by Bruce Golden
Bruce Golden’s short stories have been published in more than thirty anthologies and across a score of countries. Asimov’s Science Fiction described his novel, Evergreen, “If you can imagine Ursula Le Guin channeling H. Rider Haggard, you’ll have the barest conception of this stirring book, which centers around a mysterious artifact and the people in its thrall.” More recently, his book Tales of My Ancestors combines the historical with the fantastic, and has been characterized as The Twilight Zone meets Ancestry.com. Golden’s upcoming novel, Monster Town, is a satirical take on the world of the hard-boiled detective, one populated by the monsters of old black and white horror movies. http://goldentales.tripod.com
I don't know why I started remembering things long forgotten. Maybe because I was truly alone for the first time in my life. Maybe it was the quiet desolation of the landscape—nothing but remnants of the past from horizon to horizon. Of course things weren't as bad as they were immediately after the comet set the world ablaze. In the years since, much of the plant life had regenerated, the way it does after any major fire. But barren, scorched areas where nothing flourished but a few hardy weeds still blemished the earth. In a sense, I was like those weeds.
My progress was slow. Navigating the Durango around countless derelict vehicles dotting the highway was always time-consuming, especially with the trailer I was pulling. Sometimes I was forced to detour off the highway completely to make my way around. I had to proceed slowly each time. I had no mechanical knowledge, so if the Durango were damaged—if it ceased to function—my precious cargo and I would be stranded.
I didn't know where I was going—not specifically. I just knew I was headed north. Why north? Because, before he died, my dad suggested that if weather patterns held true, the rich forestlands of the north would grow back first. It was there he thought I'd best be able to live off the land while avoiding the plague that had decimated erstwhile cities.
Dad was much on my mind as I drove. My memories of his death were as clear as they were frayed and sorrowful. But I tried not to think of how he was after he fell ill. Instead I did my best to remember what he was like before, at the beginning... at the beginning of the end.
Those memories were not so clear. They came to me piecemeal and in dark dreams. I was only seven, and none of it made much sense to me at the time, even though Dad had tried to explain it. I hadn't really understood what was happening.
Two days before its arrival, Smith-Kim had become the brightest "star" in the sky. Of course it wasn't a star. I remember looking up at it as Dad packed our brand new white Dodge Durango with food, water, books—everything he could think of.
"Is it going to hit us?" I asked.
"It might, so we're going somewhere safe just in case."
"Is it going to hit Mommy?"
"No, she'll be okay."
He didn't tell me then that he'd read all the scientific reports and knew it wasn't the collision but the aftermath that would cause the most destruction. Incredible heat incinerating anything on the surface, dust thrown into the atmosphere blocking the sun for months, acid rain, nuclear fallout from damaged power plants, and weapons set off by the heat. I don't think, at the time, he really expected us to survive. But that didn't stop him from trying.
Fully packed, we drove off to the place he'd found. I remember, on the way, I saw thousands of people out on the streets, on rooftops, waiting for the comet's arrival. I don't know if they thought it was going to bypass Earth and give them a show, or if they were just resigned to their fate.
Dad drove us to an underground parking garage, going as far down inside it as he could. A few other people had the same idea, but I was too young to grasp why we were sitting down there, waiting, listening to the one radio station we could still get beneath several levels of concrete. At the time, I felt like I was missing out—that I wouldn't get to see what everyone else was waiting for.
I recall the radio went static minutes before the chilly air of the garage grew so hot I burned myself when I touched the door handle.
When the heat got so intense I didn't think I could stand it, another family decided to drive out. Dad warned them not to go yet, but they left anyway. We never saw them again.
We waited in the stifling heat for longer than I could keep track. I remember crying at one point, and asking about Mom. Dad told me she was far away on a business trip, but that he'd warned her and told her to find a safe place like we did. He didn't tell me she believed less in what her own husband was telling her and more in the assuaging news reports and adulterated government websites designed to lessen panic.
I drifted off to sleep in the heat and woke with Dad putting a wet towel over my head. I fell back asleep, and when I woke again it was much cooler, but the garage had gone dark—except for some emergency exit lights.
