Ji-Won Park was alone the night of August 26 in her apartment in Raymond, New Hampshire. She had the television on while she worked on a project. On the East Coast, it was after ten, but Ji-Won often worked very late. She was an artist—an unsuccessful artist who made dioramas and collages that no one saw. She had a day job in a hardware store, and when she got home, she made art.
At 10:14, she was busy gluing while MSNBC showed breaking news about a political scandal, a senator caught insider trading. On the left of the screen were two video-link boxes with talking heads; on the right, a still photograph of the senator leaving the Capitol Building. His mouth was agape in what appeared to be a snarling denial. One talking head demanded repercussions. The other wondered who could cast the first stone. Ji-Won wasn’t listening closely. The scandal was so run-of-the-mill, it was difficult even to notice: one speck of dirt in a dirt terrain. The senator and the talking heads were all male, another thing then very difficult to notice.
A talking head fell silent in the middle of a sentence.
Ji-Won was concentrating on the thing she was gluing, a googly eye that was part of a googly-eye-covered frame she’d been constructing for a mirror. She’d been happily away in her thoughts and not inclined to notice external things. But the TV remained completely silent. When she looked back, only twenty seconds had passed and already it felt jarring. The still photograph of the politician was there, but in the talking-head boxes there was only blue background. For the first time she consciously noticed that, though the shades of blue were alike, one was wallpaper and one was evening sky.
She glued one more eye and nothing had changed. She looked again at the TV and stood up, her palms already sweating as they easily did. When another minute had passed, she got the remote and flipped through channels. All seemed normal until she came to one that showed an empty football field. Even the stands were mostly empty, and the scene was unnervingly silent. As with the news channel, what was strangest was that nothing happened. No announcer explained what viewers were seeing. The camera angle didn’t change. No music. A few people stumbled around in the stands, apparently heading for the exits.
Ji-Won realized the broadcasts affected were live. Whatever this was, it had so far affected only live TV. Something terrible was happening right now.
The person she thought of was her best friend, Henry Chin. Normally she would have texted, but the television’s silence frightened her. She called him on the phone. As it rang the first time, she felt better because she was about to talk to Henry. By the second ring, she was nervous again. By the third, she knew there was something wrong. It went to voicemail. She called back and it went to voicemail again.
Henry always picked up the phone for her. He would pick up during a fight with a boyfriend. He would pick up during sex. He had even left a theater in the middle of a play to pick up for Ji-Won. One time he didn’t pick up because he’d left his phone downstairs, and when she finally got through to him, crying, he didn’t find her reaction strange. He apologized fervently. He cried too. They’d only been living apart for a month then and both of them were fragile.
So she called and called and was sick with fear. The last call dropped out in the middle of a ring. When she called again, the phone wouldn’t connect, even though she had three bars.
What she remembered later about that moment was knowing Henry was gone. He wasn’t at the other end of the phone. He wasn’t anywhere. She didn’t yet believe it, but she knew. She stood clutching the phone to her chest, afraid to leave the room and all the little safe things that happened here. The football stadium was now entirely empty.
Her memories began again fifteen minutes later, when she was driving to Henry’s house and hit a traffic jam in Epping, New Hampshire, a one-horse town that never had traffic, that couldn’t demographically have traffic. Still, as Ji-Won braked, more cars arrived. She was instantly boxed in. The traffic wasn’t moving at all, and already all the cars were honking. A pickup veered into the breakdown lane but traveled only a few car lengths before hitting an obstacle, an SUV that had crashed into a tree. The SUV’s front doors were open, its lights still on. A woman leaped out of the pickup’s driver’s side and ran forward between the lines of traffic, her face bright pink and shiny with tears.
Then Ji-Won wanted to get out too. She wanted to go to other cars and pound on the windows and demand to know what was going on. She got her phone from her bag and called Henry again, but again the call wouldn’t connect. She thought of checking the internet but didn’t. The traffic might move. She had to get to Henry. When she looked up, two other women had gotten out of their cars and were standing in the road excitedly talking, patchily lit by headlights. If Henry were here, he would go talk to them and come back to tell Ji-Won what they said. She tried to imagine getting out herself, but it only made the panic worse. She turned on the car’s heating, a thing she often did, even in the summer, because the hot air on her feet calmed her. Only then did she think of the radio.
