WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (44 page)

            I have no words for it. And then, the white vanishes. I wonder how it can know the terms by which we communicate. How it can refer to pleasure at all, or love. But then I try to think of the eons—the impossible lengths of time of which it speaks. And there is no possibility of comprehension. I sink to the floor. Press my throbbing head into it. Eventually, the door behind me opens. I clench the disc in my hand as Father Gold hauls me up.

            “For some reason I do not pretend to understand, God has spared your life. You are to be protected. Come, we go home.” And as if he’d been my friend all along, he leads me out. And I know the message from the sphere has already reached him. We begin a painful voyage back up and into the cave. The only thing I can think of is the strangely warm disc in my hands and the idea of meaning.

Chapter 28

            The chapel empties as normally as it has done each night for countless decades, but the light stays on longer than usual. A man notices this as he walks along the center road of town toward his home. Someone must have remained inside later than usual to pray, he thinks.

            “Have you seen him lately?” asks a woman.

            “It worries me. But we have tried our interventions. And for some reason, the High Fatherhood has given him complete absolution for his negligence,” says a wizened Father. He rises from his pew and starts out toward the aisle, his frail body hardly able to move any longer. He struggles to reach the lane. The lines on the once beautiful young girl’s face illumine under final rays of light from the failing sun. They spill in through a high window and light her eyes with a memory.

            “He’s gone,” she says, stopping his wobbling gait. The chapel is empty except for the two. The rest have gone home long ago.

            The father looks at her, at first with surprise, and then, as if some long faded memory has risen back into his mind, he looks outside, through the open front door, at the dimming road that runs through the heart of Acadia.

            “He has?” he says, as if the fact is less shocking already to him—as if, for a long age, he has expected it.

            “Yes. I don’t think he’ll come back.”

            “You love him, don’t you?” he says.

            She nods, and a tear falls from her face.

            “Oh June. Don’t cry.” The Father struggles back to her. His hand reaches out to her face and wipes away her tear.

            “The last few times I tried to talk to him, to get him to return to mass, he was drawing something new. It was something he didn’t want me to see. I think—I think it was some kind of a map,” says June.

            “He’s always drawn things. For decades, he’s been drawing things. I’ve walked many times past him there, tried to talk to him too, get him to come back to us. They’re always the same sketches though. Always the skylines. The skylines. Any other person would have been condemned long ago for fetishizing the Deadlands the way he does. I’m sure—in my heart, I know—those pictures don’t mean anything, darling. Don’t hurt yourself any more than he’s already done.”

            “Father James, I must confess something.”

            “What is it, dear June?”

            “I started to go in his house. When he goes to the beach at nights. I started to look through his drawings.”

            “That is a sin. You are wrong to have done that,” Father James says. But his voice is still soft, and his hand stays at her face. “We will bring you tomorrow to confession. It is too late for today. Let’s go home.”

            “Do you remember her?” June says.

            Father James takes his hand back. His arms fall to his side in tiredness and he sits down.

            “Yes. I remember her.”

            “I have an old sin.”

            “Child what is it?”

            “It was me, Father. I made him go all those years ago. I gave him a note from her. I read it before I gave it to him. She wanted him to leave.”

            “It was not your fault that he left. It is not your fault that he has been changed as he has into that dead object of sin.”

            “He stopped drawing the skylines. Near the top of the piles, of his drawings, they were her. Her face. And then, the maps. Endless maps.”

            “God forgave your sins long ago. Don’t cry,” says Father James. And then, when she can’t stop the sobbing, he slides along the pew. He puts his old arms around her.  

Chapter 29

The beach feels different tonight. Like it wants me to reflect on time. To think of how long a time has passed. To wonder if I can still trust that the prophecy of the fissure was real. That any of what I remember is real. But I remind myself—I know it’s real. The fact that the Fathers don’t fight me means it must have happened. Because I’m the only one they leave alone. The final word of God.  

            I think of how I can’t trace the days anymore. How they have blended into weeks and years. I look out over the ocean and see the same line through the sky. It makes me look to my leg and the old scar there. The tower. The only constant I know anymore.

            I think about Father Gold and how he passed one night in his sleep, his memory of everything that happened dying with him. How he refused to discuss any of it for the rest of his life. And how the benevolent Father Trust came and took his place. A traveler from some far away realm, but just the same as the rest of them.

            Life is easy here in Acadia. There are no whispers of the Nefandus or the Deadlands. No mention but in scripture of the old world. The time before the Wipe.

I remember some vague memory of when I tried to talk about it. June. She had been the only one I ever wanted to try with. But there were too many sinful ideas in my words. She couldn’t bear it, and I couldn’t do it to her.

            The only truth is the beach and the tower. My own mass each afternoon. To go and take it all in until the sun descends and splashes into the horizon. Until the slit that breaks the sky dims and is then lit again by the frost of stars. I think that I was once closer to those stars.

Each night I’m here I think of Maze. The times we spent watching the tower. Talking about the insanity of reaching it. How impossible it seemed then. How outrageous her ideas were.

I brought the disc with me as usual tonight. It rolls between my fingers as I scan the woods, wishing for the wolves to come. But it’s always a useless wish. They’ve died off a long time ago, or left this place. But I just want something to test me. One more time. So that I can run into the ocean.

I think of each birthday that has come and gone. Each visit to my mother’s grave. And then, at night, how I go and look at Maze’s grave. Her resting place in the After Sky. I think of the white sphere and how today is my birthday. My sixty-third birthday. How little time there is before the floor of the chapel opens up. And how I will finally fulfill for her what she wanted.

