The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel Read online

  Now, Beatrix stood alone in the middle of their apartment, her heart beating too fast. She read the note three more times before dropping it on the counter. What the fuck, people? They’d abandoned her for some hippie farm? She wished she’d never come back.

  Trembling, she opened the fridge, and a warm and horrific odor wafted out. Nothing was salvageable. In the pantry, she found two cans of beans, a half-emptied bag of rice, a jar of lentils, and—thank the Lord—a healthy stash of yerba mate, her favorite morning beverage, courtesy of some Argentine friends. She tried the stove, but there was no hiss of gas.

  She went to her bedroom, which looked different somehow—out of proportion or as if someone had come in and redecorated in her absence. But nothing had changed. Her bed hadn’t moved, nor the framed photo on her dresser of her and Hank in their senior year of college, each raising a beer bottle and a fist. The desk was in the corner, her laptop where she’d left it.

  Her heart jumped. There must be email from Carson. They’d been calling and texting and emailing for nearly a year. She ached to hear from him.

  When his school had closed after the government shutdown, he’d written: I’m concerned for King High. For all the schools actually. Mostly for the students. I feel like Victor Jara, with his broken hands.

  Yes, Beatrix had thought. Like Víctor Jara.

  In the last email, Carson had said, If for some reason everything implodes and the shit really hits the fan and we can no longer send words or speak to each other, I’ll come find you.

  Had he meant it?

  She opened the laptop. Its dead gray screen stared back at her.

  From the closet, Carson unearthed his old camping gear, pleased with himself for having kept it all these years. He packed sleeping gear in the backpack, a few items of clothing, a tent, a water filter, a small axe, a cook pot, matches. In the top pouch, he put a pocketknife, three notebooks, a bundle of pencils, and the Field Guide to the Edible Plants of North America. A few more things from Ayo, and he’d be ready.

  Carson thought about the word “ready” and how far from it he felt, even with a small axe in his pack. Nothing was predictable. Who could ever be ready? And ready for what?

  He thought about how it might be explained one day. He thought of the corncobs in Chaco Canyon. The purple robes of the Phoenicians. The Egyptian tombs. The Mayan pyramids. The moai of Easter Island. Athens and Rome and Pompeii. The Reichstag. Britain and Spain. Potsherds and buried churches, catacombs and notched bones. Here, too, there would be a history to interpret, an arc of demise to be charted.

  He had begun to record his observations.

  Buckets of water on the roof, peddlers with megaphones in the streets, candlelight. The city returns to its origins.

  MacGyverize: to fix a thing with whatever you have, after that late-’80s television show.

  What happens when the last of the canned beans is eaten?

  He did not know if the notes would amount to anything. Maybe decades in the future, they’d find his words, and history teachers would assign it as reading to their students.

  During Carson’s early teaching years, his students had flashed gang signs and symbols at one another, instantly reinterpreting the histories he taught them. At twenty-five, residually adolescent himself, he studied their codes. He was hungry to learn, and they offered him plenty. Later, as principal, he tried to impart this kind of curiosity to other teachers; so many of them just hauled around a textbook, regurgitated the same lessons year after year, presented themselves as the exclusive holders of knowledge. No wonder so many kids didn’t give a shit.

  His final moments at King High School haunted him. The afternoon light angling through the windows of the west-wing classrooms, the empty hallways, the flutter of discarded papers across the floor.

  In a perfect world, the public schools would have been the priority, Carson believed, not the sacrificial lambs. Closing them hadn’t done a thing to save government expenditures. And what did any of it matter? Three months later, they’d been plunged into darkness.

  Ever since then, protesters had gathered at the city water plant and the phone companies, outraged about the lack of access, the deadness of the internet and cell phones. Just the other day, a teenager had hurled a concrete block and hit a fellow protester. Someone threw a rock back in retaliation, and the protest turned on itself. Six people were killed; thirty or more, injured. People seemed unwilling to accept that the companies had gone belly-up and the executives had fled. There was no one left to protest against.

