After the Plague

After the Plague

After the plague — it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold — life was different. More relaxed and expansive, more natural. The rat race was over, the freeways were clear all the way to Sacramento, and the poor dwindling ravaged planet was suddenly big and mysterious again. It was a kind of miracle really, what the environmentalists had been hoping for all along, though of course even the most strident of them wouldn’t have wished for his own personal extinction, but there it was. I don’t mean to sound callous — my parents are long dead and I’m unmarried and siblingless, but I lost friends, colleagues and neighbors, the same as any other survivor. What few of us there are, that is. We’re guessing it’s maybe one in ten thousand, here in the States anyway. I’m sure there are whole tribes that escaped it somewhere in the Amazon or the interior valleys of Indonesia, meteorologists in isolated weather stations, fire lookouts, goatherds and the like. But the president’s gone, the vice president, the cabinet, Congress, the joint chiefs of staff, the chairmen of the boards and CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, along with all their stockholders, employees and retainers. There’s no TV. No electricity or running water. And there won’t be any dining out anytime soon.

Actually, I’m lucky to be here to tell you about it — it was sheer serendipity, really. You see, I wasn’t among my fellow human beings when it hit — no festering airline cabins or snaking supermarket lines for me, no concerts, sporting events or crowded restaurants — and the closest I came to intimate contact was a telephone call to my on-and-off girlfriend, Danielle, from a gas station in the Sierra foothills. I think I may have made a kissing noise over the wire, my lips very possibly coming into contact with the molded plastic mouthpiece into which hordes of strangers had breathed before me, but this was a good two weeks before the first victim carried the great dripping bag of infection that was himself back from a camcorder safari to the Ngorongoro Crater or a conference on economic development in Malawi. Danielle, whose voice was a drug I was trying to kick, at least temporarily, promised to come join me for a weekend in the cabin after my six weeks of self-imposed isolation were over, but sadly, she never made it. Neither did anyone else.

I was isolated up there in the mountains — that was the whole point — and the first I heard of anything amiss was over the radio. It was a warm, full-bodied day in early fall, the sun caught like a child’s ball in the crown of the Jeffrey pine outside the window, and I was washing up after lunch when a smooth melodious voice interrupted Afternoon Classics to say that people were bleeding from the eyeballs and vomiting up bile in the New York subways and collapsing en masse in the streets of the capital. The authorities were fully prepared to deal with what they were calling a minor outbreak of swine flu, the voice said, and people were cautioned not to panic, but all at once the announcer seemed to chuckle deep in his throat, and then, right in the middle of the next phrase, he sneezed — a controlled explosion hurtling out over the airwaves to detonate ominously in ten million trembling speakers — and the radio fell silent. Somebody put on a CD of Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration, and it played over and over through the rest of the afternoon.

I didn’t have access to a telephone — not unless I hiked two and a half miles out to the road where I’d parked my car and then drove another six to Fish Fry Flats, pop. 28, and used the public phone at the bar/restaurant/gift shop/one-stop grocery/gas station there — so I ran the dial up and down the radio to see if I could get some news. Reception is pretty spotty up in the mountains — you never knew whether you’d get Bakersfield, Fresno, San Luis Obispo or even Tijuana — and I couldn’t pull in anything but white noise on that particular afternoon, except for the aforementioned tone poem, that is. I was powerless. What would happen would happen, and I’d find out all the sordid details a week later, just as I found out about all the other crises, scandals, scoops, coups, typhoons, wars and cease-fires that held the world spellbound while I communed with the ground squirrels and woodpeckers. It was funny. The big events didn’t seem to mean much up here in the mountains, where life was so much more elemental and immediate and the telling concerns of the day revolved around priming the water pump and lighting the balky old gas stove without blowing the place up. I picked up a worn copy of John Cheever’s stories somebody had left in the cabin during one of its previous incarnations and forgot all about the news out of New York and Washington.

Later, when it finally came to me that I couldn’t live through another measure of Strauss without risk of permanent impairment, I flicked off the radio, put on a light jacket and went out to glory in the way the season had touched the aspens along the path out to the road. The sun was leaning way over to the west now, the shrubs and ground litter gathering up the night, the tall trees trailing deep blue shadows. There was the faintest breath of a chill in the air, a premonition of winter, and I thought of the simple pleasures of building a fire, preparing a homely meal and sitting through the evening with a book in one hand and a scotch and Drambuie in the other. It wasn’t until nine or ten at night that I remembered the bleeding eyeballs and the fateful sneeze, and though I was half-convinced it was a hoax or maybe one of those fugitive terrorist attacks with a colorless, odorless gas — sarin or the like — I turned on the radio, eager for news.

There was nothing, no Strauss, no crisp and efficient NPR correspondent delivering news of riots in Cincinnati and the imminent collapse of the infrastructure, no right-wing talk, no hiphop, no jazz, no rock. I switched to AM, and after a painstaking search I hit on a weak signal that sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. This is only a test, a mechanical voice pronounced in what was now just the faintest whispering squeak, in the event of an actual emergency please stay tuned to … and then it faded out. While I was fumbling to bring it back in, I happened upon a voice shouting something in Spanish. It was just a single voice, very agitated, rolling on tirelessly, and I listened in wonder and dread until the signal went dead just after midnight.

