Lost Everything (3 page)

ALONG THE RIVER, THE
market was already coming back, growing up around the ruins of the day before. The singsong calls of vendors, the shrieks of birds, gutter talk of larger animals, goats, cows. A troop of monkeys patrolled the dark, dank aisles, turning wares in their hands. The occupying soldiers were off the ground, standing in the backs of jeeps, behind weapons of comical size. The vehicles verging on tipping over. Propaganda barking from a loudspeaker planted on the roof. We are a force of peace. It is the resistance that fights us. Sunny Jim was already watching the soldiers’ eyes, was gone before Reverend Bauxite knew it. Sunny Jim’s gift, he thought, was to become invisible, granted because there was so little keeping him here. He watched a soldier watching him, a woman with a ponytail sneaking out from under her helmet. The helmet too big, the jacket too small. The soldier turned to Reverend Bauxite, eyebrows raised. Seemed to see in him, then, all that he had done, for he was not like Sunny Jim. He was an open man, his passions playing in the air around him. The same thing that made him a fire, a beacon, in the pulpit, made him a failure at espionage. They should have left days ago, he thought. Gone north and found Aaron, then west, across all that land. The war could not have broken it all. They still could go, he thought. Change their clothes, their hair, their names, until Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim were just two more men who died somewhere back in all that fighting, and their new selves were free.

That night they hid in the last building standing on the block of Peffer and North Seventh, a red brick house that used to lean on its neighbors, but had nothing to lean on now. The stairs falling off the porch. Window frames angling with rain and gravity. A kitchen half-gutted by rot, a gas stove with no gas. Across North Seventh, the railroad tracks were torn up in twelve places. They could see the remains of the capitol from the roof, burned down again. They drew the place where the building’s dome had been in the air with their fingers. They listened to the howling of monkeys in the houses near them, sirens from the other side of the bridge. There were alarms all over the city that night. Neither of them knew why.

Their phone rang again after midnight. Reverend Bauxite had his speech prepared. We can’t do your work anymore. Aaron can’t lose a father, too. But Grendel Jones’s voice on the other end was small. Something has happened to the west and north of us, she said. No. Something is happening to the west and north.

“What do you mean?” Reverend Bauxite said.

“You won’t believe me when I tell you,” Grendel Jones said. She was right. Reverend Bauxite argued and shook his head. There must be some mistake. Nothing like that can be happening. Nothing.

“What are you talking about?” Sunny Jim said.

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth, distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, Reverend Bauxite thought. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

“You won’t believe me,” Reverend Bauxite said.

But Jim believed every word. He stood there nodding and frowning. Aaron. My favorite boy. Why did I ever let you leave me?

“We can get on the highway now,” he said. “Get there as fast as we can.”

“No, we can’t,” Reverend Bauxite said. “The war is there. And the army is looking for you. They’re looking for both of us.”

All because of Aline. We never should have gotten involved.

We didn’t have a choice, Jim. Not a real one. Not one that was right.

There is always a choice, and we chose.

“How are we going to do this, then?” Sunny Jim said.

Reverend Bauxite looked out the window, toward the Susquehanna. The long meandering stripe through the Pennsylvania hills that drowned the railroad track, spread into valleys. It could take them all the way to Scranton, ahead of the war, without the army ever seeing them. Maybe all the way to Binghamton. Lose a few days, but it was worth it if it meant staying invisible. They would get there just in time, before the storm hit. The Big One, Grendel Jones was already calling it. A storm as wide as the horizon. Maybe as wide as the sea.

“We could go up the river,” he said.

“Nobody’s going up the river now,” Sunny Jim said.

“Someone must be.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” Reverend Bauxite said. “But someone has to be. Don’t they?”

His faith again, shaking. He tried to keep his voice from doing the same.

*   *   *

DO YOU SEE? HOW
the world is now? Nobody can say quite how it came to be this way. There is too much. There is not enough. It started generations ago, and so much has been lost, and even all that I found does not help. You wake up and the country is on fire, as far as you can see. How can you find the match that started it?

Our great-grandparents told our grandparents that things were different once, when they were children. A little colder. Simpler. Not as many people were dying. That the change was slow, slow enough to argue about it. A gradual, creeping shift. A field full of cars, grown over with grass and stalks of trees. The plants tipping the cars over, breaking them apart. A massacre three decades long. In West Virginia, we had leveled a green range of peaks into a gray waste, spotted with the rusting yellow metal of abandoned machinery. In Pennsylvania and New York, we had drilled for gas until the rock broke and the water went bad, and the towns that used to drink it died. We burned and we burned, until there was more smoke than fuel, and then things started to come apart. The roads breaking into rifts of jutting asphalt. Libraries with caved-in roofs, full of decaying books and dead monitors. We saw these things and yelled at each other. The system had been built on argument, believing that any problem could be fixed, explained, weaseled out of, with enough money, the right words. Until the problem was physics, and then there was only what we did and how the planet responded. It did not matter what we said after that, though we kept talking anyway. As if it was all we had.

