To Love the Difficult

He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

That morning, MacKenzie was in his usual spot behind the counter at the Pik-A-Mart.

His John Deere cap had melted onto his face, and below the green brim, Mac’s remarkably long nose had grown like Pinocchio’s, with the tip nearly joining with his chin.

It was so ridiculous that Terry Herle laughed to see it, figuring that the Pik-A-Mart window was plastic and maybe it was warped, and he’d just never noticed before.

“Hey, Mac!” he said, rapping on the frame and trying the door. It was locked.

“Mac — what’s hangin’?” Terry said, rapping again and rattling the doorknob. He really needed some java. “Gotta get my Starbucks.”

Mac kept a junior Starbucks cart in the back of the store, and you might think that this was no remarkable thing, but Portland was a genuinely small Midwestern town. Terry remembered Mac bragging that he had to pay plenty just for the privilege of putting up that green-and-white sign, getting their beans, using their cups, and even paying extra for the essential little round brown cardboard things that kept a guy from burning his fingers.

Mac’s nose wavered back and forth for a bit, but then the John Deere cap straightened itself out, and so did Mac. He looked toward the door, grinning his familiar grin and giving Terry a thumbs-up.

As Terry tried the knob again, the door practically flew open, and he grunted in surprise.

“Hey man, what’s up?” he asked as he stumbled over the black rubber welcome mat.

“Hi there,” said Mac as Terry righted himself.

This was almost as weird as the vision through the window. Terry felt like Mac didn’t know him.

“I’ll have the usual,” Terry said as he walked to the counter. He put his elbow on the counter, then rested his chin on the heel of his palm in a “pensive” pose.

“Yeah?” Mac said. “And...”

“Mac!” Terry said, laughing uncomfortably, because he really didn’t like this type of joke. “You’ve known me for ten years. Terry Herle — John Jay County’s most famous resident.”

Mac’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, the most famous,” he said slowly.

Terry started to feel like he was catching on. “Quit pulling my leg,” he said. “Like you could forget the world’s most successful blogger?” he added.

Mac nodded and turned toward the mini-Starbuck’s barista cart. He started to grind beans and fill a little stainless steel cup with dark brown powder.

“The author of the ‘Wellcome’ Poem?” Terry said, as Mac squirted steam into a big stainless steel cup filled with milk.

“Never, man,” Mac said, squirting some yellow gunk into the tall paper cup, dumping some brackish coffee into it, then sloshing in the hot, foamy milk.

“There you go,” he said, pushing the cup at Terry. “Half-caf latte with skim milk and a shot of sugar-free hazelnut.”

This was indeed “the usual.”

“Thanks,” said Terry, grinning to himself as he got one of the little brown cardboard rounds out of the stainless steel rack and slipped it over the bottom of the cup. Then, he popped on the plastic top, humming softly to himself.

“Sure,” said Mac. “How could anybody forget the ‘Wellcome’ Poem?”

Terry rocked back and forth on his heels, grinning as Mac recited his masterpiece.

If you would have asked Terry Herle in tenth grade if all grown up, he would have become a more famous poet than Edgar Allan Poe or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he would have shaken his head and said, “Nope — not me.”

Mac crossed his arms and brayed,

Wellcome

Wellcome

Smell some

Well come

Smell some

Wellcome now!

It repeated like that for a while.

“What did you think, pulling my leg like that?” Terry asked, inwardly relieved that the natural order of things had been restored.

“Really had ya there, didn’t I?” Mac said.

Terry nodded, forcing a grin. He still felt uneasy, because Mac really had him going for a while.

“Girls still won’t leave ya alone, will they?” asked Mac. “How’s that one you were telling me about from Terre Haute?”

Terry shrugged. “Tina? Aw, Tina comes by the blog every day. Sends me smokin’ hot pictures, too.”

“Heh-heh,” said Mac. “I’d like to see those —”

“No can do,” said Terry. “I’ll just have to leave her up to your imagination.” After all, Tina hadn’t sent those pictures to everyone. They were special — for the world’s most famous poet and blogger.

Terry Herle.

It was a pretty funny trick, Terry thought on the way home, Mac’s little joke. For being a little hole in the wall, Portland, Indiana was pretty fortunate. It wasn’t every little town along every highway through waving fields of grain that had famous residents like Terry.

Terry guessed that Mac probably thought it was a good idea to let some of the wind out of his sails. Maybe Mac had a point, he thought, sipping his steaming latte. It was never a good idea to get a big head, even if you were the world’s most famous blogger.

Not far from his house, Terry stopped beside the waist-high white picket horse fence and looked over at his neighbor’s property. Big red barn next to a little white farmhouse. It was a pretty scene, unless you were used to scenes like that. They were pretty much the only scenes around Portland, and if Terry was honest with himself, he was sick of them.

He could have gone for some graffiti, or maybe a bus stop with a bum begging for change getting beaten up by half a dozen raging crackhead gang members. As he struggled to imagine what gang members looked like, he suddenly got a cartoon image of a big, blobby black kid, a short, skinny kid with a purple knit cap pulled down over his face, and sharp-looking character with a messenger cap and a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

     Hey, hey, hey, he thought.

     Um. Well, somebody probably already took that idea.

He looked back at the classic farm scene next door and decided to take a picture and run with it anyway. Maybe there was a poem in it. Everyday things. Found poem. He slipped his cell out of his pocket and took a couple of candid shots, then emailed them to himself. This was tomorrow’s blog post — easy.

Horses... grass

Too pretty to last — well

Kiss my ass...

It could use a little work.

Not to worry, though — Terry had all afternoon. Plenty of time for a nap, then he could photoshop those pictures of the house and barn, polish up the poem, and take some more good long looks at the bodacious Tina from Terra Haute.

Five dollars — a half-caf latte. Custom-made Edward Green loafers — three thousand dollars. Living the life of the world’s most famous blogger and poet? Priceless.

o0o

Imagine Terry’s surprise when he woke up from his nap, the internet was completely out, and his laptop wouldn’t turn on.

After kicking his desk a few times and storming around the house causing his ex-wife’s mug collection to fall crashing to the floor, Terry threw open the back door and stomped out onto the porch, hollering, “Nooooo!!!!!”

This display roused his old yellow dog, who had been sleeping happily under the back porch.

“Howwwwa-roooo,” yowled Pinky. That was the name Terry’s gladly-departed spouse had given the dog. She wasn’t the kind of woman worth remembering, so most of the time, Terry didn’t. Terry had always called the spavined creature “dog” and as far as Pinky was concerned, that seemed to work just fine.

“What the hell have they done down at the...” Terry struggled to remember just where Portland’s power came from. “Steam plant,” he said, kicking a pot of geraniums off the porch.

The old red clay shattered and a half-dead collection of sticks and turdlike clods of mud exploded at his feet — he imagined for a moment that the weedy geranium was looking back up at him and wailing, but no — that was ridiculous. This type of thought was what you got for being creative. Geraniums didn’t cry, whether they were green, dead, on his porch, or in some old lady’s window garden.

He looked across his back yard toward the horse farm next door. He thought for several moments, but had no memory of the name of the woman who lived there.

When he’d tried to talk her up by the mailbox last year, the peppery gal had the unmitigated gall to tell him she wouldn’t know about his poems, because she never used the internet.

Unbelievable. Who said that, these days? Even the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski would have used a satellite hookup to his death cabin if it had been available. What kind of nut didn’t use the internet? If she hadn’t been a female, Terry would have been really suspicious.

Shaking his head, he went back inside and gave the laptop another try. Still no go. It was getting pretty dark inside the house. He must have taken a longer nap than he thought. Glancing over at the microwave clock, it wasn’t flashing “12:00”. It was dark and sort of greasy-looking. Same for the DVR in the living room, except it wasn’t greasy, it was dusty.

He got his travel alarm clock out of his sock drawer, and even it had stopped. It read 1:17 — and the little “day/night” picture was stuck half-way between blue and yellow. What was that supposed to mean? He opened the back with his thumbnail and two crusty, whitish batteries fell out onto his pillow.

Terry jumped back as if they were a pair of night crawlers. What was it that his heinously ungrateful heifer of a former wife Kim had said about toxic batteries? They needed to go with the toxic waste to the toxic waste dump. He knew it seemed weird, but Kim had always been the one to fix things around the house. She paid the bills, too, and cooked the meals.

It was the most amazing providence, he thought, that his blogging had taken off right after that bitch shook her skinny fist in his face, moved to Muncie, and took up with the car salesman.

Nobody was driving cars much any longer, so Terry wondered how her lazy ass liked it riding a solar-powered bus and living in whatever welfare dump she’d ended up in with that fat, unemployed, former Nissan-hawking good-for-nothing...

For some reason, Terry thought maybe he’d just blown a fuse, and he wandered back into the kitchen, idly trying to recall where the fuse box was. In the cellar? Hadn’t been down there for —

Instead, he considered the refrigerator door a moment, then pulled the latch. A beer would go down —

He gagged, staggering back. He couldn’t even tell what was in the fruit drawer, and he’d never seen a milk carton exactly that color.

Something wet touched his left wrist and he screamed like a little girl.

It was Pinky’s long, raspy tongue. The hound had pushed the porch door open with his nose. Now he was in the kitchen sniffing curiously at the horror inside Terry’s refrigerator.

“Get your damn nose out of there, dog,” Terry snapped.

