The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel Read online

  THE LIGHTEST OBJECT IN THE UNIVERSE

  a novel by

  Kimi Eisele

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For my parents, Tura and Fred, and for all the hearts that mourn and yearn

  Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different. . . . There was no electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at once—it was a sense of happiness to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.

  —Resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, after an October 2003 hurricane, from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell

  If the mental environment we live in has a single distinctive feature, the way that oxygen defines our atmosphere, it is self-absorption. . . . Some years ago, working on a book, I watched every word and image that came across the largest cable system in the world in a 24-hour period—more than 2,000 hours of ads and infomercials, music videos and sitcoms. If you boiled this stew down to its basic ingredient, this is what you found, repeated ad infinitum: You are the most important thing on earth, the heaviest object in the universe.

  —Bill McKibben, “The Mental Environment,” Adbusters 38, November/December 2001

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Darkness

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two: The Center

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three: Halcyon

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Thirteen days Into the second month of the year, the lights began to go out. Which is to say that the power grid died. In some places, the darkness came suddenly, an abrupt and violent nightfall. Elsewhere, it pulsed intermittently—like the wings of an injured bird—until finally landing for good. Everyone pressed the buttons and switches they were accustomed to pressing, but nothing happened. No light beams radiated across the room, no sound surged through the speakers, no hum or whir or tick emerged from the hard drives. The switches simply did not switch anything.

  Though no network television or internet news could report the blackout, the word “cyberattack” started making its way across the landscape. But no one could say with certainty who its perpetrators were. Many assumed it was the work of the crescendoing jihad in one of the misunderstood countries to the east. Some presumed a coalition of domestic anarchists had done it, a final act of liberation. Others believed those “anarchists” had been hired as professional agitators by the government. Some said it was a superworm gone rogue.

  The darkness was the final stroke in a series of blows that had pushed the world to its knees. In a system of uneven distribution, where “debt” was a word without consequence, only so much teetering was possible before the party ended. The companies that were too big to fail failed. The oil supply chain broke after a series of terrorist attacks halted extraction. Fuel costs rose by 200 percent. In the United States, young people who’d been sold a future they couldn’t afford defaulted on student loans. All these events precipitated the October Shocks, when the dollar fell by more than 40 percent, forcing the government to print more bills—so many bills that kids needed backpacks to haul around their lunch money. Then the rest of the public utilities went. Then the companies that had scrambled to stand in for the public utilities went. The government shut down, and no one could bail it out.

  Meanwhile, the flu swept across the globe like a wind, extinguishing hundreds of thousands of people. A potent strain, it came on like a cold but burned up its victims with fever and drowned their lungs. Those who’d caught earlier, milder strains were fortunate in their resistance but were left to deal with the dead.

  Nature continued to exact her own revenge. Torrential rains led to floods that swallowed bayous and bog towns. Forest fires, now unstoppable, swept across the West.

  Onto the topography of change and despair came the darkness. There were neither prescriptions nor predictions. Grief and pain could make you either cruel or generous; the only common denominator was loss.

  While changes circumnavigated the globe, they were noticed particularly in the country that had for so long perceived itself as the center of the universe, due to its wealth and style and the ever-burning beacon it offered for those living in places arguably darker and poorer and seemingly more precarious. It wasn’t just electrical power that they’d lost, but purchasing power. No more caffe lattes with scones. No more handheld i-thingies. No more tanks full of gas. And no more personal power: the bold bravado, the unwavering invincibility, the belief that they would always be on top, delivered from despair—because delivery was what they knew and delivery was what they believed they were entitled to.

  People stood wide-eyed, surprised by sounds that suddenly seemed to fill the silence: birdsong, wind, heartbeats, their own breath. Amidst their fear that everything they knew was ending, they saw that some things remained constant. One such thing was the sun, which continued its arc over the edge of the world, marking the days one by one, oblivious to their particulars but illuminating them all the same.

  PART ONE

  Darkness

  CHAPTER 1

  At the end of a long and narrow street not far from the sea, right around the time of the spring equinox, the sun rose as a sliver between two skyscrapers. Carson Waller could see it if he stepped out onto the tiny balcony of his apartment at precisely the right time. One morning in mid-March, he woke just as the light was shifting, the beige color of his bedroom walls warming to yellow. Time to rise. To admire the light and to tend to the tasks of this strange new life: fill water buckets, forage for food, track down supplies. In a few days, he’d leave this apartment—this whole city—behind.

  He rolled onto his back and exhaled. The inhale came of its own accord and, with it, a surprising and fragrant tang. Sweetness. The smell was unmistakable. Citrus. Oranges. How was that possible here, right now, near the end of winter? He breathed in again. There it was.

  He thought immediately of Beatrix. Her smile, her auburn hair, her hands, the sound of her voice. Closing his eyes, he inhaled again and imagined her next to him, the weight and warmth of her almost real.

