The Second History Read online

  “Yes but what?”

  He didn’t know what to say. “But I wasn’t going to hurt anything. I was just watching to see if you were…dangerous.”

  A smile broke out over her face so suddenly that he flinched. And then she began to laugh. He stared and she lowered a hand over her eyes, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I…” She dropped the hand. Though the laughter had seemed sincere, her expression now was as weary as if she’d wept. “I don’t think we’re dangerous. Do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Will you leave us alone then?”

  “Yes.” He began to retreat into the woods, feeling ridiculous and angry and ashamed.

  And then she called, “Can you help us?”

  * * *

  —

  That first night, after Eban had brought them to the two canvas tents he and his mother shared, and Alphonse had taken his mother aside and said something in French that convinced her Eban was right to trust them, the four sat together, huddled over bowls of boiled fern heads and rabbit broth. He watched Judy, who gripped her spoon like a shovel and had hardly delivered one mouthful to her lips before sending the spoon diving for another.

  She looked up then from her soup and caught him staring.

  “What,” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just the way you handle things. The way you move. It’s like you’re running out of time.”

  Eban’s mother twisted her mouth wryly. “He’s calling you clumsy, girl.”

  “Not clumsy.” He hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just strong.”

  He could tell Judy didn’t like that, him trying to take the measure of her, but she said only, “You touch everything like it’s going to run away.”

  And then she smiled. And he saw in that look how she took in all of him at once, devouring him in a single gulp. How he was stripped by her eyes. How she lost the defeated look from her face in an instant, shook it off with a lift of her chin.

  She was nineteen years old. And he was seventeen.

  Later, as he showed her how to wrap her tent in brush and skins for cover, they shared the brief stories of their lives. He went first, on her urging, and found he had little to tell. “I grew up near the foothills,” he said, haltingly. “In the outland. With my mother.” His brother’s name stuck to his tongue for some reason and he waited for her to ask about him, but of course she didn’t.

  “What about your father?”

  He couldn’t think what to say. “He was there when I was very little. And then he left. I don’t really remember him. We don’t talk about him much.”

  She nodded. “Do you think he went to the cities?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

  She nodded again. “What about your mother? Did she always live in the outland?”

  “She grew up here. But she was one of the first to attend university in the new cities, ten years after the original university closed. She was studying medicine there when she met my father. He taught in a different department.”

  He hesitated and then went on. “I used to ask my mother why they didn’t stay in the cities, but it always put her in a terrible mood. I stopped asking eventually. But one time I found her holding this old picture of my father that I thought she’d burned years earlier. I knew enough not to ask about him. So I asked about the university. And it was like she couldn’t stop herself from talking about that.

  “She’d finished her first three years of coursework in two years,” he told Judy, “which no one had done before. She began medical school the year the third and worst wave of the fourteen-year drought hit. The few other students she knew from the outland left and went home to their families, but she stayed. She said she sat in classrooms surrounded by people from the cities, who were perplexed by her and by everyone from the outland. She didn’t make a single friend. And then she met my father. She said he liked her biting tongue and how serious she was. But he didn’t understand the people she came from any more than her classmates did. He thought the government should use any means necessary to put a stop to the riots in the outland, where those who had refused to leave were now starving.”

  Eban told Judy about the day his mother had been working at the lab when a protestor broke into the university to set fire to the files of a researcher who had been publishing work on neurodivergent adaptation. His mother was one of the few who made it out in time, but she felt compassion for the protestor, who died with the others and then was reviled by people in the cities and hailed as a martyr by the resistance. She said the protestor had come from the outland and wouldn’t have understood what fire would do in a medical laboratory filled with solvents and liquid oxygen.

  The day classes resumed, she learned she was seven weeks pregnant, and Eban’s father begged her not to return. But it was her only chance. She would keep her head low. She would finish her education.

  The night the resistance tried for a coup in the new national assembly, they sent a line of demonstrators to stand around the university and prevent anyone from leaving. They didn’t hurt anyone. But the police came and broke it up and word spread that there had been a massacre at the cities centre, and then, she said, it all was a dirty mess, with people fleeing and shouting, and no one sure who was attacking. A protestor was running toward her with her arm raised and suddenly fell forward on the grass. His mother recognized her from the cannery where her sisters had gone to work after their school closed. She was scarcely fifteen.

  “She’d been shot. There was blood in her mouth and she just lay there pulling at her bloody shirt. My mother didn’t know what to do but help her pull it off. A student pushed her aside. ‘Get back,’ he said, and he pinned the girl’s arm to the ground under his boot. My mother screamed and he showed her the protestor’s hand, closed around a tin-can grenade. The girl opened her mouth and no words came out, only a bright red bubble. The student stamped on her face and she didn’t move again. ‘Come on,’ he said to my mother, but she just stayed there on her knees beside the girl.

