The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (45 page)

He's right, she's thinking, we have no story for ourselves, we've outlasted the predictions, we're too boring to be apocalyptic. But what would hope mean, after all that's happened? Hope for whom? Quentin's current theory has something to do with Caspar Weinberger, fallout shelters, server farms, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I'm the town crank, he told her once, swigging from a gallon jug of cider on her porch, his face ribboned with tears.

If she didn't want to spare his feelings she would tell him—the way only one liberal-arts college graduate can say to another—that the problem isn't just narrative. It's theory. The era of sense-making itself has passed. We don't need an analyst, she thinks, or an oracle, God forbid; we need a chronicler, a town recorder, a church Bible full of births and deaths. An inventory with a few highlights, one or two safety tips. A bit of incidental knowledge for whoever comes along next. But who has the hours to sit parked at a desk, smithing words, when there's ten pounds of berries in buckets on the porch, waiting to be picked over and dried on sheets in the sun?

I do.

It's nearly September. Two years ET, they've taken to saying, End Times, as versus BET, Before End Times. Most days the café is empty, Dorrie asleep under a canopy stitched together from banner ads she salvaged from the Catamounts' baseball field: Petco, Ledyard Bank, Murphy's Ace Lumber, National Life. Work now or starve in March. But I, she thinks, I've hit the jackpot, haven't I? Only my one mouth to feed, a roof that doesn't leak, three cords of seasoned wood in the barn, a stone-solid immune system, and hands striated and shiny with scar tissue, hands that can pluck a boiled Mason jar out of a scalding bath. Hands no man would ever love.

The charging towers themselves—top-heavy, buttressed with scrap girders, bits of fencing, broken truck axles—hold ten or twelve solar panels each. The larger ones, like Royalton, have a turbine, too. Whirligigs, Quentin says, works of folk art, the last temples, the only evidence they'll find when we're gone. Built last summer, the second summer, by a group of restless contractors who'd commandeered the Cumberland Farms and its gas tanks. There was a retired engineer from NBC, Davis something, who'd insisted on welding a radio and a TV antenna to each one. She was there the day they flipped the switch. There was only static, snow, the white-noise waterfall of empty air. People wept. Davis left his equipment to rust where it stood and vanished from town. Died later that summer, people said, eating bad freshwater crabs out of the Winooski.

At first there were long lines to charge every conceivable device—battery-powered fans were a big one, of course, PlayStation Portables, dialysis machines (how could anyone survive a year without one?), even vibrators. Twenty minutes a turn, no questions asked. Now the towers sit unused much of the time. Only the diehard and desperate rely on anything electric. There's a nurse from Woodstock who pedals nearly thirty miles with a homemade charger for hearing-aid batteries.

When Dorrie set up the Caf Café, she had a supply of light bulbs and a working refrigerator; a hundred people camped out under the tree every night, holding out for a glass of weak tea with one precious ice cube. There were jugglers, Dobro players, fire eaters, reciters of Shakespeare. Caffeine brought out the best in people. There were plans, speeches, meetings. There was going to be a new society in the ashes of the old. But then August rolled into September: you didn't need a calendar to smell the change in the air. Wood-gathering season. Nothing like the terror of that first night, when the cold lapped under the blankets like a rising sea. People all went back to their holes, Dorrie said to her. Back to their bathtub whiskey and skunk weed. They remember what last winter was like. We'll lose another twenty percent this year, that's my prediction. It's the winnowing.

She thought of the smell a body has after it's lain outside all winter, frozen in a block, even the eyes frozen, the vitreous humor turned to marble, and then the spring thaw hits.

Lucky it's only me, then, she said, and I've been splitting maple all summer.

Oh, honey, Dorrie said. I didn't mean you. God knows I didn't mean you.

