Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth

I drove away slowly. The steel glare of the tanker drew away and shrank into my rear-view mirror. After a while I calmed down and even began to feel tired. Somehow the milk smell, blended with hot stainless steel, reminded me of school, memories surfacing through twenty-five years; the fights with other kids, the hollow noises echoing down corridors, the massive silence of mid-afternoon playgrounds when you were sent outside because you felt sick and time seemed to have gone somewhere else and dried hard like a stain.

Now the danger was that I might fall asleep. The drone of the road in the heat was hypnotic. I had to force myself to concentrate.

Soon I reached State Highway 1 and turned north. I would be in Auckland in half an hour. I had reset my watch and the car clock to an approximation of correct time; it would be about midday. There must be somebody there. The expectation set some adrenalin flowing, and I began to tense and stare ahead. My sunglasses toned down the glistening of the road to sullen purple and indigo and projected a pattern of bluish marks from the windscreen’s toughened glass like faint bruises across the landscape.

A certain uneasiness, prompted by the photograph in the tanker cabin, made me wonder about driving off the motorway across to Pakuranga to Joanne’s address. I decided against it. There were many reasons why we had separated; she had made it clear that she held me responsible for the death of our son; that was enough. What would I be able to say, even if she might be there? Could I say, this world, at least this world of people he never seemed to see, and we could never quite cope with, has disappeared; can we now speak plainly and deal with what was left unsaid? Bathos. It would make no difference anyhow. What’s done is done. I have no photograph staring at me. No commitments. The child was dead. She, the mother, had wanted to abandon him to an institution because of his strangeness. She had not been able to cope with it. Or with the reactions of society to him, to herself. When he had died she blamed me. Any psychiatrist would have diagnosed a case of transferred guilt. I read a book about it. It is apparently relatively common. I was to blame. So she had gone away. There was nothing very much to leave, she said; I ought to be left alone with my conscience. Then she had gone to live in a flat in Pakuranga to be alone with hers.

I think she had believed that she was doing me a tremendous favour by not running off to some other man. I had to admit that she had been faithful. But by her own definition she had been faithful to ‘nothing very much’, to a form of words, a contractual obligation only indulged in for the sake of convention; so the effort could hardly have been very great. For better or for worse; what did that mean? Anyhow, at least she hadn’t returned to her parents, her precious family in Remuera, that clan of self-righteous hypocrites. It had never occurred to them that whatever genetic aberration lolled inside the brain of my child just might have been inherited from some dormant idiocy of their own chromosomes. I imagined them seized by yesterday’s 6.12 disappearance. It would have been irresistible, the Effect would not have spared Remuera, it would have flicked across the tight lawns, high fences, alarms, through clinker-brick walls and thick upholstery, velvet and fur and deep-pile Axminster; relentless, sudden. The owners disappear , every last executive belly, sauna-soft torso, sagging chin and lifted face, every piece of sclerotic organ and half-digested pâté of bowel pulp, all gone like magic, along with all their slavering animals, leaving untouched everything they really valued and guarded and thought they owned: real estate. Loot.

I sped onto the motorway just before noon, guns at the ready, driving fast by the few deserted cars and trucks, heading straight into and over this immense spread of houses. Corrugated metal rooftops flashed far off; blinded windows glinted. The air was clear and silent. The city blocks in the distance stood against the sky like headstones, empty boxes in a vast garbage dump, ratless and Sunday. Shadows were pulled tight everywhere, drawn in. The motorway rolled across, glaring, a dead concrete runway fixed at the centre of all this, littered with pieces of exhausted technology. I was elated, overcome by the enormity of what I was seeing and surprised by the power of the feelings of vengeance and triumph. Driving alive over all the deadness I realised how much I had always hated.

I had hoped for a clue. Why I had hoped to find it in Auckland I could not have said, even if there had been somebody to ask, and there was not. I had become more unique than I had believed; half a million people had vanished from here without a single survivor. Was I really the only living human being anywhere ? That would change everything. It would mean I had been exempted by a process beyond mere random chance.

Driving up and down these central city streets which had nothing more than a few pieces of paper drifting around them, it was easy to believe that the larger the anomaly of my survival, the greater the likelihood that there must be a particular reason for it. In half an hour the scale, the hugeness of the abnormality, pressed in on my mind and was met by the same stubborn resilience. This was all so great it must have a meaning, and that meaning would soon reveal itself to me, otherwise it would all be pointless, and I should have vanished yesterday too. I even smiled. Two days earlier my existence had been more or less pointless. Now it seemed that it might be the point of the universe. Could it be as great as that? What power did I have? Would it be revealed or would I have to find it out?

I climbed laboriously up a concrete stairwell to the top of one of the large hotel blocks and found my way onto a lookout balcony. Here I could see great distances. I was out of breath. I sat in the shade and looked south.

The sun blazed. It was hard to hate the city like this. It seemed helpless. I looked down. Beware of high places. Temptations. I sat down again.

Once I had seen a collection of early photographs of mid-Victorian city streets, taken when the exposure time of the light-sensitive plate was more than five minutes. Moving objects—people, animals, carriages—did not register on the photograph, so that the streets appeared empty, except for faint malingering smudges here and there. People were in those streets, but the machine’s perception process was too slow to record them. They had been rendered irrelevant. I had wondered: were there other objects at the other end of the time spectrum which we could not see or sense in everyday life, because our perceptions were too slow? This was not a speculation I felt like extending now. My mind dismissed it. The resemblance of this scene to the photographs, in any case, was only superficial. I could see pieces of paper moving in the streets. There was a slight breeze coming in from the sea. Getting up, I walked around the other side of the balcony and stared at the glittering water and the low curve of Rangitoto Island. The sparkle of the water was a reassuring movement.

I put my sunglasses on. The light calmed. I scanned the bridge. There were only a few specks and dots of stopped cars on it. Then, north, in the distance—something? A smudge on the skyline. It was very faint but it looked like smoke. I strained my eyes into the haze. Yes, it was smoke.

My heart shivered. I took the sunglasses off and rubbed them on my sleeve. My eyes narrowed against the strong light. After a moment I looked again. The smoke was definitely there. I walked up and down the balcony, peering intently. No, it wasn’t a mirage.

Down and down and down the flights of stairs and back into the car. How would I get to the bridge from here? I drove along the wrong street, reversed, turned left, got lost. At one point I found myself dutifully obeying a one-way-street sign and looking for an alternative way. Eventually I reached the motorway and zoomed down to the bridge. There were two articulated trucks on the motorway, one of which had trundled down and jack-knifed across three lanes. I dodged them and sped up and across the bridge, crossing to the southbound lane to avoid the toll barriers. Coming down into Northcote I could no longer see the smoke; I slowed down, then decided to stay with the main road north. Yes, there it was again, a blue-grey haze towards Glenfield. I turned off to the left past the golf course and went down Archers Road. Now the smell of burning, pungent, penetrated the car. I was getting lost in a maze of suburban streets, going down a no-exit road and seeing the car reflected in the blank panes of ranch slider doors from vacant houses. I stopped, checked my loaded guns, reversed, U-turned across dry lawns; then halfway down the next street, jammed on the brakes, hard.