Pinky rewarded this masterly guidance with a deep sniff. With a filthy look, he turned around and walked crookedly back out onto the porch. Muttering quiet oaths, Terry followed him. He put his hand to his forehead shielding his eyes, scanning the horizon.

Now, if the power had been out long enough to do what it had to the refrigerator —

Terry had a horrible vision of the old Dutch guy who fell asleep under a tree. The image was hazy, but he could google it in a minute.

He shook his head. Nobody was doing any googling at the Herle house. The thought of all the blog comments he was missing swirled and tore at his mind. How much ad-click revenue?... the adulatory messages piling up from his posse, and new pictures of Tina —

Trip L’Twinkle, he thought. Wee Willie Winkie. No — Rip! Rip van Winkle.

With a cold shudder, the thought crossed his mind — What if he’d been asleep for a hundred years? He was waking — finally —

and the world had changed irrevocably?

Pinky howled again and looked toward the horse farm, his ears erect and quivering, and his tail rigid as an old stick with a little bit of yellow fur glued on it.

Now, the dog’s existence spoke against that, he told himself. He might have been asleep for a century, but his dog sure as heck hadn’t survived a century of somnolence.

Terry reached in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. When he flipped it open, it was as dark as the inside of the refrigerator. Somehow, this didn’t surprise him.

Pinky kept looking toward the farm next door, making little cries in the back of his old hound throat.

Squinting, Terry made out a thin stream of smoke rising from the white farmhouse next to the big red barn. Somebody was there, somebody was home, and they had a fire in the fireplace.

He bit his lip. He wasn’t sure what the woman next door would say if he showed up at her door with his crazy story. No internet, not friendly — face like a smashed green cabbage. Then, he remembered — the Pik-A-Mart — Mac. Mac would know what had happened and what to do.

Terry ran down the hall and burst through the living room, barely noticing the condition of the curtains. They had advanced beyond needing a wash to greasy, then partially plastered to the windows, and were now approaching threadbare horror movie condition. Not good, Terry, he thought. Very not good.

He stumbled off the front porch and into his front yard.

It wasn’t anything like it had been that morning. He could barely see the red bricks that marked the way to the curb. Brambles and briars bowed aggressively over shoulder-high weedy grass.

Pushing his way through the scratchy, reeking foliage, with Pinky shuffling behind and whining, Terry made it out onto the road, which also didn’t look so great. The asphalt was cracked, with huge potholes that had most certainly not been there on his morning walk to the Pik-A-Mart. Trash was piled everywhere, and a little green battery-powered car was crumpled against an elm tree looking like a turtle on its back, only instead of legs it had old, cracked gray tires. Judging from the weeds poking through its empty windows, and the cobwebs connecting the tires to the wheel wells, it had been there a while. Terry saw something round and whitish in the passenger side window.

His throat filled with acid.

“Come on, dog,” he said to Pinky, who had begun to growl back in his throat.

After just a few steps, Terry’s legs started to hurt and he found himself wheezing. He stopped, coughing and hacking and clutching his chest.

With a sudden start, he wondered — what if there had been an attack? Some kind of biological weapon?

His feet were killing him. What could get worse?

His shoes had disappeared. His $3,000 Edward Green loafers, virtually fitted just for him! All Terry could think was that while he napped whatever godforsaken comalike nap he’d taken, someone had crept into the house and stolen them right off his feet.

His naked, thorny toes peeked from a pair of shredded gray-white gym socks.

Grimacing, he hobbled toward the Pik-A-Mart. It was a long, cold and fearsome trip, nothing like the pleasant jaunt he’d taken that morning. Once he got into town, there wasn’t a house that looked occupied. Most were boarded up, and his chest felt even tighter as he passed the Lutheran Church and saw its double green doors ajar, creaking softly back and forth.

His spirits raised a little as he saw the Pik-A-Mart’s windows were intact. Getting to the door, he tried the knob hesitantly. The door swung open easily and he went inside. The lights were out here too, and even from the door, Terry could see that the refrigerated cases were empty. Their glass doors had been smashed and jagged shards littered the store’s center aisle.

Terry went around the side.

“Mac?” he called.

He wasn’t surprised when he got no answer.

Somehow, in the space of — how long? — the Pik-A-Mart hadn’t just been picked-over. It had been decimated. A few cans were scattered here and there — crushed and bent, and nothing anybody would have wanted in the first place. Beets. Sauerkraut. The only untouched display was, bizarrely, the “personal” products shelf, where four pregnancy tests huddled next to boxes of Trojans and sealed black packages containing “male and female” enhancement lotion.

That stuff was expensive, Terry thought. If looters came in, why wouldn’t they go for that in addition to beer, pork rinds and cigarettes?

“Mac?” he said again in a softer voice, approaching the overturned Starbucks cart. He’d had a cup of joe from that very cart just that —

Terry stopped himself. It couldn’t have been that morning. Even the worst looting incident couldn’t have done what he’d seen in his house, the town, and the store, in a single day.

A brown work boot peeked from behind the Starbucks cart.

“Mac?” he said again, kneeling and peering around the cart as Pinky growled.

There was no leg attached to the boot. It was just a shoe, a steel-toed work boot with the laces undone. Terry started to laugh as Pinky’s low growl raised in pitch and something huge and furry leapt out of the interior of the cart with a metallic crash and flew straight at Terry’s face.

Terry shrieked as he fell back on the filthy floor, his assailant hissing and scratching at his cheeks. It was going for his eyes!

Grabbing hold of something fat, flabby and furry, Terry tugged with desperate strength. With thin, prehensile hands, the beast had attached itself to his collar.

Pinky yowled and he leapt onto the beast, sinking his teeth into what Terry figured must have been its hind quarters. The creature scrambled desperately, clawing Terry’s neck and cheeks. With a mighty groan, he dislodged the creature, hurling it four or five feet away where it hit the floor with an audible “splat,” forming a striped gray-brown circle with four squat legs splayed from under the flat fur patch.

The creature’s abnormally-small hissing head turned and Terry saw two dark rings around its beady eyes.

It was a raccoon. The biggest, fattest, meanest one Terry had ever seen.

Righting itself, the raccoon reared up on its hind legs and staggered toward Terry like Terry was a bouncer, and the raccoon an angry drunk he’d just evicted from his barstool for the night. The hair on Pinky’s back was standing straight up. He was snarling and growling at the raccoon, which was spitting and hissing back in an alarmingly psychotic, rage-filled tone.

Looking to his left, Terry saw that the inside of the upended Starbucks cart was filled with shreds of bright cellophane and plastic. Cheetos, regular and flaming hot, Doritos, Ruffles, Lays, Fritos, Tostitos, Funyuns, and of course — Terry saw the red outline of a cartoon pig that signified spicy hot pork rinds.

Terry had inadvertently trespassed upon Rocky the Mad Raccoon’s junk food stash.

The raccoon continued to advance. Terry kicked at him with his sock-feet, afraid that the thing would grab hold and start chewing on his big toe. He knelt, snatching the work boot and slung it by its undone laces at the beast. It hit the coon in the belly with a satisfying thud of hard rubber against soft, fatty fur. The raccoon flew back into one of the empty steel shelves, and with a last hissing screech of fury, scuttled out the front door of the Pik-A-Mart like a furry, striped, pissed-off crab.

“We got him on the run for now, Pinky,” Terry said, pulling the old yellow dog close. “But I’ve got a feeling he’ll be back.”

Suddenly, a buzzing hiss rose up and Terry snapped his head around to see a flickering form behind the Pik-A-Mart counter. It was more like a weird, projected shadow than anything else.

Heart leaping, Terry wondered if it was the dead spirit of Mac, still haunting his store. He could see the outline of a green cap shadowing a totally blank gray face.

“Howzit,” the shadow said.

Terry’s eyes narrowed and he backed slowly away, getting cautiously to his feet.

“Howwww-zzzzziiit,” said the shadow. It buckled, then wavered back and forth in a greenish-yellow cloud of light.

Pale streams of twilight shot through the store and straight through the shadow, illuminating the empty, broken shelf behind the counter where Mac had formerly kept lighters, plastic flasks of lighter fluid, shotgun shells and small cigars.

Terry backed out of the store with Pinky. “Be seeing you, Mac,” he said, keeping his eyes on the weird Mac-shadow. It didn’t look dangerous, but he didn’t plan to stick around to find out if it could solidify, or do something worse than buzz and sputter “Howzit.”

Terry looked toward the center of town, which was littered with bricks, burnt-out car hulks and overturned trash bins.

Then, he looked back down the way he had come. Pinky stayed at his side, back arched, hackles raised, sniffing the air suspiciously.

Terry’s body ached. He poked gingerly at his chest where the raccoon had clawed him. “Better find something for this,” he muttered, looking down at his blood-streaked fingers.

Visions of some horrible infection, like cholera or botulism, went through his head. No — if you got bit, it was tetanus. Or rabies.

He felt slow — strange, but he emphatically did not want to die foaming at the mouth while trying to swallow tough red strands of yellow dog sushi or whatever horror the disease would force him to before the end.

With renewed purpose, Terry staggered back toward his house. A slight rush of hope warmed his face as he saw the intact, silver mailbox of his neighbor the horse farmer, with the red mail flag raised. Well, if the mail was still coming, he thought, as he squared his shoulders, then started trudging down her ridiculously long, rutted mud driveway. At least somebody had cleared the weeds around this place, he thought. And the house didn’t look that bad — at least not compared to his place or back in town.

