The compelling story that follows takes us to a fragmented society that is slowly fading into barbarism after a great disaster brings it to its knees, and where a few isolated people try to hang on to some of the learning and culture of the Old Days—at great cost to themselves.
Alexander Irvine made his first sale in 2000, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has since made several more sales to that magazine, as well as to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Live Without a Net, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Starlight 3, Polyphony, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. His novels include A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, and The Narrows. His short fiction has been collected in Rossetti Song, Unintended Consequences, and Pictures from an Expedition. His most recent books are a new novel, Buyout, and a media novel, Iron Man: Virus. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
Old Varner shed tears on the rotting boards of the stage. A thousand miles I rode, he thought, this late in the season, and even here the books are ashes long since blown away with fallen leaves. He did not cry because he had strayed too far north, too late, and now winter would surely catch him before he could get south again, and he would be lucky indeed to survive the journey. He did not cry for Sue and the child she might or might not have borne him. Old Varner shed tears for the voices that had once echoed in the theater he stood in, for the pages of books that had once held the words those voices spoke. I will die without seeing it, he thought, and spoke without meaning to.
“Look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me,” he said. “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck at the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ . . .” He trailed off and stood silently weeping. After a moment he recovered enough to finish.
“Yet you cannot make it speak.”
The empty ruins of the Mendelssohn Theater, on what had once been the campus of the University of Michigan, did not answer, and Varner did not know the rest.
“It’s every actor’s dream to play the Dane,” Varner’s father said.
“Who’s the Dane?” Varner asked. He was eleven, and still playing mostly women’s roles. Ophelia, one of the witches in Macbeth, Rosalind. His father said he had promise. “In three years, my boy, you’ll be playing men,” he said, and young Varner burned for the passage of time. The only time he was permitted on-stage as a man was as Puck, but Midsummer was a tricky choice in some parts of the country. The more God-fearing the area, the more likely it was that playing elves and fairies could get you burned.
“Hamlet,” his father said. “The greatest role ever written for the stage, in the greatest play ever written. One of these days you’ll play it.” Varner studied in the whispery pages of a Riverside Shakespeare as the caravan rattled and creaked its way down Old 55 from Chicago toward St. Louis. When they stopped for the night at a rest area, pitching tents behind a sign that said PET EXERCISE AREA, his father stopped him. “There’s only twenty-six hours in the day, my boy,” he said. “Three hundred and thirty-seven days in the year. You can’t read them all away.” They looked up at the stars and ate beef jerky and flat bread. A garland of moonlets trailed the crescent smile of Luna. Some of them were large enough to be named—Varner’s father called most of them after the names of the mechanicals in Midsummer—while others came and went too quickly to merit a name. It had only been fifty years since the Fall.
Varner heard the whisper of falling leaves in his voice, the faint rasp of the grave. It is too much to dream in these times, he thought wearily. When I wake, I cry to dream again. He mounted his horse Touchstone and rode down State Street to William, collapsed storefronts on either side with trees grown through their fallen roofs. At William he left the weedy street and entered a grove of trees that must have once been a quadrangle. Varner’s father had taught him that word, when he was a boy and he listened to the older generations tell stories of life before the Fall, and the Long Winter that followed. It was a forbidden word, reeking as it did of the pursuit of knowledge. Missionaries of the Book had been known to kill a man for speaking it.
Buildings of brick and sandstone, stately even in their decay, stood all around Varner. One of them would be a library, and perhaps this library would be the one they had missed. He tied Touchstone to a rusted railing at the foot of a stair, and walked slowly into a marble-floored atrium. Right away he knew that he had chosen correctly; through a doorway he could see the battered husks of computers, and beyond them toppled bookshelves blackened with old fire. Failure again. Too much could happen in a hundred years. “Is there nowhere you have not reached?” Varner asked softly of men absent, or long dead. “Must the rest be silence?”
Knowing what he would find, he went through the stacks from floor to floor, wandered into unlocked rooms and broke locks where he found them. And—even though the Missionaries of the Book had been here, and left ashes and ruin behind—he sometimes found books crumbling in these locked rooms: technical manuals, management texts, business books. But no novels, no poems or plays. No Hamlet.
