THAT DAY’S MORNING SEEMED DISTANT, LIKE A STORY ABOUT someone else Clay had once been told. He could almost see the beach towels, drying on the railing outside, and they were like the pinch you’re supposed to administer when you think you’re dreaming. Amanda followed just behind him, and they came into the kitchen and found these strangers there, moving around like they owned the place, which, perhaps, they did.
“I made drinks. Felt like it was in order.” G. H. gestured at the glass in his hand. “Our private reserve. I’m happy to get you one.”
The man had left a cabinet ajar, and Clay could see inside of it bottles of Oban, wine, that expensive tequila in the porcelain vessel. He had done an inventory of the kitchen. Had he missed this, or had it been locked? “You know, I might have a drink.”
G. H. poured one. “Ice? No ice?”
Clay shook his head and took the glass being offered. He sat at the island. “That’s lovely, thank you.”
“It’s the least we can do!” The man gave a mirthless laugh.
There was a temporary silence, as though they’d planned it to memorialize someone now gone.
“I might need to excuse myself,” Ruth said.
“Of course.” Clay didn’t know what was required of him. She wasn’t asking his permission, and it wasn’t his to grant.
Amanda watched the woman leave the room. She poured herself a glass of the wine she’d opened earlier because she wasn’t sure what else to do. Her wine, the wine she’d paid for. She sat beside her husband. “It is a beautiful house.” What a thing, to make small talk now.
G. H. nodded. “We love it. I’m happy to hear you do too.”
“Have you been here long?” Amanda was trying to interrogate, hoping to catch him.
“Bought it five years ago now. We spent quite a while on the renovations, almost two years. But at this point it’s home. Or home away from home.”
“Whereabouts do you live in the city?” Clay knew how to make small talk too.
“We’re on Park, between Eighty-First and Eighty-Second. What about you?”
Clay was cowed. The Upper East Side was uncool, but still holy. Or maybe so uncool that it was in fact cool. They’d held on to their place so long he could no longer comprehend real estate, the local sport. Still, he’d been in apartments on Park, upper Fifth, Madison. It always felt unreal, like a Woody Allen film. “We live in Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens.”
“It’s really Cobble Hill,” Amanda said. She thought that more respectable. A better riposte to his uptown address.
“That’s where everyone wants to live now, I guess. Younger people. I imagine you have more space than we do.”
“Well, you have all this space here, in the country,” Amanda said, reminding him of what she thought was his cover story.
“A big part of the reason we bought out here. Weekends, holidays. Get out of the city and into the fresh air. It’s so different out here, the air.”
“I like what you all did.” Amanda stroked the countertop like it was a pet.
“We had a great contractor. So many of the little things were his idea.”
Returning from the bathroom, Ruth paused in the living room to switch on the television. The screen was that vintage shade of blue from some simpler technological era, white letters important: emergency broadcast system. There was a beep, then a quiet hiss, the sound of something that was not much of a sound, then another beep. They kept coming, the beeps. There was nothing but the beeps, steady but not reassuring. The three others walked into the living room to see it for themselves.
“So, no news there,” Ruth said, mostly to herself.
“It’s probably just a test of the emergency broadcast system.” Amanda was skeptical.
“It would say so if it was,” Ruth said. It was common sense. “You see this.”
They all saw it.
“Change the channel.” Clay had faith. “We were just watching a show!”
Ruth scrolled through every available channel: 101, 102, 103, 104. Then more quickly: 114, 116, 122, 145, 201. All blues, those meaningless words. “This is some emergency broadcast system we’ve got.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Clay looked at the built-in shelves with remaindered art books and old board games. “It would tell us more if there were more to tell.” Ipso facto.
“The satellite television is so unreliable. But it’s impossible to get them to run the cable out this far, so it’s the only option.” Ruth had wanted the house to be far from everything. She’d been the one who wrote that Airbnb listing, and she meant it. That the house was a place apart from the rest of the world was the best thing about it.
“The wind is enough to knock it out.” G. H. sat in one of the armchairs. “Rain. It’s not very reassuring, that rain can affect a satellite. But it’s true.”
Clay shrugged his shoulders. “So there’s an emergency. The emergency is that New York City is without power. But we still have it, even if we don’t have TV or the internet. So that’s got to make you feel better, I’d imagine? You were right to get out of the city—it must be a mess.”
Amanda didn’t believe this, but she also wondered. Should they fill the bathtub with water? Should they find batteries, candles, supplies?
“I think you should stay here tonight.” Clay had seen enough evidence. “Tomorrow we’ll sort out what’s happening.”
Amanda had nothing to say about the emergency broadcast system.