It wasn’t until he got to the porch, examined the wicker rocking chair, clean flowered cushions, and the corn cob pipe resting on a wicker side table alongside an old four-cornered green glass ashtray that he realized —

He still could not remember his neighbor’s name.

Karen? Corinne? Kayla?

He knocked. Pinky sat quietly and unceremoniously beside his right ankle and cocked his head attentively, like he knew what he was doing, and had been there before.

“Uh, Karen?” he called. “Are you home?”

He heard soft footsteps.

The lace curtain moved aside a couple of inches. He saw a single eye peering out at him, above a thin pale nose and a pair of narrow lips.

“It’s Terry, your neighbor,” he said.

“I know who you are,” came a low, not particularly-friendly female voice.

“Uh, I got into some trouble just now. I was wondering if you had some...” he struggled to think of the right word. “Bactine,” he said finally. “Or, uh,” he was really struggling now. He could picture the small brown bottle in his mind, and see the nasty bright salmon color. “Merthiolate.”

No answer.

“Something to put on the cuts,” he said. “It was a raccoon.”

“I’ve got whisky,” said the soft female voice.

“Um,” said Terry, “Would you mind letting me in?”

The curtain fell back. Terry stood on the porch with blood dripping down his waist into the top of his trousers for what seemed like fifteen minutes.

Finally, the door opened and a slender, graying woman with narrow, piercing blue eyes appeared. Terry could see around her shoulder to a combined kitchen and dining area stacked high with crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes, leaving barely enough room for a small round table, two chairs, and a flickering Coleman lantern.

“My name’s not Karen,” she said.

It was only then that Terry noticed the ominous black revolver in her hand.

“Whisky’s in the cupboard,” she said. “Rags are on the counter.”

Terry stepped around her into the hall, acutely aware that he now had a long-barreled Smith & Wesson at his back. His dad had made somewhat of a hobby of collecting and cataloging guns. This one wasn’t a newer model, but considering the type of rounds that it could hold in its chambers, at such close range it would blow a hole somewhere between the size of a tennis ball and a softball in his back or side. He wondered what that would feel like. Dad used to say getting popped by a big caliber gun like that was something like a deer getting shot by a 30-ought. The deer didn’t feel a thing, dad said. As this was something dad had just read in a book, or picked up while drinking Pabst with his pals, Terry didn’t really see the point of comparing his flank to that of a wandering buck in the forest going about its business until it was cut down by a drunk, whiskered guy in a Pendleton shirt hunkered down in a hunting blind.

“I’m sorry,” Terry said, shuffling by the boxes in the kitchen until he reached the cupboard. She instructed him where to look solely with her eyes, not speaking a word.

He opened one cupboard, and the way her mouth turned down at the corners let him know that wasn’t it. He opened the next cupboard, and saw a dark, fat bottle of Maker’s Mark.

“I really thought your name was Karen,” he said.

Considering that she had a gun on him, Terry really didn’t feel like speculating any more about what her name may have been. He remembered that day by the mailbox, where she’d given him that flat, fishlike stare and said frigidly, “I don’t use the internet.”

He took down the bottle of Maker’s Mark and set it on the counter. He hoped she didn’t see his hands shaking as he uncorked the bottle and took the least-filthy of a pile of gray rags by the dry-looking tap and poured whisky on it, then started to daub at his torn cheeks and neck.

It stung like a motherfucker and his face felt so weird, but he started hoping that Maker’s Mark would kill tetanus — or maybe even rabies, although fat chance. Even Terry knew that rabies was a virus and those probably drank whisky and multiplied.

He heard her sit in one of the kitchen chairs, but didn’t dare turn.

“I didn’t think you’d wake up,” she said softly.

“What?” he said, turning quickly, which tore a round of searing pain from the whisky and the raccoon scratches.

“You look like shit,” she said. “You should see yourself.”

Terry wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to. He had felt something while wiping his face, and it was just too weird to countenance. Something springy and bushy and rough and —

“Go ahead,” she said. “Look at yourself in the glass.” One of the cupboards had a paned-glass front and it was easy to see his reflection in it. Terry moved slowly forward and peered at the glass. He saw twin versions of a hollow-cheeked, blood-stained, bearded stranger staring back at himself. The reflection wore a tattered plaid pajama top and looked like something out of one of those old nostalgic movies, like a World War II escape-from-the-concentration-camp adventure. The type of movie that always had a sad ending.

The longer he looked, the bigger the bloodshot pop-eyes staring back at him got.

“Holy — holy shit!” he said, staggering back.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said in her soft, even voice. “Best pour yourself a couple shots of that whisky,” she added. “Shot glass in the cupboard. It isn’t too dirty.”

Terry’s head reverberated. The gun was resting in her hand on the table, sort of pointing at him, and sort of not. He was certain that in an instant, she’d lift it and squeeze the trigger if he did the least thing to spook her. So, he found the shot glass and gingerly poured Maker’s Mark into it, but not carefully enough, because oily dark gold whisky poured out of the sides and onto the counter.

“Better wipe that up,” she said.

Nodding, he did as he was told. Then he downed the shot, and after it burned its way down his esophagus, he actually felt a tiny bit, just an iota, better.

“What — what the hell is —” he said in a whisky-hoarse croak.

“Have a seat,” she said, not unkindly. She moved the gun around into what could be thought of as a neutral position, and indicated the second chair at the table with a brief gesture of one of her thin, fluttery white hands.

“What happened?” he said. “I was down at the Pik-A-Mart this morning. Mac was there — I had a whole blog post to do. I was going to — I took a picture of your farm. Do some Photoshop, put it up and —”

She was nodding, and a small smile played around the corners of her narrow mouth. “I have no doubt,” she said. “Seems to me there’s still a few folks left asleep. I think the Johnsons are still taken care of over on the other side of town. Got Reverend Baker and his cat, too — their house was fine just a week ago. Constable’s still in his office, hasn’t moved for a year, but he’s still breathing.”

“What?” said Terry.

Still holding the gun, Terry’s nameless neighbor stood and went to the counter, pouring him another shot of Maker’s Mark deftly with her left hand, and setting it down on the kitchen table in front of him before reseating herself.

“Undo your pajamas,” she said. “No — wait —” she said quickly. “Drink another shot, then have a look.”

Terry looked at the empty shot glass, then around the room. “Where’s Pinky?” he asked.

“Under the table,” she said. Pinky’s head poked out, and his jaws gripped a long beige rawhide bone, which he was masticating with gusto. At some point during Terry’s long nap — or whatever it was, Pinky had lost a few teeth.

“Where’d he get that?” asked Terry. He hadn’t seen her give it to Pinky. Heck, he didn’t remember seeing Pinky since he stepped inside the house.

“I guess you could say that’s still your dog, Mr. Herle,” she said. “But I’ve been feeding him these past five years. Can’t bear to see an animal suffer.”

“Five — years?” Terry said.

She nodded. “It’s twenty-twenty-six,” she said. “Seems like Nostradamus and the Mayans were about nine years off.”

“Nostra-Mayans?” said Terry, feeling like an idiot. He remembered something vaguely about the end of the world being December 21, 2012. BFD. A bunch of gullible dumbshits went and camped out on hilltops all around the world, it was on the newslinks, and nothing happened.

“The believers thought that on that day, the sun would enter the mouth of the great worm Ouroboros — in their idea, the Milky Way,” she said, as if that would mean something to him. “But of course the Milky Way is only what we see from our vantage here on Earth. There is no great worm in the sky.”

He shook his head, then looked toward the counter.

“It was merely a coincidence that the great worm turned on December 20, 2021 instead.”

“You can get the next shot yourself,” she added.

Terry had no memory whatsoever of that date. Five years ago! After a bit, he got some dim memory of placing a bet for the playoffs, just a day before.

Online gambling.

So if it was just a couple of days before, it had been hard winter in Portland, and it wasn’t likely he’d be walking down to the Pik-A-Mart in his socks.

He stood up and got another shot, downing it quickly. That way it didn’t burn so much, and it really was making him feel better, even if he was trapped with a crazy woman with a gun.

“I was checking my ad revenue this morning,” he said. “It doubled in the last month.”

“I just bet it did,” she said, nodding.

“I had five hundred emails overnight,” he said. “Two dozen comments and a new set of pictures from Tina — in Terra —”

“Terra Haute?” she asked.

He turned, nodding.

“Terra Haute’s glassed-over,” she said. “Indianapolis, Muncie, Chicago — all gone.”

“What?” he said. Kim was in Muncie. With the car salesman, living in a welfare shack.

“You had people there — Indianapolis?” she said.

“Muncie,” he said dully. “Glassed-over —”

“Nukes,” she said. “Big ones. Old ones. Working ones.”

“But why — why are we okay?” he asked. “How could — I mean we’re not that isolated here. We —”

“Had a wedge here,” she said.

“A what?”

“A wedge,” she repeated. “A piece of the GMID. A large, global computer. Most people didn’t realize, but it did a lot, before everything — happened.”

“I — I never heard of it,” said Terry.

“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “It ‘protected’ us when everything went nuclear. Stuff blows in from time to time, of course, but it’s not set in the soil like it is everywhere else. Then came the biochemicals, and after that just to make sure everybody was dead, they sent the big dogs through places like Muncie, Springfield and Peoria. And Chicago, L.A. and New York.”

“GMID? Big dogs? Wedges?” Terry’s head felt light. She was babbling some kind of crazy survivo-babble.

“Global Mainlink Information Dispersion... GMID,” she said. “Some people think it started the wars, but I think it just tried to — mop up. Protect people. Do the best it could.”