“You are too old, Varner,” he said to himself. “Too old to play the role anyway. Why do you search?” He said this every time; it was his ritual, his sacrament of failure, repeated in libraries from the Rocky Mountains to the drowned ghosts of the great Eastern cities. And as he always did, Varner reached in his pack and found the thin bound sheaf of papers that was all he had of the play he had dedicated his life to. He read it through: Act One nearly complete, salvaged from his father’s belongings; halves and fragments of Acts Two and Three, with the third scenes of both complete (Varner spoke the King’s praying monologue aloud when traveling, to stay awake on Touchstone’s back, and answered with Hamlet’s “am I then revenged?”, crying out to the forests and fields of what had once been the United States of America); a few lines only from Acts Four and Five. It had struck him more than once how unlikely it was that his knowledge of the play decreased so steadily from beginning to end. Shouldn’t he have expected to have a few bits from each part? Words, words, words. Himself a story, Varner went on.
Having the play as he did, though, strengthened Varner’s conviction that he was doing the work of destiny. Every page, every line he found moldering in libraries and schools and the homes whose long-dead owners had not burned all their books for fuel during the Long Winter spurred him toward completeness. Varner lived only for the day when he could bring together the text, assign parts, find a theater far from Missionaries and hear the words spoken again as they were meant to be.
St. Louis looked worse than Chicago, or Cleveland. Varner had seen drawings and even some photographs of the East Coast cities, or what was left of them. St. Louis looked much the same as those photographs. The Fall had unleashed every fault in the Earth’s crust, and according to Varner’s father, Memphis and St. Louis had been leveled by quakes before fire and flood had reduced them the rest of the way to ruin. From across the Mississippi, Varner saw the stumps of the Arch, one higher than the other. The river swirled around their bases, and lapped over the ruins of Laclede’s Landing. On this side of the river, they stood in the midst of a vast trainyard, with engines and cars lying where the quakes had flung them from the tracks. They came gingerly to the edge of the water and waited at the foot of a collapsed pier where a handwritten sign said FOR FERRY WAVE WHITE FLAG. “Fat Otis,” Varner’s father said, “your shirt is the best white flag we’ve got.” So Fat Otis tied his shirt to the end of a stick and waved it until an answering flag waved from the Missouri side. To the north and south, the pilings of fallen bridges thrust up from the river. A ferry approached them, and they negotiated passage. On the way across, Varner’s father asked where they might play. The ferryman shrugged. “Depends on which way you’re headed,” he said. “You go north, it’s wet. Don’t know who lives out there. You go south, it’s wet. You go too far west, into the County, you get bandits. In town, maybe you talk to Pujols. He’s at the stadium.”
“Pujols?” Varner’s father asked. “Really?”
The ferryman cracked a smile. “Says he was his father. ’Tween you and me, I doubt it. But don’t say that to him.”
“Who’s Pujols?” Varner asked.
“Baseball player,” his father said. “One hell of a baseball player, back before the Fall.” Varner had seen teams of players barnstorming. His father had warned him about them, especially if they came to see a play. The boys who played women’s roles excited other kinds of interest, Varner’s father said. Don’t ever let them get you alone. He couldn’t imagine that baseball had ever been played in front of as many people as it would have taken to fill the stadium in St. Louis. The seats, rows and rows of them, in two decks above which hooked the ruins of the girders that had supported a third, seemed enough to accommodate every person Varner had ever seen, all at once. Pujols was about as old as Varner’s father, his face brown and seamed where it showed through a white waterfall of a beard. He wore a shirt with an insignia of a cardinal perched on a baseball bat, and held a bat in both hands throughout their conversation. He asked what the company could perform.
“Any and all Shakespeare,” Varner’s father said, “except the ones that aren’t worth performing. Some musical revues, which are for later in the evening. And we do a story about the Fall.”
“Shakespeare,” Pujols said. “A funny one. I will feast you after, and then we’ll see about your songs.”
Leaving Ann Arbor, Varner turned south, following US-23 until it merged into 75, which went all the way to Florida. There would be snow here soon. He would need to get back to Cincinnati and down the river soon. As he got older, he made a seasonal ritual of letting the river take him back to the life he remembered from his youth—the boats, days spent dangling fishing lines into the warm brown water near Natchez or the shattered ruins of Memphis. And he still held out hope of finding Sue, so he stopped by the shipwreck castle every other year to catch up with the Schulers and learn what could be learned. Forty years had passed with no word of Sue, but he still held out hope. More, in fact, than he had in his quest to honor his father. Since he could not do that, perhaps he would yet be able to meet his child.
On the outskirts of a town called Monroe, which his father had said was the birthplace of a general famous for dying, Varner came to a camp, forty or fifty people in lean-tos and a few huts built of scavenged timber, all arranged around a central blockhouse. Three men rode out to meet him with guns. “State your business, stranger,” one of them said.
