A Different Alchemy, page 21
On one stretch of road, he went thirty miles without seeing anywhere to sleep under cover. In these areas, there was no discernible difference between now and before the Great De-evolution. In some parts, the roads blended in with the forest; there were sections of road where he couldn’t tell if he was still on the original path or in the brush next to what had been the road. In other parts, the passage had completely sunk into the marsh surrounding it. For what appeared to be a hundred yards, the road vanished and was replaced by green water so dirty that not even birds dared land near it. The swamp stretched on either side for as far as he could see. Parking lots were gone. Soccer fields were gone. There was no telling what nature would do next. Maybe a thousand years from now the entire section of earth would be a vast desert. Maybe it would be a series of lakes. Maybe something else.
It was getting dark by the time he approached Halifax. Immediately after the skyline came into view, he saw a puff of smoke rising in the air from the far corner of some outlying houses. He thought for a moment about turning around, but eventually continued toward the tiny stream of smoke and whoever lived there.
Chapter 16
An incredible amount of smoke was rising from the stadium. His senses deadened as he watched the sun get blotted out behind the black cloud. He saw the smoke, but not the birds flying away from it. He smelled the burning chemicals from miles away, but not the exhaust of the truck next to him on the road. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the cars blaring their horns right next to him.
The man on the radio was saying something, but Jeffrey didn’t hear this either. “There are thousands of people gathered around the stadium… The fire is getting out of control now. There were thousands of Blocks in that stadium.”
Each time he tried calling Katherine, both at home and on her cell, it rang until her recorded voice picked up. All around him, cars were rear-ending each other or drifting into abandoned vehicles left in random places, all because everyone was staring at the spectacle in the distance rather than the road in front of them.
The other cars were also probably listening to the radio: “I don’t know what’s happening—the fire is everywhere now—oh my God—there’s fire everywhere.”
A driver was crying hysterically as she gazed at the fire. She took her hands off the steering wheel long enough to tear strips of hair off her scalp. Her car, only barely moving because of the traffic jam, angled slowly toward the metal guardrail.
Katherine’s phone rang and rang, but there was no answer. As if in response to his calls, the man on the radio yelled, “Everything is on fire! The entire stadium is on fire! Everyone outside is leaving the area. The police are just walking away. The entire stadium is burning to the ground.”
Blaring his horn did no good. None of the other drivers took their eyes off the dark cloud that was hypnotizing them.
The fire raged and raged.
Dear God, he thought, please don’t let my boy be in there. But part of him, without having spoken to Katherine, without seeing his boy’s burned flesh with his own two eyes, already knew that was Galen’s fate. His lips didn’t stop mumbling the prayer, but he knew everyone inside the stadium, his boy amongst them, would be dead.
Some of the cars were ramming each other in an attempt to get ahead faster. One car’s bumper flew across two lanes into the guardrail, the driver oblivious to what was happening around him. Another car over-compensated after being side-swiped and veered off an embankment.
Why wouldn’t Katherine answer her phone?
Some of the drivers were getting out of their cars because they could walk faster than the traffic. A man took three steps before the car behind him ran him over by accident. His crumpled body remained motionless on the highway as other cars passed by.
Jeffrey was surprised when Katherine answered her phone.
“Where are you?” he asked before she could say anything. “Are you at home?”
“No.”
“Where are you?” he said again. “Tell me. Tell me you aren’t near the stadium.”
He was walking as he spoke. He passed a Mercedes with two flat tires, the old woman behind the wheel still trying to make her car move forward along the concrete.
Three helicopters were hovering above the stadium to get better footage of the fire.
Katherine was saying, “The guy on TV said everyone should bring their Blocks down to the stadium. He said they would help get all the Blocks down to Washington. He said—“
His phone fell to his side. A man ran past him, headed in the direction of the stadium. There was nothing left worth running to, but the man would need to learn that for himself.
When he brought the phone back to his ear, he asked, “Did you know what was going to happen?”
But Katherine was crying too much to answer. Finally, when she could speak, she started to say something about when they were younger—always with her, it was about the past. And that was when he tossed the phone away rather than hear an excuse for why their boy was dead.
He turned and started walking back to the base.
**
Past the city center, beyond a tiny bay lined with houses, the smoke’s source came into view. The active fireplace belonged to a house located just before a giant wooded park. A man, roughly the same age as Jeffrey, was at the end of the driveway, an arm already waving hello as the tank approached. The man was by himself. Not even a dog by his side. Jeffrey climbed out and said hello.
“You must be really lost,” the man said, smiling. “Where are you coming from?”
“I’ve been traveling up the east coast. But I’m originally from Philadelphia.”
“Awful thing that happened there,” the man said. But before Jeffrey could offer a response, the man had turned back toward his house. “I was just about to fix some coffee. You want some?”
As they drank, the man said his name was Art and asked Jeffrey what his name was. But in between every question, Jeffrey kept looking out the windows for somebody to sneak up to his tank and steal it.
