The phone call said to come alone, but he couldn’t just leave them. Perhaps they’d been called, too, and didn’t remember the procedure, which would only figure. His father was not good with instructions. Worse, his father was fatally indifferent to what people said. Other people spoke and the man’s face went blank, as if any voice but his own was in a foreign language. Perhaps his father had not heard the phone. Or maybe he mistook the message for a prank and hung up.
Later, his helpless parents in tow, Edward could explain the mistake, if necessary. By then it’d be too conspicuous to leave them stranded in the road while everyone else left town.
Owing to the roadblock that would be set up on Morris Avenue, Edward parked at Grove and Williams and trekked through muddy backyards to the apartment complex. He cursed himself, because he’d have to lead his parents back the same way, down a wet slope where his car would be waiting. In the many configurations they’d rehearsed at the workshop, somehow he had not accounted for this major obstacle: herding his parents in the dark down a steep, wet slope.
His father was awake and packed already, wandering through the apartment. When Edward walked in, his father started to put on his coat.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Not coming, I guess,” his father said.
“Dad.”
“You try. I tried already. You try if you want to. I’m disgusted. I’m ready to go. Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this?”
“Did they call you?” Edward asked.
“Did who call me?” His father was on the defensive. Had he even slept? Had he been up all night, waiting?
“Did your phone ring tonight?” Edward asked, trying not to sound impatient. There were cautions against this very thing, the petty quarrels associated with departure, which only escalate during an emergency.
“I don’t know, Eddie. Our phone doesn’t work. I’m ready to go. I’m always ready. We’re down there almost every night. Why not tonight?”
Edward picked up the phone and heard an odd pitch. More like an emergency signal than a dial tone.
“You don’t believe me?” his father said. “I tell you the phone doesn’t work and you don’t trust me?”
“I trust you. Let’s get Mom and go.”
His mother was in bed, sheets pulled over her face. It felt wrong to sit on his parents’ bed, to touch his mother while she was lying down. Standing up, he could hug and kiss his mother with only the usual awkwardness, but once she was prone it seemed inappropriate, like touching a dead person. He shook her gently.
“C’mon, Mom, let’s go. Get dressed.”
She answered from under the sheets, in a voice that was fully awake. Awake and bothered.
“I’m too tired. I’m not going.”
They’d been told that, at times like this, old people dig in their heels. More than any other population, the elderly refuse to go. They hide in their homes, wait in the dark of their yards while their houses are searched. Often they request to die. Some of them do not request it. They take matters into their own hands.
But there were a few little things you could do to persuade them, and Edward had learned some of them in the workshop.
“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying. You really don’t want to be here, I promise you.”
“See what I told you?” said his father from the doorway.
“Tell him to shut up,” said his mother.
“You shut up,” his father barked. “Don’t ever tell me to shut up.”
“Shut up,” she whispered.
They waited in his parents’ room, where he’d come and snuggled as a child, a thousand years ago, and he couldn’t help siding with his mother. It would be so wonderful to fall back asleep right now. If only.
“Mom, if you don’t come with us, who knows where you’ll sleep tonight. Or you won’t sleep. I can guarantee that you won’t like what will happen. It will be horrible. Do you want me to tell you what will happen?”
He could hear his mother breathing under the sheets. She seemed to be listening. He paused a bit longer for suspense.
“I could spell it out for you. Would you like me to do that? I have to say I’d rather not.”
Something wordless, passing for surrender, sounded. Edward left the room to give her time and it wasn’t long before she joined them in the front hall, scowling. She’d thrown a coat over her nightgown and carried a small bag.
“Okay?” said Edward.
They didn’t answer, just followed him outside, where the streets were empty.
“Where’s your car?” his mother grumbled.
He explained what they’d have to do and they looked at him as if he were crazy.
“Do you see any other cars here?” he whispered. “Do you know why?”
“Don’t act like you know what’s going on,” his father whispered as they trekked out. “You’re as much in the dark as we are. You have no idea what’s really happening. None. Fucking hotshot. Tell me one fact. I dare you.”
When they reached the hill and had to navigate the decline, his mother kept falling. She’d fall and cry out, landing on her rear end in the grass. He’d never heard her cry in pain before. His father was beside her holding her arm, but she was the larger of his parents and when she stumbled his father strained and couldn’t hold her up. He lost his temper and kept yelling at her, and finally, softly, she said she was doing her best. She really was.
“Well, I can’t carry you!” he yelled.
“Then don’t,” she replied, and she stood up and tried to walk on her own, but she went down again, with an awful cry, sliding through the mud.
In the car she wept and Edward felt ashamed. This was supposedly the easy part.
The gymnasium was crowded. A motor roared, which must have been the generator, because they would have lost power at this point. They signed in, then looked for their settlements, divided by neighborhood. This was the drill. Edward would have a different settlement from his parents, which he’d tried to explain to them, but his father had trouble with the terminology.
“It’s not a settlement,” he’d said.
“Okay, I agree, but that’s what they’re calling it.”