Here is a thing that happened today
, she wrote at the top of every page of a kelly-green Kate Spade journal, those first few weeks after the blackout. It had been a twenty-first-birthday gift, too pretty to throw away, though she rarely wrote anything by hand, so it had stayed at the bottom of one closet after another for fifteen years. Once her laptop went dead, she unearthed it and afterward kept it under her shirt at all times, in a special sling made of two
Eat More Kale
T-shirts sewn together.
Here is a thing that happened today.
It was the only possible way to begin when the last of the cell towers stopped working.
Spoke to Mom in California yesterday
, she wrote,
should have tried again.
Russell Tyson had his pickup parked on the town green with three generators running in the back, and people were paying twenty dollars for ten minutes of battery life, coaxing their phones back to a single bar, running fingers through their newly matted hair.

A few days later, the gravel around the green was littered with shards of thin, luminous glass: shattered smartphone screens, as disposable now as crack vials had been on North Avenue back in high school.

In those dirty days, she thinks, we were all Resurrectionists—even the most dyed-in-the-wool vegan bicyclists still had Tumblrs to update, still needed ice in their fair-trade coffee on an August afternoon, and a monthly refill of Ritalin in a stapled paper bag from the Rite Aid in Norwich. What was it like to spend every moment a little on edge, thinking that any time now the radio would beep, the air conditioner begin to whir, the lights flood the sullen filthy rooms? What it was like, as a practical matter, was stinky. No one wanting to admit that they needed to go take a bath in the creek. No one wanting to volunteer to build the town latrine. No one who knew
how
to build a latrine. After the third week, people pissed and shat by the side of the road, in the open. It was Elizabethan. And left little white flags of TP everywhere you looked.

That was the worst of it: the weeks of withdrawal when the coffee had run out, then the tea, the cigarettes, the Adderall, the Wellbutrin and Ativan, the Paxil and Zoloft.
Here is a thing that happened today.
She did a tally and counted twenty-three suicides. People disappeared into the woods, carrying knives, plastic bags, rubber bands. Or jumped off the White River Bridge on I-91. It was September, Indian summer, the leaves flaming out, the first nippy nights. The commuters, the office workers, the secretaries and actuaries and lawyers, walked around the town green in a daze, waiting for a sign. The farmers were all hard at work, running out the last diesel in their tractors. Some kids moved into the United Church and hung out a banner:
OCCUPY BLACKOUT
.

There was a girl, she remembers, who went up on the grassy hillside behind the Montessori school with a basket of scraps and a pair of scissors and began recreating her Pinterest page, squares of bright cloth for each jpeg, strips of blue sheet for the toolbar and browser frame.

One night at the beginning of that first winter—it must have been early in December, Nathan out laying the useless snares he'd built from an illustration in
The Homesteader's Manual
—she panicked when the fire wouldn't start in the kitchen stove and tore out pages in the journal, two or three at a time, as tinder. The living-room shelves sagged with books she could have used for the same purpose—
The Road Less Traveled, Italy on $5 a Day
—but at that moment, she thinks, forgiving herself, no one would have wanted to move a single extra muscle. In the winter, when you're cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction. Anyway, she thinks, no one cares about that stuff. The cheap pathos of children losing their toys. Not about the old dead life: only about the life that took its place.

She finds Matilda Barnstone in her rocking chair on the library porch, smoking a pipe, her sawed-off shotgun resting comfortably across the floral sprigs of her lap. The library is the only building left in town with a working lock, chicken wire nailed across the windows. People might share their last finger of motor oil, Matilda says, break a four-inch candle in two, divide a pot of beans to serve eight, but they'll kill you for a book. She sleeps in the basement with a Glock under her pillow. No lending anymore; all books stay on the premises, which means an old schoolhouse groaning on its joists, two floors, people in every nook, sweating, stinking, swatting flies, licking their thumbs as they page through Maeve Binchy and C. P. Snow, Louis L'Amour and George Santayana. Everyone gets patted down before leaving. Matilda blows out a blue cloud of corn-silk smoke and says, Haven't seen you here in an age. Still working through the stash at the Rumsons'?