“Trust me,” Art said, “it’s just me and the animals. There hasn’t been another person through these parts in a very long time. Nova Scotia wasn’t exactly a popular place to visit once everyone was trying to get down to New England, or even further south.”
“Why did you stay?”
“I’m still not sure,” the man said. “The only answer I can come up with is that it has something to do with being stubborn and dumb. I’d like to have a better reason, but I think it boils down to that. I was thirty when my sister, her husband, and my parents all decided to head south. As soon as they said I had to go with them, my dumbass decided I had to stay. I had a lot of reasons why I thought I had to stay, but looking back, none of them really mattered, and all of them must have sounded painfully naïve when my parents and sister listened to me. They only left without me when I convinced them I would eventually head down too. I still have no idea why I felt like I had to make the trip by myself instead of with them.”
Jeffrey thought back to all the dumb things he had said and done when he was younger. It still surprised him that Katherine had put up with him in high school and college, back when he had been at his most immature and selfish. Half the things he had done in his life had only been carried out because someone else told him not to do them. No better reason.
“Did your family go to Boston or New York?” Jeffrey asked.
Art shook his head. “The folks around here took their boats. My parents and my sister went straight down to Florida on their thirty-footer. I was going to do the same thing, but of course that was when Hurricane Tori wiped us out. There wasn’t a single sea-faring ship in these parts after that storm. It gave me a lot of time to wonder why I’d been so adamant about staying here by myself.”
Jeffrey looked in the direction of the water. “This part of the world is beautiful.”
“That it is,” Art said. “That it is. I’ve been here all my life and I still smile every time I step outside because of the hills and the trees. We went on a field trip to New York—the city—when I was a little kid. It was really neat for the first couple of hours, but even as a kid I got tired of it pretty fast. I imagine every other city to be the same way. But then again, I wouldn’t really know.”
“You’d be surprised,” Jeffrey said. “Places blend together. Especially these days.”
They didn’t say anything for a while. The longer Jeffrey looked out the window the more cats and dogs he saw wandering the streets and the forest.
Art followed Jeffrey’s eyes. “I used to take care of them. I had five pets at first. Then ten. Then twenty. After a while I lost count. Then I realized I was just encouraging them to stay around my house instead of going off on their own. If you ever go over to Big Indian Lake, you’ll be amazed. The entire area has turned into a cat sanctuary. There are thousands of them there. They’re nice mostly, but a couple of them are starting to get too wild. They eye you up like you’re the next meal. Poor little things don’t know how to take care of themselves either. I find hundreds of them over there each spring that have either frozen to death or starved to death. I tried to set a giant bonfire for them one year, so they would have a source of heat during the coldest months. Stupid me, I almost burned down the entire forest.”
Art asked if Jeffrey would like to stay for lunch, but he shook his head and said he didn’t want to overstay his welcome.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen in more than a decade,” the man said. “You could piss on my kitchen floor and you wouldn’t be overstaying your welcome.”
On his way back out the front door, Jeffrey paused and said, “I’ve been traveling a lot. Do you mind if I stay in a house down the road?”
Art laughed. “Do I mind if you stay in a house down the road? You can stay anywhere you want.”
That night, as he was walking around from empty room to empty room in his new house, Jeffrey found himself thinking about the people who used to call this very place their home. A husband and wife would be in one room. Their sons and daughters in other places throughout the house. Each room sat empty now. He spent the night there, but in the morning he packed what few things he had and explored the area.
He walked to Art’s house again the following day.
“Welcome, neighbor,” Art said with a smile. “You like Atlantic whitefish?”
Jeffrey noticed there were too many fish on the grill for one person. There was even a second plate ready to be served with food.
“Of course I do. Who doesn’t?” Jeffrey said, even though he didn’t know that kind of fish from any other.
While they ate, Jeffrey asked if Art still kept in touch with his family. He had no idea why he was asking; it wasn’t his business and it wasn’t his nature to pry into others’ business.
Tiny flakes of fish fell out of the man’s mouth when he spoke. “My mother passed away three years ago. But I still talk to my father every week. And of course I’m always talking to my sis.”
And then it was only natural that Art ask about Jeffery’s family. He could have lied and said he didn’t have any family at all; that would kill the conversation or get it onto something else.
But instead, he said, “I write to my mom and dad every once in a while. They’re down in Florida too.”
“That’s good,” Art said.
“Would you mind if I settled down around these parts?”
The man chuckled again. “You ask some really funny questions. Do whatever you want.”
A couple of days later Jeffrey decided to go north to see the rest of Nova Scotia. It was getting cold again so he packed an extra blanket and sweater. He still took peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with him whenever he went out for the day. As he left, he wondered if Art would think he was leaving for good and if it mattered either way.
It took Jeffrey a day to get back to the town of Truro. It took another day to get to the bridge that connected the main portion of Nova Scotia with the northern quarter of land. The bridge was gone. He found a working radio, but there was nothing except uninterrupted static from one end of the dial to the other. An entire section of land, as big as New Jersey, was out of man’s grasp again.
