Selection Event (4 page)

And the Chhom house. A few months before Martin had started his isolation study, his mother had mentioned that a Cambodian family had moved into the neighborhood. Mr. Chhom, as it turned out, was a physician and planted cabbages in the flowerbed along his front porch. Now his flowerbed was filled with weeds.

The sky had darkened and it started to drizzle as Martin slowed the car in front of his parents' house. Their yard had the same untended look as all the others, the wet grass tall and green, and the front curtains were open as they would normally be.

The rain on the windshield softened the outeveline of the houses, blurred the details and made it look more normal. Martin imagined his father sitting inside reading the newspaper and his mother in jeans, baking in the kitchen, as he had seen her the day before he went underground. His hands were wet on the steering wheel and he could hardly catch his breath.

“All right,” he murmured. “It's something you have to do. You have to go inside.”

He got out of the car and pocketed the keys without thinking. The warm drizzle rolled down the back of his neck. Again without thinking, he reached for the doorbell, hesitated, and pressed it anyway. He heard the two-note chime from inside, but no sound of footsteps followed. He listened intently and thought he heard music somewhere — from inside? or from his wishful imagination? The door was locked, but across the porch, under a flowerpot that held a dead geranium, was the spare key.

He rang the doorbell again before he unlocked the door and pushed it open.

The air inside was heavy, moist, and stale.

“Mom? Dad? Hello?” he said into the kitchen. Through the window over the sink, the rain dripped steadily off the eave and made loud plops on the tall philodendron leaves. All the dishes were put away, everything was neat, except for two coffee cups on the counter. In the bottom of the cups were the dried brown rings of the last few drops of coffee.

Martin leaned on the counter and covered his face and wept.

After he had composed himself, he looked around and wondered what he should do next. Something on the formica-topped kitchen table caught his eye — several sheets of paper under a stone paperweight. He started to step around the counter to get it, when he thought he heard a door-hinge squeak somewhere down the hallway.

“Hello?” he said, wanting to hurry but deliberately moving with caution. “Is someone here?”

Another high-pitched sound, three or four seconds long.

“Hello?”

He could see the three doors leading off the hall, but none of them moved. He passed the bathroom, and it was empty.

The guest room, formerly his bedroom, was neat and made up, as it always was — and empty.

His parents' room was the only one remaining. He again heard something squeak. Carefully, he peeked around the corner. First he saw that their bed was rumpled and the covers were pulled half off it, and then he saw Isha, his parents' collie, lying on the edge of the bed covers, with her muzzle on her paws. Without lifting her head, she turned her eyes up at him and made a faint whine.

“Isha!” He knelt beside her, moved his hand across the top of her head and down her back and understood why she hadn't moved to greet him: there was nothing but bones beneath her rough hair. He felt every bump of her spine. Her tail lifted and thumped once.

After stroking and talking to her for a minute, he went to the pantry, found some canned dog food and mixed it with water and brought it back to her. With his help, she struggled to her feet, lowered her head and slowly ate.

His parents had got Isha two years before, and Martin had seen her only half a dozen times on his visits home and had not thought too much about her. He had had a dog as a child, a mutt-cocker that he had loved dearly, but when his dog had died of cancer in its old age, Martin had started his endless moving from college to college and job to job and had not considered owning another one.

 Now, however, as he sat on the floor next to Isha, leaning against his parents' bed, watching her with her muzzle resting on his leg, he felt the same warmth and closeness to her as he had felt to his own dog, many years before. The two of them were, most likely, the only surviving members of his family, and she was the first living being he had touched in a year. The warmth of her body beneath his hand at that moment was worth more than anything he could think of that might remain in this world.

After a while, when she had eaten again and was sleeping soundly, Martin left her and went back into the kitchen. On the table lay the untouched sheets of paper. When he got close enough to see the handwriting on the paper, his heart lurched and he realized he was holding his breath.

Their last words to me, he thought, and he didn't want to read them. As long as there were last words he hadn't yet read, there was still something of his mother and father that remained, it made them seem more alive. But he couldn't hold back.

It was his mother's handwriting, in ballpoint.

Dear Son,

We didn't want to trust anything with batteries. We knew you would come home when your year was up and take care of Isha for us. She has been a comfort and is a wonderful girl. We are sorry we couldn't be here for you. We wanted to tell you a few things before we leave....

         The knot in Martin's throat almost cut off his breathing.

He pushed back his first impulse to read it through quickly. Instead, he put the stone back on the papers.

He checked on Isha. She still slept. He then went outside — he needed to go outside — and stood on the porch while it rained. He gazed at the overgrown yard, looking at the shrubs and flowers he remembered his mother and father had planted with their hands. He felt like he had momentarily stepped into the continuum of their lives.

When the rain slacked off, he walked around back. As he stood at the edge of their weed-covered garden in the corner of their back yard, lost in teenage memories of mowing and trimming and weeding, he stopped and listened carefully. This time he was sure he heard music in the distance. It faded in and out, but he was sure. The way the sound changed, he guessed that it came from a car. Someone was driving around, advertising his or her presence, with thunderously loud music.

His first impulse was to get in the car and find whoever it was. But he remembered Ted and Laura's warning. “Stay away from other people until you know what's going on.” So he would be cautious. He had Isha to comfort and care for and to be comforted by. But it was good to know that someone besides himself remained. Someone was out there.

Chapter 7

By nightfall, Martin was exhausted. Physically, his first day above-ground had been effortless, but he had moved from one world into another, and his mind was fatigued. Isha had eaten again, this time without his assistance, and while he was sitting in the living room beside two candles, she hobbled out and let herself collapse at his feet.