“It’s ridiculous. We’ll be staying there for what, a few hours, not even, and they call it a settlement? A settlement is a place where people stop and stay. You know, people live in a settlement.”
“Dad, I don’t think it really matters. I think what matters is you find the area where you’re supposed to be and then go there.”
“But it won’t be the area where you will be, am I right?”
“That’s right. But I’ll be nearby. I’ll be able to check on you and Mom.”
“You don’t know that, though, Eddie. How could you know that?”
When Edward brought his parents to their settlement, he could not get them admitted. A young woman he knew as Hannah had the clipboard. After scanning her pages, she shook her head.
“They’re not on my list.”
“They live in this neighborhood.” He gave her their address, their apartment number. For no real reason he gave her their zip code, the solitary zip code for all of them.
In the crowd that had already registered were several of his parents’ neighbors, huddled against a wall. There were retirees from his parents’ building. Neighbors who knew his parents. This was the right place. He waved, but no one saw him.
Hannah stared from behind her clipboard. He could sense the protocol overwhelming her mind. A street address, recited anecdotally, was no kind of evidence. Anyone could deliver that information. Edward was only a man talking.
“Do you want to see their driver’s licenses?” he asked, a bit too curtly. Not that he’d brought them.
“No. I want to see their names on this list, and since I don’t, I can’t admit them. I have the most straightforward job in the world. If you have a problem you should discuss it with Frederick, but something tells me I know what he’ll say.”
From under her shawl Edward’s mother said, “Eddie, it’s okay, we’ll go with you to yours.” She sounded relieved. That would solve everything and they could be together.
Edward looked at Hannah, who simply raised her eyebrows. She and Edward had once been on a team together at the beginning. She had seemed nice. Very smart, too, which explained her promotion. Unfortunately, Hannah was impossibly striking. He had been so desperately compelled by her face that he had instantly resolved never to look at her or show her any kind of attention. Everything would be much easier that way. It was troubling now to discover that Hannah ran his parents’ settlement. Was this how things were now? Had everything shifted again? It meant he’d have to see more of her and regularly be reminded that she would never be his. She would never kiss him or get undressed for him or relieve his needs before work or stop trying to look pretty for him, which was the part he liked best, at least when he played out futures with women he’d never speak to. When someone like Hannah, not that there’d ever been someone like Hannah, let herself go and showed up on the couch after dinner in sweatpants and a long, chewed-up sweater. It was unbearable.
Edward knew that he shouldn’t do this, but Hannah would have to understand. He broke character and pleaded with her.
“There’s nowhere else to go. Can you please take them? Please? Is someone really going to come by later and match each person to a name on your list?”
She hardened her face. She wasn’t going to drop the act, and she seemed disgusted with Edward for having done so himself.
“Did they get a phone call?” she asked. Even this question seemed beneath her.
He started to answer, figuring he could lie, when his father blurted out that their phone was broken. How could you get a phone call with a broken phone?
“I assumed they did,” he confided to Hannah. “That’s the truth. Why wouldn’t they get a call? Look, their neighbors are here. People from the same building. Why would my parents have been left out?”
At this last question she looked at him flatly. Why indeed.
“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hannah said. “You shouldn’t have brought them. You might consider…” She seemed reluctant to say what she was thinking. “At this point you’ve made a serious mistake and you need to decide how to fix it with minimal impact on the community.”
She glanced pitilessly at his parents, then muttered, “I know what I would do.”
Edward figured that he knew what she would do, too.
He leaned in so he could speak into her ear. “Are you carrying?” he whispered. “Because if you are, and I could borrow it, I could kill them right here, and it would be a lesson for everyone.”
She was stone-faced. That wasn’t funny. “There are people behind you. I have a protocol to run.”
Don’t we all, Edward thought. But his protocol, to keep his parents safe, could not be achieved here.
“Okay, well, thanks for your help,” he said, sneering. “Good teamwork. Way to go.”
She kept her cool. “So you want me to make a mistake, arguably a bigger one, because you did? Let’s say your mistake was an accident, which possibly it was, although I can’t say. I’m guessing you’re not an imbecile, although this is only a guess. You want me to consciously break the rules. You want your error, a stupid error, if you ask me, to beget other errors so we’re both somehow to blame, even though I do not know you and have no responsibility for you? How does that do you a favor? How does that help you? At this point you need to fall on your sword. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that.”
Why was it so much worse to be shamed by an attractive person? Somehow he felt he could handle this critique from anyone else in the world.
Just then the lights switched on in the gymnasium and a hush fell. Frederick, leader of the readiness workshop, walked in with his wireless microphone. Everyone watched him. He stood at center court, tucked the microphone under his arm, and started to clap methodically, as if he were killing something between his hands. Soon everyone was applauding, moving in close to hear what Frederick would say. The drill, apparently, was over.
He thumped his mic, said Hello, Hello, and everyone fell silent. He was such a cock, Edward thought. An impossible cock.
“So,” he said, in his quick, high voice. “Fair work tonight. Not terrible. We made okay time. Maybe we’re a half hour slow, and I don’t need to tell you what that means.”