  He lay still. The cold morning fell over him. When he opened his eyes, the light had shifted and the smell of oranges was gone. All that remained was a cavern inside his chest.

  Shivering from the cold, he dressed and went to the bathroom sink, where he scooped enough water from a bucket into his hands to rinse them. Since the rooftop cisterns had emptied, he’d been hauling water up from the street.

  He toasted two pieces of stale bread over the gas flame of the stove. Another temporary luxury. It would probably go soon as well. He sprinkled some salt over the dry toast, cut up a mushy apple, and carried his breakfast into the living room.

  From the window, he could see the vendors below setting out their goods on the sidewalk. This was part of the adaptation: you could simplify and run to the country, or you could buy and trade and sell. The marketplace was immortal, but it, too, had changed. Now the collections were random and personal, spread across blankets on the ground. Coffee makers, monogra
mmed towels, heirloom tea sets, little motors that no longer turned, tangles of useless electrical cords. Even a good find carried a certain bitter aftertaste. And yet there was no telling what might become suddenly useful. An extension cord made for a fine clothesline. Large Tupperware storage bins could hold gallons of water.

  He held binoculars to his eyes. One of the vendors was on all fours, reaching across the blanket to arrange pots and dishes and utensils into tidy rows. She was portly and blond and encumbered by a long, heavy coat. A small dog curled up near her feet. She placed clothing into piles and arranged books by color. At the far corner of the blanket, she’d put the things not easy to categorize—a game of Trivial Pursuit, a stack of file folders, a computer keyboard.

  A bulky man in a leather jacket moved swiftly along the sidewalk, and Carson tracked him through the binoculars. It was Ayo, one of his building’s doormen, before the layoffs six months ago.

  Ayo, a Nigerian, had immigrated to the States with his wife nearly a decade ago. He was an educated man, once a student activist. “It is not always a good idea to advertise one’s political ideas, but sometimes it is necessary,” he once said.

  Carson had crossed paths with Ayo a few weeks ago on the street—the first time he’d seen him since the layoffs.

  “Mr. Principal!” Ayo had called out from half a block away. “It’s you! I thought maybe you had dissolved in a solution of vinegar. You are holed up in your apartment like a mouse?”

  “I have not dissolved, no,” Carson had said, smiling. “It is nice to see you, Ayo.”

  “Every day is a blessing, yes,” Ayo had said.

  Ayo was a hustler now, with access to the new black market, where he could get soap, butter, coffee, meat, flour, batteries, fuel, and almost anything else. “Run by Africans,” he had explained that day. “That is why they call it the ‘black market,’ sir. We Africans are quite adept at adversity. Or maybe, sir, because we are such good con artists.” He had laughed and jabbed an elbow into Carson’s ribs.

  With the supermarkets stripped and dark, it was a lucky and necessary thing to have a supply man. The shipping containers had become bloated whales stuck up on the sand. It was vendors like Ayo who kept people fed, rolling shopping carts up and down the streets, selling canned beans and stale rice they’d hoarded, or vegetables they’d somehow grown or gleaned from farms outside the city.

  Carson tracked Ayo from the window, watching him flow down the sidewalk.

  On the other side of the country, in the back of a wagon, Beatrix Banks felt as if she were on a choppy sea, as if all she had to do was yield to circumstance. But what circumstance was this? No metro rail to shuttle her through the city and over the bay; instead, horses. When she’d left the US nearly two months earlier, no one had yet thought to attach a horse to a cart and haul passengers around. At this moment, despite the bumpy ride, she was grateful someone had.

  Exhausted and disoriented, Beatrix dug in her backpack for her cell phone. She should call her housemates, Hank and Dolores, tell them she was on her way. But the phone, of course, had been dead for weeks. She held it in both hands, like a fragile, lifeless bird.

  Across from her in the wagon, a woman, about fifty, wrapped in a purple shawl, gave Beatrix a sympathetic frown.

  “You can kiss that phone goodbye,” said a man next to her. He coughed once, and Beatrix stiffened. Was there still flu here?

  “No phone service at all? Landlines?” she asked, inching away from the man.

  “Only if you’re willing to saw off an arm and a leg,” the woman in purple said.

  There was some murmuring among the other passengers about radio communication and solar power. “What about the almighty generator that preacher uses?” someone said.

  Beatrix put her phone back.

  She watched the sun inch higher into the sky. Things here had unraveled quickly. No more phone service. Intermittent power. Horses on the highway. She felt panic rise inside. Just get me to my people, she thought.

  The wagon dropped Beatrix a few blocks from home, and as the sound of the horse hooves receded into the distance, she felt herself relax a little. Despite her fatigue, she walked quickly. Her house glimmered like a beacon, sunlight bouncing off the windows and warming the front porch. Beatrix headed up the walkway just as a tall man with shaggy hair came out the front door carrying a bicycle. Her downstairs neighbor—Joe, was it?

  It took a moment before he recognized her. “You’re back. Where were you?”

