Gloomily I feed Winnie’s rats, scrub dirt out of her crawlers, sluice the smelly cleaning solvent through Victor’s sampler heads. I feel hotly embarrassed in my silence that I came with no real tools except the document scanner. Look at you, Darian’s silence seems to say, as they carefully perform routine maintenance on their tools at night. We came here to do real science, and you came to read a diary. Like a teenage girl. And maybe write a novel about it.
In penitence, or maybe just humiliation, I leave the journal alone during the day, and I tag along with the others as an extra body. Mostly Victor and Winnie, of course. The detection rats scamper ahead on their filament leads, their little silvery bodies blending smoothly into all the shattered concrete. “They used to use dogs,” Winnie says as we follow them.
“Weird. How did they get into small spaces?”
“Right?”
Not very subtly, I steer us into the only reasonable spaces that it seems you could have staged a revolution. But even the drones and their LIDAR dongles cannot distinguish between the ordinary rubble and what might have been the mountain V. climbed up on. Wave your flag, I cry into the past. But of course, that’s not scientific.
I beg the use of Darian’s software to see if I can clean up the data and find a mountain, but after a couple of hours of the processor screeching and grinding, he comes over and grimly shakes his head. I haven’t looked at the cleaned-up data yet. Where was their single, failed stand? Maybe I will never know.
I join Eva in her horror. Absolutely I am there with her and V. in that doorway, gasping for air. Kidnapping of children was hinted at but not confirmed in the few other primary documents. It was understood, it seemed, that children were both the most valuable thing in wartime and the hardest to keep safe. I wonder how old Eva’s sons were, little I. and N.
The failure of the evacuation, I could have predicted that too. Diffidently, and couching it strictly in terms of data gathering offsite, I suggest that Winnie go check outside the city along likely routes; she agrees to send out the crawlers, but not her precious rats.
This could work. She wants the data too. I need to keep a closer eye out in the journal for things that could be useful to the others.
It’s harder to focus now. There are things I desperately want to check, but don’t want to go alone, and I can’t ask the others. I’m getting paranoid that there are things still left in the city. Things? I don’t know. I don’t want to call them anything specific. There are certainly rats and mice. Maybe deer; you sometimes see leggy elegant things at night that turn and flee when they hear you. And you see their hoofprints, like posed droplets of water in the mud. What else lives here? Dogs? Wolves? Are wolves roaming this dead city? I mean, I know nothing can get into the pod, but still.
We’re all having nightmares; no one talks about it. But you can hear it through the thin divisions, the sudden cessation of the long steady breath, then the snort, the gasp, the moan, the whimper. We all cry at night and in the morning we say ‘God, this dust!’ to explain our red eyes. Darian is snappish, short-tempered. In someone his size that’s a little scary. I listened in while we got our seats calibrated for our flight here, and I think now: Okay, I’m not very good at math, but he is exactly twice as heavy as me.
I think: He wouldn’t lay a finger on me.
I also think: Don’t piss him off, though.
July 2
Couldn’t go back to the old town today. I fret, I froth, I seethe.
Yet there are still miracles. It still seems like a miracle. I don’t say V. himself. I mean: him, at my side, silently working, in the sun. It seems impossible that he is still here. When so much else has been taken from me.
Unwanted, unsummoned, this morning I looked at him peacefully eating his lunch out of a tin can and thought: Is it for now or for always. And it was a blow, a physical blow, as if an invisible fist had punched me right in the sternum; I think my heart even skipped a beat. I didn’t want that line to appear.
I don’t remember the rest.
Is it for now or for always…
That book that M. got me when we first started dating. No: before. Before either of us said anything, when we were friends, shy. But the whole book was love poetry in English. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? he said, and I said, Only if I can compare you to a winter’s day… And we laughed, not merely because we were so opposite, of course.
But he was, wasn’t he? Looking at him was like the brightest, clearest day in February, when the ice was thick on the lake and you could throw New Year’s parties on it, dine and dance on it, and you could see forever, all the way across the lake, to the far side of the globe, it seemed; everything about him was like that, clear and pure, like the crystal drops that fall from icicles.
I never told him that, of course.
And then coming home that day, when we thought the worst was past, the city was destroyed, the boys were gone, things stalked the street at night, that day, coming home alone into the cold flat where the fire had gone out, and he was gone, and there was nothing but an enormous red lace shawl on the wall, carefully pinned in a beautiful curved shape, and for a long time I did not even recognize what it was, till I noticed the dripping, still liquid, even still a little warm.
And I thought both: They left me nothing to bury, and: But that cannot be his blood. His is bright and clear. Like melted ice. Like a white, fair winter’s day.
Nothing to bury. Nothing, I told myself, to mourn. Not like the boys. Maybe, I still find myself thinking, he is alive somewhere in the city, having lost both a tremendous amount of blood and his memory. Maybe he survived, and will find his way back to me one day; maybe they all will.
I don’t know what else to mourn. You can’t do it properly, it’s all haphazard, in the five spare minutes you get between running, scrounging, fighting, guarding. My career? Can I say that died? I guess I won’t get that back, so that’s dead, yes. My home? Yes, that too. My plans to retire, to travel, to have a warm comfortable future? How trite. Those too. Add them to the list. My books, my clothes, whatever in the flat could burn in the bombings. Thank goodness we never had pets, I suppose.
I said goodbye to everything while running and that is not a proper goodbye.
July 10
Dreaming last night, those sickly half-dreams we all seem to get now, where you can see the wall and the glimmerings of the fire but you can’t move or speak… we’re close to death every day but I dreamed about the night I almost did die, and could never explain why I didn’t.
We were out too late that night, we were caught in the open. I fell while the statue was chasing B. and A. and me and the others; I remember the fall but I didn’t remember hitting my head, and indeed afterwards there was no mark, no blood in my hair, not even a headache, but I must have knocked myself out, I remember… I dreamt… consciousness swimming back through murky water, a layer of gray, a layer of white, a layer of black, then darkness, then focus. A square of starry sky. One eye open, the other glued shut with blood. The gap in my memory was brief but absolute.
But last night I remember: I stayed still. My body hummed with recent impact.
A bronze snout near me, passing inches from my unblinking eye. I thought: Don’t blink. Of course, the overwhelming impulse is to do just that… but I held it back for long enough, and it moved on. Metal snout, hanging with iridescent tentacles like a catfish, a stench of greenblack breath, the eyes flat, clumsily cast, already cracked, apparently as unseeing as mine. But they can see.