Lost Everything Read online

  I even went west to see the Big One coming in, because I needed to see it, to tell you. I stood on the ridge of the Appalachians and looked toward where the sun was supposed to be, toward the north, too, and saw no sky at all. Just a boiling wall of clouds, gray and green and sparked with red lightning, and underneath it, a curtain of flying black rain, rippling with wild wind from one end of the earth to the other. The sound of constant thunder. I watched it take a town in the valley, far away below, and it was as though a wave were rolling across the ground, lifting houses, roads, trees, and all—anything that was still there—up into the air, into the mouth of the storm. It was still rising, into the darkness, when I lost sight of it. It must have been so loud on the ground, the earth and rain and sky all screaming together, but I could not hear any of it. I wanted to say something then, but I did not have the words. There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens. They come in time, but sometimes it takes years, and we do not always have years. My great-grandfather did not have them when he tried to speak of the towns all over upstate New York, the way the people seemed to dwindle year after year, the old ones falling into the earth, the young ones just not there the next day, as if plucked away. The decay of the houses moving across the villages and cities. Windows broken, then boarded. The lawns tangling with twisting young maples, black walnut, until the main roads were just strips of dying buildings, rusting bridges, sidewalks breaking apart. He loved it all so much. How would it ever come back? He would say these things, get that far, then try to tell you what had been lost, what he had seen himself. Then he’d just shake his head, put his hand over his eyes instead. It was the same thing for us as for them. Just much faster for us. For us, even less time.

  We do not know what is on the other side of the storm. We cannot get around it, and the few who have tried to go over it say it never seems to end. We have heard that it came in from the Pacific like a tsunami, that it ate the coast. It crashed into the Rockies and crested them, then charged across the plains, tearing up towns and crops, roads and telephone lines. Pulling us all off the land, us and all we had built there. All the people who could not run, did not want to, we have not heard from since the storm passed over them. No letters, no signals, no photographs. No messages crackling across the wires. A veil is falling across the country, one long shattering shriek at its edge, and behind it, nothing but darkness and silence.

  Though perhaps you are not silent. Maybe you can see things that I cannot, see them with utter clarity. Maybe you walked up to the storm and passed through it, because you were not as afraid as we were. Did you leave us behind, then, or take us with you? Or were we on the other side when you got there, lost and waiting?

  * * *

  WHEN WE ALL LEARNED what was coming, there were reports of desertions, from the army, from the resistance. Soldiers just disappearing into the woods. Others found outside their camps with entrance wounds in the back of their heads, caught trying to leave by an officer the war had gotten the better of. A small string of suicides. A town somewhere upriver had, in a few days, lost all its citizens. In Harrisburg, the occupying army drove a van armed with loudspeakers through the tight downtown blocks around the state capital. Do not listen to the news today. It is full of lies. The sky over the city was enough like it had always been that they could say that and get away with it.

  Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite rowed north, past the high-water marks on Rockville Bridge, up through the rapids at Marysville, to a herd of islands on a ten-thousand-year drift across the river’s width. One of the islands’ rocky spits had split in two with the effort, and Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite followed the channel up its course through a crevasse of dense vines, animals hooting in the shadows. For a few minutes, they were the only people left in the world. It was just them and the yellow boat, the water beneath. The trees closing around them. Roots walking into the water. Branches above their heads taking away the sky. Then the channel opened and the trees pulled back around an island smaller than a house, a single linden, gnarled and gigantic, hanging by its roots over the rippling water. A man with a rifle crouched in the tree’s crook, the barrel following them as they entered. Two people stood in the gravel on the inside of the channel’s curve. One of them Grendel Jones. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim had seen her less than a month ago when the shells were falling, her hand on a radio, sending orders across the wires. She had caught their eyes and smiled, just once. Thought they were going to win. Now she was hobbling on a cane, scraggly hair tied back. Five parallel scratches striping her face from cheek to forehead. Her face rubbed in it. Your town and everything you loved. Let go of it all now before it hurts too much.

  “Is it true?” Sunny Jim said. “About the north?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Grendel Jones said. There was electricity between her and Sunny Jim that could have been mistaken for attraction, but was not. She was the war to him, embodied its rage. You stole my wife from me, Sunny Jim had told her once. Made me send my son away. Give me back my family. And that was before the Market Street Bridge went down.

  She reached inside her frayed overcoat, brought out a battered envelope that looked like it had been sealed twenty years ago, though it was just the night before. The paper inside first being tacked to a plank of wood spongy with rot, so Grendel could write with her only hand, fingers stained with the dirty oil burning in the lamp. The light was a target for snipers, she knew. She was not so much careless as callous. Shoot me if you can, she thought. The war keeps taking pieces of me anyway. Makes the rest of me harder to hit.

  “There’s one boat still going upriver,” she said. “Called the Carthage.”

  “How will we find it?” Sunny Jim said.

  “You’ll find it.” Gave him the envelope. “You’ll meet the boat at the Clarks Ferry Bridge. They’ll let everyone on. Always do. But if you give them this, they’ll take extra care of you. Take you as far as you need.”