When we finally drove up, it was as if we'd been transported to another world. We drove out onto this harsh, alien landscape—a hellish vista I still see in my dreams. Fires were everywhere. Everything was burnt or burning—cars, buildings, bodies. There was no sky—only layers of smoke and ground fog. The smell filled the Durango, and ash cascaded around us like black snow. It was so dark I didn't know if it was day or night.
I remember being scared—so scared I turned away from the window and looked at my dad. He was silent, but tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked at me, saw the fear on my face, and forced a smile. "It's going to be okay, Adam," he said, wiping away his tears. "We're going to be okay."
That's when I had my first seizure. I didn't know what was happening to me, and neither did my dad.
I remember crying out—whether in pain or confusion I don't know. I remember my head hurting, dizziness, and feeling like I was going to vomit. At some point, I blacked out. When I finally woke, I was soaked in urine, still lightheaded, and very scared. It didn't help that Dad looked scared, too.
Having never seen such a reaction before, he naturally assumed the seizure was in some way related to the comet. It wasn't until after many more such seizures and years later, when he began to scour library books and talk with other survivors, that we realized I'd been struck by epilepsy.
Looking back, I always felt sorry for my dad. Not only had the world as he knew it come to an end, but he discovered his son was defective. At least that's how I used to think of myself. Now it's just one more thing I have to be wary of in a world full of hazards.
The way ahead began to narrow. I hit the brakes, put it in park, and turned off the engine. I got out and climbed onto the hood for a better look. I had to shield my eyes from the glaring sun, but the clear air gave me a good range of visibility.
The highway ahead was so clustered with derelicts, I knew I'd never be able to maneuver through. It had happened before, but I'd always been able to go off the road, around the obstacles. This time that wouldn't be possible. I was approaching a stretch of highway cut out of a mountain, with no room to either the left or the right. I'd have to backtrack, take a smaller road I'd passed earlier, and hope to find a way around.
This wasn't anything new. I'd grown up among the vestiges of civilization. Some burnt-out hulk of a building or rusted, corroded machine always stood somewhere nearby. I know my dad found such sights depressing, but to me that's just the way the world was.
As I grew up, I forgot the old world—for the most part. A seven-year-old doesn't know much anyway, but eventually I forgot all about video games, watching TV, and playing baseball. Those things didn't exist anymore. Such recollections faded with time. Yet some memories lingered—like how I used to laugh when Mom and Dad would put on their favorite music and dance.
That was the old world—their world. This was my world, the one I'd spent most of my life in, the one I had to live in. I didn't have a choice. But then I guess no one did.
The first few months after Smith-Kim hit were a struggle to survive. I remember it was a long time before we saw the sun again. There was only dust and ash, tornados and hurricanes, earthquakes and ants. Ants were chief among the many insect species surviving the inferno. They not only survived, they flourished. It was a perfect world for scavengers. That's what we'd become—we humans. We were scavengers, like the ants.
After the food Dad had packed was gone, we'd had to scrounge for everything. Most of it had been destroyed in the fiery aftermath, though we found canned and bottled food here and there. There came a time when we nearly starved, and all we had to eat were mushrooms and various bits of meat Dad always told me was chicken. I realized later it must have been rat meat, or whatever kind of animal he could catch and kill.
Like the ants, the surviving rats flourished. For the first few years it seemed as if they might overrun the planet. But when the pickings grew slim, so did their numbers. It seems rats were somewhat dependent on the leavings of mankind. A certain symbiosis existed between the two species. Of course they didn't disappear entirely. When I was older, I became very good at hunting rats... even better at cooking them.
There were other human survivors as well. Not many—Dad once estimated less than one in ten thousand. Whether they'd been as smart as my dad or just lucky, I never knew till later. Some were friendly—as friendly as one could be in such circumstances—and some weren't. Mostly Dad tried to avoid others at first. He'd packed a gun with our supplies and had to brandish it a couple of times to warn off some particularly nasty people. But the only time he ever fired it was to scare away a pack of hungry dogs that had caught our scent.
In time, we met up with people we liked. Soon we had group of seven, then thirteen, then twenty. Before long we had small community, eventually growing our own food, creating our own little patchwork society. Looking back, those seem like halcyon days now.
