IF THERE SHALL BE RECOVERY from an omega event that puts the future of humanity at risk, it will proceed along the back loop of the adaptive cycle from omega to alpha to reorganization and rapid growth (Ω to α to r). This is the path of catagenesis, which after breakdown invites the birth “of something new, unexpected, and potentially good … the reinvention of our future.”32 I choose to frame this progression as “the loop of hope,” realizing fully and without apology, the implied human arrogance. I am, after all, possessed of a human heart imbued with a perhaps delusionary belief in humanity’s goodness and potential. Hope is a healthy frame of mind so long as it is not purely wishful thinking. That is why hope is the essence of this final chapter.
The German-American poet, Lisel Mueller, thought about hope this way:
Hope is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves
the argument that refutes death
the genius that invents the future.33
Where will we find such genius? As explained in previous chapters, significant, even calamitous, breakdown is a natural progression in complex adaptive systems. And breakdown often induces novel and positive change. The physical and biological foundations of planet Earth and the way they function “as a single operational unit”,34 despite their present diminishment, lead me to believe that whether we are a piece of the story or not, the seeds of renewal and reorganization do await. If humans prove incapable of surviving the worst misfortune in their history, so be it. I am certain of this: in the next five or so billion years, our earthly home will get along very well without us. Without fail, the adaptive cycle will repeat itself many times over.
On the other hand, we are a tenacious species. If I were a betting woman, I would wager that the odds are high that our own genius may well be a factor in the speed and success of “natural” recovery. As for scale, I would expect that the back loop will launch locally at a landscape scale and will be embodied by humans in small kinship-based communities over a span of many generations. Will the evolution of complex technologically-based societies follow? Who can say? The answer may be wrapped up in whether humanity will have learned the lessons of collapse, will have become humbler in reimagining their place in the evolving ecological order. Thomas Berry sees this as the most difficult transition humanity will ever have to make — the transition from anthropocentric arrogance to biocentric humility. If this doesn’t happen it will be the outcome, he says, of tragic defects in our human hearts.
If Earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.35
On the other hand, an opening of human consciousness toward respectful, grateful, wondrous, and sacred interactions with the natural world could pave the way toward a transition toward a truly sustainable future, and not only for humans.
To understand how this might happen, let’s begin with the assumption that we have failed to make this transition, have failed to understand how serious has been our transgression of multiple thresholds at many scales across the planet. This failure of understanding and imagination has then forced an interlocking and cascading series of regime shifts. Triggered by climate change we will have brought down upon ourselves a broadscale deep collapse. Denuded and impacted landscapes, like those mined by mountaintop removal or obliterated by tar sands development or streams and lakes toxified by heavy metals: their recovery could take ten millennia or longer. The same could be said of desertified landscapes, like those of the American southwest and interior Mexico, the Sahel in Africa, and parts of central Asia. Ocean ecosystems could also be long in recovery from thermal pollution and acidification. But biodiverse regions that were never heavily industrialized, such as parts of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America and even sparsely settled bits of North America could recoup their natural function and diversity in much less time. In three or four human generations, the basis for the survival of small communities ought to be possible. Native components — from microorganisms and soil minerals to forests and their wild inhabitants — will be the building blocks for recovery.
These landscapes of hope set the scene for α, alpha, for pioneers to populate vacant niches and for new species to evolve. As explained in Chapter Three, alpha is a wild and unstable stage where invention, re-assortment of components, and trial and error are the rule. New configurations generate new dynamics that over time either persist or are abandoned. Ultimately, if the progression is viable, previously suppressed forms of life and totally new ones begin to establish new order, develop new regulatory systems, and create a fresh identity that may be something quite wonderful and original. Humans struggling to survive and understand the potentials and limitations of alpha would be advised to stand back and learn. Farming during this dynamic stage will be a challenging enterprise. Hunting, fishing, and wildcrafting would offer alternative pathways. If humans could simply survive a few generations, they might have earned the right to engage the evolutionary processes leading toward longer term renewal.
As the shift from α to r takes place, some of the accumulated resources will inevitably leak from the system. Hopefully, these will not be critical resources for surviving humans. At the same time, new components that have thrived and a few legacy components from past cycles will begin to sequester resources and organize the way forward. Ultimately, r species will gain primacy and set up the structure and function that will persist over the long run. While the dramatically explosive and abundant potential of α will not carry into r, there will be sufficient wealth to evolve toward a new more stable state. If humans make it to this point, the world will offer much promise.