“My name is Varner, and I am an actor,” Varner said. “Also I can sing, and I’ll tell a story for my supper.”
The three horsemen exchanged glances. “What kind of a story?” the first asked. Varner had them figured for a father and his sons. The resemblance was strong through the jaw and the set of the eyes. Hard eyes.
“Any kind. Tell me what you want.” Touchstone snorted and Varner patted his neck. “I and my equine fool here travel the land, telling stories and looking for pages out of old books.” Often it was dangerous to admit this, but Varner hadn’t survived forty years on his own by not being able to recognize a Missionary—or any other brand of fanatic. These were honest people, or if not honest, not zealots or casual killers.
The second horseman, one of the boys, asked, “What kind of books?”
“I’m interested in any kind, but I’m a literary man. It’s the old stories, the great stories, that I want the most.”
“You know the Odyssey?”
“Not in Greek,” Varner said, daring a joke. “But the story? Oh yes. From ‘Sing me, O Muse’ to the slaughter of the suitors, I know the Odyssey. Would you like to hear it tonight?”
“We heard part of the Odyssey the last time an actor came by,” the boy said. “Only he didn’t get to finish because—”
“It’ll be up to Marquez what we hear tonight,” the first horseman interrupted. “He’ll want to meet you.” He turned and rode back toward the camp. The two boys fell in behind Varner. Neither of them spoke to him again.
They spent the remainder of the day in a parking lot behind the stadium, rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Varner’s father considered it the funniest of Shakespeare’s plays, and Varner was glad for the chance to play without wearing a dress. Fat Otis would play Bottom. Varner’s father would play Oberon and Theseus. Since Pujols didn’t appear to be a Bible-thumper, Otis’ wife Charlie would play Titania and Hippolyta. And so on. They ran through scenes, added bits of business to cater to the stadium setting—Snug the joiner would add an aside about the poor condition of the playhouse, and Varner himself would tinker with Puck’s “now the hungry lion roars” monologue. “Here’s what you say,” his father instructed him. “The last couplet, instead of saying ‘I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door’ say sweep the Cubs behind the door.” He gave Varner a shirt with a cardinal on the front, like Pujols’. “This was the team that played here. The Cubs were rivals. They’ll eat it up.”
Varner concentrated on the change. It was only one word, but it altered his sense of the entire monologue. The truth was he didn’t like it. Why couldn’t they do the plays the way the plays were written? He’d asked his father this before. “Players need someone to play to,” was the answer. “We’re not spreading a gospel. It doesn’t have to be exact. It has to please.”
Gospel was a loaded word coming from Varner’s father. In the decades since the Fall, pocket theocracies—this was another word Varner had learned from his father—had sprung up throughout the ruins of the United States of America. Some were benevolent, some dangerous, depending on their leaders’ readings of Scripture. The company avoided them when that was possible, but it wasn’t always. Bands of evangelists roamed the countryside, heavily armed and often looking for a fight. The first time Varner had seen a crucified body, he’d had nightmares. Now he read them as his father did. They were signs that evangelists were around, and not the kind ones.
“You know what I want to hear?” Marquez said. “I had a storyteller come by four or five years ago who said he knew the Odyssey, but he didn’t. Do you? You told Ezra’s boys you did.”
Varner nodded. “I’ll tell you the same thing. I know the Odyssey. And the Iliad. Not line by line, but I know the stories, and I won’t change anything or leave anything out.” Unlike my predecessor, he thought, whose body probably fed the perch in Lake Erie. If they bothered to drag him that far.
“I want you to start like the book does, with Telemachus,” Marquez said. “And the bit with the gods arguing. I hate it when people start with Calypso just because they think the sexy bits should go first.”
“Spoken like a man who has read the book,” Varner said.
Marquez grinned. He was ten or fifteen years younger than Varner, and had strong teeth. “The Missionaries don’t come around here anymore,” he said. “I’ve read some books, yeah.”
Varner’s pulse quickened. Not yet, he thought. Give him what he wants. Then you can ask. “What time would you like to start?” It was almost dark. Past equinox, dark came early this far north.
“Let’s get you fed first,” Marquez said. “You’ll sit at my table. But don’t touch my women.”
Varner didn’t touch Marquez’s women. Even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have taken the chance. Not with books around. Dinner was trout, roasted squash, wild greens. Marquez ate well. “What was the name of the general who was from here?” Varner asked, to start a conversation.
