Scout guarding the pump. ebay.com
At the beginning of the path we’d made the day before, where the brush was thicker, there stood Scout, like a sentry.
“You can’t come in” she stated.
“Why not?” I asked.
“They’re taking their first forest shower, and they’re not done yet.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. I’ll leave you alone. I guess I’ll see you back at the house later.”
I turned and strolled back to the house, to my library. I felt a strange apprehension in my mind, and I needed to sit alone and contemplate.
I had envisioned that all of this was going to happen, with our wafers in play, cozy in our little enclave. Everything was coming up roses for us. But everywhere else things were surely going to hell. There were seven million people in the greater bay area, all waking up without power or water or phones or television, with only the scant stashes of food and drink they might happen to have in their cupboards and broken refrigerators. And this was already the second day, so some people’s supplies were surely running low.
“How many days of food can poor people keep on hand? One or two at best.” I thought.
“What next?” I imagined that the wholesale looting of stores would soon commence by every able-bodied man with a family to support, with crowbars and axes and guns, leading to fires and pandemonium and fighting in the streets. All the while a reciprocal fear would counterbalance this violence. A trembling and terror would strike the minds and limbs of the old and the weak and the children, hearing the riots outside, cowering in their basements or curtained bedrooms, helpless, a nightmare scenario.
I almost felt as if I knew too much, having read deeply into the ancient Roman historians. Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius now came flashing through my brain in all its lurid detail, with all the explosions, the lava flowing towards Pompeii, the people in total panic and the inevitable doom.
And what did we have; a month’s supply of food, a few guns, limited ammunition and a few puny locks holding our gates. All of our neighbors would be well past a frantic desperation within a week. I imagined scenes of cannibalism and the zombies of faces I knew walking in the night, banging on doors, breaking windows.
I was in a cold sweat when I awoke out of this vivid half-dream and it shook me to the core. One thing about this enhanced brain power, everything was amplified, the bad as well as the good. For all the pristine sweets of love I’d enjoyed with Claire this morning, I had just fallen off a cliff into a titanic gloom, and I could hardly stand up. I felt like I was weighed down with chains, the knowledge of imminent disaster, at the bottom of an ocean.
I did make my way out of the dim library and streaming light enveloped me as I entered the kitchen. There was Scout, who ran up and hugged my waist.
“They’re done, and they want you to see it now, come.”
She pulled me by the hand to the back of the Abbott’s yard and down the narrow path. Claire and Naomi were standing at the end of it, dressed again but their hair still wet, like two nymphs from some Hans Christian Andersen story, ready to show me their invention.
It was simple enough. They’d hooked up a short hose to the nozzle of the fountain pump, strung it to a tree branch right above the platform and screwed a shower head into that, so that if you pumped the hand lever you would be delivering yourself your shower, cold but effective.
“I hope this isn’t a hint that you expect me to take one right now.” I said as they both smiled at me.
“No, of course not” Claire replied coyly, “but you must admire our cleverness.”
“I see and I fear your cleverness” I replied, “like the Greeks bearing gifts to the Trojans.”
They both laughed. They were resplendent in their beauty at that moment and I could never forget the mental image they left me, like a photograph — two maidens, standing alone in a forest of greenery, as if on some tropical island in a delirious castaway’s wildest dream.
That afternoon we enjoyed another feast of lunch on the Abbott’s back deck, drenched in sunlight. There was food that had to be eaten up, now or never. I dragged Charlie and Jaime away from their table and the soldering iron and we all partook of the banquet which Lucille laid out, along with many bottles of white wine, the conversation flowing.
I had Claire close by my side, holding my hand on the table at times, communing. At other moments she would let it go and gaze off towards the bay, serenely motionless, lost in the contemplation of her own happiness. I kept glancing at her beautiful red hair. I thought I could still see in it the tiny droplets of water from the shower, slowly shrinking and evaporating in a deluge of sunbeams. I imagined a blue ocean and sea spray and both of us lying on the front deck of a long, sleek sailboat heading off towards nowhere, but joyful, with insatiable desire.
She woke me with a kiss.
