Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth

Less academic was the worry about my cut hand. There didn’t seem to be any slivers of glass or traces of earth in the wound. What would happen if I became ill?

What if I got tetanus? In one house I found a first-aid kit in the bathroom. I bathed antiseptic onto my fingers and sealed the cuts with band-aid. Each closed house held its own distinctive staleness. I held my breath against the smell of beer and ashtrays, remnants of exhausted Friday nights; bedrooms heavy with dead sweat and cheap scent, the curtains drawn to preserve the secretions; children’s rooms full of the breath of highly flavoured sweets, toothpaste, chewing gum, and stale urine. There were bathroom scents, soapy, antiseptic; chemical lavender disinfectant and the sharpness of chlorine scouring powder in obsessively neat houses where none of the surfaces had traces of human beings on them. One older house was filled with a feral air of animals and damp newspaper; another, unbearable, like the inside of a diseased lung, sweet, tubercular, breathed to the death of all its oxygen several times over, every door and window shut tight. I had to stop. A revulsion I had always felt about the physical secrecy of other people, the solid, hidden strangeness of their lives, formed into a nausea with these smells, the almost tangible presence of people who had sweated what they had eaten all their lives: dead mutton, sour milk.

Should I go to Auckland? Now? I didn’t want to decide. I wandered around gardens checking for insects. Even the woodlice, the slaters normally crawling frantically under old lumps of wood or large stones, had gone. No aphids, greenfly, codling moths, slugs, snails, wasps, mosquitoes, mice or rats: a dream for gardeners.

But also no butterflies or honeybees, no spiders, no background hiss of cicadas. The silence was still absolute and terrible, the gardens like cemeteries for the deaf. I wondered if nature could survive for long without insects as pollinators or without the complicated interlock of predators and victims. Surely it couldn’t? They would have to restore themselves. It was too vast a disturbance.

I discovered that my mind had begun to adapt its functions to the new conditions automatically, as though an unknown set of evolutionary switches had tripped, closing some circuits as temporarily useless, sending others into overload and short circuit, and activating new areas. It was reassuring to realise this. Whenever my progress from one house and garden to another was stalled by these vague and at times dangerous speculations which threatened to branch out into unpleasant conclusions and fear about the enormity of what was going on, then my mind would close down those circuits and redirect me to the sheer physical effort of going on, of not stopping still. The resilience of this mind amazed me; it was almost a separate phenomenon, a part of myself which had instinctively sought to protect itself from breakdown and to prepare defences to ensure its own survival as an organism. The question of whether I was really seeing what I seemed to be seeing kept recurring. I might be mad. This was met with a dodging agility. Madness is a deviation from what is normal, I thought; it is abnormal for people to disappear; I have not disappeared; I am now normality. I think, therefore I am.

Me: and the worms? No, madness didn’t need witnesses any more than heroics needed onlookers. If a tree falls in a forest where there are no ears to hear it, then you can argue whether it makes a noise, but whether it makes a noise or not, it still falls.

What will you do tonight?—a demand from my mind, overriding the contradictory impulses with an insistence on practical action. Was there any danger that if I fell asleep I might be scooped up by the Effect? What would happen when 6.12 came round again? Should I go back to the motel room or get out into the countryside?

I drove the car aimlessly along the main street again and then on impulse decided to go up to the lookout on the hill overlooking the town. The road curved up past closed, silent houses and emerged on a small car park at the top of the hill next to a large tower-like structure. I got out of the car and looked across the town in the late afternoon sun. The houses, churches, gardens, garages and streets lay below; there were greyish mudflats beyond, then the glittering spread of water, and on the far side the distant hills, blue, insubstantial. Beyond the hills would be Auckland. Empty?

For more than half an hour I sat on the steps leading up to the tower and gazed at the immense lifelessness of the scene. It did not even seem to have acknowledged the change which had come over it; there were no visible clues as to what had happened, and no sense of any further imminent changes. The stunned clarity of the landscape seemed almost insulting; but even this was only like an extension of the indifference it had always radiated. I had felt it often when driving through remote hills in the past, on deserted roads. The clear light which scrubbed the hills into such precise definition, which polished seas and rinsed distance from time as well as space, had not changed. The nothingness stretching over huge sections of land infinitely had extended itself everywhere; it had penetrated towns, cars, houses, rooms, an irresistible, magnified vacuum. I had once driven through enormities of emptiness towards the south-east coast of the North Island, to Cape Turnagain. All the way the loneliness had dilated and rebounded from the vacant ranges of hills setting up a frightening reverberation. The beach was being sandblasted by a ferocious north Antarctic wind pressing back the curling tops of the breakers as if trying to cancel and dissipate their energy. There were no human beings in sight. The atmosphere seemed hostile to any kind of vitality that was not destructive; the wind and clear light beating down forced raw, instant, hard reactions, did not allow rest or thinking, denied something that was essential to your humanity. The landscape held no possibilities other than those of that moment. You felt you had seen it all forever. It had no psychic resonance, no memories, no past; nothing human had ever happened there. That was not unusual for parts of New Zealand. But that place also had no potential, no projections from ahead; its future gaped into nothingness too. It was inconceivable that humans should ever settle there and endow it with traces of their lives. I had been chilled, appalled, at the boldness and ferocity with which it revealed its nature. Even then I had wondered as I drove away from it what would happen if that emptiness set up an echo, or found reverberations inside the people who nominally laid claim to the land; what would happen if you were insidiously affected by it, and weakened, losing the power of resisting it, until you might find yourself trapped in the same kind of abhuman present, transparent, unending?

I returned to the motel, stopping en route to recheck the radio wavebands. I had once read that the ionosphere undergoes alterations in the evening. But there was only static again. The motel was as I had left it. The door to my unit was still open. As I walked in, I felt a thickening sadness and depression. It was as if everything there belonged to another life, penetrated by the act of opening the blind that morning, fractured finally and beyond help by the most casual exit from the door I had just re-entered. I had intended to investigate the room to try to see if it contained any clues as to my escape from the Effect, and perhaps to lie down and reconstruct my movements from the moment I had awoken, like the re-enactment of a crime, to unearth, possibly, a missing link, a detail forgotten. Instead I slumped on the unmade bed, choking on feelings for that finished life all around, its closeness pressing against its remoteness. The ceiling was covered with a roughcast stipple of some sprayed, congealed composition, and the softer late sunlight revealed glints of gold and silver specks mixed in with the stipple.