A Different Alchemy (5 page)

In these moments there was nothing, save the voice in the back of his head, that kept him from believing he had a normal son who could wake up at any minute and talk to him. When everything was silent and covered in darkness and his son was a vague outline, he could imagine the life he had always planned for rather than the one he was actually living. He imagined a son who had played high school sports, brought home report cards with good grades, asked for advice with girls. But life wasn’t a fairytale, so he made a set of unwanted fantasies to counter-balance the blindly optimistic hopes: Galen breaking curfew, coming home drunk after parties, having his heart broken. These pains made the unabashed fantasies seem more realistic.

Yes, he would love to have a son who he could talk and laugh and fish with, but Galen also allowed him to bypass millions of arguments and a thousand times when son supposedly knew better than father. He was spared from suffering the times when Galen didn’t want to be seen with him in public because no kid wanted to be seen with his parents at a young age.

Katherine’s eyes were open when he got back to the living room. He thought she might ask what he had been doing, but she didn’t say anything, and a couple of minutes later, both of them on the sofa instead of in their bed, he heard the raspy breath indicating she was once again asleep. In the dark, in the final few minutes before he went to sleep, he imagined what it would be like to have a son who might cry out in the middle of the night, who needed to be comforted after a nightmare. At twenty, Galen was too old to do these things now even if he was a normal child, which made Jeffrey ask himself if he would ever be able to stop envisioning this other life.

**

The tank rumbled on. At the exit for Route 9, he drove north toward the Garden State Parkway where he would once again proceed east. There was only a little more land available before he would run out of road and end up in the ocean. He drove with no more purpose than the simple thought,
Get away from the smoke
. He didn’t think about getting away from Katherine or from the spot where his son had been burned alive because those things didn’t seem real to him.

There were times in the tank when he didn’t even believe Galen was actually dead. There must have been a misunderstanding; the boy was fine. Even as the ocean appeared, Jeffrey thought there had to be some kind of mistake for why so much smoke could be created in the middle of a city. Yes, there had been a giant fire, but in the confusion leading up to the match being struck, his son was probably skipped over, might not have been near the stadium at all. Maybe there hadn’t actually been any Blocks inside the stadium. It simply wasn’t possible that thousands of people would be purposefully burned to the ground.

As the Atlantic approached, he had half a mind to drive the tank straight into the oncoming waves until water poured in and the machine was stuck in the sand and the surf. Maybe then, as water drowned him inside the confines of the tank, he would wake up from this strange dream.

Three weeks earlier, on the news, there had been a story of a man who walked into a coffee shop, sipped his large mocha for a few minutes, then told everyone he was going down the street to the abandoned campus so he could wake up from his nightmare. The man seemed calm enough; none of the other customers paid him any attention. Thirty minutes later, a series of explosions sounded and the entire four-story academic building came crumbling down to the ground. A goodbye note at the man’s home said he had been knocked out during a football game in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the Great De-evolution. He had become convinced that everything since then had all been part of a bad dream. What better way to wake up from a nightmare than with dynamite and tons of concrete crashing down on you?

That, too, could explain why a 747 crashed into a field outside Chicago a week earlier after making a lone circle around the city. Would someone traveling south assume Jeffrey had made the same decision if they saw his tank sitting a hundred yards off the beach with waves crashing all around it?

As sure as he was that there had been a colossal mistake—it was impossible to believe his son was anywhere but at home—he continued north after arriving at the beach. Katherine could have decided against taking their son to the stadium. Maybe she had been apologizing for ever having considered taking their son near the rally, not because she actually had. A thousand thoughts kept him believing Galen was still alive. Maybe Katherine was deceiving him, paying him back for something he had done. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Some of the thoughts didn’t even make sense as he thought them, but the sheer number of doubts allowed him to believe Galen could be alive.

The tank came to a road that followed the shoreline. Back when he was a boy, these roads had been swarming with families. Now, even during summer, no cars lined the road except for those that had been abandoned. No families waited at the crosswalks for the light to change so they could cross the street and let their children run through the sand. The stoplights still functioned, though. Thirty seconds of red light ticked away until it was replaced by fifteen seconds of green.