  “Mexico City,” she told him. “A fair-trade convention. Or what was supposed to be a fair-trade convention.” It dawned on her that what she’d maneuvered—flying south across the border in the midst of a global meltdown—was more of a miracle than she’d realized.

  “That was brave of you,” he said.

  “Or just dumb.”

  He looked up from the bicycle and held out his hand. “Beatrice, right? I’m Dragon.”

  “Beatrix, with an x,” she said.

  “So how did you get home?”

  “A complicated hitchhike,” she said, explaining how the airlines had folded, and then the bus lines, and how what was supposed to be a ten-day trip had turned into six weeks, until she’d finally found a cargo trucker with enough room, fuel, and business smarts to transport her, along with a tired diplomat and a handful of US soldiers, to Tijuana. “As soon as we crossed the border, they all knelt to kiss the fucking pavement.”

  “Well, that was lucky,” he said.

  Beatrix nodded, feeling grateful. “Isn’t your name Joe?”

  “Yeah, formally. I go by Dragon now. A resurrected nickname. Fiercer, I guess,” he said, lifting one of his eyebrows and making it disappear behind a dark curl on his head.

  She had the urge to pull him into a hug. But they barely knew each other. “It is good to be home,” she conceded, picking up her backpack.

  “You know they’re gone, right?” he said as she started up the stairs. “Your roommates.”

  “Hank and Dolores? What do you mean?”

  “Yeah. They went north.”

  “North?” Beatrix said, feeling like she’d just been punched in the stomach.

  “A whole group went together,” Dragon said. “They loaded all their stuff into a wagon and headed toward wine country. More fertile, I guess.” He scoffed a little as he said this, then shrugged.

  “What? You don’t think it’s safe?” Beatrix asked. “I mean, if everyone’s going.”

  “If everyone were jumping off a bridge, would you?”

  “So you don’t think it’s a good idea. To go north.”

  “I just told you what I thought,” he said, and turned back to his bicycle.

  Beatrix went upstairs, the punch to her stomach now a grip in her chest.

  Maybe everything had been a bad idea. The going away and the coming home. All of it. Everyone had advised against the trip in the first place, but the convention had been the perfect opportunity to strengthen the chocolate market in Ecuador, which she’d been working on for the last three years, a time for coalition building with cooperatives in Mexico and Central America. She hadn’t even considered that the other twenty delegates might not be able to get there.

  She’d felt a clinging obligation to keep up the fight, even though clearly the fight for fair trade had dramatically shifted by then, if not altogether dissolved. The walls Beatrix and her colleagues had worked so desperately for years to tear down had toppled under their own weight.

  But there were larger lessons to be learned from their friends in the Southern Hemisphere. They knew what it was like when the cost of milk and corn and movies and everything else skyrocketed, when all the gold flew out of the country and into a secure Swiss bank, when you had to live off very little. “At the very least, they can show us how to prepare for the worst,” Beatrix had said.

  Now, she felt a sense of relief entering the apartment. Home. Her belongings gave her a measure of comfort. The artifacts from her travels: The balsa wood toucan fr
om Ecuador. Some pre-Columbian pottery replicas. A contemporary mask from Guinea, West Africa. The photographs: Beatrix at a protest in São Paulo. Hank and Dolores in Chapultepec Park. Beatrix on the Fourth of July in a T-shirt that said independence, my ass!

  Beatrix found a note from Dolores on the kitchen counter:

  Beatrix, love, if you are reading this, then you’re finally home. We’ve been so worried. We’re closing down the office and getting out of here before something even more terrible happens. We’ve waited for word from you, but nothing. We found a place. Brightbrook Farms. 150 miles northeast of the capital. I don’t have directions. You’re good at that. Come as soon as you can. Please come, B. We’ll be waiting for you. We love you.

  —Dolores and Hank

  Beatrix had met Hank in a college course on modern Latin American history. Beatrix and Hank had believed that the world, particularly America, needed a new revolution. Something to cauterize consumer greed, expose the true cost of goods, even out global trade imbalances. After class, at a bar, they had planned their first action—a zombie parade.

  “But there already is a zombie parade,” Beatrix had said, remembering the red paint smeared across mouths and hands, the stiff-legged walk, the raggedy clothes she’d seen the previous Halloween.

  “This is different. These will be zombie shoppers, zombie consumers, zombie numb-heads,” Hank said. “Just in time for the Christmas season. We’ll get a bunch of TVs and line them up all along the campus mall. Then we’ll sit there and stare at them, just like real people do.”

  Students from all across campus had joined the parade. They’d made the front page of the student newspaper, the clearest mark of success back then. The year after they graduated, they met Dolores, an activist who led “reality tours” along the US-Mexico border, where she set up interviews with factory workers, then pointed to the shacks on the hillside, the chemical sludge running in the wash. “Free trade hasn’t meant frijoles in these parts,” she’d said. In Dolores, Beatrix had found a friend, and Hank had found a lover, and the three of them had taken on the world.