“Boom!” someone yelled from the crowd, to an eruption of laughter.
“Boom is right,” replied Frederick. “But it’s not funny.”
The laughter stopped.
“We would have lost people. A certainty. I would have faced a decision, a certainty, even as some of you drove up in your cars. Some of you wouldn’t have made it. You’d have watched us leave and, believe me, you would not have been permitted to follow. I won’t spell that out. You’d be alone now and it would be getting colder. You’d wonder how much gas remained. You’d wonder about the power grid, the water supply, the food supply. You’d determine, correctly, that you know nothing about these things. Nothing. You’d need a leader. Or would you? Maybe you could decide things as a group. You’d start to quarrel. You’d divide. It would get colder. This is supposed to be the easy leg. We didn’t even do the highway drill tonight. Do you know how much time we’ll lose on the highway?”
“Too much!” the crowd yelled.
“That’s right. The highway is an ugly variable. There’s a reason we have not shared the details with you. The highway. We cannot find a way to speak of it that is not disturbing. Whereas this”—Frederick gestured into the gymnasium—“this you can control, down to the second. Which means I’d like to see us shave off that half hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. We need breathing room. We need to join our settlements without panic, with time to kill. Next time we do this I want time to kill. Tonight we had no time to kill. And you know what?”
Someone from far in the back of the gym shouted, “What?”
“I’m disappointed,” Frederick said. He shut his eyes. The gymnasium seemed to groan.
“But do you know what else?” Frederick asked, staring from his expressionless face.
No one responded.
“I’m proud as hell of you. Every single one of you.”
Except me, thought Edward. He was pretty sure that Frederick wouldn’t be proud of him.
They broke out in groups for the critique and Edward sat in a circle with his settlement. His parents, because they weren’t meant to be part of tonight’s drill, were dismissed. Since they had no way to get home, they were probably waiting for him outside.
The group leader for Edward’s settlement was Sharon, and she led them through the discussion. Everything was not well. Edward, she pointed out, had not registered, even though he was here in the gym. Explain that. Did he have trouble finding them? Was something wrong with Edward? Was he perhaps injured or confused? A check at the medical tent and then personal observation had confirmed that Edward was fine. Edward didn’t register with his settlement because he’d brought outsiders with him, and these outsiders had turned out to be a serious liability.
“It’s as though we’ve never discussed anything. It’s as though this workshop never happened,” said Sharon. “We fought the interests of the group. In real life this might have turned unthinkable.”
“I hardly think…” Edward started.
“Hold up, Eddie,” warned Thom. “You don’t talk during your critique.”
“What’s a possible consequence for Edward?” said Marni.
Geoff jumped in. “I think we should do something humiliating to his parents. That’s much more disturbing, because he’d have to see them get hurt. I think that’s a good punishment. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime; it is the crime. I mean, I don’t want his parents to be seriously harmed, necessarily, but there’s nothing worse than watching your parents, who are defenseless, get hurt in some way.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone except Sharon, who glared at Edward.
“Okay, guys, I get it,” said Edward. “If there’s ever a real crisis, I’ll be sure only to look out for myself. Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Unfortunately, Edward, this is not about you learning a lesson,” said Sharon. “I’m glad your colleagues think it’s funny, but this is about deterring others from suddenly deciding they can bring friends with them on an evacuation.”
“My parents aren’t my friends,” he said. “They’re my parents. I thought they’d gotten a call, too. I didn’t realize some people didn’t get called. Who here with parents still alive wouldn’t have done the same thing?”
Some hands went up.
“Yes, Liz?” said Sharon.
“Me,” said Liz, putting her arm down. “My parents are at home right now. It would never have occurred to me to bring them along.”
It wouldn’t have even occurred to her, Edward thought? How do you get to that place? He didn’t even like his parents, but he brought them along. Was that kind of thinking out of date? Had everyone evolved?
A few people echoed this. They’d left their parents behind.
Good for you, Edward thought. This could easily have been the real thing. Wasn’t that the point, that you never knew? You murderous fucks.
“Does anyone think it’s strange,” Edward ventured, “that our parents weren’t called tonight?”
“Honestly, Edward,” said Thom. “This is the second time you’ve spoken during your critique. We shouldn’t have to warn you about this. You can’t learn from what happened tonight unless you’re completely silent now.”
“I thought that what I learn doesn’t matter,” Edward snapped. “Isn’t this about you learning not to be like me?”
“No chance of that,” said a young woman on the opposite side of the circle, who stared at Edward so defiantly that he looked away.
On Edward’s way out, Frederick broke from a mob of admirers and grabbed his arm.
“Edward, a word.”
He’d never stood so close to Frederick, never had a private audience with him. As much as he disliked him, he couldn’t deny how compelling Frederick was. Impossibly handsome, confident, with the figure of a small gymnast. This was a person for the future.