I didn’t sleep that night. I’d begun to divine the magnitude of what was going on in the world below me — this was no hoax, no casual atrocity or ordinary attrition; this was the beginning of the end, the Apocalypse, the utter failure and ultimate demise of all things human. I felt sick at heart. Lying there in the fastness of the cabin in the absolute and abiding dark of the wilderness, I was consumed with fear. I lay on my stomach and listened to the steady thunder of my heart pounding through the mattress, attuned to the slightest variation, waiting like a condemned man for the first harrowing sneeze.

Over the course of the next several days, the radio would sporadically come to life (I left it switched on at all times, day and night, as if I were going down in a sinking ship and could shout “Mayday!” into the receiver at the first stirring of a human voice). I’d be pacing the floor or spooning sugar into my tea or staring at a freshly inserted and eternally blank page in my ancient manual typewriter when the static would momentarily clear and a harried newscaster spoke out of the void to provide me with the odd and horrific detail: an oceanliner had run aground off Cape Hatteras and nothing left aboard except three sleek and frisky cats and various puddles of flesh swathed in plaid shorts, polo shirts and sunglasses; no sound or signal had come out of South Florida in over thirty-six hours; a group of survivalists had seized Bill Gates’ private jet in an attempt to escape to Antarctica, where it was thought the infection hadn’t yet reached, but everyone aboard vomited black bile and died before the plane could leave the ground. Another announcer broke down in the middle of an unconfirmed report that every man, woman and child in Minneapolis was dead, and yet another came over the air early one morning shouting, “It kills! It kills! It kills in three days!” At that point, I jerked the plug out of the wall.

My first impulse, of course, was to help. To save Danielle, the frail and the weak, the young and the old, the chairman of the social studies department at the school where I teach (or taught), a student teacher with cropped red hair about whom I’d had several minutely detailed sexual fantasies. I even went so far as to hike out to the road and take the car into Fish Fry Flats, but the bar/restaurant/gift shop/one-stop grocery/gas station was closed and locked and the parking lot deserted. I drove round the lot three times, debating whether I should continue on down the road or not, but then a lean furtive figure darted out of a shed at the corner of the lot and threw itself — himself — into the shadows beneath the deck of the main building. I recognized the figure immediately as the splay-footed and pony-tailed proprietor of the place, a man who would pump your gas with an inviting smile and then lure you into the gift shop to pay in the hope that the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines and Pen-Lite batteries would prove irresistible. I saw his feet protruding from beneath the deck, and they seemed to be jittering or trembling as if he were doing some sort of energetic new contra-dance that began in the prone position. For a long moment I sat there and watched those dancing feet, then I hit the lock button, rolled up the windows and drove back to the cabin.

What did I do? Ultimately? Nothing. Call it enlightened self-interest. Call it solipsism, self-preservation, cowardice, I don’t care. I was terrified — who wouldn’t be? — and I decided to stay put. I had plenty of food and firewood, fuel for the generator and propane for the stove, three reams of twenty-five percent cotton fiber bond, correction fluid, books, board games — Parcheesi and Monopoly — and a complete set of National Geographic, 1947–1962. (By way of explanation, I should mention that I am — or was — a social studies teacher at the Montecito School, a preparatory academy in a pricey suburb of Santa Barbara, and that the serendipity that spared me the fate of nearly all my fellow men and women was as simple and fortuitous a thing as a sabbatical leave. After fourteen years of unstinting service, I applied for and was granted a one-semester leave at half-salary for the purpose of writing a memoir of my deprived and miserable Irish-Catholic upbringing. The previous year a high school teacher from New York — the name escapes me now — had enjoyed a spectacular succès d’estime, not to mention d’argent, with a memoir about his own miserable and deprived Irish-Catholic boyhood, and I felt I could profitably mine the same territory. And I got a good start on it too, until the plague hit. Now I ask myself what’s the use — the publishers are all dead. Ditto the editors, agents, reviewers, booksellers and the great congenial book-buying public itself. What’s the sense of writing? What’s the sense of anything?)

At any rate, I stuck close to the cabin, writing at the kitchen table through the mornings, staring out the window into the ankles of the pines and redwoods as I summoned degrading memories of my alcoholic mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, and in the afternoons I hiked up to the highest peak and looked down on the deceptive tranquillity of the San Joaquin Valley spread out like a continent below me. There were no planes in the sky overhead, no sign of traffic or movement anywhere, no sounds but the calling of the birds and the soughing of the trees as the breeze sifted through them. I stayed up there past dark one night and felt as serene and terrible as a god when I looked down at the velvet expanse of the world and saw no ray or glimmer of light. I plugged the radio back in that night, just to hear the fading comfort of man-made noise, of the static that emanates from nowhere and nothing. Because there was nothing out there, not anymore.

