Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I go down the hallway and into the kitchen. I go back into the hall. My child is dying. I go into the front room. Joanne is out. He knows that. I go to the kitchen. How long? I shall tell the inquest I went for a towel to the airing cupboard. Some things fell out when I opened the door. Then the phone rang. Wrong number. Then it was too late. I go into the front room. Dear God. I wrap my arms around myself. I am shivering. The sky dark blue. There is no noise.

The grey haze lightened and paled from clouds of rain mixing steam and mist. Buildings, dark macrocarpa trees, wet streets emerged and receded. The day uncovered the landscape cautiously, but the clouds still waited round the lake and hills, and I waited and looked out from the drawn curtains of the sixth floor of the hotel. The volcanic areas heaved with steam. Some craters seemed dead, scabs of white-yellow sulphur amongst pools of acid, as though the moon had pressed an infection onto the surface of the earth. The rest boiled and spat, expelling the smell of decaying innards into the thickness of the atmosphere. When the clouds moved there were glimpses of wounds gone septic, erupting from beneath pieces of loose cotton wool.

I did not believe that I could go on much longer without having a complete breakdown. There was no option but to keep going until I lost control, but the end was inevitable. It shrank closer all the time. What day was it today? Friday? No; Thursday. I might not even last a week.

The city cleared itself into a more intense daylight. The structures of motel signs, motels, car parks, filling stations, shops, take-away food bars and used-car lots solidified from the dawn and set their colours against each other to catch nonexistent eyes. How familiar. It would all go. The corrosion would eat into it. The fraying edge would make its way across like gangrene. It would all go. The makers and users had ceased to exist. Now the bits of city appeared to be nothing but lost luggage which nobody would ever claim, a dump of non-returnable objects.

When I used to look down from high buildings I always wondered about the hidden lives of the people who were hurrying around, coming and going, all fixed on errands and purposes I could never begin to guess at. How did they live? Were they content with their lives? The Maoris in the next street in Auckland, twenty years ago: why did they seem happy? Did they really have good lives? Inside all the faces you saw in the streets and on buses or behind blinds, all the minds in those miles and miles of houses, under every corrugated iron roof, in the dark, awake at night: what were they thinking? Were there bound to be so many mysteries? And secrets? I wondered how much was concealed from the world or how much was concealed from me ; my life had been a very narrow channel, and I’d edged along it knowing almost nothing. The life everybody else was leading had seemed vital and purposeful, as if meanings had been found; it went on apart from me, and I picked up faint images from it, echoes, muted sounds, filtering down my narrow channel. I watched people from a distance, I read books, I glimpsed hints from films and television advertisements. But my detachment, my amazement at the way life went on without me, stayed the same. I would feel bitter, and bury that feeling, and direct rage outwards to easy targets. I was doing it even now, when everybody had vanished into an even greater mystery, a communal secret hidden completely from any ignorant speculations I might make; me of all people. It had been left to me to break into their locked houses, look at the evidence, and make sense of it.

The light gathered in the room like a damp powder. Everywhere it would be filling millions of closed places uselessly. I got ready to leave. Holding the shotgun and torch I unlocked the door, went out into the corridor and down the stairs. Near the lift there was a trolley laden with early morning breakfasts intercepted at 6.12 last Saturday; amongst white cups and plates stood a jug of rancid milk and wads of green fur which had been bread. The silence was stronger than ever. The carpet absorbed the sounds of my movements. In the lobby of the hotel the large window walls were slanting great rectangular plots of light across the floor. The sun had come out. Enormous pleasure and sadness mixed together and welled up within a rush of new sensations. My shadow moved over the carpet, across the furniture. It was as if the world had been re-created. The dreadful night and the image of the abomination of the dark road seemed to fall back into the distance with the other bad memories. My arm brushed against the branch of an indoor plant fading to brown for lack of water, and a few dry leaves detached from the stem and rustled to the floor. Soon it would all be dead.

I unfastened the main doors and walked outside into the damp warmth. The car was covered with condensation. I wiped the windows. Cancerous waves of stench from the pools. I drove round and back onto the main street, turning left out of town. The air soon freshened on the way south. My mind began to clear. But I was achingly tired and increasingly hungry. The road went through desolate and strange-looking country with ragged hills here and there, and then carved its way through vast forests. It was a wide new highway with a cleared space on each side reaching to the blocks of trees. Even though the sun was bright there was a thick darkness in the packed forest and nothing else was growing except a few feeble ferns at the edge of the gloom. The columns of pines went back on all sides into the distance.

I did not think I should stop. After a while I saw a police car which had trundled to a halt off the road; and for the first time I thought about the emptiness of the jails. Had that happened everywhere, too? Even in the worst places? No one in the world being tortured or murdered; all the armies and secret police vanished… The world wiped clean. And then: what if there were survivors in jails? Why should I think that might not have happened? Because criminals wouldn’t have qualified for survival? That the Effect had moral scruples, an ethical mechanism? It couldn’t have, or I wouldn’t exist. I might have been in jail myself. Less than a year ago I had lied my way through an inquest on a very strange death, afraid to be worried too much by my skill at deception and the confidence of the face that answered every question. It should have been harder to do.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror, briefly, for reassurance. The road receded behind my face. Rotorua had been absorbed behind my image, a patch of weakness on the earth’s surface, a singularity, a local aberration. Was the world so much better now, all cleaned and redeemed? My face – I looked again – was pale, and the skin seemed stuck to the bone by the pressure of the light. No assurance at all. What kind of unstained world would forget or release that ?

The trees stood back on each side of the road like armies of dead soldiers standing to attention.

The river was clear and deep, shading to a dark green by the far banks. It swirled past in a heavy silence. Every few minutes the suck and slap of ripples breaking the surface from deep uncoilings gave the only hint of movement around the island. Beneath the water by the bridge the riverbed was visible, with small stones rolling along under the mass of transparent liquid.

Taupo was dazzling in its emptiness, the sun hot on tarmac and car metal, the shop windows blinded, doors locked. The light beat back from the lake fading all the colours and fading the hills even further away. Chip shops and burger bars stood unattended along the street smelling of grease and dead meat, and ranks of motels faced the lake with NO VACANCY signs raised for last weekend. I didn’t want to invade a room, but I was tired of driving and decided not to go further. A street map at the public relations office revealed the ideal place: a small island in the river to the north which had been developed as a tourist attraction. There were a few souvenir shops and a restaurant next to a bird sanctuary. The island was connected to the riverbank by a narrow footbridge. I stood on the bridge and thought about the old superstition that evil spirits were supposed to be unable to cross flowing water. Then, as I looked down, I saw a swarm of fish glint in the river, all moving against the sunlight for a moment and then darting away. They were only a few centimetres long, quite small, but brilliantly alive . They had survived! The Effect had not gone below the surface of water!