For some reason tonight I remember the other women in the village who presented their interest in me. Despite that the Fathers taught them I was a strange pariah. Something to be avoided as disease. Perhaps it was the mystery that drew those women to me. Or maybe my talent. My pictures.

            I tested them each—tricking myself into believing there could be another Maze. Asked the questions to see if their belief in the dogma of the Fatherhood was shakable. Open to any doubt at all. For each of them, it wasn’t. But I knew that before I tried. And what would be the point in shaking their belief anyway? They are each happy in it. I’ve seen that much in the years since I came home.

And the whispers that have spread throughout town that I am strange—the reclusive artist who goes to the beach each night alone, against the wishes of the Fathers, yet somehow is able to escape chastisement for it. Who draws the same picture over and over again. A skyline. But they don’t know what I draw now. A face. And it’s the face that has consumed me. Led me to start drawing the maps. I wonder if anyone ever saw her face, what they would have thought? If anyone else remembers her. If she’s part of the record. Somehow I know she’s not. She’s forgotten. We’re too specific to be in the Ark.

But there is a record. My drawings. And they must think that I’m drawing some ancient Saint.  

All of the old unsolved mysteries return to my brain as I lie and listen to the waves. I try each night to find the same pieces of sand—the same place I once slept with her on the beach.

Each mystery seems forever locked away from me now. I’ve heard some of the men in Acadia say that I have a dark past. That something happened a long time ago to me—that I ran away from the village and went into the Deadlands. That I touched metal. They know that for some reason, I have been forgiven, but they can’t understand why. I’ve heard them whisper that I’m a Saint, and that that is enough punishment for a lifetime.  

I envision the red throngs, marching along distant shores. How somewhere they march still under low-hanging clouds that spread mist inland from the sea. Carrying on their ancient war against God. And how, so long ago, the descendents of our original civilization showed their full might and then relinquished, unable to temper their own purpose. Their own meaning.

I remember how for years I told myself I wouldn’t do it after all. I wouldn’t wait for the fissure. That I’d rather die sooner, because it’s useless to do something for her now. Pointless. Because what I felt so long ago just isn’t as real anymore. I can only believe in the myth of its strength—that I once felt something as powerful as that, as her, in this life.

Still, something about my birthday tonight is different than all the others. Maybe it’s because I know it will be my last.

I think of how time has passed, how the pictures in my house have collected, one stack upon the other. How my daily task in the garden has filled my life with small but good and trustworthy meaning.

But something strange rifles through me tonight as I look out at the tower. It’s an old recklessness I thought had dies decades ago. The urge rises in me with murky images and smells of a rocky shore and the sea. A fence I’d hopped long ago. Some place where the wrecks of old ships had trapped me and almost killed me at the hands of some horned monster pent up within its walls.

When I raise my eyes to the tower, even in the dark, I see through its walls. I see a floor where Maze lies, and where she pressed her body against me, and there were warm breaths painting patterns on our skin. Where she’d spoken and told me that this life that I live now would have been enough for her.

I don’t even know what my body’s doing before I’m already moving back to the house. For once, I don’t want the wolves to pounce on me. Because there’s some daylight left, just a bit, and suddenly, I feel as if I need it. I look down at my body. How it’s still good enough. I tell myself that. It’s still good enough to get there.

I walk inside like any other night, but instead of going to bed I am compelled to my trunk. I open the top and remove the most recent stack of drawings. Most of them are her. I don’t know why, but she seems clearer to me now—after so many years of not being able to see her. I can finally draw her face.

For a moment, I see the end result of the journey. A pile of bones on the floor. A useless metal cylinder. And a glass wall that my dreams trick me into knowing will open.

I push through the pictures of her until I find one that is just right. I stuff it into my pocket. And then, at the bottom, where they are safest, I take out the maps. I spread them all over the floor. Examining each one. Suddenly, I know that some of them are accurate. And each of them leads me back there.

Through the forest to the log. And then the old sewer. Across the wolf-ridden field and past the haunted skyscrapers until I come to the coast. And then, I just follow the coast. Not toward the place where the bones of the Resistance are buried. I go in the other direction. All the way to the skulls. And then, the door. Wrist had said it opened without the tattoo. What about the other doors? You can’t get any farther after them. It doesn’t matter. You’ll die closer to her. Better than here.

And I think of one giant fuck you as I walk back to the beach with a heavy bag at my side. It goes into my palm, and then, the disc flies out into the ocean. I turn around and head back through town. I think I see a light on in Father James’s house. But he doesn’t try to stop me this time when I run. My heart beats and I leap the last fence. For the first time in forever, there are nothing but trees. In one last thought of June, I think sadly about the fissure, and the end of the world. But then, there’s nothing else but what’s around me. This step and the next. I take out the knife from my bag. For some reason, I remember this. Being alive.

Thorns rip out of my skin with each thrust forward, but the pain doesn’t bother me one bit. The only thing at all that surges through me, that I feel, is the thought of Maze.

Chapter 30

When June comes running from the beach, she doesn’t realize that the Great Chapel of Acadia is slanting low on its side, nearly touching the ground, one of its walls collapsed. She can’t process it. She presses through the crowd until she finds Father James.

            “June—thank God you’re safe. There’s been an earthquake.”

            “Father…” she says, out of breath.

            “What is it?”

            “I saw something. At the beach,” she says.

            Father James looks around, as if somehow he suspects seriousness in her claim. They find their way to a calm patch of road where the main streets intersect.