“Roland you nodded off. Is anything wrong?”
Yes, something most certainly was wrong as I realized I had just blacked out. With the image of the sailboat there followed one more, of a blinding wave rushing towards me from a nearby nuclear explosion. I was standing on a pier and watched it as it came. When it hit me it ripped all my skin away in horrible agony. In another instant, it melted away my flesh and organs as I tried to keep standing. I saw myself as a skeleton and dead. But I didn’t want to upset the company, so I hedged.
“Just daydreaming.” I said, still a bit disoriented, “Must be the wine.”
Jaime and Charlie had already returned to the basement. All of a sudden we noticed a voice in the distance. It was a man speaking through a bullhorn far away but gaining in volume, from a moving vehicle coming our way. It was driving up the main avenue some three blocks away and at its closest approach we could make out a few words.
“Stay indoors, martial law is... Looting will be severely punished… to dawn curfew. We are working around the clock to restore water and electricity. Your cooperation is ess…”
Then the voice faded away, which told us next to nothing, only that a few civil servants were desperately trying to maintain order and that they had some vehicles working. As this affluent area was probably the least of their concerns, the ghettos being their first, we wondered at the quickness of their response. From a break in the trees, a small slice of the flatlands was visible from the Abbott’s deck and also part of the skyline of San Francisco and the water across to the Marin peninsula. I went and got my binoculars to see what I could from that vantage, but buildings obscured most of the streets. The one section of University Avenue that I could survey had a few pedestrians on it but no moving cars. I did spot one small sailboat moving south from Angel Island. I wondered if it was heading out to sea. I wished I was.
Then I shook my head and commanded it to focus.
“No more daydreaming for me.” I said to myself.
We had been lounging on the deck long enough, feasting on way too much food before it spoiled. We were holding hands and telling stories, sipping wine, like idle, rich fools while the storm or perhaps I should say tsunami was rolling in. I went to the basement to check on the progress there. The inverter was up and running. Charlie was instructing Jaime in tuning the shortwave. Scout was standing at his side, soaking in all the instructions. They planned to take turns and monitor the airwaves as much as possible. I told them to train me when they had a chance, so I could take some shifts. There was no reason why Naomi and Claire shouldn’t learn too. We could all pitch in.
But I had one more chore for Charlie’s expertise. I took him upstairs and showed him the keypad to the panic room door. If we hooked up that circuit to the generator, I asked, could we get it open. He took a screwdriver from his pocket and opened it up.
“Nope, it’s fried” he told me. “But we can probably power the motor up and short this out and get the door open. Then we should be able to disengage everything from the inside, make it a manual sliding door and put a lock on the inside, so it’s still a safe room.”
We spent the next hour doing just that while Jaime manned the radio. We ripped apart the wall from the inside once we got in, disconnected the motor and found that two people could push the thick metal door on its track and open and close the thing. It hardly needed a lock, being so heavy, but we installed one anyway. Charlie was impressed with the room as he gave it a brief tour and said if he’d known about it he might have picked it instead of the basement for his radio post, except for all the fancy clothes.
“Do the rich need all this stuff” he exclaimed. “I had no idea what I didn’t have.”
All I could think of were the faces of Mary and Jane and their childlike excitement that night one week ago when I first opened it up to their amazed eyes. It had been a perfect night, so bright in my memory, so full of laughter and hope and innocence, two young women trying on clothes and giggling, in a world at peace.
And what was the picture now? It had turned from day to darkest night. They were gone, possibly dead, their little girl Scout, left behind with me, hardly a parent, and the whole planet in a shambles or soon to be, technology destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon, with no chance of repairing itself for decades.
“Was it such a short while ago?” I thought to myself, “It seems to me like an eternity. It seems impossible. This whirlwind of events is dizzying.”
Then I felt sick to my stomach, violently so. Lucky the bathroom was right there. I rushed to the sink to throw up.
Then my head went muddy, and my balance was off. The last thing I remember was reeling and reaching to clutch Charlie’s arm as he came forward to help me. But he didn’t make it in time. I fell to the floor. Then everything went blank.