It was four weeks later — just about the time I was to have ended my hermitage and enjoyed the promised visit from Danielle — that I had my first human contact of the new age. I was at the kitchen window, beating powdered eggs into a froth for dinner, one ear half-attuned to the perfect and unbroken static hum of the radio, when there was a heavy thump on the deteriorating planks of the front deck. My first thought was that a branch had dropped out of the Jeffrey pine — or worse, that a bear had got wind of the corned beef hash I’d opened to complement the powdered eggs — but I was mistaken on both counts. The thump was still reverberating through the floorboards when I was surprised to hear a moan and then a curse — a distinctly human curse. “Oh, shit-fuck!” a woman’s voice cried. “Open the goddamned door! Help, for shit’s sake, help!”

I’ve always been a cautious animal. This may be one of my great failings, as my mother and later my fraternity brothers were always quick to point out, but on the other hand, it may be my greatest virtue. It’s kept me alive when the rest of humanity has gone on to a quick and brutal extinction, and it didn’t fail me in that moment. The door was locked. Once I’d got wind of what was going on in the world, though I was devastated and the thought of the radical transformation of everything I’d ever known gnawed at me day and night, I took to locking it against just such an eventuality as this. “Shit!” the voice raged. “I can hear you in there, you son of a bitch — I can smell you!”

I stood perfectly still and held my breath. The static breathed dismally through the speakers and I wished I’d had the sense to disconnect the radio long ago. I stared down at the half-beaten eggs.

“I’m dying out here!” the voice cried. “I’m starving to death — hey, are you deaf in there or what? I said, I’m starving!”

And now of course I was faced with a moral dilemma. Here was a fellow human being in need of help, a member of a species whose value had just vaulted into the rarefied atmosphere occupied by the gnatcatcher, the condor and the beluga whale by virtue of its rarity. Help her? Of course I would help her. But at the same time, I knew if I opened that door I would invite the pestilence in and that three days hence both she and I would be reduced to our mortal remains.

“Open up!” she demanded, and the tattoo of her fists was the thunder of doom on the thin planks of the door.

It occurred to me suddenly that she couldn’t be infected — she’d have been dead and wasted by now if she were. Maybe she was like me, maybe she’d been out brooding in her own cabin or hiking the mountain trails, utterly oblivious and immune to the general calamity. Maybe she was beautiful, nubile, a new Eve for a new age, maybe she would fill my nights with passion and my days with joy. As if in a trance, I crossed the room and stood at the door, my fingers on the long brass stem of the bolt. “Are you alone?” I said, and the rasp of my own voice, so long in disuse, sounded strange in my ears.

I heard her draw in a breath of astonishment and outrage from the far side of the thin panel that separated us. “What the hell do you think, you son of a bitch? I’ve been lost out here in these stinking woods for I don’t know how long and I haven’t had a scrap for days, not a goddamn scrap, not even bark or grass or a handful of soggy trail mix. Now will you fucking open this door?!”

Still, I hesitated.

A rending sound came to me then, a sound that tore me open as surely as a surgical knife, from my groin to my throat: she was sobbing. Gagging for breath, and sobbing. “A frog,” she sobbed, “I ate a goddamn slimy little putrid frog!”

God help me. God save and preserve me. I opened the door.

Sarai was thirty-eight years old — that is, three years older than I — and she was no beauty. Not on the surface, anyway. Even if you discounted the twenty-odd pounds she’d lost and her hair that was like some crushed rodent’s pelt and the cuts and bites and suppurating sores that made her skin look like a leper’s, and tried, by a powerful leap of the imagination, to see her as she once might have been, safely ensconced in her condo in Tarzana and surrounded by all the accoutrements of feminine hygiene and beauty, she still wasn’t much.

This was her story: she and her live-in boyfriend, Howard, were nature enthusiasts — at least Howard was, anyway — and just before the plague hit they’d set out to hike an interlocking series of trails in the Golden Trout Wilderness. They were well provisioned, with the best of everything — Howard managed a sporting goods store — and for the first three weeks everything went according to plan. They ate delicious freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo and shrimp couscous, drank cognac from a bota bag and made love wrapped in propylene, Gore-Tex and nylon. Mosquitoes and horseflies sampled her legs, but she felt good, born again, liberated from the traffic and the smog and her miserable desk in a miserable corner of the electronics company her father had founded. Then one morning, when they were camped by a stream, Howard went off with his day pack and a fly rod and never came back. She waited. She searched. She screamed herself hoarse. A week went by. Every day she searched in a new direction, following the stream both ways and combing every tiny rill and tributary, until finally she got herself lost. All streams were one stream, all hills and ridges alike. She had three Kudos bars with her and a six-ounce bag of peanuts, but no shelter and no freeze-dried entrées — all that was back at the camp she and Howard had made in happier times. A cold rain fell. There were no stars that night, and when something moved in the brush beside her she panicked and ran blindly through the dark, hammering her shins and destroying her face, her hair and her clothes. She’d been wandering ever since.