For years, we lived together on what had been the grounds of San Diego State University. Thousands of books had survived in its underground library, so we had a wealth of knowledge to work with. My dad had a thing about books, so it was the perfect spot. We used the books as references for farming, first aid, water purification, sanitation—everything we needed to survive. They were also important for our sanity. There was little entertainment other than reading. Eventually, Dad introduced me to such storytellers as Twain and Heinlein, Poe and Howard, King and Brin. He once told me fiction was as important as fact when it came to telling the story of mankind.
I didn't think any of it was very important at first, though he made me learn to read. The older I got, the less significant it seemed, until one day something finally clicked. It was a revelation of sorts. I came to understand all of mankind's accumulated knowledge, thousands of years of science and art, was still there in books, still available to the survivors so they wouldn't have to start all over again. I thought about the cache of gold coins we'd found one day, and how Dad told me they once represented great wealth, but now gold was just another useful metal—if you had the knowledge to use it. He was right. Real wealth was knowledge, and that made books the most valuable things in the world.
I remember walking with Dad one day to the hills overlooking an immense valley. I'd just finished reading The Postman, and we were talking about whether such a scenario might come true someday. It was near sunset, and the clouds in the westward sky were adorned in reds and pinks and yellows. Down the middle of the valley, traveling in both directions as far was the eye could see, was a multi-lane highway. Dad called it a "freeway." North of this vast roadway was a concrete stadium that had survived the fires, though an earthquake had collapsed one section.
He told me how he'd been in that stadium with his own father when the local baseball team had won its first championship. He said the noise of fifty thousand fans was so loud it hurt his ears. I believed him, but it was hard for me to imagine that many people, when my world consisted of fewer than fifty. At least until the plague came.
The detour I was forced to take led me up a coastal road with very few derelicts. It was a much more pleasant drive, seeing the ocean glistening off to my left instead of the scattered ruins of a past civilization. We'd gone to the beach many times when I was younger, but I hadn't seen the ocean since the end of everything. The waves churning onto the sand, the retreating tide, and the chill wind blowing off the water gave it a sense of life compared to where I'd come from.
Only once, late in the day, was I forced to slow and ease my way around an overturned truck. As I drove by, I looked down. The driver had tried to crawl out of the wreck. He didn't make it far. I knew by the state of the corpse that it wasn't the trauma of the accident that had killed him. It was the plague. I was familiar with those symptoms, and I knew he hadn't been dead long.
Once the disease had hit our community, it spread quickly. Within ten days most everyone was dead. My dad lived for twelve.
As soon as people started getting sick, we searched every medical journal and scientific text we could find to determine what it was and whether there was a cure. Those last four days Dad was too sick to help, but I kept at it... for all the good it did.
We were never able to determine whether the disease was something mankind had dealt with before or a genetically engineered biological agent unleashed from some laboratory by the cataclysm. We had no doctors or real scientists in our community and not enough understanding of cellular biology or virology.
Why a few others and I didn't contract the disease we never figured out. There seemed to be no reason why we were immune and so many weren't. We were certainly in constant contact with those who were sick, but some dynamic of biology or whim of fate protected us. I considered that maybe my epilepsy somehow made me resistant, but it was just another useless theory.
In those last few hours of Dad's life, I didn't want to be protected. I didn't want to be left alone. I railed against providence, cursed the universe, and tried to put my fist through a door. In the end, none of it mattered. All I could do was sit by his side and watch him fade away.
I remember him saying, "There's so much I wanted to teach you—tell you." He stretched his arm out, so weak I didn't think he could hold it up, and put his hand on the small stack of books by his bedside. "Don't let it all die, Adam. This is humanity's legacy. Don't let the words die."
He took his last breath less than an hour later.
Anger overwhelmed me. I was angry that those same books he praised were no help in saving his life. I was angry at myself for not being smart enough to save him. I was angry that, for some reason unknown to me, I was still alive and healthy.
When my anger cooled and reasoned returned, I hitched the small trailer I'd found to the Durango and packed them both with all the food and books I could fit inside. I attached my Honda scooter to the carrier on the vehicle's rear, said goodbye to the few others who'd survived the plague, and left, heading north as Dad suggested.
As the day grew long, I stopped to eat and watch the sun setting over the ocean. The colors streaming across the horizon, bouncing off the clouds and sinking into the sea were breathtaking. It was more beautiful than anything I remembered. But then I'd grown up in an ugly world.
