‘I know,’ I say, trying to hide the cracks in my sincerity. ‘But can’t… give up.’
Her voice darkens. She calls my bluff. ‘Why are you so hopeful all of a sudden? What are you really thinking?’
I say nothing, but she reads my face like a front-page headline, the kind that announced the atomic bomb and the Titanic and all the World Wars in progressively smaller type.
‘There’s nowhere left, is there,’ she says.
Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.
‘The whole world,’ she says. ‘You think it’s all dead? All overrun?’
‘Yes.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘I don’t. But… I feel.’
She lets out a long breath, staring at the toy planes dangling above us. ‘So what are we supposed to do?’
‘Have to… fix it.’
‘Fix what?’
‘Don’t know. Ev… rything.’
She props herself up on one elbow. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice is no longer quiet. Nora stirs and stops snoring. ‘Fix everything?’ Julie says, her eyes sparking in the dark. ‘How exactly are we supposed to do that? If you have some big revelation please share, ’cause it’s not like I don’t think about this literally all the time. It’s not like this hasn’t been burning my brain every morning and night since my mom left. How do we fix everything? It’s so broken. Everyone is dying , over and over again, in deeper and darker ways. What are we supposed to do? Do you know what’s causing it? This plague?’
I hesitate. ‘No.’
‘Then how can you do anything about it? I want to know, R. How are we supposed to “fix it”?’
I’m staring up at the ceiling. I’m staring at the verbal constellations, glimmering green in distant space. As I lie there, letting my mind rise into those imaginary heavens, two of the stars begin to change. They rotate, and focus, and their shapes clarify. They become… letters .
T
R
‘Tr—’ I whisper.
‘What?’
‘Truh—’ I repeat, trying to pronounce it. It’s a sound. It’s a syllable. The blurry constellation is becoming a word. ‘What is… that?’ I ask, pointing at the ceiling.
‘What? The quotes?’
I stand up and indicate the general area of the sentence. ‘This one.’
‘It’s a line from “Imagine”. The John Lennon song.’
‘Which… line?’
‘“It’s easy if you try.”’
I stand there for a minute, gazing up like an intrepid explorer of the cosmos. Then I lie down and fold my arms behind my head, eyes wide open. I don’t have the answers she’s asking for, but I can feel their existence. Faint points of light in the distant dark.
Slow steps. Mud under boots. Look nowhere else. Strange mantras loop through my head. Old bearded mutterings from dark alleys. Where are you going, Perry? Foolish child. Brainless boy. Where? Every day the universe grows larger, darker, colder. I stop in front of a black door. A girl lives here in this metal house. Do I love her? Hard to say any more. But she is all that’s left. The final red sun in an ever-expanding emptiness.
I walk into the house and find her sitting on the staircase, arms crossed over her knees. She puts a finger to her lips. ‘Dad,’ she whispers to me.
I glance up the staircase towards the general’s bedroom. I hear his voice slurring in the dimness.
‘This picture, Julie. The water park, remember the water park? Had to haul ten buckets up for just one slide. Twenty minutes of work for ten seconds of fun. Seemed worth it back then, didn’t it? I liked watching your face when you flew out of the tube. You looked just like her, even back then.’
Julie stands up quietly, moves towards the front door.
‘You’re all her, Julie. You aren’t me, you’re her . How could she do it?’
I open the door and back out. Julie follows me, soft steps, no sound.
‘How could she be so weak?’ the man says in a voice like steel melting. ‘How could she leave us here?’
We walk in silence. The drizzling rain beads in our hair and we shake it out like dogs. We come to Colonel Rosso’s house. Rosso’s wife opens the door, looks at Julie’s face, and hugs her. We walk inside into the warmth.
I find Rosso in the living room, sipping coffee, peering through his glasses at a water-stained old book. While Julie and Mrs Rosso murmur in the kitchen, I sit down across from the colonel.
‘Perry,’ he says.
‘Colonel.’
‘How are you holding up?’
‘I’m alive.’
‘A good start. How are you settling into the home?’
‘I despise it.’
Rosso is quiet for a moment. ‘What’s on your mind?’
I search for words. I seem to have forgotten most of them. Finally, quietly, I say, ‘He lied to me.’
‘How so?’
‘He said we were fixing things, and if we didn’t give up everything might turn out okay.’
‘He believed that. I think I do, too.’
‘But then he died .’ My voice trembles and I fight to squeeze it tight. ‘And it was senseless . No battle, no noble sacrifice, just a stupid work accident that could have happened to anyone anywhere, any time in history.’
‘Perry…’
‘I don’t understand it, sir. What’s the point of trying to fix a world we’re in so briefly? What’s the meaning in all that work if it’s just going to disappear? Without any warning? A fucking brick on the head?’
Rosso says nothing. The low voices in the kitchen become audible in our silence, so they drop to whispers, trying to hide from the colonel what I’m sure he already knows. Our little world is far too tired to care about the crimes of its leaders.
‘I want to join Security,’ I announce. My voice is solid now. My face is hard.
Rosso lets out a slow breath and sets his book down. ‘Why, Perry?’
‘Because it’s the only thing left worth doing.’
‘I thought you wanted to write.’
‘That’s pointless.’
‘Why?’
‘We have bigger concerns now. General Grigio says these are the last days. I don’t want to waste my last days scratching letters on paper.’
‘Writing isn’t letters on paper. It’s communication. It’s memory.’
‘None of that matters any more. It’s too late.’
He studies me. He picks up the book again and holds the cover out. ‘Do you know this story?’
‘It’s Gilgamesh.’
‘Yes. The Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the earliest known works of literature. Humanity’s debut novel, you could say.’ Rosso flips through the brittle yellow pages. ‘Love, sex, blood and tears. A journey to find eternal life. To escape death.’ He reaches across the table and hands the book to me. ‘It was written over four thousand years ago on clay tablets by people who tilled the mud and rarely lived past forty. It’s survived countless wars, disasters and plagues, and continues to fascinate to this day, because here I am, in the midst of modern ruin, reading it.’
I look at Rosso and don’t look at the book. My fingers dig into the leather cover.
‘The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.’
I split the book open to the middle. The pages are riddled with ellipses, marking words and lines missing from the text, rotted out and lost to history. I stare at these marks and let their black dots fill my vision. ‘I don’t want to remember,’ I say, and I shut the book. ‘I want to join Security. I want to do dangerous stuff. I want to forget.’