At one intersection, as the tank passed under a red light, there was a flash, a camera clicked, and an automated system sent a picture of the tank to a now deserted government building where the license plate, if the tank had one, would be matched with Jeffrey’s address so he could receive a ticket in two months. The juvenile side of him, the side he wasn’t allowed to show very often after becoming a father, thought about turning the turret toward the camera and blowing it off the face of the earth. If he were younger he would stand up as the tank made its way through the red light sensor and stick his bare cheeks up at the camera. A photo of his hairy ass would forever sit in an abandoned office computer database.

The further he got from the highway, the fewer abandoned cars littered the roads. Each time he drove by an overpass for one of the main highways leading to the beach, he could look out the viewfinder and see long lines of cars scattered about like misplaced junkyards.

Only once did he pass by a road in which the abandoned cars were all lined up on the two right lanes so that traffic could easily pass on the other two lanes. Someone must have spent their entire day walking up and down that strip of highway, aligning the cars neatly. The cars were just going to sit there until they rusted into a slow oblivion. Jeffrey wanted to shake the fool by the shoulders and ask what the point was of making something pretty and organized anymore.

At the next overpass, someone had come along and set a string of cars on fire, presumably to see the line of fuel tanks explode like giant kernels popping. Just like that, the line of abandoned cars was turned into a singed wasteland.

Looking at the cars, he turned to say something to Galen, before realizing he was alone in the tank.

All of this had to be a mistake. Surely, Galen would have been at home when the fire started. How many times had he told Katherine everything would be OK?

The second beach town was as abandoned as the first. No families walked the boardwalk. No joggers ran for exercise and a tan. The distinct beach town smell of toffee and suntan lotion was gone. They were things he had never thought to miss until they weren’t there anymore. People always talked about how Maine was officially void of human life, that New Hampshire was probably empty as well, along with Vermont, but the government kept delaying the official “Naturalized” status for those states so as to not cause more panic.

But people never talked about the little things that disappeared through all of it. The smells that vanished. The sounds. When was the last time he held a piece of vanilla fudge up to his mouth? When was the last time he heard a carousel’s music as children were twirled in circles? Someone could come up and ask him what a beach town smelled like and he would have to shrug his shoulders and say, “Salt water?” It wasn’t incorrect, but there was supposed to be so much more: cotton candy, cheap seafood snacks, spilt beer. None of that existed now. The seagulls tried to make up for it by providing tons and tons of bird shit. Everywhere he looked there were white spots of dried crap plastering the closed shops, the sidewalks, the burned-out neon signs.

At the first clear view of water, the tank came to a stop. His stomach growled at not receiving new food since breakfast. Hungry and thirsty, he left the tank and headed toward a small strip of abandoned restaurants. His throat was dry and sore. If he was going to make his way alone, he was going to have to take better care of himself.

The restaurants and stores were just like the houses: there was no need to take all of your possessions with you; there was plenty more of everything where you were going, and the resources themselves—the food, the clothes, the TVs or computers—weren’t worth their weight. Each time another person died and there were fewer people in the world, material possessions also held less value. There would be a day when there were only two or three people left. At that point not even the
Mona Lisa
or the
Star of Africa
diamond would have any value. Everything was becoming worthless.

He grew up reading comic books that told about an apocalyptic future of gangs hoarding water, food, women, and whatever else they could find. The Great De-evolution was nothing of the sort. There was more clean drinking water than anybody would ever need. There was more food and clothes than people would ever be able to use up. Houses were abundant.

The first restaurant he stopped at still had pictures of celebrities who had dined there decades earlier. The walls were littered with smiling faces that had appeared in movies and TV shows. Everyone in the pictures looked happy.

In the kitchen, he found a supply of canned fruit and frozen meat that seemed as good as anything else. He could have walked next door and found different food there. One restaurant would probably have frozen seafood. Another might have pasta. But he was tired and hungry and wasn’t picky about what he ate. He fired up the kitchen’s stove and dropped the frozen chunk of meat on it.