At first Dad tried his best to hide the ugliness from me. But there were only so many ways he could turn, so many things he could do to protect me from the sight of seared bodies or the brutality of scavengers... animal, insect, human.
I didn't like to travel at night. Even with headlights it was hard to see all the obstacles in the road. I didn't want to take a chance on damaging the Durango, so I decided to stay there for the night and to see if I could find a way down to the beach.
First I drank a lot of water. I was careful, because dehydration could cause a seizure, along with stress, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and a dozen other things. Some I could control, others I couldn't.
Getting down to the beach wasn't hard, and once on the beach I took off my shoes to feel the sand between my toes. The texture of the fine granules and the smell of the sea air brought back memories of being at the beach with Mom and Dad, and how I used to dig a big hole in the sand, climb in, and wait for the tide to roll in and create my own little pool.
The sand on this stretch was near-white, but it wasn't a pristine beach. Rocky outcroppings protruded here and there—dwindling fortresses of stone battered by centuries of surf.
I rolled up my pants and walked across the damp sand. The water was cold—too cold to think about going in any farther. I strolled through the shallow surf, lost in thought but careful to avoid the sporadic mounds of seaweed. When I looked up, I saw something small move behind one of the rock formations. I was certain it was an animal of some sort, but the glimpse I had was too quick to be sure exactly what it was.
It didn't matter. Drawn by the sight of another living creature, I walked quickly as I dared, not wanting to scare whatever it was. I looked behind the rock. There was nothing there. So I stepped up onto it and looked around. There, down the beach a short way, was a cat.
It was a striking animal with a snow-white face, a golden sheath around one ear, black around the other. Its lower torso was all white, but its back was a patchwork of gold and black running down to the tip of its tail. It seemed so out of place, so unreal, that I considered, for just a moment, that I was imagining it—seeing things.
I began walking towards it, slowly, saying, "Here, kitty, kitty."
It was unimpressed with my cat call and sat there on its haunches for a moment. As I drew closer, it walked away—not like it was scared, but nonchalantly, like it had better things to do.
I quit calling it but kept moving forward. After a moment, it sat back down and waited.
When I was close enough, I squatted and reached out to pet it. I was afraid it would run off again, but it stood its ground and wallowed in my touch. It even began to purr.
"Where did you come from? Are you by yourself out here?"
It accepted my attention for a bit, then sauntered off.
"Wait," I said, getting to my feet. "Where you going?"
It wasn't running, but it was moving steadily down the beach. I followed it quite a way, sure it was leading me somewhere and not just out for a stroll. The farther we walked, the higher the shoreline cliffs rose, and the rockier they got. It wasn't long before I spotted more cats up ahead. When I got closer, I saw a large opening in the cliffs—the mouth of a cave. The cliffs were dotted with smaller such crevices, and I didn't think anything of it until I saw the chair. It was right there, just inside the opening. A large wicker affair with a red cushion. I had only seconds to contemplate the misplaced furniture when a man rounded the section of cliffs jutting seaward. All around him, following him, were cats. A half-dozen at least.
At this point, the feline that had led me here pranced over and began rubbing against my legs as though we were old friends. I bent down to scratch its head. That's when the other fellow saw me.
"Go away!" he shouted, walking towards me and waving his arms. "Shove off! Get! Go away!"
I stood.
"I don't mean any harm. I saw this cat and followed it down the beach."
He looked at the cat, still rubbing against me, and slowed his walk. He stopped waving his arms but continued to draw near. His cats still trailed him, though haphazardly. A couple of small kittens paused to play. Another larger one took a moment to scratch and lick itself.
I saw as he approached he was an old fellow for sure. Both his hair and beard were gray—in sharp contrast to his sun-darkened skin—and he walked with a slight limp. I was no judge of age, but he had to be least 60—probably older. His feet were bare, and he wore one of those rolled-up woolen head covers. His clothes were as tattered as I imagined Robinson Crusoe's must have been. That's the image which came to mind anyway.
"My name's Adam," I said, hoping to break the tension.
He didn't respond at first. He looked me over with a suspicious eye. I didn't particularly like the way he was sizing me up. A part of me wanted to turn around and go back the way I came. Another part was just plain curious, even though I expected him to start screaming at me again. Instead he said rather mildly, "Well, I guess Kimber likes you." He half-gestured at the cat between my legs. "Come on up if you want."