When she turned it on, there was nothing but static. She went through the stations, and the static dipped into silence, then climbed hills of static and dropped into silence; again and again, a dozen moments where the world’s heart stopped. She caught at last on a woman’s voice saying, “… not yet clear if it’s global in scale, but we have reports of mass disappearances in Europe and China. In America tonight, every region is affected, with government functions at a standstill and fires raging out of control …” Ji-Won listened, breathing shallowly, gripping the wheel. Years seemed to pass while she worked to understand. The woman talked about nuclear power stations left critically understaffed and gave a number for experienced workers to call if they could come forward. She said the Speaker of the House was expected to address the nation in the next ten minutes, with the president and vice president still missing. The woman’s voice sounded anxious but brave, and Ji-Won was reminded of how a female voice on the radio often sounded vulnerable to her, like a brave child reciting in the dark. Around her, more women were leaving their cars. They were hugging in the bleary haze of headlights. A little girl among them turned and looked directly at Ji-Won.
The woman on the radio was losing control now, her voice deformed by tears. Ji-Won was crying as the woman was crying as the women in the headlights were all crying, and she realized they were all part of something, something strange and malign and enormous like a war. They were all brave children together. They were children who would never be happy again.
Alma McCormick spent the day of August 26 at the mansion where her brother, Billy, worked. He was a personal assistant for two doctors who’d bickered for years about getting married and now had really wed and were on honeymoon in Tuscany. The mansion was a plantation-style house in a rich neighborhood in Los Angeles. It had rosemary hedges and a massive jacaranda and a pool with a Spanish-style cabana and a statue of Poseidon where a diving board normally went. Billy was left to keep an eye on the gardeners and take care of the greyhound, Fred.
Letting Alma come over was bending the rules, but Alma was depressed, because Evangelyne, because bitches broke your heart and just fucked off, and of course the bitch in question was an academic star and Alma worked the counter at a burger joint, so Alma should have known, but no, she’d fallen in love. But she’d promised she wouldn’t drink tonight and she kept all her promises to Billy. It was also her fortieth birthday, though they weren’t allowed to mention that. Instead Alma talked about their mother and her sudden fascination with her Mexican roots, when all the time they were growing up they had to be Americans, no hyphens allowed. And did Billy remember that girl in their school who was also half Mexican but had blond hair, and gross dudes told her, “You’re too pretty to be Mexican,” and she’d whine to Alma about it? But what Alma got was a girl sitting next to her in math class writing a note to a friend saying, “I’m sitting next to La cucaracha. Ewwwww.” Bitch was writing in purple Sharpie, but she switched pens and wrote “La cucaracha” in black. Just the kind of thing Mami taught them to deal with by saying, “I’m American! Melting pot!” Not that Mami had even been in touch with Alma. Like, Alma knew she hadn’t been the greatest daughter, but what ever happened to fucking forgiveness? No wonder Alma was still waiting tables at forty with a bachelor’s degree. No wonder they were both so depressed.
Billy said, “I’m not depressed. I’m just fat.”
“That’s the most depressed thing I ever heard, dude.”
Billy laughed gently (he was always so gentle) and said it wasn’t easy for their mother either. People did the best they could, and she would come to forgiveness in her own time.
But Alma raged and became unhinged and insisted you didn’t just drop your kids, even when those kids were broke-ass drunks, and she stalked along the edge of the pool, inveighing against the shittiness of fair-weather parents who could burn in hell. On and on, while Billy laughed and splashed water on her and booed when the insults got too ugly. The sun was setting, and part of the horizon was dramatic orange with liquid sun, the spidery high silhouettes of palm trees black against it. There she went, and she saw herself in her mind’s eye, a buzz cut avenging angel, handsome, all black tattoos on her noble, thick arms, with the greyhound, Fred, dancing after her, activated by her wild voice. At last she yelled, “And Evangelyne!” At that moment, the dog peeled off, sprinting up to the main house and triggering the motion-detection lights so the mansion flashed white. A little lean coyote was silhouetted against its wall.
The coyote briefly ran toward Fred, then thought better of it and wheeled and vanished. Fred barked ecstatically in all directions, doing a victory lap of the lawn, so fast his racehorse legs were a blur, then veered back and belly flopped into the pool, splashing Billy so thoroughly he had to get changed.
