On the tenth day I came down the mountain, stiff-haired, red-eyed, madwoman-looking, and drove into the world on a two-lane highway that seemed to flow into blackness, the thick trees burying and burying the road. I’d spent those ten days searching the forest, praying, screaming their names. By then I knew what had happened, of course, but the emergency made no sense, so I thought it might capitulate to prayer and sacrifice. If miracles were happening, there must be gods. So I lay in the dirt and chanted at the sky. I didn’t wash myself or change my clothes. For the last three days, I had no food. My body was covered in mosquito bites, some of which I’d scratched down to the blood.
The nearest town was a little tourist place that was just one street of stores. Both ends of the street led to mountains that rose in layers of dark green forest and bleached brown rock, until the farthest peaks were misty blue, as if heaven were visible from this town and its citizens could just walk out their front doors and hike into the afterlife. There was no one out and nothing was open. No cars. I drove through the streets alone.
I stopped first at a supermarket, an Albertsons whose glass door had been broken in very thoroughly and carefully, all traces of glass cleared from the frame. I stepped through the missing door with the feeling of stepping into a mirror. Inside, it was cool and dim. There was no food whatsoever on the shelves, and it had the grandiose emptiness of a cathedral in a nation where faith has waned. Nonfood items remained in patches: colanders, party balloons, hundred-packs of plastic spoons. A few wilted, liquefying shreds of greenery clung to the produce bins. In one aisle, a jar of pickled beets had smashed, and shards of glass and little round beets lay scattered on the tiles in a bright magenta stain. Automatically I looked around for Benjamin, to stop him from stepping in the glass. When he wasn’t there, I felt the ordinary panic of having lost sight of my son in a grocery store. Part of my dazed mind jumped to guessing where in the store he might have strayed. When I remembered, the pain was incandescent.
I did lose Benjamin once in a supermarket when he was four years old. While hunting for him, I had calmed myself by imagining he’d been kidnapped by a kindly spinster who would adore him and care for him better than I could. When I told Leo about it later, he thought it was hilarious. He named the woman “Miss Brasenose.” After that, he sometimes threatened Benjamin that, if he didn’t keep up, Miss Brasenose would get him. Benjamin would roll his eyes and say, “Miss Brasenose isn’t real.” But he would catch up; you could see he was a little concerned.
Now I sank to the supermarket floor. I was praying out loud and not noticing the words. With the idea of expiation, I planted one hand into the shards of the jar, crushing broken glass into my palm: an intolerable bright singing pain that was clean. When the hurt became a bone-deep throb, I let go, shook glass from my hand, and picked away a few shards that had embedded themselves. I wasn’t crying anymore but huffing strangely, trying to expel all the air from my lungs, a thing I’ve always done when I’m very upset.
For a while then I was eating the beets, meticulously clearing the bits of broken glass from them with my fingernails and fingertips. They were still moist in their centers and the moisture was calming. My hand was bleeding but not dangerously. That was good; I still had to find Leo and Benjamin.
When the beets were gone, I got to my feet and walked back through the deconsecrated Albertsons. When I got out to the parking lot, I was at first struck by the quiet in all directions. There was no sound of traffic at all, an absence like a deafening noise. Only slowly I noticed a faint, sweet clamor of voices in the air. When I turned my head at a certain angle, it seemed to be coming from the sky. It was high-pitched, festive. It almost had a melody. Many children playing, was my first guess, though I also thought of the God I’d been praying to, of the choirs of heaven.
The sound seemed near and far away at once, and I wondered if it was delirium. But I guessed at a direction and walked, and when I turned the first corner, I saw them. They were two blocks away, in a parking lot in front of a strip-mall pizzeria. They weren’t angels or children. It was the sound of a hundred women with no men.
A few were standing, but many had blankets spread and were sitting eating pizza from take-out boxes. Some wore dresses and high heels, while others wore pajamas or sunbathed in their underwear. Everyone was drinking Bud from cans, and they all appeared to be talking. One shrieking little girl was chasing another, menacing her with a long white feather. Through the voices, I could hear a groaning generator and a speaker playing “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” A teenager was singing along with Elton John, that you couldn’t keep her in a penthouse, while three younger children giggled and danced in splay-armed circles around her.
In that moment, I was struck by how profoundly a scene was changed by the removal of a masculine element. It felt very sweet and fantastical: a world of lambs with no wolves. At the same time, it was oddly reminiscent of a rebel encampment on the eve of a raid.