I made her a package of Top Ramen, gave her a towel and a bar of soap and showed her the primitive shower I’d rigged up above the ancient slab of the tub. I was afraid to touch her or even come too close to her. Sure I was skittish. Who wouldn’t be when ninety-nine percent of the human race had just died off on the tailwind of a simple sneeze? Besides, I’d begun to adopt all the habits of the hermit — talking to myself, performing elaborate rituals over my felicitous stock of foodstuffs, dredging bursts of elementary school songs and beer jingles out of the depths of my impacted brain — and I resented having my space invaded. Still. Still, though, I felt that Sarai had been delivered to me by some higher power and that she’d been blessed in the way that I was — we’d escaped the infection. We’d survived. And we weren’t just errant members of a selfish, suspicious and fragmented society, but the very foundation of a new one. She was a woman. I was a man.

At first, she wouldn’t believe me when I waved a dismissive hand at the ridge behind the cabin and all that lay beyond it and informed her that the world was depeopled, that the Apocalypse had come and that she and I were among the solitary survivors — and who could blame her? As she sipped my soup and ate my flapjacks and treated her cuts and abrasions with my Neosporin and her hair with my shampoo, she must have thought she’d found a lunatic as her savior. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, and I was gloating, I was, sick as it may seem, “try the radio.”

She looked up at me out of the leery brooding eyes of the one sane woman in a madhouse of impostors, plugged the cord in the socket and calibrated the dial as meticulously as a safecracker. She was rewarded by static — no dynamics even, just a single dull continuum — but she glared up at me as if I’d rigged the thing to disappoint her. “So,” she spat, skinny as a refugee, her hair kinked and puffed up with my shampoo till it devoured her parsimonious and disbelieving little sliver of a face, “that doesn’t prove a thing. It’s broken, that’s all.”

When she got her strength back, we hiked out to the car and drove into Fish Fry Flats so she could see for herself. I was half-crazy with the terrible weight of the knowledge I’d been forced to hold inside me, and I can’t describe the irritation I felt at her utter lack of interest — she treated me like a street gibberer, a psychotic, Cassandra in long pants. She condescended to me. She was humoring me, for God’s sake, and the whole world lay in ruins around us. But she would have a rude awakening, she would, and the thought of it was what kept me from saying something I’d regret — I didn’t want to lose my temper and scare her off, but I hate stupidity and willfulness. It’s the one thing I won’t tolerate in my students. Or wouldn’t. Or didn’t.

Fish Fry Flats, which in the best of times could hardly be mistaken for a metropolis, looked now as if it had been deserted for a decade. Weeds had begun to sprout up through invisible cracks in the pavement, dust had settled over the idle gas pumps and the windows of the main building were etched with grime. And the animals — the animals were everywhere, marmots waddling across the lot as if they owned it, a pair of coyotes asleep in the shade of an abandoned pickup, ravens cawing and squirrels chittering. I cut the engine just as a bear the color of cinnamon toast tumbled stupendously through an already shattered window and lay on his back, waving his bloodied paws in the air as if he were drunk, which he was. As we discovered a few minutes later — once he’d lurched to his feet and staggered off into the bushes — a whole host of creatures had raided the grocery, stripping the candy display right down to the twisted wire rack, scattering Triscuits and Doritos, shattering jars of jam and jugs of port wine and grinding the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines underfoot. There was no sign of the formerly sunny proprietor or of his dancing feet — I could only imagine that the ravens, coyotes and ants had done their work.

But Sarai — she was still an unbeliever, even after she dropped a quarter into the public telephone and put the dead black plastic receiver to her ear. For all the good it did her, she might as well have tried coaxing a dial tone out of a stone or a block of wood, and I told her so. She gave me a sour look, the sticks of her bones briefly animated beneath a sweater and jacket I’d loaned her — it was the end of October and getting cold at seventy-two hundred feet — and then she tried another quarter, and then another, before she slammed the receiver down in a rage and turned her seething face on me. “The lines are down, that’s all,” she sneered. And then her mantra: “It doesn’t prove a thing.”

While she’d been frustrating herself, I’d been loading the car with canned goods, after entering the main building through the broken window and unlatching the door from the inside. “And what about all this?” I said, irritated, hot with it, sick to death of her and her thick-headedness. I gestured at the bloated and lazy coyotes, the hump in the bushes that was the drunken bear, the waddling marmots and the proprietary ravens.

“I don’t know,” she said, clenching her jaws. “And I don’t care.” Her eyes had a dull sheen to them. They were insipid and bovine, exactly the color of the dirt at her feet. And her lips — thin and stingy, collapsed in a riot of vertical lines like a dried-up mud puddle. I hated her in that moment, godsend or no. Oh, how I hated her.

“What are you doing?” she demanded as I loaded the last of the groceries into the car, settled into the driver’s seat and turned the engine over. She was ten feet from me, caught midway between the moribund phone booth and the living car. One of the coyotes lifted its head at the vehemence of her tone and gave her a sleepy, yellow-eyed look.

“Going back to the cabin,” I said.

“You’re what?” Her face was pained. She’d been through agonies. I was a devil and a madman.