“What you did tonight was arguably brave. You demonstrated a priority for love and loyalty. You protected two fragile people who had no other savior, even though technically they were not in danger and would have been much safer at home. Technically, we may have decided that they were a danger to you, and yet you went to them anyway, endangering everyone else. You made a choice, and on the individual level, that choice was courageous and selfless, even if at the level of the group you risked our entire operation. If those had been my parents, may they rest in peace, and I didn’t have my years of training, and I also didn’t have sophisticated instincts and survival habits, it’s possible I would have done the exact same thing. In other words, if I were you, and knew next to nothing about how to keep people alive today, tomorrow, and the next day, I might have brought my parents here tonight as well. It is completely possible. It’s precisely because I can relate, however abstractly, to what you did that you won’t see any lenience from me. Not a trace. On the contrary, you will meet great resistance from me, and if you do anything like that again, I promise I will hurt you. But I want you to know, face-to-face, how much I admire you.”
When he got outside, his mother was asleep in the car, his father leaning on the door.
“I bet you’re expecting an apology from me,” said his father.
Edward was tired. He said that he wasn’t, that he only wanted to get home. He had a big day tomorrow.
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong,” his father continued.
“I know that, Dad.”
“It doesn’t really seem like you know it.”
“I do. I would like to go home now, that’s all.”
“Okay, go. You’re the one who screwed up, anyway. We don’t need your help. You should be ashamed of yourself. Go straight home. Your mother and I will walk.”
“You’re not going to walk.”
“Katherine! Katherine!” his father shouted into the car, banging on the window. “Wake up! We have to walk home. Eddie refuses to drive us.”
“Dad, get in. Please. I’m driving you home. Don’t worry.”
“Because we wouldn’t want to put you out.”
They waited in the line of cars revving to leave the high school parking lot. Some people took these evening drills—hellish and deeply pointless as they were—as valuable social encounters. So Edward and his parents sat in traffic—his mother asleep, his father grinding his teeth—while athletically attired settlement leaders strolled up to cars and leaned against drivers’ windows, chatting it out. Running the drill backward, doing the blow by blow, reliving the night because the crisis protocol training was all they damn well had in their lives.
Edward didn’t dare honk. These glad-handing semiprofessional tragedy consumers would turn on him, attack the car, eat his face. Or, worse, they’d stare at him and start to hate him slightly more, if that were possible.
His father, on the other hand, hadn’t noticed that they weren’t moving.
“That Hannah is a Nazi cunt,” his father said.
“Dad, you can’t say things like that about people.”
“She’s a Nazi cunt with a tiny cock.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“What, you don’t agree? You don’t like her, either. Tell me you don’t agree.”
“I don’t agree. She’s in a tough position. She’s just doing her job.”
That set him off.
“Just doing her job! Gandhi was just doing his job.”
“Gandhi?”
“Not Gandhi, that other one. That other one!”
His father was in a rage.
“Which other one? Hitler?”
“The one with the stick. With the blowtorch that reaches across fields down into bunkers. The one who had that huge set of keys! Like a thousand keys on that goddamn monstrous key chain. The one with the small gun they have in the museum in D.C.”
“Mussolini?” he guessed.
“Fuck you!” his father yelled. “Goddamn amateur!”
Edward locked the doors of the car.
“I’m not sure I know who you’re talking about,” Edward responded carefully, “but I know what you mean. You really don’t like Hannah. I get it.”
“Bullshit. You know exactly who I’m talking about. You learned about him in school. I remember you coming home one day saying you wanted to be this motherfucker, this dictator, for Halloween. Imagine how your mother reacted to that.”
His mother. If this had really happened, how would she have reacted? She probably would have cheerfully gone along with it, fitting little Eddie with a large key ring and a blowtorch, sending him off into the neighborhood to gather candy. At the moment, though, his mother had the right idea. She was snoring softly in the backseat.
At Edward’s office the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died. The paramedics set up a perimeter around her desk while colleagues from the office looked on, whispering. Edward tried to keep his employees calm. He ran a modest shipping firm where nothing like this ever happened. Why wouldn’t the paramedics touch her, even if it was clear she was dead? Their fear did not bode well. What was the protocol? One of them squinted through a monocle at her body. The others pushed back her cubicle partition. They took pictures and air samples and questioned the coworkers who sat nearby, but they stayed away from her.
The paramedics consulted a radio, then turned to question Edward and his employees.
Had anyone touched this woman? Her clothing? Her hair? Her skin?
No one answered, but of course they had touched her. Edward had still been in his office when she collapsed, but he understood that they’d tried to revive her. They’d loosened her clothing, breathed into her mouth, pounded on her chest. The usual hopeless tricks, taught by sad specialists at adult education centers. And, one year ago, at this very office, for a reasonable discount. Were you not supposed to touch someone who died?
A few hands went up, and these people were escorted to a private office.
“What’s going on?” someone yelled. “Where are you taking them? What are you going to do?”
“Calm down, they’ll be fine,” someone else answered, and this set things off.
“How do you know? You don’t know anything. You have no idea what’s going on.”
The paramedics announced that the office would need to be cleared. Everyone out, quickly and safely, and this quieted people down. They were to please follow their evacuation drill. Employees could wait across the street in the park. They wanted to be able to see everyone from the window.
