Flare (12 page)

Zeke had nothing to say in response, and Brother Colm laughed.

“I understand, that’s a loaded question, and you don’t have to answer it.”

Zeke nodded in agreement, and realized that he liked Colm. Though the old man tended to ramble, he wasn’t the crazy street-corner preacher he worried about becoming. Each time Colm’s speech threatened to run off the rails, he brought it back a notch and started to make sense.

“My point is this,” said Colm. “Compassion is going to get us through this, and the compassion we need goes beyond the altruism explained by science. We need something more, something deeper.”

Colm looked at Zeke and laughed.

“But these are just words and something to think about,” said Colm. “For now, we need only move forward towards the Salvation. My role is that of a courier, and your role …”

Colm went silent for a moment before finding his words again.

“You’ll have to discover your role on your own.”

Zeke nodded, but Colm stopped and looked him in the eye.

“I mean it, Ezekiel, you
must
realize your purpose, because you’ll have a part to play before this all pans out,” said Colm. “You’ve skin blacker than the darkest Nubian, and though I know not how you’ll use it, you’ve been given a gift. You’ve survived a long time by yourself, with no home to spend your nights, with no dark basement to spend your days. This might not be a coincidence, and your survival might have relied on more than just luck.”

Brother Colm looked sad for a moment and then resumed walking.

“But I cannot tell you what to do,” he said. “For I’m not a prophet, and God doesn’t speak through me. I’ve been tasked with couriering all souls to Salvation, nothing more. But though I’ve been given no extra foresight other than the power to solve a few riddles, I see the power of God in you, Ezekiel. So when it comes time to act, when you hear the Lord speaking, don’t turn a deaf ear because what He asks makes you uncomfortable. Do what’s right, because you must. Humanity won’t survive this flare with a single charismatic leader, or a group of scientists creating a simple solution. Humanity will survive this only if pilgrims like you and I play our role well, and do what we must do regardless of the cost to ourselves. Look around you, Ezekiel, and know that the world depends upon you, and you cannot fail.”

COURTNEY

Dreaming, vivid dreaming.

Piano performance at age thirteen. Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, first movement, playing well enough to place, perhaps get first if he doesn’t mess up. He wanted to play something by Landini, but his father required that he play Rachmaninoff, because Ash is too talented to play anything else at a competition. He always gets nervous when he performs, and if he were playing a simple melody he would have simply transposed everything to C major or A minor. It would be a little clumsy to do that, but their notes lie only on white keys, never a black. If he makes a mistake, it will sound fine as long as he just hits the white keys and avoids the blacks.

But Rachmaninoff holds no such possibility. Difficult to perform, harder to transpose. Flipping from key to key on a dime, never a rest because his father picked the most demanding piece for him to play.

He needs to place well. If only he can place well, things will be okay. Fourth place a ribbon, not good enough, third place a statuette, second a plaque, first a trip to the conservatory for a weeklong summer course.

Time to perform the concerto, he knows it now by memory but uses the music as a guide anyway. First an establishing melody, and then it gets tough. He misses a note, whole when it should have been half, piano emits the worst kind of dissonance. Sees disapproval in the judges’ faces out of the corner of his eye, knows his father caught it too. He makes up for it with an improvisation, comes back to the same dissonant notes again, pounding them like a drum, sees that the judges are amused. Keeps it easy and doesn’t press the dissonance angle too hard, ends the piece with a flourish to silence, and then polite applause.

/***/

More silence in the car ride on the way home, and then his father speaks.

That was a good recovery.

Ash sits silently.

I mean it.
I’ve never seen you do anything like that. I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that.
Sergei Rachmaninoff himself couldn’t have performed that save. It was like you were playing the piece from the inside out, taking the notes wherever you wanted them to go.

Ash nods.

You’ll have fun at the conservatory.
But you’ll do more than just music. Do you understand me?

Ash nods, more out of reflex than of meaning, and his father picks up on it.

Music is important, and you’ll compose great pieces.
But you’re more than just a musician. You’ll do other things too.

Ash nods.

You’ll give the world music, but you won’t stop there, because the world needs more than music. The world needs
…

Ash’s father trails off.

How are your classmates treating you, Ash? Better?

