“At Grandma’s?”
“Yes, Mom and Dad got in this fight about all sorts of things and Dad said he’d had to give up all kinds of things to be with her and then Mom said oh, it’s that again and then they yelled at each other and then Dad went to live with Grandma.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Do you think Grandma is upside-down now, too?”
I felt my stomach twist. “Do you know where Grandma lives?”
“Somewhere we always went by car,” Dawnie said, tugging at her crooked ponytails. “But I don’t wanna go to Grandma’s. Grandma yells at Mommy, too.”
“So where would you like to go?”
“I want my Mommy.”
I realized that Dawnie didn’t have anything left as well, just like me. So we had to share.
“Then you’re coming with me,” I decided. “And on the way, we’ll try to find Mommy. But you’ll have to do one thing for me.”
“What?” Dawnie asked.
I gave her the 7-Up bottle. Dawnie took it in her hands as if it held the weight of the world. She looked wide-eyed in through the plastic, and Bubbles looked wide-eyed out. For a second, something of immense significance seemed to be exchanged between the goldfish and the girl, as if her desire to see her mother and Bubbles’ desire to see you, which was really my desire to see you, were just one and the same thing. Then Dawnie’s face lit up in a wide smile, displaying her entire gappy set of teeth. From that moment on, Dawnie never left Bubbles’ side. If he was hungry, she flaked fish food in through the bottleneck; if he was thirsty, she added more water; and if he got short of breath she blew in air through a straw until Bubbles regained his luster.
At the end of the world, we all need something to hold on to. If we don’t hold on, we’ll have to let go. And if we let go, we’ll have to find our own orbit in the universe.
And so I held on to the playground fence. Tightly! We had reached it by climbing through the walkway door and over the tabletop bridge, but once there, the unnatural depths below our feet affected me so acutely that I seized up against the fence for several minutes, my hair streaming in the wind, unable to go forwards or backwards. I only dared to look up when I felt Dawnie’s soft hand touching mine.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said, showing me the 7-Up bottle in her little backpack to urge me on. “There’s nothing down there.”
That wasn’t just the truest, but also the loneliest thing she could have said. The abyss instantly lost its meaning. It turned into just another obstacle, one of the obstacles I could lower Dawnie down along or lift her up with the rope between us. Inch by inch, we shuffled toward the edge of the park and, deftly manipulating the attic ladder, reached the first treetop in the row of lime trees lining the street. Even though many branches had been ripped off by falling cars, it was relatively easy to use the ladder to climb from tree to tree to windowsill and back to tree. And so we zigzagged forward, a ripped-open Earth surface with power cables and sewers protruding like dead veins and bones over our heads, and every step brought me closer to you, every step took the sting out of the cruelty of your last words and transformed them into a message of hope: Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow.
“Hey, you there!”
In an easy chair on a timber platform, hanging a little ways below an attic window from a makeshift assembly of furniture, sat a short, balding man. On the boards beside him stood a thermos, and a steaming mug of coffee. When we spotted him, the man waved his binoculars.
“Relief troops are on the way!” he yelled good-naturedly.
“Really?” I yelled back, feeling a spark of hope.
The man burst out in a roar of laughter. “Of course not! I thought you were the relief troops!” He smacked himself on the thigh and took a sip of coffee. “From what I can see from down here, things are not looking good!”
I sighed, nevertheless glad to be able to talk to an adult. “What do you think happened?” I asked, gesturing around.
“Hanged if I know!” the man yelled. “The Earth pulled a fast one on us, now didn’t it! No Internet, no phones, no information! Last night I heard a loudspeaker message from downtown, but it was too far away to make out what it was saying! I’ve heard rumors that they’re building rope bridges and structures down there! You know, plenty of food for survivors and all that! But you’re only the second group I’ve seen come by here all day! The first one made it to the end of the street before they fell into the sky by accident!” He paused for a second, and then added, “We’re doomed!”
“How about you? Aren’t you going to try getting downtown?”
“Now you listen to me, son!” the man yelled. “I’ve lived here all my life! As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s seen both the construction and the demise of this street! What do you think about that?”
On the second day of our journey, we saw injured people on ceilings behind windows, waving curtains and begging, their hands pressed up against the glass.
On the third day, we found a string of knotted sheets dangling down from a bay window, where someone had gone in search of solid ground.
On the fourth day, my heart sank, because the hours and minutes were raining down in the universe and we were making such slow progress, and because I missed you so much, and because all ordinary and extraordinary speculations about the catastrophe turned out to be pointless. We had climbed on the underside of the bridge, now suspended below the river. The road surface had fallen off, but the iron frame was still intact and a few concrete slabs were still fixed to the pylons. And believe it or not: the water was still there. Flowing like liquid lead across the ceiling of the Earth’s surface, it spat the laws of nature in the eye. In places where the surface heaved, the water rained down in a soft, windblown mist, as if the river surface itself was the plane where gravity flipped over.
“Why isn’t the river falling down?” Dawnie asked.
I wanted to say something—I think Earth was simply fed up with us—but before I had a chance, Dawnie got bowled over by a hang glider that suddenly came hurtling through the space between the river and the bridge. My hand darted out to grab her little backpack before she and Bubbles in the bottle could tumble away. The aviator whooped, circled around in the airspace below us, and came flying toward us from the front. For a second, it seemed like he was going to crash, but in the last instant he pulled the hang glider’s nose up, slowing down and losing lift right over the underside of the bridge. He landed with a clumsy, stumbling step and stopped, dragging the delta wing behind him. “Rescue-squad, at your service,” the aviator said. “Women and children first, please.”
“That was . . . spectacular,” I stammered.
“Thank you, thank you,” the man said, unclipping himself from his contraption. “Municipal service. Only way of picking up survivors and getting them to the evacuation centers.”
“There are evacuation centers?” I asked incredulously.
“In the basement below city hall.”
“And the city had one of those . . . flying things?”
“Three, actually,” the aviator grinned. “Haven’t you seen my associates around? Maybe they haven’t been to this part of town yet.” He lowered himself to his knee in front of Dawnie and took her hand. “Hello there, big girl. How would you like to go flying?” Then he looked up at me. “Sorry, children first. It’s protocol. I’ll come back for you later.”
Dawnie shifted a forlorn look from the aviator to me. Something in her eyes alarmed me. Something wasn’t right.