Let us call this piece an interruption.

My plan was to write a series of posts detailing our criteria for selecting stories for State of Matter. I would start, as I did in the last post, with the movie Ratatouille and the problematics of time when we encounter something ‘novel’. To understand something as new, I would argue, is to understand it as a rupture in time. The next entry would be inspired by Auster’s New York Trilogy, and the motif of the detective that he builds, and how a character becomes the sinkhole for everybody else. However, between these pieces, a rift has opened up. A new temporality, it would seem, has revealed itself.

Last month, Tahatto put up its play, Love in the Cholera of Time. A review, it would seem, has demanded itself.

The play has aged past its initial runs. Last year, when Jagriti Theatre put it up, a friend brought it to my attention. He told me that it combined many of my interests: time, Marquez, meta-textuality, the experience of non-linearity, the theatre, the incorporation of an audience in what is supposed to be a contained act, the body and its orientations and its movement — themes that escape conventional discussion. Since that day, and until this kind-of-review is published, I am already a few beats of the cosmos too late. Tahatto has organised this play multiple times in different cities, most recently in Delhi.

Perhaps the review would be better suited if I could point to an upcoming show and link to it. That does not seem possible right now. Then again, I may defer to the celebration of non-linearity within the play, hoping that not all of the past is lost, and not all of a future is exhausted in anticipation.

This delay gives my kind-of-review some breathing space. Other places (see reviews in The Hindu and Indulge Express, for instance) have already spoken about the motivation, preparation and organisation of the play. But because I am late, I can skimp on the summaries, the temptations, the causal linkages from page to stage. This review might be stationed outside of chronological time. Let us call this a transverse time, and remember Bachelard again,¹ who tells us that the present instant, the now, sits resolutely outside of the continuous flow of time. He says that in this now, we may experience a multiplicity of experience, without necessarily arguing what comes before and what comes after. We may ask then what it would be to review a work of art, a play, a composition, a story, standing not before nor after the piece, but by its side, or vertically above it. What must we speak about to speak about the play?

Time? Cholera? Or just plain old love? Perhaps, like Bachelard proposes, I need to be inspired by a poetic image, allow its reverberations to unsettle me.

Let me start with time. Let me also be pedantic for a moment, revisiting that century-old scientific breakthrough that is Einsteinian relativity. Einstein, invoked in the descriptions of the play, proposes that space-time does not offer us a certain Archimedean position. In his careful descriptions, clocks and rulers lose their solidity: they stretch and skew, they enmesh what they measure (time, space, time-space!) and they demand always a trace of where they measure it from.² In doing so, Einstein upsets our tripartite categories of time. No longer is time merely a matter of the past behind the present behind the future! A new category appears: the “absolute elsewhere”, that livezone of other happenings from which light cannot make it to the ‘here-now’, or to where light from here-now may not reach. This may just be the transverse zone (of escape? of desire? of political possibility?) in which the past reaches out to a different life, from which the future will have eventually become possible.³

It seems that in these places, we come unstuck in time. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse V, who found himself loosened in the temporal flow, the characters of the play find themselves pushed outside the here-now, outside enclosures (of marriage, of prison), to meet in an other-zone. Where? When? In a time neither His nor Hers, not in-between either. The play opens with a juxtaposition outside prosaic time: a playful sort of beginning that has no ‘bearing’ upon a strict sequence of events the way conventional narratives do. What if the moon was made of cheese? Not a what-if that burgeons into a science fiction narrative, but a what-if unburdened from its own future. The question leads nowhere important, but is revived again and again, gaining currency in its recurrence. The first rule of the other-zone is that there is no rigorous plot: there is just idyllic romance around the moon, which splits, like Debussy’s reprises, throughout the play.

If I were to point to the strength of the play, I would point to this… this playfulness of its scenes. A play as play, whoever could think of that! Notice at the same time the sheer fluidity with which it indulges its audience in the time-settings of its characters. Almost to the extent where you feel that it is your anticipation that makes characters meet and speak on stage. To an extent where the audience intimately perceives multiple modalities at work: a visuality among the cast interacting with the stage, the rising music, that artistic sensibility of time that we insipidly call pacing…

But the critic is condemned to seriously engage even with playfulness! To speak a little about the stylistics and the themes of the production.

We folks begin as beings with brute speech; art, perhaps, is our development into nuanced language. When we first come across Einsteinian time, we say, “Time is non-linear,” to sketch its broad contours. Linearity is a Cartesian gridline; it is to act per rules, to realise freedom with reference to an overarching rulebook. Chronology is linearity in time. The play’s the thing that substantiates non-linearity: in marking time this way or that, it points us toward the dramatic curve that our own lives occupy. Is time all-knowing? Is all already known? Can there be no surprise from this moment to the next?

The distance between a broad non-chronology — the time guardians would explain to you as the play begins — and how the act will be chronologically structured for ‘you’, the viewer, is what sets up its tension. There are, on one hand, the themes of destiny and certainty. The Nation is under construction; we know that it will become independent; that is history. Our own world will see the proliferation of dehumanisation, such as the business of deleting old social media accounts; we may predict this much future; that is sociopolitics.⁴ The power of a thousand Black Holes will be unleashed; the device that the actor hands the audience member must be of some import; that is good storytelling! On the other hand, there is desire, there is the possibility of chance. Will He and She meet again? Might the Moon be really made of cheese?⁵ The play shores up and lets go of this tension with metric certainty, playing upon an irony with the audience. And this too is its way of drawing the audience into its own telling. Here, when He reveals a fact that is Her proper future, the audience is in on the joke — we laugh at the characters. There, when the audience is treated as mere ‘humans’, limited in the way they understand time, the audience is the butt of the joke — we laugh at ourselves. And then, when someone asks out loud, “What sort of a question is And then?” we are not sure what to laugh at, because so central is this question to the telling of a story that the joke seems targeted to every one of us, the actors, the audience, the fictional characters, the multiple allusions, perhaps even the city itself.

Enough about time; there is also cholera and love, the signals for passion and romance, evoking that strange combination that is Marquez’ story.⁶

Marquez gives us Him and Her, Florentino and Fermina, whose soft names constantly interrupt the world of the novel. Cholera, water-borne, a disease from the very thing that must sustain you, is perhaps in this regard much like love. And I have “confused cholera with love, of course” like Marquez’ character. The afflicted man in either case displays all the signs of a lack of health, a paleness that persists somewhere deeper than his bones. His passions run wild; he retches his insides out. Bleeding from every orifice, he realises that he is a dead man walking, talking, acting out a part not his own. Love, the choleric kind, erupts. Perhaps, love in the cholera of time should erupt too. That evocation is missed in the play; that kind of love impinges itself as an absence in the play. That feels like a loss.

What is this temporal syndrome, this ‘cholera-of-time’? In his landmark work on perception, Merleau-Ponty says that time-instants are telegraphed, embodied totalities⁷ — you find yourself a Russian doll, stacked as moment within moment within moment, each moment a full life — and that moments do not die, but remain open like a wound. Love, the choleric kind, then, persists multiply and totally because you encounter it along many worldlines, chaotically and surprisingly arranged. A full life here, and here again, and then, and then again. What better way to tell a love story then than to tell it as a series of images that stand relatively alone, among which you see not at first a narrative but a reverberation, where scenes do not follow or precede other scenes but contract them, like one contracts an illness. What is written now exists autonomously in the past: a letter, a rose find themselves travelling in time, characters have memories of the future and anticipate the past. And just like that, life is brought up short by time.

Surely the operational concept is that of movement. Surely, disturbing the nature of time must cause paradoxes of motion. If love may be encountered along all possible worldlines, if I may enter it faltering and stumbling, open doors to it and briskly walk in, be whisked away into the past or slip, violating some physical laws, into the absolute elsewhere of my own existence, how may I go about making such a huge range of motion possible? The characters must mount a difficulty with an obvious answer, that which in Boulder,⁸ Baltasar explains with surprising clarity, “But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge.” Against the inner borders of the tripartite stage-set, the characters must thrust and recede and tunnel: at the right time, after all, these borders have to be transgressed for Him and Her to appear elsewhere. It feels in such moments of transgression that the extended gag to open a door for a performance appraisal, or the conversation with a parent across prison walls — that these are conditioning possibilities; that these mundane motions make the extraordinary flights of the characters possible. The play hints at these minor confinements, these minor escapes, until it is time for a major escape, a major stumbling into a transverse world with another. If there is a concern, it is only that these possibilities skew more toward Him than Her, that He has been apportioned more of the conditions of motion than She.

But let me not nitpick here. Let me insist that in the play, love possesses some allure. Love’s preferred symbol, like in poetry, is the moon. Here, the play becomes indulgent, especially with Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The moon, like in Calvino’s cosmology, becomes desire and its fulfilment, fantasy and its reason, the promise of and pining for love. The moon, we are told, holds hands with the earth the way lovers must hold hands. Scientifically, it is of interest that the moon is a poor companion: it is drifting away from us a little each day. Scientifically, it is also of interest that the earth and the moon do not hold hands; their motion is, perhaps, best described as falling past each other at immense speeds, a constant choreography of sidestepping the other. There is thus in this romance, some wish-fulfilment, some pure fiction. Surely, something in this romance might interrupt the celestial motion of the planets. Surely, something in this romance might even stop time.

Of course, that happens… In perhaps one of the more explosive displays of telling a story, time slows. The actors slowly lunge at one another, falling past one another with insufficient speed. It is the acting out of slow motion, an effect which might be borrowed partly from slapstick, partly from old Bollywood, partly from the history of movement on stage. It is cathartic (look, the device that had been foreshadowed has been used!), comical (look they are jumping and tumbling!), intense (where is this sequence going?). Almost everybody who walked out of the theatre with me marvelled at this sequence. Weeks later, they could remember the visuals from the scene. “Like a movie,” said someone, offering that paradigmatic comparison that we often make for excellence in visuality. “Like time actually slowed,” said someone else, as if time actually hadn’t! My favourite comparison comes from a friend who has the disappointing habit of stating the answer obviously embedded in the question. “Like in love,” they said.

Yes, like that.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Ismael, J. (2021). Time: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. See sections on Einstein for a quick summary. Most of the reproduction here is succinctly presented in Ismael’s work.
3. It is tempting here to cite so much of Bergson, whose historic debate with Einstein spells out much of twentieth-century tussles between the great disciplines. See for instance:
   Bergson, H, (1930). The possible and the real (DVL, Trans.). Bergsonian.org. https://bergsonian.org/the-possible-and-the-real/
4. Here, of course, a host of texts come to mind. For a relatively accessible and recent TV series, see Upload.
   Daniels, G. (2020). Upload. Amazon Prime Video.
5. Of course, one does not talk about the Moon this way and forget Calvino’s Cosmicomics, and the many degrees of desire and liminality that it suggests.
   Calvino, I. (2010). The complete cosmicomics. Penguin. (Originally published 1965).
6. Márquez, G. G. (2003). Love in the time of cholera (E. Grossman, Trans.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. (Originally published 1985).
7. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
8. Baltasar, E. (2022). Boulder (J. Sanches, Trans.). And Other Stories.

He drove closer as he heard music, dancing, and revelry, and then his car broke. The weather was ice cold. He had to walk a bit of distance through the wet mud and the slush and he felt the sticky black snow under his feet. A sharp smell of the carcasses in the sea caught his nostrils till he came to the heavy gates of The Steamer that automatically opened at the touch of his fingers.

He walked ahead. The death odor was still not gone as he pushed through the heavy metallic doorway of the motel. His eyes led to the reception lounge and a brightly lit hallway, and all of a sudden, he felt warm, almost in sweat. He realized the environment was perfectly controlled, so he removed his protection suit and mask. The man at the door gave him a slight bow, relieving him of his heavy apparel. The receptionist, a young lady at the desk, welcomed him with a smile. ‘Mr. Indra Basu!’ she said as if instantly recognizing him as he went through the booking register.

‘I would like to…’ he began hesitantly.

‘Yes, we have arrangements for your night stay in suite number seven on the second floor,’ said the receptionist. When she handed over the keys, she emphasized number seven as his favorite suite. And then he thought that whoever he was, he must have been stinking rich to be able to be welcomed to a place like this. He tried hard to remember what these places were called, but it only added to his confusion. He saw flashes of him and his wife in some such place, but the artificial oxygen and the regulated room temperature made him feel sick. There weren’t many people there at the reception lounge, except the staff dressed in identical suits with badges and aprons. It appeared like a quiet place to retreat to, or even die at, for people often spend their last moments in isolated places. It seemed ironic to him now that places that were built to survive should look like places to die.

‘And your pass, Sir. Today there is a special dance at the club on the rooftop open to all,’ she continued. But he could not remember ever having come to this place. He merely smiled and nodded. He took the keys to the room as another man dressed in a suit, a staff member of the motel, got up to show him to his room.

‘I will go to the club,’ he said hurriedly.

‘I’ll show you the way, Sir,’ the man said, beckoning him to the elevator. The man pressed the switch, opening the door wider as he stepped into the boxed space with mirrors on all sides. He glimpsed himself in the mirror, but it only added to a sense that his life bordered on confusion.

His wife was dead, he thought, but he had not killed her. He could not do that, not even hurt a fly; he could not, he was sure. But how long had she been dead? Not yesterday? And then a thought occurred, and he felt terrible—surely not a year ago? Had he, in his grief and madness, been out of his senses for a year or more? That was not possible, for he saw himself in the mirror, perfectly dressed in an expensive blazer on top of a buttoned-up shirt, paired with matching trousers and loafers, for an evening at the club.

‘Ok, thank you, sir. Have a nice day,’ the motel staff said almost mechanically, taking leave.

The word day hardly made sense, for the thick smog that had covered the sky since the catastrophe had made sunlight disappear for months. Temperatures had fallen to drastic levels. Without the sunlight, most of the flora and fauna in these parts had perished, while the animals were dying of starvation. It was only the pall of the dirty snow and the poisonous dust, even though to him it seemed death, that enigmatic abyss of darkness or silence, seemed a long way away; now was just the slow burn of ambivalence between the poisonous dust and smog.