“Listen, Sarai, it’s all over. I’ve told you time and again. You don’t have a job anymore. You don’t have to pay rent, utility bills, don’t have to make car payments or remember your mother’s birthday. It’s over. Don’t you get it?”

“You’re insane! You’re a shithead! I hate you!”

The engine was purring beneath my feet, fuel awasting, but there was infinite fuel now, and though I realized the gas pumps would no longer work, there were millions upon millions of cars and trucks out there in the world with full tanks to siphon, and no one around to protest. I could drive a Ferrari if I wanted, a Rolls, a Jag, anything. I could sleep on a bed of jewels, stuff the mattress with hundred-dollar bills, prance through the streets in a new pair of Italian loafers and throw them into the gutter each night and get a new pair in the morning. But I was afraid. Afraid of the infection, the silence, the bones rattling in the wind. “I know it,” I said. “I’m insane. I’m a shithead. I admit it. But I’m going back to the cabin and you can do anything you want — it’s a free country. Or at least it used to be.”

I wanted to add that it was a free world now, a free universe, and that God was in the details, the biblical God, the God of famine, flood and pestilence, but I never got the chance. Before I could open my mouth she bent for a stone and heaved it into the windshield, splintering me with flecks and shards of safety glass. “Die!” she shrieked. “You die, you shit!”

That night we slept together for the first time. In the morning, we packed up a few things and drove down the snaking mountain road to the charnel house of the world.

I have to confess that I’ve never been much of a fan of the apocalyptic potboiler, the doomsday film shot through with special effects and asinine dialogue or the cyberpunk version of a grim and relentless future. What these entertainments had led us to expect — the roving gangs, the inhumanity, the ascendancy of machines and the redoubled pollution and ravaging of the earth — wasn’t at all what it was like. There were no roving gangs — they were all dead, to a man, woman and tattooed punk — and the only machines still functioning were the automobiles and weed whippers and such that we the survivors chose to put into prosaic action. And a further irony was that the survivors were the least likely and least qualified to organize anything, either for better or worse. We were the fugitive, the misfit, the recluse, and we were so widely scattered we’d never come into contact with one another, anyway — and that was just the way we liked it. There wasn’t even any looting of the supermarkets — there was no need. There was more than enough for everybody who ever was or would be.

Sarai and I drove down the mountain road, through the deserted small town of Springville and the deserted larger town of Porterville, and then we turned south for Bakersfield, the Grapevine and Southern California. She wanted to go back to her apartment, to Los Angeles, and see if her parents and her sisters were alive still — she became increasingly vociferous on that score as the reality of what had happened began to seep through to her — but I was driving and I wanted to avoid Los Angeles at all costs. To my mind, the place had been a pit before the scourge hit, and now it was a pit heaped with seven million moldering corpses. She carped and moaned and whined and threatened, but she was in shock too and couldn’t quite work herself up to her usual pitch, and so we turned west and north on Route 126 and headed toward Montecito, where for the past ten years I’d lived in a cottage on one of the big estates there — the DuPompier place, Mírame.

By the way, when I mentioned earlier that the freeways were clear, I was speaking metaphorically — they were free of traffic, but cluttered with abandoned vehicles of all sorts, take your pick, from gleaming choppers with thousand-dollar gold-fleck paint jobs to sensible family cars, Corvettes, Winnebagos, eighteen-wheelers and even fire engines and police cruisers. Twice, when Sarai became especially insistent, I pulled alongside one or another of these abandoned cars, swung open her door and said, “Go ahead. Take this Cadillac”—or BMW or whatever—“and drive yourself any damn place you please. Go on. What are you waiting for?” But her face shrank till it was as small as a doll’s and her eyes went stony with fear: those cars were catacombs, each and every one of them, and the horror of that was more than anybody could bear.

So we drove on, through a preternatural silence and a world that already seemed primeval, up the Coast Highway and along the frothing bright boatless sea and into Montecito. It was evening when we arrived, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. If it weren’t for that — and a certain creeping untended look to the lawns, shrubs and trees — you wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. My cottage, built in the twenties of local sandstone and draped in wisteria till it was all but invisible, was exactly as I’d left it. We pulled into the silent drive with the great house looming in the near distance, a field of dark reflective glass that held the blood of the declining sun in it, and Sarai barely glanced up. Her thin shoulders were hunched and she was staring at a worn place on the mat between her feet.

“We’re here,” I announced, and I got out of the car.

She turned her eyes to me, stricken, suffering, a waif. “Where?”

“Home.”

It took her a moment, but when she responded she spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were just learning the language. “I have no home,” she said. “Not anymore.”

So. What to tell you? We didn’t last long, Sarai and I, though we were pioneers, though we were the last hope of the race, drawn together by the tenacious glue of fear and loneliness. I knew there wouldn’t be much opportunity for dating in the near future, but we just weren’t suited to each other. In fact, we were as unsuited as any two people could ever be, and our sex was tedious and obligatory, a ballet of mutual need and loathing, but to my mind at least, there was a bright side — here was the chance to go forth and be fruitful and do what we could to repopulate the vast and aching sphere of the planet. Within the month, however, Sarai had disabused me of that notion.