For what? Edward wondered to himself. So they can take aim?
It would be a little while before this was resolved, the paramedics explained, so people were free to get coffees if they wanted to. Edward hung back until most of his employees had filed out. It was really not appropriate for a paramedic, or anyone, for that matter, to tell his employees to take a coffee break. But he would let it go.
He introduced himself as the boss and asked what was going on, what did they think?
They stared at him.
“Because we thought it was an aneurysm,” he went on. “Except she’s so young. A stroke, maybe? At any rate, it’s horrible. Was it a heart attack? Probably not. What do you guys think?”
When they didn’t answer he continued to theorize out loud, naming ailments. They were leaving him stranded. He couldn’t handle this conversation by himself.
“Sir,” said a paramedic, “we’ll have to ask you to leave with the others.”
“Okay,” Edward said. “But do you know how long this will be? I need to know what to tell my employees. We have kind of a crazy day ahead.”
It was true. Edward had five job candidates to interview after lunch, and he had been planning to spend the morning in preparation.
The paramedics shook their heads and stared at him again, as if they were baffled that Edward expected them to stoop to a conversation with someone like him.
Edward wasn’t finished. This was his office, and they were sprawled out in his chairs, and they’d moved and probably broken office equipment he’d paid for, while completely ignoring him. Or, at the very least, failing to take him seriously.
“It’s Kristina,” he said.
Again they looked at him in their odd way, like doctors standing around at a morgue.
“Kristina is her name,” Edward said, gesturing at the dead woman. “She’s from Ditmars. I hired her about six months ago. She went to college…I forget where. She was a terrific employee. Here’s her emergency contact information, if you want it. But maybe you don’t want it. Maybe you guys don’t care. Maybe this is simply too boring for you and that’s why you can’t speak. You’re bored. Well, her name is Kristina. Show some fucking respect.”
One of the paramedics stood up.
“Sir,” he said, gesturing at an officer holding a cell phone. “This is Deputy Arnold Sjogren. His sister was a close friend of Kristina’s. We know exactly who she is, we grieve her passing, and now we are doing our jobs. The longer you stand here yelling at us, without any facts, the greater risk you place yourself in. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I personally do not require a lesson in respect. We are risking our lives today, and you are not. Who should be showing respect to whom?”
It was cold outside, not yet ten in the morning. Kristina must have only just started work when she died. In truth, Edward reflected, she had been a detached figure in the office, a kind of ghost. When she was trained, including a short session with Edward himself—since he tried to impress upon his new employees the larger aims of the company—she seemed indifferent. He felt obliged to act excited about his life’s work, even if it sometimes exhausted him.
Across the street stood his employees, shivering and coatless, holding their arms. Others huddled together, crying.
Edward and his employees—all fifteen of them, or it’d be fourteen now—were not accustomed to being outside together. It was Edward who made them nervous, and he knew it. He shunned the public spaces at work for this very reason, protecting his employees from the destabilizing effect of his presence, keeping to his private office whenever he could. What a kind service to offer, to keep them from having to see him up close. He tried to be nice and cordial, but it was true that in some deep way he had trouble thinking of them as human, with lives outside of the office. Was this bad, especially if he never showed it? He thought of himself as deeply empathic—if mainly toward himself. In theory he held a strong share of empathy in reserve for a stranger he had yet to meet.
His team was standing in the little patch of dirt that passed for a park. When Edward approached they fell silent. A broad swing set creaked on the other side of the square. As the boss, it seemed that he should speak. He should sum up, or lead them in prayer, or say something, perhaps, cheerful. Maybe it was too soon for that?
“Well, poor thing,” said Edward, finally.
“Did you call her family?” someone asked, and the others nodded, leaning in.
This alarmed him. Was he supposed to do that? How could he call Kristina’s family if he didn’t know the facts? At any rate he’d left the emergency contact card with the paramedics.
“They’re taking care of it,” Edward said, nodding up at the building.
But were they? He could feel his employees thinking that this was his job. He was supposed to take care of it, not some bland paramedics, inured to calamity. What if one of them had died, he imagined them thinking. Would Edward, their supervisor, neglect to call their families, leaving it to some rookie EMT who might not even be able to pronounce their names? What fucking kind of boss was he? Any one of them could have died today. They could die tomorrow, or next week. Could Edward be trusted to call their spouses or roommates or parents—to at least pretend that he cared?
After they stood there looking at their feet, someone volunteered that they’d been discussing how Kristina might have died. They focused on Edward again, and again he hated being in charge.
“Did you learn anything? What did they say?”
Edward shook his head. “I shouldn’t really comment,” he said, adopting an air of secrecy. “They asked me not to say anything. I’m sorry. I’d better not.”
Oh, was he something. For a few moments Edward’s employees could—wrongly! wrongly!—see him as a person with exclusive information, entrusted with a secret. An insider. And in exchange, what? What did he get for this lie? Well, for one, Edward would never forget what he’d said here today, how low he’d fallen. That seemed fair. A fair deal. He might as well bask in their awestruck sense of his power. Why not enjoy it for a while?
