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

—

I have to confess that I’ve never been much of a fan of the apocalyptic potboiler, the doomsday film shot through with special effects and asinine dialogue or the cyberpunk version of a grim and relentless future. What these entertainments had led us to expect — the roving gangs, the inhumanity, the ascendancy of machines and the redoubled pollution and ravaging of the earth — wasn’t at all what it was like. There were no roving gangs — they were all dead, to a man, woman and tattooed punk — and the only machines still functioning were the automobiles and weed whippers and such that we the survivors chose to put into prosaic action. And a further irony was that the survivors were the least likely and least qualified to organize anything, either for better or worse. We were the fugitive, the misfit, the recluse, and we were so widely scattered we’d never come into contact with one another anyway — and that was just the way we liked it. There wasn’t even any looting of the supermarkets — there was no need. There was more than enough for everybody who ever was or would be.

Sarai and I drove down the mountain road, through the deserted small town of Springville and the deserted larger town of Porterville, and then we turned south for Bakersfield, the Grapevine and Southern California. She wanted to go back to her apartment, to Los Angeles, and see if her parents and her sisters were alive still — she became increasingly vociferous on that score as the reality of what had happened began to seep through to her — but I was driving and I wanted to avoid Los Angeles at all costs. To my mind, the place had been a pit before the scourge hit, and now it was a pit heaped with seven million moldering corpses. She carped and moaned and whined and threatened, but she was in shock too and couldn’t quite work herself up to her usual pitch, and so we turned west and north on Route 126 and headed toward Montecito, where for the past ten years I’d lived in a cottage on one of the big estates there — the DuPompier place, Mírame.

By the way, when I mentioned earlier that the freeways were clear, I was speaking metaphorically — they were free of traffic, but cluttered with abandoned vehicles of all sorts, take your pick, from gleaming choppers with thousand-dollar gold-fleck paint jobs to sensible family cars, Corvettes, Winnebagos, eighteen-wheelers and even fire engines and police cruisers. Twice, when Sarai became especially insistent, I pulled alongside one or another of these abandoned cars, swung open her door and said, “Go ahead. Take this Cadillac”—or BMW or whatever—“and drive yourself any damn place you please. Go on. What are you waiting for?” But her face shrank till it was as small as a doll’s and her eyes went stony with fear: those cars were catacombs, each and every one of them, and the horror of that was more than anybody could bear.

So we drove on, through a preternatural silence and a world that already seemed primeval, up the Coast Highway and along the frothing bright boatless sea and into Montecito. It was evening when we arrived, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. If it weren’t for that — and a certain creeping untended look to the lawns, shrubs and trees — you wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. My cottage, built in the twenties of local sandstone and draped in wisteria till it was all but invisible, was exactly as I’d left it. We pulled into the silent drive with the great house looming in the near distance, a field of dark reflective glass that held the blood of the declining sun in it, and Sarai barely glanced up. Her thin shoulders were hunched and she was staring at a worn place on the mat between her feet.

“We’re here,” I announced, and I got out of the car.

She turned her eyes to me, stricken, suffering, a waif. “Where?”

“Home.”

It took her a moment, but when she responded she spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were just learning the language. “I have no home,” she said. “Not anymore.”

—

So. What to tell you? We didn’t last long, Sarai and I, though we were pioneers, though we were the last hope of the race, drawn together by the tenacious glue of fear and loneliness. I knew there wouldn’t be much opportunity for dating in the near future, but we just weren’t suited to each other. In fact, we were as unsuited as any two people could ever be, and our sex was tedious and obligatory, a ballet of mutual need and loathing, but to my mind at least, there was a bright side — here was the chance to go forth and be fruitful and do what we could to repopulate the vast and aching sphere of the planet. Within the month, however, Sarai had disabused me of that notion.

It was a silky, fog-hung morning, the day deepening around us, and we’d just gone through the mechanics of sex and were lying exhausted and unsatisfied in the rumple of my gritty sheets (water was a problem and we did what laundry we could with what we were able to haul down from the estate’s swimming pool). Sarai was breathing through her mouth, an irritating snort and burble that got on my nerves, but before I could say anything, she spoke in a hard shriveled little nugget of a voice. “You’re no Howard,” she said.

“Howard’s dead,” I said. “He deserted you.”

She was staring at the ceiling. “Howard was gold,” she mused in a languid, reflective voice, “and you’re shit.”

It was childish, I know, but the dig at my sexual performance really stung — not to mention the ingratitude of the woman — and I came back at her. “You came to me,” I said. “I didn’t ask for it — I was doing fine out there on the mountain without you. And where do you think you’d be now if it wasn’t for me? Huh?”

She didn’t answer right away, but I could feel her consolidating in the bed beside me, magma becoming rock. “I’m not going to have sex with you again,” she said, and still she was staring at the ceiling. “Ever. I’d rather use my finger.”

“You’re no Danielle,” I said.

She sat up then, furious, all her ribs showing and her shrunken breasts clinging to the remains of them like an afterthought. “Fuck Danielle,” she spat. “And fuck you.”

I watched her dress in silence, but as she was lacing up her hiking boots I couldn’t resist saying, “It’s no joy for me either, Sarai, but there’s a higher principle involved here than our likes and dislikes or any kind of animal gratification, and I think you know what I’m talking about—”

She was perched on the edge of a leather armchair I’d picked up at a yard sale years ago, when money and things had their own reality. She’d laced up the right boot and was working on the left, laces the color of rust, blunt white fingers with the nails bitten to the quick. Her mouth hung open slightly and I could see the pink tip of her tongue caught between her teeth as she worked mindlessly at her task, reverting like a child to her earliest training and her earliest habits. She gave me a blank look.

“Procreation, I mean. If you look at it in a certain way, it’s — well, it’s our duty.”

Her laugh stung me. It was sharp and quick, like the thrust of a knife. “You idiot,” she said, and she laughed again, showing the gold in her back teeth. “I hate children, always have — they’re little monsters that grow up to be uptight fussy pricks like you.” She paused, smiled, and released an audible breath. “I had my tubes tied fifteen years ago.”

That night she moved into the big house, a replica of a Moorish castle in Seville, replete with turrets and battlements. The paintings and furnishings were exquisite, and there were some twelve thousand square feet of living space, graced with carved wooden ceilings, colored tiles, rectangular arches, a loggia and formal gardens. Nor had the DuPompiers spoiled the place by being so thoughtless as to succumb inside — they’d died, Julius, Eleanor and their daughter, Kelly, under the arbor in back, the white bones of their hands eternally clasped. I wished Sarai good use of the place. I did. Because by that point I didn’t care if she moved into the White House, so long as I didn’t have to deal with her anymore.