The adaptive cycle in nature, like evolution itself, tells and retells the timeless story of “nature evolving”. Nature evolving is about “abrupt and transforming change”.36 As a narrative, it begs us to understand and embrace the uncertainty of surprises and the necessity for responses more imaginative and enduring than our present crisis management default. In the absence of this understanding, if we continue to base our decisions on the myth of a nature as a predictable equilibrious entity, our febrile attempts to manage natural and human disturbances will grind the adaptive cycle toward a regressive halt. The fate of any particular ecosystem and of our civilization itself now depends more than ever on a well-functioning environment. It requires a nimble society whose institutions are flexible in response to disturbance and a revision of humanity’s very perceptions of how our planet works. “Nature evolving” and “humanity evolving” are bound together in this story. They are not separate. The sooner we comprehend this, the better our chances of being part of the loop of hope. Otherwise, our ignorance will condemn the families and neighborhoods, communities, cities, farmlands and forests to the fate of the fictional Brights Grove, described at this book’s onset.
Rachel Carson wrote with foresight and awareness two generations ago that if we fail to take account of the way nature works, “its living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions,” in other words, the adaptive cycle, we shall never reach an “accommodation” between ourselves and the world we depend upon. She understood that arrogance could be our undoing. “The control of nature,” she wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”37 It is our “alarming misfortune”, she concluded, that so primitive a set of misconceptions has driven our decisions about how to live on this sacred planet and, I would add, has backfired so tragically. May we somehow put aside such misconceptions and draw ourselves back from the Late-K lunacy that has taken us to the edge of the cliff. I beseech this of us even as I realize that a plunge toward omega might in the long run be the inevitable and more instructive outcome.
2
We, the people, decided to conduct a census. Em was reticent about the count, thinking, as people in Senegal did in her childhood, that assigning a number to a particular human amounted to a death curse. Rational arguments did not square with this cultural knowledge.
“How are we to know what we seek if we are unclear about our need?” Nick asked.
“Oui, mais, we are so few. We cannot lose one more person,” she said.
“That’s the point, ma chérie,” he replied, his arm wrapped 'round her.
Our settlement, Gilligan Island (the irony and pertinence of the name lost on all but the three seniors), included five mixed-race couples, two gay/bisexual couples, an elderly Caucasian couple, and two single parents, both white. Adults ranged in age from 20 to 79. Seven young people from 6 to 18 contributed to intergenerational activities as well as perpetual anxiety about the future. Although indecorous, the adults were forced to admit that the rubrics of the census boiled down to this: non-procreators (18), potential procreators (2), nubiles (3), children (4). Faced with these data, we rejected arranged marriages. It was wrong, we decided, to force our young adults to pair up, for they had been raised as siblings. It would constitute consanguinamory . It would lead to friction among the people. It would narrow the gene pool. The stark reality was that without the recruitment of new procreating members, quite apart from external events, demographically Gilligan Island was on its way to oblivion.
Huddled along Gilligan Road on the Shawnee River banks at the western outskirts of what was once Argolis, the settlement consisted of a string of restored houses and cabins and the nearby forests, fields, and pastures. At lane’s end, an astonishingly large building loomed over everything. It was a restored four-story wood-framed mill built in 1821 at river’s edge adjacent to a dam constructed in that era and restored in 1934. Freshly limed and gleaming brilliant in the mid-June sun, Holmes Mill was the people’s most treasured accomplishment and a daily reminder of their deepest sadness. It was their schoolhouse, library, meetinghouse, tavern and storehouse, their grain mill and abattoir, and their source of erratic power for lighting. The latter thanks to a cranky micro-hydroelectric unit, reclaimed and restored by Weston Churchill, which, in any event, had limited capacity and could not generate power through the low water summer months.
Holmes Mill had been the labor of love of Jeremy Holmes, the African American Peace Corps volunteer and former GUO graduate student who, after his undergraduate years at Dartmouth, had spent six years building housing for the poor in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. After Jeremy lost his partner, Maybelle, to the Guangdong flu, he wondered aimlessly on long treks into the forests and along the Shawnee Valley, his eyes ever on the ground, a months-long fugue causing the people to fret. We could not cheer him. A carpenter by inclination and upbringing, Jeremy awoke one morning and strolled desultorily toward the decaying building. He spent that day in solitude. He studied the structure from all angles, wandered through its musty interior, knocked his hammer against columns and beams, imagined how the people might make use of the sturdy classic. He began to envision a new purpose. Restoring the mill became the source of his resurrection, his life’s work. After sketching blueprints on Kraft paper he found in the mill’s office and writing a work plan, he organized parties to pilfer and haul materials from every corner of Argolis, including the GUO campus — roofing, siding, insulation, windows, doors, construction timber, furnishings, bricks, pipes, re-bars. He and Boss Hays and others (including skimpy me now with estimable biceps and forearms) crisscrossed the ghost town dozens of times. Boss’ stout wagon, drawn by his big Percherons, Henrique and Benoit, hauled the loot back home.