As Indra entered the club from the rooftop, he heard the strains of old-time Bollywood film music. Amidst the murmur, the clinking of glasses and the dancing lights, he saw well-dressed people like him with deadpan faces. The crowd was full—men and women with half-filled glasses in their hands, couples engrossed in their rehearsed steps, while drinks and food were being served.

‘Ah, Indra, how long?’ asked a rather stout man, making an appearance all of a sudden. The man was much older than him, actually old enough to be his father, with a thick mustache and spectacles, wearing an expensive formal suit. He had a bulky body and a large face, which made his personality all the more imposing. ‘Staying over today?’ he asked. ‘Surely…’. He had not finished the sentence, but Indra nodded.

The man patted him on the back, and they were in the lounge at a corner table. As they sat, the man called a server, who seemed to know both of them, and ordered drinks for both.

‘Surely these are extraordinary times! First the swarm, the catastrophe, the starvation,’ and then he gave a flourish with his hands like the conductor of a classical concerto and said, ‘All’s well that ends well, the happy ending that you can have, the election. Finally, the government is in place, just like we are in the club, doing nothing actually. Must we say then that now is the Great Hibernation?’ and he winked at him like they were old pals who cracked jokes.

But the music was getting too loud, and their conversation drowned out, so he could not hear a thing except that the man said, ‘The war’s over, I say.’

He vacantly looked towards the crowd dancing, not able to find any meaning in the exercised moves. He saw a lady waving at him in the distance. She looked elegant in a blue gown wrapped around her waist like a lehenga, with her hair tied back. She was young and had a quiet prettiness about her rather than the stunning beauty he remembered of his wife, and now she was moving towards them.

‘How did you manage this far? I thought you would not make it, Indra,’ she exclaimed. Then under her breath, he heard her mutter about his companion warily, ‘Oh, this man’s all over the place.’ He understood then that this lady and the man also knew each another, but disliked each other intensely. The man’s smile was gone as he glanced at her. ‘Excuse me for a moment, Indra,’ the man said and immediately left. The lady took the man’s seat, and he garnered her name was Ira.

‘What was Stoker talking about?’ she asked, and he guessed she meant that man who had accompanied him previously.

‘Well, nothing, just about the war being over, and then he left, and you came,’ he said as though she was already familiar to him.

‘I know it would not make much sense now, but he has made a fortune in the war, and well, his money stinks. Of course, I need not lie. At the time of the war, I survived because of him, and even now, our contract has not ended. But it stinks, you know and I hate myself.’

She moved closer to him and then went on, ‘When you came back from the war, you could not remember anything, nor recognize anyone. If it had not been for her… I mean your wife, and for this, I should be grateful to her.’

So, it was that he had lost his mind after the war. Perhaps he had not fully gotten better after all, he thought resignedly.

Ira advanced her delicate hands towards him. ‘Let us move to Seven like old times. It’s quieter there,’ she almost whispered, and he felt he knew her. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to follow her. Her body, her fragrance—had he at one time…? No, he had never loved her; he knew that for sure. The heart can never lie, even if the memory is gone.

He left the club and followed Ira through what he thought were staff bunkers, with the oxygen generators, water purifiers, and stacks of wine and food. Men like shadows, with scalded hair, skin diseased, the kind who couldn’t, in their lifetime, afford one protective suit, even if they worked day and night all their lives. They kept this place going, and he saw their sad eyes, sensed their eyes on him, but it was strange that he had never noticed these people. To him, they all looked alike. And then even if men were cheap, he wondered where the power for running this place was coming from, how they had somehow managed that.

Seven seemed like an expensive executive suite at the motel. He noticed there was a large old-fashioned bed with silken sheets, a stack of books, a closet of expensive suits, and a mini wine cellar. From the windows, one could see the black sea rolling through the dark sky, and he closed the curtains. He thought he might have once been in such a place, injured and sick as Ira had said he was, and she had nursed his wounds and healed him, his wife. Was that it? Perhaps this was a place where a man and woman could begin anew after the war even though he was now alone.

Ira sat on the sofa at the bedside as he stood by the window. Without memory, language seemed extinct to him, even though Ira seemed never to be at a loss for speech. Perhaps it was some kind of nervousness about never forgetting anything that was about her.

‘Remember when we were young and the sun shone every day? We did not bother about that, of course. And in the spring, when we read together and had phones, we called each other and left messages. Now I can tell you that in a hundred years, we will wait just like that.’ He felt a terrible pain in his head that made him dizzy. He could never have loved her, that was not possible. But she went on. ‘And we read Romeo and Juliet. Then another day, we read Chandrasekhar and then Eurydice and Orpheus. We swam together that day into the sea, and you kept your word, but I came back. I was selfish, or just young and frightened, so I called the boats.’ Perhaps he had drowned himself to keep his word, he thought. Keeping his word had meant more to him then, maybe, for he was not a coward after all. ‘Did you ever hate me for that Indra?’ she asked suddenly. He had no answer for what she said made little sense in this world.

As she continued, her voice sounded slightly disturbed and less melancholic, ‘What is the use of living like this, Indra, surviving like an animal? Sometimes it gets so bad, and my lungs, the pain… to be able to bear it. I cannot wait any longer, not with the water thick with filth, the corpses, and the stench. It is the squalls of fire that were started by the bombing, and it may finally be many more months before the light comes. I’d prefer to die soon like the birds and the animals.’ He thought she wanted him to say something, like I cannot let you die. But it appeared too dramatic in this world—almost absurd and comical.

‘When the war began, I thought I must live,’ Ira was still saying. ‘What I did, only to live: sold everything, even my soul. What do women do to live during a war? But to think that now that it is over, I do not feel like waking up with this darkness and the smoke killing my lungs.’

He walked up to the sofa, where she lay in a posture halfway between sitting and lying down. He found a faint echo of the past in what she said. A woman struggles to keep her head above water during the most difficult time of the war, and when it’s all over, all of a sudden she gives it up. ‘The weather is going to be like this for days, Indra, they say.’ She got up and pulled aside the curtains as they sat around in silence. ‘If only for old time’s sake,’ she asked but he could not remember. The Steamer might have made him understand that just opening a door could lead him to the old world, but between that world and this stood the death of someone that he had not been able to prevent, and that had changed everything. They didn’t talk about his wife. How had she become one with the dying world? He wondered if he had carelessly let her die, if he somehow wanted it or worse was relieved by it. Was there a child between them that never came into the world, who was muffled by the mere threat of a catastrophe?

As Ira came close and embraced him, he felt her trembling and could hear the pounding of her heart. It made him feel that she was almost shaking like a tree in a tropical storm, but he felt paralyzed and remained unmoved. Maybe it was insomnia, but his head was throbbing and he felt a terrible pain. She felt the coldness of his body and withdrew. ‘You have not slept for days,’ she said, pained, as she opened a medicine cabinet beside the big bed and brought out a bottle of pills. She hesitated then, as if she wasn’t sure of giving it to him, that there was some thought passing her mind that was stopping her. But then she slowly slipped the bottle into his palms and he thought if she wanted him dead, he would accept it. He was always willing to obey, as though condemned to take orders. ‘I’m sorry’, he finally managed to say. He slept like a dead man, even a child in its womb; just a couple of colored pills and he couldn’t remember when she was gone.

When he woke, it was still dark. He heard footsteps as though a great many people were going down the unused stairs. He rushed out into a wide corridor and found the lifeless body of Ira being taken down in a glass box by the shadowy men who worked in the bunkers. It seemed she was asleep and would wake at any moment, except that she was now dressed in a red wedding dress.

His eyes met Stoker’s, who appeared behind these men. ‘She’s dead, Indra’, and there was a slight tremor to his voice, even though his eyes were cold looking ahead.

‘It is the weather,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Even the birds and the animals are drowning themselves in the murky sea, jumping off cliffs, or rushing into the fire. And for women, it is contagious, like an epidemic. They are killing themselves like in an epidemic,’ Stoker said vigorously, shaking his head.

She probably would not have died if he had not come. And again, he was seized by a pang of terrible guilt.

‘I will leave,’ he said.

‘Where, Indra?’

Stoker stood alone, even after everyone had gone. ‘This is the last post that has the remnants of our civilization: clean water, food and a bit of electricity. The land ends here. Everything else is gone. I am a man of science, Indra! I am not dependent on that woman. What’s she called? Ah! Yes, the naughty Lady Luck, for whose favor men clamor. I am a survivor. I have mastered the art of survival, for sure. You can stay here as long as you want; I can do that much for you, young fellow.’

Stoker’s stinking money, he thought, as Ira had said, but he always obeyed orders. He was born to follow them, but the women were not and could set themselves free. When he and Stoker went back to the club, the people were still dancing and laughing. ‘We have to keep it going, Indra, with this place with the lights, and all we have to do is maintain the pretenses, the fun, the dancing, the little games.’

But he thought that he should leave, though it was not by the path that the woman had chosen. He was neither fighting death like Stoker nor was he seduced by it. He desired supreme indifference, like a cruel God, perhaps. In an earlier world, this indifference would have made him an aristocrat. In this world, there was simply one word for it: insanity.

‘There is no place else to go, Son,’ Stoker said. ‘The city is emitting nothing but deathly radiation. Have you forgotten the swarm when we fled the city? Memory is an unpleasant thing, Indra. If I did not have that, I would be the happiest, I suppose; there would be no need for this awful show.’. But he had no memory, past, or future, or so he thought, and he wanted to say what Stoker thought was wrong, but he did not.

He did not know for how many days he had slept. He had lost track of time, but to him, it was the next day when he woke up. Again, he heard the frantic movement of heavy footsteps of too many people outside his suite. Ghostly wails crying from within the Steamer. He was seized by panic. He had an impulse to hide, to become invisible. Still, something drove him out, and he followed the crowd down the stairs. The suspense almost killed him till he came into the lounge. He saw Stoker’s body resting, waiting to be carried in a hearse. All the employees of the motel, indistinguishable in identical suits with their tired heads and starved bodies waited to follow the hearse in what would be a man’s last journey. Some grim, some sobbing it seemed they still waited to bow or nod to Stoker’s orders.

For the first time, it appeared to him he would burst into loud wild sobs. Then, as if on an impulse, he wanted to rush up the stairs but felt weak, so he took the elevator, and his eyes fell on the mirror. It was not him anymore; it was someone older. His eyes were sunk, his face was hollow, and his skin wrinkled. But it did not frighten him, and he took it in with a calm acceptance, like inviting dusk at the end of day. He did not know how long he was in his suite. In fact, he could not even remember how long he had stayed on the Steamer. But when he opened the window, the sky looked familiar, and there was a bit of light and warmth, and it felt like an evening in the old world.

He had forgotten the woman he loved, whom he thought to be his wife. In the future, the scientists would explain the swarm, the catastrophe, and the hibernation that would have nothing to do with him, Ira or Stoker but that didn’t matter. Outside, the narrow track to the beach was piled with bones of long rotten carcasses that had become as hard as rocks. He stumbled on them when he came close to the water, which was clear. The filth had drifted away somewhat.

I must be back, he thought, but he could not find any place or reason to go, so he stood there under the sky with a splash of red-orange, the water touching his feet.

“You’re one of the few whose bodies are compatible with the energy source.” My handler’s hair collected ash, which I imagined to be snow. We stood facing each other, under the shadow of the clocktower, lights taken from a football stadium serving as a proxy for the sun.

“Do you intend to turn me into a bomb?” I asked, slightly amused at how soon we’d come around full circle. Bombs were the reason half the world was buried. They were the reason why I was being held hostage in my own university.

“No.” He removed his hat, his mustache gathering white. I imagined I was shivering, that it was blizzarding out. “To be frank…” He did me the service of at least a partial disclosure. The world was too dead to take much sugar-coating. “Something far worse.”

They were pulling babies from what used to be buildings, what used to be nurseries and neonatal ICUs. The body bags were too large, so they had locals bring out pillow cases to wrap the youngest of the dead in.

They tugged bodies from the rubble, volunteers in night vision goggles, whatever the army had on-hand. I couldn’t help from where I was, in the university that had become a prison. I watched from the feed the military had provided me to instill “nationalistic feelings.” A rescuer had ended up on his knees after extracting a toddler headfirst from crumbled concrete. They were slapping him, screaming at him to get it together, bringing their palms to his cheeks. There were more children buried in the ruins of the homeland, in the ruins of their own houses. And he was one of the few with the physicality and equipment to pull them out.

He lifted himself off the ground, retracted the goggles, and smeared his tears with the hands of others. He was staring forwards, like some smothered statue, caked in ash. And they ruffled his hair, white snowing down from where it collected, and pushed him onto the next victim.

The girl in one of the next dorms, of which there was a surplus because the university had become mostly a ghost town, told me she’d seen footage of the enemy hauling picnic baskets up to lookouts. That they ate their dinner on foldaway chairs and tables, watching the fireworks that bore craters into our country. That rained ash over all of us.

“They’re an evil people.” She said, shaking her head, body resting on her doorframe. “I didn’t know humans could act like this.”

“The enemy is not human.” I said, matter-of-factly, so she did not confuse me with a sympathizer. And she didn’t take it as well as I thought, only sniffled, sucking back tears, and slammed her door shut.

One of the reasons why I was not allowed out of university grounds was because the campus was considered a safehouse. I could watch the destruction unfold around me, knowing it would never penetrate whatever shield my handlers had set up.

Here, the bombs were the only things I could see without aid from night vision goggles. They’d start as orange dots in the horizon that you would say to yourself were stars, then they’d grow until you’d swear you’d discovered the sun again since this winter started. Then that sun would multiply and grow a comet’s tail. Phosphorous. That stuff cooks you from the inside out. Causes organ failure, melts your skin down to your bones, and your bones down to stardust.

I was watching one. The window surrogated the back of my eyes. Two camera obscuras, shrouding most of the world as unseen matter. I could see the telltale dot swelling from the skyline, of a false sun, trailing poison as it ripped through the sky. Though I knew I was safe, that didn’t keep the fear at bay. Deep down, I was beyond terrified. It was the kind of fear that cut like a knife, that turned me cold. That made my breath hitch when I saw the bombs deployed because I thought of the people that would be struck by them, and for a moment, their bodies were an extension of my own, and I could feel my skin smolder and my blood boil. And there was nothing I could do but watch.