“Wars?” Terry asked, his tongue feeling thick and heavy.

“You don’t think just one war could do all this?” she said. “They fought until there wasn’t anything left. Just a few bits and pieces of the GMID here and there. Wedges, like here in Portland. The least little corner of Indiana.”

“But why here? Why not —”

“I guess you could blame me for a little bit of that,” she said. “I’m not originally from here. I was — manager — of this wedge. They, uh — well, the people in charge decided to spread the wedges around to out-of-the way places. They sent people to maintain them. You know,” she said. “In case of war — have them out of the way of big military targets.”

She took a deep breath and grabbed the shot glass and fat brown bottle of Maker’s Mark. She poured a shot, downed it, and then she said, “It was just my luck the day the nukes went off that it was my three-day downtime. I’d just bought this farm and was taking measurements for an armoire upstairs. An armoire,” she said, her voice mixed with equal parts of wonder and disgust.

“I thought as long as I was going to work here, that this would be a peaceful place to settle down,” she continued. “Looked like I wasn’t going to get married.” She gazed out the kitchen window.

Terry wished for the shot glass back, but now it was resting loosely in the fingers of her left hand, while her right hand was casually covering the grip of the Smith & Wesson.

“Why not try horses?” she said. “This was some beautiful country back when, Mr. Herle. Very beautiful country.”

She had an odd accent. She wasn’t from Indiana, of that, Terry was certain.

“Where the fuck have I been for the past —” he blurted, losing track of the years and passage of time, and wars and nukes — she had rushed through.

“Five years?” she reminded him. “You’ve been next door in your house lying on your couch. Now, do as I said,” she said in a steely voice, her narrow, glittering eyes meeting his. “It’s time. Undo that pajama top and look down.”

Terry looked down, and he didn’t really need to undo the buttons to see down down his skinny pale chest to something that looked really bad. Weird. Like big red welts with sucker-like holes in them.

“You can see,” she said. “Where the wedge fed you.”

“Fed me!” he cried.

“Pop pop,” she said. “The wedge didn’t think about niceties like tube-feeding down your throat. It just shot nutrients straight into your stomach. Then it sucked the waste out of your colon when it was done.”

“Like a — !”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sort of like a colostomy. The wedge had this idea,” she added. “That it would save as many people as it could, and wake you when the bad times were over. I believe it keeps people content while they are asleep. Or so I have heard.”

Terry lifted the ragged pajama top away from his chest and squinted, horrified, thinking that the whisky was probably spilling out of the hole in his gut all down his side.

“Self-sealing,” she said. “When you woke up and — well, what most people do is rip the tubes out, first thing. They were set up to self-seal. It’s not a good idea to do a lot of strenuous activity at first. But I see you already got into that.” She pointed at the raccoon’s dirty work marring his neck and chest.

“I don’t remember waking up,” he said — about coming to and ripping any tubes out. Then, after a moment, he said, “It was a raccoon.”

She nodded. “A lot of animals out now, around these parts.”

“Why would I — wake up?” Terry asked.

“The wedge is running out of power, Mr. Herle. Not enough food, either. So it’s shutting people off, one by one. Based upon — I guess who it thinks can make it. Or maybe who it thinks isn’t worth —” She cut herself short and her narrow lips pursed.

Terry let his pajama top drop back onto his caved-in chest. “It shut me off,” he said. “I guess I should have —”

“Died?” she said. “Well, some do.”

“I didn’t die,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Obviously not.”

Terry folded his hands on the table and looked down at his long, cracked fingernails. How could he lie there — five years? — not knowing where he was, or what was happening? How could he not know there had been a war — heck, wars? That Kim, rest her evil soul, was fried to a crisp and glassed-over with the bastard car salesman in Muncie. Those two, and everybody — anybody.

“I’m —” he said thickly. “I’m not a — a famous poet,” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“It was the wedge, you say,” he said.

He felt a hot burst of shame realizing what his unconscious mind had come up with.

“I thought I wrote this poem,” he said. “The Wellcome Poem.”

She nodded. “It tried to make things easier on people. A little nicer. What was the poem like?”

Terry began to wonder if he had really seen her by the mailbox, or if that had been a figment of the — wedge — as well.

“I — I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Well come, well come, smell some,” he mumbled.

He could not imagine sounding any more like an idiot.

“Oh, my God,” said Not-Karen. “That’s —”

“What a fucking bastard,” he snarled.

She nodded again, smiling that sad smile. “You’ve got that right, Mr. Herle. The wedge is a real fuck-ing bastard.” She separated the curse word with a strange pause in the middle.

“I wish I was dead,” he said.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, without a trace of smile on her face. “Everybody says that.”

“Everybody?” he said.

“Well, you’re not the first one to wake up,” she said. “Two families and the veterinarian woke up last year — they formed a search party and left the wedge bubble, headed toward Terra Haute.”

“Terra Haute! But you said that was —”

“Yeah, glassed-over. They didn’t believe me. Had family there, all of them.”

“Did they —”

“Make it?” she said. “Don’t know. But it’s not good out there, Mr. Herle. Outside of the bubble.”

“Not —”

“It’s only been five years,” she said. “That’s not enough time for any of the hot stuff to die down. There’s still biologicals out there, and enough radiation to give a frog two heads.”

“That’s — that’s disgusting,” said Terry.

“I pride myself,” she said, suddenly grinning and showing a full set of clean, strong white teeth. “Maybe you should have a bite to eat. There’s plenty of food. Not to worry about that.”

Terry’s stomach growled. He looked anxiously down at the raw, sucker-like hole right below his ribcage and saw with relief that it remained, as she had said, sealed shut.

“What — what do you have?” he asked, feeling a little strange that he was giving short-order cooking instructions to his neighbor whose name he still did not know. Not-Karen. “I meant, what should I eat after —”

“What do I not have?” she asked.

Terry thought of the empty shelves down at the Pik-A-Mart. “There’s no real person down at the Pik-A-Mart,” he said.

“Oh — you must have liked that store,” she said. “The wedge remembered for you.” She got up and opened another kitchen cabinet to reveal neat rows of cans. She was, however, still holding the gun.

“Let’s see,” she said. “Spaghetti-O’s, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli, Durkee beef tamales, Dinty Moore, corned beef, chipped beef, and potted meat product.”

“Dinty Moore,” Terry said. He might be realistically starving after five years of force-fed Soylent Green, but he still hadn’t come to the level of thought that found “potted meat product” palatable.

“An excellent choice. Would you like Tabasco?” she asked.

He looked down at his chest.

“You’re right,” she said. “I bet that flesh down there is probably still pretty raw.” She pulled the tab on the top of the can of stew and dumped it into a white Chinet bowl, added a plastic spoon and set it in front of him.

He looked around and realized that while he’d seen smoke rising from the chimney before, the room was now cold and whatever the smoke had come from, the fire was out.

“Hope you don’t mind it cold,” she said. “Don’t have enough wood right now to bother with cooking things if they’re already cooked.”

Dinty Moore stew was always fully-cooked, even if congealed when cold.

Terry put the spoon in the brown, chunky liquid and lifted a hunk of meat only slightly better-looking than fancy dog food and a square of waxy potato to his lips.

It tasted — amazing.

Terry shoveled more stew into his mouth and chewed, although his mouth felt weird, almost raw.

“Take it easy,” she said. “First solid food —”

“For five years,” he said, mumbling through bites of stew.

She nodded. “You’re waking up,” she said. “Catching on. That’s really good.”

For the first time, her voice contained some thin hint of excitement or happiness. Looking up, he noticed that her eyes had lost some of the cold glare they’d had before, and there were smile-lines around her mouth, even if her thin lips were not smiling, and looked as though they may never have smiled.

“After you finish,” she said, “We can turn the radio on. See what’s going on down in Way-Way-tango.”

“Way — Way?” he mumbled.

“Way-Way-Tay-Nahn-Go,” she said. “Spelled H-U-E, H-U-E, T-E-N-A-N-G-O. It’s a city in Guatemala. They had another wedge.”

After he finished his stew, Terry stumbled up the stairs after her, wondering how he’d ever find the right way to ask her name, and wondering just where in the hell Guatemala was. Somewhere, he recalled, in South America.

o0o

“What’s that?” Terry asked, as Not-Karen sat at a small desk upon which rested an old stereo receiver, put a pair of headphones on her head, and twisted a knob on a nearby open metal box filled with plastic toy-like contraptions and weird little coiled copper wires.

“It’s a radio,” she said, not turning.

“But if everybody’s dead, what’s the point of calling —”

“Huehuetenango,” she said. “We still have some satellites, and they’re not dead there. Other places too,” she said. “Some folks up in Fairbanks, got another station in Alberta, though I haven’t talked to them for a while.”

“Canada,” he said.

Not-Karen didn’t bother to reply as she twisted the knob, little lights on the inside of the box began to glow, and crackling noises came from the stereo receiver-thing.

Terry sat on the small, narrow bed. It was covered with an old, patched quilt that smelled of cedar. The bed creaked. “You’ve got power,” he said approvingly.

She removed the headphones for a moment and swiveled around in the chair, fixing him with a steely gaze.

“I have a generator for the radio,” she said. “Not much else.”

“Oh,” he said, folding his hands on his lap. Pinky came sauntering in and jumped up on the bed, pushing fretfully against Terry with his hind legs. There was no surer proof that what she’d said was true — Not-Karen had been looking after his dog for the past five years.