“Pals,” he said to her, and she thumped her tail twice and rested her chin on his ankle. He stroked her head, not surprised to find her fur rough and unhealthy-feeling. He buried both his hands in her white ruff and scratched her gently behind her ears. She turned her brown eyes up at him and he wondered what her eyes had seen in the days he patiently spent underground, devising games and activities to pass the days during which the earth had depopulated.

He took the pages from his parents and turned them over in his hands. He knew that when he finally read the last word, it would break his heart. He put it off.

In the meantime, he made lists.

In the order that he thought of them, he wrote “Generator,” “Gasoline supply,” “Radio with shortwave,” and “Collect perishable food.” He knew there would be canned foods available for years, but what about dried foods, like pastas and beans? And would there be any fresh food left anywhere?

Martin blew out the two candles and went outside. Isha weakly followed him, her head hanging low, and watched from the driveway as he got the aluminum ladder from the garage, carried it to the back of the house, and propped it against the roof.

From the peak of the roof, he pulled himself up another three feet to the top of the brick chimney, and from there he could see between some of the neighborhood trees toward the downtown area. A few streetlights were on, lighting the way for evening shoppers and late traffic, but the night was peculiarly silent — no car or truck or machine noises carried from downtown.

How long, he wondered, until the electricity completely failed?

Several distant mockingbirds warbled and chittered, and somewhere a tropical bird shrieked and made a hooting laugh. Below him, in the overgrown yards, masses of crickets creaked rhythmically.

  Calling for mates, Martin thought, all of them, birds and insects, and most likely so was whoever was driving around blasting music from his car.

He sat atop the chimney a while longer, looking for any lights that moved or turned on or off, but there was nothing. He could see a few house- and porchlights in far neighborhoods. They would burn till the electricity failed. Across the portion of the city that he could see, however, nothing moved, nothing changed.

Isha met him at the foot of the ladder and pushed her narrow collie muzzle into his hand.

“Feeling better, aren't you. So now both of us are back in the land of the living. Sort of.” Martin knelt and put one arm around her and stroked her. He realized he was smiling — smiling for the first time that day, perhaps for the first time in several days.

Back inside the house, he did not relight the candles. His eyes were dark-adjusted and he could see well enough. Why advertise his presence? When it came to meeting people, he wanted do it on his terms, not theirs.

As for his parents' last words to him, he would read them in the morning. He didn't want to sleep with his parents' goodbye running through his head. Besides, he was exhausted, emotionally drained, and realized his rationality was frail.

From the corner cabinet in the kitchen he took out their bottle of cognac and poured himself a couple of ounces in a short glass. His eyes caught on the dim glint of moonlight on the two coffee cups at the edge of the sink. He had intended to sip the brandy, but he gulped it in one swallow, and whether his eyes clouded from that or from memories... was immaterial.

Sleeping in the guest room seemed wrong for some reason. All he could think of was his mother's hands pulling the sheets tight over the mattress and smoothing the blanket and bedspread till it was perfect. He didn't want to disturb that. So he got a blanket from the linen closet and put it on the sofa.

Isha lay on the floor beside him and sighed once heavily. It was the last thing Martin heard till the morning mockingbirds wakened him.

When finally opened his eyes, he saw Isha, crouched at the front window, her ears down, growling very softly, her attention intently focused on something outside the house.  

Chapter 8

Martin came fully awake.

He sidled up to the window and cautiously looked around its edge. Parked at the curb was an immaculately restored black motorcycle, one that could have been straight out of the 1940's, and sitting on the curb at the edge of the front lawn was a big guy, maybe about thirty years old, in levis, a blue work shirt, and a black leather vest. He was generally scruffy-looking, with tangled shoulder-length hair, sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, and he was sitting there on the curb, turned sideways, reading a paperback book.

A biker? Martin thought. A biker out there waiting for him?

The likelihood of the man just happening to pick this house to stop and read was, Martin knew, microscopic.

On the other hand, if the stranger had something aggressive in mind, why wait around till Martin woke up and saw him? Why sit there in the open with his back half turned, engrossed in a book?

Martin opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. Before he could say anything, the man at the curb turned his head from his book from his book and showed a huge yellow-toothed grin. “Mornin'. Quiet neighborhood you got here.”

“They're all dead. Good morning. I was told to stay away from people till I knew what was going on,” Martin said. He noted that the book was
The Way of Zen
.

“No sweat.”

The big man waved his hand as though to ward off any possibility of doubt. “That's always good advice, epidemic or no epidemic. I'll stay right here. You been out of circulation, then. Solitary?”

“I was in an isolation experiment. I came out yesterday.”

He nodded. “You're one lucky guy. You didn't have to see it. I was immune. No matter how you poison the rats,” he said with his huge grin, “always a few slip by. My name's Diaz.”

“I'm Martin. The people who ran the experiment left me a stack of newspapers so I know the basics.” He shivered. “It's colder than it should be.”

“Right.” Diaz nodded deeply. “You see the sunset yesterday?” As if imparting special knowledge, Diaz lowered his eyelids and raised his eyebrows. “It was beautiful, man. They're beautiful every day. Some Middle East bonzos had a nuke-it-as-you-are party and the sunsets're getting better every day, when it doesn't rain. And it's an average of fifteen degrees cooler than it should be this time of year. But the sunsets, man. Incredible. Red smeared with yellows and gold, orange and blues, purples and mold.” He flashed his grin again. “I'm a poet, too.”