A disembodied voice emerges from the fog. “And now let’s return to the problem of rats, shall we?”
Vosch. I don’t see him. His voice has no source. It originates from everywhere and nowhere, as if he’s inside me.
“You’ve lost your home. And the lovely one—the only one—that you’ve found to replace it is infested with vermin. What can you do? What are your choices? Resign yourself to live peaceably with the destructive pests or exterminate them before they can destroy your new home? Do you say to yourself, ‘Rats are disgusting creatures, but nevertheless they are living things with the same rights as me’? Or do you say, ‘We are incompatible, these rats and I. If I am to live here, these vermin must die’?”
From a thousand miles away, I hear the monitor beeping, marking the beat of my heart. The sea undulates. I rise and fall with each roll of the surface.
“But it isn’t really about the rats.” His voice pounds, dense, thick as thunder. “It never was. The necessity of exterminating them is a given. It’s the method that troubles you. The real issue, the fundamental problem, is rocks.”
The white curtain peels away. I’m still floating, but now I’m far above the Earth in a black void awash with stars, and the sun kissing the horizon paints the planet’s surface beneath me a shimmering gold. The monitor beeps frantically, and a voice says, “Oh, crap,” and then Vosch’s: “Breathe, Marika. You’re perfectly safe.”
Perfectly safe. So that’s why they sedated me. If they hadn’t, my heart probably would have stopped from shock. The effect is three-dimensional, indistinguishable from reality, except I would not be breathing in space. Or hearing Vosch’s voice in a place where sound does not exist.
“This is the Earth as it was sixty-six million years ago. Beautiful, isn’t it? Edenic. Unspoiled. The atmosphere before you poisoned it. The water before you fouled it. The land lush with life before you, rodents that you are, shredded it to pieces to feed your voracious appetites and build your filthy nests. It may have remained pristine for another sixty-six million years, unsullied by your mammalian gluttony, if not for a chance encounter with an alien visitor one-quarter the size of Manhattan.”
It whizzes past me, pockmarked and craggy, blotting out the stars as it barrels toward the planet. When it breaks through the atmosphere, the lower half of the asteroid begins to glow. Bright yellow, then white.
“And thus the fate of the world is decided. By a rock.”
Now I’m standing on the shores of a vast, shallow sea, watching the asteroid fall, a tiny dot, a pebble, insignificant.
“When the dust from the impact has settled, three-quarters of all life on Earth will be gone. The world ends. The world begins again. Humanity owes its existence to a bit of cosmic whimsy. To a rock. It really is remarkable when you think about it.”
The ground shudders. A distant boom, then an eerie silence.
“And therein lies the conundrum, the riddle you’ve been avoiding, because confronting the problem shakes apart the very foundation, doesn’t it? It defies explanation. It renders all that’s happened impossibly discordant, absurd, nonsensical.”
The sea roils; steam whips and swirls. The water is boiling away. A massive wall of dust and pulverized stone roars toward me, blotting out the sky. The air is filled with high-pitched screeching, like the screams of a dying animal.
“I don’t have to state the obvious, do I? The question has been bothering you for a very long time.”
I can’t move. I know it isn’t real, but my panic is as the thundering wall of steam and dust bears down. A million years of evolution has taught me to trust my senses, and the primitive part of my brain is deaf to the rational part that screams in a high pitch like a dying animal, Not real not real not real not real.
“Electromagnetic pulses. Giant metal rods raining from the sky. Viral plague . . .” His voice rises with each word and the words are like thunderclaps or the heel of a boot slamming down. “Sleeper agents implanted in human bodies. Armies of brainwashed children. What is this? That’s the central question. The only one that really matters: Why bother with any of it when all you need is a very, very big rock?”
The wave rolls over me, and I drown.
I’M BURIED FOR MILLENNIA.
Miles above me, the world wakes. In the cool shadows pooling on the rain forest floor, a ratlike creature digs for tender roots. Its descendants will tame fire, invent the wheel, discover mathematics, create poetry, reroute rivers, level forests, build cities, explore deep space. For now, the only important business is finding food and staying alive long enough to make more ratlike creatures.
Annihilated in fire and dust, the world is reborn in a hungry rodent digging in the dirt.
The clock ticks. Nervously, the creature sniffs the warm, moist air. The metronomic beat of the clock speeds up, and I rise toward the surface. When I emerge from the dust, the creature has transformed: It’s sitting in a chair beside my bed, wearing a pair of jeans stiff with dirt and a torn T-shirt. Stoop-shouldered, unshaven, hollow-eyed inventor of the wheel, inheritor, caretaker, prodigal.
My father.
The beep-beep of the monitor. The dripping IV and the stiff sheets and the hard pillow and the lines snaking from my arms. And the man sitting beside the bed, sallow and sweaty, covered with grime, restless, nervously plucking at his shirt, bloodshot eyes and wet, swollen lips.
“Marika.”
I close my eyes. It’s not him. It’s the drug Vosch pumped into you.
Again: “Marika.”
“Shut up. You’re not real.”
“Marika, there’s something I want to tell you. Something you should know.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me,” I say to Vosch. I know he’s watching.
“I forgive you,” my father says.
I can’t catch my breath. There’s a sharp pain in my chest, like a knife driving home.
“Please,” I beg Vosch. “Please don’t do this.”
“You had to leave,” my father says. “You didn’t have a choice, and anyway, what happened is my own damn fault. You didn’t make me a drunk.”
Instinctively, I press my hands against my ears. But his voice isn’t in the room; it’s in me.
“I didn’t last long after you left,” my father tries to reassure me. “Only a couple hours.”
We made it as far as Cincinnati. A little over a hundred miles. Then his stash ran out. He begged me not to leave him, but I knew if I didn’t find some alcohol fast, he’d die. I found some—a bottle of vodka tucked underneath a mattress—after breaking into sixteen houses, if you can call it breaking in, since every house was abandoned and all I had to do was step through a broken window. I was so happy to find that bottle, I actually kissed it.
But I was too late. He was dead by the time I made it back to our camp.
“I know you beat yourself up over that, but I would’ve died either way, Marika. Either way. You did what you thought you had to do.”
There’s no hiding from his voice. No running from it, either. I open my eyes and look straight into his. “I know this is a lie. You aren’t real.”
He smiles. The same smile as when I made a particularly good move in a match. The delighted teacher.
“That’s what I’ve come to tell you!” He rubs his long fingers against his thighs, and I can see the dirt encrusted beneath the nails. “That’s the lesson, Marika. That’s what they want you to understand.”
Warm hand against cool skin: He’s touching my arm. The last time I felt his hand was against my cheek, in hard, stinging slaps while the other hand held me still. Bitch! Don’t leave me. Don’t you ever leave me, bitch! Each bitch! punctuated by a slap. His mind was gone. Seeing things that weren’t there in the profound darkness that slammed down every night. Hearing things in the awful silence that threatened to crush you every day. On the night he died, he woke up screaming, clawing at his eyes. He could feel bugs inside them, crawling.