Over a span of years, Jeremy continued to inspire us to help him resuscitate the historic mill. In August of the eighth year, just months from completion, while replacing roof tiles, Jeremy lost his footing. He slid down the roof and fell 40 feet to a stone weir below. Hearing his scream, Lara Hedlund, his partner, ran from their home to the edge of the river. In unspeakable horror, she looked upon a scene she could never expunge. Jeremy’s broken body lifeless on the wall. Having lost Adrienne to an untamed beast named Morse, and her second and third partners in blood-smeared finitude, Lara went out of her mind. When she proved incapable of caring for David, their two-year-old son, fourteen-year-old Macy, the mystical child of yore, rushed into the vacuum. She became David’s caregiver, tutor, and dearest friend, even as his rearing became a project of the people. Lara meanwhile dwelled in a woeful world of anguish, rarely reaching ‘hereness’, gaunt and slump-shouldered, mumbling and pacing the lane in frayed and faded calico and moth-eaten sweaters, a person few in her cohort (if any had survived) in suburban Minneapolis (if it still existed) would ever have recognized. She was thirty-seven when she lost Jeremy.
By our own reckoning, Gilligan Island’s survivors had done more than survive omega and two decades of alpha. Above all, out of sheer necessity, we had committed ourselves first to the greater good of our community while tending, as time would allow, to our own needs. Brick by brick, garden by garden, chicken by chicken, project by project, we had built and sustained an isolated community while confronting no small measure of suffering. Beyond the loss of Jeremy, other tragedies encompassed a beloved mother’s death in childbirth; a half-dozen infant deaths; the pandemic and its two dozen fatalities in less than a year; a child drowning; crop raids and losses to corn blight and wheat rust; a thousand-year flood followed by a hundred-year drought; a catastrophic house fire killing Burt Zielinski, a community pillar; and ever-aggravating health and medical challenges, including Lara Hedlund’s chronic depression. On the other hand, at play with such post-collapse agonies were moments of inexpressible love and light: births of healthy children; stories of their rearing and schooling, the kids’ language — a quirky blend of English, French, Spanish and Gilligan patois — their bumps and bruises, their gifts and gaffs; birthdays and seasonal celebrations drawing on Native American, Senegalese, Ecuadorian, Vietnamese, Latvian, and Mexican traditions; games and swimming in the river; dancing, theatre, and music; and always, tales of the Appalachian fields, forests, and waters reviving to their pre-industrial immanence and of the miraculous recovery of the four-leggeds and winged and finned sisters and brothers. Here was living proof of the “remember” part of panarchy which draws upon the accumulated genetic “wisdom” and ecological maturity of eons of evolution, yielding for us, if we don’t fuck up all over again, the profound potential of sustainability.
Life, two-plus decades after the Great Collapse, no longer a tooth and nail battle for survival, still presented exhausting challenges. Though he tried, Stefan, our facilitator, school teacher, and sage, found it difficult to square up developments on the ground with the airy components in Nickleby’s book. Every month or so, he promised himself the analysis. Drained by the responsibilities of personal survival and the people’s needs, his life (and ours) a perpetual training ground for obstacle courses yet to come, the analysis never happened. Where were we on this loop of hope? Might our rebirth be as vibrant and promising as that of our surroundings? Have we built enough diversity, variability, modularity? Are we nimble? Is our social capital sufficient? What of our children? Have we reared them with the toughness and humility required? In his mid-fifties, feeling but not looking his years, the setting sun of an early summer evening bathing the valley in steamy golden haze, he sighed, weary of those questions, craving reassurance. Kate? Rumi? Anyone?
It was not as if we, the adults of Gilligan Island, arrived with even a few of the old-time skills required of these times, stripped as we were of what was once called modernity. Stefan and Nick recalled a tune Nick had brought to class, written in the early part of the century by Canadian Corb Lund: “Can you gut the fish? Can you read the sky? Can you track the deer? Can you dig the well? Can you break the horse? Can you light the fire?”xix
“This pretty much sets out our challenges,” Nick mused.
