Kathleen Goonan: Crescent City Rhapsody

He let off the brake. The truck slowly gathered momentum. After a minute, he popped the clutch and the engine caught. It had been the starter. He just didn’t like those computerized components. Too fragile by far.

Gingerly shifting into first, he went into a controlled slide and started up the hill on a different track, hoping that he had enough momentum to get to the top. The truck slid sideways for a few feet, then plowed up the hill. He reached the crest, next to the recording shed, and circled around until he was back in the tracks he had made on the way up.

He took the truck out of gear, set the brake, and turned on the heat full blast. Leaving the truck running, he went into the shed and took the data from each roll, making sure he had the last few hours of information.

After he finished getting the papers, he turned off the light and locked the door behind him. He had already planned to be back on Friday. Now he thought he might return tomorrow.

He stacked the papers in a box on the floor of the truck and climbed into the cab.

His house was on a low ridge halfway between Angel’s Rest and town. It was about 2 a.m. when he turned into the long driveway. His two collies, Pleiades and Zephyr, rushed from the porch to meet the truck.

Exhausted, he staggered into the yard, tilting his head to look at the stars. Puzzled. Intrigued. What the hell was going on? After a few moments, they flashed and twirled like the Van Gogh print Terri had put on their bedroom wall. He felt giddy; euphoric. That was a bad sign. He needed his medication. Sally kept urging him to get one of the new time-release implants, but he was shy of having stuff in his body. It put him in mind of shrapnel.

He and the readouts survived the dogs’ greeting and he crossed the porch and opened the door. The collies rushed past him and bustled around, barking. He turned on lights and set the readouts on a huge heavy table in the center of the living room, pushing aside a stack of books to make room. The ornate Warm Morning Stove he had bought at a junk store in Newcastle was almost out. He stuffed a few newspaper twists, some kindling, and two big logs on top of the still-glowing ashes, closed the door, and opened the dampers. The fire roared and snapped for a few minutes before settling down.

His farmhouse was over a hundred years old. After years of steady work, the house was as habitable and as up-to-date, communication-wise, as he wanted it to be. The living room, where he spent most of his time, had been three rooms. He had taken out the walls and put posts in strategic places. Two old comfortable couches and several big armchairs sat here and there, facing not one another but various flatscreens, some wall-mounted, some stand-alone. Bundles of wires ran every which way beneath various rugs, which made the room look as if it might be infested with large snakes. Electronic gear was stacked on scattered tables, lights winking at seeming random. The walls were covered with books and CDs. The wide plank floor beneath his feet was scarred and dark.

He went into the kitchen, turned on the propane burner, and made himself some coffee, which he drank black. He picked up his vial of pills; put it down. Best to take the next one tomorrow morning, his regular time; that’s what they told him to do if he missed a pill. He scrambled eggs in a cast-iron skillet and carried his snack back into the living room. Bannered across his mail screen was a message from an old friend in Washington: wow!

He heard from Craig at least once a month. They’d done a few papers together, but Craig moved in higher planes than he did; he was internationally known and taught at Harvard for a portion of each year. They’d met at Stanford during the heady year before Zeb had crashed.

Crash was the word for it. He would literally be walking on air for days on end, forgetting to eat, absorbing books, lectures, raw data. He was there on a scholarship, studying graduate physics, though he was only eighteen. He was the darling of the physics department. He spent most of his time submerged in challenges he chose himself, discussing them with heated intensity in the lounge, arguing points, picking up insights. He would come down from a week of this utterly wrung-out, sleep for a day or two, and drag himself out of bed with no energy. The world looked dull and stupid; completely impermeable. He couldn’t understand how he could have been so excited, how it had all clicked so precisely. Then it would start to build again, until he once again was in the realm where he could fill pages and pages, disks and optical spheres, with pure thought. He was lit. He was burning.

And he burned out.

He couldn’t even remember the depth of his despair when the darkness took a long time to lift and then longer and longer. He had cut his wrists. Why? Such an action was completely unimaginable to him today. But back then…

Sally was pregnant then with Annie. She’d still flown out to California. Their parents were dead. She was his only hope. His college HMO would pay for only the most rudimentary of treatments. He lost his scholarship. All was in fragments—not only his thoughts, but his life. He was like two different people. Three. More. They were not finely delineated. But he was, most definitely, mentally ill.

Sally got him back in shape. Brought him home, took him up north to an expensive clinic, talked to people who might have an inkling of what was wrong. Different than simple schizophrenia. Some sort of neuronal firing malfunction, possibly stress-related. Many medications were tried. He was now on medication generations removed from those.

He was satisfied with the path he had taken. Terri had compared him to Rimbaud, some French poet who had burned like the sun and then never wrote again. He felt that comparison was rather unfair. He was still capable of thought. He still published the occasional paper. At first he chafed at the medication, for it was clearly holding him in, barring him from the higher realms he knew existed. But living in this slow way, he could savor life. He was happy. Before, he had never been happy. He had merely been extremely excited.

He eased into a chair. The dogs sat next to him, panting. The room was warm now. He ate his eggs. “Wow,” he directed verbally, and the wow file opened.

He read: what the hell’s going on? why the blackout? got a clue? craig.

Blackout?

He tried to log on to the Internet, but now, apparently, the phones were down. Craig’s message had come through an hour ago—probably about the time he came down from Angel’s Rest.

Clearly some news was called for. “SNN,” he said resignedly.

The alerted screen was filled with static. Satellites must be out.

Zeb found a local station. The announcer cast worried glances toward the camera; her voice quavered at times. “… have radio information broadcast from Washington in the past half hour. An apparent high-altitude electromagnetic pulse of unknown origin has caused communication failures. Many satellites are out of commission. A plane crashed in the fog at National Airport, killing everyone onboard. Emergency crews are working overtime to get phones working. Expect temporary lulls in service and please do not panic. Floyd and Montgomery counties are presently without power.” She paused for a moment as someone handed her a paper. “We repeat: There has been no known hostile action on the part of any country. There have been no reported nuclear explosions. We have just received a—”

Static filled the screen once more. Zeb sat back in his seat. Thinking.

The most likely source of an electromagnetic pulse would be a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere. Depending on the power and location, it could do a little damage to communications and power systems—or a lot. A 1962 explosion of a nuclear weapon over the Pacific blacked out Honolulu for half an hour and triggered burglar alarms. But if there had been an upper-atmosphere nuclear explosion, Zeb thought that there would be a lot more war hysteria.