T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

What did I do? Ultimately? Nothing. Call it enlightened self-interest. Call it solipsism, self-preservation, cowardice, I don’t care. I was terrified — who wouldn’t be? — and I decided to stay put. I had plenty of food and firewood, fuel for the generator and propane for the stove, three reams of twenty-five percent cotton fiber bond, correction fluid, books, board games — Parcheesi and Monopoly — and a complete set of National Geographic, 1947–1962. (By way of explanation, I should mention that I am — or was — a social studies teacher at the Montecito School, a preparatory academy in a pricey suburb of Santa Barbara, and that the serendipity that spared me the fate of nearly all my fellow men and women was as simple and fortuitous a thing as a sabbatical leave. After fourteen years of unstinting service, I applied for and was granted a one-semester leave at half-salary for the purpose of writing a memoir of my deprived and miserable Irish-Catholic upbringing. The previous year a high school teacher from New York — the name escapes me now — had enjoyed a spectacular succès d’estime, not to mention d’argent, with a memoir about his own miserable and deprived Irish-Catholic boyhood, and I felt I could profitably mine the same territory. And I got a good start on it too, until the plague hit. Now I ask myself what’s the use — the publishers are all dead. Ditto the editors, agents, reviewers, booksellers and the great congenial book-buying public itself. What’s the sense of writing? What’s the sense of anything?)

At any rate, I stuck close to the cabin, writing at the kitchen table through the mornings, staring out the window into the ankles of the pines and redwoods as I summoned degrading memories of my alcoholic mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, and in the afternoons I hiked up to the highest peak and looked down on the deceptive tranquillity of the San Joaquin Valley spread out like a continent below me. There were no planes in the sky overhead, no sign of traffic or movement anywhere, no sounds but the calling of the birds and the soughing of the trees as the breeze sifted through them. I stayed up there past dark one night and felt as serene and terrible as a god when I looked down at the velvet expanse of the world and saw no ray or glimmer of light. I plugged the radio back in that night, just to hear the fading comfort of man-made noise, of the static that emanates from nowhere and nothing. Because there was nothing out there, not anymore.

—

It was four weeks later — just about the time I was to have ended my hermitage and enjoyed the promised visit from Danielle — that I had my first human contact of the new age. I was at the kitchen window, beating powdered eggs into a froth for dinner, one ear half-attuned to the perfect and unbroken static hum of the radio, when there was a heavy thump on the deteriorating planks of the front deck. My first thought was that a branch had dropped out of the Jeffrey pine — or worse, that a bear had got wind of the corned beef hash I’d opened to complement the powdered eggs — but I was mistaken on both counts. The thump was still reverberating through the floorboards when I was surprised to hear a moan and then a curse — a distinctly human curse. “Oh, shit-fuck!” a woman’s voice cried. “Open the goddamned door! Help, for shit’s sake, help!”

I’ve always been a cautious animal. This may be one of my great failings, as my mother and later my fraternity brothers were always quick to point out, but on the other hand, it may be my greatest virtue. It’s kept me alive when the rest of humanity has gone on to a quick and brutal extinction, and it didn’t fail me in that moment. The door was locked. Once I’d got wind of what was going on in the world, though I was devastated and the thought of the radical transformation of everything I’d ever known gnawed at me day and night, I took to locking it against just such an eventuality as this. “Shit!” the voice raged. “I can hear you in there, you son of a bitch — I can smell you!”

I stood perfectly still and held my breath. The static breathed dismally through the speakers and I wished I’d had the sense to disconnect the radio long ago. I stared down at the half-beaten eggs.

“I’m dying out here!” the voice cried. “I’m starving to death — hey, are you deaf in there or what? I said, I’m starving! ”

And now of course I was faced with a moral dilemma. Here was a fellow human being in need of help, a member of a species whose value had just vaulted into the rarefied atmosphere occupied by the gnatcatcher, the condor and the beluga whale by virtue of its rarity. Help her? Of course I would help her. But at the same time, I knew if I opened that door I would invite the pestilence in and that three days hence both she and I would be reduced to our mortal remains.

“Open up!” she demanded, and the tattoo of her fists was the thunder of doom on the thin planks of the door.

It occurred to me suddenly that she couldn’t be infected — she’d have been dead and wasted by now if she were. Maybe she was like me, maybe she’d been out brooding in her own cabin or hiking the mountain trails, utterly oblivious and immune to the general calamity. Maybe she was beautiful, nubile, a new Eve for a new age, maybe she would fill my nights with passion and my days with joy. As if in a trance, I crossed the room and stood at the door, my fingers on the long brass stem of the bolt. “Are you alone?” I said, and the rasp of my own voice, so long in disuse, sounded strange in my ears.

I heard her draw in a breath of astonishment and outrage from the far side of the thin panel that separated us. “What the hell do you think, you son of a bitch? I’ve been lost out here in these stinking woods for I don’t know how long and I haven’t had a scrap for days, not a goddamn scrap, not even bark or grass or a handful of soggy trail mix. Now will you fucking open this door?! ”

Still, I hesitated.

A rending sound came to me then, a sound that tore me open as surely as a surgical knife, from my groin to my throat: she was sobbing. Gagging for breath, and sobbing. “A frog,” she sobbed, “I ate a goddamn slimy little putrid frog! ”

God help me. God save and preserve me. I opened the door.

—

Sarai was thirty-eight years old — that is, three years older than I — and she was no beauty. Not on the surface anyway. Even if you discounted the twenty-odd pounds she’d lost and her hair that was like some crushed rodent’s pelt and the cuts and bites and suppurating sores that made her skin look like a leper’s, and tried, by a powerful leap of the imagination, to see her as she once might have been, safely ensconced in her condo in Tarzana and surrounded by all the accoutrements of feminine hygiene and beauty, she still wasn’t much.

This was her story: she and her live-in boyfriend, Howard, were nature enthusiasts — at least Howard was anyway — and just before the plague hit they’d set out to hike an interlocking series of trails in the Golden Trout Wilderness. They were well provisioned, with the best of everything — Howard managed a sporting goods store — and for the first three weeks everything went according to plan. They ate delicious freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo and shrimp couscous, drank cognac from a bota bag and made love wrapped in propylene, Gore-Tex and nylon. Mosquitoes and horseflies sampled her legs, but she felt good, born again, liberated from the traffic and the smog and her miserable desk in a miserable corner of the electronics company her father had founded. Then one morning, when they were camped by a stream, Howard went off with his day pack and a fly rod and never came back. She waited. She searched. She screamed herself hoarse. A week went by. Every day she searched in a new direction, following the stream both ways and combing every tiny rill and tributary, until finally she got herself lost. All streams were one stream, all hills and ridges alike. She had three Kudos bars with her and a six-ounce bag of peanuts, but no shelter and no freeze-dried entrées — all that was back at the camp she and Howard had made in happier times. A cold rain fell. There were no stars that night, and when something moved in the brush beside her she panicked and ran blindly through the dark, hammering her shins and destroying her face, her hair and her clothes. She’d been wandering ever since.