Maybe in ten more years, everything north of the Mississippi river would be cut off from the people in the final settlements, until, one day, even the bridges in and around Miami and Los Angeles would begin to deteriorate and the people there would be stuck in the final two decaying cities.
He still thought about the times he and Galen and Katherine had gone to the beach together. As his eyes closed one night, he thought of the greatest gift Galen had given him: Jeffrey had never felt pressure to impress his son or to live up to the expectations that only a child could create for their parents.
He remembered a time when he had been in first grade and all of the other boys’ moms or dads went to school to talk to the class about their jobs, but Jeffrey’s father had been in New York on business and couldn’t be there. And even if he could have been there, he remembered being nervous that his father’s job as a textile supervisor would embarrass him in front of the other kids. All his father cared about was providing for his family and yet there Jeffrey was, a typical, unappreciative kid, not concerned with the long hours his father worked or all the dreams he had given up on in order to provide for his wife and child.
Galen had never made him feel that pressure, that unsubstantiated embarrassment. He had never felt fear over whether or not his son might be ashamed of what he did. He could have been a garbage man or a brain surgeon and his son would still sit on the porch with him each evening. That in itself was enough to have loved the boy.
Soon after returning to Halifax, he went to Art’s house. With him, he carried a big plate of pancakes. The other man’s face brightened at the offering.
“How was your vacation?” Art said as they stood by his food processor to make a batch of fake syrup.
“I tried to go see the Highlands National Park but the bridge was out.”
“I could have told you that. That bridge was out before my family sailed south. You could have taken my Kayak across the water if you were really interested.”
Jeffrey imagined himself in a tiny boat with an oar in his hands. “I didn’t want to see it that badly.” After another bite of pancakes, he asked, “Do you ever think about going down and joining your family?”
“Of course. I think about it all the time. But not even I’m stubborn enough to think I can make it south in a kayak. That would be suicide.” He shoveled another bite of pancakes into his mouth.
“Does Halifax have a nice library?” Jeffrey asked.
Again, Art chuckled. “Always with the odd questions. Yes, it has a very nice library.”
They didn’t say anything else until both plates were clear of food. When Jeffrey did speak, he said, “If you’d like my tank, you can take it to go down to Florida.”
“I don’t know the first thing about driving a tank.”
“Believe it or not, neither did I until I took this one.”
“You don’t need it?”
“I think I’m done with it. I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
The man looked out the window and smiled. “A random guy shows up here after everyone else has been gone for years, then offers me a tank. This is an amazing world.”
He accepted the offer right away. The only thing left was to learn how to maneuver the tank so it got him where he wanted to go. And for the first time since coming into possession of the tank, Jeffrey had somebody in the cockpit with him. He went over what each lever did, explained what the tank could do and what it couldn’t do, then gave a list of bridges he knew of that had collapsed. And when the explanations were over, Jeffrey climbed back out, handed Art’s bags down to him, and watched the hatch shut.
From within the tank he heard Art’s voice. “I still can’t believe this is happening. Thank you so much.”
And then the tank’s engine came to life. A moment later the machine started in the direction Jeffrey had originally come from. The tank could still be heard after it had disappeared from sight. When the noise faded away, Jeffrey walked down to the water.
The cold Canadian water signaled the approach of yet another winter. As he watched the tiny waves lap against the rocks, he got the feeling that he needed to call home. Not to his parents, but what had been his home. The phone rang and rang. He expected it to either keep ringing forever, or for an operator’s recorded voice to tell him the number was no longer in service, but eventually Katherine’s old message came on and said that neither she, nor Jeffrey, nor Galen could come to the phone, and to please leave a message.
Beep.
“Hi, it’s me. I don’t know if you’re still there or not. I guess it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. I just wanted to say that I forgive you. I’ll never agree with what you did, but I forgive you. That’s all.”
That night, as he sat on a wooden bench, watching the sun go down behind the trees, the ocean side already dark, he found himself thinking about how incredible it was to be near the water in that moment, to see the immensity of the ocean rubbing against the stones, listening to the water’s constant, soothing noises. And he thought about how nice it had been to be able to share similar moments with Galen years earlier.
Instead of wishing his son was still with him right then, however, he remembered those past memories with fondness as he thought about the new memories he had yet to make. His boy had moved on. He would move on one day as well. All things would. That was part of the lesson the Great De-evolution was trying to teach.
With the final moments of light left in the evening, the sight of water faded to only its sounds. And then those too ebbed away, and there was only silence. And he added that moment to the set of new memories he started to build, being thankful for what he had instead of missing that which he didn’t.
A day would come, maybe not for another decade, maybe not for three, when he would take his final breaths. And maybe he would see his son again then. Maybe he wouldn’t. And a day would come when the very last man or woman would take their last breath too, and the world would return to a simpler time. Some things were certain and some things could never be known.