“That was George Armstrong Custer. Killed at Little Big Horn, out West somewhere. But he was from here, yeah. There’s a statue of him in town.”
“How come you don’t live in town?”
“Because in town is full of people who don’t like people whose last name is Marquez. Fuck them,” Marquez said. “I don’t want to live in their town anyway. They come out here, I send their horses back. Now they leave me alone. Plus there are Missionaries there. I got you figured for a man who doesn’t like the Missionaries.”
“They don’t like me,” Varner said. “Because I look for books.”
Marquez finished crunching through his salad. “I’ll show you my books if I like the way you tell the story. Deal?”
Left unspoken was what would happen if Marquez didn’t like Varner’s telling. “Deal,” Varner said.
One of the women at the table, who could have been Marquez’s wife or daughter—any of them could have been his wife or daughter—spoke up. “You look for any books, or what books do you want?” she asked.
“Any books,” Varner said. In the context, it was true, and if Marquez had what he was looking for, it wouldn’t pay to let him know ahead of time how highly Varner valued it.
“How do you find them?”
“I hear things sometimes,” Varner said. “I’m not the only one looking for books. We talk to each other, when we survive long enough.” He thought of a man he had known only as Derek, burned three years before with his books used as the pyre. Varner had found the body only days after it had happened. He hadn’t even stopped to bury the body, in case the Missionaries were still nearby.
“Everyone who sits at my table knows how to read,” Marquez said. “Even the women. They hate that in town.”
“What books do you have?” Varner asked. It was hard to keep the hunger out of his voice.
“People all around here know to bring me books. Any little thing they find, they bring me.” Marquez filled his glass as he went on, then passed the bottle. “My best book is Grimm’s Fairy Tales. You can read all of the pages.”
When they loaded into the stadium, Pujols’ men had already built a stage, or pieced one together from storage. It had aluminum steps and interlocking sections. Varner felt like a real professional just stepping onto it. Curtains bearing the Cardinal logo hung at either side and behind it, to hide entrances. A tent behind the upstage curtain was big enough for costume changes. One of Pujols’ lieutenants showed them a tunnel from a dugout back into what Varner took for a green room until his father said, “Well, I’ll be damned. So this is what a major-league clubhouse looked like.”
Once, Varner thought, when there was electricity and television and things like that, this must have been a pretty nice place. He wasn’t sure how it helped baseball players get ready for a game, but there was a lot about the pre-Fall world he didn’t understand. The look on his father’s face in the torchlight saddened him. He was old enough to know what had been lost. Sometimes Varner was angry that he had never seen the wondrous pre-Fall America that the old people liked to reminisce about, but sometimes he thought he was better off never having known it. His world was his world. He liked it, on the whole. He liked traveling with his father, he liked doing plays, and although he missed the mother he had never known, the women of the company ganged up on him like a platoon of mothers, so he had never felt unloved by women. Maybe when I get older, he thought, but couldn’t complete the idea. He had lots of fragmented ideas about how things might be when he got older.
When the company came out of the dugout, the thunder of the crowd was the biggest noise Varner had ever heard. There must have been thousands of them, clustered in different sections of the stadium and scattered among the trees in the outfield and lounging on blankets closer in toward the stage. Pujols stood on his dais and shouted through a bullhorn. “Traveling players have come to St. Louis to do a show just for us, people! They bring Shakespeare, and later—after the little ones are shuffled off to bed—some stories for grown-ups” Whistles and cheers from the crowd overwhelmed Pujols’ voice. He calmed everyone down and said, “I hate introductions, so that’s as long as this one’s going to be. To the play!”
Adrenaline rippled through Varner as he waited in the wings while the tangle of mismatched lovers was introduced, and the mechanicals made their first appearance to plan their own play. He bounced on his toes as Fat Otis cleared the stage, then launched himself out onto the stage to meet the fairy played by his second cousin Ruby. The play was a hit. Nobody went up, everyone was funny, all the little bits of business Varner suggested went over like (as Varner himself would say) gangbusters. Whatever that meant. Varner had never performed before so many people, and never gotten such a raucous response to Puck’s merry malice. When he tore open the front of his costume to reveal the cardinal beneath, proclaiming that he would sweep the Cubs behind the door, the stadium erupted. They could hardly hear themselves through the last scene of the play, and Varner had to deliver his “If we spirits have offended” closing monologue at the top of his lungs, which took something away from the whimsical, mocking approach he preferred. Back in the clubhouse, wiping off makeup and hanging costumes, everyone laughed and joked. Some performances were best forgotten as soon as they were over, but not this one. This one they’d remember.
