Apothecaries, tinkers, blacksmiths, seers. Old words, old ways. So much about the world has reverted, so that it is not so much the future people once imagined, but a history that already happened, this time like a time long ago. Lewis read a story once about the birth of a baby who looked like an old man, with silver hair and wrinkled skin and eyes fogged by cataracts. As the years passed, his appearance grew younger, and by the end of his life he was a drooling infant barely able to care for himself. In this way Lewis sometimes feels they have as a society cycled back without the hope of moving forward again.
A bell jangles when he walks inside. The shop is dimly lit with candles and the linoleum floor has been worn down to pitted concrete. The man behind the counter has skin as brown as bark. His shoulders are thin and bony and from them rise a head topped by a thinning crown of gray woolly hair. This is Oman. He does not fear Lewis, not like the others. They deal with each other regularly and have developed not a rapport, but a comfortable business relationship. Behind Oman rises a wall full of cubbies and shelving units. A snake is curled up in a jar full of foggy green liquid. In another bottle float black eggs. In another, hairless mice. There are hundreds of baskets, brightly colored vials, bottles. Spiders spin webs in glass cages. Herbs hang from the ceiling like roots from the roof of a cave.
Oman has the habit of chewing the leaves of a smoke bush. They have stained his teeth a tarry black. “How is she?” he asks.
“She is the same.”
The counter is made of Formica curled up at the edges. Oman sets a mortar and pestle upon it and grinds up a combination of herbs. Then he removes a blue bottle from a shelf and takes a dropper to it and squirts out several ounces of the medicine and stirs the herbs into a paste that he stores in a small yellow vial once meant for pills, the remains of some prescription still smeared across it.
“And how are you?”
If Lewis was the type to share, the type who offloaded all his aches and worries and displeasures onto others, then he might complain about the dreams that bother him nightly. In them he sees a man. An old man. His veins are as stiff and pronounced as roots. He is so ancient he cannot walk without the help of a cane made from a twisted length of wood, cannot eat unless his food has been mashed up. His face is never clear, always blurred or hidden by the long white hair that rings his bald, spotted head. Sometimes he sees the man waiting by a window. Sometimes he sees the man sitting in a library. Last night, the man stood by a river, all his attention focused on an eddy, the sort of deep black pool where a fat fish might surface. Lewis feared the man might fall when he waded into the water up to his knees. With his cane he stirred the eddy until a whirlpool formed. In the dark funnel the man saw a familiar face and whispered a name, Lewisssss.
But he says nothing to Oman. He only takes the vial on the counter and secrets it up his sleeve—then in its place sets a square silver canister.
“More?”
“Yes.”
“You look tired.”
“Double the order for this week.” He clatters out a pile of coins, nickels worn down to silver discs that bear the faintest ghost of Jefferson’s profile. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, the occasional half or silver dollar, all smoothed like stones in a river. This is their currency.
“Double it?” Oman collects the coins and pulls down a wide-mouthed bottle full of white powder. He pulls off the lid and scoops four generous spoonfuls into the silver canister. “You are tired.”
“Not tired enough. Do you have anything for sleep?”
“I’ve some opiates that—”
“No. No dreams. No hallucinations. I just want to put my head down and for there to be nothing.”
“Of course.”
Lewis keeps one of his fingernails long, his pinky. He digs it into the pile of powder and lifts it to his nose. Snorts. A shudder goes through his body. His eyes tremble closed—then snap open a second later when the door jangles and a blade of sunlight falls across the floor.
A woman with a shaved head and black uniform clomps into the shop. A deputy. She has heavy-lidded eyes and a nose with a raised worm of a scar at its bridge. “Lewis Meriwether,” she says.
Lewis sniffs, wipes his nostril clean with a knuckle. “What?”
“The mayor wishes to see you.”
Lewis stares at her for a long few seconds. “But I do not wish to see the mayor.”
She hesitates, takes a step back. “He said you’d say that.”
“Tell him I haven’t made any progress.”
“He said you’d say that, too.”
“Good. Then we’re both clear.”
“I’m afraid.” She swallows hard. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
I’m afraid, she says. Yes, she is. She is afraid. Lewis can tell from the muscles bulging in her jaw, the twitching of her eyes. She is afraid and so must fight the fear with bluster. A machete hangs from her belt and she rests a palm on its handle. “You’ll have to follow me,” she says.
*
Clark might hear hoofbeats. Or maybe it is just the slamming of her pulse. She stares down the road that leads from the Sanctuary. It extends a quarter mile before petering into many avenues of broken asphalt and trampled earth. This place, where the road ends and the ruined wilderness begins, is marked by a massive tree. The Witness Tree, Clark calls it, as it has been there longer than any person, longer than the Sanctuary itself, a spectator to the rise and fall of humankind. It carries no needles or leaves, its branches as bare as bones. But so many crows roost in it this morning that it appears laden with some dark, poisonous fruit. They shift their wings and scrape their claws and mutter among themselves—until the rider appears. The horse screeches out a whinny and clomps its hooves, and the crows take to the air in a swarm, caw-caw-cawing.