Man’s best friend, he thought sourly. Scratching under the pillow, the dog extracted and began to mouth an old plastic squeaky toy shaped like a hot dog, and he sure as heck had never gotten Pinky anything like that. Child-like dog toys ruined a hound’s better nature.

Not-Karen picked up an old-fashioned microphone on a coiled black wire, continued to fiddle with the dial and started saying something in Spanish.

“Well, I guess Tina in Terre Haute was as real as a three-dollar bill,” he said softly, reaching over to scratch Pinky behind the ears. Pinky, interpreting this as an attempt to snatch his toy, growled. Terry gave him a dirty look, but considering his host’s temperament, he just shook his head at the dog, and didn’t cuff him back of the head as he would have before — the wedge.

Not-Karen didn’t seem to have heard him, but he saw her back stiffen slightly.

Then, her voice said brightly, “Hola! Como ’stas?”

Through a storm of clicks and hums came a rough-sounding voice. “Hola, Carina. Bien, y tu?”

“All right,” she said in English. “Somebody else woke up today.”

“Muy bueno!” came the rough voice. “A — man?” The radio clacked and popped. Terry didn’t like the tone the guy was using.

“Yes,” said Not-Karen — or Carina? Was that her name?

“Is your name Carina?” blurted Terry.

She looked over her shoulder for a moment, her eyebrows meeting in a harsh line. She raised her finger to her mouth.

Terry fell silent, nodding. Carina — Karen — not so different. He felt a little bit better. And he hadn’t even had to ask her name!

“Ah, I can hear heeem,” said the voice with its Yo Quiero Taco Bell inflection.

“He’s still kind of out of it,” Carina said.

Carina. Kind of a pretty name, thought Terry. How could he have forgotten that? How could he have not realized he had some important government employee living right next door? Before the world blew up.

“Tell heeem my seven daughters would love to meet him,” said the voice.

Seven daughters? Terry leaned closer. Imagine that —

“Cut it out, Nacho,” she said tartly. “You know nobody’s going to make it three thousand miles.”

After a pause, Terry heard the voice say, “Xochilt had her baby yesterday.” The tone was completely different, far softer.

“B-boy or girl?” she asked.

“Girl,” said the voice. “Muy bonita. Very —”

“Healthy, Nacho?” she asked, voice trembling.

“Si,” said “Nacho.”

Why she’d give the guy a nickname after some kind of chips and cheese was beyond Terry. Even he knew that wasn’t an authentic Latin dish.

“Praise the Lord, In-ah-see-yo,” she said in a heartfelt tone.

Now she was calling him something else. Who were these people? But a baby, Terry thought — that sounded really good. Really hopeful.

“We have lit all the candles,” he said.  

“I’ll say a prayer too. Tell Xochilt I’m praying for her too. And —”

“Ramon,” said “Nacho” or “Nasseee-yo” or whatever his name was.

“Yes, Ramon,” she said.

“You know we are worried,” said the rough voice.

“I haven’t found anything yet,” she said. “I can’t see any evidence of what could have killed Ramon.”

“Thank you for looking, Carina.”

“I won’t stop,” she said. “If it’s out there, I’ll find it. Then we can figure out what to do.”

“I pray every night,” said Nacho.

“As do I,” said Carina. “Look to the baby now — our time is up.”

“Hasta la —” said Nacho, but he was cut off in mid sentence. She threw a switch and the metal box went dark and a whining noise came from the stereo-like receiver.

“It — it sounds great that they’ve had a baby — Carina,” said Terry, sitting back on the bed.

She removed the headphones slowly, then set them down on the bedside desk with a crack. Turning suddenly, she snapped, “What?”

“I said it seemed good, Car... Carina,” he said.

“That is not my fucking name,” she growled. “Now get your ass out of my bedroom. There’s a door down the hall and a cot and an army blanket.”

Terry felt his mouth fall open. She stood stiffly, thrusting her hand in the hip pocket of her oversized plaid shirt. The grip of the big gun was clearly visible, the barrel almost poking through the fabric.

“I’m — sorry I don’t remember your name,” he said.

Her lips formed a tight line and her eyes blazed. “Out!” she snarled. And this time the gun came out of the pocket.

Terry stumbled down the hall, and something hot and wet came down his cheeks into the deep, raw raccoon scratches. It stung worse than ever. Probably — probably rabies, he thought as he threw himself on the cot and drew the scratchy blanket up around his shoulders. Pinky stuck his head in the door for a moment, then sniffed around Terry’s face. After a brief chuff! as if to say, “You loser,” the dog left, padding down the hall toward her room.

o0o

“Those,” she said coldly, pointing at some gnarled, feathery green foliage pushing skyward out of the ground at the back of her house, “Are parsnips. You can pull shit out of the ground, put it in a basket and wash it in the stream, can’t you?” she said.

Not-Karen threw a big wicker laundry basket, the kind with two handles, on the ground next to the patch of parsnips.

Terry nodded, swallowing hard. The raccoon scratches had crusted over and scabbed up overnight. It hurt to talk.

“Where — where’s the stream?” he asked.

She looked down at the parsnip patch, and the corners of her mouth turned downward.

“You sat in that house of yours all day, every day, even before the wedge put you out and fed you like a coma patient,” she snapped. “Of course you don’t know where the stream is.” She put two fingers to her mouth and whistled loudly.

Pinky came trotting out of the house and sat by her side, gazing up at her with big, black, adoring dog eyes. Terry thought the dog was smiling, and if he could have spoken, he would have said, “I love you soooo much.”

She raised one thin, stringy white arm and gestured across the horse pasture. Terry blinked. He remembered horses being there, but there certainly weren’t any now. He supposed they were in the big red barn.

With an excited grunt, Pinky took off across the field much faster than Terry would have thought the old hound was capable, bounding toward a stand of trees about half a mile distant.

“He’s going toward the stream,” he said slowly.

“That’s right,” she said. “So pull up a dozen parsnips and get to it. Watch out for any sudden movements you see when you get down there. There’s more and more — critters,” and she had an odd tone when she said that word, “every day.”

Terry felt his brow wrinkling. After his run-in with the raccoon, he wasn’t eager for any more Wild Kingdom action. In fact, he felt a little feverish, and wondered if it wasn’t the rabies coming on. Did rabies come on overnight? Or did it stay in his bloodstream... move into his brain right away? What was the word?... incubating.

“Maybe you could give me the —” he said, unwilling to utter the word “gun.”

Not-Karen immediately understood his meaning. “In a pig’s eye,” she said, squatting back on her heels and looking skeptically at him. “I hope that even in your fogged mind, you won’t make the mistake of thinking I’m stupid.”

“N — no,” Terry said, stepping back.

“Parsnips,” she said. “A dozen. Wash them and bring them back.”

“But there’s water here,” he said, pointing to the cistern by the back porch where she drew water for tea, soup and plain old drinking.

She shook her head, pointing toward the stream, where Pinky had already disappeared in the grass. Scowling, she turned sharply on her heels and stomped back into the house.

Terry thought about just washing the parsnips in the cistern and not telling her. Deciding against that, he surveyed the parsnip patch for a moment, then knelt to grab one of the feathery green parsnip tops, telling himself to think “caveman” and “woman’s hair.” He tugged.

It was a lot harder to pull parsnips than one might think. And half a mile is quite a piece, for a guy who hasn’t walked for five years and just ripped some feeding tube out of his gut and tore out a colostomy tube, too. And survived an attack by a mutant, possibly rabid ’coon drunk on stale Cheetos and Junior Mints.

o0o

After two weeks, Terry had come to the conclusion that the coon couldn’t have been rabid, since he hadn’t begun frothing at the mouth, and no matter how much he might have fantasized about it, had not yet tried to tear out Not-Karen’s throat. After the scratches had sealed over to dull, crusty rust-colored scabs, Terry had used some of Not-Karen’s cheap disposable razors to shave. And in the bathroom mirror, seen something almost resembling his old, doughy face — though he’d never, he thought, ever be doughy again, no matter how many cases of Dinty Moore Not-Karen had stowed in her survivalist larder.

He, of course, still didn’t know her true name and would rather have washed parsnips all day long and eaten them raw than ask her. He’d found some old junk mail in a drawer in the kitchen addressed to “Mrs. Phoebe Long,” but he had a distinct sense that Not-Karen was no Phoebe. Nor had she ever been, he was certain, a “Mrs.”

He had gotten an answer to the mysterious death of Ramon, the Guatemalan baby’s father. Apparently some “rogue” biochemical agents were loose in the area of Huehuetenango, which had been a much bigger town than Portland, Indiana. Huehuetenango was located in Guatemala, which was not in South America, as his faulty memory had told him. Guatemala was a country south of Mexico, but north of the Panama Canal. Terry had apprised himself of these geographical facts while sneaking looks in Not-Karen’s North and Central American road atlas.

Not-Karen was looking for some indication of what the “rogue” germs might be.

Her desire to help the Guatemalans was not entirely altruistic. Their wedge was dying, she told Terry over breakfast the other morning.

“When it’s gone,” she said, “The bubble’s going to give way and we won’t just be alone. Everything that’s out there is going to come rushing in. It’s already happening in Huehuetenango. That’s where the stuff came from that killed Ramon.”

“But they’re having babies,” he said. “Maybe the poisonous stuff isn’t so bad.”

