Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Yes, Siss; a sad time.”

  They got to First Avenue and the U.N. There wasn’t anybody there, either.

  * * * *

  Notes for a History of the Worldwas what he wrote on page one of his notebook.

  On page two he had alternate titles, some facetious:

  The True History of the Martin Rolfe Family on the Planet Earth; or, Two for Tomorrow.

  Recollections of a World Well Lost.

  How the Population Crisis Was Solved.

  What Next? or, if You Don’t Do It, Marty, Who the Hell Will?

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  Thank God for movies. We’d be outen our minds by now if I hadn’t taught myself to be a projectionist.

  Radio City Music Hall apparently’s only movie on Con Ed’s EE list. Bit roomy for Siss and me but getting used to it. Sometimes she sits way down front, I in mezzanine, and we shout to each other when. Gregory Peck does heroic things.

  Collected first runs to add to8½ from all major Manhattan houses—Capitol, Criterion, Cinema I & II, State, etc.—so we have good backlog. Also, if Siss likes, we run it again right away or next night. I don’t mind. Then there are the 42nd St. houses and the art houses and the nabes & Mod. Museum film library. Shouldn’t run out for a long time.

  Days are for exploring and shopping. I go armed because of the animals. Siss stays home at hotel.

  (Why are there animals? Find out.Where find out; how?)

  The dogs in packs are worst. So far they haven’t attacked and a shot fired in the air scares them off. So far.

  Later they left the city. It had been too great a strain to live a life half primitive, half luxurious. The contrast was too much. And the rats were getting bolder. The rats and the dogs.

  They had lived there at first for the convenience. He picked a hotel on Park Avenue. He put Siss in a single room and took a suite down the hall for himself.

  He guessed correctly that there’d be huge refrigerators and freezers stocked with food enough for years.

  The hotel, with its world-famous name, was one of the places the Consolidated Edison Company had boasted was on its Emergency Electricity net, along with City Hall, the Empire State Building, the tunnels and bridges, Governors Island and other key installations. The EE net, worked out for Civil Defense (what had ever become of Civil Defense?), guaranteed uninterrupted electricity to selected customers through the use of deep underground grids and conduits, despite flood, fire, pestilence or war. A promotional piece claimed that only total annihilation could knock out the system.

  There was a hint of the way it worked in a slogan that Con Ed considered using before the government censors decided it would have given too much away: “...as long as the Hudson flows.”

  Whatever the secret, he and Siss had electricity, from which so many blessings flowed, for as long as they stayed in the city.

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  I’ve renamed our hotel The Living End. Siss calls it our house, or maybe Our House.

  I won’t let her go out by herself but she has the run of the hotel. She won’t use the self-service elevators. Doesn’t trust them. Don’t blame her. She cooks in the hotel kitchen and carries our meals up two flights on a tray.

  Garbage disposal no problem. There’s an incinerator that must work by electricity. So far it’s taken everything I’ve dumped down it. I can’t feel any heat but it doesn’t stink.

  We’re getting some outdoor stinks, though. Animal excrement that nobody cleans up (I’d be doing nothing else if I started). Uncollected garbage. Rotting food in supermarkets and other places without EE.

  There are certain streets I avoid now. Whole sections, when the wind is wrong.

  * * * *

  Bad night at the Living End. Had a nightmare.

  I dreamed that Siss and I, home from the Music Hall (Gary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in something from the sixties), were having a fight. I don’t know about what but we were shouting and I was calling her unforgivable names and she was saying she was going to climb up to the 20th floor and jump, when the phone rang . . .

  I woke up, seeming to hear the echo of the last ring. The phone was there on the floor, under the night table.

  I didn’t dare pick it up.

  * * * *

  It must have happened just before dawn, when Manhattan was as deserted as it ever got.

  I took a chance on the EE and went up in the elevators to the top of the Empire State Bldg. First time I’d ever been up—also the last, probably. What a sight. Plenty of cars, cabs, trucks, buses rammed into each other & sides of bldgs but lots more just came to natural(!) stop in midstreet or near curb. Very feasible to drive around and out of town, tho probably not thru tunnels. GW Bridge shd be okay, with its 8 lanes. Have to get out of town one day anyhow, so best explore in advance.

  Planes. No sign that any crashed but bet lots did somewhere. Everything looks orderly at NY airports.

  Fires. Few black spots—signs of recent fires. Nothing major.

  Harbor & rivers. Some ships, lots of boats drifting around loose. No sign of collisions; nothing big capsized.

  Animals. Dog packs here and there. Sound of their barking rises high. Nasty sound. Birds, all kinds.

  Air very dry.

  * * * *

  Down in the street again, Rolfe began to think about the animals other than the dogs that ran in packs. How long would it be until the bigger ones—the wolves and bears and mountain lions—found their way into the city? He decided to visit Abercrombie & Fitch and arm himself with something heavier than the pistol he carried. Big-bore stuff, whatever they called it.