With that he turned and headed for the cave.
Up close he looked even older. The backs of his withered hands were a maze of wrinkles, veins, and bony ridges, crisscrossed by long, thin scars. Judging by his companions, I guessed the scars were cat scratches. But there was something not quite right about his eyes—something askew—as if there were times he was somewhere else, seeing something no one else could see.
He had an eclectic array of old furniture inside the cave, including a small bed that rested under a mottled wooden sign that read "Home is wherever I drop anchor." A large cast-iron pot hung over a fire pit, and something was cooking. It smelled good, but I didn't ask what it was.
"Do you live here?" I inquired, gesturing at the cave.
"Course I do."
"All alone?"
"Do I look alone?"
His sarcasm was justified. With all the cats, he was hardly alone.
Cats were everywhere. The longer we sat, the more that appeared. Black cats, white cats, gray cats, orange and gold cats, tabbies, calicos, Siamese, and combinations thereof.
"I've never seen so many cats. I thought most of them died in the cataclysm."
"Cat-what?"
"You know, when the comet Smith-Kim hit."
He didn't respond, and his blank look made it seem he didn't know what I was talking about. I guessed it was a memory he didn't want dredged up.
The same two playful kittens diverted my attention, taking center stage when one pounced on the other. The resulting ball of fur rolled over and over, their high-spirited battle compounded by tiny snarls and hisses. They separated and faced off, each with a paw poised to strike the other, their tails whipping back and forth like crazed pendulums. One of them growled menacingly then pounced again.
While this was going on, another cat with a thick, fluffy patchwork of gray and gold fur jumped onto the old man's lap. It spoke to him in a half cry, half purr, punctuating and accenting its sounds as though forming the words of some ancient feline language.
"I catch your drift, Banshee. I was thinking the same thing."
The cat settled on his lap and I asked, "Do all your cats have names?"
"Course they do," he snapped. "Cats are people, too."
I ignored the inanity of that. "How many cats do you have?"
"Too many," he said with a short, wheezy laugh. "More than a shark's got teeth."
Paying no heed to the cat on his lap, he stood. The cat landed easily and walked away as though the affront were nothing new. He walked to the side of the cave entrance and lit a lantern.
I hadn't noticed how dark it had become—maybe because a full moon was already shinning down on us.
"How do you remember all their names?"
"Each one's an individual," he said with authority. "Each has got his own mind, his own disposition, his own voice. Hell's bells, they even walk different." He sat back down. "If you give a cat a unique name, it'll be a unique cat—that's just common sense."
"How do you feed them all? How do feed yourself?"
"The sea is bountiful."
"You mean fish?"
"Fish, kelp, crabs, sea spinach, sea beets...whatever it brings me. You go ashore a ways, there's licorice fern, crowberries, cotton grass, mushrooms. There's cures, too. Irish moss is good for fevers, you know... and laver prevents scurvy."
I'd read about edible plants, but most of those he mentioned I was ignorant of.
"Is that why you live here?"
"I like the sea. Used to be a seaman, a navigator, long before you were born. There ain't no crowds out in the deep, no long lines to wait in, no noisy highways and byways and gizmos. Just quiet. I sailed the seas in more than dozen different ships. Freighters, tankers, tuna trawlers... you know what I'm talking about?"
"I've seen pictures in books."
"Psssss, pictures in books," he said with contempt. "You have to see a ship up close, smell the rust of its gunwales, hear the groan of its engine as it turns into the wind, feel its deck roll under your feet. You can't see that in a book. Hell's bells, you could even navigate by the stars if you knew what you was doing—and I did."
I felt chastised by my lack of experience in such matters. My only real experience was post-apocalyptic. The only things I knew about the world before came from books. So, somewhat defensively, I said, "Did you know the light from the stars you navigate from is billions of years old? It takes so long for the light to get here, that some of the stars we see might not even be there anymore. I read that in a book."
"That so," he said, apparently unimpressed by my factoid. But he turned and looked up at the night sky as if contemplating the essence of it. Or maybe he was just remembering another time, another place.
It occurred to me I was likely the first person he'd talked to in years. I wondered how he went on, day after day, this ancient mariner, this cat man. How he faced each day alone. Of course he wasn't alone—not to his way of thinking. But if all he had to talk to were cats....