When the blast first reached our shore, it came as a ring of sound and wind that would dissipate as it neared the interior of the landmass, then recede and spread back again. Over the course of weeks, the incoming waves of pressure would expand and collapse as aftershocks. Those were the test runs, performed on other countries, nuclear warheads dropped from planes, disintegrating all allies. The enemy really knew how to corner us.

The real blasts, the ones that turned my country into a wasteland, came in this eternal night that was newly blanketed over us. We had no way of seeing it, and if we even could see anything, we had no way of communicating it to anyone.

The enemy started with missiles, then dirty bombs that exploded shrapnel into their blast radius. And then, when we thought they had used the last of them; nuclear weapons. They dropped them on hospitals and churches first. On the places that would cripple our communities. And then, they engaged the military targets. Finally choosing a destination for their fireworks that was not civilian.

I was halfway through my thesis when all of this went down, studying data of stars’ positions in the sky, of changes to their size that may indicate black hole activity or just natural death in the star’s life-cycle. Looking back, such an organic dying process, even if it was that of a star, was something to envy. The enemy had conjured up the most painful ways to kill. Makes being slurped up into yourself as your light dims and kills the planets you once illuminated seem more ideal to nuclear fission. But, to our relief, by the end of the first barrages, we were notified that the enemy had run out of its nuclear weaponry. Or at least, that was what our specialists surmised from intelligence reports.

It would be a while before people had the decency of instantaneous atomization in lieu of the more painful, drawn-out deaths to come.

While I waited to be turned into a warhead, I occupied myself leafing through half-eroded journals. My studies in astrophysics, of the birth and death of stars, was long forgotten, rendered too frivolous for the current winter. My telescope, the largest of others among most universities in the north, was being disassembled and smelted down into another one of the war machines.

The study would haunt me, would possess me like a second spirit. Every equation, every proof, was somehow preserved in the back of my mind, only to resurface at night just when I was at the precipice of sleep. It would torment me. I would think in series of numbers, in formulas; would feel the click of my calculator, as a phantom, beneath my fingers.

I missed the stars. I missed the sun most of all. There was no warmth at the time. Only ash and darkness. And my studies proved exceptionally useless in alleviating this situation. I worked in the theoretical, not the physical. I could map the lifespan of a heavenly body but I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to produce hot water using what remained of lost technology and no sunlight. I’d crouch, with a flashlight between my teeth, and wish I had done something more mechanical with my time in school, that I had both the motor skills and technical expertise to coax the flow of electrons from a grounded state to a more excited one.

I was never successful. I waited, like everyone else in the university, for the army corps of engineers to piece together what they could of the surviving infrastructure. And for the first time since the winter set in, there was light. Enough light for me to scrawl equations onto the empty backs of notebooks, to finish my thesis in vain. Because I didn’t care that the world was going to consume me and spit me out a killer in a matter of months. At the time, I was still human. At the time, I needed to pretend that the world would always see me as such. As someone in the same ranks as those who brought the light back to Americans. Not as the one who extinguished it across the ocean.

American physicians performed surgery on soiled hospital floors, without anesthesia, with fewer doctors than they had last month because they had lost almost half of them in the war so far — the enemy was adamant on calling this barrage on civilians a war — and the screams through the special military-grade transmitted television were enough to make me spit bile.

This would all be my fault in a period of months. Children with their names written on their arms because they would be too shellshocked to remember, their entire families yet to be dug up. Did you know that nearly half of the US population consisted of children right before the big bombs were deployed by the enemy? Children made up a majority of survivors. And of Martyrs. And soon, I would be the one producing skeletons on the other side of the ocean in their remembrance. It would be my turn to power the killing machine.

The enemy kept circling back to the first events that started the war. They cited beheaded children, and butchered civilians, evidence of which could not be produced. And the statements were eventually retracted, but it was too late. The world thought we were inhuman, and that is how they would proceed. With the slaughter of animals. The damage had been done. Our whole country, and its children, were named complicit in a killing conducted by rogue soldiers on foreign soil.

The enemy talked of tearing America down, flattening it completely, and renaming it “equinox” after the nightclub where the insurgents first struck.

The enemy said that terrorists ran our hospitals, so they bombed them. They said that American patriots were cowards, using women and children as human shields. And they just kept bombing until our sky turned black. Until they’d disabled all infrastructure and communications, leaving the country completely dark. No sight, so the world could not see the atrocities they were about to commit. So there would be no one to record the slaughter. That it would be locked in by the current winter, that the ash would do enough to silence. That all those who bore witness would be turned to ash.

By the time the second wave of bombs fell, the world learned that most of the US consisted of pockets of refugee camps, from the ruins of neighboring states, and from Mexico and South America. The world found out that our enemy was bombing the most helpless of civilians, and their children. And when they tried to flee, up to Canada or down to Mexico, the borders were sealed. We were locked in, all of us. In the place where the day and night bled into each other because the enemy had pummeled us so badly with their warheads, that we lost the sun.

They told me to leave no one alive. And I did not. When they disconnected the electrodes from me, millions of fading heartbeats were reverberating through my ears. When they stripped me of the insulating suit and cast me naked into the stabilizing liquid, I could still feel shrapnel rip through one thousand times over, could still feel the roll of ignition liquidize the ground and then make bodies go airborne with the aftershock.

Afterwards, they’d ask me: reporters and angry civilians, who’ve gotten too proud once they’ve seen the light again, why I bombed a hospital. A refugee camp. A food storage facility.

I did not answer them. Weapons don’t have to say anything. I was not scared of public opinion. I was death from above. And they did not feel what I’ve felt; a million bones crushed, bodies charred through-and-through, the kinds of screams that will never die, even in memory.

They asked me why I did not fight my handlers. Why I let them turn me into a human weapon. To that, I said that I was no longer human. I was only a weapon. I was only death. I was their deaths too. That the enemy was not human either, and they would do unto us a-million-fold what I’ve done. And I was the one to provoke them.

They asked why I didn’t cry at the sight of what I’ve done, and I reminded them that I was a weapon. I didn’t cry anymore. The valium pump in my inferior vena cava did not allow me to. The implant at my thalamus made sensation impossible. Couldn’t they remember that I wasn’t human anymore? That they might as well be talking to the tanks or the missiles, or the surviving atom bombs. I could not give them what they wanted. I could not give them remorse. I was responsible for the damage, not the aftermath.

“I can’t feel anything, remember?” I addressed them, casting wetness down my cheeks. And they took photographs of me like that; grainy, black-and-white, from old tech cameras, of the weapon with tears in her eyes.

My handlers took me back in, blared “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as they shoved me into a padlocked door and through the tunnel system under the destruction, to a place where no one would know to look for me. I was the best kind of weapon. Easy to hide, to move. To pass off as anything but.

I screamed and screamed about the enemy, melting into the floor, a slobbering mess of a girl. At least I thought I could still be called that despite everything. I wished I could. I screamed and screamed things I never thought I would even think, but war and death did these things to me, turned me into something I didn’t know ever existed inside me.

“I’m going to kill them!” My voice ripped through my throat, raw and stinging. And it must have been what the handlers wanted to hear, but too crazed. Too emotion-laden. They wanted something bloodthirsty but mindless. I still had too much of what I was told to leave behind. “I’m going to kill them all!”

Adrenaline rushed cold through me, warping my surroundings. I couldn’t feel properly with all the tubing feeding into my sensory centers, but I could feel something and I hated it. I needed it to stop. I could only be annihilation or human, not something straddling the line between the two. Nothing can survive the split. I was the only living thing that could remain in the divided state, body sectioned off into organ systems, picked apart by sensory nerves. I had switches to kill, sections to excise from my being, another version of me to break off from myself.

There was a memory that hit me, as my hands began to work at my skin, of a woman working for a relief organization, who told reporters that her toddler, who lived on base with her, was beginning to show signs of distress only reserved for the field of military psychiatry. The kid tore her hair out and clawed gashes into her thighs. My condition wasn’t much better than hers; I scratched at my skin, at the instruments going through me, at the monitors and tubing and things holding me back.

I screamed some more, imagining I was digging into the earth’s crust and I was also the planet. It was all so painful; I was destined to rip the earth in two, could fit the world between my teeth. And I bit down, on myself, into the pulp of my palm, drooling red, spittle foaming at the corners of my mouth as I groaned in both surprise and some kind of retaliatory relief.

I woke up with a morphine pump opposite to the valium. I felt like something was constantly drilling the back of my head, rattling my brain. They’ve installed other equipment I couldn’t see, but I knew were there. Some in my brain. Some on my adrenal glands. They were forming the most obedient anthropomorphic weapon. And I had no choice but to become what I had been resisting. I had no choice but to take the world with me.

The enemy let loose from their warships flyers with a colored dot in the center reading: “You are here,” with almost cartoonish imagery of their weaponry surrounding. “You are surrounded.” Sprawled the bottom of the page. “The only way out is south.” So, the masses fled to Texas, where there were more bombs waiting, smothering the ruck in the consequences of collision at a subatomic level. The enemy, as it seemed, had a surviving atomic weapon. And their first target was a helpless crowd of refugees.

As far as the war effort went, the enemy was growing closer to their objective of flattening us. The stretch from California to Montana had been rendered unlivable, with no surviving infrastructure to sustain life. All the inhabitants of Austin, Texas had been vaporized, a level of destruction I was still incapable of. They were still working on ways to make me stronger, to make me deadlier. All of that came to a crescendo when Texas was atomized.

And then the killing stopped, on both ends.

I was told to reserve energy, so they locked me in a healing tank while they braced for any enemy attacks. And they waited, while I floated in the ultraviolet stew, still holding their breaths. When I was released from the tank weeks later, there was yet to be a bombing, a missile strike, or any other form of warfare on the enemy’s end. They were quiet.

My handlers called them a sleeping giant, they were so massive and powerful, that they would just turn the other cheek to our attacks and wait for the right moment to deploy any countermeasures. Our country was in ruin, with only the New England area left with surviving infrastructure. The enemy did not need to do much to deliver a final blow.

As the apparent armistice went on, we counted the dead and saved whoever we could unearth. We waited, with bated breaths, for the earth-shattering we knew would come. We waited for the sky to grow dark again, for the sun to be blotted out by clouds of ash and radioactive waste. But nothing ever came.

The enemy’s major generals were contacted, with a single question in the transmission:

[Is this a ceasefire?]

There was more silence for weeks. And then a reply, as if they were reluctant earlier to share such information:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

No one knew how to respond. Linguists were brought in to decode any possible mistranslations, as if it wasn’t apparent at first what they were trying to say. That their weapon was someone like me. That they had been using living, breathing beings to unleash the atom bomb. That this whole time, it was people who were turning the sky black. Who were locking in a global winter with every blast, with every detonation. There was a human behind it all. One for each pole, for each end of the earth. And we could have split the world between the two of us, could have torn the planet apart if we didn’t show the restraint our supervisors lacked. If we weren’t human, then we would have killed every living thing. We would have committed total slaughter, of an entire race, of an entire world.

The United States military replied, as simply as possible:

[Weapon is willing.] And it was not a lie. Not yet.

I still had the death drive in me. Still had the urge to level the enemy the way they did to us. I did not forget what they had done; my handlers had made it impossible to think of anything but, a neural chip in my hippocampus subliminally looping news feed of the bodies, of the destruction, steady power warping buildings, the slopes of entire cities caving into themselves. I wanted to cut into their warships, to slice the bellies of the enemy’s C-17’s and rain their supplies down the way they did ours, the way they destroyed the food banks when they had winter locked around us.

My thirst for vengeance was not something that could be dissolved so easily.

There was no activity on the enemy’s side, and I had not been forced to destroy anything for months. The military shifted its focus to reconstruction. They re-paved destroyed roads, rebuilt hospitals and housing, reconnected electricity and internet lines. Though contained to the northeast, the remains of America were growing stronger. I was growing stronger too, having been spared from expending myself as a weapon for so long. I began to feel human again.

I took tours with the national guard, greeting people as their savior. As the one who bullied the enemy into their months long silence. The general public didn’t know about the enemy weapon’s reluctance. They did not know we were theorizing that the ceasefire would quit once a suitable replacement was found. Then, the new weapon, with the young verve that all those unexperienced with genocide had, would rain down onto us all that was supposed to hit long ago. We were supposed to be annihilated by now and then built anew, turned into the enemy’s playground; luxury apartments over where the bodies of a family still lay, huddling together in death and decay. And I saw the stars collapsing in on themselves, still saw my work in my head because I could not let that part of me go. I thought for a moment that we must not be so different from the stars, that our life cycles were the same. Grow bright and then destroy yourself. That must have been our destiny this whole time.

My handlers told me that in the instance of enemy retaliation, then my power would be used in one short burst to produce an effective countermeasure, most likely killing me. They told me their thermal physicists believed the energy of it all would boil me from the inside. Then, I would be given a martyr’s burial and swiftly replaced.

I always imagined it would be my neighbor, from the next dorm, that would be my replacement. That she would be forced to give up her body for her country, and for the destruction of what remained of the world. And she and the enemy’s new weapon would circle each other like sharks, never delivering a killing blow. Maybe it’d be because they knew how much it would take to lock the world in a nuclear winter forever. Maybe they knew that their objective was wrong from the start, and that data would be passed onto the weapon’s next host.

Maybe I didn’t want destruction after all. What good would it do if I killed their children too? What would be put into the world other than death? There was no more light for me to create other than the death strobes. It was time I drank my body in and collapsed, sucking in all matter until I was a pinprick on the fabric of space, with enough gravity to tear right through, until everything I’ve destroyed down here on earth became an afterthought. Because there would always be bigger destruction. Because I could always destroy others with myself.

It was night when I transmitted the message. Spending months in the same portion of a military base, with partial free range, gave me a good lay of the land. I was able to memorize logins and passwords, mechanisms for communication, and when the enemy’s scientists were online.