Where exactly were the yeomen farmers, the animal husbandmen and women, the brickmakers, coopers, tinkers, glassmakers, cartwrights, tanners, and ax makers? Whence the candlemakers, soapmakers, stonemasons, salt workers, woolworkers, weavers, and potters? We all knew the answer: nowhere to be found, at least at the onset, among the random collection of adults who now comprised one professor (also a fair fisherman); an ageing marijuana and chili pepper grower, along with his two Percherons, five Morgans, three oxen, and certain trade skills (though, who needed an electrician or mechanic these days?); his partner, a grieving woman, once a novice monkeywrencher, hardened by time, her children dead; a boundlessly cheerful young caregiver, her heart the size of Canada, her homeland; a doctor with less than three years of medical education, little knowledge of native medicinals, and no anesthesia; a third year student trained in computer-aided engineering; a Mexican immigrant cook with a herd of goats and sheep; a trail bike guide with dozens of bicycles, all without tires; an ornithologist who had lost her way; a computer hacker with no computer; an actor and dancer; several other former students with varying bookish interests, and me, a Jill-of-all-trades with a history of espionage.
We adults had long ceased trying to explain to the children what a household in the earlier part of the century had taken for granted. Rummaging through abandoned houses for useful items, we found it futile to explicate the functions of every derelict, rusty, moldy, or cracked gadget dug out of the dust: flip phones and smart phones (one pulled from the pocket of a skeleton identified as philosopher Freddie Neysmith), baby monitors, motion-activated thingies, recharging stations, espresso machines, food processors, blenders, sandwich makers, air fresheners, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, printers, shredders, modems, routers, DVRs, tablets, gameboys, laptops, MP3s, flat screens, and countless others, let alone their extensions — apps, wifi, social media, emails, texts, streaming video, cloud computing, surveillance, GPS, and on and on. Say, on the hottest, most humid day of summer, while splitting firewood or pulling weeds between rows and rows of beans and sweating like a sumo wrestler, I, Hannah, might nostalgically recall adjusting a thermostat to cool a room or a whole house. Whereupon, someone else would say, “nostalgia of that sort is nothing but amnesia turned on its head” and kids’ eyes would glaze over. They might ask, “What’s a thermostat?” or just say nothing, realizing the old people had lapsed again to their fantasyland, a land they cared little about. Back here, in the land they called home, they’d beg, “Can we go swimming now?”
When it came to taking things for granted in this era, what we believed to be true and what we strived to teach the children was this: the clean water flowing from the community tap (the pump connected to a seesaw assembled by Boss), the next meal on the table (and the next and next), birdsong in spring, bullfrog croaks and cougar roars on star-studded summer nights, the warmth of hearthside in mid-winter and firewood from nearby forests creating that warmth, the gifts of insects and birds who pollinated our crops and flowers, bees who made honey, the heft of workhorses and oxen, the flesh and milk of goats, the wool of sheep, the eggs of chickens and ducks, the fat of Canada geese and river fish, the lives of every person, indeed the very breath that sustained our lives — all these and more, that in other times might have been ignored or taken for granted, were sacred blessings in a world rebuilding itself.
~
A kgotla was called. Kgotla, a tradition brought by Jeremy and Maybelle from Botswana, is a council whose job was to achieve consensus on a matter of importance to the people. All were invited. Each would have an equal and valued say. It was about the census. Its implications now clear, a grave issue challenged us: How shall we recruit young people from other communities, if they exist, to enhance our gene pool and enable generations yet born?
Stefan arrived first. In the freshness of early morning he set up under ‘the kgotla tree’, a grand sugar maple at the edge of the Holmes Mill courtyard. At the other end of the courtyard, Flocker’s Pan, high above on a sandstone pedestal, watched quietly. These proceedings required his counsel, focused as they were on fertility and the future. Pan had been heisted from the sunken garden near Brownlow Library almost twenty years ago. It took six strong people and a pulley system rigged by Boss and pulled by Henrique to provide Pan a new home. Not one citizen of Gilligan Island believed his iconic presence inappropriate.
As the people of our beloved community began to file into the circle, Stefan bowed his head, as if to pray, though he had never prayed nor even aspired to pray. He pressed and rubbed his skull with both hands. I plunked down next to him. He told me he was summoning hope for the kgotla and musing on the irony of having to deal with the obverse of overpopulation. He opened his eyes and swept them around the circle. He nodded and smiled as people spread their blankets, engaging with each other in easy conversation, the hum of community on a summer morning beneath a cirrus-laced silky blue sky, a breeze from the east, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and milkweed, redolent and intoxicating.