Then I realized the real question wasn't about him. It was the one I'd been asking myself. Not out loud, but deep in the recesses of my thoughts.
What's the point? Why go on? For what reason? To end up like this wretched fellow?
I didn't have an answer. I didn't know if I ever would... or even if my dad did.
I remember asking him once, when I was older, why he didn't just let us die—how he kept going in those first, dark, desperate years. He told me he didn't believe in giving up—whether you were playing cards, baseball, or board games—you did your best until it was over, no matter how badly you were losing. You competed until the end. He said the human race needed to compete now more than ever. Winning was surviving.
An ebony tomcat with yellow eyes and a torn ear stalked in from the darkness. Adults and kittens alike moved aside, leaving no question as to his dominant status. He sauntered close to Kimber, the she-cat that had taken a liking to me, paused and snarled at her. She responded with a warning of her own, but the male ignored her and casually settled next to the old man.
He chuckled. "That was just a shot across the bow. Reefer here doesn't get along with Kimber—never has. She usually gives him a wide berth. Like some people—oil and water—they never mix."
A mewing sounded from deeper in the cave. He looked back, concerned, and I followed him when he went to investigate. There, on an old blanket, lay an exhausted mother and four newborn kittens. Fatigued as she must have been, she raised up and began cleaning one of the babies.
The old fellow turned to me and said, "Nature keeps marching on, doesn't she?"
That's when I was hit by that feeling of déjà vu. It was a familiar feeling, one almost always accompanied by dizziness and the smell of burnt toast. They were the first signs of an oncoming seizure. I tried to sit, but I was blinded by flashing lights, and my muscles wouldn't respond.
I woke covered with a blanket. I was confused, thirsty, and my head hurt. But I wasn't so confused that I didn't know what had happened. I'd experienced too many seizures not to know. I waited while the nausea and fuzziness went away. When I finally sat up, I saw the old man sitting close by.
"Those were some rough seas you sailing on there," he said. "You all right?"
"Yeah, I'm okay."
"Happen often?"
I shrugged. "Once in a while."
"What's wrong with you?"
"It's epilepsy."
"I've heard of that," he said, "but don't rightly know what it is."
"A seizure's kind of a disruption of the communication between neurons." I could see by his expression he had no idea what I was talking about. "It's kind of an electrical storm in the brain."
He nodded. "Seemed like you were riding out quite a squall. You okay now?"
"Yeah, I'll be fine."
He walked back out into the open and looked up at the moon. I was about to break the silence when he said, "It's almost time."
"Time for what?"
"You can come, if you're feeling up to it," he said, ignoring my question.
"Come where?"
He didn't respond. It was like he was somewhere else again. He started down the beach. Slowly, but eventually en masse, the cats followed him. What I thought was maybe a score of felines became dozens. Some came down from the cliffs, others out of the darkness. It was startling to see them all moving as one, avoiding the murky fingers of the tide.
I followed, not asking any more questions, and when he reached a stretch of beach that met with his approval, he turned and walked straight into the surf. I was afraid he'd be swept out to sea, but he stood there, knee-deep in water, holding his ground against the surge, waiting. Waiting for what I didn't know. But all the cats, and there must have been half a hundred, kept vigil at the tide's edge.
The sound of the waves was gradually infiltrated by a growing number of deep-throated cries—a scattered chorus coming from the waiting felines.
"What's happening?" I finally called out.
The waves crashed, the tide rushed forward, then retreated, and suddenly, magically, the lifeless wet sand was swarming with activity. Hundreds of tiny fish, glistening silver in the moonlight, squirmed and wriggled in the sand. The cats silenced as abruptly as the fish appeared, but a grunting sound emanated from the sea creatures.
It was an astonishing sight, spellbinding, surreal—except it was real. Just as amazing were the cats. Each and every one held its ground, watching, waiting, as many of the fish struggled to burrow into the sand.
The old man returned to shore, walking among the fish.
"What are they doing?"
"Propagating," he responded as he knelt and grabbed hold of one fish. "Life goes on." He tossed the single fish towards his waiting friends. It was a signal. As it dropped the cats raced down into the mud and shallow water and began to feast.