It was a silky, fog-hung morning, the day deepening around us, and we’d just gone through the mechanics of sex and were lying exhausted and unsatisfied in the rumple of my gritty sheets (water was a problem and we did what laundry we could with what we were able to haul down from the estate’s swimming pool). Sarai was breathing through her mouth, an irritating snort and burble that got on my nerves, but before I could say anything, she spoke in a hard shriveled little nugget of a voice. “You’re no Howard,” she said.

“Howard’s dead,” I said. “He deserted you.”

She was staring at the ceiling. “Howard was gold,” she mused in a languid, reflective voice, “and you’re shit.”

It was childish, I know, but the dig at my sexual performance really stung — not to mention the ingratitude of the woman — and I came back at her. “You came to me,” I said. “I didn’t ask for it — I was doing fine out there on the mountain without you. And where do you think you’d be now if it wasn’t for me? Huh?”

She didn’t answer right away, but I could feel her consolidating in the bed beside me, magma becoming rock. “I’m not going to have sex with you again,” she said, and still she was staring at the ceiling. “Ever. I’d rather use my finger.”

“You’re no Danielle,” I said.

She sat up then, furious, all her ribs showing and her shrunken breasts clinging to the remains of them like an afterthought. “Fuck Danielle,” she spat. “And fuck you.”

I watched her dress in silence, but as she was lacing up her hiking boots I couldn’t resist saying, “It’s no joy for me either, Sarai, but there’s a higher principle involved here than our likes and dislikes or any kind of animal gratification, and I think you know what I’m talking about—”

She was perched on the edge of a leather armchair I’d picked up at a yard sale years ago, when money and things had their own reality. She’d laced up the right boot and was working on the left, laces the color of rust, blunt white fingers with the nails bitten to the quick. Her mouth hung open slightly and I could see the pink tip of her tongue caught between her teeth as she worked mindlessly at her task, reverting like a child to her earliest training and her earliest habits. She gave me a blank look.

“Procreation, I mean. If you look at it in a certain way, it’s — well, it’s our duty.”

Her laugh stung me. It was sharp and quick, like the thrust of a knife. “You idiot,” she said, and she laughed again, showing the gold in her back teeth. “I hate children, always have — they’re little monsters that grow up to be uptight fussy pricks like you.” She paused, smiled, and released an audible breath. “I had my tubes tied fifteen years ago.”

That night she moved into the big house, a replica of a Moorish castle in Seville, replete with turrets and battlements. The paintings and furnishings were exquisite, and there were some twelve thousand square feet of living space, graced with carved wooden ceilings, colored tiles, rectangular arches, a loggia and formal gardens. Nor had the DuPompiers spoiled the place by being so thoughtless as to succumb inside — they’d died, Julius, Eleanor and their daughter, Kelly, under the arbor in back, the white bones of their hands eternally clasped. I wished Sarai good use of the place. I did. Because by that point I didn’t care if she moved into the White House, so long as I didn’t have to deal with her anymore.

Weeks slipped by. Months. Occasionally I would see the light of Sarai’s Coleman lantern lingering in one of the high windows of Mírame as night fell over the coast, but essentially I was as solitary — and as lonely — as I’d been in the cabin in the mountains. The rains came and went. It was spring. Everywhere the untended gardens ran wild, the lawns became fields, the orchards forests, and I took to walking round the neighborhood with a baseball bat to ward off the packs of feral dogs for which Alpo would never again materialize in a neat bowl in the corner of a dry and warm kitchen. And then one afternoon, while I was at Von’s, browsing the aisles for pasta, bottled marinara and Green Giant asparagus spears amid a scattering of rats and the lingering stench of the perished perishables, I detected movement at the far end of the next aisle over. My first thought was that it must be a dog or a coyote that had somehow managed to get in to feed on the rats or the big twenty-five-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow, but then, with a shock, I realized I wasn’t alone in the store.

In all the time I’d been coming here for groceries, I’d never seen a soul, not even Sarai or one of the six or seven other survivors who were out there occupying the mansions in the hills. Every once in a while I’d see lights shining in the wall of the night — someone had even managed to fire up a generator at Las Tejas, a big Italianate villa half a mile away — and every so often a car would go helling up the distant freeway, but basically we survivors were shy of one another and kept to ourselves. It was fear, of course, the little spark of panic that told you the contagion was abroad again and that the best way to avoid it was to avoid all human contact. So we did. Strenuously.

But I couldn’t ignore the squeak and rattle of a shopping cart wheeling up the bottled water aisle, and when I turned the corner, there she was, Felicia, with her flowing hair and her scared and sorry eyes. I didn’t know her name then, not at first, but I recognized her — she was one of the tellers at the Bank of America branch where I cashed my checks. Formerly cashed them, that is. My first impulse was to back wordlessly away, but I mastered it — how could I be afraid of what was human, so palpably human, and appealing? “Hello,” I said, to break the tension, and then I was going to say something stupid like “I see you made it too” or “Tough times, huh?” but instead I settled for “Remember me?”