Here now on Stefan’s other side, Em, offering us a tender hug; Nick, still a force of nature, a bear hug; their lanky children, Jason, 18, and Adrienne Tafani, 14. On his woman Melissa’s arm, Boss Hays, 79, swaggered across the courtyard to this day oozing copious measures of piss and vinegar. “Got yer bible?” he asked. Stefan waved his copy of Over the Cliff. Astrid and José, the odd couple whose sharp minds we had cherished since classroom days, settled to his left. “Yo Stefan,” José said with a subtle shift of his hips, a balletic move. “Yo,” he called back. Astrid, trim, bright-eyed, grey strands in a single long braid brushing her backside, savoring non-conformity against all odds. She waved and blew him a kiss. Astrid taught the people permaculture. She was the single reason we knew how to grow enough healthy food, year after year. José insured that all of us engaged in drama and dance, though we so far have not performed “Hair”.
Other families followed: Greg Pappas, the student of Greek extraction, and his partner Linh, a Vietnamese American, and their son, Danh, 8; Manuel Diaz, ‘my man’ and our daughter, Samantha Maria, 6. “Hola!” said Stefan. Manuel, 36, came to Gilligan Island seven years after the collapse. He claimed to have been the last soul in Pomerance, having landed there at sixteen an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. In the old days, he served up enchiladas and tacos at El Grande Restaurant on the Big River. Alone and lonely, having seen no traffic on the river for several years, one day Manuel herded his flock of goats and sheep up the Shawnee valley. He believed he was the last human on Earth. I brushed up my Spanish. We fell in love. After one miscarriage, we were granted the gift of Sam, obviously named for my dear sister who died in Fargo in 2018.
Sean Ralston and Todd Avery strolled into the circle with Zach Grayson and Mikaela Santos and their son, Esteban, 12. Todd was village doctor, his clinic in the front room of their home. Sean looked after the water system, assuring ample supplies of clean household water (bearing no unfriendly microbes). He came over to Stefan, squatted down, placed his hands on Stefan’s shoulders and whispered, “Good luck herding these cats.” And finally, Weston Churchill, Abby Weaver and their son, Running Bear, 6, the most recently born surviving child. They were accompanied by David Hedlund-Holmes, 16, with his mom, Lara, just a bit unsteady, grasping his arm. Abby announced that the two missing community members, might not make it. It depended on Portia, a nanny goat working on the birth of twins. We applauded.
I swept my gaze around the circle, noting the lovely blends of these adults and their children, all off-white in some sense. They were the future, if there was one. A tribe of cinnamon people. Their parents, including Manuel and me, sturdy survivors of the pandemic and multiple other hazards, were entering middle age. Yikes, I just celebrated 41! Boss at 79, Melissa, 63, and Stefan, 53, constituted the elder generation. So cherished, this “family”. I celebrated daily these people bonded by circumstances in this the harshest of human times with many scarcities but no shortage of love.
Stefan called the kgotla to order. Boss pulled his flute from its pouch to call the owls and birds and wood spirits in resonating tones across the valley and into the sun-dappled forest on the ridge towering above the river. Melissa followed with an invocation. “Oh, universal spirit, help us seek your wisdom and guidance and with each other speak truth and listen carefully and reverently. And may we come to choices that will serve us and our children in these times of resurrection and for all times to come.” Stefan then spoke words of remembrance for community members no longer with us: people like Burt Zielinski, Sophie Knowles, Marilyn Shesky, Mitchell Redlaw and Beth Samuels, Julianna, Jason, Frank, and others as he read from a tattered memorial journal. Some minutes of silence followed before he passed the talking stick to Abby, sitting to his right.
The kgotla began. About an hour into deliberations, I noticed something startling. Light seemed to have returned to Lara’s eyes. She seemed more erect, more animated. When it was her turn to speak, she found her voice. She formed hesitant but coherent arguments, uttering more words in a few minutes than we had heard from her in years. She sought assurance that she could be a participant in the resolution of their plight. People wondered whether she would be strong enough. She would hear none of our doubts. David, her son, smiling through tears, wrapped his arm around her. “Mom is back,” he proclaimed.
Just before noon, Stefan declared that he believed we had arrived at consensus. He asked Astrid to put into words her sense of the kgotla.