I woke near the mouth of the beach cave with Kimber curled up next to me. I didn't see the old man anywhere, so I started down the beach in the direction of the Durango, followed by my feline friend. Doubt crept into my head. I worried about the car. Not only was it my transportation, but it contained all my supplies and worldly possessions, as meager as they were. I didn't usually sleep so far away from it. I wanted to check on it and get back on the road.
As I walked, I glanced seaward and saw something odd. Far out, almost at the horizon, was a mountain of blue-white ice, floating with the current. I thought of what I'd read about ice, about the expression "tip of the iceberg," and considered how large it must be under the surface. I wondered, too, how enormous it must have been before it began its voyage to this warmer clime—wherever it came from.
Before I reached the lower cliffs where I'd descended the previous day, I came across the old man—with a small contingent of cats. I figured he never went anywhere alone.
"I wanted to thank you for letting me spend the night... and for the soup." He responded with a slight nod. "I'm going to have to be on my way now. My car's up the hill."
"Time and tide," he said, shrugging. "Well, if you gotta weigh anchor, I'll walk with you."
It was more of a climb than a walk, and I was worried the grizzled fellow might not make it. But he did, with more grace than I managed.
Kimber and the other cats followed us up. She hadn't left my side since I'd first happened on her—except for the fish feast. I don't know why, but the thought sparked a memory of my mother, who, when I was little, followed me everywhere when she took me to the park or the playground. She was afraid to lose sight of me even for an instant.
At some point, after the world went to hell, I asked my dad, "Is Mommy dead?"
He'd looked at me with a forlorn expression and said, "I don't know." For a moment, I thought he might cry, but he contained his emotions and added, "I know she'll never be dead as long as we remember her."
I know, from then on, I tried hard to remember my mom. But over the years those memories dissipated like wisps of smoke until all I could picture was her dark, wavy hair. It saddened me I couldn't see her face anymore.
Kimber followed me all the way to the Durango, even though the old man and the rest of his tiny entourage paused at the cliff's edge.
"Go on," I said to her with a shooing gesture, "go on, go back with the others."
"I think she wants to go with you."
I picked her up and scratched her head as I carried her over and set her down with the others. But when I walked away, she followed me again.
"She likes you—no getting around it. She's always been kind of a loner, fighting with Reefer all the time. I think she's decided you should take her."
"I can't do that—she's yours."
"She's not mine. You don't own a cat."
"But how will I... how will I take care of her?"
"Cats pretty much take care of themselves. And they pretty much go where they want."
I didn't know what to do. All I knew was I didn't want the responsibility, not for another life, not when I'd seen so many lives extinguished while I stood by helplessly. Not even a cat's life.
"They say cats have nine lives," he said as if privy to my thoughts. "They're healers, too. She'll take care of you as much as you will her. Help you keep an even keel."
"I don't know..."
"You don't always get the post you want," he admonished me. "You can tread water for a long time, but eventually it's sink or swim. Life's funny that way."
I wasn't sure what he meant, but I gave in. "Okay. I guess she can come with me." I wouldn't have admitted it then, but deep down I was lonely. Part of me liked the idea of a companion—even a feline one.
I unlocked the door, picked up Kimber, and made space for her on the passenger seat. The old fellow turned to leave. "Wait a minute," I said. "There's something I want to give you."
It took me a minute to search through the books stacked on the floorboard, but I found the one I was looking for.
"Here, you take this. I've got as many books as you have cats. Call it a trade."
He walked over—almost cautiously—and took the book from me.
"I'm not sure I need a book," he said. "Haven't read one in a whale's age."
"Books can be good companions—like cats," I said, not knowing if he'd take offense. "I once read that books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." I thought he might appreciate the metaphor.
He looked at the cover and slowly read the title as if rediscovering each word, "The Old Man and the Sea." There was a glint of silver in his smile.
As quickly as it was born, the grin faded, and his countenance grew thoughtful.
"We had saying when we were at sea and things got bad—storms and such. We'd say we're closer to what's ahead than what's behind. You'd do good to remember that."
With that he turned and headed for the cliff's edge, followed by his feline honor guard. He stopped short of the drop-off, looked at me, and raised his hand to his forehead. I couldn't tell if he was saluting or just shading his eyes from the sun.
"You keep her trim and true and you'll be fine."
I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I had an inexplicable feeling he was right.