Now a herd of little girls raced toward me, filtering effortlessly through the women. They came at a gallop, parted around me without pausing, and continued full tilt down the middle of the street. No one got up and chased after them. No one yelled at them to stay in sight. There were no men. No cars in the street. The little girls were all set free. A chill went over me, thinking of the broken glass in the supermarket, of bears—some risk I needed in order for the world to seem substantial and real.
The women had all taken note of me as the little girls passed. Most looked away, perhaps alarmed by my appearance, while a few still held my eye and smiled. It was as if they were volunteering their faces. I hadn’t seen anyone in ten days, and the emotion was indescribable, a very powerful mix of relief and fear. Here was my salvation, I thought; at the same time, I knew they might turn on me if they realized who I was. I reminded myself I was probably bigger and stronger than all of them. I was six feet tall. I’d been a dancer. If they tried to hurt me, I could probably escape—though of course I wouldn’t. I’d be torn limb from limb without a struggle. That was one thing I’d learned from the business with Alain.
As I thought this, a very gaunt white woman with blackish hollows around her eyes and wispy iron-colored hair—a woman with a face like a horse’s skull—detached herself from the others and came toward me. As she passed, the other women flinched and looked away. A teenage girl even got up hurriedly and went into the pizzeria, as if fleeing an impending scene.
“Ma’am?” the horse-skull woman said to me. “Ma’am, if you think they’re going to help you, you should just turn around now. They only want your gas from your car, and they won’t even let you charge your phone. Here the generator’s only for medical equipment. Or that’s what they told me.”
My hand was throbbing. Blood seeped ticklingly between my fingers. I couldn’t help looking at the open door of the pizzeria, where music was playing, presumably from some electricity source, but she wouldn’t follow my gaze. She said, “And even if something else is running off the generator, that’s just part and parcel. There’s plenty of capacity for something Holly wants. Holly’s the owner here.”
I said, “I don’t need to charge anything.”
“Holly acts like she’s your friend, but whatever she tells you, she just wants to siphon your gas and then you’re stranded here. That’s what they’re like here. You’ll see.”
At that moment a woman rushed out of the pizzeria—a heavy, middle-aged white woman in a purple dress designed to be floaty and shapeless, with long, floaty, shapeless hair. She was smiling in welcome like an emissary from this female realm.
She said to me, “Hello, stranger. I’m Holly. You look like you need something for that hand.”
The horse-skull woman said to her, “I’ve been telling this lady you’re not an inexhaustible resource. Or that’s what you told me.”
“Julie, are you okay?” said Holly.
“I’m fine,” said the horse-skull woman. “What are you talking about? Are you okay? I’m fine.”
“Listen, Julie, I’m going to take care of this lady. If you want, you could go ask Micah for a Xanax. There’s some lemonade left to drink it with.”
The horse-skull woman snorted explosively, turned on her heel, and stalked off, muttering to herself about controlling people, toxic people who were going to be sorry. She walked through the other women and went on, keeping carefully to the edge of the road though there was still no sound of cars.
Holly watched her go and sighed. She said, “I’m real sorry about that. Should we go get you cleaned up?”
She led me into the pizzeria, which was suffocatingly hot and dark. The pizza oven was on, but the lights and air-conditioning were turned off, presumably to keep from overwhelming the generator. Contrary to what the horse-skull woman had said, there were power strips plugged into all the outlets, with other power strips plugged into those, and a chaotic overgrowth of charging cords and cell phones and laptops. A huge fan on the floor was creating a wild turbulence that stirred even my dirt-stiffened shorts. On the tables were boxes of local produce: tomatoes and dirty potatoes and eggplants. A sign taped to one box said: ASK BEFORE TAKING. WE ARE RATIONING! The wall above the one booth was covered in HAVE YOU SEEN flyers with printed photographs of men and boys. All the flyers fluttered manically in the breeze from the fan, as if desperately waving to attract attention. The teenager who’d run inside before us was now at the booth working on a jigsaw puzzle. She looked up and asked, “Things go okay?” Holly said long-sufferingly, “It’s just Julie.”