People started to drift off. Jonathan took a sandwich order, but when it grew too complicated someone suggested that they all go, and they looked at Edward expectantly. This was going to take a while. He sent them off with his blessing—explaining that he should really stay here in case they needed him—and he was left alone in the park, staring up at the window to his office, where, for some reason, the shade had been drawn.
The first job candidate showed up right on time, minutes after the hazmat truck and the mayor’s motorcade pulled away. Edward and his employees had only just been cleared to return to the building. The candidate, Elise Mortensen, was announced when Edward returned to his office, where he discovered that his documents had been disturbed. His filing cabinets were open. On his shelves the books had been tossed around. Did they think he was hiding something? A smell ran through the room, too, something floral that he hadn’t noticed in the outer offices. He didn’t have time to take stock of what had changed or to wonder what they were looking for in his office, so far from where Kristina died, when Elise Mortensen came in, adopting an exaggerated tiptoe, as if she were disturbing him, which she kind of fucking was, and asked where to sit.
Edward fumbled through the interview. He started with the dreaded opener Tell me about yourself, so he could collect his thoughts. Elise Mortensen seemed to have been waiting her whole life to answer this question and she went for it. She delivered a droning memoir that kept rising in tone, which assured Edward that it might not end until she died. He kept his eyes fixed on hers and established a pattern of interested nods, then withdrew his attention to the place where it rightly belonged. On himself.
Edward tried to piece together the morning’s events. What interest would the mayor have in Kristina’s death, and why would Frederick from the workshop be part of the mayor’s entourage? This was arguably the worst part of the morning, standing across the street watching the mayor exit his car, followed by business-suited staff whispering into their phones, and then, what the fuck, Frederick from the workshop, almost like a government official now, wearing his jumpsuit, carrying a duffel bag.
At that point Edward figured it was okay to bring his employees across the street so they could wait at the entrance. In truth it offered Edward another chance to discuss the situation with officials, perhaps reestablish his authority. This was his office! He paid rent here, and the death had happened during working hours at his business. And he, not that he wanted to broadcast this, was liable for what happened. But of course he was rebuffed at the door by a police officer, even while his employees looked on, knowing—how could they not know?—that Edward had no influence. No role to play. He was a bystander just like they were.
When the mayor came out, Frederick pointed at Edward in the crowd.
“There he is!” yelled Frederick, and the mayor’s entire entourage peered into the crowd, as if a rare animal had been sighted.
Edward froze.
“That’s the man!”
Next to Edward stood Philip, who returned Frederick’s greeting, said things were fine, considering, and what the hell, a tragedy, right, to which Frederick shrugged, pointing at the mayor with a knowing look. This wasn’t about him. Edward lowered his hand and stepped behind Philip, where it was warm and safe, waiting for the motorcade to leave.
There was a final interview that afternoon, and then he could go home. Edward thought he would die. At times like this, when he didn’t want to be seen by anyone in the office, and with the bathroom so conspicuous at the other end of the office, the entire staff watching him go in and come out, Edward peed in a jar that he kept in his drawer. He was sealing the lid when the last candidate was announced: Hannah Glazer. Oh dear God. The same Hannah, the settlement leader, who’d turned away his parents.
On his desk was her résumé, which he couldn’t focus on, but he willed himself into the conversation. As ever, it was difficult to look at her and be reminded of an enormous segment of life—the segment in which you were naked with a stunning person and she was not repulsed by you—that was not available to him. She wore tailored black clothes, her eyes clear and mean, and her hair was arranged in one of those old-fashioned styles, pasted to her head at the top and then curled out at the bottom. Quite lovely.
“What interests you about the position?” Edward started.
“You’re kidding, right?” Hannah said, glaring at him.
So he would have found no viable candidates today. A receptionist had died, and he’d have to interview for her replacement, and now he’d need to schedule another day of interviews for this position as well.
He had to hold up appearances, or else his appearances would turn deranged. “I’m not kidding, no.” Maybe they could keep this short.
“Are we going to be pretending today?” Hannah asked.
“Pretending what?”
Edward looked longingly at his window, wondering if he could get up enough speed for it to shatter if he threw himself against the glass.
Hannah stood. She spoke calmly, but she was seething. “I seriously question your ability to be fair here, given what happened. Last night I did my job. I did my job. And today when I very much need this position, a position I am ridiculously qualified for, here you are, mister fucking policy dodger, ready to dole out a punishment because I followed instructions in a difficult situation.”
“I’m sorry,” said Edward. “What punishment have I doled out?”
“Not hiring me,” she said. “I saw your eyes when you knew it was me. You knew you weren’t going to hire me.”
“That’s not true.”
It was, for the most part, true.
“I wonder if I could interview with someone else. Is there someone else on the hiring committee so I could be assured a fair shake?”
“Well, it’s only me. There’s no committee. This is my company. If I recuse myself from the interview, for my intense bias, my inability to evaluate your suitability for a position in the company that I created from nothing, a company I understand better than anyone else in the world, you’ll be in this room alone. Shall we do that?”