Not-Karen had shrugged, looking down at her fingernails. After a long pause, she’d said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Terry had discovered what had happened to the horses. There was a row of half a dozen long graves, from a fresh, soft one to old, sunken ones, back of the big red barn.

At first, Terry had thought these were the graves of people, and spun a horrified imagined scenario where Not-Karen was a crazed, cannibalistic serial killer. But kicking at the dirt on the old sunken grave, there was no mistaking the big teeth and elongated skull of a horse, with some of its mane still attached and half a fine-furred, conical ear that most certainly never belonged to any person.

When he asked her over a plate of cold corned beef hash and parsnips, she’d rubbed at the corners of her eyes and told him that she’d shot them one by one. And taken as much flesh as she could, and preserved as much as possible, and then eaten as much as she could. With those that had awakened before — she had shared.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “You’d never mistake it for steak.”

“I — I bet that was tough,” Terry said, realizing with a start that she might take that really the wrong way.

“No harder than any of the rest of this,” she said, looking steadily in his eyes, and he realized that for once, she’d taken what he’d said charitably — even kindly. “Every living soul I ever cared about is gone. There’s not too much harder than that.”

But I’m here, Terry thought, and immediately told himself he was still an idiot. He had always been an idiot. There was no chance he would ever not be an idiot. He didn’t even know her real name, was too scared to ask, and he could tell she cared five thousand times more about those distant voices from Guatemala than she cared about him.

Or his dog, he thought. Pinky. Slavishly, everlastingly, he was her dog now.

Most of him didn’t blame the old hound. If somebody had taken him in and fed him when there was nothing else to be had, he supposed he’d get attached to that person, too.

Most of all, he thought, he felt a dull sense of rage and loathing toward the “wedge.” He didn’t precisely know why. After all, the thing had done pretty much the same thing for him as Not-Karen had done for Pinky when the bad stuff started to happen. Tried to take care of him. Fed him. Tried to keep him safe.

Maybe, he thought, regarding his hands, which had begun to grow stronger and calloused from work — now, Terry Herle with calloused hands - that was really something. Maybe Not-Karen did care about him a little. He could tell she’d never let anything happen to Pinky. And he got the gist of what she’d said about the horses. They were going to die anyway, so she’d done it quickly, and made the best of it.

Not a bad thing to do, he thought. But then it was time to pull and wash more parsnips. Without realizing, there was a little spring in his step when he headed down to the stream. He spent quite a while down by the water poking around with a stick. He had it in his mind that there might be fish in it, as he’d seen glints of silver, and small, fast-moving streamlined bodies in the water.

And that seemed like a very good thing.

o0o

Terry sat on the bed, listening to the radio crackle. Ignacio had bad news. Huehuetenango’s first baby wasn’t eating well, and cried all the time. She was losing, not gaining weight.

“Did they — did they try soy milk?” Terry suggested. He remembered that his brother’s daughter hadn’t taken to regular baby formula, and was losing weight too. She hadn’t thrived until they did soy milk. Don and... they were in Denver. Terry knew Denver was gone, too, just like Muncie. Just like everywhere else.

Not-Karen glared at him, and her eyes flashed. She licked her lips, and seemed to decide something. She turned back to the microphone and asked Nacho, “Do you have any soy milk?”

“Que?” asked Nacho.

“Soy formula. I know your daughter can’t breastfeed enough. Have you tried supplementing with…”

“Oh, I see,” said Nacho. “Leche soya,” he barked. Terry could tell that it wasn’t meant for Not-Karen, but for the other people who were listening to the ham radio beside him.

A muttering and rustling came through the receiver.

“Yes, we have some cans of dry milk,” he said. “We’ll try that. But Carina, maybe it is the water?”

Not-Karen cleared her throat. “No,” she said quickly. “Don’t think that. The wedge would protect the water to the end, Nacho. I can promise you that.”

“It’s dark in the building where the wedge is, Carina. There’s no power left at all,” he said.

“There’s a... residual barrier,” she said. “You wouldn’t see it from the outside. It should stay up for... two, maybe three years.”

“Oh!” said Nacho. “Dios mio, that’s good.”

“So don’t worry,” she said. “Try the soy milk,” she said. Her fingers were quick, but trembling, as she turned the dial and powered down the radio.

Terry stayed on the bed, not moving, his hands at his side.

“You weren’t telling the truth,” he said softly.

She turned.

Her mouth was turned down at the corners. She wouldn’t meet Terry’s eyes. Finally, she lowered her head and shook it.

“No,” she said. “When the power’s gone, that’s it. There is no barrier.”

“So, the water could be poisoned,” he said.

She shook her head. “Possibly,” she said. “Probably. But what’s the point in telling them? They’ve got to have some kind of hope. Nobody could go on, if they knew the next day their gut would shred up inside their bodies from radiation, or their hair would fall out, or they’d come down with some horrible mutant smallpox and die like dogs, covered with pus and sores.”

“Rabies,” said Terry.

Not-Karen looked at him, her eyes widening. “I thought you were getting better,” she said.

Terry tried to smile. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. For the first two weeks after I — woke up — I was sure I had rabies from the raccoon. When a couple of weeks went by and I didn’t get sick, I figured that he wasn’t rabid. I wasn’t going to get it. I started to feel like — well —”

“Like you had some hope?” she said.

He nodded.

“That’s the way I feel like every time one of you wakes up,” she said. “I feel hope, right up until the day you leave.”

Suddenly her anger meant something different. Terry felt like he ought to say something, but before he could form the words, she’d already left the upstairs bedroom and gone downstairs with Pinky.

“Midnight snack,” she called back up the stairs in a voice so small that he barely heard her. “You can have some if you want.”

It turned out that she had saved a bag of marshmallows, which they stuck in twos and threes on seafood forks, and roasted over a precious can of Sterno. Marshmallows, Terry realized, were one of those miracle foods like Dinty Moore and Spam that, if sealed properly, never seemed to go stale.

Well — that was an overstatement. They were pretty hard to jam onto the forks, but the big white puffs roasted up well, turned soft, and once done, were toasty, gooey, sweet and very edible. Terry delighted in watching the pale Sterno flame ignite the outside of the marshmallow, and then blowing it out before stuffing the crusty, sticky mess into his mouth.

Terry told Not-Karen about scout camp. Then, his cheeks flushed with some sort of foolhardy, marshmallow-fueled happiness, he told her a ghost story, about the “Boo Hag,” a witch who fooled men into thinking she was a beautiful woman, until one day, nothing but flesh and sinew, she attacked and ate her unwary husbands.

Not-Karen laughed at that.

Then, thinking of the fish in the stream, he told her about the times he’d been fishing with his uncle, and about catching the four-pound bass that had fought like a demon and how its sharp teeth had closed on his finger when he was taking out the hook. He told her how good that fish had tasted, cooked in a heavy cast-iron pan over a fire he’d made himself.

He told her about riding his skateboard in the summertime, playing World of Warcraft with his best friend, and spying on his big sister and her boyfriend when they made out on the living room couch.

He told her how he got started in blogging, but she waved her hand and said, “Enough. Fishing and boy scouts and skateboarding and making out is real. The internet — no.”

“I — I guess you’re right,” he said after a long while.

He hadn’t understood what she had meant for days after he’d awakened. Now, he thought that he did. Long before the wedge put him to sleep, food had lost its taste. Soft skin had lost its feel under his fingers. The scent of a woman’s clean hair was as dull as dead straw, the feel of her lips remote, as if he was being kissed through parchment.

Now, though he didn’t want to think about it, he remembered why Kim had left him for the car salesman. He knew why she and that man were both dead now, while he was here, alive, in a strange woman’s farm house telling her more about his life than he was even sure that he remembered.

“You’ve got books,” he said slowly, looking toward the old-fashioned sitting room with its Persian rug and deep mahogany bookcases — a room that she never used.

“That’s right,” she said. “I brought back some boxes from the library. Maybe a month after it happened. That was when the car still ran.” Not-Karen’s Volvo was covered under a tarp in the barn, and Terry had already checked out its four flat tires and utterly dead batteries. Not that there was enough power to charge it anyway. Portland’s charging stations were all but one, outside the bubble, Not-Karen had informed him, and the one that was inside had been drained not long after the last wave of nukes had hit.

“Do you —” he said, rising from the kitchen table, “Do you think there’s any poetry?”

Yes, there was poetry. Not-Karen even gave him a candle to read by, and found a shawl for his knees.

Terry spent the rest of the night in the living room. Reading poems.

o0o

A few nights later, after dinner but before the ham radio call to Huehuetenango, Terry sat at the kitchen table waiting for cold soup, and feeling a stab of shame as he remembered what he had thought he was, how he believed things to be, during those lost five years.

What — even then, why had he thought that? What did it matter, even if he had been famous to a faceless internet audience that never-was? How many people had been taken in by soft-porn pictures of girls who never were? He wondered if there had ever been a Tina from Terra Haute, or if she was some years-dead incinerated corpse of a 55-year old man, his internet scam caught short by the brief blast of a thermonuclear explosion.

Terry’s comfort, which wasn’t much, was that he knew he hadn’t been bragging like a fool to the real Mac at the Pik-A-Mart, but just a digital simulation, replaying the same tired phrases over and over. A dumb, fake ‘Mac,’ who would have said whatever Terry wanted to hear.

His face burned with shame upon recalling these things. It reminded him of one of those junior high dreams where he walked to school buck naked, and even the newspaper he held in front of his privates somehow kept slipping aside. One time, he’d gone through an entire school day like that — in his dreams. Some guys might have dreamed that the cheerleading squad was excited by his giant schlong.