  Rolfe was admiring an elephant gun in the fantastic store (Hemingway had shopped here, and probably Martin and Osa Johnson and Frank Buck and others from the lost past) when he remembered another sound he’d heard from the top of the Empire State Building. It had puzzled him, but now he could identify it. It had been the trumpeting of an elephant. An elephant in Manhattan? The circus wasn’t in town— He knew then, but for the moment he pushed aside the thought and its implications.

  After he had picked out the guns, and a wicked gas-operated underwater javelin for good measure, he outfitted himself in safari clothes. Khaki shorts and high socks, a big-pocketed bush jacket, a sun helmet. Hurrah for Captain Spalding! He looked a true Marxman, he thought, humming the song Groucho had sung and admiring himself in a full-length mirror.

  He took a cartridge belt and boxes of shells and first-aid and water-purification kits and a trapper’s knife and a light-weight trail ax and a compass and binoculars and snowshoes and deerskin gloves and a tough pair of boots. He staggered out into Madison Avenue and dumped everything into the back of the cream-colored Lincoln convertible he was driving that day.

  The trumpeting of the elephant had come from the Central Park Zoo, of course. He drove in from Fifth Avenue and parked near the restaurant opposite the sea lions’ pool. He could see three of them lying quietly on a stone ledge, just above the water, watching him. He wondered when they’d last been fed.

  First, though, he went to the administration building and let himself in with lock-picking tools. He had become adept at the burglary trade. He found a set of what seemed to be master keys and tried them first at the aviary. They worked.

  The names of the birds, on the faded wooden plaques, were as colorful as their plumage. There were a Papuan lory, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, the chiffchaff and kookaburra bird, laughing jackass and motmot, chachalaca, drongo and poor old puffin. He opened their cages and watched their tentative, gaudy passage to freedom.

  A pelican waddled out comically, suspicion in its round eyes. He ducked a hawk and cowered from a swift, fierce eagle. An owl lingered, blinking, until he shooed it toward the doors. He left to the last two brooding vultures, hesitating to free creatures so vile. But there was a role for scavengers, too. He opened their cage and ran, to get outdoors before they did.

  After the cacophony of the
aviary, he was surprised at the silence as he neared the monkey house. He’d have to be damned careful about the gorilla, which obviously had to be shot. The big chimps were nothing to fool around with, either. But the monkey house was empty. The signs were there and the smell remained but the apes, big and little, were not. Could they have freed themselves? But all the cages were locked.

  Puzzled, he went on to the smaller mammals, freeing the harmless ones, the raccoons, the mongooses, the deflowered skunks, the weasels and prairie dogs—even the spiny porcupine, which looked over its shoulder at him as it shuffled toward the doors.

  He freed the foxes, too, and they bounded off as if to complete an interrupted mission. “Go get the rats,” Rolfe yelled after them.

  He marked the location of the wolves and the big cats. He’d come back to them with his guns.

  Last of all he freed the lone elephant, scarcely grown, whose trumpet call had summoned him. The elephant— an unofficial sign said it was a female, Geraldine—followed him at a distance almost to the car, then broke into a clumsy trot and drank from the sea lions’ pool.

  As Rolfe was returning to the cages with the guns he knew why there weren’t any monkeys. The big and little apes were hominids, like man. Their evolutionary climb had doomed them, too.

  He killed the beasts of prey. It was an awful business. He was not a good shot even at close range and the executions took many bullets. A sinuous, snarling black panther took six before he was sure. The caged beasts, refusing to stand still for the mercy killings, made it hot, bloody, stinking work. He guessed it was necessary.

  Finally he was done. Quivering and sweating, he returned to the car. The sea lions honked and swam across to his side of the pool. He could see now that there were three babies and two adults.

  What was he to do with them? He couldn’t bring himself to a final butchery. And what was he to do about all the other captive animals—in the Bronx Zoo uptown, in zoos all over the world? He couldn’t be a one-man Animal Rescue League.

  Rolfe had a momentary fantasy in which he enticed the sea lions into the car (four in the back, one in the front) and drove them to the East River, where they flopped into the water and swam toward the sea, honking with gratitude.

  But he knew that in his present state of exhaustion he couldn’t lift even the babies, and there was no way for them to get out of their enclosure unaided. Maybe he could come back with a truck and plank and fish to tempt them with. He left the problem, and that of the Bronx and Prospect Parks Zoos and the Aquarium (not to get too far afield) and started the car.

  Geraldine looked after him. He would have liked a little trumpet of farewell but she had found some long grass and was eating.

  As he drove back to the Living End through the wider streets, weaving carefully around the stalled cars, his mind was full of the other trapped beasts, great and small, starving and soon to go mad from thirst, as if in punishment for having outlived man.

  Only then did the other thought crash into his consciousness—what of the millions of pets, trapped in the houses of their vanished owners? Dogs and cats, unable to open the refrigerators or the cans in the pantries. Some would have the craft to tear open packages of dried food and would learn to drink from leaking faucets or from toilet bowls. But at best they could prolong their miserable existence for only a few more days.