  “She had been studying physiology for three years but she had no supplies, no tools, no help, and she said she saw then that none of her education had made her any less helpless. So she just watched until the girl died. Another protestor appeared behind her and yanked her to her feet. My mother could only see the woman’s tired eyes over her mask. She suddenly found herself shouting the name of her village, the names of her parents, and over and over again, ‘I’m pregnant. Help me get out of here.’

  “And the woman did. She helped her find my father so they could go home.”

  “Home?”

  “She wanted to go back to the outland.” His mother had described to him the ride out of the cities in the back seat of a tiny solar car that belonged to one of his father’s colleagues. It had been three years since she was home, and all along the road she saw the difference. Houses plastered in dust. Cars deserted in the road, sometimes a door still open. A tiny cross in the ground in front of a line of empty cars, where someone had painted over the car windows, Lily Mary Two Months Old Dead of Dust Pneumonia.

  “She said when they stopped the car in front of her family’s house, two children from across the way came running over, holding out their hands. She remembered the babies they’d been but they’d hardly put on any weight in the three years since, even though now they were tall enough to crowd the doors of the car and reach inside. She said one didn’t even speak, just pulled at her pockets. She said their eyes looked like holes.”

  “Did she give them anything?”

  “She had brought a crate of canned meat and legumes, and she gave them one of the cans, and the older girl started pounding it with a rock, but her sister looked sullen and went back to gnawing at a bit of bone that had long been stripped of meat, and my mother said she looked
at the bone, and she understood all at once that it was the bone of a…” Judy’s eyes, watching him, were so round that he faltered. “She understood how bad things were then, worse than she’d even guessed.”

  “Did she go back to her family?”

  “They wouldn’t let her inside. She said she saw her father standing at the open door, looking twenty years older than he was. And he looked at her and shut the door.

  “She found a friend from her school days who told her about a house that had been left. Lots of left houses, I guess. She said my father agreed to stay until the baby came, but she knew right then she’d never go back to the cities again.”

  Judy told him that Alphonse’s mother was a professor too, like Eban’s father. She had taught French literature in another country, and as climate migrants flooded the border, she managed to secure a visa to accept a new teaching job. She’d just immigrated when the second tsunami hit, four years after Eban’s mother was born. And then everything was gone. The job, and the university. She and her young son travelled out to what would become the outer edge of the allotment, a decade later. She hired a local man and together they built the house where Alphonse lived until the day he left it with Judy. And one day, when he was scarcely twenty, he met Daniel at the outer gate. Daniel, a decade older, who had grown up outside the old city and had moved with his family to the cities after consolidation, the previous year. Daniel who loved to walk into the allotment, creeping past the cameras to study the insects that fed on the remaining crops. Daniel who was handsome and kind, who had a gentle and faintly mournful way about him, became the first and only man Alphonse ever loved.

  Some months later, Daniel arrived at Alphonse and his mother’s house with a suitcase, and as far as Judy knew, he’d never returned or seen his family again. “Alphonse knows nothing about the cities. He was only six years old when his mother brought him to the outland. But Daniel spent an entire year there with his family. I used to beg him to tell me about the cities, and he would almost always change the subject.”

  “Maybe he was ashamed,” Eban said, staring at the ground.

  “Ashamed?”

  “Of leaving them. His brothers and sisters. His parents.”

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I remember once Daniel told me that in the cities all seven of them were living crowded together in two rooms, at the top of a building seven floors above the ground. That was all they could afford with the consolidation payout. He said he couldn’t understand why his family seemed so happy there. He hated it. He said there was no outdoors in the cities, just concrete walls and floors and hardly any sky.

  “He got a job as a field labourer so he could get out into the allotment, and then little by little, he learned the patrol schedule and where the cameras were, and he was able to slip into the outland and collect data. He shared it with his mother, who was working on the pollinator action plan, and she connected him with a group of scientists who disputed the government’s species extinction doctrine and official climate projections. They paid him to share his research with them.”

  “What extinction doctrine?”

  “He didn’t know. He said he didn’t know. Honestly, I don’t think he really cared. He said he only ever cared about the research, not the politics. He wanted the stories the insects were telling to be heard. That was all.” Judy smiled. “I think that part was true. But he did like that the work he did mattered. I know that was true too. Even after he came to the outland, he still sent research back to the cities, and he knew it was dangerous and he did it anyway.”

  “But what was dangerous about it?”

  “I don’t know. I must have asked him every day for years to tell me more, more about the cities, more about his work, more about everything else, and he always said he didn’t know anything to tell me. All he knew was that the people who collected his research told him he needed to be very careful.”