“A blackout could be something. It could be a symptom of something bigger.” Ruth had ninety minutes to work it out and wanted to say it. “It could be fallout. It could be terrorism. It could be a bomb.”
“Let’s not let our imaginations run away.” Clay’s mouth was sugary from the drink.
“A bomb?” Amanda was incredulous.
G. H. didn’t like to ask, but he had to. “You know, I’m sorry to trouble you, but we didn’t have dinner. Some cheese and crackers before the concert.”
The party—was it a party now?—retreated to the kitchen. Clay took the leftover pasta, still in its pot, out of the refrigerator. He was suddenly aware how messy the room was, how thoroughly they’d made themselves sloppily at home. “Let’s eat something.” He said it like it was his idea. Professors learned that, taking the occasional insightful classroom comment and transforming it into fact.
Ruth noticed that the sink was full of dirty dishes. She pretended not to be disgusted. “A dirty bomb in Times Square? Or some coordinated effort at the power plants?” She had never thought of herself as imaginative, but now she was discovering a flair for it. It only sounded like paranoia if you were wrong. Think of what had been done and forgotten in their lifetimes—in the past decade alone.
“We shouldn’t speculate.” G. H. was reasonable.
Someone had left the tongs inside the pot. The metal was cold to the touch. Clay filled four bowls, microwaved them in turn. “Where are the power plants in New York City?” There was so much you never knew in life, even someone smart like he was. Clay found this marvelous or meaningful. “They must be in Queens, I guess. Or by the river?”
“Some guy blows up a suitcase in Times Square. His pals do the same thing at the power plants. Synchronized chaos. The ambulances couldn’t even get through the streets, if all the lights were out. Do the hospitals even have generators?” Ruth accepted a bowl of pasta. She didn’t know what else to do, so she ate. Also, she was hungry. The pasta was too warm, but good, and she was unsure why this was something she begrudged. “This is very kind of you.”
Amanda slurped accidentally. She was suddenly ravenous. Sensual pleasures reminded you that you were alive. Also, drinking too much made her hungry. “It’s nothing.”
G. H. could feel the food working on his chemistry. “It is delicious, thank you.”
“It’s the salted butter.” Amanda felt the need to explain because it was unclear whether she was guest or host. She liked clarity about the role she was meant to discharge. “That European kind, shaped like a cylinder. It’s a very simple recipe.” She thought chat might salve the discomfort. She was embarrassed to have served this to strangers. The meal was just an improvisation that had ended up part of her repertoire. She liked to imagine some future summer, at some other rental house, the children back from Harvard and Yale, requesting this special dish that reminded them of their sun-filled childhood. “On vacation, I like to keep it simple. Burgers. Pancakes. That kind of thing.”
“I’ll do the washing.” Ruth thought restoring her kitchen to order might soothe. Also it was only polite.
“We’re here now. We’re grateful to you both. I feel so much better, having eaten. I think I might have another drink.” G. H. refilled. It was a whisky old enough to vote. It was for special occasions, but surely this counted.
“I’ll join you.” Clay slid his glass toward the man. “You see, there’s nothing to worry about here.” Tumbler was somehow fitting; the glass was heavy and expensive and it kept him from tumbling to the floor.
These strangers didn’t know him, so they didn’t know that G. H. was not given to hyperbole. In the hour and a half drive his fear had doubled like resting dough. “Well, it was disturbing.” He had what he wanted, but now he wanted this man and this woman to understand him. He could sense their suspicion.
Ruth was calmed by the suds, the yellow sponge, the lemon scent, the squeak of a clean, hot plate. The preceding ninety minutes she’d been both suspended and speeding—modern life had an uncanny tempo, one man was never meant for. Cars and planes made time travelers of all of us. She’d looked out at the black night and shivered. She’d put a hand on G. H.’s knee. She’d thought about this place, this house, solidly made and tastefully furnished, beautifully situated and absolutely safe but for the complication of these people in her kitchen. “That’s an understatement.”
“A blackout. Like Hurricane Sandy.” Clay recalled unfounded reports of an explosion, Superfund sludge from the Gowanus spilling into the water supply, every sip a carcinogen. They were without power a day and a half. It had been a kind of charming emergency; hunker down with playing cards and books. When the lights came back on, he had baked an apple pie.
“Or in 2003,” Amanda said. “The electrical grid, remember that?”
“I walked across the Manhattan Bridge. Couldn’t reach her on the phone.” Clay put a hand on his wife’s, nostalgic and possessive. “I was so worried. Of course, we were all remembering 9/11, but it was so much better than that day.” That parochial one-upmanship New Yorkers think their own, special remit, but everyone is possessive of the places they inhabit. You recount the disasters to demonstrate your fidelity. You’ve seen the old girl at her worst.