Pujols burst in to slap backs and kiss the hands of the women. “Marvelous! Excellent!” he cried. Stopping in front of Varner, he winked. “The Cubs bit. I loved it! My dad would have laughed, how he would have laughed!”
“Thank you, sir,” Varner said. He couldn’t help smiling himself, even though he still didn’t like the change. How could you be upset about it when it made the audience so happy?
The entire camp showed up to hear Varner. Children sat down in the front, their parents and the older adults clustered near them, with the younger people hovering in the back so they could nip away to do the things young people always did when their elders were looking the other way. Varner told the Odyssey the way he had heard it from his father, who had memorized it during the Long Winter. He kept the expressions he’d loved hearing in his father’s voice: wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, wily Odysseus, gray-eyed Athena. But his memory had never been as good as his father’s, so he made no attempt to quote long stretches from the poem. He told the story. Whatever his father had been, Varner was a storyteller. He spoke long into the night, beginning with Athena’s resolve and unfolding the story of Telemachus’ commitment to his mother’s honor and his father’s memory. It had been years since he had told the Odyssey, and it came to life differently in his mind this time through. He was both Telemachus and Odysseus, but doomed in both roles, eternally searching for a father who would never be found and a home that never was.
When it was over, he was hoarse, and a little drunk, and on the edge of tears. Varner, he told himself, you have lost both father and child. So you go chasing after a book about a man who cannot honor and avenge his father. You have let this drive you insane.
Out of the crowd, Marquez appeared to clap him on the shoulder and hand him a bottle. “Just the way it should be told. You are a real storyteller,” he said. “Go around, let everyone say thank you. Then you can come look at my books.” In a haze of exhausted revelation, Varner accepted the thanks and gifts of the audience. He fell into a routine: yes, very kind, thank you, very glad you came. When it was over, he followed Marquez to the blockhouse and waited while Marquez dragged a footlocker out from a corner of the hall. Opening it, Marquez stood back. “See?” he said. “Thirty books. No one for a hundred miles has this many.”
Varner approached the trunk preparing himself for disappointment. Probably he would find a Bible. There would be computer manuals, biographies of celebrities whose fame vanished with the Fall, guides to bettering your personality and your relationship with God and your family. That was all he ever seemed to find, when he found anything at all.
But on top of the neat stacks in the trunk, like a thunderclap rolling across forty years, lay a water-stained, mildewed, broken-backed, but completely readable Collected Plays of William Shakespeare, volume IV, containing—in addition to As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure—the complete text of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Two hours later, the last of his reservations were gone. Pujols had given him a cup of something warm and spicy, and Varner was drunk for the first time in his life. His father was standing on a picnic table performing his blank-verse version of the story of the Fall. Varner decided he was in love with one of the women bringing plates of smoked meat around. A crackling boom rolled across the sky and Varner looked up to see the fading glow of a fireball. Big one, he thought. We’d have felt that one if it hit. He tried to think of how many big impacts he’d seen or heard. A dozen, maybe? None of them compared to the original Fall, or to the five or six after it that merited the capital letter. The closest Varner had ever been to an impact was once in Michigan somewhere, when he was six or seven. He happened to be looking out from the beach across an immense lake, and a streak of fire from the sky raised a towering plume of steam. A few seconds later, he heard the sound of the impact, and a minute or so after that, huge waves started to roll up the beach. Laughing, Varner had run into the surf, but Fat Otis had caught him and told him that those kinds of waves could suck you right out with them. Another crackle, perhaps farther away or perhaps just from a smaller meteor, brought Varner back to the present. Fat Otis was looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was watching while he tried to get one of the serving women to sit on his lap. And now the list of drowned cities fair: New York, DC, Miami, Boston, Tokyo, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town, Dublin, Hong Kong . . .
Then it was later, and the party had moved out into one of the enclosed parking lots at the back of the stadium. Trees and vines wove into the chain-link fencing and gave the space the feel of . . . well, they’d just done Midsummer. A fairy bower, or something. Varner was a little sick to his stomach. The sky was alive with shooting stars. Sometimes that meant an impact was on the way, according to Varner’s father. There was no way to know.
