The Blue (The Complete Novel) (12 page)

I don’t know whose voice it is in my head. At first I think it’s Russell’s, but then I realize it’s not. It’s somebody else’s from the past—from the distant past. Some dark space that I can no longer see or understand clearly. Don’t go in, it tells me, over and over. And then I finally accept it, and listen, and watch the seal. But I can’t figure out the voice.

            A noise comes eventually that startles me from my stare down with Spots. It’s Voley. He’s whining. The whines come in short bursts, and when I turn to see what’s the matter, he’s looking directly at me, right from the edge of his floe, ready to jump in. Testing the edge to build his confidence, ready to swim to me, because he can’t take it anymore. His paws scratch and scratch at the edge of his floe, and his nose lowers and raises, showing how hesitant he is. But the distance is way too far, over ten feet of ocean, and I know he won’t make it, and I yell at him desperately: Stay boy! Get back! And after three more shouts, somehow, Voley listens. He stops testing the edge and retreats, expecting me to fix things for him. I don’t know how long he’ll wait for me, but I can’t keep watching him, I have to check the seal again. My eyes dart to Russell, and then back to Spots. But Spots is still there looking at me. Watching patiently from his belly. Silent and still.  

After five minutes, Spots finally rises up. I think he’s getting ready to make his move at last, but then, with all the tension of it, he just lies back down. And this time his head settles and his eyes close, not even facing my direction anymore. As if he’s satisfied with the terror he’s caused for now, and he wants to sleep. I wonder why he doesn’t go back in the water, or try to go after Russell, or Voley, or me, like it seems his hunger should force him to do, but he doesn’t. He just puts his long, threaded body down on the ice. And then I sit down too, realizing that the only thing I can do is wait. Keep Voley from jumping in, keep calling to Russell, and wait for the pack to close up again. For the wind to drive the floes back into one Ice Pancake like I’ve seen it do before. I wait and wait and freeze and watch Spots. But every few minutes I look back and call to Russell, wait for him to move. And then I call to Voley. I try to comfort him. I tell him we’ll be back together again soon. Just stay, boy, okay? And then I shout at Russell again. I tell him not to die on me. And then, I have to watch the seal.

When I fall asleep, just for a minute, it scares me. I can’t lose consciousness now, not when we’re all drifting apart and Spots is so close. I shake my head in fright, hoping I didn’t really fade out. But I did, I really fell asleep. And the first thing I do is rub my eyes and confirm that Spots is still there in front of me, in plain view where I can see him. He is.

            I breathe a sigh of relief. But the darkness looks awful, and it makes the panic rise in me for a moment before I check on Russell and Voley, that I really must have fallen asleep for longer than I thought. When I turn my head, fear like acid rolling through my gut, I sense the rocking motion of a swell under the floe. And from every angle, no matter how much I strain and double-check, I can’t make out a single figure on the ice besides the seal. No Russell, no Voley. Just the lost and distant specks of the pack. Long drifted apart, disintegrating, and taking with them every last piece of me.

   Part 3

Chapter 13

My eyes twist back and forth along the horizon. The sea chops and slaps the shelf of the floe as it drops into a quick glide down a wave, and then jerks up. Just enough momentum to launch up and over the next crest, spraying a high barrage of foam and frost that can’t reach me in the center. The floe rides the waves, over and over in just the same way, taunting me to start trusting the ice. To believe that this tiny island can weather the storm. And I count the swells.

Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two…

The sky is uniform steel in every direction, darker in one spot than all the rest. But all of the endless gray is just there as a contrast for the blue. It’s so close that I could touch it. And so is the plane. Only the thousands-of-feet depths and frothing sea between me and it. I rub my arms, hoping to ward off the numbness as long as possible—but despite the cold, I can’t help but think there’s something about the wind—a warm strand of air pushing through the cold everything, like the sea wants to preserve me so that I live on to the worst.  

            My voice is too tired to keep calling out, and I lose track of the swells. I can’t remember if I said fifty twice, or if it was sixty-one…I start over again. For the third time, but in my head now:
One, two, three…

Spots has closed his eyes. I hope the swells will push his berg into mine, ram it apart and throw him down on the ice next to me, so that I can gouge out his eyes. He’s responsible for all of this. For the complete aloneness.

            For some strange reason, it passes through me that this is the first time that I’ve ever really been all alone. There’s always been someone—mostly Russell. But now, I don’t even have Voley. And feeling the stab of my loneliness, and another urge to vomit from the rolling sea, my mind forces itself to leave. I vanish from the Colorado pack. I think of Philadelphia.

When Russell made up his mind, that the chaos would become too much and come too soon, and we had to set forth over the great sprawling farms of Pennsylvania, heading toward Ohio and the Midwest beyond, we’d had out last dinner with Jennifer and Delly. The last people he ever admitted were
friends
. Their kids were gathered around. I’m stopped with the thought of their children—I see their faces, but their names—nothing brings their names back to me. They had looked up to me so much. Wanted to follow me around wherever I went. But their faces disappear, following their names into nothingness, as I remember Delly’s warning.

            He said things weren’t bad enough to head out west. And that for all we knew, there was no reason to leave Philadelphia. No reason until the verdict was in on what exactly was happening. Russell had said the verdict would never come, because the news had stopped coming in. But Delly had warned us—don’t go West.

