The Garden of Darkness

It might be worth living, if there were a real cure.

How many people needed to be left for there to be an actual human race anymore?

Clare had read in school about passenger pigeons, about the way they had darkened the sky for days at a time and made slick the earth with their guano. There had been billions of them. Billions. Then, when their populations had declined beyond the tipping point (and that was when there were still millions of them), Clare read that their numbers had simply dwindled until they had become extinct. She supposed it was like that with humans, too. Pest might have tipped them over the edge. There might be others like her, but there would be no more cities or schools, or, finally, people to think thoughts about passenger pigeons. The world would pass into another age.

Clare felt she should write some things down, maybe just because, as her father used to say, that’s what human beings did. So, with Bear walking beside her like an enormous mythical creature, she went slowly back to her own house where the paper was, where the pens were, where her father’s study waited.

Along the way, she picked some flowers.

When she got to the house, the stench wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be. She left the flowers in front of her parents’ closed bedroom door. In her father’s study, she found a block of paper and a pen. Bear lay at her feet, and she rested her toes on him. Clare looked at her father’s prizes and degrees—he had always kept them in the country house and not in the city, although she wasn’t sure why. And then, with all her father’s diplomas hanging on the walls around her, with his Pulitzer Prize gleaming at her from his desk, she tried to write. About the Cured. About the stink that rose from the dead city. About the pandemic—she liked the word ‘pandemic’—that had thrown her into adulthood. Then she scratched everything out and started again.

She knew that whatever she wrote would be inadequate for the occasion, but she also knew that, anyway, there wouldn’t be any more Pulitzer Prizes given out anytime soon. So she just wrote what had been on her mind. She wrote in small print letters:

The last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, and, after that, there weren’t any passenger pigeons ever again.





CHAPTER SIX





THE MOMENT THAT DETERMINED





THE NIGHTS WERE getting colder. She and Bear sat on Sander’s Hill companionably, her arm around the great dog. She opened a new block of paper and started a fresh page with the heading, ‘Getting Ready For Winter.’ She was preparing to go into Fallon, but she wanted the trip to be as fast and efficient as possible. “A surgical strike,” Michael would have called it. A few leaves drifted into her hair as she prepared to write ‘gloves,’ but the pen remained poised above the page. She was deeply uninterested in gloves, or scarves, or boots, or going into Fallon. A few rogue leaves might have been falling, but winter still seemed far away. Maybe she was fooling herself, but it was hard to think ahead. The light was a syrupy golden morning glow that highlighted Bear’s black fur. In the long grass, blue cornflowers and tattered Queen Anne’s Lace still held sway. Instead of writing ‘gloves,’ she started to doodle.

She found herself writing Michael’s name, and soon it curled down the margin, dark and important, underlined, shaded. Delicate tendrils of climbing vines wound up onto the page from the ‘h’ and the ‘l,’ while Clare pictured Michael going ahead of her into the darkness, scouting out the black territories, finding a final haven where it would matter how much she had loved him. Where they could be together forever. Together Forever. And then she found she couldn’t really invest much in the fantasy. It was too much like Barbie and Ken in heaven.

Besides, her father had taught her that there was no afterlife, an idea he had tried to dress up by talking about becoming one with the universe and scattering one’s atoms back into primal matter. But Clare had seen a lot of rotting bodies since Pest had taken over, and she now recognized that he had been a romantic. Scattering atoms back into primal matter was a nasty business.

She remembered her father at his computer, writing Bridge Out Ahead. She remembered pizza night for the cheerleading squad. Reading Mrs. Dalloway at two in the morning. Michael, slightly drunk, kissing her after the Spring Dance—where she had been elected Princess by those who probably didn’t realize such things usually went by blood. The kiss had surprised her. The Princess status had not. She was, after all, the only cheerleader who could do decent back flips. And when she did enough of them, she could, finally, stop thinking—as the blood roared in her ears, as she became nothing more than her body.

She thought of Michael and Robin and Chupi and of Mrs. Hennie, lying dead in the street. And then she thought of Plan B—of the man who had called himself the master-of-the-situation.