  What was he to do about the pets? What could he do? Run around the city freeing them? Where would he start? Should he free all those on the north sides of odd-numbered streets? Or those on the ground floors of houses in named streets beginning with consonants? What were the rules? How did you play God?

  He resolved not to talk to Siss about it. He wouldn’t have her breaking her heart over a billion doomed animals; she had enough to mourn.

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  What should I call today? Rolfeday? Sissuary the 13th? Year Zero?

  Shd hav kept track but don’t really know how many days it’s been since I walked out of Bill’s storage vault and found myself ½ the human pop. of the whole fursh-lugginer world.

  Asked Siss. She remembers. It has been exactly 11 days since the holocaust. She accounted for every one of them. Moren I cld do: they started to run together for me after the first three.

  OK, so it’s Sissuary the 11th, Year One, Anno Rolfe. Somebody’s got to keep a record.

  How many days in Sissuary? We’ll see. Got to name the second month before closing out the first.

  * * * *

  It was difficult for him to look back and remember exactly when he had first realized with certainty that this was the woman with whom he was fated to spend the rest of his life, when it had dawned on him that this moron was to be his bosom companion, that he had to take care of her, provide for her, talk to her (and listen to her), answer her stupid questions, sleep with her!

  The realization must have come about the time he began to experience his stomach-aches. They weren’t pains; they were more like a gnawing at the vitals of his well-being, a pincers movement by the enemy that was trapping him where he didn’t want to be, with someone he didn’t want to be with, a leaden weight that was smothering his freedom.

  Some of her traits nearly drove him out of his mind. He was oversensitive, he supposed, but he had to wince and tried to close his ears every time she converted a sneeze into a clearly-enunciated “Ah choo!” and waited for him to bless her.

  Worse because more frequent was her way of grunting audibly when she was picking up something, or pushing something or moving something around. This was to let him know that she was hard at work, for him. After a while he forced himself to praise her while she was at it —her diligence, her strength, her unselfishness—and she stopped making so much noise. He hated himself for being a hypocrite and felt sure she would see through him, but she never did and in the end his exaggerated praise became a way of life. It stood him in good stead later, when he had to tell her white lies about the degree of his affection for her and the great esteem in which he held her.

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  Asked Siss if she’d ever read a book and she said oh yes the Good Book. Parts of it. It used to comfort her a lot more in the old days, apparently. She’s read two books all the way thru—Uncle Wiggily and Japanese Fairy Tales, and parts of a Tarzan book. She sometimes used to look at the paper—read the comics, the horoscope, picture captions, the TV listings. Lord save us from ever having to hold a literary conversation.

  To be fair I’ve tried to remember the last 10 books I read before doom. Probably be a pretty stupid list if I was following my usual random reading pattern—off on an Erie Stanley Gardner or James Bond kick and reading everything available all at once.

  * * * *

  Aside from his obligation to humanity to sire a new race, what was there for him to do? Rolfe considered the possibilities, dividing them into two groups: necessities (duties or obligations) and pastimes (including frivolities).

  Under necessities he put:

  Keep a journal for posterity, if any. He was already doing that.

  Give Siss the equivalent of a grammar school education; more if she could take it.

  Try to elevate her taste for the sake of the unborn children she would one day influence.

  Keep his family fed and sheltered. Would it be necessary to clothe them, except for warmth in the winter? Nudity might be more practical, as well as healthier.

  Then he jotted down on a separate piece of paper “Obligation to self paramount” and looked at it. He felt that he had to come first, with his duty to Siss a little lower (on the paper and in his estimation) because he was smarter than she was and therefore more worth saving.

  Then he had another look and amended it. Siss was more worth saving because she was a woman and able to reproduce her kind.

  But not without his help, of course.

  Finally he put himself and Siss together at the top of the list. No good saving one without the other.

&nb
sp; Pastimes. Take up a sport to keep fit. What one-man sports were there? Woodchopping? Fat chance. Too blister-prone, he. Hiking? Maybe he and Siss should hike around the world to make absolutely positively sure there was nobody else. Or around the eastern United States, anyhow. Or just up and down the Hudson River Valley? Somehow walking didn’t seem to be his sport, either.

  He might take up cooking. Men had always been the best chefs and now ingenuity would be needed to make nourishing and palatable meals from what was available to them. They couldn’t depend on canned and preserved food forever. Okay, he’d be a cook. Of course that was a sport that tended to put pounds on, not take them off. He’d better find an antidote, like swimming or handball.

  How about collecting? What—money? Diamonds? Great art? Neither money nor diamonds, obviously; neither had any intrinsic value in a World of Two—and then art was best left where it was, as well-protected as anything in the poor old world. If he wanted Siss to see a Rembrandt or an Andrew Wyeth, he’d take her to it.