It’s occurring to me that besides my dad’s final word and my own chatter, I haven’t heard a human voice since the world ended. I pull the ring and release it. At first there’s static, then a slow crescendo of sound as some out-of-use mechanism struggles to rewind the string. The doll speaks, slowly, garbled, but clear enough: “new… creatures… coming…” I drop the doll and almost wet myself.
I haul ass all the way back to Brine Street. When I slam the brakes in front of my house, the Pathfinder’s brakes grind miserably. I am reminded it’s time to learn to change out the brake pads, or to hotwire a new vehicle. Sweating by the time I reach the attic, I step to the corner behind the old wicker rocker. One hand is over my heart, which is going like a jackhammer, the other at my forehead. I think of Grandfather, then picture in my mind’s eye a beam of light coming out of my forehead. The imaginary beam marks a spot ahead of me. Reaching out, I pinch at the spot with my thumb and pointy finger. I breathe and concentrate until the spot’s tangible to my flesh. Pulling the spot downward, I unzip the doorway. I’m standing in front of a V-shaped opening between here and there. I step out of the room and into the void of comfort. Grandfather called it the Quiet Space.
In the void, the scent and light of my world slips away, the air of this world is crackling molecules. Momentarily, my eyes will adapt to the darkness. I zip up the door, closing out Grandfather’s room.
As I’m rubbing Grandfather’s shoulders and back with Bengay, he tells me it’s time to visit the Quiet Space. He tells me the story of a boy who discovers a special place beyond our world, where he is safe from everything. In the Quiet Space he is not restricted by the rules of our world. He doesn’t need food or drink, and he won’t be affected by time. It takes a while for me to understand that this is more than a story. The Quiet Space is real. It takes even longer for me to find the zipper that opens the door. It’s more about coming to sense its existence and wishing it into real life. When I finally open the door and giggle at what I have done, and can see the pride in Grandfather’s shiny eyes, I feel so loved.
“In here nothing can touch you,” he says. “Nothing can see you.”
Grandfather tells me of the coming days of darkness, the Change, the new world. And most importantly, the New Creatures.
“The New Creatures?”
“We’ll talk more about them when you get a little older,” he replies. “I don’t want to frighten you. But the time will come when you must hear about the New Creatures, even though it will scare you. Do you understand, darling?”
I tell him I do, but I don’t.
“What about Mom and Dad?”
“I’m sorry, my darling, but the Quiet Space is for you alone. That’s the way it must be.”
“How do you know, Grandfather? Have you tried to let other people in?”
He snaps at me. He’s done it before, but not often. “Child! Do not question the path that has been prepared for you. Don’t bring insolence to your naivety.”
“I’m sorry, Grandfather. I love Mom and Dad…”
He wipes tears from my face and kisses my cheeks.
The doll is a messenger from Grandfather, I know it. I need him more than ever. Some days I hate him for leaving me alone to deal with this new life. I remember as he lay dying in the hospital, Grandfather told me the Change would come any day. I’d been hearing about the damn Change for so long that at twenty-one years of age, I was surprised he said “days.” It had always been “in the future,” or “when you’re older.”
I’m home from college to see Grandfather because they tell me he won’t be leaving the hospital. Though we talk every week, I’ve seen him less and less since attending school, Bowling Green State University. I think of his hospital room as Antarctica: a bright, frozen white space where a person can’t live for long. His appearance shocks me. He’s no longer the big room who hugged me away in his huge arms and barrel chest. Grandfather is a feeble shell of a man. I’m thinking the real Grandfather is hidden beneath this boney man tangled in tubes and rumpled bedsheets.
When I’m alone with him, he tells me, “I’ll give you a signal when it’s time to escape into the Quiet Space.” He can’t breathe on his own and one eye is open wider than the other. His lips are so dry and cracked they look like dead fruit about to fall from a tree.
“Grandfather, don’t leave me,” I request selfishly.
“Hush, darling,” he manages. “Your whole life you’ve been preparing for this.”
“Grandfather!” My voice is unrestrained, juvenile. I’m shivering, breathing out frost. “Please don’t leave me!”
But he does.
He leaves me in this frozen wasteland, heart iced over with gooseflesh from head to toe. I remember my daddy tells me it’s okay to cry. I tell him, “I won’t because Grandfather will always be with me and he’s prepared me for this.”
I return to college after the funeral but promise Mom and Dad I’d be back next weekend to check on them. That weekend, having early dinner with my parents in our Foursquare on Brine Street, the world cracks. I look down into my tomato soup and see Grandfather’s false teeth float to the surface. Laughing’s the only thing I think to do. “It’s time,” they say. Light outside our windows draws down, an instant sunset.
“What the heck?” Dad says.
Donut, our eight-year-old Lhasa Apso, emerges from under the table in a barking frenzy. I react like a well-trained soldier. I don’t even think to say goodbye to my parents—Dad at the dinner table, Mom carrying a plate—as I bolt from the room.
“Mia!” is the last thing I hear my father say as I stumble up the stairs, to Grandfather’s room, to the void. I’ve opened it many times under his watch, but never by myself. Through the semicircle window, the black sky lights up like a nuclear bomb detonating in heaven. The light flashes through the window and illuminates the attic like a thousand-watt bulb. A moment later, as I’m concentrating to open the void, God-thunder descends, raining down on the world and shaking the house. Before I can witness anything else, I surrender to the safe place prepared for me.
I’m crying in the void. In eternal quiet, serene darkness, I bawl. For days, or weeks, or months, I float in the void. I am disembodied without an environment to define me. I am here, nowhere, until the whispering voice of Grandfather tells me it is time to come out.
Grandfather’s room has an odd stillness—the way it felt when I first returned to it after his funeral. I don’t want to go downstairs but do. Down to the second floor where I sleep, then down to the first. The house smells like sulfur. My parents never left the dining room.
Motionless at the table, Daddy’s head rests sideways on his plate. His eyes and mouth are pits of ash. Thin gray smoke trails up from the pits. Mommy dropped into a sitting position on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs. Her eye sockets are smoldering, bits of ash tumble from her slack mouth. My screams shatter my own ears. I hear only heartbeats throbbing in each canal.
Outside, on Brine Street, the first body I see is Mr. Swiftleg’s. On the other side of the street, directly across from us, he’s slumped over his lawnmower, the handle of the machine jammed up his armpits. His face is tipped down to the mower, but I can tell by the ash spilling on the machine that he’s dead. So is little Carol, his daughter. She’s on the concrete steps of their porch with Barbie dolls at her feet. Locks of her golden-blond hair have blown into her ashy mouth, her tiny head is twisted sideways.