Consulting her scribbled notes, Astrid reported:
“The kgotla on this twenty-first day of the sixth month of the year 2034, the summer solstice, gathered to consider the question of whether and how the people of Gilligan Island might find other human communities and entice some of their young to join our people and become mated with our rising generation. While passing the talking stick around the circle, our people, from our senior-most, Boss, to our youngest, Running Bear, spoke their minds and hearts. Running Bear stated that he wanted more kids to play with.”
“We agree that a party of six, comprising Jason, David, and Macy, and led by Nick, Em, and Hannah shall travel northward in the coach drawn by Henrique and Benoit. Their mission shall be to seek other human settlements. Although it may be a dangerous trek, they will proceed in peace unarmed but for hunting bows. A family on a flatboat on the Big River two years ago told Hannah, Linh, and myself, who were picking blackberries by the river with Samantha and Danh, that there were people on the shores of Lake Erie. That shall be the destination. The people assent to the provisioning of this expedition which shall set forth no later than the fourteenth day of the seventh month.”
3
The streets were empty and still. Stefan circled the weedy uptown district and strolled around the edges of Centennial Quad, now a tangle of undergrowth and downed trees — way too depressing a scene for me. I had not ventured into the Argolis ruins for at least a decade. Denis Pádraig Gilligan, ghost-white in pigeon shit, stood tall nonetheless. Stiggins, its roof trusses exposed, windows gaping, was open to the outdoors. Its twin, Gilligan Hall, looked like a great green dragon enveloped by kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle. The university had achieved its goal of carbon neutrality by the mid-2030s. Some solace there, Stefan mused. Brownlow Library loomed staunchly in the background, a bastion of a civilization now lost. I remembered our incursions, through broken windows, to pilfer books. How ironic. Yet how rich the rewards: a patina of enlightenment to our rough-hewn days. After dinner readings of Dickens under the stars. Our chance to dream as we sophomores once had dreamed.
He descended Harrison Hill and veered away from campus into the near east neighborhoods. He peered at collapsing front porches and into darkened houses and apartments, vines and vermin invading, shells of home and hearth. He stepped over tangled brambles crawling across sidewalks and streets, into abandoned vehicles, a rusted baby carriage, a Cub Cadet: a maple sapling up through it. He felt a need to be alone. But this was a larger dose of abandonment than he could swallow: a ghostly place bereft of human life. He found himself on Spruce Street and came upon her place. He had not been here in two decades. Could he bear it? Doors hung open on rusty hinges, tilted at opposite angles, creaking in the searing summer breeze. He climbed the stairs, strewn with leaves, the droppings of small mammals, accumulations of black dust. He wandered through the rooms, resonant with her memory. Her shadow hovered across a moonlit wall. He could imagine being with her, here.
He stood in silence facing the kitchen. He heard Todd urgently calling for more boiling water. He heard her screams, moments of silence, the wail of a baby. He rushed into the room. Todd, blood to his elbows, cradled a squealing red being. Take her, he begged. She’s bleeding out, he stuttered. Breathing shallow. Stefan, the child.
Cracked faux leather furniture, covered in dust, the heat of the subtropical eve, the ghastly memories, seized his throat. He could barely breathe. Frayed curtains blew inward. Indecipherable knick-knacks and books, candles, framed photos with broken glass, stacks of mouse-riddled papers and files mute on shelves. Broken windows invited all manner of life. Indiana bats hung from the ceiling. Something skittered across the floor. A pair of swifts flew from their nest on a bookshelf. The scent of love once hovered. Now, the air, dank of dust and molds, mildews and rat feces.
Standing there, an intruder from another age, he tried to reduce his life to its essentials, to force from it the pain and bleakness. Omega. It was like repeatedly passing his thoughts through a distiller, evaporating and condensing components from the past, their disorder and loss, leaving numbness and oblivion, heart-rending dread. He worried of days ahead, the inevitable unwinding of minutes and hours, the expedition north, the disquieting needs of the people. Water seeping through ceilings and wallboard, the press of decades, the decrepitude of civilization’s failed experiment. In the solitude of this unholy scene, he found a tortured peace.
He descended into the sultry night. Across the hills and hollows and through the empty streets, he heard barred owls calling. He watched July clouds scudding past a waning moon. An hour later, he plodded past Manuel’s and my place toward his cabin tucked away at the end of a side street. He came over the rise. In the moonlight, he beheld a gauzy figure swaying gracefully across the porch, a tall being in bare feet, dancing sensuously. Her tawny hair swished freely across her bare shoulders, her wide cinnamon eyes alight, her sculpted face aglow, palpable across and through the deep shadows.
She called his name.
“Dad?”
“I’m home, Kate.”