrey a day to get back to the town of Truro. It took another day to get to the bridge that connected the main portion of Nova Scotia with the northern quarter of land. The bridge was gone. He found a working radio, but there was nothing except uninterrupted static from one end of the dial to the other. An entire section of land, as big as New Jersey, was out of man’s grasp again.

Maybe in ten more years, everything north of the Mississippi river would be cut off from the people in the final settlements, until, one day, even the bridges in and around Miami and Los Angeles would begin to deteriorate and the people there would be stuck in the final two decaying cities.

He still thought about the times he and Galen and Katherine had gone to the beach together. As his eyes closed one night, he thought of the greatest gift Galen had given him: Jeffrey had never felt pressure to impress his son or to live up to the expectations that only a child could create for their parents.

He remembered a time when he had been in first grade and all of the other boys’ moms or dads went to school to talk to the class about their jobs, but Jeffrey’s father had been in New York on business and couldn’t be there. And even if he could have been there, he remembered being nervous that his father’s job as a textile supervisor would embarrass him in front of the other kids. All his father cared about was providing for his family and yet there Jeffrey was, a typical, unappreciative kid, not concerned with the long hours his father worked or all the dreams he had given up on in order to provide for his wife and child.

Galen had never made him feel that pressure, that unsubstantiated embarrassment. He had never felt fear over whether or not his son might be ashamed of what he did. He could have been a garbage man or a brain surgeon and his son would still sit on the porch with him each evening. That in itself was enough to have loved the boy.

Soon after returning to Halifax, he went to Art’s house. With him, he carried a big plate of pancakes. The other man’s face brightened at the offering.

“How was your vacation?” Art said as they stood by his food processor to make a batch of fake syrup.

“I tried to go see the Highlands National Park but the bridge was out.”

“I could have told you that. That bridge was out before my family sailed south. You could have taken my Kayak across the water if you were really interested.”

Jeffrey imagined himself in a tiny boat with an oar in his hands. “I didn’t want to see it that badly.” After another bite of pancakes, he asked, “Do you ever think about going down and joining your family?”