I trailed my machinery with me as I tripped through the control room. I was heavy and so augmented that I had more tubes leaving my body than vessels inside. I was no longer human, by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t even look it anymore.

I sat at a workstation with the same familiar ease as taking a seat on a bus. Like I belonged there. Like there weren’t armed guards who wouldn’t hesitate if they saw me.

I typed in a string of letters and numbers, successfully logging in. By the time I set up the interface, I could already see the soldiers nearing through the glass. I had no time, and so much to say. I wanted to scream at the enemy that they would destroy themselves with us, that we would all destroy the world together and there would be no one left to benefit from it. That they had made me a monster, and I had made them inhuman. But there wasn’t enough time. I only had time to enter a string of four words, no punctuation. I only had one sentence to deter humanity from its own suicide. So, I typed:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

It was peaceful outside, the sky ultramarine as the last shafts of orange and purple hues slashed the distant horizon, abandoning the earth to let the strangers in. The sultry autumn air mingled with the scent of baked banana pie, the last trace of normality that soured under the siren.

Sam scratched her nose, went to the window, locked it and pulled the thick curtains—her sunset ritual when the siren screamed. Complete darkness engulfed their house.

Josias grabbed her wrist and led her to the basement.

And finally the siren closed its mouth.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and saw no difference. His world was pitch-black. The only relief in this twelve-hour world was the warm skin over his hand. Samantha leaned her head on his shoulder, slowly caressing his wrist.

His stomach rumbled and she clutched his arm. The things outside didn’t bother about bodily functions unless it was too loud but it still made their hearts skip a beat.

Josias sniffed her hair, then ran his finger along her hand, writing now?

She remained still for a moment before she wrote ok on his elbow.

Every night, to pass the time and wait for sleep, they’d invent a story by writing on each other’s skin using a finger. Tonight they continued from where they had left off last night. He wrote and she ran. Sam grabbed his shoulders and squeezed them, indicating he should turn around. She then wrote on his back to a purple house so far away she could see the frozen mountains. Her knight in shining armor would arrive shortly. She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Josias smiled in the dark and wrote on her wrist that was cute.

This imaginary world, where people still explored the outside, kept them sane and entertained from the doom that haunted them every night. At first, it had seemed silly but he grew used to it because he was doing it with her.

Samantha took his hand and wrote—

She froze. He held his breath. Something in a distant corner of the pitch-black world outside yapped until the sound transformed into an incessant bark. Someone’s dog alerted the world of its presence.

Josias closed his eyes and opened them again.

The dog barked and barked. Then its bark became a suffocating cough, then short panting, happy and louder than the world itself. And even louder than that, as if somehow the dog stood right there in the room. Then as abruptly as it had arrived, it was gone, the sudden silence making Josias’ ears throb.

Samantha was shaking, her skin cold and sweaty. He searched for her hand, kissed it and nibbled at it until she calmed down and hugged him.

There were no more stories that night, only the silence and their touches. Sleep soon came with dreamlessness.

A faint lullaby of birds chirping dragged him out of the black ocean. Josias rubbed his eyes and got up.

They went upstairs to open the doors and windows to welcome a new day into their home, the sight of a clear sky bringing tears to their eyes.

“God, I’m so jealous of them,” Sam whispered, watching the birds flutter across the roofs, her mouth a grin, her eyes wet and red. For some reason, small animals like birds were never targeted by the-ones-that-come-at-night.

Josias kissed her hair. “When will we get used to this?”

Sam breathed in the chilly autumn morning air. “We’re not meant to. Remember what Pedro—” She bit her lips. “I’m sorry.”

His laugh echoed inside Josias’ mind so loudly, he felt as if his throat were about to burst.

“Will you go to the farm?” He tried to brush Pedro’s voice out of his mind.

Sam glanced down. “Yeah, why not?”

Josias went outside after breakfast, welcoming the blessed kiss of sunlight against his skin. He said good morning to a neighbor placing a boom box beside a lamppost across the street. The sky was open and bright with only a few smudges here and there but down here, gloomy faces trod through a gloomier neighborhood. Most houses were empty, left to rot after they came for the inhabitants. Some left their homes thinking that out there, somewhere, they might find a safe haven but no one ever heard from them again. Others moved into better houses once they saw them empty. Next to the charred ruin of a three-story house that had burned down an eternity ago, a short geezer, who always wore floral dresses, sobbed against a young woman’s arms as a tanned man carried out of her home a lump wrapped in a pink blanket. A brown tail dangled out of one of its ends.

And a few blocks from that house, a couple sat on the sidewalk holding the mangled body of a child, their faces devoid of expression. Josias offered his condolences, as he did every day when someone was found. That was part of his job, anyway.

Alongside a group, his job was to knock on the houses that were still occupied. When nobody answered a locked door, he pried it open with a crowbar.

Today nobody answered the knocks on a derelict house standing alone among two barren trees, so a crowbar it was. As he stepped inside, the stench of rancid meat slapped his face. Within was all dark as thick curtains covered every window; the smell covered every corner. A podgy man called Roberto, who lived next to Josias’, stooped forward and vomited.

Yesterday, they had knocked here, and Mr. Casagrande had answered.

“Someone’s been dead a lot longer than a night.” Roberto spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

They searched around the first floor until one of them found a locked door almost hidden under the upstairs staircase. The stench, sweet and pungent, grew heavier as they approached it. They covered their faces with respirators but the smell seeped in nonetheless. Another one vomited and Josias soon joined her.

The stench of death was never easy to get used to.

After they broke the door handle, putrid hot air hugged them. Swollen and gray and swarming with house flies, three bodies huddled together. Their bloated limbs coiled and wound around each other in a disgusting mockery of a family embrace. One was a woman, another a man, and one, thinner and shorter than the other two, a teenager. Mr. Casagrande had said some time ago that his family had gone somewhere south to find shelter.

They did find shelter right here but the things had still managed to find them.

Half an hour later, the group took the bodies to bury them with the many others, the burring of the wheels of the gurneys the only dirge for the dead.

Whenever they could spare some hours in the afternoon, Josias and Samantha enjoyed sunbathing in a lawn chair in their front yard. Black thunderheads gathered in the distance, cloaking the neighborhood in cold shadows when the clouds swept past the sun. His thoughts were blacker than the clouds. Six bodies only today, with Mr. Casagrande missing. Thousands of years ago, he could hear the noise of hammer against nail, men shouting orders, music playing, dogs barking and even children playing.

The only music now was the whistle of the wind.

“Tell me what’s on your mind.” He took Sam’s hand and kissed the knuckles.

She squinted at a lowering pall looming over white clouds, her eyes as silent as her face. “Pedro was right, you know. We were never meant to get used to this.”

That was a cloud blacker than all of them.

He was only a few months older than Samantha and yet much wiser. When their father died, the world was still alive; people could still go out at night and make noise. Both became each other’s anchors as their mother deteriorated inside and out. Or, as Pedro used to say, she “rotted from the inside out.”

Don’t make any noise and stay in the dark. Her brother’s words murmured inside his brain, poking out of a tight corner to haunt him again. Josias had never heard a sound like that, the mad crackle and wheeze bobbing out of Pedro’s throat when the things had come to twist his limbs.

“But we must.” Josias took a sip of cold coffee, watching some people passing by, faces carved by fear and loss—a sight he’d grown used to by now.

“There’s no salvation, no way for this to stop.”

His heart tightened. They could be each other’s salvation, each other’s reason to live. They made it after all; against impossible odds, they managed to keep on living. They even had electricity again.

But for what?

They couldn’t have a family. It wouldn’t make sense. Some still followed the instinct to reproduce and most paid the price. An eternity ago, a couple who once lived next door had decided to have a baby, their way of bringing hope and normalcy; they’d even named the poor baby Hope. She’d slept through the first few nights thanks to the sleeping pills, but one night her wailing had cut the silence. First, it had been a soft crying that had turned into sobbing. Then it had stopped for a second before returning louder, until sobbing became laughter. The baby had laughed and laughed until her voice had broken and after one last sharp shrill, silence had come.

He wrote on her wrist: the knight had a golden sword and he swore to protect her against the nocturnal creatures.

Samantha shook her head and giggled. “I love you.”

They kissed as the wind whistled.

Swollen black clouds soon covered the world. The drizzle gave way to a raging storm and the people gathered inside their homes.

A few minutes later, the blaring of the siren cut through the deafening storm, imposing and sharp. Josias locked the windows upstairs while Sam took care of the living room. Then, the siren shut its mouth to announce their coming.

From where he stood to the basement was an entire universe of distance. Anything could happen along the way.

And so Josias inched forward, one step at a time. A cold finger ran down his body as he exited the bedroom, still alive. He continued on downstairs, each movement a potential death sentence. Midway, he stopped and waited.

Still alive.

He went on, one step after the other, then another. With the stair behind him, he turned and saw the living room window uncovered, Sam staring right through it. A scream stuck in his throat, a lump of agony ready to call forth the strangers into his home.

But nothing happened. Samantha stood there, watching the storm, half her body hidden in the dark and the other tinged by the yellow glare of the lamppost. Josias approached her. She read his face and lightning flashed, bathing everything in pale white for a split second. The roar of the thunder came soon after.

She turned her head and he followed her gaze.

The night was never truly empty. Silhouettes, their shapes outlined by the raindrops, ambled through the streets, front yards, even the roofs. They trod around as if floating or traversing an invisible road only they could see. Some were as tall as the lampposts, others no taller than a child, capered around a shape that seemed to hold an umbrella, danced between two giants and jumped from roof to roof. One of them peeked at their window, dancing and teetering as if mocking them. Two shapes held hands on top of a lamppost and in their front yard, others gestured as if having a lively conversation.

These were the ones that had ruined everything, the ones that had brought the entire world to heel. Josias had heard friends and neighbors talking about seeing them in the rain and yet he’d never dared to look, could not look. Now actually seeing them in front of him, around him, it was almost peaceful, that relief that comes after going through a long-awaited event. Even the tall ones didn’t seem as monstrous as he’d imagined, perhaps because he couldn’t see them, only their outlines.

No, no, those shapes had nothing peaceful about them. They mocked the living because they knew nothing could be done against them.

Once a man called Virgilio had attempted to hose them off but the water had simply streamed out. He had called out for his wife before he began to chortle.

Josias took Sam’s hand and inched backward. She stood still. He wanted to scream at her, lock her in the room until dawn. But he couldn’t move quickly or speak, so he clutched her hand harder. She still didn’t move.

A vibrant blue light blinked across the street. Then a raucous noise of plates breaking boomed across the world, louder than thunder, louder than the rain.

“Hello, morning, afternoon, evening! This is your one and only Miss Flower Sunshine!” The childish voice shook the walls and the ground. This time Sam was the one who clutched his hand. The front door of the house across from theirs flung open with a loud crack, and a woman burst out of the darkness on an electric bike and drove off.

Some people never, ever learn.

The woman, whose name was Carolina or Catarina, her wet black hair flailing behind her, managed to drive a good ten feet before the bike slid from under her, and she stood hovering in the air. The bike skidded off and hit a tree. The man, whose name Josias didn’t remember, drove a bit farther away. The dwarfish form that stared at Josias and Sam swirled around and jumped and jumped. Two other dwarfs leaped over the boom box and grabbed the man’s legs and he slid away from the bike and slammed onto the ground. His bike jerked and swerved and fell and lay rumbling.

“Mommy, will you help me bake chocolate cake?” The child’s voice joined the man’s shrieking.

Then the giant form holding an umbrella also turned and hugged the man as if comforting a sad child. And the man laughed louder than the storm, louder than Miss Flower Sunshine. His piercing guffaw faltered and became a mad howl as the enormous wet outline twisted his arms, snapping each bone as calmly as a man snapping twigs. And still, a broad smile never left the man’s face.

“But don’t eat too much sugar!”

Another giant shape held the woman as she hollered and howled like a mad woman. A middle-sized silhouette approached her and twisted her neck as if turning a screw. When her head completely faced backward, the body slumped down, shuddering.

This time Sam stepped back and took Josias with her. Thunder raged, Miss Flower Sunshine sang about the pleasures of chocolate cakes and the wet shapes outside sauntered away from the mangled bodies to resume their lively nothingness.

The creatures were too many, strong and hungry. I’ll defend you! The knight in shining armor brandished his sword toward the night and he slashed and slashed as the bodies fell.

He dragged himself out of the cushion in the basement and out of the house, ignoring his rumbling stomach. He left Sam still snoring and went to check out the results of last night’s slaughter.

The streets glistened wet and blotches of clouds still lingered in the sky. By midmorning, the bodies had already lost color, the astringent scent of death beginning to ooze from them. Josias and a couple of other workers covered the bodies in a tarp and dragged them to be buried in the cemetery half a mile east of the neighborhood.

Before noon, they would find five more bodies, including a cat, two men, a teenager, and the geezer who had lost her dog—her pale gray body adorned in a pretty pink floral dress.

“Don’t you wanna go? Mr. Oliveira will cook some burgers.”

Sam didn’t leave bed all morning, which was odd, and refused to go to Mr. Oliveira’s, which was even odder since she loved burgers more than humanly possible.

“Go, please go and have fun. We both know you need it.” She rolled to her side and propped herself up on an elbow.

“We both need it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ll go. And I’ll be really pissed if you don’t bring me some burgers.”

He shook his head and grasped his crotch. The silly gesture was worth it just so he could see her laugh.

Once in a while, the neighborhood would organize a small get-together to forget, for just a moment, the ones that come at night. They could gossip, share trivial things about life and their jobs (at least those whose jobs didn’t involve retrieving dead bodies from their homes,) anything that could distract them for a bit.

If only for a moment, they allowed themselves to forget about last night and many nights before and the nights to come. All his life brought him to this simple medium-rare burger dripping with onion and green sauce. Nattering with those who still remained and enjoying the afternoon sun was that glimpse, that spark that told him: life could still keep on going, despite everything.

But the siren opened its metal mouth to blare its usual message: night is coming and they are too.

Conversations snuffed out. Smiles withered. Plates and cups fell, spreading half-eaten burgers on the ground and orange and lemon juice plashing down. Neighbors and friends ran without uttering a word as the siren screamed.

