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

Weeks slipped by. Months. Occasionally I would see the light of Sarai’s Coleman lantern lingering in one of the high windows of Mírame as night fell over the coast, but essentially I was as solitary — and as lonely — as I’d been in the cabin in the mountains. The rains came and went. It was spring. Everywhere the untended gardens ran wild, the lawns became fields, the orchards forests, and I took to walking round the neighborhood with a baseball bat to ward off the packs of feral dogs for which Alpo would never again materialize in a neat bowl in the corner of a dry and warm kitchen. And then one afternoon, while I was at Von’s, browsing the aisles for pasta, bottled marinara and Green Giant asparagus spears amidst a scattering of rats and the lingering stench of the perished perishables, I detected movement at the far end of the next aisle over. My first thought was that it must be a dog or a coyote that had somehow managed to get in to feed on the rats or the big twenty-five-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow, but then, with a shock, I realized I wasn’t alone in the store.

In all the time I’d been coming here for groceries, I’d never seen a soul, not even Sarai or one of the six or seven other survivors who were out there occupying the mansions in the hills. Every once in a while I’d see lights shining in the wall of the night — someone had even managed to fire up a generator at Las Tejas, a big Italianate villa half a mile away — and every so often a car would go helling up the distant freeway, but basically we survivors were shy of one another and kept to ourselves. It was fear, of course, the little spark of panic that told you the contagion was abroad again and that the best way to avoid it was to avoid all human contact. So we did. Strenuously.

But I couldn’t ignore the squeak and rattle of a shopping cart wheeling up the bottled water aisle, and when I turned the corner, there she was, Felicia, with her flowing hair and her scared and sorry eyes. I didn’t know her name then, not at first, but I recognized her — she was one of the tellers at the Bank of America branch where I cashed my checks. Formerly cashed them, that is. My first impulse was to back wordlessly away, but I mastered it — how could I be afraid of what was human, so palpably human, and appealing? “Hello,” I said, to break the tension, and then I was going to say something stupid like “I see you made it too” or “Tough times, huh?” but instead I settled for “Remember me?”

She looked stricken. Looked as if she were about to bolt — or die on the spot. But her lips were brave and they came together and uttered my name. “Mr. Halloran?” she said, and it was so ordinary, so plebeian, so real.

I smiled and nodded. My name is — was — Francis Xavier Halloran III, a name I’ve hated since Tyrone Johnson (now presumably dead) tormented me with it in kindergarten, chanting “Francis, Francis, Francis” till I wanted to sink through the floor. But it was a new world now, a world burgeoning and bursting at the seams to discover the lineaments of its new forms and rituals. “Call me Jed,” I said.

Nothing happens overnight, especially not in plague times. We were wary of each other, and every banal phrase and stultifying cliché of the small talk we made as I helped her load her groceries into the back of her Range Rover reverberated hugely with the absence of all the multitudes who’d used those phrases before us. Still, I got her address that afternoon — she’d moved into Villa Ruscello, a mammoth place set against the mountains, with a creek, pond and Jacuzzi for fresh water — and I picked her up two nights later in a Rolls Silver Cloud and took her to my favorite French restaurant. The place was untouched and pristine, with a sweeping view of the sea, and I lit some candles and poured us each a glass of twenty-year-old Bordeaux, after which we feasted on canned crab, truffles, cashews and marinated artichoke hearts.

I’d like to tell you that she was beautiful, because that’s the way it should be, the way of the fable and the fairy tale, but she wasn’t — or not conventionally anyway. She was a little heavier than she might have been ideally, but that was a relief after stringy Sarai, and her eyes were ever so slightly crossed. Yet she was decent and kind, sweet even, and more important, she was available.

We took walks together, raided overgrown gardens for lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini, planted strawberries and snow peas in the middle of the waist-high lawn at Villa Ruscello. One day we drove to the mountains and brought back the generator so we could have lights and refrigeration in the cottage — ice cubes, now there was a luxury — and begin to work our way through the eight thousand titles at the local video store. It was nearly a month before anything happened between us — anything sexual, that is. And when it did, she first felt obligated, out of a sense of survivor’s guilt, I suppose, to explain to me how she came to be alive and breathing still when everyone she’d ever known had vanished off the face of the earth. We were in the beamed living room of my cottage, sharing a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1970, with the three-hundred-ten-dollar price tag still on it, and I’d started a fire against the gathering night and the wet raw smell of rain on the air. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot,” she said.

I made a noise of demurral and put my arm round her.

“Did you ever hear of a sensory deprivation tank?” She was peering up at me through the scrim of her hair, gold and red highlights, health in a bottle.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But you don’t mean—?”

“It was an older one, a model that’s not on the market anymore — one of the originals. My roommate’s sister — Julie Angier? — she had it out in her garage on Padaro, and she was really into it. You could get in touch with your inner self, relax, maybe even have an out-of-body experience, that’s what she said, and I figured why not?” She gave me a look, shy and passionate at once, to let me know that she was the kind of girl who took experience seriously. “They put salt water in it, three hundred gallons, heated to your body temperature, and then they shut the lid on you and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing there — it’s like going to outer space. Or inner space. Inside yourself.”

“And you were in there when—?”

She nodded. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read — pride, triumph, embarrassment, a spark of sheer lunacy. I gave her an encouraging smile.

“For days, I guess,” she said. “I just sort of lost track of everything, who I was, where I was — you know? And I didn’t wake up till the water started getting cold”—she looked at her feet—“which I guess is when the electricity went out because there was nobody left to run the power plants. And then I pushed open the lid and the sunlight through the window was like an atom bomb, and then, then I called out Julie’s name, and she… well, she never answered.”

Her voice died in her throat and she turned those sorrowful eyes on me. I put my other arm around her and held her. “Hush,” I whispered, “it’s all right now, everything’s all right.” It was a conventional thing to say, and it was a lie, but I said it, and I held her and felt her relax in my arms.

It was then, almost to the precise moment, that Sarai’s naked sliver of a face appeared at the window, framed by her two uplifted hands and a rock the size of my Webster’s unabridged. “What about me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and there it was again, everlasting stone and frangible glass, and not a glazier left alive on the planet.

—

I wanted to kill her. It was amazing — three people I knew of had survived the end of everything, and it was one too many. I felt vengeful. Biblical. I felt like storming Sarai’s ostentatious castle and wringing her chicken neck for her, and I think I might have if it weren’t for Felicia. “Don’t let her spoil it for us,” she murmured, the gentle pressure of her fingers on the back of my neck suddenly holding my full attention, and we went into the bedroom and closed the door on all that mess of emotion and glass.