It was a good, good night. It could have made up for everything. Alma hadn’t had a drink. It was cool.
And Billy came back out from getting changed, padding through the soft grass (these luxuries they shared with the rich because Billy rode on charm and she got in on Billy’s good love); Alma high on it all as her brother came toward her and she opened her arms to hug him deeply, to say it was a good, good night—
when it changed. She couldn’t focus. The great night shrank, and all the rich, wide lawn became nothing, uninteresting. Something else pulled her mind. Captivating thing, thing that wanted her to notice it. Billy seemed very unimportant. Far away.
She fought. She needed her brother. She fought for Billy with all her mind. Tears came to her eyes. It was a nightmare where you couldn’t move, couldn’t wake. Fred raced around the lawn again, yipping and frantic, and the movement of the dog was hypnotic. She fought it. She fought it and the orange in the sky had gone. Time gone. Billy wasn’t there at all. She was alone.
She knew. She started running and fell and got up. She ran calling him, the greyhound close at her heels, both afraid. She hunted the front and back lawns, screaming. She went inside and went through the mansion, all the forbidden rooms as well as the open rooms: the pink marble bathroom, where she tore the shower curtain open; the music room with the grand piano; the bedroom with the massive bed awash in pillows that she threw all around, while Fred barked and whined—Billy was gone. He wasn’t anywhere at all. She was alone.
Then she called Evangelyne. Then she found the liquor cabinet. She rampaged through the house again with a bottle of bourbon in her hand. She knew. The third time up the stairs, she went on hands and knees and stopped in the middle and sat there drinking, snot running down her face from the tears.
Then she had a last hope and ran out the front door. She sprinted out into the night, tore the front gate open, and ran down the street in bare feet, yelling, and as she ran past the other assorted mansions, she heard other voices calling through the night, screaming, sobbing, as if they too knew Billy was lost.
For Ruth Goldstein, it began in the afternoon, when her eldest son, Peter, came home unannounced. He was then thirty-four and had had another breakdown, an acute depression with flashes of euphoria, which ended in his catching a flight to New York and knocking on Ruth’s apartment door to say he was escaping from his sister, Candy, because he didn’t feel safe around her anymore. Candy had only let him stay to have someone to manipulate, to punish whenever she felt cruel. He’d often suspected this, but now he was sure, though he couldn’t be absolutely sure because he was so fucking borderline. And if he was wrong, that would be so shitty. He was always hurting everyone who tried to help him. He knew coming here would upset Ruth; it would upset his half brother, Ethan. It would really piss off his stepdad. And what if this was all more fucking insanity? (By this point he was crying.)
Ruth said, “You don’t have any luggage with you, sweetie.”
He laughed nasally and said, “I didn’t take anything because I didn’t want Candy to know I was leaving? But then I called her from the airport to say why I went. I’m sorry. I’m so crazy!”
And Ruth said, because this was the point of it all, “Do you need to stay here a few days?”
Then (as always happened when she let Peter stay) his misery magically vanished. Ethan came out and was overjoyed to see him. Peter laughed and hugged Ethan and did a dance of happiness. Just like that, the place was filled with a pajama party atmosphere, a home-for-Christmas atmosphere. Peter was returned to childhood. Eleven-year-old Ethan was returned to an earlier stage of childhood. Ruth became the mother of children she’d once been, a slovenly and satisfied giantess, indulgently admiring their antics. Peter and Ethan sparred with Nerf swords, then made a Bundt cake together while Ruth chopped vegetables for dinner. Peter cleaned the kitchen and began to fussily tidy the cabinets, which Ruth always left in uncoordinated clutter—she didn’t see the point of making neat rows of cans when she knew where everything was. Now Peter carped about her “degeneracy” happily and got up on a chair to dust, while Ethan gazed up at him with the openmouthed marvel of a little dog in love with a big dog. And it was the spellbound peace of the apartment, the old CD of The Nutcracker Suite that Peter always put on, her boys padding around in their bare feet. A bliss, a reprieve—what Peter came home for, and what she couldn’t stop giving him, even if she worried that it wasn’t good for Ethan.
Then, while the cake baked, she and Ethan made dinner. Peter showered and came out wearing Ruth’s floral bathrobe. Ethan said, “You look ravishing,” and they all laughed.