  Beatrix would have disagreed with him on this. “Protests matter,” she would have said. “People need to act.” But maybe she’d be irritated, too, by what it had taken to make people pay attention. In any case, protesting was preferable to hopelessness.

  He opened a window, and the smell of smoke infused the room. Outside, the new homeless—the transient—lit fires on sidewalks and in parks, to keep warm, to cook. It was hard to believe life in the city could be any more public than it had once been. But it seemed every act imaginable now played out on the streets. A woman in pajamas sat on the curb and brushed her hair. A man knelt down on the sidewalk to wipe his baby’s bottom with a newspaper. Another man propped a mirror on a park bench and shaved, a small cup of water his sink.

  Carson watched a man standing at the blond woman’s blanket, pointing to something round and red, with patches of yellow. Some kind of toy. Maybe a gift for a child? The woman held it up like a question, but the man shook his head and moved on. The woman tucked the object under her elbow and watched the man walk away. Carson could not see her face, but from the way she held her body, he could read this woman’s sorrow. Her grief reached thirteen stories up.

  Beatrix turned on the bathroom faucet, and a trickle of rust-red water sputtered into the sink. Unmoved, she splashed some of it onto her face, then tried the bathtub faucet. More sputtering. Not wanting to waste one drop, she plugged the drain and let the tap run. She rushed to the kitchen and put a pot in the sink to catch more there. Was this really happening? Of course, she knew this dance well from Ecuador, where water would come and go all the time. But here?

  Anxious, she made her way downstairs. Maybe Dragon would know more.

  She found his door open and him sitting on the floor cross-legged, eyes closed. How was it possible that he could be so calm?

  “It’s okay,” he said, obviously sensing her there. He pressed his palms together, bowed forward, and opened his eyes. “I’m done.”

  She looked around his apartment, mostly empty but for an upended bicycle in the middle of the floor and tools scattered around it. More bicycles leaned against the far wall. “You fix bikes?” she asked.

  “Make ’em, fix ’em, sell ’em.”

  “Good skill to have at the end of the world,” she said.

  “While the rubber lasts, at least.”

  Beatrix asked about the water, and he told her about the water trucks. “We’re lucky. Some of them don’t cross the bay because of thugs. There are buckets and jugs under the stairs, but if you come across any more, nab them.”

  Beatrix nodded. She’d taken her share of bucket baths.

  “Oh, we’ve rigged up a solar shower in the backyard, which you’re welcome to use if you help haul water.”

  “Thanks. I was also wondering about the flu,” Beatrix said, nervous about his response.

  “Hasn’t been any since the first spell. But you never know.”

  “No, you don’t.” She pulled Dolores’s note out of her pocket. “Brightbrook Farms. Does that ring a bell?”

  Dragon held one edge of the paper, his hands black with bike grease. “Nope. But a hundred and fifty miles is really far.”

  Voices came from the front hallway. An older woman wearing a cardigan and sneakers appeared, followed by a teenaged girl in a short denim skirt.

  “Maria del Carmen and Rosie, grandmother and granddaughter,” Dragon said quietly. “They live there.” He pointed to the door across the h
all. Beatrix remembered that a hefty man who always wore too-tight suits had lived there. Did he still?

  The girl stopped in the doorway. “Hi,” she said. A fleet of brass bracelets around her arm jingled as she placed her hand on her hip. She looked about seventeen.

  Behind her in the hallway, the grandmother called, “Rosie, come help me.”

  The girl turned, and they disappeared inside.

  “Maria del Carmen cleaned for the guy who lived there,” Dragon explained. “He left right before your friends did. She and Rosie were living in their car, so I told them they could stay there.”

  “That was nice of you,” Beatrix said.

  “My dad owns this place, but I haven’t heard from him in a long time. No big loss. My friend Flash lives here, too.”

  “Flash? Dragon? What is this, a superhero headquarters?”

  Dragon chuckled. “I’m only thirty-three. Never too old for superheroes,” he said.

  The girl, Rosie, returned holding something wrapped in a towel. “My abuela’s not feeling well. She’s all out of her anxiety tincture.” She put a finger on the side of her forehead. To Beatrix, she said, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

  The girl had one brown eye and one blue eye, and Beatrix wasn’t sure which one to look at. “I’m away a lot,” she said.