Never thought I'd get into Trollope. I've read ten so far.

Beats Tom Clancy. We take donations, you know.

Once I get someone to lend me a horse and some saddlebags.

Mmm.

Listen, she says, Matilda, there's a typewriter in the back office, right?

Was last I checked.

Is there paper for it? Ribbons?

Matilda regards her with a faint smile.

I'm working on a town history, she says. August of '15 to the present. A record. There ought to be a record.

An oral history.

Not quite. Just a record. Written by me.

Who's going to read it?

Why, she says, it'll stay here. In the library. For the next generation. For history.

Did I hear right? Did you say “the next generation”? I never took you for a Resurrectionist. Matilda sits up straight in the chair. There is no history, she says. That's over now. No writing, only reading.

But we have a story, too.

We
had
a story. She rocks vigorously. Now we're just poor, she says, outside time. Lumpen proletariat. The subaltern. Outside history. And let's hope history never finds us again. We'll be squashed like bugs on a windshield.

Then a thought seems to strike her.

Stay here for a moment, she says. She shoulders the sawed-off and disappears inside. Carter, she hears Matilda bellowing, no pissing out the window, please. Use the latrine. Matilda reappears with a thick padded envelope. Here, she says. Inside there's a stapled stack of white paper, a manuscript.

Shroud of the Hills

a novel

by

Matilda E. Barnstone

COPYRIGHT
2003

Sent it to some contests, Matilda says. A few agents, one or two MFA programs. No bites. No notice. Kept getting afraid someone would steal my ideas. Anyway, you can use it.

Use it how?

Turn it over, dimwit. Use the back. That's three hundred and thirty-two pages of blank paper.

You don't have another copy?

What would I need it for? Leave it in the library and eventually some poor unfortunate soul would read the thing. Got pens?

A whole box of ballpoints. Haven't hardly used them since.

Make me look good is all I can say.

At home, later, after she's weeded the tomatoes, harvested the last of the string beans, hauled a load of wash down to the stream and spread it out over the long grass, she sits on the porch with a jar of cold well water and begins:

Before the last blackout the power had been on and off for weeks. I came up to Burlington in 2007 after a bad breakup in Brooklyn. It wasn't until Brian Sterling died, in February of the first winter, that we knew we were doing it wrong.

All that paper, glorious and terrifying. She riffles the stack through her fingers. She wonders where her laptop is. Heaped in the back of a closet somewhere, upstairs, with all the other dead things they weren't able to cannibalize: the surge protectors and headphones, Nathan's guitar amp, their digital cameras and printers, iPods, iPads, the Rumsons' Tivoli stereo receiver and Harman Kardon speakers. Before End Times, she'd never written anything on paper longer than a single sheet. Even when she kept a journal her hand cramped up. In college, her writing tutor told her not to think
essay
, not to think
paragraph
, just think in thought bubbles like comic strips and type them in big letters, hitting
print
,
print
,
print
every time, then spread them out across the floor and let the essay appear.

God, she says out loud, not for the first or the thousandth time, the way we built everything on waste.

Now she feels she can't afford a single wasted sheet. It ought to just come to her. Not because she's such a genius. No, because she's the only one, the town scribe, the voice of the people. The living
and
the dead.

For the first few months, before November came and the snow started, you'd still have people rumbling into town in cars, pickups, motorcycles—especially motorcycles, because a gallon of gas went so much farther that way. One of the occupiers would climb up and clang the church bell with a hammer, bringing people running from every direction, skidding their bikes, banging strollers along the rutted sidewalks.
Mic check
would come the cry, and then the waves of news in little sentence bundles, tweets amplified in waves through the crowd.

Manhattan is almost empty there are rats running down Broadway

I'm just on my way to look for my kid in Burlington her name's Shelby just started at UVM don't know what it's like up there

Police station torched in Hartford; all the riot gear was stolen