Further north, he might have difficulty finding real food, but there would be food processors to keep him going. The Great De-evolution was no different from other disasters in that calamity had inspired technology. Refrigerators became popular in the early 1900s after food shortages led to starvation. The Atom Bomb came from WWII. The food processor came about when Blocks signaled man’s impending end. Nearly any meal he wanted could be created by the machine, leaving him able to survive after farms stopped growing crops and grocery stores closed.

While he ate, he watched waves crash on the empty beach. The water boomed each time a wave broke, then swirled as it rushed back to meet the rest of the ocean. It was beautiful. Even after he was done eating he sat on top of the tank and watched the waves as if seeing them for the first time.

Of course, watching the waves made him think about Galen too. He had loved taking his son to the beach so they could sit in the quiet and watch the water flow onto the sand. Sometimes when he brought his son here, Jeffrey had spent the time recounting whatever he knew about the great body of water and the fish it contained, as if it were possible for him to teach his boy about the world. Other times, he was content to sit with his son, without saying anything at all, until Katherine woke from her nap or was ready for dinner.

Galen
had
to be home. He had to be safe. He had to be.

After eating a second plate of steak and fruit, his belly felt like it might burst. He took the dirty plate back to the restaurant’s kitchen even though he could have left it in the dining area and no one would have cared. For his sanity’s sake, he even cleaned it and left it to dry. It was important to keep up habits or else he could lose his mind very quickly. If he left the plate out in the open, he might as well piss on the street too. And if he did that, he might as well do whatever else he wished. It wouldn’t be long before he had no rules to follow and his mind didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

He imagined Galen being there with him to see the waves crash one more time. Katherine would have chided him for not putting a stronger suntan lotion on their son before taking him outside.

The thoughts lingered even as the tank lurched forward and made its way north again.

Chapter 4

“Flint, Michigan had no issues when they relocated and joined up with Detroit. Why should we be any different?”

“Flint? Are you serious? Flint?” The Grim Reaper’s laughter got him sitting up straight. “Flint? You really crack me up.”

“You can laugh,” his adversary said, already beginning to perspire. “But other cities have done it and they haven’t had any problems. We’ll be just fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Did Flint have as many Blocks as us?”

“How would I know? I don’t have those numbers.”

“That’s right, you don’t know.”

Jeffrey motioned to Katherine. “Turn it off. I can’t listen to these guys today.”

But instead of turning the TV off, she merely changed the station. An hour-long program was airing that would be translated into twenty different languages and be viewed by more than a billion people around the world. If the population wasn’t in the second phase of decline, the estimated amount of people watching it would have beaten the final Super Bowl.

On the show, a collection of former spies met in a university auditorium to discuss what they had been doing before the Great De-evolution, confess to what was real and what was fiction, and provide an update on what former spies were doing now that there was no need for intelligence agencies. Seated in an oval, facing the audience, were intelligence officers from England, France, Israel, America, Russia, and China. A man had tried to attend as the official representative from North Korea but no one thought him to be sane, and everyone had a good laugh at the nonsense he might have said if given a microphone.

Each man attended the symposium with the understanding that they were now retired and, although they had all signed confidentiality agreements with their respective governments saying they would either be executed or spend the rest of their lives in jail if they gave away classified information, that rules of secrecy were no longer necessary by default because there was no need anymore to recruit double agents or disseminate misinformation. And, most importantly, nearly all of the governments they had once collected intelligence for were now defunct.

None of the men bothered to wear suits. None of them cared enough about ensuring the other men around them, all supposed trained assassins, had been patted down or walked through a metal detector, lest a poison dart launch from the side of a wristwatch or poison gas be released from a belt buckle. If those things had actually ever occurred, they were part of a different life. The moderator was a former college professor who had taught political science for three decades before this year’s final graduating class signaled that he too was joining the ranks of unnecessary professionals.

“I still laugh,” the English officer said, pointing to the French officer, “about the time our chaps planted the story in the news about your President nearly dying from diarrhea. There was absolutely nothing to gain from it, my good man, except shits and giggles.”

The audience laughed. The other men on stage chuckled as well. The French officer could do nothing but pick imaginary lint from his shirt.

The Russian representative claimed to have had at least three different officers from each rival agency on his payroll. A brief round of bickering ensued when every other man claimed the same thing. The moderator asked what the point was to all of the secrets, double-crossing, and espionage, if every agency had men on the inside of every other agency.