Sitting on the back of one of the wagons, Fat Otis was telling a version of the Miller’s Tale. Everyone was drunk. Varner found his wagon and crawled in to lie down. His stomach was roiling. A roar of laughter went up outside as Alison fooled Jenkin into kissing her nether eye. Varner rolled over onto his side, hoping to ease the pressure in his stomach. It wasn’t working. He got up and stumbled to an overgrown corner of the parking lot, where he puked his guts out and then rolled away from the mess, lying on his back and waiting for the shakes to go away. Never again, he thought. If this is drinking, I don’t want any part of it.
A commotion arose near the gate, which stood open to the street. Through the babble of voices, Varner heard the clop of horses’ hooves. Words started to jump out at him: filth, ungodly, sin . . . oh no, Varner thought.
Pujols started shouting, and then everyone else was shouting, and then as Varner started to get up and sneak back to the wagon gunfire exploded at the gate. Varner froze, then backed up into the brush. Horses screamed and people were screaming and the guns kept going off and then there was the sound of fire crackling. That was all he could take. Varner scrambled out of the brush and saw too many things all at once.
The wagons, burning. Pujols, dead among the hooves of a horse ridden by a cold-eyed man sighting down the barrel of his rifle at Varner.
Varner’s father, face down on the asphalt, one motionless arm outstretched toward the burning wagon.
Varner broke and ran, followed by the crack of the gunshot and the buzz of the bullet passing near his head. He scaled the fence and flung himself over the top of it, tearing his fingers on barbed wire. The fire crackled, the sound seeming to grow until just as his bare feet hit the ground outside the parking lot Varner understood that this crackle was coming from above and as that thought came to his mind the biggest sound he’d ever heard first knocked him off his feet and then blew him out like a candle.
Varner had nothing to trade but his rifle and Touchstone, neither of which he could live without, and he would not beg. So he asked Marquez for permission to copy the play from the book. Using the backs of the scraps and sheaves of paper he had collected over the previous four decades, Varner wrote out the play over the course of three days. Every night he told a story—the Miller’s Tale, his father’s old version of the Fall, finally the Iliad—and every day he wrote until his eyes felt boiled and his fingers lost their strength. On the morning of the fourth day, he left. Instead of going to Cincinnati, he turned west, driving Touchstone along the old Turnpike until he turned south on the outskirts of Chicago and found passage on a boat down the Illinois River out of Peoria. Snow fell twice before he arrived there.
I have it, Varner thought when he was safely on the boat. But I am too old to play the role, and I have no troupe. It all comes to nothing, this striving after approval from people gone to dust. Yet I keep doing it. The whole reason for coming this way was so he could pass by the shipwreck castle and ask, as he did every year or two or three, whether there had been news of Sue.
He read the play over and over while the boat made its slow way down toward its confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton. Each reading, it seemed, was a litany of his sins. I have played the Dane, Varner realized. Since I was nineteen years old, that is all I have done. Once he stood on the deck of the boat, the pages held out over the water. Let it be gone, he said to himself—but could not make himself do it. The pilot, a boy of twenty-three, said, “What’s that?”
“A story,” Varner said. He looked at the pages, fluttering in a chill morning breeze, and at the swirl of water below them.
“What you want to throw it away for?” the pilot asked. “Tell it to me instead. What’s it called?”
“Hamlet,” Varner said.
“What’s it about?”
“A man whose father is killed, and he can’t figure out how to avenge him.” Still Varner held the pages out over the water. What would it be like to be free of them?
“Revenge is simple,” the pilot said. “You find the sonsofbitches and kill them, right?”
__________
Later it would be called the Seventh Fall, although everyone knew that there must have been more, in other parts of the world. Varner remembered stealing shoes from a dead man partially buried in a drift of bricks. He remembered running, then being knocked down by aftershocks. A glow in the sky to the north turned him south, and by morning he had come to swampy bottomland where the angry Mississippi boiled and churned. Varner was hungry and lost. His father was dead. Everything was gone. He had no food and he knew better than to drink the water here. He climbed into the crook of a willow tree, high enough that he thought the water couldn’t reach him. I could die, he thought. He’d never been able to believe that he could really die until that moment. He felt the earth growling, and the willow tree swayed. Varner gripped the branch between his thighs and pressed his back into the trunk. His father was dead. Fat Otis was dead. Cousin Ruby was dead. Everything he had owned was burned. Pujols was dead. Who would live in the stadium? The river churned and roared. Dead animals floated in the foam, rolled over and disappeared. Varner leaned to one side, his shoulder coming to rest against a side branch. Would the Missionaries come looking for him? The sound of the bullet passing hung in his ears, became the whine of mosquitoes. Stop, Varner thought. All of it. Stop.
