“Mom? Do you remember anything?”
Audrey lunges and snaps her teeth an inch from Julie’s face. Julie jumps up and back, her lips trembling. Audrey is looking right at her. The Dead’s emotions are hard to read, even for their fellow Dead, but if I had to guess, I’d say the look on Audrey’s sallow face is bitterness. The deep, singular hurt of someone who has tried to do good and been punished for it.
“Why do we keep doing this?” I demand of my mother as she peels potatoes for tonight’s vat of communal stew. “What’s the point of helping people if the world’s going to burn anyway?”
I can no longer spare her. My confusion has grown too big to be restrained by kindness; it lashes out heedlessly, beating my mother down.
“Are we winning points with God? Is he even keeping score? Won’t it all go back to zero when he resets the world? There won’t be any record of what we’ve done here, Mom! Why are we doing this?”
“I don’t know!” she screams at me, and the peeler falls to the floor. She is crying. She has been crying for a while; her face and neck are wet with it, but her back was to me and I couldn’t see. “I don’t know, you cold, logical thing. I don’t know.”
I back out of the kitchen, my anger and confusion mixing with guilt, forming still harder alloys.
Wiping at her eyes with a callused hand, my mother bends down and picks up the peeler—
Julie is looking at me. What has been on my face? How much have I revealed? I feel gravity weakening as the plane begins its descent, thinning my body’s connection to solid things.
WE
THERE ARE NO MORE ROAD games in the van. No more lively debates or pop rock on the stereo. Just uneasy silence. The boy sits on the bucket between the two seats, his sunglasses somewhere in the back, lost under bags and boxes. He keeps his gaze straight ahead as Gael and Gebre steal sideways glances at him. He is not bothered by their curiosity or even their fear. He would answer their questions if he could answer his own.
“One thing I can say for sure,” Gebre says as if concluding a long discussion in his head, “you talked. I definitely heard you talk back there. So it is safe to assume you understand us, yes, Rover?”
“He could be deaf,” Gael says.
Gebre considers this a moment. He hands the cracked iPod to Gael. “Play something kids hate.”
Gael spins the wheel and clicks. A cherubic falsetto rises over plodding drums and bittersweet strings.
“No, no,” Gebre says with a grimace. “I said something kids hate, not something every sane person hates.”
“It’s Sigur Rós!” Gael objects. “It’s a mopecore classic.”
Gebre shudders. They watch the boy for a reaction, but he stares blankly ahead. Gael raises the volume until the piercing falsetto threatens to crack the windshield. Gebre is shouting at him to shut down the experiment, the boy is obviously deaf, but then he cuts off in midsentence and kills the stereo.
“Hey,” he says to the boy, whispering in the ringing silence. “Are you okay?”
The boy’s face is still blank, but his shocking yellow irises are dulled behind a pool of tears. He does not answer Gebre because he is no longer in the van. He is stumbling along a walkway in a dark, echoing Library, suspended between unknowable heights and unthinkable depths, struggling to keep his eyes ahead. A few books topple out of their shelves and loose pages flutter around him, and now he’s in a restaurant, sitting across from a girl, trying to tolerate the music she has chosen. The girl looks like him, older and thinner and a little lighter-skinned, but with the same brown eyes, dark like wells that sink through all strata to the beginning of life on Earth.
He loves the girl and she loves him. They are the only remaining keepers of each other’s memory, though it’s buried deep in them both.
“Hey,” Gael says, gently wiping a tear from his cheek. “What’s wrong, love?”
The boy looks at the dampness on the man’s pale finger, the salt crystals inside it like icebergs adrift on a diluvial Earth.
“Washington, DC,” he says.
Gael and Gebre share a stunned glance.
“Is that where you were going?” Gebre asks.
The boy doesn’t respond.
“The Almanac we found in Dallas . . . ,” Gebre says to Gael under his breath. “DC was exed, wasn’t it? Exed and razed?”
“Rover,” Gael says to the boy, giving him a look of deep regret, “there’s nobody in DC, mate. It burned down a long time ago.”
The boy has no visible reaction.
“But we’re going somewhere that has a lot of people,” Gebre says with forced cheer. “People and food and work, and it’s safe there. No one will hurt us there.”