I couldn’t keep my eyes closed, couldn’t stop watching the sheep watch us. I was out of breath, I was frozen, dizzy. Without finishing I felt finished. I slipped out of her and stepped back. I buttoned my pants and backed away, in the path of the wind. The nickly shimmer of the moon sat blankly, doing nothing.
“Sorry,” I said.
Her back to me, she dragged her pants up over her thighs. “Don’t be sorry. That would make it weirder.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “This is so bad.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “It’s bad if we say it’s bad. It’s not bad. It’s fine.”
I wanted to help her with her pants but I knew she’d refuse. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to be cut to pieces and eaten.
“Erin.”
She slid down against the wall and sat. She squinted at me. “That hurt, Tom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck!” she said. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck-fuck!”
“Sorry.”
“That hurt.”
“Sorry.”
“You should have at least waited.”
I wanted to throw myself over the anvil-shaped rock. Or I wanted to tell Erin that I wanted to throw myself over, so that she would feel for me, see my grief. We both sat for a minute, occasionally glancing at each other. I wanted to erase the road that had brought me to her.
I tried to touch her shoulder where her arm was missing. She brushed my hand to the ground.
“Shit,” she said. “This whole fucking year.”
In Erin’s room there was a cat. I’d seen this cat, in the hotel lobby, stepping gingerly along the granite mantle over the fireplace. It was very small and wailed when we entered.
“It’s hungry,” Erin said.
I didn’t agree. I thought the animal just wanted more than she deserved, that she was surely fed all the time, but I said nothing. I was glad that Erin was speaking to me.
Erin decided to go downstairs to get milk for the cat, and when she opened the door, the cat tried to leave with her. But Erin pushed it inside and closed the door.
We would feed the cat and love it, name it. I found food in the small fridge under the TV. Cashews. I opened the can and tossed cashew fragments on the carpet. The cat pounced and her head pecked at the nuts; she was finished in seconds. I dropped her another handful and she ate those. The door opened and Erin walked in with a glass of perfect white milk. I had never been happier than when she walked in. I would not be sent away, not yet.
Hours later, the cat was asleep, and Erin lay next to it, her eyes half-closed. There was purring. I felt content. Why does it give so much comfort to be responsible for someone’s sleep? We all — don’t we? — want creatures sleeping in our homes while we walk about, turning off lights. I wanted this now. I touched Erin’s soft head and she allowed me. She allowed me because she was tired. She seemed so profoundly tired. After Scotland I would not hear from her again.
As my fingers spidered through the strands of Erin’s hair, the brightness outside took my eyes from the room. The moon was striped by the blinds but I could see its nickly shimmer on the bay. It looked like aluminum foil, when crumpled and then smoothed with a thumb or the back of a knife. It smiled, eyed me with an unwelcome knowingness, and began to speak.
YOUR MOTHER AND I
I TOLD YOU about that, didn’t I? About when your mother and I moved the world to solar energy and windpower, to hydro, all that? I never told you that? Can you hand me that cheese? No, the other one, the cheddar, right. I really thought I told you about that. What is happening to my head?
Well, we have to take the credit, your mother and I, for reducing our dependence on oil and for beginning the Age of Wind and Sun. That was pretty awesome. That name wasn’t ours, though. Your uncle Frank came up with that. He always wanted to be in a band and call it that, the Age of Wind and Sun, but he never learned guitar and couldn’t sing. When he sang he enunciated too much, you know? He sang like he was trying to teach English to Turkish children. Turkish children with learning disabilities. It was really odd, his singing.
You’re already done? Okay, here’s the Monterey Jack. Just dump it in the bowl. All of it, right. It was all pretty simple, converting most of the nation’s electricity. At a certain point everyone knew that we had to just suck it up and pay the money — because holy crap, it really was expensive at first! — to set up the cities to make their own power. All those solar panels and windmills on the city buildings? They weren’t always there, you know. No, they weren’t. Look at some pictures, honey. They just weren’t. The roofs of these millions of buildings weren’t being used in any real way, so I said, Hey, let’s have the buildings themselves generate some or all of the power they use, and it might look pretty good, to boot— everyone loves windmills, right? Windmills are awesome. So we started in Salt Lake City and went from there.
Oh hey, can you grate that one? Just take half of that block of Muenster. Here’s a bowl. Thanks. Then we do the cheddar. Cheddar has to be next. After the cheddar, pecorino. Never the other way around. Stay with me, hon. Jack, Muenster, cheddar, pecorino. It is. The only way.
Right after that was a period of much activity. Your mother and I tended to do a big project like the power conversion, and then follow it with a bunch of smaller, quicker things. So we made all the roads red. You wouldn’t remember this — you weren’t even born. We were all into roads then, so we had most of them painted red, most of them, especially the highways — a leathery red that looked good with just about everything, with green things and blue skies and woods of cedar and golden swamps and sugar-colored beaches. I think we were right. You like them, right? They used to be grey, the roads. Insane, right? Your mom thinks yellow would have been good, too, an ochre but sweeter. Anyway, in the same week, we got rid of school funding tied to local property taxes — can you believe they used to pull that crap? — banned bicycle shorts for everyone but professionals, and made everyone’s hair shinier. That was us. Your mother and I.
That was right after our work with the lobbyists — I never told you that, either? I must be losing my mind. I never mentioned the lobbyists, about when we had them all deported? That part of it, the deportation, was your mother’s idea. All I’d said was, Hey, why not ban all lobbying? Or at least ban all donations from lobbyists, and make them wear cowbells so everyone would know they were coming? And then your dear mom, who was, I think, a little tipsy at the time — we were at a bar where they had a Zima special, and you know how your mom loves her Zima — she said, How about, to make sure those bastards don’t come back to Washington, have them all sent to Greenland? And wow, the idea just took off. People loved it, and Greenland welcomed them warmly; they’d apparently been looking for ways to boost their tourism. They set up some cages and a viewing area and it was a big hit.
So then we were all pumped up, to be honest. Wow, this kind of thing, the lobbyists thing especially, boy, it really made your mother horny. Matter of fact, I think you were conceived around that time. She was like some kind of tsunam—
Oh don’t give me that face. What? Did I cross some line? Don’t you want to know when your seed was planted? I would think you’d want to know that kind of thing. Well then. I stand corrected.
Anyway, we were on a roll, so we got rid of genocide. The main idea was to create and maintain a military force of about 20,000 troops, under the auspices of the U.N., which could be deployed quickly to any part of the world within about thirty-six hours. This wouldn’t be the usual blue helmets, watching the slaughter. These guys would be badass. We were sick of the civilized world sort of twiddling their thumbs while hundreds of thousands of people killed each other in Rwanda, Bosnia, way back in Armenia, on and on. Then the U.N. would send twelve Belgian soldiers. Nice guys, but really, you have a genocide raging in Rwanda, 800,000 dead in a month and you send twelve Belgians?