‘Twenty million cows are missing,’ he shouts across the distance; ‘they haven’t milked for a week. What are you going to do about it?’
I begin to formulate a sarcastic answer, but he sits at the piano and starts to play, and to sing purposely off-key.
The moon has, in fact, edged into the sky over the harbour, embalming the powerless buildings and streets in a formaldehyde white. The shadows are utterly black. Stars are flickering morse dots a long way off.
He stops playing. Then shouts: ‘You ever go overseas?’
‘To Sydney, once. To a conference.’
‘We were in Singapore. Last year. Great place.’
He comes back and sits by the table again.
‘Know anything about ships? Sailing?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Well we’re stuck here, aren’t we? I’m bloody useless with boats. We can’t even get to the South Island.’
‘You expect to find more people?’
‘Bound to be.’
‘There might be one other person in New Zealand. The survival rate must be about one in a million.’
‘Survival?’
‘Non-disappearance, then.’
‘We could have missed people. You’d have driven past Waiouru, I might have missed you by ten minutes. There could be people out there in the bush, could be months before they even know anything’s wrong. Deerstalkers. Anybody.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘One in a million, that’d still be a hell of a lot in Singapore.’
‘What would you do if we got to Singapore and there were a dozen Chinese or Malays or whoever they are? What’s the point?’
‘The point is—’
‘What would you do? Sing “Moon River”?’
He bangs the table, his eyes glittering, lips tight.
‘Well what’re you going to do? Eh? What if there’s an accident? If one of us gets sick? Then what? You get appendicitis, or something. You want me to cut you open, eh?’
A coldness goes through me, as though my stomach and intestines are actually being exposed to the air at that moment. The tension has squeezed this psychotic idea from inside his mind. He spreads his big hands down on the white tablecloth and looks down at them. Then he says, more quietly, ‘We stand a better chance if there’s more people. We don’t know how long it’ll go on, do we? What about women? I mean, there might be…there’s no reason why…’ His head sags and shakes. ‘Oh, hell, I don’t know.’ Then, silence, perhaps memories of barrack-room Malaysian prostitutes.
‘If we start panicking, we’ve had it,’ I say, as evenly as possible. ‘We’ve got to think logically. Right?’ He nods. I take a deep breath. ‘Look. Today we’ve driven for about two hundred and fifty kilometres. What did you notice about your windscreen?’
‘Notice? Why?’ He looks up.
‘Not a single insect. No flies. Mosquitoes. Moths.’ I waved my hand at the open windows. ‘After a week, not one.’
‘So what?’
‘We used fruit flies in our research. In genetics you need something which breeds fast. There used to be billions of insects. There should have been thousands of survivors. Flies have a two-day breeding cycle; they’d lay millions of eggs. They’d breed like mad, and there are no natural predators to keep them down. But we haven’t seen a single one of any species.’
‘They all disappeared, then.’
‘There are two other possibilities. Think about it.’
He stares at me with a frown, a long, slow minute.
‘No females.’
‘Yes. Or?’
A pause, then he says, ‘They’re all sterile.’
I nod. His head sags down again. The tape has run to its end; the music has gone. Outside, the city, livid, drained of colour, is spread out beneath our reflections.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he whispers. Then, ‘How could you find out?’
‘I can check the local research centres. The chances are, that the first option is correct. The most obvious solution is usually the most likely.’
The tone of my voice makes him glance up at me; I sound much calmer than I feel. He seems only half-convinced, as if he doesn’t want to believe that I can be so cool at this moment, so objective.
‘You mean, that they all disappeared?’ he says.
‘Yes. But I can check radiation levels as well.’
‘With Geiger counters?’
‘And with more sophisticated equipment. There are whole bands of radiation’—and I hold up my arms, side-ways—‘from ultraviolet out to cosmic radiation, through gamma rays, and then at the other end, from infrared through radar out to radio waves. I know enough to be able to check if there are any abnormalities. But’—and here I lean forward and look intently at him—‘I can’t do it without your help. To fix electrical equipment, to make power.’
To my relief, he responds, and his face becomes animated again. He nods vigorously.
‘Okay. Yes, okay.’
‘And we’ll have to set up a radio transmitter and a receiver, and do lots of monitoring over all the wavebands.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Then his expression clouds. ‘Doesn’t radioactivity…doesn’t it cause sterility?’
‘Only in very large doses.’
‘I thought—’
‘It usually changes the genetic structure…in various ways. ‘
‘Could you tell if that had happened?’
‘No. Only if there are some Drosophila—I mean, fruit flies, around.’
I seem to have convinced him that I know what I’m talking about, and he relaxes, looking apologetic. The last few sentences have been hard for me.
‘Sorry I was…you know.’
‘That’s alright. I should have explained a bit more.’
‘I just thought…there’d be someone here, in Wellington.’
‘If there’s anybody else in the North Island, I should think they’ll come here sooner or later.’
He nods again, and toys with some food on a plate.
‘How long do you reckon somebody would last before they…cracked up?’
‘Hard to say. Not much more than a week or two, I wouldn’t think.’
‘Be a few days, for some people.’
‘It would depend on their jobs, I suppose. On how they were trained to cope.’
‘Huh.’ A half-laugh; he presses some pieces of uneaten asparagus to a flat paste with a fork. ‘And we were trained, eh?’ Then, throwing the fork down, ‘Well trained.’
‘It’s not just that. It’s what you get to know about life, as well.’
‘Is it?’ He yawns, rubs his face, seems to be suddenly tired. ‘Not much life left to know about.’ The expanse of dead city has an almost hypnotic effect. ‘It can’t all be just for us,’ he says. ‘I’m not that important.’
I smile back; but in not immediately replying with an agreement that neither am I of much importance, I realise that perhaps he has set a test for me, and I’ve unwittingly confirmed something for him. In fact he looks away with a wry expression as though inwardly amused and only half-concerned to conceal it.
I did not want to have to know, to understand, very much about him. It had not seemed necessary. Now I can see that I have no choice. My survival might depend on it.
Because he is finding out about me, gathering information in odd ways, casually, perhaps not with any motive but because this is what he is used to; his life must have forced him to spend a lot of time trying to understand Europeans. I am at a disadvantage. I would not have said—and this comes to me with no great blaze of revelation—that I had ever begun to understand even myself. I knew a great deal, I knew many things; but there was some impediment which stopped me from comprehending; it made large patches of shadow. And now—I shall ignore his ploy, if that’s what it is. I pretend I’m not interested; and after a pause I see the chance to ask a question I’ve been feeling uneasy about since we met. So I say, ‘You remember when I said dead things didn’t disappear? How did you find that out?’