His house was visible from two blocks away, the windows still uncovered. Then he ran as fast as his legs could take him.

And stopped.

Complete silence engulfed the world and he heard only his panting and his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. The sky was a deep shade of dark blue. Stars already blinked and stippled the quiet firmament, watching him.

Do it now.

He bolted to the house closest to him, praying it was open. For once, his prayers were answered, so he slammed the door shut behind him.

In this dark world smelling of dust and spoiled food, he breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth as slowly as possible, gagging through the effluvia. A smooth wave of relief washed over him when he felt his body still intact.

He had been here last week to retrieve the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Souza, an elderly couple. They were found mangled together on the living room sofa as blow flies swarmed about them. The smell still lingered.

He could go, bolt out of the house and reach his. A single block wasn’t that far. He could still reach—

No.

Silence meant the door was open and they had come in.

It wasn’t raining today, so there was no way to see them. But he had to reach her, embrace her, hold her all night long until the morning sun came to appease them. Would she do something crazy and come looking for him? No, no. She was smart, smarter than him. She should know he was safe.

Josias sneaked on toward the end of the hallway. The yellow light of the lamppost illuminated part of the L-shaped staircase and a corner of the empty living room. Ahead was a small kitchen reeking of burnt olive oil. The food had been thrown in the garbage; the furniture—except the couch—was distributed among the neighborhood, so the kitchen was also empty.

He sat on the floor, his back against the wall.

Waiting, waiting…

No matter how hidden you are, how deep underground, or how many walls between you and the outside world, those outside reached anywhere. A lifetime ago, a friend of a friend of theirs had turned his basement into a bunker by covering every corner, from floor to ceiling, with soundproof panels. He had thought that maybe this could help. It had taken two men to pry open the door. Josias had never forgotten his face contorted in agony, facing up like a faithful pleading for divine help.

When they had cleaned the room, it had looked too neat to abandon, so he had moved in with Sam. He didn’t know who first had the idea to sleep in the basement every night. However, it became their ritual; perhaps by doing so, it offered a sense of security, albeit false.

Sam…

Perhaps if he moved slowly, he could reach her safe and sound. They would survive another night and another.

Instead, Josias remained sitting, stretching his legs and back when they got too sore. Her soft voice danced in his mind, her calling out to him. It wouldn’t hurt to try. He had survived until now; why wouldn’t he survive another night?

Instead, he lay down on the cold, hard floor and closed his eyes to embrace the gloom that was already there. He’d survive again. Nothing had changed. He was in another person’s house, that’s all.

Now go to sleep, soon it will be over.

When he opened his eyes, only the pitch-black welcomed him. Utter silence. Josias raised his hand and didn’t see it. He had drifted off but not enough to go through the night. His back was sore and the back of his head ached. Hunger and thirst commingled with the pain in his crotch and stomach. He begged for a waste bucket and a cup of water; he begged for a sleeping pill. He begged for Sam.

Thinking of her relieved the pain for only a moment.

Was she crying right now? Or had she gone outside to look for him? He’d have heard, yes. He’d have heard her scream and laugh. He’d have felt it.

He rose, biting through the pain, and went to the kitchen door and saw the still black of the night, smudged by the yellow tinge of the lamplight. He knelt and put his member out as close to the wall as possible so as to not make a sound, then relieved himself. He could almost smile if he weren’t here alone. With his mind clear, he tried to think of a way out.

No idea came.

It was impossible to reach his house without stepping outside. The things were blind when people moved quietly indoors in the dark—as long as there were no doors or windows open—but sharp-eyed when they moved even a fraction of an inch outdoors after the blare of the siren until sunrise. No, just forget about it.

Go back to sleep.

Josias breathed in the stench of burned olive oil and lay down again, this time on the other side of the kitchen. It didn’t matter if his whole body was sore in the morning as long as it was intact.

The night stretched out for eternity, a minute longer than a decade.

Sam, Sam.

When would the night end?

The darkness did dwindle, bringing in a dim pale light.

A motor bellowed out and smashed the silence like a hammer. Josias jumped, only to groan and bite his tongue when a sharp blade sliced along his neck and down the back. He rolled to his side and stood there.

Josias eventually rose and pissed on the floor right there and then again.

He shouldered the door open and ran as fast as he could, ignoring the pain. His house wasn’t locked, so he went straight to the living room.

Her body was already cold and not yet stiff. She sat on the couch facing the window with her arms sprawled out. Dry blood drenched her left wrist, seeping to the floor and blooming like a dark-red flower. Her face, almost serene, was kissed by the faint morning sunlight, so relaxed. Josias whispered her name and shook her shoulder. Perhaps she was still asleep.

Of course not.

He sat on the floor and rested his pained head against her leg. Next to her foot, he found a piece of paper adorned with her neat handwriting.

She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Her knight in shining armor kissed her brow and put his hand on top of hers. We will be together forever, she said.

Josias laughed as loud as his throat allowed as warm tears blinded him. It was a lovely morning out there, full of birds singing and gloomy faces. He kept on laughing because tonight, her knight in shining armor would see her again.

The light that illuminated the supermarket was as fake as the milk Sascha was about to buy. The milk was synthetic. It contained water, colour, and minerals that humans had made in large chemical factories. Before the supermarket was built, real cows had stood in its place. Then all the cows died. Many humans as well. Then Sascha’s father, Anton van der Meer, died. Sascha died in the supermarket while buying milk. The supermarket was built in the year 2057, when World War III had already begun. It had been triggered five years before.

The trigger for World War III was fifteen years old and went by the name Batbayar Ganbaatar. Ganbaatar never knew he was indirectly to blame for it. He sat at the foot of Sutai Uul when the incident occurred. Sutai Uul was one of the tallest mountains in a country then called Mongolia. From a glacier high on Sutai Uul, melted water trickled past Ganbaatar, until it reached Lake Tonkhil. A glacier was a thick mass of ice which crawled through the mountains.

Today there are no more glaciers.

Ganbaatar was a nomad and cowherd. But most importantly, he was in the middle of puberty and would have preferred to spend his time masturbating rather than looking for his cows. When Ganbaatar masturbated, he liked to think about Arielle McConnor, who back then enchanted the world with her beautiful voice and her big brown eyes. Arielle McConnor came from the United States of America, the land of great freedom, and sang in English. Ganbaatar didn’t understand English but he liked her voice and her eyes and what she did to him when he closed his eyes and concentrated.

While sitting there, eyes closed, concentrating, his cows continued to drink the water of the Sutai Uul glacier that flowed past them on its way to Lake Tonkhil. If Ganbaatar had looked closely, he still would not have seen that his cow Arielle had laid the foundation for World War III.

Here is what ice on Earth was good for: humans stored food in ice to make it last longer. Nature stored bacteria in ice to make them last longer. Bacteria were small creatures that humans could only see with the help of a magnifying device. Nature had stored bacteria in the Sutai Uul glacier. Now these bacteria floated down, past Ganbaatar and his cows, all the way to Lake Tonkhil. Some of these bacteria were absorbed by the cow Arielle. Clever humans later named the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense. The disease it caused was called Cattle Tuberculosis, or CAT for short. Cats couldn’t get infected with it.

When one of the bacteria entered a cow, it multiplied. If a cow had the bacterium inside it and met another cow, the bacterium entered that cow as well. Ganbaatar’s cows met many other cows. The following happened when the bacterium had multiplied sufficiently: The cow got tired and was hungry no longer. In the cow’s lungs, small nodules formed in the blood vessels, which burst after a while. The cow coughed up blood from its lungs and died. Ganbaatar’s cow Arielle died after twenty-three days. Had it been able to speak, it would have wished for death to arrive sooner.

Thanks to Ganbaatar’s cows, which he drove further south, CAT was able to reproduce and from there came to China, Kazakhstan, and India. India was a country where cows were sacred to many humans. I mean, why not? Unfortunately, a disease that killed cows was not the best thing for a country where cows were sacred. While CAT was not dangerous to humans, many clever ones thought it might be possible for the bacterium to mutate and eventually adapt to them. Some of these wise humans said the best thing to do was to kill all the cows.

Nobody killed cows in India because cows were sacred.

In the United States of America, the land of great freedom, humans liked to kill because guns were sacred. So, the humans there started shooting all the cows. The smart humans then said to humans in other countries they should pretty please do the same. In Europe, humans followed the words of the United States of America, the land of great freedom. In India and China, they refused.

Four years after Batbayar Ganbaatar sat by Sutai Uul with his eyes closed, concentrating, the last cow in the Americas died.

At the same time, back on top of Sutai Uul, the glacier continued to melt and revealed something else: a tiny spaceship.

The spaceship belonged to Dulrax Zondobar. Dulrax Zondobar himself belonged to the Pirasakut, who lived about eighteen light-years from Earth on the planet Ylon-B.

Here’s why Dulrax Zondobar’s spacecraft ended up in the glacier: Dulrax Zondobar, distinguished professor of anthropology at Ylon-B University, had to make an emergency landing during a research trip. The forced landing took place during the last great ice age, when the glacier had formed on Sutai Uul. Dulrax Zondobar had been preserved in ice for thirty thousand years. Just as nature had preserved the Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense, the cause of CAT, in ice.

When Dulrax Zondobar landed on Earth, Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense did not exist. What did exist was the Mycobacterium bovis, which caused a less dangerous variant of bovine tuberculosis, and a hole in the fuel tank of Dulrax Zondobar’s spaceship.

The Pirasakut used a biological fuel made from slug-like creatures that was harmless on their planet, Ylon-B, but could cause serious mutations in living beings on Earth. Thanks to the fuel, Mycobacterium bovis mutated into the much more dangerous Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense.

When Dulrax Zondobar awoke from the ice, he had a problem: no fuel. So, he sent a message to his fellow Pirasakut. The Pirasakut communicated with their hands and fingers.

Before humans began communicating with their lips and their tongues and other parts of their mouths, they also used their hands. Then they used their hands to develop tools and beat other humans to death.

Now they don’t communicate any longer.

Even though the Pirasakut had a similar build to humans, there was one difference. Where humans had a head, the Pirasakut had a third arm with a third hand and a third set of fingers. They used their side-fingers to telepathically send messages and their top-fingers to receive them. Sending a message far into space required larger fingers than usual, so Dulrax Zondobar had to boost his transmission power. He did this by using the largest hands that existed on Earth.

These hands belonged to humans that have been more important than others. They were as fake as the milk and as fake as the illusion that all humans were equally important.

In order to show these important humans how important they were, less important humans recreated them using stone or metal, and these recreated, important humans were placed in large squares. Humans called these fake humans statues.

Dulrax Zondobar used the statues’ hands to send a message to the other Pirasakut. With the help of a device in his spaceship, he was able to position the fingers of the statues as needed and sent the message out into space. The Pirasakut called the device Telespector. The message consisted of two hundred and eighty-three thousand different finger signs. Here’s what Dulrax Zondobar sent to the Pirasakut on Ylon-B:

HELP! DULRAX ZONDOBAR

While Dulrax Zondobar waited for help, the United States of America, the land of great freedom, threatened to use nuclear weapons to wipe out all cows in India and the rest of Asia. Some humans thought this was a slight overreaction. India still refused. Cows were still sacred there.

Meanwhile, Dulrax Zondobar’s message had arrived on his planet Ylon-B, and the Pirasakut sent a fleet to rescue the stranded professor. The Pirasakut ships were fast. On departure they said, “Zip-wop.” Mongolian authorities, who sided with India on the cow issue, discovered their ships and reported enemy aircraft to India. India mistook the spaceships of the Pirasakut for airplanes of the United States of America, the land of great freedom. Fearing invasion, India sent a nuclear bomb towards the Americas, which was intercepted en route.

The United States of America fired back.

World War III was now coming to India and with it Americans and Europeans who killed all the cows and many humans. By that time there was already no more milk in the supermarkets and the Pirasakut were on their way back to Ylon-B.

Sascha van der Meer was not only good-looking, but I had also endowed him with a polite personality. He would never have said the following word to the old lady standing next to him at the supermarket’s milk shelf: “Cunt!” Perhaps he would have been able to if he had known who the lady was. But I never gave him that information.

The lady was seventy-one years old, and her name was Anna Baumann. Her husband’s name was Julius Baumann. Julius Baumann was dead. And it was his fault that Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, was dead too.

Julius Baumann had been working at Tepco Ltd. when CAT started to spread. Tepco Ltd. was the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, and Julius Baumann tried to develop a vaccine against CAT. Although Julius Baumann was among the smart humans who were concerned about mutations in the Mycobacterium bovis subsp. mongoliense, he didn’t succeed with creating a useful vaccine. One of the promising vaccines was called CI-6. CI-6 was Julius Baumann’s greatest hope. With its help, many test cows had been saved from death by CAT. Unfortunately, CI-6 came with side effects.

Cows vaccinated with CI-6 developed toxins in their milk. When calves drank from it, they would go into a frenzy and soon die of cardiac arrest. One morning, Julius Baumann arrived at the Tepco Ltd. laboratory and he found the usual pile of dead cows, but also an unusual pile of dead employees. Millions of dying cows had a bad effect on the mental health of humans, so many of them decided to end their lives. This was what one of Julius Baumann’s colleagues decided as well. He was a mad man. This mad man wanted to die by drinking the milk of cows that had been vaccinated with CI-6. In his opinion, something that caused cardiac arrest in cows should certainly do the same in humans.

He was wrong.

What happened was that Julius Baumann’s colleague had been thrown into a frenzy and killed all the colleagues in the lab. Tepco Ltd. security guards eventually shot him.

At least he had reached his goal.

Julius Baumann continued his research on this milk and found that it made humans uninhibited and aggressive. Exactly the right tool for a war. And since Julius Baumann was not only in possession of intelligence but also had a wife who was very fond of money, he sold his knowledge about the milk to the military. They were pleased because from now on their soldiers could kill much more efficiently and without a bad conscience.

They called the milk War Milk. War Milk turned even the kindest of humans into ruthless killing machines.

One of the kindest humans was called Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was born about two thousand and sixty years before World War III, and two thousand years after his birth many humans gave socks to each other to celebrate his birthday. Apparently, he was the son of a God.