Hannah didn’t laugh. “I’d like to continue this interview under protest,” she said.
Was that a real thing? Was there a form you could fill out?
“Listen,” said Edward. “I would understand completely if you didn’t feel comfortable going forward, if you maybe wanted to try somewhere else.” Please, please, try somewhere else.
“You sound like Frederick now. Get the person to believe her rejection is actually her own idea. Classic Frederick. Old school. I bet you’ve been told that before.”
“Never.”
“I guess it’s no secret about me and him,” Hannah said, grinning.
Edward stared at her.
“That we’re involved. I mean, everyone must know at this point.”
He wished he didn’t. That was knowledge he’d very much rather not have. He picked up her résumé, waving it at her. “Shall we?” he said. “An actual interview, and to hell with the past?”
Hannah Glazer was right. She was qualified for the position. Edward was crestfallen. She was smart, articulate, preposterously experienced, and when he challenged her with difficult production scenarios—bottlenecks on the front or back end, human error, acts of nature—she produced a staggering arsenal of troubleshooting strategies, more sophisticated than any he’d ever heard, which she rattled off casually, as if they were too simple to be of interest anymore.
“You know,” she said, “Frederick is good at this sort of thing, too.”
This sort of thing? Was his job just a hobby to her, something to perfect in the off-hours?
“But of course he’s more of a manager/leader/boss type. As you might imagine.”
“Of course,” said Edward, even though what did he know about Frederick and his life outside the workshop?
“So…” said Hannah. “I mean, if you ever thought of taking a leave of absence, or retiring or something like that—not that you’re that age yet—Frederick could be a really ideal person to take over.”
He could only stare at her.
“I mean, of course, only if, you know, that sort of thing has been on your mind. Taking a break. Succession. Lineage. You know. Just don’t forget about him. About Frederick. He could really do your job, and still have time left over for his other work.”
On her way out Hannah looked at his couch. “Is that where you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Fuck them.”
“What?”
“All of the desperate people who come looking for work. Is that your casting couch?”
“This isn’t like that. It’s just a couch.”
“You didn’t think, when I walked in, that within twenty minutes, if everything went well, you’d have me down on it?”
Edward couldn’t answer. Was that an option that he’d somehow missed? Two minutes into the interview she was yelling at him about his bias. Was that some deeply veiled flirtation?
“So you’ve fucked no one there? I’m curious.”
She didn’t seem curious. She was yawning.
He looked at the brown couch and thought back, and back, and back. The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location—or, in fact, on any couch ever—was, indeed, zero.
His phone rang that night and this time he wasn’t going to screw it up. He grabbed his bag and headed over to the high school, alone.
The roads were quiet, streetlights shining so fiercely the neighborhoods were bright as day. A siren issued into the night, deep and low. He’d never heard this before. The closer he got to the high school, the more the sound became like an engine rather than a siren, rumbling beneath the ground. When he reached the turnoff, he came upon a sea of abandoned cars, doors jacked open, hazards flashing.
Edward stopped fast. The cars racing behind him closed in, trapping him there. He could do nothing but leave his car and walk, as the others must have done. When the drill was over, it would be one hell of a mess driving out of here, but for now he had to get inside.
He was one of the first to check in with Sharon, and it seemed she almost smiled at him. She looked strange and excited, her face glazed. Maybe he could show her that last night was a fluke.
From across the gymnasium he watched Hannah’s settlement grow, waiting for a sign of his parents. Now that he had checked in, he wasn’t supposed to leave, and since this was a drill, since it didn’t matter, he resolved not to care. Probably his parents hadn’t been called. This was some new thing they were doing, a test of loyalty he would fail no matter how he responded. Anyway, he’d long ago given up trying to understand the methods of the workshop. Even if his parents had been called, the phone was broken, and how would they know? It couldn’t matter. But Edward kept looking over to Hannah, even as the gymnasium filled with bundled-up people, and children, and, of all things, animals—smooth, golden dogs—a few of them wandering sleepily across the hardwood floor, moaning. He’d never seen it so crowded. The generator roared over the chaos—something felt different tonight.
To be fair, he’d had that feeling before. Maybe he always had that feeling. They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing, at last. No matter how false and strange things were, Edward always thought it was smarter, in the end, to believe they were real. You’d better not get caught thinking something was only make-believe.
Finally, Edward spotted his father joining Hannah’s settlement. He was alone. Hannah waved him in and he vanished into the crowd. The gymnasium lights never switched on and Frederick never appeared to praise and chastise them, to bark strange phrases about a future none of them could imagine. Instead the settlements headed outside to get in line for buses, which were departing from the back field of the school.
The siren was so loud that when Edward tried to speak nothing came out. Some terrible noise cancellation was at work. Was this intentional, a trick of Frederick’s to keep them from understanding each other? Edward looked at Thom—who was terminally available for eye contact, lying in wait for it—and Thom smiled, giving a thumbs-up. Thom was excited. He’d wanted to leave for years. He was ready to roll. He had no parents, no wife, and it was as if he was waiting to start a new life somewhere else where they weren’t drilling for escape day and night. Unless in their new location, too, wherever in the world that ended up being, they’d have to pretend to leave all the time, just as they’d done here.