A sore point. Ash feels a ball in his stomach and crouches in his seat. He stares ahead, knowing that if he looks at his father, there will be tears. His father understands this and doesn’t force the issue.

Survive the semester.
Just survive it, that’s all I ask. I’ve instructed Heather to look out for you, and she will. That’s her job. All I ask is that you stay afloat, and after the summer the world will begin to understand who you truly are.

/***/

Still dreaming. Two months later.

Ash eating alone at lunch like he normally did, and then he builds up the courage to sit with some other boys. He chooses a group of kids, not the most popular. One boy notices Ash sitting down and makes fun of him.

What happened to you?
asks the boy.
What happened to your face?

Who is this guy?
asks another.

He’s the kid with no friends,
says the first boy.
I once saw him try to hang out with the retarded kids, and the retarded kids didn’t even like him.

Cruel, incisive, true, and the other boys start to laugh, even the nice ones. Ash feels the deep despair that one can only experience as an unhardened child, or in a dream where emotions have no limit. The pain soon overwhelms him, and he has no recourse but to go to the bathroom and cry.

He’s in the stall, locked in, sobbing. Kids hear his tears, different kids than those in the first group, and they only know that there is someone inside a stall, crying. The pack outside grows, making jokes, guessing who’s in there, sneaking glances through the cracks in the door, and not leaving. Ash is cornered like prey in a tree. He’s on a thirty-minute break, no hope for the bell of the next period. Five minutes later, they guess who he is.

The boy with the messed up face and no friends,
they say,
and he’s crying.

They won’t leave, and then they do … because he’s not worth it.

He walks out and leaves the bathroom. A kid sees him, Ash starts to cry again, and thirteen-year-old boys can’t cry, not in public. The kids start to notice and Ash has nowhere to go and no place to hide: he’s swimming in a pool of sharks. Heather comes to him, saves him, mature enough to see beyond the associative humiliation conferred to her by his tears, and by his relation. She saves him, brings him outside, tells two boys to go fuck themselves. She has a quiver in her voice but says it, and the boys go away because she’s pretty.

/***/

At home, Ash alone in his room, the faint sounds of Heather talking to their father from the other room. Ash’s mother is not there, because Ash’s father liked to handle these matters alone.

Ash is called in, and feels shame. Mortified that his father heard of what happened, anxious that he has to live through this once more, either by retelling it or just by seeing it in his father’s eyes.

I heard what happened.

Ash, reliving it, immediately bursts into tears. His father consoles him, and after a minute relaxes his grip.

Those kids
are beneath you
.

His father lets that sit for a moment, and then speaks again.

There’s the grist in the mill, and then the mill itself.
They are the grist, and they’ll be churned out by life, turned into lawyers, administrators, soldiers, maybe a few musicians and doctors here and there. But they’ll live and die as grist, just ordinary folks hovering around the mean. Do you understand this?

Ash can’t say
yes
, not even out of reflex.

You might not be able to see this
,
because you aren’t grist. You aren’t even the mill. You’re the guy who will invent a new type of mill and change everything from the ground up
.

His father takes out the brochure for the conservatory and shows it to Ash.

Are you looking forward to this?

Ash can’t focus enough to care but nods anyway. His father sits in silence for a moment, and then speaks.

We’ll be attending more than the conservatory this summer.
There’s a place I’ve found for you, a place that can take you to the next level.

Ash is at a loss for words, and his father recognizes this.

I’ve taken you … as far as I’ve been able to.
You need more, more than you can get anywhere around here. More than you can get from me, or from us.

Ash’s eyes start to well up again. He doesn’t know why this time. He hears Rachmaninoff’s 2
nd
Concerto in C Minor, opus number 18, perhaps Sergei’s most rhythmic and haunting piece. The composition plays in beautiful consonance … but then starts to miss notes. The music keeps going, but the melody misses more and more notes and gets deeper and deeper in tone, descending down the octaves without end.

I’m not doing this for myself
, says his father.
And I’m not doing it just for you, either. You’ve got something, something that da Vinci had, maybe Goethe too. I don’t expect you to understand this now, but there’s a responsibility here to cultivate your gifts. Your abilities are too important to waste, or even to risk wasting. I know right now your world doesn’t seem to care for you, but that’s only because you’re in the wrong place. The greater world will care about you, and they will need you. It’s my responsibility to put you in the right place, so we can ensure that this will happen
.