A voice called out to him, and Varner realized he’d fallen asleep. His skin was alive with mosquito bites. “Boy. Up there. You ever coming down?”
Varner looked down and saw that the river had risen during the day. It was getting dark, and in the deepening shadows, he saw a flat-bottomed boat with an old man standing in its stern holding a long pole that trailed into the water. The man lit an oil lantern. “Come on down from there,” he said. “River might keep coming up, and the snakes’ll be up in the trees if it does.”
“Snakes?” Varner said. He didn’t like the idea of snakes.
“Goddamn right, snakes,” the man said. “Why are you up there?”
“I was running away,” Varner said.
“From who?”
“Missionaries, I think. They—” But before he could say it, a wave of grief welled up in Varner’s throat and choked away the words.
“All right, kid. All right,” the boatman said. “I know all about the Missionaries. You come with me. Come down from there before the snakes get you.”
He stopped at the old shipwreck, on the outskirts of a town once known as Herculaneum. Carl Schuler was dead, but his son John lived in the same part of the ship. He had been Varner’s favorite brother, and forty years on, they fell easily back into conversation even though they only saw each other every two or three years. The other two Schuler boys were dead, and one of the sisters. The other sister, Piper, was in another part of the ship with children and grandchildren of her own. “I heard a year or so ago about Sue,” John said before Varner could ask. “I heard river bandits got her up north somewhere, and her kids, too.”
“Kids?” Varner said. It was all he could say. There was too much, all at once, to get into words.
“A daughter and her husband,” John said. “There was a boy survived. People up that way found out where she’d come from and brought him down here. He’s staying up in town with Sue’s people this past couple of weeks.”
Varner left the wagon and rode Touchstone hard up into town. Herculaneum had never been much of a city, by the looks of it, and a hundred years after the Fall, it was barely a ruin. Sue’s people had always lived in the courthouse, and still did. Varner knocked on the door and found himself looking into the eyes of Sue’s sister Winona. “I’m Varner,” he said. “Sue and I went around for a while.”
“Yes,” she said. “You did. Are you here about the boy?”
“I am,” Varner said.
“Well, I don’t want you in my house,” Winona said. “But I’ll bring him out to talk to you.”
The boy was nine years old. I played Rosalind and Hero and Hermione when I was nine years old, Varner thought. “Your grandmother’s name was Sue?” he asked. They were sitting on the stone courthouse steps, cracked and heaved from quakes.
“Yes sir,” the boy said quietly.
“And she was from here?”
“She always said her people were down here. We were always in Moline.”
Always in Moline. How many times was I close? Varner wondered. Before I chased a hundred thousand miles across North America looking for a book that might not exist anymore. “I think I knew her,” he said to the boy. “A long time ago.”
“Yes sir,” the boy said.
There was so much more to say. “A long time ago, when we weren’t much older than you. She lived here.” Varner couldn’t get at what he wanted. “I came here when I was eleven. Because someone killed my father.”
For the first time the boy looked at him. “In St. Louis,” Varner added.
“We were passing by Hannibal,” the boy said. “They were in canoes. I just swam.” His voice was nearly toneless.
Varner nodded. “You must be a hell of a swimmer. What’s your name?”
“Will,” the boy said. “I’m a good swimmer. I swam all the way down to an island. It was foggy.”
Fifty years apart, Varner thought. My story and his story. “You escaped, like me,” he said.
“How’d you escape?”
“I climbed a fence and ran. Easier than swimming at night in the river. But it was the night of the Seventh Fall,” Varner said. That was when everything had changed for him.
“That was a long time ago,” the boy said.
Varner looked out over the river. “It sure was. You have any other family?”
“No sir,” the boy said.
The whole time, she was in Moline, Varner thought. It was hard to believe. “My name is Varner, Will,” he said. “I had a child once, but I never knew at the time because the mother was taken away from here up to the Quad Cities. That was forty years ago, or a little more. I think the child of mine I was looking for might have been your mother.”
“So you’re my granddad?” the boy asked, not missing a beat. The word cut Varner to pieces. Tears started from his eyes.
“Looks that way, young Will,” he said. He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Looks that way.”
