I made a noise of demurral and put my arm round her.
“Did you ever hear of a sensory deprivation tank?” She was peering up at me through the scrim of her hair, gold and red highlights, health in a bottle.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But you don’t mean—?”
“It was an older one, a model that’s not on the market anymore — one of the originals. My roommate’s sister — Julie Angier? — she had it out in her garage on Padaro, and she was really into it. You could get in touch with your inner self, relax, maybe even have an out-of-body experience, that’s what she said, and I figured why not?” She gave me a look, shy and passionate at once, to let me know that she was the kind of girl who took experience seriously. “They put salt water in it, three hundred gallons, heated to your body temperature, and then they shut the lid on you and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing there — it’s like going to outer space. Or inner space. Inside yourself.”
“And you were in there when—?”
She nodded. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read — pride, triumph, embarrassment, a spark of sheer lunacy. I gave her an encouraging smile.
“For days, I guess,” she said. “I just sort of lost track of everything, who I was, where I was — you know? And I didn’t wake up till the water started getting cold”—she looked at her feet—“which I guess is when the electricity went out because there was nobody left to run the power plants. And then I pushed open the lid and the sunlight through the window was like an atom bomb, and then, then I called out Julie’s name, and she … well, she never answered.”
Her voice died in her throat and she turned those sorrowful eyes on me. I put my other arm around her and held her. “Hush,” I whispered, “it’s all right now, everything’s all right.” It was a conventional thing to say, and it was a lie, but I said it, and I held her and felt her relax in my arms.
It was then, almost to the precise moment, that Sarai’s naked sliver of a face appeared at the window, framed by her two uplifted hands and a rock the size of my Webster’s unabridged. “What about me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and there it was again, everlasting stone and frangible glass, and not a glazier left alive on the planet.
I wanted to kill her. It was amazing — three people I knew of had survived the end of everything, and it was one too many. I felt vengeful. Biblical. I felt like storming Sarai’s ostentatious castle and wringing her chicken neck for her, and I think I might have if it weren’t for Felicia. “Don’t let her spoil it for us,” she murmured, the gentle pressure of her fingers on the back of my neck suddenly holding my full attention, and we went into the bedroom and closed the door on all that mess of emotion and glass.
In the morning, I stepped into the living room and was outraged all over again. I cursed and stomped and made a fool of myself over heaving the rock back through the window and attacking the shattered glass as if it were alive — I admit I was upset out of all proportion to the crime. This was a new world, a new beginning, and Sarai’s nastiness and negativity had no place in it. Christ, there were only three of us — couldn’t we get along?
Felicia had repaired dozens of windows in her time. Her little brothers (dead now) and her fiancé (dead too) were forever throwing balls around the house, and she assured me that a shattered window was nothing to get upset over (though she bit her lip and let her eyes fill at the mention of her fiancé, and who could blame her?). So we consulted the Yellow Pages, drove to the nearest window glass shop and broke in as gently as possible. Within the hour, the new pane had been installed and the putty was drying in the sun, and watching Felicia at work had so elevated my spirits I suggested a little shopping spree to celebrate.
“Celebrate what?” She was wearing a No Fear T-shirt and an Anaheim Angels cap and there was a smudge of off-white putty on her chin.
“You,” I said. “The simple miracle of you.”
And that was fine. We parked on the deserted streets of downtown Santa Barbara and had the stores to ourselves — clothes, the latest (and last) bestsellers, CDs, a new disc player to go with our newly electrified house. Others had visited some of the stores before us, of course, but they’d been polite and neat about it, almost as if they were afraid to betray their presence, and they always closed the door behind them. We saw deer feeding in the courtyards and one magnificent tawny mountain lion stalking the wrong way up a one-way street. By the time we got home, I was elated. Everything was going to work out, I was sure of it.
The mood didn’t last long. As I swung into the drive, the first thing I saw was the yawning gap where the new window had been, and beyond it, the undifferentiated heap of rubble that used to be my living room. Sarai had been back. And this time she’d done a thorough job, smashing lamps and pottery, poking holes in our cans of beef stew and chili con carne, scattering coffee, flour and sugar all over everything and dumping sand in the generator’s fuel tank. Worst of all, she’d taken half a dozen pairs of Felicia’s panties and nailed them to the living room wall, a crude X slashed across the crotch of each pair. It was hateful and savage — human, that’s what it was, human — and it killed all the joy we’d taken in the afternoon and the animals and the infinite and various riches of the mall. Sarai had turned it all to shit.
“We’ll move to my place,” Felicia said. “Or any place you want. How about an oceanfront house — didn’t you say you’d always wanted to live right on the ocean?”
I had. But I didn’t want to admit it. I stood in the middle of the desecrated kitchen and clenched my fists. “I don’t want any other place. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her drive me out.”
It was an irrational attitude — again, childish — and Felicia convinced me to pack up a few personal items (my high school yearbook, my reggae albums, a signed first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a pair of deer antlers I’d found in the woods when I was eight) and move into a place on the ocean for a few days. We drove along the coast road at a slow, stately pace, looking over this house or that, until we finally settled on a grand modern place that was all angles and glass and broad sprawling decks. I got lucky and caught a few perch in the surf, and we barbecued them on the beach and watched the sun sink into the western bluffs.
The next few days were idyllic, and we thought about little beyond love and food and the way the water felt on our skin at one hour of the day or another, but still, the question of Sarai nagged at me. I was reminded of her every time I wanted a cold drink, for instance, or when the sun set and we had to make do with candles and kerosene lanterns — we’d have to go out and dig up another generator, we knew that, but they weren’t exactly in demand in a place like Santa Barbara (in the old days, that is) and we didn’t know where to look. And so yes, I couldn’t shake the image of Sarai and the look on her face and the things she’d said and done. And I missed my house, because I’m a creature of habit, like anybody else. Or more so. Definitely more so.
Anyway, the solution came to us a week later, and it came in human form — at least it appeared in human form, but it was a miracle and no doubt about it. Felicia and I were both on the beach — naked, of course, as naked and without shame or knowledge of it as Eve and Adam — when we saw a figure marching resolutely up the long curving finger of sand that stretched away into the haze of infinity. As the figure drew closer, we saw that it was a man, a man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and hair the same color trailing away from a bald spot worn into his crown. He was dressed in hiking clothes, big-grid boots, a bright blue pack riding his back like a second set of shoulders. We stood there, naked, and greeted him.