Holly took me to the utility sink in the pizzeria’s kitchen. She said I could use it exactly like a bath, and don’t ask her how she’d figured that out, but she did ride a bike five miles to work and in the summer it got ugly. She brought a hurricane lamp. From a cupboard, she got down a pail filled with bubble baths and washcloths, then a very faded but clean beach towel with a print of the Puerto Rican flag. She pointed out a carton of old clothes on the floor, which she said people had been donating all week, and she’d thought, Who’s going to need clothes? but here we were. She made me show her my hand by the lamp’s flame and clucked and said she’d get a nurse to take a look. She had the soothing despotism of a mother of young children, and when she left to give me some privacy, I missed her. I imagined how people must have first been drawn here by the free pizza and the generator, then were held by Holly’s maternal pragmatism, until she became the de facto chieftain.
On the other hand, it struck me as plausible that Julie was right about Holly wanting my gas. That generator had to be running on something. There would also be ambulances and fire trucks. I couldn’t imagine myself refusing if Holly said she needed my gas for an ambulance, not in front of all these people. That may have been how it began for Julie.
I thought all this in the loosened, post-horror trance of washing away the blood and dirt, immersed in a sink as deep as a tub, lavender bath foam getting in my hair, my blood appearing bright on a white washcloth. I contorted myself to rinse my hair underneath the streaming faucet. Elton John had now moved on to “Bennie and the Jets.” The steel bottom of the sink buckled slightly with my shifting weight, reminding me I was really here. And there was a moment—I was hearing Holly’s voice outside, gently telling some little girls they couldn’t come in and being drawn into a good-natured argument about whether they would like it if people walked in on them in the bath, which the little girls insisted they would—when it struck me forcefully that the new world was better. Already, it was better. I liked it here.
I began to cry at the thought. In my head, I told God it wasn’t better. Anyway, nobody cared if it was better. I told God I wouldn’t want to live in a world without men, even if my own family was somehow spared. It would lack a whole dimension of experience. I told God whatever I thought He needed to hear to make Him bring them back, crying stupidly for Benjamin and Leo and pressing the wet washcloth against my face to try to stop the tears.
By the time I had cried myself out again, the bath foam bubbles were flat. Outside, Holly was talking now to two adult women, laughing pleasantly as if it were a normal day. With their soothing muffled voices in the background, I dried myself and found clothes. I came out barefoot on the warm, dusty tiles to find two middle-aged Black women sitting with Holly at the booth. The three of them were focused on the jigsaw puzzle, leaning forward in a staggered array so all their faces could catch the fan’s breeze.
One of the women was majestically fat, the other only plump. The fat woman had a grand crown of chestnut braids and wore a lacy sundress. The plump one had a short cap of grizzled black hair and wore faded scrubs. It was clear they belonged together, however, because they were identical twins.
The sundress twin was eating pizza with a fork and knife. The scrubs twin was focused on the jigsaw puzzle and hadn’t looked up. The puzzle was a photo from a national park, and all the pieces were blue and green. They’d finished the waterfall but seemed to be getting nowhere with the foliage.
Holly got up to introduce us. The sundress twin was Maya, and the scrubs twin, Micah. They’d run out of gas here driving south to San Jose, where they both lived. Maya had a daughter there, who’d been staying with her dad while the sisters went camping. The girl was now alone, just ten years old. “So I’m seriously losing my mind about now.”
Micah was a nurse. As I sat down, she produced a first aid kit from beneath the table and said, “Let’s see.” Holly went and brought me a slice of pizza and a can of Tecate. I ate one-handed while Micah tweezed grit from the wounds in my palm and bandaged it. There was an atmosphere of commonsensical nurture, women getting on with the business of life. With my wet hair in the breeze from the fan, it was just cool enough if I didn’t move at all.
Meanwhile, they went on talking. At first, it was about the local gas issue. The twins were saying they’d give anything just to be able to fill their tank and asked Holly if there was a plan going forward. Micah said the crisis might end soon, so maybe some supplies could be spared for private use, while Holly took a conservative line. Briefly Micah looked mutinous, then reconsidered and sat back, tired. Maya said she guessed everyone was suffering, and God would have to grant them the serenity.