  “What about the couple that lived there before?”

  “They left, apparently,” Beatrix said.

  “Rosie!” the grandmother called.

  Rosie shook her arm, making the bracelets chime, and turned her head slowly toward the door, as if in defiance. “I gotta go,” she said. She handed the towel package to Dragon. “These are for you.”

  “Thank you,” he called after her. He unwrapped it to reveal a stack of flour tortillas. He peeled off half and handed the rest to Beatrix.

  “Seriously?” Beatrix said, equally astounded by Dragon’s generosity and the reality of the tortillas now in her hand. “She makes these?”

  Dragon folded one into his mouth and nodded. “The grandmother does. She worked at a bakery, and when it went under, her boss paid her retirement package in flour. Bags of it,” Dragon said. He explained that recently a butcher had been coming into the neighborhood on horseback selling packets of lard, which meant she could make tortillas, by the dozens. “She’s a little nervous, but she’ll warm up to you. And Rosie only has attitude around her grandma. She’s a softie, and pretty naive. She looks older than she is. She just turned fifteen.”

  Dragon wiped his hands on his jeans. “Here, follow me.” He led her down the common hallway and out to the backyard, where there was a picnic table, a beat-up countertop with a faucetless stainless-steel sink, and a set of wire shelves that held a mishmash of pots and dishes. Nearby was a fire pit.

  “We’ve been cooking here,” Dragon said. “We share food. Mostly I find it, and Maria del Carmen cooks it. Protein is hard to come by, though we caught a pigeon last week. At the moment, we have firewood, but please be sparing with it. You’re welcome to share with us, if you contribute.”

  “Great,” Beatrix said, thinking for a moment of the rabbits and guinea pigs people raised in the Andes. Surely that was doable here, too. But she wouldn’t be staying long. “Thank you, but—”

  “You have a bike? You’ll need one. Let’s find one that fits you.” Dragon gestured to a small fleet of bicycles parked under a ramada, then undid a combination lock and freed a long cable from the stack. He pulled out a red bike with a large wire basket at the handlebars. Beatrix sat on the seat and rang the bell. A lightness came over her.

  “Looks like a fit. Just be sure to always keep it locked up,” Dragon said. “And I wouldn’t do anything crazy like cross the bay. It’s not safe. Just stick around here. And try not to go out alone.”

  Beatrix nodded. Right. Shit. How was she going to get out of Dodge?

  “So, I gotta run,” Dragon said. “But I’ll see you later, yes?”

  “Yes,” Beatrix said, wishing he wouldn’t go anywhere just yet. She returned the bike to its place, locked it up, and went back upstairs. She ate a tortilla and tacked the note from Hank and Dolores onto the fridge next to a photo of Carson—a snapshot he’d sent her of him on a trail in the Grand Canyon under a purple-orange sky, taken long before she knew him. She paused at his wide smile, then went to her bedroom.

  She opened the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out a small velvet pouch. Inside was a coin. I mutilated a quarter for you, Carson had written when he’d sent it to her. They’d thought they were so clever: a small puncture into the madness of consumption, a little “fuck you” to the system. It was also a reference to that funny restaurant they’d gone to together—Diner/Bar, either a diner or a bar, depending on where you sat. They ate waffles on one side, then drank beer on the other, where there was an old-fashioned photo booth. They’d squeezed into it together, but they’d been short a quarter and had to beg one off a guy at the bar.

  Beatrix shook two photos out of the pouch. In one, she pretended to pick her nose while Carson held his hand over his eyes. In the other, both of them stared deadpan into the camera. She held the photo up close. His physicality enchanted her. His round gray-green eyes, his large hands, his rosy cheeks. The way his tall body moved with an adept and virile grace.

  Also in the pouch was a thin leather cord. Beatrix threaded it through the hole in the quarter and strung it around her neck. She lay back on her bed, the pendant resting perfectly in the space in the middle of her collarbone. She tried to empty her head of thoughts, but there was too much swirl. Alone. No water. The power’s gone for good. What am I going to do?