She looked stricken. Looked as if she were about to bolt — or die on the spot. But her lips were brave and they came together and uttered my name. “Mr. Halloran?” she said, and it was so ordinary, so plebeian, so real.

I smiled and nodded. My name is — was — Francis Xavier Halloran III, a name I’ve hated since Tyrone Johnson (now presumably dead) tormented me with it in kindergarten, chanting “Francis, Francis, Francis” till I wanted to sink through the floor. But it was a new world now, a world burgeoning and bursting at the seams to discover the lineaments of its new forms and rituals. “Call me Jed,” I said.

Nothing happens overnight, especially not in plague times. We were wary of each other, and every banal phrase and stultifying cliché of the small talk we made as I helped her load her groceries into the back of her Range Rover reverberated hugely with the absence of all the multitudes who’d used those phrases before us. Still, I got her address that afternoon — she’d moved into Villa Ruscello, a mammoth place set against the mountains, with a creek, pond and Jacuzzi for fresh water — and I picked her up two nights later in a Rolls Silver Cloud and took her to my favorite French restaurant. The place was untouched and pristine, with a sweeping view of the sea, and I lit some candles and poured us each a glass of twenty-year-old Bordeaux, after which we feasted on canned crab, truffles, cashews and marinated artichoke hearts.

I’d like to tell you that she was beautiful, because that’s the way it should be, the way of the fable and the fairy tale, but she wasn’t — or not conventionally, anyway. She was a little heavier than she might have been ideally, but that was a relief after stringy Sarai, and her eyes were ever so slightly crossed. Yet she was decent and kind, sweet even, and more important, she was available.

We took walks together, raided overgrown gardens for lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini, planted strawberries and snow peas in the middle of the waist-high lawn at Villa Ruscello. One day we drove to the mountains and brought back the generator so we could have lights and refrigeration in the cottage — ice cubes, now there was a luxury — and begin to work our way through the eight thousand titles at the local video store. It was nearly a month before anything happened between us — anything sexual, that is. And when it did, she first felt obligated, out of a sense of survivor’s guilt, I suppose, to explain to me how she came to be alive and breathing still when everyone she’d ever known had vanished off the face of the earth. We were in the beamed living room of my cottage, sharing a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1970, with the three-hundred-ten-dollar price tag still on it, and I’d started a fire against the gathering night and the wet raw smell of rain on the air. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot,” she said.

I made a noise of demurral and put my arm round her.

“Did you ever hear of a sensory deprivation tank?” She was peering up at me through the scrim of her hair, gold and red highlights, health in a bottle.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But you don’t mean—?”

“It was an older one, a model that’s not on the market anymore — one of the originals. My roommate’s sister — Julie Angier? — she had it out in her garage on Padaro, and she was really into it. You could get in touch with your inner self, relax, maybe even have an out-of-body experience, that’s what she said, and I figured why not?” She gave me a look, shy and passionate at once, to let me know that she was the kind of girl who took experience seriously. “They put salt water in it, three hundred gallons, heated to your body temperature, and then they shut the lid on you and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing there — it’s like going to outer space. Or inner space. Inside yourself.”

“And you were in there when—?”

She nodded. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read — pride, triumph, embarrassment, a spark of sheer lunacy. I gave her an encouraging smile.

“For days, I guess,” she said. “I just sort of lost track of everything, who I was, where I was — you know? And I didn’t wake up till the water started getting cold”—she looked at her feet—“which I guess is when the electricity went out because there was nobody left to run the power plants. And then I pushed open the lid and the sunlight through the window was like an atom bomb, and then, then I called out Julie’s name, and she … well, she never answered.”

Her voice died in her throat and she turned those sorrowful eyes on me. I put my other arm around her and held her. “Hush,” I whispered, “it’s all right now, everything’s all right.” It was a conventional thing to say, and it was a lie, but I said it, and I held her and felt her relax in my arms.

It was then, almost to the precise moment, that Sarai’s naked sliver of a face appeared at the window, framed by her two uplifted hands and a rock the size of my Webster’s unabridged. “What about me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and there it was again, everlasting stone and frangible glass, and not a glazier left alive on the planet.

I wanted to kill her. It was amazing — three people I knew of had survived the end of everything, and it was one too many. I felt vengeful. Biblical. I felt like storming Sarai’s ostentatious castle and wringing her chicken neck for her, and I think I might have if it weren’t for Felicia. “Don’t let her spoil it for us,” she murmured, the gentle pressure of her fingers on the back of my neck suddenly holding my full attention, and we went into the bedroom and closed the door on all that mess of emotion and glass.

In the morning, I stepped into the living room and was outraged all over again. I cursed and stomped and made a fool of myself over heaving the rock back through the window and attacking the shattered glass as if it were alive — I admit I was upset out of all proportion to the crime. This was a new world, a new beginning, and Sarai’s nastiness and negativity had no place in it. Christ, there were only three of us — couldn’t we get along?