Then they talked about the world and its chaos: the tankers and container ships adrift in the ocean; the oil refineries that had exploded and burned on unchecked; the horrifying stories of passenger aircraft that couldn’t be landed when the pilots vanished, because the planes had reinforced locked doors on their cockpits, and how an Aeromexico flight had taken out a whole residential block in Buenos Aires. I drifted off and thought about how to find Leo and Benjamin. So far, I’d been proceeding on the assumption that the disappearance suggested the existence of God, so the solution must be irrational. One should search even when it made no sense. One should starve and sleep in the mud and pray. But perhaps, even though the problem was supernatural, one should proceed as if it weren’t, since God helped those who helped themselves. Perhaps what was needed were the skills of a scientist or a smart politician who would fund research. I was a stay-at-home mother with an English degree whose only skill was ballet dancing. My husband and son would die without help because I was worthless, because I’d wasted my life.
By then, my silence had become a hole in the gathering, a hole that had accumulated mass and began to suck the comfort from the room. I hadn’t even helped with the jigsaw puzzle. The women’s talk came to a natural pause and all three looked at me.
Holly said, “You’re looking better. You’ve got some color back. You were in a real state when you came in.”
“Yes,” I said.
Holly looked dissatisfied, so I added, “I was looking for my husband and my son. Up on the mountain. We were up there camping.”
“I figured as much,” said Holly. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
Micah said, “I wouldn’t like to have gone through that in the woods, that’s for sure. That’s scary.”
Maya said, “Bad enough in a car. And we had each other.”
Holly said, “We’re here for you if you want to talk. You might find it helps. A lot of people here are finding it helps.”
There was perhaps an animosity in her manner. I never like people to attend to me closely. Holly was just the kind of person who would entertain suspicions about a stranger, and pursue those suspicions until proved right. My appearance hadn’t substantially changed since my crimes were a national news story. I’d told them my name was Natalie, but I couldn’t lie about my face.
Then I remembered how, in the corps de ballet, the girls always said the quickest way to make a woman like you was to say your boyfriend was cheating.
I said, “I’d just learned my husband was unfaithful. That’s what I’m really struggling with. I saw him with another woman, and I never got to talk to him about it, and now he’s gone.”
This is the story I told about Leo’s infidelity, which I warn you ahead of time is not true.
There was a rising-star biologist at Leo’s university whose wife was a voluptuous Greek American woman who cheated on the rising star with all his colleagues and also bullied him, often berating him in their Mini Cooper in the parking lot where anyone could hear her bellicose voice, insistently sexy and throaty from cigarettes, the roar of the sexual lioness. Then the doors would open and they both would come silently out. The wife’s name was Cleopatra; the husband’s, Micky. That alone gave their relationship a comical aspect. Leo and I liked to gossip about them as a way of confirming we would never cheat. I privately pitied Cleopatra, though. Perhaps she couldn’t help cheating. Many people drift into a false position. I envied her too, for her power, for using men and dominating them: a fuck witch. Then at some point we stopped gossiping about them. I told Holly and the twins, “That should have been a red flag.”
I then explained that I have an uncanny, one-in-a-million capacity to recognize faces. For instance, if I left the pizzeria that instant and didn’t see Holly again for ten years, I would still be able to spot her instantly in a crowd of a thousand people. I could also spot the twins and be able to tell them apart, regardless of weight change, clothes style, aging. Each face is unique in my eyes and I never forget. I can’t go on vacation in Paris without recognizing some random American. Sometimes I recognize a person I last saw in my early childhood—a friend of my parents’ or a kindergarten teacher—though I have no narrative memories from that period of my life. The people have aged thirty years, of course, so these encounters are depressing, sometimes even macabre.
Because of this freakish ability, I told Holly and the twins, when one night I was driving home on the coastal road and passed a lit-up restaurant at speed, I had no trouble recognizing Cleopatra at a table with my husband, Leo. She was touching his face and crying.
“I didn’t want to stop because my son was in the car,” I said. “Then I put off mentioning it to my husband because I was so afraid he would lie. It would be so tempting for him to lie. People never believe I can be sure I’ve recognized someone from a glimpse like that. I’d only met Cleopatra once. But I know. I have this freakish ability.”
When I finished, Holly and the twins looked politely skeptical. Of course no one really believes your claims about your freakish abilities. The freakish ability, however, is real. I was not at all embellishing the freakish ability. It was the rest of the story that was fabricated. There was a Cleopatra, but Leo never met her, and she had no connection to his place of work. As far as I know, she never married.
Holly said carefully, kindly, “It might not have been what it seemed like. Even if they were there together, they were only in a restaurant. It could have been innocent.”
I said, “No, I’m sure.”