Not Terry. At Terry, they had laughed and pointed while his dick shrank to the size of a button mushroom.

It wasn’t that he wanted to think that way. It was more along the lines of, he couldn’t help it.

Biting his lower lip, he sat at the kitchen table thumbing through a slim, yellow paperback book of German poetry. Rilke was the poet’s name. The poems were written in German on the left side, and English on the right. By looking at the two together, Terry thought he could almost discern the deeper poetry in the strange German words.

“Hey,” he said to Not-Karen, who was carefully opening a can of Campbell’s tomato soup at the counter. He swallowed hard. He wanted to say her name, but still did not know it.

“Listen to this,” he said, and he started to read the poem on the English side of the page.

From under the table, Pinky raised his head, dropped his plastic hot dog, and made a questioning “whuff” in the back of his throat.

“Suddenly from the green all around you,” he read softly, licking his thumb and holding the page open so he could see better in the flickering light of the Coleman lantern,

...something — you don’t know what — has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood
you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,

reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren’t supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

o0o

“Rain-er Mah-ree-ah, Rill-key,” he said, closing the book.

Not-Karen had scraped the last of the red soup from the can. She turned, facing him, a gentle, strange expression on her face, her eyes shielded and dark in the lamplight.

“It’s Mah-rye-ah,” she said.

“Mariah,” repeated Terry. “Rain-er Mar-eye-ah...”

“Rill-kuh,” said Not-Karen. Then, suddenly, her eyes seemed to shine and glint through her lashes and she said, “That’s my name. Maria.”

“Marr-Eye-Ah,” Terry said, feeling the sound of it on his tongue as his heart seemed to stop.

“My name is Mariah Rye-Nuh,” she said. Then with a liquid lilt, she said, “Maria Rainer. I was born in Moon-ken — you say Munich. I am a doctor of computer languages — I was the head of COMSON. It was the project that created the science behind the wedges, the living computers — nanocomputing — for the GMID.”

Terry listened, not really comprehending. After a moment, he said, “That’s why you never got married.” He immediately felt more stupid than he had for days, and started to apologize.

But she laughed, a sudden, sharp bark. “Ja,” she said. “Yes. That is why I did not marry. I was married to my numbers and the beautiful little half-live creatures. It is a whole world that is gone. An internet on a level that you cannot imagine, Mr. Herle.” And she pronounced his name “Hurr-luh,” as he knew was the correct German way to say it, not “Hurley” as everybody and their brother had always called him and his dad.

Not that they were actually German or anything like that. He supposed he had a great-great-great Grandfather who’d fought for the Kaiser. Or maybe Hitler, but it couldn’t have been that. And he knew how to say “Ich hab eine hammer” and “Kai-zu-slaw-den” for the town by the air base where his grandfather the Air Force Sergeant had been stationed. Back when there were big-ass jets and internal combustion engines.

“Now you eat by lantern light, wake when the sun comes up, and shoot horses,” Terry said.

“And eat them,” said Maria, smiling bitterly. She fumbled in the cupboard for something. He watched her take down the Maker’s Mark and for the first time, he noticed another clear bottle behind it, which she stood on her toes to reach and slipped it from the shelf.

“What’s that?” he asked as she put the bottle on the counter.

“What else?” she asked, smiling merrily. “I suppose now that you have discerned my name through Rilke, we should have a toast.”

The bottle of clear glass had German writing on it, and Terry could smell it from across the table when she poured.

“Schnapps,” he said. “We used to have it every Christmas.”

“The true schnapps,” she said. “Apfelwasser.”

“Ours was supposedly pine-flavored.”

“Oh, ja,” she said. “You can have that too.” And she said “haf” like German people did.

So, it takes about two hours for two people, somewhat malnourished, to drain a bottle of apfelwasser, which is an acquired taste, but which goes down smooth and light after about two shots.

Schwarzwalders said, that such was the water of life, and with life, came love. Or so the Schwarzwalders said. No trees grew now in that forest.

o0o

“I will do the parsnips today,” said Maria as they went out onto the back porch.

“There aren’t that many left,” said Terry.

“Ja,” she said, smiling. “No matter. We will plant more.”

She was, Terry thought, a remarkably beautiful woman.

He watched her straight, lightly muscled back and the lean, longer muscles bunching in her thighs and calves as she strode across the field with the parsnip basket, Pinky running at her side, stopping playfully every few steps, and leaping at her for attention.

Terry stood for a while with his hands on the railing, then sat in one of the cane-backed chairs on the porch, took out a corncob pipe, and stuffed it with some of the pipe tobacco that Maria had stashed in a small wooden box in the library, a room where he now spent many hours. It was there he had found the poetry.

Rill-kuh, he thought. Now, that was poetry.

He wished that he could truly read and understand the German. And after a moment, it came to him. He had time. To read, to learn German. To — to even write poetry. There was paper in the library, and plenty of pens and pencils.

He had just lit the pipe and had begun to form a few words in his mind, taking a deep, satisfying draw on the pipe, when he heard Maria scream.

o0o

Terry was not a young man, it must be understood, when he jumped the porch railing and ran across the field. He tripped, once, and went down on his knee with a bitter crash and cold, teeth-jarring scrape of both knees. He was up, quickly. It didn’t cross his mind that Maria’s gun was still in the cutlery drawer until he had reached the stand of trees.

She screamed once more, and he heard a deeper, throatier cry.

“Maria!” he yelled, pushing through the small saplings near the stream as their young branches slapped him in the face and shoulders.

He was breathing heavily when he reached the clearing where he usually washed the parsnips.

The basket lay half-in the stream. The parsnips were scattered in the water, most of them floating away. He couldn’t see Maria, but he saw footprints in the sandy mud, and broken branches scattered about.

“Maria!” he called again.

He heard rustling to his left and turned to see a thicket of branches moving.

Her head appeared through the leaves. He ran to her, kneeling quickly. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

She put her finger to her lips, shaking her head. Her eyes were enormous, with the whites showing. She grabbed his wrist with surprising, steely strength.

He started to say something else, but her eyes widened even more, and something huge crashed into his back. He fell forward into the branches as Maria tumbled away.

Terry saw a flash of yellow fur as Pinky, snarling and growling in a way he’d never heard, leapt over his head. He tried to rise, but whatever it was, still lay on his back. He smelled the odor of death and rotten meat, and heard deeper snarling than Pinky could ever make. Something tried to bite his shoulder, horribly close to his neck.

“Get away from it!” Maria screamed.

Whatever “it” was, was four or five times the size of the raccoon. Most of Terry’s breath had been knocked out of him, and he grunted as he struggled to throw the beast off and get to his feet. More from instinct than anything else, he threw his right arm back, elbow bent, and felt the hard bone connect with a meaty, furry body.

There was no mistaking the canine yelp that followed. Terry rolled over to find himself face to face with — he supposed he had been expecting a big, wild dog — maybe a Doberman or a German Shepherd.

It had ice-blue, utterly undoglike eyes and was snarling with the biggest, longest yellowish teeth he’d ever seem.

“Wulf!” cried Maria.

Yeah — a wolf. It leapt again, and Terry twisted at the waist, raising his forearm to fend it off. Its jaws snapped right by his cheek. Pinky clung to the wolf’s shoulders with a desperate death-grip, his skinny yellow body flung this way and that.

“What the — fuck —” Terry cried as he wrestled with the wolf. “Get off him, Pinky!” he yelled. “He’ll kill ya, ya dumb dog!”

The wolf’s jaws grazed Terry’s chin. This time, the hard side of his wrist caught it in a soft spot between its jaw and ear.

Dumb luck. The wolf yelped, then made a gargling growl and scrabbled against Terry with its hind legs. Terry bashed its nose with the hard part of his forearm, and it yelped again.

“Goddamn son of a —” Terry screamed.

He looked into its weird, blue-white eyes for a frozen moment, then he threw his knee up as hard as he could. The wolf finally let go, and Terry got up, grabbing any branch, anything he could.

The wolf’s body was twisting, and it was ready to leap again, when he planted his steel-toed boot in its ribs. These had turned out to be a decent fit, after he had retrieved then from the Pik-A-Mart. He had never been so pleased with any footwear in his life. His foot felt not a thing as he stepped back, kicking the wolf again. It let out another agonized yelp and skidded away, Pinky still attached.

The wolf backed away, snarling, while Terry reached backward, looking for anything he could use. His fingers found a rough, dry branch, and he grabbed it and tugged. The branch came away and he raised it. Good-sized, if dry, the branch was about as thick as three of Terry’s fingers. He swung it toward the wolf, which backed away as the wood whistled in the air.

Now he saw that the wolf was underweight, maybe weighing about eighty pounds, and that it had open sores on its flank. It circled warily, long yellow teeth bared, red gums flashing. Pinky clung to its back with his teeth sunk into the loose fur and skin looking like a weird parody of a dog on a pony ride.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Terry yelled, swinging the branch and hoping he wouldn’t whack Pinky. He caught the wolf on the left side of its head and it yelped and stumbled, forelegs suddenly giving way.

“Get off him!” Terry cried.

The wolf was scared now, and he’d hurt it. Terry grabbed Pinky behind his shoulders as the wolf tried to scramble away. Terry whacked it with the branch and heard a distinct crack, not of wood, but bone. Pinky’s jaw seemed to be locked into the wolf’s skin, and his dark eyes rolled wildly.

