“Wow,” I hear Abram gasp to no one in particular, and I realize how little he actually expected this to work.
I scan the windows behind me until I find our pursuers. They are plainly visible now, but they have stopped growing. If they were equipped with missiles, or even high-caliber cannons like the last one, we might be in trouble, but these are not gunships. They are light craft salvaged from news stations and corporate buildings, and as we climb rapidly and they shrink away beneath us, the distant flashes of their rifles and handguns become less and less frightening. Finally, a towering cumulus welcomes us into its cottony bosom, and the world goes white.
A tightly held breath bursts out of M in the form of incredulous laughter.
Nora stares out the window, awestruck.
From the cockpit, I hear Sprout giggling and clapping in the copilot’s chair.
Julie squeezes my hand, and I realize it’s her left hand. Either she’s ignoring the pain in her finger, or she’s forgotten it.
The record player is still on. In the relative quiet of our ascent I can hear it popping and skipping on an inner groove. Then a gust of turbulence rocks the cabin, and the needle scratches back a few songs, landing almost exactly where we left it in that bittersweet melody of slow-boiling beauty.
So in looking to stray from the line
We decided instead we should pull out the thread
That was stitching us into this tapestry vile
And why wouldn’t you try? Perfect weather to fly
The fog around us flickers a few times, and suddenly we’re above it. An impossible fantasy landscape of creamy white towers stretches out before us, and here and there, in holes and gaps below, the real world peeks through, full of unknown threats and promises, shouting at us to come back and fight.
We’re coming, I tell the world, squeezing Julie’s hand harder. We’re ready for you.
TWO
* * *
the basement
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
WE
A BOY IS WALKING ALONE on the highway. He has been walking a long time. His Nikes fell apart years ago and his feet have become their own shoes, tender flesh encased in callus. The boy is Dead but he does not rot. His brown skin is ashen but firm, preserved through the years by a powerfully simple refusal. The plague has not won him. He holds it at arm’s length and considers its offer.
We follow the boy as we follow everyone, spinning around and through him, skimming the pages of his life’s brief novella, but we follow him a little closer than others. He is interesting. He looks seven but is much older, a boy bottled and cellared, aging in strange ways that even we cannot predict. Death has halted his life but it has failed to erase him. He has wrestled it into unexpected shapes, used it as a knife to open secret boxes, and we are not quite sure what he is.
I remember this road, he thinks. This is the right way.
The boy remembers more than most of the Dead. Not facts, exactly, but the amorphous truths behind them. He doesn’t know his name, but he knows who he is. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he is not lost. The world unfolds before him like a four-dimensional map, its lines bending and peeling off the paper, outer and inner realities weaving into one.
What happened here? he asks us as he passes through a ruined city in a stretch of land once called Idaho. What made them leave?
We don’t answer.
He passes a bullet-riddled Geo coupe and lets his eyes wander over the corpses of the family inside, fresh enough that the mother’s scalp still has its ponytail.
Did anyone try to help them?
We know, but we don’t answer.
Were they good people? How much of them is in you?
The boy asks us many questions while he walks, but we hold our silence. We spoke to him once, long ago, when his pain reached out and seized us by the throat. It had been years since we felt a grip so strong, and he squeezed a few words from us. But now we hold our silence. The chasm is still too wide for whispers, and we do not like to shout.
The boy accepts this and keeps walking. He is used to silence. He has been alone a long time.
At the outer edge of the city, the highway forks north and south, and the boy pauses to consult his strange map. Then he notices a sound rising into the silence. He has never heard it before. A soft roar like a distant avalanche. He looks up. The sun beats down into his eyes, flashing on his bright gold irises. He doesn’t squint. His wide pupils suck in the light and break it apart; he sees all its colors, its waves and its particles, and inside this tetrachromatic rainbow, he sees an airplane.
He has seen airplanes before. He has spent the last seven years staring at them, dreaming about them, willing their dusty fuselages to move, but he has never seen one in flight. He watches the tiny black shape etch a white line through the sky and he wonders who’s up there. He wonders where they’re going. Then he looks down at the road and keeps walking.
I