  March 15

  Dear Carson,

  For all practical purposes, you have disappeared. I am a wayward Dorothy. The speed of this collapse astounds me. I guess I, too, believed in some kind of American exceptionalism, though I resented it enough to think I could destroy it. Now look. Maybe we did.

  Someone knocked at the door. The girl from downstairs, Rosie. Her two-colored eyes showed worry.

  “It’s my abuela!” Rosie said. “She can’t breathe.”

  Spilling down the stairwell of Carson’s apartment building were fruit pits and peels, shriveled tea bags, empty cat-food cans, and a small pile of bones (chicken? squirrel?). He’d been stepping over the trash for weeks, but today he gathered up a bagful. Amidst the refuse, he found a small plastic bottle of hand lotion. He opened it, sniffed, and coughed at the overpowering chemical scent. But he tucked the bottle into his pocket anyway, then picked up the bag of trash and made his way out of the building.

  He dropped the trash bag on the corner next to others and questioned for a moment the benevolence of his service. Then he walked half a block away to where the air smelled cleaner. Like spring. His wife, June, used to call it a “delicious nonsmell smell” when the snow began to melt. It matched the sound of falling snow, she said, a kind of whisper within the silence. And the sound of snow melting? June said that within it, you could hear the tinny sound of a miniature orchestra.

  “Come on, motherfucker!” A man in a bomber jacket shouted at a large Buick town car. He and three other men were rocking the car violently in attempt to move it from the thoroughfare.

  “That’s it, that’s it,” the man said. Metal clanged against the chassis, and each time the car landed, Carson thought it might simply break in half.

  “Give a hand?” one of the men called out.

  Carson approached, and they made room for him at the back bumper.

  “Like a seesaw,” one of them instructed.

  Carson could feel the muscles working in his shoulders and back; his solid legs held the ground. He felt strong and useful. At the end of the world, men could still move cars.

  Carson wiped the sweat from his forehead onto his pants as a sand-colored dog with wiry fur yipped at him. The blond vendor with the long, heavy coat whistled, and the dog pranced back to her. Carson followed and stood at the edge of her blanket, still trying to understan
d the logic in her spread of items.

  “I got everything you need but a car,” the woman said.

  “Not sure I’d get very far,” Carson said, gesturing to the one he had just helped move. He perused her items, looking for candles, batteries, anything useful. There was the red-and-yellow toy, which he now saw was a piggy bank.

  “What’s the story with that?”

  The woman stood up, and he noticed her hefty boots—rubber-toed and fur-lined, the kind June used to wear on walks in the field. “Why is everyone interested in this thing?” she said. “It’s my piggy bank from when I was a little girl. And then it was my kid’s after that. My son. He got the flu.” She looked away then.

  “I’m so sorry,” Carson said.

  The woman looked back to him blankly. “There’s a Kennedy coin in there. From my grandfather. I can’t get it out. Got all the other coins out, but not that one. Dunno how I even got it in.”

  A man at the next blanket called out, “Lady, get your dog!” The dog had wandered over and was sniffing the man’s lunch.

  “Lola, get back here!” She turned to Carson. “You want this or not?”

  “Okay,” he said, not exactly sure why.

  He put his hand in his pocket and found the bottle of lotion. “Would this do it?” he said.

  “Hand lotion? Dear God, yes.” She took the bottle, opened it, and lathered up her hands. Carson held back a cough.

  “Take the piggy bank,” she said. The dog barked. “Lola says, ‘Thank you.’”

  June would have approved, Carson thought. June. She would have liked this kitschy vintage thing.

  He held up the piggy bank, noticed its exaggerated snout, the painted black circles for nostrils, the bulging yellow eyes. Chump, it seemed to say.

  Carson shook it, and the coin rattled. A mourning landed in his chest. He found a bench and sat down. After June’s death, he thought he might simply disintegrate, shatter into fine particles and blow away over the fields behind their house, blurring the sky. But it had been June who became fine dust, who floated up over the fields.