Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

‘No females.’

‘Yes. Or?’

A pause, then he says, ‘They’re all sterile.’

I nod. His head sags down again. The tape has run to its end; the music has gone. Outside, the city, livid, drained of colour, is spread out beneath our reflections.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he whispers. Then, ‘How could you find out?’

‘I can check the local research centres. The chances are, that the first option is correct. The most obvious solution is usually the most likely.’

The tone of my voice makes him glance up at me; I sound much calmer than I feel. He seems only half-convinced, as if he doesn’t want to believe that I can be so cool at this moment, so objective.

‘You mean, that they all disappeared?’ he says.

‘Yes. But I can check radiation levels as well.’

‘With Geiger counters?’

‘And with more sophisticated equipment. There are whole bands of radiation’—and I hold up my arms, side-ways—‘from ultraviolet out to cosmic radiation, through gamma rays, and then at the other end, from infrared through radar out to radio waves. I know enough to be able to check if there are any abnormalities. But’—and here I lean forward and look intently at him—‘I can’t do it without your help. To fix electrical equipment, to make power.’

To my relief, he responds, and his face becomes animated again. He nods vigorously.

‘Okay. Yes, okay.’

‘And we’ll have to set up a radio transmitter and a receiver, and do lots of monitoring over all the wavebands.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Then his expression clouds. ‘Doesn’t radioactivity…doesn’t it cause sterility?’

‘Only in very large doses.’

‘I thought—’

‘It usually changes the genetic structure…in various ways. ‘

‘Could you tell if that had happened?’

‘No. Only if there are some Drosophila —I mean, fruit flies, around.’

I seem to have convinced him that I know what I’m talking about, and he relaxes, looking apologetic. The last few sentences have been hard for me.

‘Sorry I was…you know.’

‘That’s alright. I should have explained a bit more.’

‘I just thought…there’d be someone here, in Wellington.’

‘If there’s anybody else in the North Island, I should think they’ll come here sooner or later.’

He nods again, and toys with some food on a plate.

‘How long do you reckon somebody would last before they…cracked up?’

‘Hard to say. Not much more than a week or two, I wouldn’t think.’

‘Be a few days, for some people.’

‘It would depend on their jobs, I suppose. On how they were trained to cope.’

‘Huh.’ A half-laugh; he presses some pieces of uneaten asparagus to a flat paste with a fork. ‘And we were trained, eh?’ Then, throwing the fork down, ‘Well trained.’

‘It’s not just that. It’s what you get to know about life, as well.’

‘Is it?’ He yawns, rubs his face, seems to be suddenly tired. ‘Not much life left to know about.’ The expanse of dead city has an almost hypnotic effect. ‘It can’t all be just for us,’ he says. ‘I’m not that important.’

I smile back; but in not immediately replying with an agreement that neither am I of much importance, I realise that perhaps he has set a test for me, and I’ve unwittingly confirmed something for him. In fact he looks away with a wry expression as though inwardly amused and only half-concerned to conceal it.

I did not want to have to know, to understand, very much about him. It had not seemed necessary. Now I can see that I have no choice. My survival might depend on it.

Because he is finding out about me , gathering information in odd ways, casually, perhaps not with any motive but because this is what he is used to; his life must have forced him to spend a lot of time trying to understand Europeans. I am at a disadvantage. I would not have said—and this comes to me with no great blaze of revelation—that I had ever begun to understand even myself. I knew a great deal, I knew many things; but there was some impediment which stopped me from comprehending; it made large patches of shadow. And now—I shall ignore his ploy, if that’s what it is. I pretend I’m not interested; and after a pause I see the chance to ask a question I’ve been feeling uneasy about since we met. So I say, ‘You remember when I said dead things didn’t disappear? How did you find that out?’

He stares at me with a much more distant expression, as if puzzled that I should ask.

‘Dead animals on the road. Opossums, hedgehogs. Dead flies’—and he holds up his hand, spread out flat in midair—‘stuck in cobwebs.’

For security against any outside threat we have locked and barred all exits and entrances. We occupy a suite of rooms on the eighth floor. The corridor door can be locked, and there is a press-button locking mechanism on the connecting door between our two bedrooms. I realise that we would both like to close and lock this door, but for either of us to do so would be such a significant action that it can’t be done. I try to stay awake. The silence tightens. Then slackens. Sleep is as treacherous as ever.

She turns suddenly and looks at me as I hold the door of the black car open after the slow walk down the gravel path from the edge of the oblong pit. The earth has battered down on the wooden lid. To earth. She knows beyond my face. Everything. Ashes. The look warns against touching her. She is driven away. Cases are packed, boxes filled, papers signed, it will all go. An empty house. Dust.

In dreams different times in the same place melt into each other.

The stones by the church, in the churchyard, are upright in waves of grass, the wind rushing over the grass, and I can see their ages and names, and think how the names planned to get here. Enormous journeys, faces set hard; strange expectations at the end. The stones have grown yellow and grey with tissues of lichen like dry brains covering their letters. Everlasting Peace. Dearly beloved. Arms of the Lord. A glorious awakening.

I am dissecting tissues and cellular structures, finding the motives and impulses inside the smallest items of life, pulling apart the micro-secrets. Billions of these build into illusions of free will. Coded protein chains transmit memories and instincts. Nerve chemicals form commands inside muscles, enough to make a hand move back, a head turn, an arm go still. I shall discover the source of all this, expose it for what it is. Faces whitened by fluorescent lights inside rooms with no windows or way out will stare with the recognition of my discovery.

We may be on the verge of a breakthrough. He pushes his steel-rimmed spectacles back with the forefinger, smiling, the dentures glistening more than the real teeth. Well, he says, the last thing people want to know is that everything is decided for them by influences they can’t control. Or know damn all about. Can’t hope to understand. They don’t want that. We find out the truth because we don’t have any choice. Nothing else works, empirically. I sometimes wonder what we could do if we gave them what they really want out there. Illusion. Very powerful. The alchemists had the right idea. They dealt in both.

That was because they never knew the difference, I say; and the lips unwrap the shining teeth again.

He is walking away along the white corridor and I have not said what I have to say. The words choke back. There are questions. Terrible, overwhelming problems. My resources had proved inadequate. Why didn’t I make it clear? I had reached the most adverse conclusion. He goes away as if he half-knew.

‘It’s Sunday.’

‘Is it?’ I count the days. ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’