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

I made her a package of Top Ramen, gave her a towel and a bar of soap and showed her the primitive shower I’d rigged up above the ancient slab of the tub. I was afraid to touch her or even come too close to her. Sure I was skittish. Who wouldn’t be when ninety-nine percent of the human race had just died off on the tailwind of a simple sneeze? Besides, I’d begun to adopt all the habits of the hermit — talking to myself, performing elaborate rituals over my felicitous stock of foodstuffs, dredging bursts of elementary school songs and beer jingles out of the depths of my impacted brain — and I resented having my space invaded. Still. Still, though, I felt that Sarai had been delivered to me by some higher power and that she’d been blessed in the way that I was — we’d escaped the infection. We’d survived. And we weren’t just errant members of a selfish, suspicious and fragmented society, but the very foundation of a new one. She was a woman. I was a man.

At first, she wouldn’t believe me when I waved a dismissive hand at the ridge behind the cabin and all that lay beyond it and informed her that the world was depeopled, that the Apocalypse had come and that she and I were among the solitary survivors — and who could blame her? As she sipped my soup and ate my flapjacks and treated her cuts and abrasions with my Neosporin and her hair with my shampoo, she must have thought she’d found a lunatic as her savior. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, and I was gloating, I was, sick as it may seem, “try the radio.”

She looked up at me out of the leery brooding eyes of the one sane woman in a madhouse of impostors, plugged the cord in the socket and calibrated the dial as meticulously as a safecracker. She was rewarded by static — no dynamics even, just a single dull continuum — but she glared up at me as if I’d rigged the thing to disappoint her. “ So, ” she spat, skinny as a refugee, her hair kinked and puffed up with my shampoo till it devoured her parsimonious and disbelieving little sliver of a face, “that doesn’t prove a thing. It’s broken, that’s all.”

When she got her strength back, we hiked out to the car and drove into Fish Fry Flats so she could see for herself. I was half crazy with the terrible weight of the knowledge I’d been forced to hold inside me, and I can’t describe the irritation I felt at her utter lack of interest — she treated me like a street gibberer, a psychotic, Cassandra in long pants. She condescended to me. She was humoring me, for God’s sake, and the whole world lay in ruins around us. But she would have a rude awakening, she would, and the thought of it was what kept me from saying something I’d regret — I didn’t want to lose my temper and scare her off, but I hate stupidity and willfulness. It’s the one thing I won’t tolerate in my students. Or wouldn’t. Or didn’t.

Fish Fry Flats, which in the best of times could hardly be mistaken for a metropolis, looked now as if it had been deserted for a decade. Weeds had begun to sprout up through invisible cracks in the pavement, dust had settled over the idle gas pumps and the windows of the main building were etched with grime. And the animals — the animals were everywhere, marmots waddling across the lot as if they owned it, a pair of coyotes asleep in the shade of an abandoned pickup, ravens cawing and squirrels chittering. I cut the engine just as a bear the color of cinnamon toast tumbled stupendously through an already shattered window and lay on his back, waving his bloodied paws in the air as if he were drunk, which he was. As we discovered a few minutes later — once he’d lurched to his feet and staggered off into the bushes — a whole host of creatures had raided the grocery, stripping the candy display right down to the twisted wire rack, scattering Triscuits and Doritos, shattering jars of jam and jugs of port wine and grinding the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines underfoot. There was no sign of the formerly sunny proprietor or of his dancing feet — I could only imagine that the ravens, coyotes and ants had done their work.

But Sarai — she was still an unbeliever, even after she dropped a quarter into the public telephone and put the dead black plastic receiver to her ear. For all the good it did her, she might as well have tried coaxing a dial tone out of a stone or a block of wood, and I told her so. She gave me a sour look, the sticks of her bones briefly animated beneath a sweater and jacket I’d loaned her — it was the end of October and getting cold at seventy-two hundred feet — and then she tried another quarter, and then another, before she slammed the receiver down in a rage and turned her seething face on me. “The lines are down, that’s all,” she sneered. And then her mantra: “It doesn’t prove a thing.”

While she’d been frustrating herself, I’d been loading the car with canned goods, after entering the main building through the broken window and unlatching the door from the inside. “And what about all this?” I said, irritated, hot with it, sick to death of her and her thick-headedness. I gestured at the bloated and lazy coyotes, the hump in the bushes that was the drunken bear, the waddling marmots and the proprietary ravens.

“I don’t know,” she said, clenching her jaws. “And I don’t care.” Her eyes had a dull sheen to them. They were insipid and bovine, exactly the color of the dirt at her feet. And her lips — thin and stingy, collapsed in a riot of vertical lines like a dried-up mud puddle. I hated her in that moment, godsend or no. Oh, how I hated her.

“What are you doing? ” she demanded as I loaded the last of the groceries into the car, settled into the driver’s seat and turned the engine over. She was ten feet from me, caught midway between the moribund phone booth and the living car. One of the coyotes lifted its head at the vehemence of her tone and gave her a sleepy, yellow-eyed look.

“Going back to the cabin,” I said.

“You’re what? ” Her face was pained. She’d been through agonies. I was a devil and a madman.

“Listen, Sarai, it’s all over. I’ve told you time and again. You don’t have a job anymore. You don’t have to pay rent, utility bills, don’t have to make car payments or remember your mother’s birthday. It’s over. Don’t you get it?”

“You’re insane! You’re a shithead! I hate you!”

The engine was purring beneath my feet, fuel awasting, but there was infinite fuel now, and though I realized the gas pumps would no longer work, there were millions upon millions of cars and trucks out there in the world with full tanks to siphon, and no one around to protest. I could drive a Ferrari if I wanted, a Rolls, a Jag, anything. I could sleep on a bed of jewels, stuff the mattress with hundred-dollar bills, prance through the streets in a new pair of Italian loafers and throw them into the gutter each night and get a new pair in the morning. But I was afraid. Afraid of the infection, the silence, the bones rattling in the wind. “I know it,” I said. “I’m insane. I’m a shithead. I admit it. But I’m going back to the cabin and you can do anything you want — it’s a free country. Or at least it used to be.”

I wanted to add that it was a free world now, a free universe, and that God was in the details, the biblical God, the God of famine, flood and pestilence, but I never got the chance. Before I could open my mouth she bent for a stone and heaved it into the windshield, splintering me with flecks and shards of safety glass. “Die!” she shrieked. “ You die, you shit!”

That night we slept together for the first time. In the morning, we packed up a few things and drove down the snaking mountain road to the charnel house of the world.