“Pinky!” Terry tugged at the stubborn, terrified dog.

Finally, Pinky’s jaw popped open with a spray of foamy pink wolf blood mixed with dog spittle. It happened so suddenly that Terry staggered back, with Pinky’s legs kicking and flailing about.

With a low growl, the wolf acceded the field. It lowered its head, gave Terry a long, blood-chilling look, and loped crookedly away down the stream, leaving a ragged muddy track in its wake.

Pinky whimpered in Terry’s arms. Looking down, Terry saw that the dog’s right paw hung at a terrible angle.

Maria came out of the bush, brambles in her hair, and immediately reached for the dog. “Oh, my poor hund,” she said, taking Pinky from Terry’s arms.

She looked quickly up into Terry’s eyes as she did so. “You saved me,” she said. “You were very brave.”

Even as he felt a chorus of stabbing, shooting pains along his side, shoulders and back, Terry felt himself smiling.

“Aw,” he said. “It was just a —”

“Just a wolf?” she said. “He has been eating human flesh. Did you see how bold he was? This is what they become, when they do such things.”

Terry looked down the stream in the direction the wolf had fled. He shivered. The wolf had seemed to know exactly what he had been doing — a practiced ambush from behind. He had only been deterred by Terry’s arrival, his steel-toed boots, the lucky branch, and a loyal old yellow dog.

“His leg,” Terry said, touching Pinky’s paw. The dog cried out. “Maria, we should —” He thought of the Smith & Wesson in the cutlery drawer, and the horses.

She looked up, eyes blazing. “No,” she said, cradling Pinky. “No, we shall not. I don’t care what it takes. We will save him.”

Terry followed her as, carrying Pinky in her arms and cradling him to her chest, she walked slowly across the field to the house, weeping silently.

o0o

Pinky’s nose was hot the next day, and his forehead fiery. It was hard to tell if a dog actually had a fever or not. Terry recalled the vet telling him that, from the days before he had stopped going out of the house, before Kim left, and before the wedge shoved him down on the couch and started feeding him comatose man pap.

Maria smashed some aspirin with a spoon and fed it to Pinky mixed in dollops of meat-flavored baby food. In all the food she had accumulated, she had somehow brought in cases of Gerber — for emergencies, she said. Pinky wouldn’t take much of it, but he could be coaxed to swallow a few bites of veal or chicken goo with a picture of a cooing baby on the small glass jar. After Maria was finished with the dog, Terry sniffed the open jar. It didn’t smell half-bad. He tried a bite — didn’t taste bad, either.

Pinky’s lower right leg was broken, but at least the bone hadn’t gone through the skin. It was therefore Terry’s job to carry the hound out back so he could take care of his business, which, feeling poorly as he obviously did, Pinky executed on three legs, trembling, while giving Terry the most mournful gaze of humiliation and resentment ever seen on man or beast.

When later that night, Terry came to Maria’s bedroom, she stopped him with a steely glare. Without a word, he tightened the belt of his robe, nodded at her, and turned and left. It was going to be the end of her bed for Pinky, and the cot for Terry. Women, he thought. Women were like that, and for some reason that thought was a comfort to him.

As Terry lay on the rock-hard, lumpy cot and pulled the rough army blanket up to his neck, a dark green torture device which seemed to be woven from sisal and twined razor-wire if it was made out of anything, he found himself staring at the dimly-lit ceiling in the moonlight, thinking about Rilke, and... smiling.

The next day, Pinky was a bit better, ate a whole jar of baby food, and hopped a few times when Terry put him out beside the garden for his morning duty. The humiliated stare was a little less intense. And his nose was cooler, and wetter.

That night, it was still the cot for Terry, and the bed and quilt for Pinky.

The night after that, Maria reached Huehuetenango. Ignacio, voice barely audible, told her that during the day, the baby had died.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the distant receiver. “We will light a candle.”

“Hold on,” said Terry. He had the book of Rilke in the pocket of his robe.

That afternoon he had been reading some more, both the German and English, and thinking about it.

“For the baby,” he said. “I have something to read.”

“All right,” said Maria. “My friend has — something here,” she said. “A poem.” She made it sound like he had written it.

Terry looked over at her, surprised, but her eyes were veiled. He took the microphone and cleared his throat, beginning to read.

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world’s stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, in truest woods.

“Oh,” said Ignacio when Terry was finished. “That was beautiful. You are a great poet, Mister Terry.”

“But I —” Terry said.

Maria reached out quickly and took the microphone. “He is a wonderful poet,” she said. “He is too modest. I shall pray tonight for the baby’s soul. My thoughts and prayers with you and your daughters.”

“You have found no information on disease?” asked Ignacio.

“No,” Maria said. “Not yet,” she said. “I will keep looking.”

She turned the radio off with a snap.

“Maria,” Terry said. “Why did you —”

“Lie?” she said. “Sometimes lies are more true than the truth. This is something we Germans understand.”

“Rilke wasn’t German,” said Terry as she took his hand and led him toward the bed. He noticed that a flat silk pillow had been placed on the floor. For Pinky.

“Exactly,” she said. “Rilke was from Prague. A Bohemian.”

“Isn’t Bohemia a beer from Mexico?” asked Terry as she put her fingers across his lips and drew his hips toward hers.

o0o

Six weeks later, Maria sat at the radio, turning the knobs and trying every frequency, but there came no answer from Huehuetenango.

With a grief-stricken sigh, she turned the radio off.

Thinking about what to say, Terry found he could say nothing. Instead, he said, “I’ve come to the end of the book.” He took the thin yellow volume of Rilke from his pocket and sat on the bed.

Then, as she faced him with tears streaming down her face, he read,

You, whom I do not tell that all night long
I lie weeping,
whose very being makes me feel wanting
like a cradle.

You, who do not tell me, that you lie awake
thinking of me:—
what, if we carried all these longings within us
without ever being overwhelmed by them,
letting them pass?

Look at these lovers, tormented by love,
when first they begin confessing,
how soon they lie!

You make me feel alone. I try imagining:
one moment it is you, then it’s the soaring wind;
a fragrance comes and goes but never lasts.
Oh, within my arms I lost all whom I loved!
Only you remain, always reborn again.
For since I never held you, I hold you fast.

“Es eine lieder,” Terry said slowly. He had both come to the end of the book, and learned a few words in German. “It some song,” was what he had said.

“Ich weiss,” said Maria. “Ein lied,” she said. “Not ‘some song’.”

“Oh,” Terry said.

Tears tracked down her cheeks.

“I was a lonely woman,” she said. “Wisst du was ist Einsamkeit? Do you know what is — loneliness?”

“Ja,” Terry said. “Ich... weiss.”

She put her slim, trembling hand to his cheek.

“The baby died,” she said. “In Guatemala.”

Then, she slowly lowered her hand and took his.

“But this baby,” she said, putting his hand to her flat belly.

“This baby,” he said wondering, feeling tears of his own squeezing from the corners of his eyes. “Maria,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

“Yes,” she said. “Ja, Terry. A baby. And it is yours.”

“Meine Gott,” he said. No one needs translation to know what that means. “My baby. Ours.”

“Ja,” she said. And while he held her in his arms and stroked her hair, he felt the soft skin of her cheek beneath his trembling fingers. Each of her ribs. The muscles of her back. The still-strong flesh of her haunches, firm and powerful. He smelled the life of her, and something different, beneath her smell. Heard, distinctly, the barest beating of the tiniest of hearts. And he drew her to him and held her close and they stayed like that on the bed — oh, for such a long time, until light fingered across her bed and Pinky thudded to the floor and padded over to his water bowl.

Maria raised herself up on her elbow and said, “You must take him out, Terry, I won’t have him going in the house.”

Terry got up in the frigid morning, threw on his robe, and carried the old dog down the stairs. It was not precisely necessary, as Pinky’s broken leg was nearly healed. Terry watched the sun rise with streams of pink fingering over the stand of trees by the stream as the dog looked up at him with veiled dark, shame-filled, yet somehow wise eyes.

Then Terry went back in the house along with the dog, and he held Maria’s hand as they ate cold corned beef hash at the kitchen table in the pink and golden dawn.

o0o

That night, there was nothing from Huehuetenango, again, but there came another sound.

Crackles and pops, followed by the faintest voice, broken, barely audible.

“Hello! Hello! We are from Edo. We are a small community — twenty five men, women and children. Can you hear?”

Maria’s face registered surprise. “Yes,” she said in a trembling voice. “We are from America. Indiana. There are only two here,” she said. Looking quickly over at Terry, she added, “Well, perhaps — three.”

Terry knelt beside her, leaning toward the radio.

“I am — a scientist,” she said. “I know about the wedges. Und meine mann, he ist hier.”

Terry looked toward her, the strangest light feeling in his heart, as if something had just sprung to life in the room, and he didn’t even know what to call it.

“He is a poet,” she continued. “And we are — we are expecting a baby. Sometime in the spring.”

“A baby,” the voice said. “We will turn the prayer wheel for you.”

Terry grasped Maria’s hand. Questioning, he looked at her, and she shook her head, lowering her face and smiling. Her hand brushed his cheek.

He thought she was going to say something about prayer wheels being pointless, but instead, she whispered, “Terry — no wedge survived — in Japan. None — at all.”

“Does that mean —” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It means people can live outside the wedges. It means — we could someday be —”

“Free,” he said, “But I think, already we are. And alive, and it does not matter.”

The poet kissed her deeply and the radio went dark.