“Anyone else home?” asked the trooper. “Wife?”
“No, sir,” said Fowler. “She’s up in Rooneville.”
“No kids?”
“Not yet.” Fowler crossed his fingers and held them up. I wish I may I wish I might.
Just words in his head he would not share.
“Okay, well,” said the trooper. “I’m supposed to do my best to talk you folks out of your houses. That’s my best. I’ve done it.”
“Oh yeah, other people stuck it out?” Fowler asked, looking up the street. He’d seen no one today. Heard nothing.
Witnesses, was the worry. Except what had he really done? Just the one home invasion, although that was a strong way to name it, with no one being home. Wasn’t every bit of motion, anywhere, an invasion? You invade a room, you invade the street, you invade your own bed.
“A few folks. Here and there. Holed right up like you, no doubt. But look, we could get you to dry ground, no charge. Pack a bag real quick. Better safe than sorry.”
“Right. Or both.”
“What’s that?”
“Safe and sorry.”
Well, he should not have said that.
“Sorry about what?” asked the trooper.
He couldn’t find an answer. This man sure could talk and now here Fowler was, answering.
“Just a lot of suffering,” Fowler said finally. “For the people who suffer. I’m sorry about it.”
The trooper gave Fowler a pretty long look.
“Anyway, good thing you’re up here on this rise.”
“Good luck for us,” agreed Fowler. “Plus the stilts.”
“What’s that?”
“Got the house up on stilts. Even last time with, what was it, six feet of it coming right through town, we kept it pretty dry in here.”
“Good for you,” said the trooper. He looked around. “You’ve got a nice little situation. You all take care.”
“We had the work done when we bought the house. Never could have gotten a mortgage without it.”
Stupid to keep talking. When someone leaves the conversation, you let them go. Never keep talking. Just let them go. If he ever had to write a manual for how to be a person, that would be in there, right at the top. Just look for the silence and be the first to practice it.
The trooper turned back. “So, no children in the house, huh?”
That seemed to be a funny way to ask. Fowler looked at the trooper and tried to make the question go away with his face.
“No,” he said. Simple was best. It also happened to be true, which made him more uneasy. That’s where they got you, when you said the truth but did so falsely, nervously.
Fowler saw himself doing unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he’d do them. He’d come to terms with that difference a long time ago.
“I had to ask,” explained the trooper, waving as he left.
Had to ask. Fowler knew the feeling. He thought of all the things that he had to ask, too, and that he never would ask. The things he wouldn’t say. The things he wouldn’t think. Statements waiting inside him, if only the right listening device were deployed. Mostly you walked the world in a kind of lockdown. Mostly.
He couldn’t sleep so well that night. Rain and mud and rain again, and then thunder shook the house. Weather like this could peel back a mountain. A hut had no foundation. It sat on rocks. When the soil softened and the rocks shifted, then the hut was merely another grave, unearthed, sliding off, with no bodies in it yet.
No one questioned an empty grave. It was often just mistaken for a hole. No one noticed that empty graves were everywhere, inside houses and out, on mountains and right in town. Areas being readied for the dead. All areas. You more or less could not occupy an area, anywhere, that was not once, or would not soon be, a fairly ample grave.
Fowler had to feel it didn’t matter. He was in his grave already. He and the girl. Their graves were on the move. The question was how best to fix them in place. Get the thing formalized.
When he finally got out of bed, in pure darkness, he confirmed that his power was down. Streetlights, too. Nothing in the hills. No light. Too little sound. Water and heat and everything, finished for a while. How he had kept power this long was a mystery.
How big the outage was, along with its long-term forecast, would remain unknown for a bit. He had a radio that took batteries, but the men who spoke on the overnight broadcast had little to say. Farmers and thinkers and worriers. Sensibilities from another time. Imaginary creatures with old sad voices whose message, perhaps, had never been clear. If they ever had information he could use, he’d found, they withheld it from him, in ways that could seem intentional. A promise of what they might be discussing, which they never did in fact discuss.
He had a flashlight. He had a telephone landline that used to work, though he hadn’t checked it in a while. Phone calls were not his specialty, though he was capable of receiving them. Should one come along, he’d be ready.
Probably he had candles and matches if he wanted to go and look. This was the sort of thing you did when you had a partner in the darkness, a blackout friend, Marjorie used to say. Light up some candles and make a home out of it. Marjorie had always been pretty good about keeping a kit. She’d get him to fill the tub with water, to help the toilet along when the pump was off. You’d want to move that water out of your home. Keep a little bucket by the tub. Sometimes the bustle and panic was for nothing, and sometimes he was grateful that she’d thought of it.
For a minute he wondered if she was out of power wherever she was, too, but then figured that it wouldn’t be too likely. Not that he knew for sure. Rooneville was just a town name he’d given the trooper. There were lots of good town names, each of them as likely as the other. Each the name of some place you went to die. You could give them out and they seemed to work. She was asleep somewhere, he would bet, unless she’d gone and leapt a time zone, which wasn’t really like her. She was safe and warm. He could hear her voice anytime he wanted to. She would wake up soon and make tea.
Probably what he would do was sit up and wait for morning. The time right now was unclear. It could be midnight or it could be 4 a.m. Something might have happened and he would not know it. Something big. He hoped it was closer to day. Waiting wasn’t his specialty. From his kitchen window he could look to where the sun would be, expecting advance notice of some kind, but right now there was nothing out there, no lights in the hills, none in the sky. The power outage would seem complete. From far away was the whole planet dark? Maybe, if things seemed stuck out there, in terms of the sun, some kind of rupture, he’d move his chair to where he wouldn’t even have to get up. He could sit there looking for it, be the first to see it, a front-row seat for when the world turned back on.
Some people, apparently, suffered a disturbance where they were afraid the sun wasn’t going to come up. It was a fear and it had a name. His wife had read about it. She said these people had to be consoled at night, but you couldn’t console them. There was a kind of therapy for it, but she didn’t remember what it was. Supposedly it didn’t much help. They were as certain as you could be about anything. They fought you off and yelled.
Fowler pictured these people in a dark house, holding each other, trembling. When the sun finally came up they stood and shook themselves, relieved. They’d be embarrassed, apologizing to everyone. What a lot of fuss over nothing. They kept looking out the window to make sure the sun was still there. Weeping and hugging each other, shaking their heads, feeling foolish, foolish. Then the day, of course, advanced, took a left turn, deepened, the afternoon came on strong, and they felt a pull again, a terrible suspicion. They went outside, staring and pointing. They watched and wept, holding each other as tightly as they could, as the sun went down again, for what genuinely felt like the last time on earth.