In this story I am the only god and my son’s name was Sascha.

All soldiers stationed in India received War Milk. Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, was stationed in India twenty-one years before Sascha entered the supermarket.

Before World War III began, there were too many human beings on Earth because humans spent a lot of time connecting parts of their bodies, and not so much time caring about glaciers. This is one of the reasons why there are no more glaciers today. Nine months before Sascha’s visit to the supermarket, an Indian woman had spent roughly seven minutes connected to an Indian man, and nine months regretting it.

To compensate for this new life and to counter overpopulation, I decided to kill Sascha.

In Jaipur, in the northern part of India, Manisha Bhandari was in labour. Manisha Bhandari’s father, Himal Bhandari, was among the humans who considered cows sacred. Manisha Bhandari was poor. When she was a little girl, she played with cow bones.

She had never found her father’s bones.

Before Himal Bhandari, her father, died, he was tired and no longer hungry. When he was shot, he was coughing up blood from his lungs. Had he still been able to speak, he would have wished for death to arrive sooner.

As Manisha Bhandari’s labour intensified, Sascha’s death also advanced with great strides.

Sascha was still standing in front of the shelf with the artificial milk. Here are the last words his father spoke to him: “Make sure to drink enough milk.”

Then he shot himself.

Sascha’s mother removed her husband’s blood residue from the tiles with scouring milk. Scouring milk wasn’t real milk, but a white liquid that humans used to remove stains. When humans drank scouring milk, they died.

Sascha’s mother drank scouring milk.

Anton van der Meer, Sascha’s father, didn’t drink scouring milk. He drank War Milk.

Anton van der Meer was the perfect killing machine. He worked smoothly. In five months, Anton van der Meer killed one hundred and thirty humans in Jaipur, in the northern part of India. He was an excellent automated killing machine. He killed one hundred and thirty humans with a well-aimed shot to the lungs, sometimes a second one, just to make sure. Anton van der Meer was efficient and bureaucratic. One hundred and thirty humans on a list.

Ayush Singh: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. Next please! Khira Kumar: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. Next please! Himal Bhandari: a well-aimed shot to the lungs. And so on. Anton van der Meer was a mindless killing machine as long as he was given War Milk.

When the war was over, he was no longer given War Milk but what he got instead was dreams of Indians starved to the ribs, bleeding from their mouths.

Next please!

At first the dreams haunted him at night, then also during the day. Anton van der Meer saw dead Indians everywhere.

“Make sure to drink enough milk,” he said to Sascha when he could no longer bear the many Indian nightmares, and he shot himself with a Glock 54. The Glock 54 was a semi-automatic killing machine that fully automatic killing machines like Anton van der Meer used. The semi-automatic killing machine came from Austria, the country where Sascha was now standing in the supermarket. Anton van der Meer’s gun was never found after his suicide. Sascha’s shopping trip had meanwhile led him to the cleaning supplies. On the shelf next to the scouring milk I put the second present for him, a Glock 54.

Sascha knew what he had to do. Meanwhile, Manisha Bhandari’s son was born. A little later, a bacterium entered his body, which clever humans called Bordetella pertussis. The bacterium caused Manisha Bhandari’s son to develop whooping cough. He died a few days later. Well.

Lea herself didn’t have a mobile phone on her as she hardly used it. This was because she preferred to have different equipment for different purposes. To take photos, she used a camera. To find a new place, she consulted first a traditional map and then she drew her own small map which she held in her hand when looking for her destination. Most importantly, however, Lea simply did not like the look and touch of smartphones. For her, a smartphone was like a cross between a grenade and a rodent, waiting for the right moment to blow one’s hand or bite one’s ear, therefore she normally left it at home and only took it when travelling abroad. Even then, she put it at the bottom of her suitcase, where it quietly run out of battery. Lea’s smartphonophobia didn’t go unnoticed. People asked her how she managed to survive being so ‘disconnected’. When she explained, they gave her funny looks or with ironic smiles wished her good luck in moving against the tide.

A couple of weeks after the episode in the restaurant Lea noticed that most people’s smartphones emitted an orange light and that when looked at from a specific angle, the ears and hands of some of the smartphone users were also glowing with orange light, albeit much weaker than that which the phones emitted. She didn’t share this observation with anybody, not to reinforce her reputation as an eccentric, but at home she took the smartphone away from Alex, her son, replacing it with an old model of a mobile phone and asked him not to use it, unless absolutely necessary. Since then she spent much time teaching Alex the skills one needed when one didn’t have a phone, such as using maps and playing music from vinyl records and CDs. To make him keener, she told him that this was what she and her father used to do when they were young, long before Alex was born.

Alex was initially dismissive of this ‘back to the old days’ exercise but later started to enjoy the time spent on the old devices or without any electronic equipment whatsoever, cycling with Lea to the neighbouring villages and having lunch in the old-style cafés. It was on such trips that Alex also discovered the orange light originating from the bodies of some guests. Unlike Lea, for him the light had a different intensity and shape; on some occasions Alex saw a glow, on others, sharp rays piercing the air and reaching as far as the ceiling.

“The orange monsters try to find the best way to take over people’s bodies and launch an attack,” he said to Lea, pointing out to her a particularly strong orange ray, which for her, however, looked like a fragment of a blurred rainbow.

“Shh, don’t say that to anybody,” said his mother. “People will take us for nutters.”

“But we’re not,” protested Alex.

“I know, but as long as the rest of the world doesn’t see the world the way we do, our perceptions are not valid.”

On one visit to the café some twenty miles from home, Lea noticed that light also emanated from Alex and it was green. When by chance he lifted his hand, sharp green rays crossed in the air with one man’s orange rays. The man must have got a strong headache as a result as he buried his head in his hands and went to the waitress asking for Aspirin. For the duration of their stay, the guests’ smartphones stopped working. In consequence, some people left before they finished their meals and one went to the manager accusing her of creating ‘white space’ to force the customers to eat more. Lea and Alex found this accusation rather funny, but they kept quiet and left when there were still several customers, so they couldn’t be identified as the culprits. After that, they tried to avoid this café. Luckily it coincided with a beginning of a period of short days and heavy rain, followed by an unusually severe winter, which put Lea and Alex off from cycling. They were spending most of their weekends at home, reading books, listening to music and playing board games. They also hugged a lot and touched each other’s hands. Although it was enjoyable by itself and the two were affectionate all of Alex’s life, they felt that now there was more to it than cuddling, as every time their bodies touched, a refreshing coolness moved between them and they became more energetic. Without saying a word, they knew when it was happening and giggled when it did so.

When winter passed, many of the children in Alex’s school got ear infections. It was attributed to a nasty virus which arrived in the North of England, together with the bad weather. Its peculiarity consisted of attacking only one ear, the right in the case of right-handed children, and the left in the case of the left-handed ones. It caused a burning pain and black discharge, which looked like ash mixed with saliva. The doctors didn’t know what to do apart from giving the children antibiotics and vitamins because they were not familiar with such an ailment. Alex was the only child in his year who didn’t get the illness. He told his form tutor that this was most likely because he stopped using a mobile phone, but she laughed it off, saying that it was proved beyond doubt that smartphones were completely safe and the school was not a place to spread conspiracy theories. But during the same meeting, she praised Alex for making progress in practically all of his subjects. In less than a year he moved from being an average pupil to the top of his class. Alex believed that this was not because he had gotten much better, but because the rest of his class had gotten worse, but he didn’t say it as he didn’t want to offend anybody.

Eventually, the ear infections cleared up but the children emerged from the illness weaker. Most lost hearing in one ear and after some time, in the other, as well as their appetite and energy. A year after the mysterious illness only about a dozen kids in Alex’s school were still able to hear and the school had to adapt to teaching all children as if they were deaf. The same pattern could be observed across the whole region; children got ear infections which debilitated them. Lea was surprised that the media kept quiet about this epidemic; the only sign that it was acknowledged was indirect; the health section of the BBC website heralded the lowering rates of child obesity in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the area’s drive to learn sign language, which was presented as a sign of the growing inclusivity of the British society, particularly the North.

Alex didn’t mind using sign language at school, but this made him eager to return home, where he could chat with his mother in his usual noisy way, with talking being mixed with laughing. In fact, every day he came home anxious that Lea might also lose her voice because deafness and muteness had become more common also among the adult population. Quietly and gradually, sign language became the dominant language not only at schools but also in the offices of all sorts of businesses and even the parliament. Rather than fighting to translate sound language into sign language, now those who weren’t deaf demanded that the sound language was preserved in national institutions, but their plight was usually dismissed as bigotry.

The spread of deafness and muteness affected the way films and music were produced and consumed. There was a massive return to silent cinema. New films were made without sound; old films were subtitled or discarded if it was deemed unprofitable to subtitle them. The makers and distributors of these films argued that only now had cinema fulfilled its promise of becoming a universal language – the century of sound cinema was a step back on the road to achieving this goal. There was also a return to black and white films, as people were increasingly insensitive to colour, but here the resistance was stronger, especially from the arthouse directors’ lobby, who didn’t want to lose their distinction from those producing commercial films. In music, the louder instruments got prevalence over the quieter ones. Drums and bass guitars dominated the stage, rendering acoustic guitars, pianos and flutes redundant. Despite such adjustments, there was simply less demand for music, and musicians filled the queues for unemployment benefits. Many became homeless. One could see them begging on the streets of Marston, propped by their silent guitars, to indicate that they were not ordinary junkies or weaklings kicked out from their houses by their girlfriends, but a nobler kind, like the victims of tsunamis or political persecution. The problem was that the streets were now full of such destitute ex-professionals, surrounding themselves with their now obsolete instruments and almost nobody paid any attention to them. Everybody in Lea’s work agreed that it was only a matter of time before the university folk joined them, but for some strange reason, this moment kept being postponed.

Lea, who was both charitable and a music lover, was spending a large part of her salary handing money to the begging musicians. Eventually, she offered one such musician, a young man named Daniel with a sunny face and large dark eyes, who turned out to be half-Cuban and half-Hungarian, a room in their house. She thought, perhaps irrationally, that as Daniel knew three languages, he might keep his voice longer than most people.

Daniel was happy to move in. He admired Lea’s collection of Spanish books and conversed with her in this language. Sometimes Alex joined in, as the silence surrounding him outside home made him eager to learn foreign languages – something which he didn’t want to do previously. Daniel also played board games with Lea and Alex and started to teach Alex how to play guitar and drums, even though previously music was Alex’s least favourite subject at school, till it was quietly abolished due to the spread of deafness. For Alex’s thirteenth birthday Lea bought her son not one, but two guitars and a drum kit, as they were now sold for pennies. Daniel also turned out to be very good at repairing things in the house and even making furniture. Like Alex, he was also chatty and in a short time, Alex and Daniel became best friends. Every day Alex was checking if Daniel wasn’t producing any orange light and when he contracted it (usually after a trip to a shop or a local diner), Alex extinguished it through the touch of his ‘green hands’. He confessed to Lea that he was doing it also at school, and after several of his ‘healing sessions’ kids were regaining some of their hearing and voice. Lea asked if the teachers knew about his power, but he said no – he was doing it discreetly, not out of fear of teachers, but in order not to be pestered by the whole school.

The growing deafness slowed communication as everything now had to be written down or conveyed by gestures. People also started to make more mistakes in their writing than they used to. At Lea’s university, the lecturers got special training to learn what the students intended to say when they wrote gibberish and mark their work according to the merit of their intention. However, many of those who were meant to teach them also experienced illiteracy of sorts and were unable to decipher either the text or its intentions. Consequently, nobody now wanted to show colleagues how they marked their students’ work in order not to be accused of incompetence. The management recognised the problem as it was itself also plagued with it. The response was limiting direct communication to the bare minimum. In order to send an e-mail to an external institution, one had to receive numerous permissions and even writing to colleagues required vetting by the head of department and somebody from HR. Lea began to wonder whether other employers adopted the same procedures, but it was impossible to find out because employers everywhere were secretive about their practices.

As weeks and months passed, Lea’s workplace became quieter, literally and metaphorically, as the people lost the will to write or gesture, as well as their voice. In offices, she frequently saw employees scrolling a mouse on a blank computer screen with a vacant expression or moving their finger on the lower parts of their smartphone as if they were reading the Braille alphabet. They even didn’t do it to pretend that they were working, as they didn’t change their behaviour when their superiors came in. There was much talking about the change – the approaching change was the explanation and excuse for this stupor because there was no point in investing one’s energy in the present, if the present was meant to be swept away any minute from now.

Eventually, the change was about to happen: the company Pineapple decided to introduce to the market a new smartphone, the ‘wordless’. The idea behind it was that people would send messages using a phone which would absorb the person’s thoughts, edit them and pass them to their addressee. This soon-to-be universal telepathy was meant to be the fastest, cheapest and most effective way of communication ever invented. To transfer their thoughts properly, however, people would have to focus on what they wanted to say or otherwise, the wrong messages would be delivered or they would be unreadable or get stuck in the thoughts-processing centres. One could imagine how dangerous such a situation would be, if, for example, political and industrial secrets were passed to enemies. A wrong use would also lead to unnecessary use of electricity and e-waste. In short, there were meant to be great advantages to learning how to use the Pineapple phone well and disadvantages in resisting this great invention. Pineapple admitted that the new phone was a bit bulky, but all great inventions started like that. In due course, it would become smaller and more convenient to use.