“I thought of 9/11, of course.” Ruth washed the food scraps down the drain and switched on the disposal. “What if people are dying right now? Remember a few years ago, that guy drove his truck on the bike path on the West Side? Just rented a truck in New Jersey and killed all those people? It’s not even difficult. Like how much planning could that have possibly taken?”
“The lights. All the lights—” G. H. knew that no one was interested in hearing about the dream you had last night. This had been real, but maybe some things you had to see for yourself.
Clay believed if you said it, it would be true. “I think in the morning—”
“It is morning, now.” Ruth met Clay’s eyes in the reflection of the window, a neat little trick.
“I guess what I mean is that things always look different in the light of day. I guess self-help clichés are rooted in truth.” Clay sounded apologetic, but he believed it. The world was not as fearful as people thought.
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Ruth dried her hands on a towel and hung it back where it belonged. A building lit up was alive, a beacon; dark, it vanished, like David Copperfield had made the Statue of Liberty do that one time. Ruth associated the sudden absence of light with something being extinguished, with a switch being flipped, with a change, and this invited the question: What had been extinguished, what switch flipped, what had changed?
“You’ve had a scare.” Clay understood.
Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order. “I was scared. I am.” This last part she didn’t quite whisper. She wasn’t ashamed, but she was embarrassed. Was this it, then; was she a fearful old woman now?
“We’ll find out more tomorrow.” Clay believed this.
“What if it’s the North Koreans? That fat one who fed his own uncle to the dogs.” Ruth could not stop herself. “What if it’s a bomb. A missile.” A year ago, was it, there was that false alarm in Hawaii where, for some terrible stretch, vacationers and honeymooners and dropouts and housewives and surf instructors and museum curators thought that was it, a missile was on its way from the Korean peninsula to obliterate them. How would you spend the last thirty-two minutes: looking for a basement or texting your friends or reading a story to your children or in bed with your spouse? People would probably monitor their own destruction by CNN play-by-play. Or the local stations wouldn’t cut away, and you could go out watching The Price Is Right.
“The North Koreans?” Amanda said it like she’d never heard of the place. What if it was the Outer Mongolians? The Liechtensteiners? The Burkinabé? Did they even have the bomb in Africa? She’d watched Lorin Maazel conducting in Pyongyang. Some cable correspondent had promised détente, some previous president had promised them all peace. Amanda didn’t have time to think about the North Koreans, and had no idea, even, what Ruth was talking about, feeding people to dogs; she thought the rap on the Koreans was that they were the ones who ate dogs.
“It’s not the North Koreans.” G. H. shook his head, but this was as remonstrative as he was willing to get. You didn’t scold Ruth. She was a Barnard girl: she had ready answers. He fiddled with the heavy watch on his wrist, a nervous tic he knew was a tic. He had his money on Iran, maybe Putin. Not literally so; that was against the law. But he was no fool.
“How do you know?” Now that they were safe—but there was a question mark there—Ruth could cede to the panic that had been in her throat as they drove. She could say what she’d been unable to in the car, afraid of jinxing them with an empty tank or a punctured tire. She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer. Muslim fundamentalists! Chechen true believers! Rebels in Colombia, Spain, Ireland, every country had its madmen.
“Wouldn’t there have been a boom?” This was a familiar feeling for Clay, whenever he had to assemble furniture or the car made funny noises: how little he knew. Perhaps that was why, in his estimation, true intelligence was accepting how limited one’s intelligence always is. This philosophy let him off the hook. “You would have . . . heard something. Like if it had been a bomb.”
“I was having breakfast at Balthazar on 9/11.” G. H. remembered the silky omelet, the salty French fries. “Can’t be more than twenty blocks from the towers, right? I didn’t hear a goddamn thing.”
“Can we please not talk about 9/11?” Amanda was uncomfortable.
“I heard the sirens, and then people in the restaurant started talking, so—”
Ruth idly rapped her fingers against the countertop. There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?
Without thinking, Clay gave his phone his fingerprint. The phone showed him a photograph of the children, Archie, then eleven, Rose, only eight, rounded, small, innocent. It was startling to look at this evidence of the selves now gone, though he often didn’t truly see this picture, obscured by little squares of information, the seductive glow of the phone itself. He felt phantom tingles when the phone was not at his side. Clay recalled that in January, in the spirit of resolution, he’d tried leaving his phone in another room while he slept. But that was how he did most of his newspaper reading, and staying informed was as worthy a resolution. “Still nothing,” he said, answering a question they all wanted to ask, even if none of them had bothered to. They decided to go to bed.