Over the course of the next several days, the radio would sporadically come to life (I left it switched on at all times, day and night, as if I were going down in a sinking ship and could shout “Mayday!” into the receiver at the first stirring of a human voice). I’d be pacing the floor or spooning sugar into my tea or staring at a freshly inserted and eternally blank page in my ancient manual typewriter when the static would momentarily clear and a harried newscaster spoke out of the void to provide me with the odd and horrific detaiclass="underline" an oceanliner had run aground off Cape Hatteras and nothing left aboard except three sleek and frisky cats and various puddles of flesh swathed in plaid shorts, polo shirts and sunglasses; no sound or signal had come out of South Florida in over thirty-six hours; a group of survivalists had seized Bill Gates’ private jet in an attempt to escape to Antarctica, where it was thought the infection hadn’t yet reached, but everyone aboard vomited black bile and died before the plane could leave the ground. Another announcer broke down in the middle of an unconfirmed report that every man, woman and child in Minneapolis was dead, and yet another came over the air early one morning shouting, “It kills! It kills! It kills in three days!” At that point, I jerked the plug out of the wall.
My first impulse, of course, was to help. To save Danielle, the frail and the weak, the young and the old, the chairman of the social studies department at the school where I teach (or taught), a student teacher with cropped red hair about whom I’d had several minutely detailed sexual fantasies. I even went so far as to hike out to the road and take the car into Fish Fry Flats, but the bar/restaurant/gift shop/one-stop grocery/gas station was closed and locked and the parking lot deserted. I drove round the lot three times, debating whether I should continue on down the road or not, but then a lean furtive figure darted out of a shed at the corner of the lot and threw itself — himself — into the shadows beneath the deck of the main building. I recognized the figure immediately as the splay-footed and pony-tailed proprietor of the place, a man who would pump your gas with an inviting smile and then lure you into the gift shop to pay in the hope that the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines and Pen-Lite batteries would prove irresistible. I saw his feet protruding from beneath the deck, and they seemed to be jittering or trembling as if he were doing some sort of energetic new contra-dance that began in the prone position. For a long moment I sat there and watched those dancing feet, then I hit the lock button, rolled up the windows and drove back to the cabin.
What did I do? Ultimately? Nothing. Call it enlightened self-interest. Call it solipsism, self-preservation, cowardice, I don’t care. I was terrified — who wouldn’t be? — and I decided to stay put. I had plenty of food and firewood, fuel for the generator and propane for the stove, three reams of twenty-five percent cotton fiber bond, correction fluid, books, board games — Parcheesi and Monopoly — and a complete set of National Geographic, 1947–1962. (By way of explanation, I should mention that I am — or was — a social studies teacher at the Montecito School, a preparatory academy in a pricey suburb of Santa Barbara, and that the serendipity that spared me the fate of nearly all my fellow men and women was as simple and fortuitous a thing as a sabbatical leave. After fourteen years of unstinting service, I applied for and was granted a one-semester leave at half-salary for the purpose of writing a memoir of my deprived and miserable Irish-Catholic upbringing. The previous year a high school teacher from New York — the name escapes me now — had enjoyed a spectacular succès d’estime, not to mention d’argent, with a memoir about his own miserable and deprived Irish-Catholic boyhood, and I felt I could profitably mine the same territory. And I got a good start on it too, until the plague hit. Now I ask myself what’s the use — the publishers are all dead. Ditto the editors, agents, reviewers, booksellers and the great congenial book-buying public itself. What’s the sense of writing? What’s the sense of anything?)
At any rate, I stuck close to the cabin, writing at the kitchen table through the mornings, staring out the window into the ankles of the pines and redwoods as I summoned degrading memories of my alcoholic mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, and in the afternoons I hiked up to the highest peak and looked down on the deceptive tranquillity of the San Joaquin Valley spread out like a continent below me. There were no planes in the sky overhead, no sign of traffic or movement anywhere, no sounds but the calling of the birds and the soughing of the trees as the breeze sifted through them. I stayed up there past dark one night and felt as serene and terrible as a god when I looked down at the velvet expanse of the world and saw no ray or glimmer of light. I plugged the radio back in that night, just to hear the fading comfort of man-made noise, of the static that emanates from nowhere and nothing. Because there was nothing out there, not anymore.
It was four weeks later — just about the time I was to have ended my hermitage and enjoyed the promised visit from Danielle — that I had my first human contact of the new age. I was at the kitchen window, beating powdered eggs into a froth for dinner, one ear half-attuned to the perfect and unbroken static hum of the radio, when there was a heavy thump on the deteriorating planks of the front deck. My first thought was that a branch had dropped out of the Jeffrey pine — or worse, that a bear had got wind of the corned beef hash I’d opened to complement the powdered eggs — but I was mistaken on both counts. The thump was still reverberating through the floorboards when I was surprised to hear a moan and then a curse — a distinctly human curse. “Oh, shit-fuck!” a woman’s voice cried. “Open the goddamned door! Help, for shit’s sake, help!”
I’ve always been a cautious animal. This may be one of my great failings, as my mother and later my fraternity brothers were always quick to point out, but on the other hand, it may be my greatest virtue. It’s kept me alive when the rest of humanity has gone on to a quick and brutal extinction, and it didn’t fail me in that moment. The door was locked. Once I’d got wind of what was going on in the world, though I was devastated and the thought of the radical transformation of everything I’d ever known gnawed at me day and night, I took to locking it against just such an eventuality as this. “Shit!” the voice raged. “I can hear you in there, you son of a bitch — I can smell you!”
I stood perfectly still and held my breath. The static breathed dismally through the speakers and I wished I’d had the sense to disconnect the radio long ago. I stared down at the half-beaten eggs.
“I’m dying out here!” the voice cried. “I’m starving to death — hey, are you deaf in there or what? I said, I’m starving!”
And now of course I was faced with a moral dilemma. Here was a fellow human being in need of help, a member of a species whose value had just vaulted into the rarefied atmosphere occupied by the gnatcatcher, the condor and the beluga whale by virtue of its rarity. Help her? Of course I would help her. But at the same time, I knew if I opened that door I would invite the pestilence in and that three days hence both she and I would be reduced to our mortal remains.
“Open up!” she demanded, and the tattoo of her fists was the thunder of doom on the thin planks of the door.
It occurred to me suddenly that she couldn’t be infected — she’d have been dead and wasted by now if she were. Maybe she was like me, maybe she’d been out brooding in her own cabin or hiking the mountain trails, utterly oblivious and immune to the general calamity. Maybe she was beautiful, nubile, a new Eve for a new age, maybe she would fill my nights with passion and my days with joy. As if in a trance, I crossed the room and stood at the door, my fingers on the long brass stem of the bolt. “Are you alone?” I said, and the rasp of my own voice, so long in disuse, sounded strange in my ears.