  “Thanks,” Sunny Jim said. She could tell how it hurt him to say it. In his grief, his anger, at Aline not being with him, he was making Grendel Jones complicit in her absence. The commanding officer felt it, too, the guilt and horror at her own power whenever she stopped to contemplate it. She gave an order, and people died. She could take lives just by speaking.

  “Just get your boy,” she said. Then caught his eye. I’m so sorry about Aline.

  What do you want me to say?

  That you forgive me.

  I can’t forgive you yet. Forgiving you would mean letting her go.

  In Baltimore, the bones of Grendel Jones’s left arm lay under a collapsed apartment building, softened by water. The rain was taking down all that was left of that city, the rain and the vines and trees, its accomplices. Wildflowers stormed along Falls Road. Tendrils of kudzu snaked around the Bromo Seltzer Tower. Plants and animals burying our dead for us. Turning us and all that we did into soil, then digging their roots in deep. They would never let us come back.

  Grendel was not yet a soldier when she lost her arm. She was only there to care for her aunt, an invalid. After the first rocket attacks, they sat in her aunt’s apartment, pushed the wheelchair up to the window. Watched a line of people leaving, a centipede of refugees. A family of five. The father with a coffee table and a rolled-up rug tied to his back. The mother with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head. Their children on leashes running from their waists to their parents’ hands, staggering with the movement of drunken spiders. So little sound for so many people.

  “They’re overreacting,” her aunt said, frowning. “This will all blow over soon.” Her resolve never left her, even when the rockets came dozens a day and it seemed that someone was always firing a gun somewhere. Even when the flames turned the nights into the last minutes of evening for good, as though the sun were not allowed to set. When Grendel told her aunt about the massacres, she refused to believe it.

  “People don’t do that to each other,” she said.

  Fire, fire, I heard the cr
y, from every breeze that passes by. All the world was one sad cry of pity.

  Grendel’s arm left her as she stood in the doorway to the apartment building. It was wearing a blue sleeve with a white cuff, was holding cooking oil in a plastic bottle. The rocket’s explosion threw the rest of her into the street, though she was already unconscious by then. When she woke up, she was lying on the deck of a barge in the Chesapeake Bay. A thin mat beneath her. The stump of her arm, bandaged, dirty. The Bay Bridge dim in the twilight. To the north and east, all of Baltimore consumed by fire or water, a long ragged band of orange light raging above the broken seawalls, the drowned streets, a mist of steam. Her aunt back there somewhere. On the barge with her, a small horde of survivors huddled under canvases, prone on the metal deck. A woman shaking with quiet sobs. A man sedated out of his head, still groaning on every pull of the saw that was taking off his right leg above the knee. A banjo and mandolin, two voices high and loose, their throats too smoky to get it quite right.

  Oh Katy dear, go ask your mama

  If you can be a bride of mine.

  If she says yes, come back and tell me.

  If she says no, we’ll run away.

  She was a glass jar dropped from a great height, then. No putting back together the past that had scattered from her head. Her life began again in that minute on the Chesapeake Bay, in ash and strained song. But her life before is back there somewhere, in the miles of her childhood before the war. Picnic tables rough from winter after winter. A biting insect clinging to a tree. Ankle-deep in a creek in early spring, her toes frozen already. A friend standing there with her, grimacing. You get out first. No, you. It all matters, it has to, even if she cannot remember it.

  She became a guerrilla as soon as she could. Ascended through the ranks of the resistance until she was a field commander, ever in the calm land a mile or two ahead of the front. She learned to smell it, feel it, as animals sense weather, when it wavered and flexed. Spared some towns and destroyed others. She was ahead of it all through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Knew what it meant when she got the orders to march to Harrisburg and settle in. They were going to be there a while, she thought, anyone could have guessed it. But she could even see it, in the way the city sat on the riverbank. The steps to the water. The bridges thrown across it, the stone arcades of their arches. A fortress already. The war would be fought in alleys. Window by window. Entire battles hinged on the turn of a staircase.

  She met Aline a month before Harrisburg, after hearing about her two months before. The battle of Cumberland. Horses on fire, screaming, their manes trailing stripes of smoke. The resistance could never have turned the army back—it was ten to one—but they made them bleed for every brick of that old city in the steep valley, left them a smaller thing. The wounded lying under open sky in the shadow of the clock tower. Masonry cracked by concussion. Nothing to show for all that death.

  “Somehow I thought you’d be taller,” Aline said.

  “Funny. I thought the same about you.”

  They both laughed, as if they were twins. Except that Grendel never knew what to do with Sunny Jim, that wraith of a man. Their son under his arm, straining to run, the father refusing to set him free. It’s not you, it’s this, he said to his boy. All this. When the war is over, as soon as it’s done, I’ll let you go.

  Sunny Jim turned the envelope over in his hand, eyed the stain running along its back. The folded paper inside pushing lines into its skin. As if Grendel Jones always knew it would come to this, the day they met.

  “Why didn’t you ever fight?” Grendel said.

  “I didn’t believe in it.”

  “Fighting.”

  “No. Just this war.”