            I don’t know why I remember it, or why it passes through me—it feels like a collage of memories, and that their conversation maybe wasn’t even one night. And maybe the decision to leave took a very long time and very many conversations. All I see is just a glimpse of a fire. But I hear the voices. The voices of something that must be close to what family sounds like. And Russell  said—I hear the voice like it was yesterday—that the solar flare was enough of a verdict for him. That the axis was shifting, and eventually, everything would go wrong. And Delly had said that that theory was no good, that the last news broadcasts had recanted that information just a few days before they shut down for good. But Russell hadn’t heard it. Even their projections of massive coastal flooding—Delly had tried to warn—all of it had been recanted. Just rain, Delly had gone on. No reason yet, Russell. But Russell had had enough reason with the death count rising—too many people packed too closely together there—too many people clawing after the same scraps of food, ammunition and shelter. Not enough food or medicine or hope. And the news stations had to recant their announcements. That’s what Russell told Delly, anyway. That if they hadn’t, panic would raze the cities to the ground much faster than the rain would sink them. And in the end, right until the hour we left, they didn’t see eye to eye. They stayed. They thought it would all pass. And we left.

On the road we heard a million stories. Most of the talk came at night from strangers, when there were common fires. Everyone gathered around, and that was the only thing to talk about. In Ohio it was always stories about the comets. No one talked about the supply hoarding yet, or the rumors of cannibalism. That would take another couple years. It was still talk of the weather and the loss of the news broadcasts. But each group we passed, all the way until Indianapolis—it was always the comets. Russell carried the idea of the axis shift, and the solar flare, all by himself through those parts. Brought it with him from stations out of Philadelphia that no one had heard of or believed. And there was nothing to go on other than that old memory of his—a crackling broadcast through an old radio on the top of a skyscraper one night in Philadelphia when I was only a few years old. So young I don’t even know that it happened except that he told me it did. My own memory of it really just Russell’s memory.

            But it was somewhere in there, somewhere around Indianapolis, that I realized the people had started to change. We hadn’t expected anyone to be friendly like Jennifer and Delly, but we didn’t think the veneer would strip away so fast. That was before Russell called it that. He would just mumble about it then—that people were losing something.

            Everyone was close-quartered, kept to themselves. Wary of anyone passing through or asking too many personal questions. Especially about food or ammunition. To ask someone their name, let alone what they had to eat or where they had to sleep, was starting to get people killed by then. But just about anyone would stop for a moment to talk to you about Leadville. That’s when it had really started mixing into our plan—the idea of the place where it wasn’t raining. I know Russell had heard about it first in Philadelphia, but I don’t think he really knew why we were heading out west until we lived in Indiana. That’s when the legend of Leadville became a part of him, really became his reason to keep moving. At least that’s what I tell myself when I think things weren’t really that bad in the East. Because there had to be a reason to keep going.

            And once we got to the first deep seas, right where they shouldn’t have been, Russell told me—though I’d never seen the country otherwise so it didn’t seem anything special to me except for the enormity of it all, an endless stretch of muddy brown churning ocean that tasted like metal and salt—he was out of hope for people. For anyone in humanity. The Jennifers and Dellys of the world were gone forever, too many miles behind us, and we both knew it. But then, just when all that hopelessness settled in, we came to live on the
Sea Queen Marie.

            And old Cap’n. It comes into my mind that I can’t even remember his real name anymore. And that he’ll always just be a memory of a man named Cap’n who for a moment, just a real short but full of passionate life moment, restored our faith in humanity. A living community of social people who cared for each other. But there were still storms. And that’s one thing Cap’n must have known all along, the whole while as we floated past the great tower of Chicago, which rose like a stripped flag pole from the rolling seas. That sooner or later the storms would wear away our glowing community. Or drown it suddenly and altogether, like they did.

And the storm came like it had to, swallowing the short flashback of what the veneer was. And that fast it was all cast down to the muddy depths where Russell told me lay the sleeping graves—the millions of homes and electric wires and bodies and cars and churches and hospitals and schools and police stations and government buildings and fields and museums and everything else that people had managed to build up for themselves. To set themselves apart from nature as a tangling mass of fertility and adaptation. But on we went.

            We went on to find out just how wrong we had been to travel west—wronger and wronger—from Souix Falls to Rapid City. And by then, it was so wrong that Leadville
had
to be true. Because if it wasn’t, nothing made sense.

But after it all, and through it all, I think of Jennifer and Delly for some reason, that one night, so long ago, when they first told us not to leave yet. And I wonder just what happened to Philadelphia. To them. And if it really is different in different places. The rain didn’t seem to stick there, after all. And it still wasn’t sticking in Pittsburgh. As if all the water could do yet was make things muddy, but the good old Earth would absorb everything right up. No seas in the wrong places.

As I scan the shifting bergs, realizing I’ve lost count of the swells again because of my daydream, I remember the craziest story of them all. It was the man—the face eater—on the aircraft carrier.    He’d told us—the night before we snuck right down off the side of that ship like quiet spiders and stole the boat and left—about what he’d heard from the great North. The last radio broadcasts out of Canada, something from fifteen years ago, he’d said. Russell had quietly nodded his head, no smile, no disapproval either, just nodded and listened and kept quiet. Acknowledging that the man had his own theory and we had ours. But by then, Russell had already caught on that the man was a face eater, and that meant he wasn’t to be trusted with information anyway. But for some reason, it pops back into my head as I lie dying here on the floe, waiting for the signs of my friends to reappear from watery graves somewhere amidst the dotted and endless stretch of cold canvas ocean. Just exactly what the aircraft carrier face eater had said:
The oceans have all slid from their old places. They’re still sliding, too. And the atmosphere is screwed up forever and getting worse, until everything is gone. And the old oceans, their old floors, are dry. Mountains and deserts now.