Peter said, “How much would Tom hate it if he saw me in this?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ruth said. “He’s not such a caveman.”
That got her twenty minutes of caveman jokes, with Ethan making “oog-oog” noises and Peter teasing her about the allure of Homo erectus men. Peter set the table for dinner, talking about how he was going to get a horticulture certificate, because he now loved gardening. He believed that plants were love. Ruth listened and made approving noises, though she couldn’t help thinking this would end like all the other things: the Jungian therapy abandoned after three sessions; the training to be an aromatherapist; the sign language classes; the three girlfriends and two boyfriends; the $10,000-a-week rehab for alcoholism he didn’t have; the rescue dog he’d adopted, then brought back to the shelter the same day, after which he went home and took ten Xanax and slashed his wrists and called 911.
Then Ruth’s husband, Tom, came home. Peter ran to the bathroom to change before Tom saw, but Ethan said to his father immediately, giggling, “Peter’s wearing Mom’s clothes.” Tom looked at Ruth and said, “Peter’s here?”
Later, Ruth thought they should have disappeared then, when it could have all ended on an okay note. But it happened at the synagogue later that night, after three hours of fights and tantrums, of Tom saying he would throw Peter out if she didn’t, of Peter saying, “Why not just kill me, Tom? You’re too much of a coward, that’s the only reason,” of Tom telling Ruth, “Tell your son to have some dignity,” of Peter telling Tom, “Your problem is you can’t stand your stepson being a fag,” of Tom saying, “You’re not even gay. You’re a fake. You’re a fake and a goddamn parasite,” of Peter saying, “I knew you were just this bigoted. And in case you didn’t know, you’re racist too.”
And Ruth screaming, “Stop it!” and sobbing, pushing in between them physically, calling them assholes. Ruth shutting all the windows so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. Ruth shrieking, Ruth swearing, Ruth out of control. It was what came with Peter, or what he brought out in them. Ruth’s fault for letting him in.
Ethan hid. He vanished into his room. That was the worst of it. She couldn’t even think about Ethan. She would die. At one point she was coming back from the bathroom, and Ethan cracked his door open, whispering, “Mom?” but shamefully she waved him away. Choosing Peter. She was always choosing Peter. Her fault.
At long last Tom went out, not saying where he was going. By then she was late for synagogue. She’d signed up to make sandwiches for the soup kitchen. They were always shorthanded, so she couldn’t not go. But Peter couldn’t be alone, and there was Ethan. So they all three went, and in the taxi they were hit by euphoria again, that feeling of playing hooky from trauma. Peter mimicked Tom and they all giggled, though Ruth knew she should put a stop to it—but the sun was setting over the Hudson and the windows were open to the summer air and she was weak. She was human. She could not be all things.
Then of course all the synagogue people loved Peter. Ethan basked in his reflected glory as Peter held forth about his life in California, talking about his job as a gardener and how people always spoke to him in Spanish, and once when he explained to a man that he was not Latino but Sephardic Jewish, the man said, “Oh, so this is your house?” Peter’s voice was manic, too loud. Ruth suffered, though the other people didn’t seem to notice. Meanwhile, it was already after nine thirty. Ethan would be out too late. At last the man who was donating the cheese arrived, and they all went into a back room furnished with folding tables and plastic chairs, with sagging posters on the walls: MIDRASH AND MOVIES. THINKING OUT OF SHABBOX WITH RABBI GOLD.
At the long tables making sandwiches, Peter calmed down. He said, “This is what I should be doing with my life. I’m so selfish.”
Ruth said, “This is your life. This is what you’re doing.”
“Okay,” he said, “but—”
Then Ruth lost interest. Didn’t hear what was next. It was as if she were freed to coast in the soft light of her thoughts. It peaked, and she was more than alive. She was touched by the glowing-hot fingertip of God, ignited—a frank bliss she’d never felt in synagogue. She’d never really believed in God. She’d been a fraud and she needed to think about that right now. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, time had passed. The feeling was gone. She was in the ugly light of any church hall. The room seemed colder. It was now half empty, with a messy scattering of vacated chairs.
The women in the room looked at one another, all wearing bright, besotted smiles that rapidly faded into puzzlement. Ruth knew right away that all of them were female. There was—had always been—a characteristic feeling to a female room. It took more time for her to grasp specifically that her sons were gone.