Lea’s university signed an agreement with Pineapple to launch there a pilot project to assess the effectiveness of the new phone before the device was to be used commercially; the Training Unit was given the task of testing the new technology on its employees. The skill needed to master it was labelled the ‘channelled mode of thinking’ and it consisted of thinking one thought at a time and making sure this thought was directed to the right address: the student, the colleague, the manager or somebody external. Thoughts had to move quickly rather than occupy one’s mind endlessly and be work-centred rather than private or random, as this is what working should be about – being at one’s office not only in one’s body but also in one’s mind. To participate in this test, the staff was to wear the phone during their working hours. It looked like a helmet, filled with thin cords which attached themselves to the nerves like tentacles of the octopus, except that an octopus had only eight tentacles while this helmet had hundreds. The tentacles were meant to collect the thoughts and send them to the processing centres which would edit them before passing them further, as well as prepare the statistics for the day, listing how many messages were prepared correctly, how many went adrift, how many stay in one place and the overall quality of intellectual work performed by a given person. Those who had a low ratio of correct messages were to receive extra support either from motivational speakers or yoga instructors. The former were to help the staff think fast and straightforward; the latter to assist them in concentrating on useful thoughts and to clear their heads from ‘dust’. People gossiped that the best way to pass this test, which presumably would determine one’s continuous employment or lack thereof was to clear one’s mind with a line of cocaine in the morning. The management must have found out about it as the next day the campus was plastered with posters about the dangers of drugs and warnings that being caught on using them equalled instantaneous dismissal.

“Can I opt-out from this trial?” Lea asked a woman who was leading one of the pre-testing sessions.

“Why do you want to do that?” asked the woman.

“I would like to keep my thoughts private,” said Lea.

“Honest people have nothing to hide,” said the woman.

“They might want to hide this very fact, in order to not be taken advantage of,” said Lea.

“This exercise is not about curtailing people’s privacy or censoring their thoughts, but about working more efficiently and improving communication. This is how humanity develops – by changing the modes of communication. Once one mode ceases being efficient, another needs to be introduced. We are now on the threshold of the communication revolution, but to make it happen, we need to show commitment.”

“Can you explain to me why the old mode of communication stopped being efficient? Why people can’t speak or write correctly anymore?” asked Lea.

“This is an evolutionary thing. Certain organs regress or disappear when they stop being useful, like the tails on monkeys when they developed into humans. Of course, there are always “dinosaurs”, who keep their extra teeth or useless tails, even groom them as if they were a sign of their superiority. But they delude themselves by thinking that they matter; they are irrelevant or even obstructive. It is in these organs where toxins accumulate.”

Lea wasn’t convinced by this argument, which sounded memorised and recited, so there was no point to discuss it any further, especially as her interlocutor produced an above-average amount of orange light, which made Lea almost dizzy.

“Returning to your question, I will have to talk to my boss. I will let you know as soon as I find out,” said the woman.

The following week Lea learnt that going through the training was not compulsory, but was essential for keeping her professorial job and salary. The alternative was to get re-deployed, either to the university catering services or to estate management, moving furniture and other stuff along with the robots. She decided to go to catering as she couldn’t do heavy lifting. She was sad to tell Alex, as he was always proud that his mother was a professor, but it turned out that he wasn’t too concerned. He said that they would manage even on her reduced wages, as they were used to modest living and thanks to working in the kitchen Lea was allowed to bring uneaten food back home. In fact, there was so much waste food these days, that the leftovers were enough for all three of them. The government boasted that the epidemic of obesity was finally averted, but in Lea’s view, it was less to do with the policies of public health or self-restraint and more with the general lethargy enveloping the population.

Some of her new co-workers, like Lea, found themselves in catering because of their refusal to wear the gear provided by Pineapple. They made their choices for various reasons. A couple of union activists objected because they were politically minded and didn’t want their thoughts being censored; two lecturers from psychology because they were prone to migraines and dizziness and believed that the ‘helmet’ would trigger their illnesses. There was also a woman from the fashion department who refused this gear because she specialised in designing hats and regarded the headgear as hideous and a threat to her job. They were all called the ‘Left Behind’. It was meant to be a term of abuse, but their recipients embraced it. ‘We, the Left Behind must stick together,’ they said and they greeted each other by putting their hands on their heads as if to show that nothing, literally and figuratively, was exerting pressure on their brains – they were their own masters. Lea looked at this budding symbolism with amusement, yet she succumbed to it because she didn’t want to be left behind even by the Left Behind. She wanted to belong somewhere, not so much for her own sake, as for Alex’s.

Lea quite liked her new work, not least because half of the people who were working in catering weren’t deaf and even when they were making wraps and sandwiches, they engaged in conversation. They also didn’t mind speaking their minds. But even the most outspoken complained that ‘speaking one’s mind’ didn’t mean what it used to, because society had lost the ability to judge others’ outspokenness. The language of most people had become reduced to the basics and such layers of linguistic expression as irony went unnoticed by its recipients.

One day after work Lea found in her pigeonhole a piece of paper inviting her to a meeting at the professor of neurosurgery’s house, Eric, who’d been demoted to the campus’ assistant gardener. He lived in a part of Marston that Lea had never visited before. There were about ten people when Lea arrived, mostly university folk, but there was also a woman who used to work at the council and got fired when she demanded that a quarter of the city become an internet-free area.

They started the meeting by introducing themselves and then Eric said: “We’re meeting here because we are concerned about the future: our own future and that of our children and grandchildren. We are called the Left Behind, but I believe that it is the rest of the world which is moving backwards, while we, at least, managed to stand still.”

“Why do you think so?” asked somebody.

“The people who surround us are gradually losing their senses. It started with hearing, but now it is also sight, smell, taste and touch. And with the loss of the senses, comes the loss of intellectual power, as it is the use of the senses which allows us to develop intellect, as John Locke observed as early as the seventeenth century. And when both the senses and intellect are impaired, the will to live also diminishes,” said Eric.

“We are told that the loss of the senses has to do with the development of intellect. The more intelligent people are, the less they need their senses. Pure intellect is meant to compensate for these losses,” said a woman from psychology.

 “I think this theory is false. Intellect is not autonomous – it cannot develop in the void,” said Eric.

“If this is the case, why does all of this happen?” asked Lea.

“I’m not sure, but I believe that this has to do with the consequences of long-term exposure to substances used in computers and even more so, smartphones,” said Eric.

“What substances?” asked somebody whom Lea had never met before.

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “I am or rather I was a neurosurgeon, not a chemist, but I think it is not a single element, such as mercury, whose effect on the body is fairly well-known, but their combination. And because as many as 62 different types of metals go into an average smartphone, it is very difficult to say which combination is most dangerous. It might be copper and neodymium, gold and terbium, zinc and dysprosium or all of them. But even before this epidemic, I discovered that some smartphones emit an orange glow which has the power to penetrate one’s body, like sunlight penetrating the bodies of people who spend too much time sunbathing. Once it has moved under the skin, it slowly destroys what is there, like the mysterious virus we heard about last year. Has anybody noticed the orange glow?”

Lea, of course, knew it very well, as well as the green glow, but she didn’t want to bring it up, at least not until the others did.

There was only one person who saw it, a guy from criminology who specialised in explosives. Correctly, he also noticed that the light took two forms: rays and an amorphous glow.

“Rays are for shooting, glow is for strangling,” he said in an impassive voice.

“Why can’t the rest of us see it?”, asked a man with very thick glasses, which made Lea giggle silently.

 “It’s possible that together with getting weaker, we lose the power to notice what happens to us. Ignorance is a means of putting up with loss”, said Eric.

 “So we are doomed?” asked the woman from the fashion department.

“I hope not. There were plagues in the past which decimated communities, but in the end, these communities managed to survive. Sometimes the epidemic simply went away; on other occasions, a cure was invented, like antibiotics. Here it seems to me that the first stage to halt the plague should be to give up smartphones. Instead, what we see is Pineapple introducing a more sophisticated version, which uses all these rare metals, only in larger quantities and produces more orange light, which goes straight to people’s brains.”

“Why do they do it? Do they want to destroy us?” asked the ex-council employee.

“We cannot exclude that possibility, but I think it has more to do with a need to conceal the old flaws. Once everybody is using the new version of the smartphone, nobody will ask what was wrong with the old version. This is how technology develops. Who these days, apart from historians, ponders on the disadvantages of using a jenny or printing machines? But I think we need to resist the change because the new smartphone is more dangerous than anything previously invented. It is not like a new jenny, but a new guillotine.”

“Why is this scheme being piloted in England, rather than in the States, where the company has its headquarters or in China where most of the smartphones are produced?” asked a man who used to work in sociology.

“Good question,” said Eric, “In fact, the pilot schemes are running in these countries as well. England, however, was chosen, because here the gap between what the people think and say publicly was deemed the greatest and this is especially the case in Marston. The assumption is that if the English people can be trained to “say” what they “think”, everybody can. But this is exactly the reason why we shouldn’t allow this to happen.”

“What should we do?”

“First, we should resist the experiment, not allow the orange light to penetrate our bodies and those of our kids. We also need to have our eyes open to people who might have developed antibodies, anti-rays. It is them who will show us a way out of this apocalypse.”

“How to recognise them?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I know that there are already people working on constructing equipment which would capture the orange radiation. The hope is that it will be able also to identify benign radiation. Most likely its carriers, our saviours, will be young and for some reason have been sheltered from the orange light until they were able to fight it. We need to have them on our side and extract their secret.”

“Surely we cannot do it without their consent and that of their parents,” said Lea.

“Why shouldn’t they consent when the saving of humanity is at stake?” asked Eric rhetorically.

“Maybe they want to be left in peace. Maybe their parents want them to be left in peace,” continued Lea, thinking that already she’d said too much.

“This would be very selfish of them,” said Eric.

On the way back Eric and his friend gave everybody a bunch of leaflets to distribute. Fittingly, they were printed on the old, yellowish paper which practically stopped being used some years previously and was quietly rotting in the rooms housing defunct equipment, such as photocopiers and scanners.

Its author, on behalf of the ‘Resistance’ asked that people stop using the helmets and ‘regain their voice’. Lea threw them in a bin on the way to the railway station, which took her almost an hour to get to. She was thinking how Marston had changed since she started working there twenty-six years previously. On the winter day of her job interview, she’d thought how she’d never seen as nice a place as Marston. All the shops were beautifully decorated: Debenhams, BHS, Marks and Spencer and dozens of independent shops. And over the next fifteen years or so all of them had gone. Only food shops remained but they were also decimated. Against the background of their disappearance, restaurants, pubs, hairdressers and beauty salons became more prominent and it stayed this way for a while until a new app helped people cut their own hair and they stopped going to restaurants because of the crowds of homeless people living in abandoned shops nearby.

Back at home, Lea asked Alex and Daniel whether they attracted any unusual attention at school. They didn’t.

“Okay, but don’t agree to wear a helmet or give blood or saliva or anything,” she said.

Eric’s predictions turned out right. Although still few people were able to see the orange light, in the next year belief in its existence became almost universal. This could be gauged by the ferocity with which the government and the established media rejected its existence as a conspiracy. ‘There is no orange light,’ was a message which appeared on the screens of computers and mobile phones, as well as on posters and billboards. Inevitably, as soon as such posters were put up, people got rid of the ‘no’. Like in the past tattoo parlours became popular, now the cities were filled with shops selling meters measuring one’s ‘orange radiation’, as well as measuring it on their premises. They were all illegal, but nobody cared – after many years of disappearing professions it was one which offset, albeit in a small measure, the losses of industry and trade. Soon the orange light meter sellers started to offer pills and tonics to reduce the radiation. Again, the authorities warned against their ineffectiveness and toxicity, but this was seen widely as proof that they were actually working. However, people were waiting for the true breakthrough – something which would allow them, not only to slow the penetration of orange light into their bodies, but regenerate them.

One day Alex came to Lea’s work to fetch her to see Daniel’s gig. Paradoxically, Daniel started to get more work recently, not because people were regaining their hearing but because those who were still able to hear were looking for spaces where they could meet like-minded or rather like-sensed people. During the concerts people would often throw their arms forward. This was to show that no orange light emanated from their hands: there were no traitors among them. Lea was reluctant to do so, as she didn’t like to participate in public displays of emotions. But, as the people around her looked at her, she did so and so did Alex. It was then that everybody noticed that they both produced more green light than the rest of the people in the room put together. Especially Alex – the rays from his hands managed to reach the furthest corners of the hall, changing the gloomy room into something like an old-style disco.

After the concert, Lea and Alex were surrounded by the rest of the audience. The people asked Alex to touch them – their ears, the top of their heads, their mouths. Alex did as he was asked, and some people put money into his pocket as he was doing it. But that wasn’t the end of it. He was asked to meet their relatives and friends. One woman said that she could arrange a large-scale ‘healing session’ in an old church.

Lea decided to intervene. She jumped in front of her son, saying. “Please, leave him alone. He’s just a boy and we don’t need your money.”

Lea took the notes out of Alex’s pockets and tried to give them back, but nobody accepted them.

“Keep them, keep them,” they were shouting.

They returned home by taxi. As they were leaving, people stood by the wayside, waving to them. It appeared that there were more of them now than there were at the concert.

Back at home, Lea said to Alex: “We cannot stay in this city. If more people learn about your ability to produce green light, we will be besieged. Somebody might want to kill you to extract the light from your body. We have to escape.”

“Mum, we cannot run away. These are my people. If I don’t save them, they will perish.”

Daniel joined in, adding, “Alex is right. We have to stay here,” and he put his arms around Lea and Alex and Alex embraced Daniel and Lea. Lea also, somewhat against her will, stretched her arms out and put them around Daniel and Alex, so that they created a circle. Then Lea noticed that there was a second circle surrounding them, made of green light. It didn’t stay still but moved as in a joyful dance.

Church tied a bandana over his mouth and nose and dumped the man’s bedpan into the tub of the hotel bathroom. The pan’s ecosystem had rubbed the porcelain raw and sent scaly growths climbing the lip of the tub, turning the curtains moth-brown.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Church told the Marriott man. “Chapter seven tonight.” He ruffled the pages of a tattered Dickens paperback, the cover peeled off.

The man’s eyes fluttered under their lids.

Church smiled.

He scrubbed the Marriott man’s dinner plate downstairs in what was once the restaurant kitchen. The Dastard Palms Hotel had a full pantry, even a year after the world had blacked out, enough yet for four months. Six, if the three of them stretched.

“How is he?” Marsh fished a warm beer from the fridge that hadn’t worked since February. Back then, she would have thrown on a T-shirt before entering the same room as him, but now she sweated through nothing but her workout tank and shorts, about to hit the shower.

“He’s conscious, I think. We need to move him into a new room soon. It’s spreading to the carpet.” Church dried the dinner plate and placed it in a cabinet labeled DAVY JONES in black Sharpie. He waited for Marsh to comment, but she never did. “I might need your help.”