The Chinese officer cleared his throat. “They didn’t have agents in every agency,” the man said.

When the intelligence officer from the United States and Russia started to protest, the Chinese representative pulled out a tablet for reference. “Yes, we knew about the men you had on your payroll in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Xi’an,” he said to the American. “And the men you were paying from Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong,” he said to the Russian. “But we don’t count them because we were the ones who told them to start accepting money from you. It went into our party fund and paid for some nice lunch celebrations, but the men only fed you what we wanted them to.”

The American and the Russian sank back in their chairs without further protest.

The Israeli officer told the audience that the important thing, looking back, wasn’t what they had heard over the years, because that was just what the various agencies had wanted you to hear. “The things you hear about, even about our greatest blunders, was misinformation. We leaked stories of bungled assassination attempts to divert attention away from the fact that we had a computer transferring half of Iran’s economy into a secret fund.”

The English representative tried to say that the famous Rand fiasco, a drunken MI6 officer found sitting in a pool of his own urine in a French phone booth, was also a diversion tactic, but the French officer cut him off: “That was just a case of an Englishman who drank like a girl and pissed himself like a boy.”

The American officer thought this was hilarious and reached over to give the French officer an awkward high-five.

At first, the ribbing was good-natured, but after twenty minutes the men’s competitive spirit, if not remnants of their patriotism, started to surface. The Russian accused the American of backing out of a deal to share intelligence obtained from China. The Chinese representative said he already knew everything being given out to both countries. The Israeli officer made a bet with the man from China that he had a man on the inside who no one else knew about. The Englishman ruined the game by saying the spy’s name before the Israeli or Chinese could. The French representative said that was the first time MI6 actually knew something useful.

The American said he wasn’t sure why someone from France was even in attendance: “Did you guys actually do anything, or were you laughing at the paychecks you managed to collect?”

The French officer, tired of being belittled, left the stage. But before he did, he told the audience, “The CIA killed Kennedy. Every man on stage right now knows this as fact.” Then he gave the other men the middle finger and walked off.

The crowd, this was being held in London, booed him ferociously as he left.

He paused before stepping off the stage and disappearing behind a curtain. “Just so you all know,” the Frenchman added, “for the last fifty years our country has had three missiles, each nuclear ready, with a hundred times more payload than the ones that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aimed at your little island. And we fixed the result of ten different Manchester United versus Chelsea matches. And if you ever bother to look inside Shakespeare’s tomb you’ll notice it’s empty. We took his remains as a joke, and you were all too stupid to realize it, so we kept them.”

And with that, the man from France was gone.

The Chinese representative scanned some information on the tablet he was holding before saying, “Everything the French gentleman just said is factually accurate.”

The moderator asked the men what life was like now that there were no longer any secrets to keep.

The Russian attendee, not wanting to have all of the wonderment stolen by the man from China, said, “Vot makes you think there are no more programs?” It was obvious he just wanted the respect of the audience, that he wasn’t used to being outplayed in a room. “The spy game is never over. Even now, even this night, ve have been collecting intelligence. Russia never stops. Russia never forgets. You formed a blockade to obstruct our boats,” he said to one of the men. “Ve never forget! A time vill come, before the end, ven retribution is paid. Maybe it vill be a year from now. Maybe it von’t be until you are all old men, ready to die anyway, but ve vill have the last laugh. The spy game is never over.”

The moderator asked if this payback would come in the form of nuclear war, a chemical attack, or something else, but the Russian, disappearing behind the same curtain the French man had disappeared behind, was already signaling for his cab to be called. The audience, both in the auditorium and at home, was left to wonder if evil, scheming men were still out there, still power hungry, still plotting away in secret.

Of course the threat would upset Katherine.

The screen went blank. Jeffrey asked what her plans were for the next day, mainly because if there was silence, she would imagine what the men on TV would have said next, and in a way, letting her think of the possibilities was worse than if she actually watched the show.

“I don’t know. I guess pack another box of stuff to take down to Washington.”

“You know,” he said, “we won’t have much room in the truck when we head south.”

She pulled away from him, and he didn’t say anything else.