Only one other time had the drill run this long. To Edward, that night seemed like years ago, when the workshop began, when it was just a few worried citizens finally admitting to each other how little they knew of the future. But probably it was only last winter. It was a viciously cold night and they’d waited in this very spot while the buses warmed up. He’d been so scared! But then Frederick’s girlish voice had rung out through a megaphone and everyone had hurried back for their critiques.
So there was still time. Frederick could call this off and get them back inside.
As the settlements gathered behind him, headed to separate buses, Edward waited and waited and waited, until finally Hannah approached, and, behind her, her settlement, mostly old-timers from Wellery Heights. He had only a moment for this, but he had to do it. There was nothing in the protocol about it, anyway. The protocol hadn’t been written this far. It was a blank chapter. They’d spoken so much about how after a certain point nothing could be known, and they were right. Edward grabbed his father, who looked startled, and then the two of them opened their mouths soundlessly at each other. They couldn’t hear anything. It was his mother Edward needed to know about. His mother. He shrugged where and he mimed other things, things to indicate his mother, which anyone else from any country in the world, during any kind of crisis, would understand, but it was no use, it was stupid. Or his father was stupid, because he either did not get it or did not want to, smiling dumbly at Edward, reflecting the mime back at him as if it was a game. Finally Edward grabbed his father’s left hand, isolating the ring finger, and held it up to him, tapping on the ring.
Do you get it now, you stupid old man? Where is she?
Edward’s father smiled, put his palms together, closed his eyes, and leaned his head against his hands. A universal sign. His mother was home sleeping. His father had left her there asleep, and don’t worry, she was doing fine.
His mother was asleep, alone, at home. In a city that might soon be empty. She was fine.
The buses traveled south. Frederick had been wrong about the highway. It was not an ugly variable. It didn’t even present a problem. Was something supposed to shoot out at them from the trees? He was no longer sure what, exactly, he was supposed to fear. In a caravan the buses climbed the on-ramp, entering a freeway that seemed reserved for them alone. They drove for hours. The driver was in radio communication, but otherwise the bus was quiet. Edward sat by himself in a rear seat, staring from the window. At this point, he reasoned, the drill should have been called. They’d done it. They’d proven they could leave quickly, if necessary. But now what? They’d never rehearsed this far, so what on earth could they be testing? Wasn’t it a pain in the ass now that they were so far from home, and how exactly were they going to get back? The buses, of course, could be ordered to turn around. But as the sun started to rise, and as muffins wrapped in brown paper were sent back, along with juice boxes and clear packs of vitamin pills, that didn’t seem so likely.
During the second day of driving, after he’d slept and woken and then slept a little bit more, he heard a commotion at the front of the bus and the bus steamed and seized and buckled as it started to slow down and pull off the highway.
Thom slid into the seat next to him.
“Holy fuck, right?”
“What happened?” asked Edward, still waking up.
“Sharon.”
As the bus lurched to a stop, Edward tried to look, but there were too many people mobbed together.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
Thom shook his head. “I don’t think so. She fell out of her seat. All of a sudden. I only got a quick look. But, fuck, man, I think she’s dead.”
It was a pretty sight. Ten—or was it more—glittering yellow buses pulled over on the side of the highway. Edward’s was the only bus that had discharged its passengers, and this was spoiling a lovely image: ragged, tired travelers wandering up and down the embankment while the passengers from the other buses, from behind darkened glass, looked on. Edward found a soft, dry place to sit. What a drill this was! Something for the record books. In a strange way he was excited for the critique. How would you begin to pick this apart? He wondered, surveying the fleet, which of the buses carried his father. Sharon had been removed, conveyed on a stretcher by some younger fellows, who’d hiked her into the woods and returned already. Without Sharon. Without even the stretcher. They were sharing a thermos down in the grass. One of them sang something. Edward wasn’t sure what the holdup was now, even while Frederick and some others, including the mayor, huddled in conference down in the shadow of the last bus.
It wasn’t long before a signal was given and the buses revved up again. Edward stood and joined the orderly line his settlement had formed to board their bus, but the door didn’t open and their driver never appeared. Where was he, and who was supposed to drive them now?
Frederick and his crew had already boarded their buses. One by one the other buses wheezed into motion, crawling from the side of the road to join the highway. His neighbors reacted differently to the situation that dawned on them, but Edward stood out on the shoulder to watch. Of course the windows of the buses were dark, so he couldn’t see, but in one of them, perhaps pressed against the glass, perhaps waving at him this very moment, waving hello and, of course, good-bye, was his father. So Edward, just in case, raised his own hand, too. Raised it and waved—thinking, Good-bye, Dad, at least for now—as the other buses built up speed down the highway and disappeared from sight, leaving the rest of them alone in the grass by the side of the road.