“Can we eat this?” I asked Chuck.
I was inspecting a mushroom growing underneath a rotted log at the side of the river. I sniffed it and then poked its base, uncovering a mass of wriggling grubs in the earth.
“Not sure,” he replied.
For some reason I remembered reading that the body had two brains. One in your head, the one we called the brain, and the other circling your gut, what they called the ENS, the enteric nervous system, our most ancient brain. In the same way that I’d become aware of the sky and the weather and the cycles of the moon, somehow I felt like I’d started listening to this ancient part of me, and right now it was sending a message up into my conscious mind: Don’t eat those mushrooms. The grubs, on the other hand …
With a spoon I’d been carrying in my pocket, I began digging the insects out to store in a plastic bag.
We were down at the river, checking on the fishing lines and traps. Other animals came down from the hills to the water from time to time, so this was the best place to hunt and trap. The rifle was slung over my shoulder, just in case we saw a deer or pig, and, of course, for protection in case we encountered anyone unfriendly.
All of the other cabins in our area were empty now, even the one that I’d visited during my night prowls. We were alone, apart from the glow on the horizon that we watched each night, waiting for signs of activity or change as we attempted to eke out a marginal existence.
“What were the garbage bags on the deck for?” I asked. I’d noticed them this morning when we left. We were composting anything organic, and we didn’t have any waste to speak of.
“That’s one of your wife’s projects. Tie clothes and sheets up inside garbage bags for two weeks and you kill all the lice, even the eggs. They all hatch and die.”
I nodded as I surveyed the forest for anything that looked edible. There were lots of possibilities: berries, nuts, leaves, shoots. I’d always thought it was the human brain that had enabled us to conquer the planet, but really it was our stomachs, our ability to eat almost anything. The problem was that eating certain things could kill us. Or make us sick, but that was pretty much the same thing, given our circumstances.
“I might not mind being Chinese,” I said.
I’d been thinking about it more and more. What difference would it really make? China had become more Western, with its money and wealth of material goods, and the United States had become more like the Chinese, spying on our citizens. Maybe we’d reached a middle point; maybe it wouldn’t matter anymore who was in charge.
“Chinese-American, or American-Chinese, huh?” laughed Chuck. “That’s what you’re thinking?”
“We can’t survive out here much longer,” I replied.
The creek near the cabin had dried up as the last of the snow had melted, reducing it to a muddy path through the forest. To get fresh water we now had to walk to the river, over a thousand vertical feet down and several miles. Chuck had found some iodine to sanitize the water, but we’d run out, and now we had to boil it. It was difficult to boil as much as we needed on a daily basis, so we’d started drinking untreated water and suffered bouts of diarrhea. We were weakening and slowly starving to death.
After finding nothing in our fishing lines and traps, we filled up water bottles and then sat by the river near the short stretch of rapids. We had to rest a little before starting the long hike back up the mountain, empty-handed.
“How are you feeling?” asked Chuck after a long silence. The soft sound of the rapids was soothing.
“Good,” I lied. I felt ill, but at least my head was back in the world.
“You hungry?”
“Not really,” I lied again.
“Do you remember that day, just before this all started, when I showed up at your place with lunch?”
My mind rewound. Thinking about New York felt like remembering a movie about some fictional place I’d once imagined spending time in. The real world was here, this world of pain and hunger, of fear and doubt.
“When I was asleep on the couch with Luke?”
“Yeah.”
“When you brought french fries with foie gras?”
“Exactly.”
We sat silently, remembering the glistening chunks of pâté, reliving the taste.
“Oh, that’s good,” groaned Chuck, imagining the same thing as me, and we both laughed.
Clenching my jaw, I felt pain shoot through my mouth. I rubbed at my face; my teeth were loose in their sockets, and my finger came away bloody.
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I think I have scurvy.”
Chuck laughed. “Me too. I didn’t want to say anything. When spring comes, we should be able to find some fruit.”
“Always the man with a plan, huh?”
“Yeah.”
We sat silently again.
“And I think I have worms,” said Chuck with a sigh.
Again we sat in silence.
“I’m sorry you stayed for us, Chuck. You could have been here faster. All that preparation, I messed it all up for you.”
“Don’t say that. You’re our family. We’re together.”
“You could have gotten away, farther west. I’m sure there’s still an America out there.”
A groan of pain interrupted me, and I looked at Chuck. He was holding his arm.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
He winced as he pulled his arm out of the sling. He’d been keeping it covered. I could see that his hand was swollen, and the tissue was black.
“It’s infected. I think something from the buckshot got into my skin, infected my hand.”
His hand had never healed from the injury back in the stairwell of our New York building. It was three times bigger than it should have been, with dark streaks tracking ominously up his arm beneath translucent skin.
“This started a few days ago, and it’s getting real bad.”
“Maybe we can find a honeybee hive in the woods.”
I’d read in the survival app that honey was a strong antibiotic. Chuck didn’t reply, and we sat in silence again, this time for longer. An eagle circled the treetops in the distance. White clouds studded the blue sky.
“You’re going to need to amputate my hand, maybe my whole arm below the elbow.”
I watched the eagle. “I can’t do that, Chuck. My God, I have no idea—”
He grabbed me. “You have to, Mike. The infection is spreading. If it gets to my heart, it’ll kill me.” His cheeks were streaked with tears.
“How?”
“The hacksaw in the cellar. It’ll get through the bone—”
“That rusty thing? It’ll make the infection worse. It would kill you.”
“I’m going to die anyway,” he cried, laughing, turning his head away from me.
The eagle circled and circled in the distance.
“Take care of Ellarose for me, and Susie. Try to take care of them. You promise?”
“You’re not going to die, Chuck.”
“Promise me you’ll take care of them.”
The eagle was blurry now through my tears.
“I promise.”
Taking a deep breath, he put his arm back in its sling. “Enough of that,” he said, getting up. The river gurgled and splashed. “Let’s get back.”
Wiping my eyes, I got up, and we headed back up the trail. The sun was going down.