The boatman’s name was Carl Schuler. He added Varner to his family, and for the first time in his life Varner had a mother. Her name was Adele. She was thin and red-haired, with a sharp tongue that often sent the five children—Varner was the fifth—fleeing out into the swamps. They lived with a number of other families, Varner was never certain how many or how they all were related, in the beached hull of a container ship. After the Seventh Fall, parts of the Schulers’ living area needed to be repartitioned and fixed up. Varner was glad to pitch in. He wasn’t sure what it would be like, living in one place all the time, but his father had instilled in him the proposition that adversity existed for the purpose of teaching you how to make lemonade. Now that his father and the rest of the troupe were gone, Varner did his best to fit in where he was. He told the Schulers stories that he’d learned and before long, he was telling them to an audience of everyone who lived in the ship or happened to be stopping for the night on their way up-or downriver. For hundreds of miles along the Mississippi, from St. Louis all the way down to the submerged ruin of New Orleans, a loose confederation of rivermen traded and tried to keep the peace. They lived on fish and deer and the rich bottomland soil, which grew every vegetable Varner had ever heard of and more. He learned to handle a boat, a fishing line, and a rifle. He fell in and out of love with the river girls, and once Carl beat the hell out of him when one of the girls got pregnant and was sent away to stay with cousins upriver. Varner asked around, but he never heard whether she had the baby or not. The situation put him in mind of The Winter’s Tale. Was his Perdita born and growing up somewhere along the river? Did she know who her father was? He never saw the girl again, but the idea that he might have a child somewhere gnawed at him, until finally when he was nineteen he told Carl Schuler that it was time for him to go.
“Go? Go where?” Carl said.
“Answer me a question,” Varner said. “Did Sue ever have that baby?”
“I don’t know,” Carl said. “That’s the plain truth of it. Her people live up near the Quad Cities. If that’s what’s bothering you, then go. I always knew you wouldn’t stay. A boy who spends the first eleven years of his life on the move sure isn’t going to settle down when he’s just learning to be a man.”
Varner went. Nobody in the Quad Cities, when he got there a month later, could tell him what he needed to know. He stayed there a while, until winter was coming, hoping she would pass by. Every night he told stories, changing them a little each time to suit the audience. During the day, he worked unloading boats or hammering together new houses using pieces of old houses. Sometimes he found books in the old houses. Sixty years of looting and neglect had ruined all but a very few of them. He went to libraries and found most of them burned by God crazies. People told him that there was a group called Missionaries of the Book that went around the country burning every library and bookstore they found. They would come right into your house, too, the story went. And if you had books, you’d better give them up if you wanted to live. Been like that for years. There’s hardly a book left anywhere around here.
No, Varner thought. If I have lost my child, I’m not going to lose the stories. He started trying to write down what he remembered of the plays he’d done in his father’s troupe. So much of it he’d forgotten. Little snatches came back to him, couplets and phrases, sometimes favorite passages ten or a dozen lines at once. It can’t all be lost, he thought. Somewhere out there I’ll be able to find it.
His father had said that it was every actor’s dream to play Hamlet. So Varner would find Hamlet, and he would gather a company, and in his father’s memory he would play the Dane whether anyone showed up to see it or not. Varner traded a month’s labor for a horse and wagon and things he would need to travel. Then he set out, and before he knew it, forty years had passed.
I will be sixty this year, Varner thought. And now I have taken on a boy because he might be my grandson. He’d had to trade Touchstone for Will. Sue’s people weren’t sentimental, and didn’t want the extra mouth to feed, but they were canny enough to see how badly Varner wanted the boy, so they drove a hard bargain. That was all right. There were other horses in the world. Touchstone had been a good one, but he was never going to be the last. Varner and Will walked back down toward the shipwreck castle. “I tell stories for a living, Will,” Varner said. “When I was a boy, about your age, my father taught it to me. You want me to teach it to you?”
“Sure,” Will said. “What stories?”
“All kinds of stories. You’ll learn them. But my favorite one is Hamlet. That’s a play. My father always wanted to play the role of Hamlet, and after he died I decided that I would play Hamlet because he never could. But here’s the problem. You know about the Missionaries of the Book?”
Will looked away. “Yes sir,” he said.
“You know what the worst thing is in the world that we could do to the Missionaries of the Book?” Varner asked.
“What?”
“You want to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“The worst thing we could do to them is Hamlet, Will,” Varner said. “They haven’t destroyed it yet.”
Walking along the track down to the swamp, Varner considered the path that had brought him here. And driven him a little mad? Perhaps, he thought. Oh yes. But when the wind was westerly, Old Varner thought, he still knew a hawk from a handsaw.