Katherine said, “Do you remember what it was like when we were young? Our biggest responsibility was going to class and taking quizzes. Our biggest worry was getting a good grade on the next test.”

One day they had been carefree teenagers without a genuine worry in the world. Each year had added another concern, however. Eventually, they were a married couple with daily responsibilities that they couldn’t have fathomed as young adults. After being married for a while, the endless debates had started about whether or not they were ready to become parents. Then the Blocks appeared and the discussion took a more urgent tone. He never could remember what he said that finally convinced her to agree that they should try to have a child. If only he could have convinced her earlier.

On the sofa, she was already asleep when he spoke again. Instead, he looked out the window at the night sky and the city lights that kept everything slightly aglow. Katherine’s sleeping breaths were steady and constant. A flickering in the distance, vague at first, became more distinct. He knew at once what it was. It had made him gasp the first time he saw it: a house on fire. It was three or four blocks away, entirely engulfed in flames. Wisps of fire reached into the sky. He watched it with enthusiasm as if it were something to be mesmerized by rather than a possible tragedy in the making.

Without being told, he knew the house would be empty, that its inhabitants had just left in order to move south. The fire was there because the house’s occupants intentionally set it ablaze. Nine out of every ten house fires across the country were the result of such acts. Maybe the few remaining volunteer firefighters would arrive and put it out so it didn’t spread to the neighboring houses. But maybe they wouldn’t. It was a guarantee that the police wouldn’t take a report. The few remaining cops never bothered investigating house fires anymore because they too understood that the arsonists were on their way south. What were they going to do, extradite them back to Philadelphia just as the city was getting ready to evacuate?

He still didn’t understand why it happened. He knew what the people were thinking when they lit the match, but he didn’t understand the reasoning that got them to that point. They were doing it because they were leaving the area for good, heading south, and didn’t want anybody else to live in the home that held special value for them, as though a family from Montreal or Syracuse would taint their house’s memories. It took a special kind of egotism to think a house that was built fifty years earlier, had been lived in by three other families before they had lived in it, held some special significance strong enough for one family and one family only. Good riddance to whoever it was.

The proper thing to do, the custom that people everywhere had taken to as they moved further south, was to leave their house in proper working order for the next people who wanted it. The doors remained unlocked. The garage was left open. Some people even went as far as to vacuum and dust before they left. These were the people who understood they were beginning the next part of their life, and that somebody else was taking part in the same journey as well. These people knew that karma always repaid its debts.

Part of him thought about waking Katherine so she could see the house burning. It was a no-win situation, though. She would be terrified if he woke her up to see another burning home. But if he didn’t, if she found out the next day, she would be afraid to fall asleep at all for fear of what happened when she was dreaming. That was just how she worked. The first time he saw one of the fires, she had been brushing her teeth.

“Hey, honey,” he had called to her and she appeared in the bathroom doorway. “Check this out.”

At the time, neither of them was accustomed to people burning down their houses on their way out of the city. Both of them had thought it was a life or death situation. Like a fool, he had called 911. Ever since then, she had never been able to see one of the house fires without feeling a sense of dread. Each time, she would start packing their bags while he convinced her it was better to leave with everyone else as the entire city—what was left of the city—made the trip to Washington together.

And so he let her sleep. She would see the smoldering remains the next morning, and when that happened he would feign surprise and act like he hadn’t seen anything either. It was, he had learned, the best way to handle things. Live and learn.

Hours later, surrounded by boxes of paper once again, he was still thinking about how to keep her from getting upset so often. All around him were cabinets full of paperwork that no longer served a purpose. The boxes behind him contained photocopied records of every single invoice dealing with sustaining the living quarters. Somewhere else on base there were boxes full of similar invoices which detailed the amounts, dates of purchase, and vendor POCs for the dining halls. He had no idea where those boxes were, but they were taking up at least twenty square feet of space somewhere else on Fort Dix. Somewhere else on the base were boxes of paper dealing with every mechanical part of every piece of equipment, every gun, every computer, everything. And those were just the invoices, a tiny blip on the paperwork radar compared to the military’s annual reports, its progress reports, the annual inspection results, the yearly performance results. They had reports for everything.