“We all know how that is,” Micah said. “When you know, you know.”
“Still, it’s hard to see from a car,” said Maya. “Looking into a restaurant? From a car? You’re seeing through two different windows. Just thinking about the glare.”
“Yes,” I patiently said. “It’s harder to see from a car. That’s true.”
“Hey, speaking of cars,” said Holly, “if you have your car here, we’d sure appreciate you sharing your gas. We’re trying to keep up basic services. We’ve been providing the ambulances with gas, then there’s also what we offer at the pizza place here. But of course we can talk about that later. Just putting it out there. I know you’re wiped out.”
I instantly felt resistant to surrendering my gas, though I knew I would ultimately give in. An ambulance was an ambulance. I didn’t even have anywhere to go. I couldn’t very well claim I needed my car when Maya and Micah were right there, and Maya’s daughter alone in San Jose. It was at that moment that I cast my eye up and spotted the ComPA flyer.
It was pinned among the HAVE YOU SEEN printouts, seeming absolutely ordinary there. I looked away instinctively, getting chills all over. Still I saw it in my mind’s eye: the neat red flowers along its border; the plain font we used to call “Arial-Leninist”; the logo of a crossed knife and fork that was a joke about a hammer and sickle, but no one ever got it without being told. I’d spent so much time designing similar flyers, but I hadn’t seen one in years and had no idea they still existed. I’d certainly never expected to see one outside the cafés of liberal college towns.
As my initial shock subsided, it struck me that there was nothing incriminating about my interest in the flyer. It had nothing to do with Alain.
I had let my eye stray back to it, and because Holly was that kind of person, she noticed and guffawed. “Oh, that? Those people came through this morning, and the kids here are totally infatuated. But I think I can take that down now. Maya, can you reach that, sweetie?”
I said, trying to sound nonchalant, “Can I see it?”
Maya took it down and handed it to me. Holly started explaining, saying what people always said about ComPAs: they were crazy, cultlike, fanatical, Stalin killed more people than Hitler, who’s going to pay for all that free stuff. “They’re taking advantage of the crisis now,” said Holly, “acting just like a mafia and taking over neighborhoods because there’s a power vacuum. Well, some people fall for that kind of thing.”
The ComPA flyer began with the typical rabble-rousing, slightly altered for the new era. It had all the old promises—better this, free that—but also the suggestion that a feminized society would be more equitable and less violent. More surprisingly to me, there was a past-tense section that listed the ComPAs’ achievements in the ten days since the disappearance. Working with local authorities, they’d reinstated bus service in Greater Los Angeles, cleared major streets of abandoned cars, restarted the Scattergood Generating Station. Thanks to them, garbage collection in L.A. County was back at 100 percent. Now they’d taken their program to San Francisco and points north. They welcomed all local input.
It included an address for “Northern California Operations” in San Francisco. It was signed: “Founder and National Director, Dr. Evangelyne Moreau.”
I got to my feet as if I’d been stung and walked blindly to the open door with the flyer in my hand. I stopped in the doorway, trying to breathe, pretending that Holly and the twins weren’t staring. I was eerily calm and exalted: one of the great moments of my life.
Outside, the sun had begun to set. The women in the parking lot talked softly on their blankets, pacified by the growing dark. The lack of cars made the town sound huge and windy and unsettlingly natural. There was that murmur of women like forest noise and the uneasy quietness all around. We were a seed adrift on the ocean. With the power outage, there was a shift in the balance of light to the advantage of the heavens, and it looked as if the still-living sky were drifting away and leaving a black dead Earth behind. I was looking at the sky. It was all so clear.
I had thought every person I loved was gone. But here was Evangelyne, Evangelyne who I believed in above all people, who could find my son if anyone could. And I was frightened but euphoric with the ease of a trajectory. I didn’t have to find God or reinvent myself as a scientist or a politician. I only had to get to Evangelyne.
Holly said, “Natalie, honey? Are you okay?”
I turned and saw them again, with a flood of contrition and wistful generosity. Maya and Micah were watching me with faint irony, their tired faces uncannily the same. Holly looked sincerely worried, primed to rush to my side and help. Good people—and the last piece fell into place with one impulse of love.
I said, “I do have gas in my car. But I just keep thinking about Maya’s daughter. I was headed to San Francisco myself, so I was thinking, Maya, Micah—do you want a ride home?”