I heard her draw in a breath of astonishment and outrage from the far side of the thin panel that separated us. “What the hell do you think, you son of a bitch? I’ve been lost out here in these stinking woods for I don’t know how long and I haven’t had a scrap for days, not a goddamn scrap, not even bark or grass or a handful of soggy trail mix. Now will you fucking open this door?!”
Still, I hesitated.
A rending sound came to me then, a sound that tore me open as surely as a surgical knife, from my groin to my throat: she was sobbing. Gagging for breath, and sobbing. “A frog,” she sobbed, “I ate a goddamn slimy little putrid frog!”
God help me. God save and preserve me. I opened the door.
Sarai was thirty-eight years old — that is, three years older than I — and she was no beauty. Not on the surface, anyway. Even if you discounted the twenty-odd pounds she’d lost and her hair that was like some crushed rodent’s pelt and the cuts and bites and suppurating sores that made her skin look like a leper’s, and tried, by a powerful leap of the imagination, to see her as she once might have been, safely ensconced in her condo in Tarzana and surrounded by all the accoutrements of feminine hygiene and beauty, she still wasn’t much.
This was her story: she and her live-in boyfriend, Howard, were nature enthusiasts — at least Howard was, anyway — and just before the plague hit they’d set out to hike an interlocking series of trails in the Golden Trout Wilderness. They were well provisioned, with the best of everything — Howard managed a sporting goods store — and for the first three weeks everything went according to plan. They ate delicious freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo and shrimp couscous, drank cognac from a bota bag and made love wrapped in propylene, Gore-Tex and nylon. Mosquitoes and horseflies sampled her legs, but she felt good, born again, liberated from the traffic and the smog and her miserable desk in a miserable corner of the electronics company her father had founded. Then one morning, when they were camped by a stream, Howard went off with his day pack and a fly rod and never came back. She waited. She searched. She screamed herself hoarse. A week went by. Every day she searched in a new direction, following the stream both ways and combing every tiny rill and tributary, until finally she got herself lost. All streams were one stream, all hills and ridges alike. She had three Kudos bars with her and a six-ounce bag of peanuts, but no shelter and no freeze-dried entrées — all that was back at the camp she and Howard had made in happier times. A cold rain fell. There were no stars that night, and when something moved in the brush beside her she panicked and ran blindly through the dark, hammering her shins and destroying her face, her hair and her clothes. She’d been wandering ever since.
I made her a package of Top Ramen, gave her a towel and a bar of soap and showed her the primitive shower I’d rigged up above the ancient slab of the tub. I was afraid to touch her or even come too close to her. Sure I was skittish. Who wouldn’t be when ninety-nine percent of the human race had just died off on the tailwind of a simple sneeze? Besides, I’d begun to adopt all the habits of the hermit — talking to myself, performing elaborate rituals over my felicitous stock of foodstuffs, dredging bursts of elementary school songs and beer jingles out of the depths of my impacted brain — and I resented having my space invaded. Still. Still, though, I felt that Sarai had been delivered to me by some higher power and that she’d been blessed in the way that I was — we’d escaped the infection. We’d survived. And we weren’t just errant members of a selfish, suspicious and fragmented society, but the very foundation of a new one. She was a woman. I was a man.
At first, she wouldn’t believe me when I waved a dismissive hand at the ridge behind the cabin and all that lay beyond it and informed her that the world was depeopled, that the Apocalypse had come and that she and I were among the solitary survivors — and who could blame her? As she sipped my soup and ate my flapjacks and treated her cuts and abrasions with my Neosporin and her hair with my shampoo, she must have thought she’d found a lunatic as her savior. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, and I was gloating, I was, sick as it may seem, “try the radio.”
She looked up at me out of the leery brooding eyes of the one sane woman in a madhouse of impostors, plugged the cord in the socket and calibrated the dial as meticulously as a safecracker. She was rewarded by static — no dynamics even, just a single dull continuum — but she glared up at me as if I’d rigged the thing to disappoint her. “So,” she spat, skinny as a refugee, her hair kinked and puffed up with my shampoo till it devoured her parsimonious and disbelieving little sliver of a face, “that doesn’t prove a thing. It’s broken, that’s all.”
When she got her strength back, we hiked out to the car and drove into Fish Fry Flats so she could see for herself. I was half-crazy with the terrible weight of the knowledge I’d been forced to hold inside me, and I can’t describe the irritation I felt at her utter lack of interest — she treated me like a street gibberer, a psychotic, Cassandra in long pants. She condescended to me. She was humoring me, for God’s sake, and the whole world lay in ruins around us. But she would have a rude awakening, she would, and the thought of it was what kept me from saying something I’d regret — I didn’t want to lose my temper and scare her off, but I hate stupidity and willfulness. It’s the one thing I won’t tolerate in my students. Or wouldn’t. Or didn’t.
Fish Fry Flats, which in the best of times could hardly be mistaken for a metropolis, looked now as if it had been deserted for a decade. Weeds had begun to sprout up through invisible cracks in the pavement, dust had settled over the idle gas pumps and the windows of the main building were etched with grime. And the animals — the animals were everywhere, marmots waddling across the lot as if they owned it, a pair of coyotes asleep in the shade of an abandoned pickup, ravens cawing and squirrels chittering. I cut the engine just as a bear the color of cinnamon toast tumbled stupendously through an already shattered window and lay on his back, waving his bloodied paws in the air as if he were drunk, which he was. As we discovered a few minutes later — once he’d lurched to his feet and staggered off into the bushes — a whole host of creatures had raided the grocery, stripping the candy display right down to the twisted wire rack, scattering Triscuits and Doritos, shattering jars of jam and jugs of port wine and grinding the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines underfoot. There was no sign of the formerly sunny proprietor or of his dancing feet — I could only imagine that the ravens, coyotes and ants had done their work.
But Sarai — she was still an unbeliever, even after she dropped a quarter into the public telephone and put the dead black plastic receiver to her ear. For all the good it did her, she might as well have tried coaxing a dial tone out of a stone or a block of wood, and I told her so. She gave me a sour look, the sticks of her bones briefly animated beneath a sweater and jacket I’d loaned her — it was the end of October and getting cold at seventy-two hundred feet — and then she tried another quarter, and then another, before she slammed the receiver down in a rage and turned her seething face on me. “The lines are down, that’s all,” she sneered. And then her mantra: “It doesn’t prove a thing.”
While she’d been frustrating herself, I’d been loading the car with canned goods, after entering the main building through the broken window and unlatching the door from the inside. “And what about all this?” I said, irritated, hot with it, sick to death of her and her thick-headedness. I gestured at the bloated and lazy coyotes, the hump in the bushes that was the drunken bear, the waddling marmots and the proprietary ravens.