/***/

Ash woke to see Heather next to him, driving slowly. He hadn’t slept at all the day before and had to take a nap. The RV plus the curtains had held the light out during the day, but it had become dreadfully hot inside, and Ash hadn’t been able to sleep. The vehicle had simmered them Crock-Pot style the previous day, slowly roasting their bodies until they considered opening a window. That wasn’t an option, so they just took the heat and drank a lot of water. Heather eventually fell asleep, and by nightfall she was able to drive.
Doctors never rest, yet can rest whenever they want to,
thought Ash.

Heather informed him that they were running low on water and might not make it through the next night. They’d sweated gallons, and though the crisp night air had dried their skin and left them odorless, they would be sweating again tonight, and the night after, and the night after. Ash had looked at ventilation options, but there weren’t too many solutions. There weren’t any small hatches to open safely, or any hidden windows to open a crack. He didn’t feel comfortable drilling down through the floor. What if he tore through an axle? What then?

Heather said she would park under shade, and though it wouldn’t allow them to open the window during the day, the cover might be enough to keep them from sweltering.

That might work,
thought Ash,
but one day we might not have shade, and we’ll be cooking again.

“We need water, clean water,” he told Heather. “We’re almost out, and we need lots of it. That’s what’s going to keep us alive during the day: water.”

/***/

They passed through one town that probably had less than ten thousand residents in normal times. The survivors all seemed to be hiding now, though for all Ash knew they didn’t exist and the current population of the town was zero. The town had a single store, which had been looted completely. No junk food, no dusty bottles of Gatorade next to expired milk, nothing but dirt and torn shelving. The faucets were empty and let out loud, low grating sounds when Ash turned them on, groaning horribly as if they were begging him to turn them back off again.

They found a tap that worked near the water tower, and the liquid came out dark and smelled foul. It didn’t have the sulfurous odor of untreated water, but rather the smell of a pond that had been decaying for a year. They climbed up the water tower and opened the hatch to peer into the tank. The moon lit it well, and Ash could see bodies floating inside. He couldn’t even guess how the bodies had gotten there, but there they floated, out of the sun’s eye and decomposing naturally, bloated pale logs bobbing in the black sludge.

“We can’t drink this,” said Heather. “We need another source.”

Ash considered this while Heather paced around the tower. The city was beautiful, lit well by the partial moon, still intact and peaceful-looking. He knew there had been untold grief here, but from his current vantage point it just looked like an ordinary town.

In times of disaster, where do people go?
In times of war, the countryside. In economic disaster, the city, and if that gets bad enough, the country again. But what now? The city’s patrolled by gangs, and the rural areas are choked of food and supplies.

“I found something,” said Heather.

They walked around the edge of the water tower and saw a campfire in the distance, a drop of glowing orange about five miles away.

“I have no idea what it is,” said Heather, “but you can see the outline of a big building behind it.”

/***/

They approached cautiously, planning for every disaster. They’d park a quarter-mile away and walk in, just in case the people wanted to steal their RV. They’d scope it out from afar and be ready to leave. If anything went wrong they’d run into the darkness, and if they got separated they agreed to meet at a spot five hundred feet from the RV. If this group was in any way threatening, or even if they weren’t and didn’t have water, they’d abandon the plan and spend the next day back in town, most likely in someone’s basement.

They turned off their headlights and drove around the building in a wide circle, because there wasn’t much cover. There were no trees, no sheds, and nothing but a broken-down fence and dirt until they reached the structure at the center, so they drove as cautiously and as quietly as they could. They parked and then got out and inspected the building. It was a straight, drab-looking construction with only two floors and a lot of space around it, most likely military or government. They saw the fire in the distance, and Heather pulled Ash aside.

“Anything goes wrong,” said Heather, “we get out of here. Discreetly, so we don’t startle them, but we get out of here.”

Ash nodded, and they approached the fire slowly. They squinted in the moonlight and saw that the group was all women, and they were laughing, hooting and hollering. One was husky, with a low-pitched voice, and she seemed to be leading the party, though a smaller, wiry and weathered woman was the center of attention.