Felicia had repaired dozens of windows in her time. Her little brothers (dead now) and her fiancé (dead too) were forever throwing balls around the house, and she assured me that a shattered window was nothing to get upset over (though she bit her lip and let her eyes fill at the mention of her fiancé, and who could blame her?). So we consulted the Yellow Pages, drove to the nearest window glass shop and broke in as gently as possible. Within the hour, the new pane had been installed and the putty was drying in the sun, and watching Felicia at work had so elevated my spirits I suggested a little shopping spree to celebrate.

“Celebrate what?” She was wearing a No Fear T-shirt and an Anaheim Angels cap and there was a smudge of off-white putty on her chin.

“You,” I said. “The simple miracle of you.”

And that was fine. We parked on the deserted streets of downtown Santa Barbara and had the stores to ourselves — clothes, the latest (and last) bestsellers, CDs, a new disc player to go with our newly electrified house. Others had visited some of the stores before us, of course, but they’d been polite and neat about it, almost as if they were afraid to betray their presence, and they always closed the door behind them. We saw deer feeding in the courtyards and one magnificent tawny mountain lion stalking the wrong way up a one-way street. By the time we got home, I was elated. Everything was going to work out, I was sure of it.

The mood didn’t last long. As I swung into the drive, the first thing I saw was the yawning gap where the new window had been, and beyond it, the undifferentiated heap of rubble that used to be my living room. Sarai had been back. And this time she’d done a thorough job, smashing lamps and pottery, poking holes in our cans of beef stew and chili con carne, scattering coffee, flour and sugar all over everything and dumping sand in the generator’s fuel tank. Worst of all, she’d taken half a dozen pairs of Felicia’s panties and nailed them to the living room wall, a crude X slashed across the crotch of each pair. It was hateful and savage — human, that’s what it was, human — and it killed all the joy we’d taken in the afternoon and the animals and the infinite and various riches of the mall. Sarai had turned it all to shit.

“We’ll move to my place,” Felicia said. “Or any place you want. How about an oceanfront house — didn’t you say you’d always wanted to live right on the ocean?”

I had. But I didn’t want to admit it. I stood in the middle of the desecrated kitchen and clenched my fists. “I don’t want any other place. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her drive me out.”

It was an irrational attitude — again, childish — and Felicia convinced me to pack up a few personal items (my high school yearbook, my reggae albums, a signed first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a pair of deer antlers I’d found in the woods when I was eight) and move into a place on the ocean for a few days. We drove along the coast road at a slow, stately pace, looking over this house or that, until we finally settled on a grand modern place that was all angles and glass and broad sprawling decks. I got lucky and caught a few perch in the surf, and we barbecued them on the beach and watched the sun sink into the western bluffs.

The next few days were idyllic, and we thought about little beyond love and food and the way the water felt on our skin at one hour of the day or another, but still, the question of Sarai nagged at me. I was reminded of her every time I wanted a cold drink, for instance, or when the sun set and we had to make do with candles and kerosene lanterns — we’d have to go out and dig up another generator, we knew that, but they weren’t exactly in demand in a place like Santa Barbara (in the old days, that is) and we didn’t know where to look. And so yes, I couldn’t shake the image of Sarai and the look on her face and the things she’d said and done. And I missed my house, because I’m a creature of habit, like anybody else. Or more so. Definitely more so.

Anyway, the solution came to us a week later, and it came in human form — at least it appeared in human form, but it was a miracle and no doubt about it. Felicia and I were both on the beach — naked, of course, as naked and without shame or knowledge of it as Eve and Adam — when we saw a figure marching resolutely up the long curving finger of sand that stretched away into the haze of infinity. As the figure drew closer, we saw that it was a man, a man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and hair the same color trailing away from a bald spot worn into his crown. He was dressed in hiking clothes, big-grid boots, a bright blue pack riding his back like a second set of shoulders. We stood there, naked, and greeted him.

“Hello,” he said, stopping a few feet from us and staring first at my face, then at Felicia’s breasts, and finally, with an effort, bending to check the laces of his boots. “Glad to see you two made it,” he said, speaking to the sand.

“Likewise,” I returned.

Over lunch on the deck — shrimp salad sandwiches on Felicia-baked bread — we traded stories. It seems he was hiking in the mountains when the pestilence descended—“The mountains?” I interrupted. “Whereabouts?”

“Oh,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “up in the Sierras, just above this little town — you’ve probably never heard of it — Fish Fry Flats?”

I let him go on a while, explaining how he’d lost his girlfriend and wandered for days before he finally came out on a mountain road and appropriated a car to go on down to Los Angeles—“One big cemetery”—and how he’d come up the coast and had been wandering ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such exhilaration, such a rush of excitement, such perfect and inimitable a sense of closure.

I couldn’t keep from interrupting him again. “I’m clairvoyant,” I said, raising my glass to the man sitting opposite me, to Felicia and her breasts, to the happy fishes in the teeming seas and the birds flocking without number in the unencumbered skies. “Your name’s Howard, right?”

Howard was stunned. He set down his sandwich and wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips. “How did you guess?” he said, gaping up at me out of eyes that were innocent and pure, the newest eyes in the world.

I just smiled and shrugged, as if it were my secret. “After lunch,” I said, “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”