There must have been a day, a single day, when it was too late, when we could not go back, but nobody can remember when it was. The storms started coming, more and more of them. A typhoon walloped in from the ocean, put an entire city underwater, and the water tore half the place down when it receded. Tornadoes swept across towns that could have lasted for centuries more, turned houses, fences, and cars into giant fields of shredded wood and metal strewn with the dead and everything they had loved. The bare trunks of dead trees that the wind had snapped in half and stripped of bark reached for the sky like scorched hands. The survivors staggered through the broken streets, stunned and shouting. Far away, there was news of entire countries flooded. Places where people had been for thousands of years, gone. In Richmond, Virginia, I found photographs in the basement of an apartment building showing a massive fleet of dilapidated ships arriving at a port, maybe in New Jersey, maybe Maryland. Maybe everywhere. Old cruise ships streaked with oil and smoke, tankers of rust, dropping sheets of corroded metal into the sea when they shuddered to a stop. Filled with people with clothes rotting off their backs. In those pictures, the seawalls our great-grandparents had put around the cities were still there. The ocean knocking on the door, about to let itself in. It took maybe seventy years. A growing beat, they say, of stronger and stronger storms, a long chain of hurricanes, until the walls gave way and the streets went under, buildings fell. Savannah. Atlantic City. A freak storm in Boston. A ragged swath carved out of New York. The remaining cities cringing with every change of season, every gathering of clouds, waiting for the Big One. A tide of survivors inland, looking for things that were not there. The government able to do less and less, until it was just men in frayed suits, arguing in buildings where the power kept going out, whose surroundings were turning back to swampland. The borders on the maps of America getting hazy, the names and the boundaries becoming lines and letters of no significance. Then there were just the cities and the towns, and the land all around. As though the planet was taking it all back from us. You could almost see it happening before your eyes, our grandparents said. The trees rushing over empty fields, year after year. Jumping from one dead farm to the next. The diseases followed, one after the other.

The war, the war. There was no Fort Sumter, no Pearl Harbor, no moment that we all understood at once that we were fighting. No one to tell us things had changed. There must have been a first shot fired, perhaps two men—it must have been men—arguing over where one’s land began and another’s ended, a first bullet flinging a ribbon of heat through the air. Another one shot back. But I have to believe they did not know what they were starting. If they knew, why would they have shot? An army was raised, a resistance arose. By the time Charlotte, North Carolina, burned, nobody was asking what it was about anymore. It was about territory. It was about food and water: who had it, who did not. The old fights, the ones we had fought since we got here, the ones our ancestors brought with them when they came here, all those bitter old things becoming new again. It was about how much we had done to the planet, and the way the planet, at last, had turned its great eye to us in anger. You have done enough. The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

The war came for us, my daughter and I, four years ago, in Charleston, West Virginia. We had moved six times, on a ragged diagonal across the South, from a washed-out beach house in South Carolina into the mountains. Slept in a garage outside of Roanoke, listened to the flood of rain find its way through the roof. Sat against the wall of a freight car with thirty other people, my arms around my little girl, while the train screamed and banged along the old Winchester and Western rails, too loud to rest. In Charleston, we heard the war was coming up the Kanawha river valley, talked about moving again. But the trees all around Charleston were in bloom, and we had a house, just big enough for us both, with a small yard behind it, a cinder-block wall. We were so tired of moving. Always thought we had more time. Three days later I was howling in the bottom of a metal boat with a man who had lost both his arms, shells exploding all around us. Then we drifted toward the Ohio, away from the war. He died when everything got quiet.

Do you see? The story I have left to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled. Two men going upriver to get a boy. Four soldiers going up the highway after them. Then the house where everything converged. But I had a child, too, strong and small. I lost her when I lost that house in Charleston, and I do not know where she has gone. And since then, I have been to Baltimore, to New York. I saw what happened to Philadelphia. I stood at the edge of a mass grave in Maryland, next to the parking lot of an abandoned shopping center. I walked through the windows of a fallen bell tower in Delaware that had crashed into the street after the bombs came for it. I was in a firefight in West Virginia, all oil and darkness and screaming animals, and when it was over, nothing but moans and crying, the ground swampy and fetid with blood and pieces of men. A tree hung with human limbs. I want to tell you their names, all those people who died around me, but I cannot say who they were.

I even went west to see the Big One coming in, because I needed to see it, to tell you. I stood on the ridge of the Appalachians and looked toward where the sun was supposed to be, toward the north, too, and saw no sky at all. Just a boiling wall of clouds, gray and green and sparked with red lightning, and underneath it, a curtain of flying black rain, rippling with wild wind from one end of the earth to the other. The sound of constant thunder. I watched it take a town in the valley, far away below, and it was as though a wave were rolling across the ground, lifting houses, roads, trees, and all—anything that was still there—up into the air, into the mouth of the storm. It was still rising, into the darkness, when I lost sight of it. It must have been so loud on the ground, the earth and rain and sky all screaming together, but I could not hear any of it. I wanted to say something then, but I did not have the words. There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens. They come in time, but sometimes it takes years, and we do not always have years. My great-grandfather did not have them when he tried to speak of the towns all over upstate New York, the way the people seemed to dwindle year after year, the old ones falling into the earth, the young ones just not there the next day, as if plucked away. The decay of the houses moving across the villages and cities. Windows broken, then boarded. The lawns tangling with twisting young maples, black walnut, until the main roads were just strips of dying buildings, rusting bridges, sidewalks breaking apart. He loved it all so much. How would it ever come back? He would say these things, get that far, then try to tell you what had been lost, what he had seen himself. Then he’d just shake his head, put his hand over his eyes instead. It was the same thing for us as for them. Just much faster for us. For us, even less time.

We do not know what is on the other side of the storm. We cannot get around it, and the few who have tried to go over it say it never seems to end. We have heard that it came in from the Pacific like a tsunami, that it ate the coast. It crashed into the Rockies and crested them, then charged across the plains, tearing up towns and crops, roads and telephone lines. Pulling us all off the land, us and all we had built there. All the people who could not run, did not want to, we have not heard from since the storm passed over them. No letters, no signals, no photographs. No messages crackling across the wires. A veil is falling across the country, one long shattering shriek at its edge, and behind it, nothing but darkness and silence.