Marsh pretended not to hear.

“Peloton says I’ve biked four hundred twenty-two miles.” She loosened and redid her wet ponytail. “I’d be all the way to South Carolina by now.”

“What’s in South Carolina?”

“Let’s say I was.”

Church nodded.

“That’d be at least one reason to visit, then.” He moved past Marsh and fetched a water bottle. Neither of them trusted the tap. “Mr. Marriott might like the Carolinas. It can’t beat Disney World, but it’s not like the rides are working.”

“Let’s say it’s only us. Let’s say Mr. Marriott stays here.”

Church redonned his bandana mask and thumbed his page in the Dickens paperback. He knew Marsh’s routine by now, and she knew his. Both knew what the other wanted to hear.

“Let’s say I’ll think about it.”

Church kept the poolside patio lights on every night, even when he wasn’t outside straddling a sun lounger and listening to strays rummage garbage in the darkness. The Milky Way spilled overhead in a starry earth-halo now that light pollution was nil, the hollow expanse of which reminded Church just how small he was. The abandoned Hyatt and Four Seasons and other superstructures of Resort District Florida punctured the skyline like looted Egyptian tombs from a bygone glory.

A radio coughed white noise beside his lounger, the dial slippery from use. He didn’t know what he hoped to hear through the static. There was nothing out there. The world was dead and he refused to bury it. The sole exception was some guy hunkered south of town playing Billy Joel over the air, but that was the only blip amid the blackout. Most nights Church found ole Billy eerier than the static.

Marsh’s Peloton whirred from her second-floor room. Through the balcony window, she was pounding pedals and racking up miles she couldn’t cash in. Even if it wasn’t for the extra juice she was drip-feeding into their tiny backup generator, Church had no doubt she would be up there pedaling anyway. She had arrived eight months ago, shortly after the world had stopped broadcasting and even the looters had begun migrating north. She had run marathons and iron mans before. Had run in the Olympics, too.

“Always running,” Church said to no one.

Church wasn’t a runner. He was a drifter. Too young to call himself a snowbird, but that’s what he was. Ever since Rachel died, before the world had gone dark and its people unraveled, he had made his way south, riding his thumb partway, buses in the other parts, nodding off at motels far worse than the Palms. Rachel had wanted to retire in Florida. A faraway plan meant for the faraway future, but after months at her bedside across five hospitals and four experimental treatments and more doctors than he could keep straight, the future had turned a sour, hollow color, and Church knew nowhere better to spend it.

In the early days, he and Marsh had made supply runs once or twice a week, gleaning whatever the looters had overlooked. The department stores and retail giants were out of the question. The fancy hotels and gated resorts fared worse; looters had sucked the ground-level rooms and pantries dry, stripped them clean to bone and plaster, but most folks hadn’t bothered hauling mattresses and mini-fridges all the way from the rooftop suites.

That’s where Church and Marsh found the expensive booze. Many a morning they would wake to find themselves sprawled in their underwear in a room they could never have afforded in the previous life, content not to ask each other if anything had happened the night prior. Because nothing ever happened.

Nothing until the Marriott man.

They had discovered him curled beetle-like and bleeding in the shower room of the Marriott northside of Disney, naked save for a towel. Marsh still had sympathy then.

Church had returned periodically those first few weeks, curious if anyone would come looking for Mr. Marriott. A wife. A son. A dog even. Someone to claim him. But no one came, and Church stopped expecting them.

Church didn’t expect much of anything now, but that all things would persist, that Mr. Marriott would take his time recovering, that the man would continue in stasis, tethered to this life by ambiguous, precarious strings. Church had expected Marsh always to be around to keep him sane, the inevitability of otherwise—of South Carolina—never once blipping onto his radar. He wouldn’t leave a dying man behind, but wouldn’t was a far cry from shouldn’t.

It was providence, them finding each other. The Marriott man wouldn’t find greater care from anyone else. It gave a flavor of meaning to it all, more than the poolside vigils and the drinking and the not-dying. It had given meaning to both Church and Marsh, or so Church had assumed.

He threw his beer into the pool and watched the water ripple. The bottle bobbed stubbornly, refusing to sink. When Billy Joel melted into static, Church dialed the radio off and thought about jumping in. Thought about bobbing. About sinking.

A crash and a sputter of barks echoed from far away, scattering all thought, but Church didn’t stir. Nothing ever disturbed the Dastard Palms. Strays and crocs didn’t sneak in anymore to dip in the pool, which was more bog than chlorine these days, though on occasion black fins flippered along the swampy surface, the same dark mysteries that swam in the Marriott man’s bedpan.

“It might be infected, but it’s not Davy Jones,” Church said.

“Would you lie if it was?”

Church didn’t answer.

Marsh sat on the kitchen counter with her back to Church and her shirt pulled over her shoulder blade. Her Cthulhu tattoo snarled at him while he inspected the rough patch of discolored skin bridging her bony spine.

“It’s not Davy Jones,” he repeated.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll borrow some of your poultice.”

The poultice had done little for Mr. Marriott, but Church didn’t argue.

“Do you think Davy Jones is it? This is what ended the world?” Marsh rolled her shirt down and pivoted on the counter.

“Has it ended? We’re still here.”

“Barely.”

Church shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s contagious, so no.” He bared his arms and wrists. “I would have sprouted by now if it was.”

Marsh swung her legs back and forth, pedaling air.

“He’s not getting better, you know,” Marsh said. “One day you’ll go up and find a fish in his bed, not a man.”

Church folded his arms and gave her an indulgent, academic nod.

“I used to change his sheets,” she said. “His body… There are appendages I couldn’t explain.”

If the Marriott man was mutating into some unholy crustacean, would Church wheel him to the coast one day to let him scuttle out to sea to be with his own kind? Church supposed he would. He couldn’t go on reading Dickens novels to a dead fish night after night, or maybe he would, if only to foster the illusion that nothing had changed. But the Marriott man was changing. The unspoken horror was what neither of them dared speculate; what if this wasn’t a man turning into an unthinkable, but something unthinkable turning into a man?

“You’re not paying some sort of penance by keeping him. He’s not Rachel. Even if he was—” Marsh reached out to take his hand, then must have thought better of it. “Sometimes it’s okay to accept what’s happening to a person.”

“You never knew Rachel.”

“No, but you did.” Marsh nudged him with her foot. “I wouldn’t think differently of you. If we left him, I mean.”

“You must think pretty low of me now, then.” Church grabbed her an unsolicited beer from the fridge. One for himself as well. Neither took a sip.

“You’ve done more than most men would, and not just for him.” She patted the countertop beside her, but Church didn’t take the invitation.

“I’m gonna run a bath for you,” he said. “You should soak that rough patch.”

Marsh was watching him, still pedaling, when Church turned away.

Church carried the Tupperware and blanket down to the shore, close enough to cool their toes in the sand but not close enough to soak their shorts. Marsh passed the gasoline jug between her hands, trotting ahead of him, humming a tune he never could name.

He set the picnic while Marsh scrounged their old firewood stash, higher up along the beach. Both remembered where. They used to motorbike to the ocean every week to watch the sun drown, summon a fire, drink a little, dance a lot, and invent backstories for the boats and debris that washed ashore. 

They didn’t talk about the Marriott man. They ate stale granola bars and rice and waved to the buoys blinking lonely blinks out at sea. A cruise ship lumbered by at a great distance more than once, stalking the shore, as dark and uninviting as water, ambiguously manned. They mooned over ships, not in the sense they wanted rescue, but out of curiosity; could it be that people lived on them, after all this time, that they had known better than to dock?

“You’d get claustrophobic on a cruise,” Church said.

Marsh smiled. They both knew this was true, but it wasn’t the point. Church withheld a joke about her growing her sea legs, opting to smile back instead.

They broke out the wine and mused about aliens and zombies and other cinematic clichés which may or may not have ended the world. Marsh’s theories, primarily. Church suspected the culprit was far more mundane. A glitch in the banks. An electromagnetic pulse. Nothing inherently apocalyptic. Just enough to galvanize worldwide unease, and the rest would have snowballed.

But after a little wine, gaslighted by those stars that made him small, he might have believed aliens. He might have believed the strangest of things. None stranger than Davy Jones. Maybe Davy Jones could have infected and eradicated humanity, but if so, it had arrived a few months too late.

Church teetered between dreamless sleep and the waking world, but before he could cross over, Marsh draped the blanket over him and slid the bottle from his hands. She lifted his head and mounded him a pillow of sand too. Church didn’t resist, but he never fully winked out. He lay beside the fire, eyes half-open, watching Marsh airplane her arms and tiptoe the shoreline, like she was a kid seeking balance.

While Church feigned sleep, Marsh chose her steps up and down the beach, the bottle ever in hand, but she never drank any. Church couldn’t remember if she had taken a sip all night. Not like before. The early days. The booze runs and the hotel-hopping that had led them to Mr. Marriott. Those days were gone. Could see it in the way she moved. The way she looked at him, then back at the sea. He might have believed she was a mercreature longing for home.

And who was he to prevent her?

For all he knew, the Marriott man also yearned. Again, Church considered bringing him to this very spot, only, unlike Marsh, who had no real interest in the water, the Marriott man would crab-crawl into and under the waves like a newly hatched tortoise. Church could then leave with Marsh and they could tackle the new world together, like the old days. This, for what it was worth, was how Church imagined it would go.

But tonight’s oceanside fire would be their last. A celebratory sendoff for Marsh before she departed. She didn’t need his permission, but she clearly wanted his blessing. Church wouldn’t withhold it, but he would selfishly savor these final moments. Like a child who wasn’t a child anymore, Marsh had outgrown the Palms. The Marriott man had yet to do so; he needed Church, or, maybe, Church needed him. A symbiosis. They had a place here, together, but Marsh no longer did.

When the day came for Marsh to hike north, Church joined her as far as the overpass. They stopped to rest on the hood of an abandoned Jeep and threw crumbs to the birds flocking on the exit ramp. They shared a sandwich and a warm Coke.

“Find me once you’re done here,” she said.

“South Carolina it is.”

They embraced. He pecked her on the cheek, and she kissed him on the mouth. It wasn’t exactly a romantic gesture, but it felt right.

“I know you won’t want me to worry about you, so I won’t.” Marsh looped her arms through both straps of her bag and was already backing away.

“No need. All the trouble’s gone north. Nothing left here.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

He waved her off until her silhouette shrank with distance and eclipsed the horizon. His gut urged him to go with her, to run after her and see where the End of Days led them, but he didn’t. He hoped to see her again, but hope wasn’t worth much.

The hotel district dug long shadows by the time he returned to the Palms. He sweated from the trek but postponed showering until after fixing the Marriott man dinner. He wasn’t hungry himself.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Church told him. “Last chapter tonight.”

The man’s eyes marbled under their lids.

Church dumped the bedpan.

The kitchen felt emptier that night. With Marsh gone, the pantry would hold out an extra three months. Church jotted this on the calendar. By the time the food ran out, he would need a new calendar, but he doubted he would care enough to hunt one down. He kept one from the year Rachel had died. Maybe he could reuse it.

He grabbed his radio and a beer and went outside to watch the pool. It was quiet: no Peloton whirring from the second-story balcony. Without Marsh’s pedals trickling juice into their backup generator, Church thought it best to conserve and leave the patio lights off.

He sat in darkness.

When there was no word from Billy Joel above the static, Church flicked the radio off and listened to wind whistling through the dead buildings. He wondered if future archeologists would have better luck than him in deciphering what had happened.

He was about to head inside to finish the Dickens book when movement at the edge of the pool made him go rigid. Silhouettes loomed. They weren’t strays or crocs. He hadn’t seen those in some time. These were tall, man-shaped shadows. These he had only theorized, maybe heard their distant sleuthing at night time and again, but never laid eyes upon. They now huddled at the hotel property fence, laying eyes upon him.

Marriott men.

Church wished he had kept the lights on.

They weren’t crustaceans, nor were they a fiction conjured by a drunken fever dream. They moved like elk—skittish and too quick for their size—and carried a salty, sea-carrion stench. Vestigial flesh dangled and twitched like tentacles from their inner thighs and armpits.

The Marriott men didn’t regard him any more than they might a stray. They scaled the fence with inhuman swiftness and waited while two of their number entered the Palms, slipping through the front doors, as traceless as a breeze. Church anticipated the fitful clatter of overturned furniture and ransacked cabinets, but it never came. The Palms idled in silence, unaware of its penetration. Church sank deeper into his lounger, every moment where nothing happened cinching his heart tighter and tighter. The Marriott men’s icy stillness was enough to drive him mad, and yet their body language suggested no threat. No violence. No concern. Like they weren’t trespassing. Like they were meant to be here and Church was a fly on the wall.

The two man-things returned after a small eternity with Mr. Marriott cradled in their arms, bouncing him like a baby. He slept like a baby. The one bearing him was tall, the alpha of the group, perhaps. His tentacles quivered over Mr. Marriott’s body, latching like thick veins to unnourished flesh. The others gawked. Had Church not known better, he would have guessed their alpha was about to breastfeed Mr. Marriott, but Church didn’t know better and there were no breasts, only amphibious ink-blue skin stretched over a flat chest, patches of Mr. Marriott’s cheeks already turning the same oily hue.

The alpha made unholy cooing noises, which stirred Mr. Marriott from his sleep, but rather than tremble or scream or act in any way surprised to wake to someone other than Church, he grinned and puckered little mewling sounds. He proved cooperative as the tribe of Marriott men embraced him and began gnawing his clothes off with their blunt, omnivorous teeth, revealing similar tentacles and anatomical taboos Church had spent months vying to cure.

Church waited for them to advance on his lounger and eat, dismember, or otherwise end him, but they didn’t. Their pupilless, moon-red eyes never blinked or lingered long on him. They took Mr. Marriott and disappeared over the fence, the Palms having fulfilled its purpose. To them, Church was as dead as the gutted hotels entombing him, unworthy of notice. He was but a relic from another time, another world, a world which had moved on, even if he hadn’t.