  “Were the people…” Eban hesitated. “The people he gave his research to…were they the other ones?”

  Judy looked puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘other ones’?”

  “Did they not…Did your fathers not tell you about the other ones?” She shook her head and he saw that he now held her attention completely. “Something happened to the people in the cities. They were altered somehow. My mother didn’t like to talk about it. All she would say is that it made them dangerous.

  “When I was little, I asked questions whenever I thought I could do it without making her angry. But it was like you said about your father.”

  “The more you asked, the less she would say.”

  The conversation was circling too closely around things Eban had never been able to talk about with anyone before, and he saw now how dangerous it could be to have someone to tell things to.

  “What about your mother?” he asked, so she would talk instead.

  So Judy told him how she’d come to have two fathers. How Daniel and Alphonse had found a woman willing to carry a child for them. How the mother had begged them to let her stay when the baby came, to keep her safe, and they agreed, but then, just minutes after giving birth, she died.

  “How?” Eban asked, and Judy hesitated.

  “Her heart…”

  “Her heart?”

  “Daniel said she had something wrong with her heart, something she’d been born with. But he said it’s not something that would have been passed on to me. He said I don’t have to worry.”

  Eban nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  * * *

  —

  In the days and weeks that followed, Eban looked at Judy so much and so often he had to hide it. Alphonse caught him watching her once and said he used to find the English beautiful too ugly and lumbering a word, until he came to understand how complicated beauty was. He said it was a better word than the French one after all, because of the clumsiness of it. “Such a brutal word,” he said. “So much weight and spoken with such force. And awkward, like a burden, something hard to carry. You see what I mean, or I think you will.”

  But he had misunderstood Eban, who didn’t stare at Judy because she was beautiful, and wasn’t sure she was, even in whatever complicated way Alphonse meant. He stared because she was written there, something true and essential marked on her face in text that was almost, almost legible. Even now he feels the weight of her head on his shoulder and wonders whether her eyes are closed or open, and what they see.

  He wonders why his mother so disliked her. She prized deep feeling, and no one feels things more than Judy. He’s seen how she borrows pain from anything that suffers. After she came to their hide, he taught her what he knew of fishing and hunting, and she learned the skills well. But he saw her, once, take a fish from the hook when she thought she was alone. He saw her bend her head over it, her hands fingering the wound left behind and whispering to it something he couldn’t hear.

  Their warmth has begun to moisten the cold air, their breath surrounding them, new oxygen leaking in only slowly. The warmth makes it less bearable to be in this tight space, but it also makes Judy feel closer. “Judy,” he whispers, but she’s sleeping. He takes off his glove. Takes her hand.

  III

  He has lost track of the months.

  His mother had told him to be very careful about the passage of time. She’d numbered the days and months on the wall in white paint, and marked their passage with a bit of chalk. She warned him that if he were to lose a day, it would be gone forever. Eventually, he would lose a week, and then a month, and then the seasons would become cryptic. Too much would be unknown—when to expect heavy rains or the migration of birds; when certain animals would be at rest for winter, or made savage by hunger or rut. Marking the time, his mother said, was a daily task, as important as gathering water and food.

  He’d heeded her words; at least, he’d never intended not to. B
ut after the cold weather came this year, not a single traveller passed their hide, not even a peddler. And somehow, in the many months since he and Judy last saw any face but their own, he occasionally forgot.

  At first he’d remember in time and know a day or three had passed, and he’d mark those missing days. But then one day he couldn’t recall how many days he’d lost, and a week later he forgot again, and then again. Each time he forgot, the calendar he kept became more doubtful and therefore less and less important. Finally he stopped keeping time altogether. And now he feels this winter has stretched on far longer than it should have—somehow it has expanded beyond containment into a bloated, endless season, devouring all others. But he isn’t certain, and now he will never know.

  And so he counts the days of their walking. The new calendar in his head begins with their departure. It has taken five days to reach the bridge, longer than he’d hoped. The temperature has fallen further every day, and they walk with their faces lowered against the cold and struggle to keep warm at night. They smell the stench of eel on everything.

  They cross the bridge in the middle of their fifth day. He guesses it’s noon though the sun is smothered somewhere in the grey sky, impossible to locate. White shreds of sky slip from the clouds. Judy is the only mark of colour in the white and grey wood; he watches for her red coat and shining black pants as around her everything that isn’t tree or snow is disappeared, a white, meticulous erasure.

  At the end of the bridge, Judy stops short.

  “What?” he asks. “What is it?”

  “The dog.” She’s opening the zipper of her coat. “Beau, he…”

  He steps toward her, and looks as she peels back the collar of her tattered coat to show him the dog inside, clutched to her chest. “What is it?”

  She stares down at the bundle she holds. “Something’s wrong.”