I’m so upset. I don’t know what I can do. Maybe at the end of the trip, I will put the book back where I found it—I still have the plastic bags, the cinderblock it rested in. I have the full scan, after all, which does isotope and chemical analysis and is in some ways better than the book. But still. I cradle it to me, I touch the delicate old pages, I sniff it hungrily. It’s over a hundred years old, this book. It means something to me to be able to touch it. But perhaps I shouldn’t be touching it. The others wouldn’t understand.
I’m confused, still, about the statues. All the other primary sources are no help either. Is the bronze they always speak of (sometimes brass, iron, copper, stone) the metal, or the colour, or both? Who made the statues? Are they robots or automatons of some kind, programmed by the Invaders to keep Their order in the cities? I simply cannot understand ‘comes alive at night,’ but everyone said it, and most people saw it once or twice and survived.
July 14
Still searching. Went out first thing at dawn, after a night of screaming, nightmares, and unseasonal, awful aurora. Filling the whole sky, like a silk scarf. Roar and chant and burn and howl from constellations whose names I’ve never known.
I admit (don’t tell V.) that I felt the pull again, and nearly toppled out the window. Snatched the sill at the last moment, and cut my fingers on the broken glass. I still hear it, that thin, high whine from the stars. I don’t dare look even long enough to try to figure out which constellation it might be (how clear they all are now!). I want to open the shutters and bellow Fuck off!
God, can you imagine.
Endlessly, as if performing penitence, I think about that child, dangling in the brass jaws of the statue. When I find myself not thinking about him, I force myself back to it.
From all those science fiction movies I knew: People took to the road to get away from the end of the world, and they found new communities together, and eventually things got better. Not like this, pinned down, terrified, exhausted, in a world no one can understand. Where all the rules are broken and no one is coming for us.
I miserably confess that I think more about that dangling child than I think about my own boys. Both memories are raw wounds, but one is so deep and welling with pain that I feel that I cannot even touch it, lest, like a broken bone, something shift and puncture me and I bleed out on the floor at the thought of it. (They’re all right. They’re together. They’re all right. I have to keep telling myself.)
I should never have let the boys go. I should never have let them go.
I know they would have gone no matter what I said, but… I could have tried harder.
And they went with so much unsaid, so much not even hinted at. That they barely knew my own parents before the accident, that I was plunged so deeply into grief that M. parented all alone for almost a year, I never apologised for that. They were old enough to hear it. And grieving for their grandparents too, poor little things.
I tell myself it was all right, that losing my parents wasn’t the same disaster for them as it was for me. The boys had each other, and they had M. And I had myself… if we are being honest, here on this thin paper, on which my pencil might glide like a confessional whisper, if we are, I had begun to fret, already, even though they were perfectly healthy (God forgive me) about Mama and Papa moving into the flat with us, that the day would come when they could not manage stairs in that huge ridiculous house any more, that one day inevitably on the phone I’d say, Why don’t you just come live with us? and it would be the end of whatever little life, whatever little personality, remained in myself, that I would be pulled too many ways…
And then the world ended and the veil dropped from my eyes and I saw that yes, I was always mediocre, as daughter, student, wife, mother, friend, employee. That I was dull and dutiful and the girl who laughed at poetry and chased the boys on the frozen lake was not actually dead and gone, as the cliché would have it, but buried alive, and still screaming, quietly, under the monumental weight of grown-up responsibilities. And now I only have one—to survive.
Can I do any better?
I don’t know.
It is infuriating that I have turned out to be one of those Mad Max people, a born survivor, impossible to kill; I have watched in despair as people stronger, bigger, faster, smarter, luckier than me died or were killed or starved. I shouldn’t be here, but here I am.
I wish I weren’t. Oh God! That little boy, alive in the mouth of the monster.
What can I do?
I am so angry at the Army for abandoning us, I am so betrayed. I never thought of it in those words before. I thought, at the time: Well, of course they are going outside the wall to fight. Only then can they turn to the ones in the city, which are fighting guerilla style and killing thousands every day. They are being resupplied from the outside. If we were not cut off, we could be rescued; we learned that from the failed evacuation, in which everyone was massacred down to the last flea.
But now I think: You Army bastards stole my children and vanished and I bet you did not even fight one day. I bet you deserted. Fled into the countryside. Well, joke’s on you. The only place you can live now is a city.
Except that you have my boys, you bastards. You took my boys.
July 17
We shopped well yesterday and today a girl named Polina joined our furtive community dinner. The first question we ask ourselves is: Is this person an agent? We didn’t use to, but there are so many of them now. More every day. I hear of the squads roaming the cities, killing agents or trying to, and dispersing quickly, like roaches, to avoid retaliation from the statues; but the agents also roam, and kill.
I suppose that’s all right, to kill people who are trying to kill you. But privately I think I would also kill a traitor if I knew one, whether he was trying to kill me or not.
There are spies now. But there should be no sympathisers. None.
With that said, she does not seem the type. She does not seem as if she has ever submitted to any authority in her life, even the ones at the university where she says she was studying. She is a small fast-moving teenager who reminds me inexplicably of a dark gray tabby cat, or just a kitten, wearing an oversized leather jacket with a giant American flag on the back over her ripped leggings, as top-heavy as an ice cream cone. She bolted her food, even the horrible sardines, and I thought of the boys doing the same thing, not deigning to chew, and I closed my eyes for a long time, barely hearing her and V. speaking.
V. said, It’s all bullshit, you know. Our enemy is endless, numberless, and the resources They can muster are infinite.
Says who? snapped the girl.
I saw, he said, before the electricity went. There were news reports all over the world. Thousands and thousands of Them, pouring through the holes They made in the bend of things, and behind Them, you could see thousands more. They will always be here. They will always rule us.
And I was stunned. He never told me he thought that. That we were defeated no matter what we do.
But now, sitting here in the warm room while the rain falls outside, I think: Do I think that too?
I was never beautiful, never popular. It seemed like a joke that I ended up with the life that lined up so closely to the one I wanted: the house full of light and noise, the husband with his clear, pure eyes, the doors banging open and shut. I hated being alone. I’m alone all the time now. Even with V. next to me, I feel alone. As if the appearance of the Them cut through the laws of physics and space and time and gravity and… and whatever holds people together, rather than molecules. I look at people I’ve known for two years and I think: I don’t know you at all; who are you?