The waitress brought the—handwritten—bill. Louise paid it. She and her daughter walked out together. As Vanessa unlocked her bike, she lit a cigarette. “When did you start doing that?” Louise exclaimed. “It’s not healthy.”
“You live. Then you die. So what? While I live, I want to live, dammit, not just exist.” Vanessa blew out smoke. A little sheepishly, she went on, “I don’t smoke much. I can’t afford to. These friggin’ things are expensive.”
“You shouldn’t do it at all,” Louise said.
“Yes, Mommy,” Vanessa said, which meant she wouldn’t listen. When had she ever? She pedaled away. Sighing, Louise walked toward the bus stop.
XV
Rob Ferguson tried never to miss a Guilford town meeting. You had to make your own entertainment around here these days, and town meetings held more of it than anything else he could think of. They didn’t charge admission, either.
Jim Farrell stood at the pulpit in the Episcopal church. That would have been worth the price of admission if there were one. The wind outside made the windows rattle. It was below freezing out there, but not really cold. Rob’s ideas about what cold meant had gone through some changes since he came to Maine.
“I have word from On High,” Farrell said, as if he were the minister who officiated when Sunday rolled around. “Well, actually I have word from up north and word from down in the wilds of Washington. For people will write to a harmless backwoods hick in the wilds of forgotten Maine. They will unburden themselves to him, knowing full well that nothing they say in their letters will ever reach the news channels they still enjoy to the fullest in their oh-so-civilized lands.”
“Subtle, isn’t he?” Lindsey whispered to Rob as chuckles ran through the church.
“Like an avalanche,” he whispered back. Their son, Colin Marshall Ferguson, dozed in his arms. Lindsey hadn’t wanted to name the baby after any male in her family. Her mother and father had gone through a divorce at least as unpleasant as the one that split Rob’s folks. Her father’s current girlfriend was drop-dead gorgeous… and about her age.
The more or less benevolent more or less dictator of Maine north and west of the Interstate rolled on: “One of the things they tell me is that a big part of northeastern North America’s power grid depends on electricity from plants along the chief rivers in northern Quebec. Now, friends, with all due local pride I say that there are not any great number of places with more miserable, colder climates on God’s half-frozen earth than this patch which we ourselves infest. But northern Quebec, I kid you not, is one of them.”
More chuckles from the packed house. Farrell acknowledged them with a tip of his trademark fedora. He overacted and overwrote. He would have bombed on TV, but live he was terrific.
And he had things to say: “So far, they’ve managed to keep those hydroelectric plants going in spite of what the supervolcano has done to the weather. So far. But the winters keep getting worse. If those rivers freeze up and don’t thaw out, the power plants up there can’t make power. And if that dread day comes—no, when it comes—do you know what happens to the power grid in most of the Northeast?”
“What happens?” a voice called from the audience. Not just any old voice: Dick Barber’s voice. When you needed a particular question asked at a particular time, you planted a shill to make sure it would be. You did if you were a cynical old fox like Farrell, anyhow.
The retired history professor beamed out at his erstwhile campaign manager, as if surprised and pleased he’d inquired. Yeah, as if, Rob thought.
“I’ll tell you what happens. The grid goes down, that’s what,” Farrell answered. “So millions upon millions of people get to find out what we’ve enjoyed ever since the eruption.”
He still sounded droll, but nobody was laughing any more. People up here, people in thinly populated, self-sufficient northern Maine, had more or less managed to muddle through without much in the way of electricity. How would New York City or Philadelphia or Buffalo do? Rob was no prophet, so he couldn’t be sure ahead of time. But he could guess, and none of his guesses was optimistic.
“And on that cheerful note, I give you back to more local concerns,” Farrell said. “You do need to know, though, that the rest of the land of the free and the home of inflation may forget about us altogether, not just mostly.”
There was commerce with the rest of the country at high summer, when things thawed out enough to permit it. New clothes came in, and canned goods, and batteries. So did such essentials as whiskey and rum and wine and beer. Moonshine popped up all over the place in these parts. The turnips and potatoes that gave their lives in the service of distillation did not die in vain. What the amateurs turned out was longer in kick than in flavor, though. When summer lasted long enough for barley to ripen, there was homebrew beer, too. Some of that was pretty good, but supply never matched demand.
This past summer, a little weed had made it up here, too—unofficially, of course. Rob smoked some. It was as much about nostalgia as about getting loaded. And smoking anything hurt when you hadn’t done it for a long time. But for alcohol, he was pretty much locked into the Aristotelian world. So was everyone else in these parts.
After news that a big chunk of the country’s population might have to find a way to live without Twitter and streaming Netflix and porn (to say nothing about details like lights and water pumps), arguments about things like moose-meat rations and the proper punishment for public drunkenness seemed less important—and less amusing—than they would have otherwise. When little Colin started fussing, Rob was glad for the excuse to leave early.
“Brr!” he said as soon as he and Lindsey and the baby got outside and the wind hit them. But it was an ordinary complaint, not the kind that meant they’d all turn into icicles if they didn’t get inside in the next thirty seconds.
The sky was clear. A million stars blazed down from it. Rob had never seen skies like this, skies where the Milky Way really was a glowing river through blackness, in SoCal or anywhere else. You didn’t get skies like this unless you went somewhere far, far from electricity—or unless the electricity went somewhere far, far from you.
Northern lights danced. Some of the streamers were maroon, others golden. A shooting star scratched a brief, bright, silent trail through them. Somewhere out there were the probes the USA had launched in happier times. For all Rob knew, they were still sending back data. Once upon a time, he’d thought space exploration was the most important thing humanity could do. He couldn’t imagine it would ever mean anything to him again.
“That’s sad,” Lindsey said when he spoke his thought aloud as they made their way back through the darkness.
“Yeah. It is. But my thoughts have pulled back—pulled in. It’s like I told you when you wanted to head south after Colin was born: I’m a small-town guy now. My horizon barely has Newport in it these days, let alone Mars or Jupiter.”
Newport was the small town—small, but bigger than Guilford—where the road up to here branched off from I-95. It wasn’t even forty miles away. Without a car or a bus or a railroad, though, forty miles was two days’ travel. Now he got why, before the Industrial Revolution, most people never went farther than twenty-five miles from home their whole lives. He’d known the factoid for a long time. Here in this postindustrial corner of the world, he got it.
He got why darkness was such a big deal in those days, too. Without electric lights to push it back, it was always there at night, always lurking, always waiting to reach out and drown you.