These Lifeless Things

May 5

Spent the day going door-to-door, industrious little bees, with our bucket and paintbrush, our axe and hockey stick. Just like those first days. People will become like animals, my husband said, and I agreed, and I wept with fear waiting for our door to be smashed in, for him to be killed and eaten in front of me, for myself to be raped in half while everything in my flat was stolen or broken. But it never happened; and if you knock, now, survivors invite you inside, and you put your axe in the umbrella stand. There are too few of us to fear the violence of the mob. There are too few of us, to be honest, to field a proper mob. We’re more of a club.

Four big bags of questionable cans and canisters and packets, carted effortfully back to the flat. I’ll catalogue them tonight, start distributing them the day after tomorrow if I can. I need to rest. My breath rasps in my throat.

A funny thing. On Shoemaker Street we discovered—in fact, almost walked into—a new crater, house-sized, so fresh the soil was still damp and steaming below. Something misfired, I said, and V. nodded. I’ve never seen one so small.

In the house opposite, the only sign was a gleaming shard of metal embedded in the brick like a thorn. Perfectly clean, so smooth you could see your face in it. We walked over and did just that, and laughed and preened, far from the edge of the crater, listening to the soil shift.

Perhaps he was thinking of the day we met. It feels like another lifetime, though it was right after the invasion, before the city was really dead. Back when we still thought what government that remained might return things to normal.

Does he remember? The bomb hit as I was buying tomatoes from the marketplace, and sat hissing and spinning in the dirt. Another dud, I thought, but I still leapt to pull the tomato girl out of the way, knocking over the plastic tub; we both looked like we were covered in blood.

But it didn’t go off, and I wandered away eventually from the football-sized thing and sat on a bench to eat. The trees had just begun to turn, and their tentacles craned to stare at me, the leaves wide-eyed, curious. I used to hate that, seeing eyes on the trees. Funny what you can get used to.

Then there he was, approaching me out of nowhere, a ragged skinny thing like a feral cat, slipping between the shadows of the watchful trunks. He was so very catlike back then, as if he might get a pat or a scrap by offering himself to a stranger, but still ready to run. He seems more settled now. I gave him a tomato, and the tiny paper packet of salt, and looked at him in the hazy sunlight, that Baltic olive skin and curly dark hair all cluttered with gold from the sun. The days, I thought, when we could rebuild. I did not know how wrong I was then.

But he’s still here. And I’m still here.

Instead of fobbing him off as a thief or murderer I gave him my three-quarter profile, like a bullfighter, and held out my hand. In the distance at last, as we shook, a muffled explosion.

We were not imaginative enough, that was our problem, we pointed at the past and said, That cannot happen again, and we bought the science fiction books and said, That will never happen, and then everything happened and we were shocked, utterly unprepared, the news told us in the first five minutes ten million people killed themselves.

But they must have been fundamentalists, we said. Evangelicals, radicals.

No: it was everyone, we simply did not imagine it.

After the world ended I thought we would resemble the dusty movies of the eighties, you know, studs, spikes, leather. Instead we all look like extras from Fiddler on the Roof, our clothes worn-down, exhaustively beaten up at the riverside, mangled and hung in the sun. M.’s old leather coat, bought aspirationally, non-ironically, long after those movies came out, protected me from the fires the night They came, and I had to throw it out. O noble cattle, that saved my skin!

I haven’t seen a cow in over two years. But I know they are still out there, somewhere outside the wall. If I ever see one again, I will thank it.

Or, well. Let’s be realistic. Eat it, and then thank it.

We thought the world would burn, disintegrate. Instead it simply flopped over and sighed, like a sick dog, and died in the street, and the buildings sagged instead of collapsing, and no one can drive cars now, and the gangs of feral cannibal children smugly sporting the wristwatches and sunglasses of the dead never materialized.

And yet. And yet.

Trapped and freezing, we did eat our dead that winter, swiftly, sensibly, as if in our genes, long inured to famine, some memory had resurfaced to tell us that history was happening again. I remember sitting next to V. when it really got bad, watching him quietly forking chunks of flesh off his plate in the shadow of those eroded, tottering skyscrapers, all pocked and ropy with mould, and the old woman at my side nudging me, telling me we must save our canned goods, eat the fresh stuff first. She is probably still alive somewhere in the city. The old women of our country are impossible to kill by normal means.

I told myself: I won’t, I won’t do it. Definitely not if it’s… if it looks like… But it didn’t, and I did. I thought it would taste like pork, but those first few bites tasted like freedom. A little bitter. Maybe we cooked it too rare.

Some of those old women were old enough to have survived the famine, I thought at the time.

I said to V., It’s lurking there in the genes. Something for survival. Something that lets you do what’s needed to outlast.

He said, patiently, Genetics doesn’t work like that.

I said, It does too. I read an article about it. In Scientific American. There’s something… they pass it on, they do. If your parents starve, their bodies remember, and then the genes of the children are ready, they are already ready for them to starve, from the moment they’re conceived.

No, I don’t believe so, he said, but he sounded uncertain.

That night, eating over the fire, I referred to Them as our conquerors, and Valentin hissed, Don’t say that!

Eventually, we took back all the names that we came up with anyway. Now, everyone just says Them. And we all know. And though I have no way of knowing what the rest of the world is doing I am sure that in every language the people just say: Them.

V. still had war eye, back then. The bombs fell constantly, the population of the city halved overnight, then halved again, then again; we railed at whoever had mustered up a plane and some munitions trying to kill Them, who failed and were killing us instead, while the statues writhed and came alive, while They Themselves flickered in and out of existence from strange angles and passed through bodies like a killing mist, while the air was filled with dust and smoke.

Oh, that feverish burn! We all had it. They occupied our land, and then They occupied our eyes, after the skies split and the ground split and They roared up, half-seen, a blur, a glitch in the air, hints of eyeballs, tentacles, hair, scales, claws and teeth. So many of us had that look that we thought you could get some kind of disease from simply having seen Them. We didn’t know it was just the shock and the exhaustion and the dust. The oldsters knew. Saw it before. Taught us to bathe our eyes in eggcups and build fires so the smoke rose up instead of out.

War eye. And I wouldn’t even have known the term if not for those old ladies.