The rest is history, just not the kind that comforts. By the time of the specialist’s daughter’s death, creams of understanding were no longer new. Lotions smart and otherwise. Fortifying pastes across the torso, or in skins hovering at face level. Surrogate torsos made of lotion. A cosmetic fore-face that hung in liquid suspension in front of the real face, which turned as old and muddy as a coin. Bodies of cream worn like clothing. And so decorated. Foreign-language creams at the throat, to make speech plain. A cream at the back of the neck to release secrets. A salve for the mute and a salve for the tongue. A swishing lotion for inside the mouth, to protect the speaker from cream-induced prophecy. An unwitting release of secrets, compelled forth by perfect application, unbeknownst, of a cream. Applied in the woods. In the home. At work. Underground. On people, things, and space.
Omen
It was April 29 and the streetlights were flickering in and out. And yet—little miracle—power was still on at Fowler’s house. Barely. He still had water. Heat. The clock on his stove was blinking, so at some point in the night he’d lost electricity. Briefly. His house might go dark again. It was out of his hands.
The flood had come on hard yesterday, the answer to a season of mountain rain. They’d seen it coming, and all the clay-faces had been crying about it on the news. Whimper whimper out of their omen holes. Everybody run for the hills. But you couldn’t force people from their homes. Yet. You could scare them to higher ground, another town, a school gymnasium outside the flood zone. You could conjure the odds of survival, showing the footage of past disasters, a child’s sock in a ditch, the imprint of a little person in the grass. Most people would scatter.
Most people. Excepting his truly. Fowler the Last. There would be no heirs. He’d waited out the evacuation because certain projects flourished in an empty neighborhood. Houses hollow. No people around to see. Most of what was really urgent to do necessitated a near-total absence of the living. Hell yes, he was relieved, but there was a sack of undesired emotion inside him. Instincts boiled up, even in idiots. His blood was on notice. His body could be scared and so what. Death to all feeling soon, right? RIP and whatever, because darkness forevermore. He wasn’t in charge of his feelings. It was kind of a relief. Just see where the secret engine pulled him, and don’t show your goddamn cards.
From his doorway Fowler could see a distant light burning in the hills. Given what he knew about the terrain, a light of that sort didn’t compute. There were mud barriers up there, rock dams, and lookout blinds, sometimes with little huts attached. There was what was called a sluice. He’d been to a few of the huts. He knew the hills pretty well. You could enter a hut, go to sleep. No one bothered you. You could think of it as your own home when you wanted to.
But there were no power lines at that elevation. Not even animals, really. The word “hideout” had obvious problems. Connotations. You pictured a shoot-out. You pictured an old dirty bed with handcuffs on the floor, a shit stain on the wall. But he used the word privately as a kind of code. He knew what it meant. He could call it whatever he liked.
He found it hard not to worry. A light pulsing in the hills as if someone had just plugged in the eye of God. Was there a work crew dug in up there, and did that mean there’d been a significant mudslide, bringing a hut down with it? With some daylight he’d have perspective. Shapes would come out and show themselves.
He held something of value in the hills, is why he cared. That was a safe way to think about it. Holdings. A lien. A claim. Nothing on paper, of course. Never that. You had to keep yourself from even thinking of these things in any detail. In case of what? Men, women, and children, first of all. Spies of varying skill sets, which was more or less the entire human race. People who were not whole. Certain citizens, just a mush of sadness on the inside, ached and pined and agonized unless they could lick your insides for whatever you knew. They had to sniff you over like you were a dog bowl and tear off a piece of your special core and just rub it all over themselves. Your own true water. Not that there were people who could stethoscope your thoughts. He wasn’t stupid. But the operating wisdom now, in the year of all hell breaks loose, was that you didn’t know who could hear you, see you, know you. Weren’t you the ultimate fool if you thought you had a secret that was yours alone?
At sunrise Fowler stepped outside his house, closed the door gently so as not to disturb his wife. It would be pretty hard to wake her, he laughed to himself, because she wasn’t home. Hadn’t been for a good while. How funny that he kept doing that, tiptoeing around, being so careful, so quiet, because she always said his steps were too heavy. She could hear him breathing in the next room. She told him he coughed too loudly, and once she said that when he coughed like that, with such a rumble, she felt threatened.
Threatened like, what, he was going to hurt her?
She wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t control her own reactions. How was she supposed to just pretend it didn’t scare her? Did he want her to do that? She could try to do that. Would that make him happy, she asked, if when he did something she found frightening, she kept quiet and calm and acted like it did not upset her?
He didn’t want to smash her head in. Nothing like that. He would know if he regularly had thoughts like that. He wasn’t really that way. She wasn’t here, anyway. He couldn’t get to her if he tried.
Fowler wandered the waterlogged neighborhood, mud spilling over his Bogs. What a strange vacancy all around him, like everyone just had to get off the planet.
He wanted to be able to look up into the sky and see a stream of people, just slashes and dark marks, shooting off and away from here. A proper evacuation. A full-on abandonment of the world. That wasn’t something you often got to see. The word “evacuation” should be held in reserve for such an event.
From Burdock Road to the Deering radial there were uprooted trees drifting by like canoes. The people who had left yesterday had left badly. Doors to some houses were still open, lights shining inside, which, if he didn’t have something else to take care of right now, he could be a good neighbor about. He bet there were cats. People often left a cat behind. During calamity, Fowler could pick a house, and go on in, and run into a cat or two. See who wore the crown then, who owned the planet. He didn’t really know who kept cats. You had to be a regular in someone’s house before you knew if they kept a cat.
He got the occasional invite, but mostly he knew these houses from the outside. Sometimes the cats never appeared when someone strange was over. The cats had an idea of their own safety and they practiced it carefully. People less so, which, well. A different attitude toward safety. Someone comes to your house, and you happen to be in the other room, you come out. You don’t crawl under your couch. Mostly because of being polite. That would be a good chart to look at. Just all of the creatures and how they supervised their own safety. Strategies against harm, real or imagined. Accurate or inaccurate view of a threat. Good choices, bad choices. Success rates. How was the species doing overall, in relation to its enemies? So many charts he’d like to examine.