Ark (40 page)

The fact that the Mid-Oceanic Ridge was located on the bed of the ocean meant that most of the damage was inflicted on the Americas and Europe, which were closest to it. An offshoot of the ridge that runs up what used to be the Red Sea devastated most of the Middle East, so neither of the great religions that had been attempting to obliterate each other when the planet convulsed could plausibly claim that the deity had chosen sides. They did so anyway, but since electronic communications and even paper mail no longer existed, they were forced to rely on ragged, wild-eyed pilgrims who wandered the scalped land dressed in robes and hoods, to spread news of the aftermath by word of mouth. The interior of Asia (though not the islands along its Pacific coast) escaped catastrophic damage. Ng Fred’s factories were unscathed, the herdsmen of Mongolia felt only a slight tremor. The destruction of most of the United States and nearly all of the European Union meant that the wealth of those two manufactories of sin had evaporated, and along with them, international trade and the very idea of wealth and its relentless conscience, philanthropy. Asia, therefore, was in no condition to come to the rescue of the ruined half of the world even if its culture could have produced such an impulse. The destruction of the dollar and the euro demonstrated the inconvenience of bad luck in a world that now lacked an America ever poised to come to the rescue of those who hated it. In what used to be the United States, central government was in hibernation. It still existed, or so we sometimes heard, but the pillars and domes and cupolas of the alabaster city that had been Washington, D.C., were now strewn over the bottom of Chesapeake Bay like a deconstructed Atlantis. Naturally, those who fancied themselves the rulers of what was left of America, whoever they were, issued decrees. However, their commands and proclamations traveled from the capital, wherever that was, to the people at about the same rate of speed—that of a man on foot or mounted on a horse—that had applied during the administration of George Washington. The smart thing was to ignore them.

“Henry was spot-on about what was going to happen and how it would happen,” said Clementine, “and I’m sure he’d be quite happy to know that he overestimated the effect. By the time the mother ship returns, the rescue of humanity will be quite unnecessary. Civilization will be up and running, and glorious human folly will rule the planet once again.”

QED. One could admire or be revolted by Clementine’s optimism, but there was no gainsaying that she had the right attitude. She was the only person in our little commune who ever mentioned Henry’s name in my presence. The chaps and others who had attached themselves to us took great care not to upset the grieving widow. Clementine refused to look on me as a Victoria that had lost her Albert. In her tidy bureaucratic way, she regarded my husband as missing and presumed to be alive. That was the MI5 rule
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always had been— when no corpse had been identified. Whatever his fate, Henry was still present in all our minds. It would be unthinkable to classify him as one of the dead, an affront to put him into the wrong drawer in the absence of proof that he was one of the uncounted millions that had perished in the cataclysm. Quite possibly he would turn up one day at the end of the lane, and a lookout with exceptional eyesight would recognize him and cry, “Henry is back!” He knew where we were because Clementine had established our commune on land that Henry designated for the purpose. For him, it would be no problem to calculate how far that property had moved and where it was now. It would be like him never to show up. In any case, Clementine was right: He deserved to be counted among the living as long as we didn’t know for certain that he was dead. Clementine insisted on it for his child’s sake. How else could the girl grow up with the necessary mental picture of the father she had never seen?

Clementine delivered my daughter with her own hands. As a young woman she had taken a night course in midwifery. Afterward, as a way of doing her bit, she had birthed many babies as a volunteer in a shelter for distressed young women. Even if it was she who said so as shouldn’t, she remarked in a mock Cockney accent moments after the child’s birth, no one knotted a neater umbilical cord than she, and indeed little Clementine—called Tiney because neither Clementine nor I could bear the thought of her being known as Clem—had a lovely belly button. The child spent more time on her namesake’s lap than mine, and surely absorbed more sensible vibrations. In her gruff contralto Clementine sang her nursery songs. She also read to her—stories I wrote and Clementine illustrated. Because batteries had temporarily vanished from the world, photographs were a thing of the past, so she recorded Tiney’s childhood by sketching her in charcoal or watercolors at least once a month. In these portraits, as in life, she looked just like the half-smiling, lama-like portrait of Henry that Clementine had painted and hung on the wall of Tiney’s room. The child, after learning to talk in sentences, spoke in a voice in which fugitive Cantabrigian vowels skittered like trout.

It was Clementine who told me what the chaps had told her about my rescue and the disappearance of Henry when she debriefed them. I remembered nothing after the moment when he dropped me at
the feet of the chaps because I had knocked my head against a rock. While I was out, according to the chaps, Henry had kept running with the skidding earth beneath his feet. It was, the chaps said, like watching a man as he ran down a steep hill. To me, as I listened to their description, it seemed like the Quasimodo from Henry’s nightmare, now invisible, had wrapped his arms around him. Henry could not stop himself. It looked to the chaps like he was trying to regain his balance—trying to catch up with it, reaching for it as a kid will do when in danger of falling on his face.

They did not pursue him because they figured he would soon fall down and they could reach him more easily when the earthslide came to a halt. However, he did not fall, but just kept staggering on. By the time they realized they were losing him, they had already lost him, because another great slab of bedrock, glistening with moisture and smeared with mud, burst from the ground between them and Henry, hiding him from them. Afterward, they spent hours searching for him, turning over the bodies of the many dead and injured people who wore blue jeans, but he was nowhere to be found. They never saw him again.

