“My pleasure. Get you something to drink?”
“A Coke,” Rachel said.
“For you, sir?”
“Anything.” His mouth was dry.
Rachel said, “I didn’t mean to be scary.”
“No. You took me by surprise, that’s all.”
“I surprise myself sometimes.”
The meal passed in awkward silence. Matt noticed Rachel glancing off across the water—checking for eagles. Once you started, it was hard to stop. “You still look sad,” she said when Arturo had brought his coffee. “Do I?”
“You were happy for a little while. Because we talked. But only for a while. Because of what’s happening.”
“Because it’s stealing you, Rachel. You’re right, I’m happy we talked. But it doesn’t change anything, does it? You’re going somewhere I can’t follow.”
“Doesn’t that happen anyway? If I’d gone off to college, or—”
“It’s hardly the same. I know you’re not a teenager forever. You go to college, maybe you get married, you have a career, things are different. Of course. But, my God, this is something else entirely. You go to college, I can phone you on weekends. Next year—can you guarantee we’ll even be able to talk to each other?” She looked away.
“So what do we have?” Matt asked. “A few months?” She pondered the question. Her eyes strayed to the harbor, the calm water there. “Maybe a few months. Maybe less.”
“You are going away.”
“Yes.”
“All of you?”
“Yes.”
“Where? When?”
“It’s not—it isn’t altogether clear.” He balled his napkin and threw it on his plate. She said, “Daddy, it works both ways. You made a choice, too. I’m entitled to a little resentment.”
“Oh?”
“Because you’re going to die. And I’m not. And it didn’t have to be that way.”
He followed the bay road toward home.
“You know I mean to save this town,” Matt told his daughter.
“I’ve heard you say so.”
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
“I’m… not sure.”
“Rachel, listen to me. If you know anything about the future, anything at all about what might happen to this town—to the planet—I need you to tell me. Because we can’t plan for what we can’t imagine.”
She was silent for a long time in the passenger seat. Then she said: “Things will go on as they are now. At least for a little while. Maybe into the winter. After that… people will start to disappear.”
“Disappear?”
“Give up the physical body. Oh, Daddy, I know how horrible that must sound! But it isn’t. It really isn’t.”
“If you say so, Rachel. What happens to these people?”
“They move to the Artifact, at least temporarily.”
“Why temporarily?”
“Because we’ll have a place of our own before long.”
“What are you saying—a human Artifact?”
“That kind of environment, yes.”
“For what purpose—to leave the planet?”
“Maybe. Daddy, these decisions haven’t been taken yet. But the planet is a serious consideration. We’ve left a terrible mark on it. The Travellers have already started cleaning it up. Erasing some of the changes we made. Taking some of the C02 out of the air.…”
“They can do that?”
“Yes.”
“So people disappear,” Matt said. “So Buchanan is empty.”
“We don’t all disappear. Or at least, not all at once. In the short run… What would you call a day like today? Indian summer? Last nice day of the year. Last chance to get in a ballgame, maybe, or go to the park. Well, I think the next four or five months are going to be Indian summer for a lot of us. Our last chance to wear skin and walk around on the earth.”
“Last chance before winter,” Matt said.
“Last chance before something better. But even if you were moving from a log cabin into the Taj Mahal, you’d still want to look around the old place before you locked the door.” Her eyes were vague, unfocused. Her voiced seemed faint. “It’s the cradle of mankind. Not always easy, leaving the cradle.”
Curious, Matt thought, how a sunny day could feel so cold.
After dinner, she curled up in the easy chair with Dostoevsky in her lap. “How come you still need to read that?” Matt asked. “How come you can’t just remember it?”
“I’m not that good yet.”
“So the library’s not defunct.”
“Not yet.”
“But the time is coming.”
“Yes.” She looked up. He was wearing his jacket; the evening had turned cooler. “Are you going out?”
“Just for a drive.”
“Want company?”
“Thank you, Rache. No. Not this time.”
He drove down to the parking lot where the summer ferry took tourists over to Crab Pot Island, a dot of National Park greenery in the embrace of the bay. The parking lot was low to the water, and Matt parked facing west, where the sky was still gaudy with sunset, although the light had begun to fade.
He used to come here in the bad time after Celeste died. When you wanted privacy and you lived with a daughter, you found your own retreats. A parking lot was one place where you could sit by yourself in an automobile and be left in peace. People assumed you were waiting for someone. They didn’t look closely. A person could be alone with his grief… could even weep, if he did so discreetly, if he forestalled the kind of helpless sobbing that would attract a stranger’s attention.
He was past that now. But he wanted the solitude.
It was that time of evening when the streetlights flicker on and everything solid seems hollow and flat; when dark thoughts come easily and are harder to ignore.
He wondered what he was trying so hard to save.
What was he sorry to lose, in this new world they were making? War was finished, after all. Disease, apparently, was a thing of the past. Starvation was history. Lies were becoming impractical.
He had never loved war, disease, starvation, or deceit.
So what was it?
What had he loved so much that he turned down the offer of eternal life?
Something evanescent. Something fragile.
A family. Rachel’s childhood. Celeste. The possibility of a human future.
All these things were illusions. He thought of Willy’s IWW banner, an old rag invested with glory by his stubborn defiance. Or the eagles of Dos Aguilas, a beautiful lie.
The sky above the bay was empty.
But the eagles flew, Matt thought. They flew when we believed in them. Willy flew, those ten minutes on the hillside. I will save this town, Matt thought. See if I don’t.
And if I can’t save the town… if it comes to that… then, by God, I will save some part of it.
Someone.
Chapter 18
Annie and Bobby
On the Saturday Matt took his daughter to Old Quarry Park, Annie Gates drove south for an hour on the coast highway.
She had made this drive one weekend out of two—sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday—for ten years now.