  “Well, believe it. Because where you’re going? It’s going to get worse.”

  He knew that. He could feel it sometimes, in the dark. The front’s gigantic edge, its claws, rusty and broken, tearing up the hide of the world. He had heard how it was along the highway from Wilkes-Barre to Scranton. Seen the debris in the Susquehanna. Tatters of clothes. A pair of eyeglasses. There were days that the river had changed color—bright orange, luminous purple—and he had thought of his boy and Merry, alone in the family house, almost two hundred miles upriver. The front howling behind the horizon to the south. And then the Big One coming in. When they were children, he remembered, his sister had told him this was coming as they stood on the ragged edge of a field. Watched the wind fall across the tall, dead grass, bright yellow under angry gray clouds. A desiccated red barn shaking on its beams. This earth, this sky, will come for us, she said, it’ll get tired of us and come. And what comes after will be beautiful, even if we’re not allowed to see it.

  No wonder it was happening now, Sunny Jim thought. After what we had done.

  * * *

  THEY WERE IN THE back of a delivery truck on the road out of Harrisburg with four other people, all down to what they could carry. The highway was broken by craters, clotted with the wrecked exoskeletons of military equipment. The remains of some hard miles. They passed a checkpoint after the sign for the Super 8, where the driver sweet-talked the soldiers into letting them go without inspection. They had nothing the soldiers wanted anyway. Across the river, they could see the lights from the army camp at Marysville, hear the murmur of a bullhorn across the water. The soldiers having to pacify themselves as much as the people they conquered. Soon the truck was swerving along the river valley’s side. The hills to the right steep and jutting, a radio tower’s single signal on one summit. The river to the left, slipping past dark clusters of islands. Betraying nothing of its strength. The southbound lane teemed with a long, unquiet line of people swinging torches and whipping animals. The chatter of confused children. In the places where the highway seemed to hang over the water, they could see up the valley, the refugees’ lights drawing a chain across the foot of the slope. They were taking everything they could and going. The truck with Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite in it the only thing heading north. If either of them had glanced outside, they could have seen the looks. The shock and pity, the jokes and prayers. Why would anyone want to go up there?

  They curved onto a long ramp over the water, where the islands fell away, the valley opened out, and the river swelled wide. It was cutting the hill in half, tearing the wound wide. The ridge was ragged with the river’s assault, fell to the shore at steep angles. Covered in foliage, leaning trees. Rocks shaking loose from the bleeding wall. The highway, the giant Clarks Ferry Bridge, a toy amid all this violence. Once it had shot across the gap over the water, the river unperturbed around its monumental pilings. It would have pulled it all down in time. But the war got to it first, took down the bridge’s middle third. The western end then fell all on its own, leaving the eastern end a jagged pier, its length ending in crumbling concrete, bubbled asphalt. Metal beams jutting below. The rubble from the explosion was gone. The river had made its bed with it, and the birds had returned already to the bridge’s underside, built nests in the blackened steel. Their cries bouncing off the water’s sleek surface. All the while, the river dug deeper. Bringing the mountain to its knees.

  Up on the bridge, people waited on the pavement. Pairs, groups of three, of five, with small livestock muttering in cages. A dozen children wandering back and forth from the ramp to the bridge’s edge, trying to make friends. They had a game with a ball of rags tied together until an errant throw sent it into the water. They watched the river take it away from them. Then started playing cards, rules involving slapping, punches in the arm. Evening brought fog that hung in suspense, threatening to become rain. Lanterns and small fires flared. Low voices. Someone humming. They huddled together for warmth as the river seemed to widen in the fading light, gather water far beyond what the Juniata brought in tribute less than a mile away. As if the whole world were water below them, rising into the air. They could smell it, taste it. The earthy musk of plants and soil, curdled by dead fish.

  Near the end of the bridge, a woman had hung a tarp
across plastic pipes to try to stay dry, started a tiny fire that writhed in a trash can lid. Two people joined her, beckoned others to join them, until there were eight of them standing in a semicircle, just out of the rain. Hands extended and open over the heat. The woman who started the fire giving everyone a faint smile, hesitant greetings. Looking for what is good in us.

  “Do I know you?” a man in a top hat said to Sunny Jim.

  “I don’t think so. I’m not from here.”

  “No, no, I think I know you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sunny Jim said, “but I don’t recognize you.”

  The man in the top hat peered at Sunny Jim, as if waiting for him to say something. He was a con artist, a professional, thought he read something in Sunny Jim’s face. A vulnerability. A fragile man, he thought, who had much and was unaccustomed to losing. Pegging Sunny Jim all wrong.

  “Then it’s my turn to apologize,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  He was, Reverend Bauxite thought, not so long ago. A man tied to the planet by a thread of happiness and rage, his wife and child his only anchor. Now both were far away, beyond his sight, and his belief in them was all that was keeping him here. Reverend Bauxite began a small prayer, that his friend have the strength, the forbearance, not to lose his faith. Be granted a sign, a small thing, to tell him to hang on. He thought again of Talia, in the days before the war started. Picking at a hangnail in the pink wingback chair in his office, lips drawn tight with the concentration of it.