I’ve printed it out to show Henry. But he doesn’t laugh. “She’s a good person,” he says. “So are you,” I say.
Then just as I’m remembering that we are all one people, that we all have hopes and dreams, I see Mrs. Kovinski coming down the street toward me. We avoid each other now. Ever since I told her I would not listen to her hate.
* * *
…
I’ve been telling Will about the cards I help Henry write. “I want a card!” he says. So I write him one on a napkin.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I feel slightly less dread,
When I am with you.
He’s going back home soon. He wants to live near the woods again. Somewhere in Quebec.
The other night he gave me a book: Code of Maritime Signals, 1931 edition. Beside some of them were tiny pencil dots.
“I wish to communicate with you.”
“Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.”
“I am on fire.”
“Nothing can be done until the weather moderates.”
* * *
…
On his last day, we go to the aquarium. My favorite are the manta rays. We watch them wing past. They have the largest brain of any fish, I remember. If you put them in front of a mirror, they do not behave as if they see another ray. Instead they glide and watch, dip and wave.
“What’s keeping you here?” he says. Please, I think, but no, I can’t even look at him. All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn’t believe it.
FIVE
A man is having terrible dreams. In them, he is being chased by a demon. He seeks counsel from a therapist, who tells him he must turn around and confront the demon or he will never escape it. He vows to do this, but each night in his dreams, he runs again. Finally, he manages to turn around and look straight at the demon. “Why are you chasing me?” he asks it. The demon says, “I don’t know. It’s your dream.”
* * *
…
After he left, I realized he had inscribed the book for me. I wondered how he’d sign it. There are all those ways to be careful: yrs or warmly or best. He’s clever though. MYBAS. Even if Ben saw it, he wouldn’t guess. A prepper joke.
May You Be Among the Survivors.
It’s cold turkey, this thing sometimes. I’m sweating it out. Music helps a bit.
Can I kick it?
Yes, you can.
* * *
…
I try to explain to Tracy about Will. How it was like a wartime romance. Minus the war. Minus the sex. She looks at me. “So nothing happened?” she says.
And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
Q: How do you maintain your optimism?
A: If you are not getting enough iron, put a few iron nails into a bowl of lemon juice and leave it overnight. In the morning, make lemonade out of it.
Mom? Mom? Mom?
* * *
…
Little flickers sometimes, things I want to tell him. At the bodega, I buy a cucumber from Mohan.
You can obtain plants more easily and more quietly than meat. This is extremely important when the enemy is near.
Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.
* * *
…
“There are ancient ways of prepping too,” Ben says. The mystery cultists believed that the first thing a newly dead soul would see in the underworld was the spring of Lethe. It would be found flowing beneath a white cypress tree. The soul would arrive very thirsty but must resist the temptation to drink, because the waters of this spring were the waters of oblivion. Part of the training of the mystery cultists was to learn to endure extreme thirst.
Consider the earth’s diminished radiance…
I remember on our first date, I waited for Ben to tell me about his awful childhood or his newly acquired drug habit, etc., etc., but instead, he told me about the community garden he was involved in. He was having trouble with the eggplant, he said. He had hopes for it though. Maybe if there was a little more rain or a little more sun. I can’t remember now which one he needed.
* * *
…
There was once a Desert Father who was able to banish demons, and he asked them afterward, What makes you go away? Is it fasting?
We do not eat or drink, they replied.
Is it vigils?
We do not sleep, they replied.
Is it separation from the world?
We live in the deserts.
What power sends you away then?
Nothing can overcome us except humility, they told him.
* * *
…
They are playing a board game when I come home. “If you give me wood, I’ll give you some wheat and a brick,” Eli says to Ben.
I asked her once what I could do, how I could get him ready. It would be good if he had some skills, she said. And of course, no children.
SIX
I go to get my permanent crown. I have been putting off my dental work, but now I go. The hygienist talks to me about the weather. The dentist comes in with his gloved hands and mask. He says I have an unusually small mouth. I open it wider for him.
* * *
…
There was once a race of mythic arctic dwellers called the Hyperboreans. Their weather was mild, their trees bore fruit all year, and no one was ever sick. But after a thousand years, they grew bored of this life. They decked themselves in garlands and leaped off the cliffs into the sea.
“What is the core delusion?” Margot asks the class, but nobody knows the right answer, and she doesn’t bother to tell us.
* * *
…