All the chaps were trained battlefield medics in addition to the many other things that they were, so they knew exactly what was the matter with me—I had a concussion—and how to stabilize a person in my condition. After treating me, they carried my inert body, a dead weight, over mountains of rubble—on their backs, presumably, though they were too taciturn ever to describe this flight to me. The bridges and tunnels were gone, but this didn’t matter because the Hudson and the East River had been dammed and filled in by dirt and debris, so they simply walked across, climbing over the obstacles they could not skirt. By some sort of chaps’ magic, they knew exactly where they were going, even though their destination was no longer where it used to be. The outpost Clementine had set up was several hundred miles away. We walked—and after I came partly to my senses, sometimes ran—the whole way. At such moments, my head ached terribly as my bruised brain bounced against bone. The chaps foraged in the ruins of supermarkets and houses for food to eat and water to drink and pain medicine for me, which I refused to take because of the baby. For the moment, there was still plenty of everything. Sometimes they slaughtered and cooked chickens or livestock from the flocks and herds that roamed the countryside. The dead, human and other mammals, lay everywhere, covered with flies, crawling with maggots, oozing disease. Birds including escaped poultry and small animals including dogs and cats fed on them. Rats scampered in multitudes, a great gray moving carpet. I turned my face away from such sights and put my hands on my belly as if shielding the baby’s eyes. Since waking up I had been absolutely certain that I was pregnant. At moments I was sure that Henry was speaking to me, reassuring me, through the child in my womb.

We also encountered living people. They stood beside the roads— or what used to be roads—staring at us dead-eyed as we jogged by, as though we had roused them from a collective sleep and they were not yet entirely aware that they were awake and walking. Sometimes the chaps sang cadence as they ran. Once in a while, gangs of younger survivors attacked us. The chaps, in their offhand way, neutralized them with expert brutality, hardly breaking stride as they made the kill. As a child on my grandparents’ farm I had seen their three dogs attack a woodchuck and tear it apart in an instant. Watching the chaps at work was like watching that.

My concussion was a blessing of sorts. My memory of the last hour of Manhattan, my memory of Henry, my memory of practically everything, was blurred. My speech was slurred. Words eluded me. If asked a question I chased the answer around in the half-darkness of my mind like a name I couldn’t quite recapture. I was tired to the bone, though my body did not seem to realize this and kept on functioning. Nothing to worry about, the chaps said, the feeling will go away. It never did—not really, not altogether. In my heart I didn’t want it to. Nothing else was as it used to be. Why should my brain be different?

Our commune grew. People joined us, especially the educated
who wanted to be useful and young women who had no one to protect them from the gangs. If rape had made the women pregnant, as was sometimes the case, our doctors and nurses delivered the babies or performed abortions. Some of the women brought children with them. More had lost or abandoned their families. Clementine, as Henry’s viceroy, interviewed each applicant. If they were suitable— that is to say, intelligent, strong, free of disease and illusion, possessed of a skill they could practice for the common good and teach to an apprentice (Clementine loved farmers, carpenters, craftsmen of all kinds, engineers, nurses, physicians and surgeons, dentists, soldiers), they remained. If not, she sent them away. She was coldhearted about this. It was her job to put together a team that would not merely survive, but thrive and breed itself up into a thinking and doing class. Over time, this social Darwinism of hers resulted in a miniature raj, with the lucky elite living on the green and pleasant island that was a flawed replica of the perfect Blighty of their dreams. This paradise was a replica, a symbol, a fancy, but a reality nonetheless. As before the Event, everyone else existed outside the cantonments in dust, stench, and desperation. In early days we saw these people when they fell on our commune like Stone Age war parties, looking to steal women and weapons and animals they could take home and eat. Some of them named themselves after the fiercer Indian tribes—Comanche, Apache, Mohawk, Cheyenne, Shawnee—and were said to practice a religion whose eucharist was marijuana, just as they had done before the end of civilization. Stoned or not, they were no match for the chaps or for the new chaps the original chaps adopted and trained. Our warriors punished them in battle and drove away such survivors as they chose not to kill. After a while, the raids dwindled and finally ceased altogether.

It wasn’t a bad life—not much different, really, from the one led by the whole of the human race until quite recently. The obsession with time went away. The lust for possessions intensified because there was so little to possess. Lust ruled the world, which was, on balance, a good thing in a world that needed to be repopulated. For the first time since the Middle Ages, people lived entirely in natural light, and so close together and to the other animals, that the idea of privacy simply perished. The apocalypse was, in a way, a victory for the Greens to an extent that was almost comical. Pollution diminished to almost nothing. Colors that had not been seen outside of paintings since the Industrial Revolution reappeared. Quicker than anyone expected, the land healed. Flowers bloomed. New kinds of grasses grew. The trees came back. The ones that had fallen in the quake provided an inexhaustible supply of firewood and lumber. The hunter-gatherer stage quickly ended, though the tribes never disbanded, just huddled together as in the past, and continued to prey on one another. Commune by commune, agriculture was rediscovered. We raised food from the seeds Clementine had stockpiled, and from the seeds of those plants. Feral animals were captured and domesticated again. Inside the commune, we ate a healthy diet—grass-fed, free-range meat, vegetables and fruits fertilized with urine and manure. The demanding monotony of producing food and keeping nature at bay provided plenty of exercise for everyone.

Culture lived on. Like Marx’s money, it seemed to have a life of its own and the ability to feed on its own body. Children were taught to read, write, figure, and conform. Books—long regarded as artifacts of a lesser civilization—were salvaged from ruined libraries and schools, musical instruments from schools and houses. When books, or memory, did not provide the necessary data, Clementine looked it up on Henry’s sphere. Synthetic drugs disappeared. Quite soon the medicines collected from pharmacies were all gone. Except among small children and the very old, this didn’t seem to alter the death rate very much. Others believed that the kids who survived would transmit their immunity to their own children and the species would end up being healthier and sounder genetically. Until the middle of the twentieth century, after all, mankind had demonstrated that it could increase quite handily in the absence of antibiotics. Meanwhile, there seemed to be fewer crazies than there used to be, and who knows but what the disappearance of pills had something to do with that.