Blanca Suarez was fourteen years old and having emergency cardiac surgery when the surgeon and the anesthesiologist went. All over the hospital, doctors went. There was panic throughout the surgical unit, women coming out of operating theaters yelling names of missing doctors and demanding help with their ongoing surgeries from others needing help with their ongoing surgeries. In the end, a resident completed Blanca’s, with a nurse anesthetist she had to share. It took longer than planned. Blanca woke in the middle to find the resident sweating, hunched at the long stalks of laparoscopes protruding from Blanca’s punctured chest. The resident and Blanca were alone in a blinding white place, at a great height of horror and impossibility, Blanca’s body looking like a macabre bagpipe. There was no pain, only weight and a mouselike tugging so far inside, Blanca couldn’t be sure it was her. Then the resident noticed the change in her breathing and yelled for the nurse anesthetist, who came in already weeping, said, “Oh, my poor lamb,” and made it go away.
When Blanca woke again, the noises were wrong. Normally she liked waking up in recovery. She was a veteran of surgeries: born very premature, with complications, she was always in a hospital, engulfed by a machine, getting bloods taken, holding still, opened up. Waking in recovery meant she hadn’t died, and her father would be there. He would have taken the day off and brought her candy and books. There was the beeping of machines that sounded underwater somehow, the pain that meant she was brave and exceptional. It was a place where you didn’t have to sleep in the dark.
But Blanca woke alone, and the noise was all wrong. It was sobbing and ranting. ER noise. A nurse came and topped up Blanca’s morphine before she had time to figure it out. She lay there drifting in the morphine’s wake, very sleepily and slowly absorbing the news from the terrified babble around her. Two kids in other beds were telling each other what had happened, fighting anxiously about the details. When she understood what it meant to her, Blanca started to cry, but in a morphine way, a fairyland way that was almost pleasure.
Her father had been her only person in the world.
She lived in the Texas Children’s Hospital for a month, recovering and waiting for her aunt María José to come from Las Cruces. There were various adventures in that time: the day the power first went out, the day the hospital was invaded by drug addicts, the water contamination crisis, a mother who tried to stab the doctor she blamed for the loss of her son. In the second week, there were fires in the city, and Blanca was able by then to go to the window to see the distant plumes of smoke, looking firm in the air like cats’ tails. Some mothers came to the children’s hospital twice a day to eat, because the grocery stores were out of food, while the hospital was getting donations from a network of well-wishers all over the state. It had emergency generators and volunteer guards; it would stand when the rest of society fell. The volunteer guards wore red scarves or bandannas to identify themselves and carried a motley assortment of weapons: hunting rifles, handguns, baseball bats.
In the third week, Blanca and a band of other unclaimed girls went feral in the corridors. They slept on the carpet in a waiting room, making tents of stolen sheets and whispering for hours, elaborating a folk belief in which they alone knew where their fathers had gone. They saw it in their dreams: a prison city on a snowbound island, guarded by winged demons. The girls were planning to kill the demons through white magic and get their fathers back. Some of them were probably only pretending, but Blanca really did have dreams where misshapen birds and animals patrolled a dead landscape, smiling human smiles. On the horizon, she saw a mass migration in which she knew her father marched. If she could only figure out what was happening, he could still be saved.
One night, long past any possible bedtime, the girls crept into the hospital chapel to speak to God and ask for His help. The oldest girl, Akeisha, got them to kneel down, holding hands, and picture their fathers. The chapel was nothing but a carpeted room with three rows of wooden chairs facing a cross. Fluorescent light from the hall came murkily through two stained-glass windows. Blanca wasn’t used to staying up late; to her, it felt like an uncharted hour that possibly no one had seen before, a time when anything at all could happen. Ghosts could be real, or God could appear. The night could last forever. It didn’t matter that she could hear the elevator dinging and footsteps passing outside. Those were adults. They no longer counted. They hadn’t known how to stop this from happening. Blanca prayed though her chest was aching. The pain was powerful. She was almost there.
But the next day, one of the guards brought in a box of donated toys and electronics, and the other girls started playing video games. When Blanca tried to talk about the demons again, Akeisha called her stupid.
The last week, Blanca went to the chapel alone. By the time her aunt came to pick her up, she was praying to her father.