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Authors: Robert Charles Wilson
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mourning her dog, when everyone else seemed either indifferent or secretly relieved that St. Augustine was finally out of the house.
She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. “I was heartbroken when that animal died.”
We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.
She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don’t know. I don’t know what people do when they pray. I don’t think I’m capable of it.
But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.
The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.
When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.
Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.
I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I’d have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.
Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.
RUMORS OF APOCALYPSE
REACH THE BERKSHIRE
I didn’t see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I graduated from med school, at a summer rental in the Berkshires about twenty minutes from Tanglewood.
I had been busy. I had done four years of college plus volunteer time at a local clinic and had started prepping for the MCAT a couple of years ahead of writing it. My GPA, the MCAT results, and a sheaf of recommendation letters from undergraduate advisors and other venerable worthies (plus E.D.‘s largesse) had bought me admission to the SUNY medical campus at Stony Brook for another four years. That was done, behind me, finished, but I was still looking at at least three more years of residency before I was ready to practice.
Which put me among the majority of people who continued to conduct their lives as if the end of the world had not been announced.
It might have been different if doomsday had been calculated down to the day and hour. We all could have chosen our motifs, from panic to saintly resignation, and played out human history with a decent sense of timing and an eye on the clock.
But what we were facing was merely the strong likelihood of eventual extinction, in a solar system rapidly becoming unfit for life. Probably nothing could protect us indefinitely from the expanding sun we had all seen in NASA images captured from orbital probes… but we were shielded from it for now, for reasons no one understood. The crisis, if there
was
a crisis, was intangible; the only evidence available to the senses was the absence of the stars—absence as evidence, evidence of absence.
So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction? The question defined our generation. It was easy enough for Jason, it seemed. He had thrown himself into the problem headlong:
She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. “I was heartbroken when that animal died.”
We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.
She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don’t know. I don’t know what people do when they pray. I don’t think I’m capable of it.
But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.
The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.
When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.
Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.
I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I’d have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.
Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.
RUMORS OF APOCALYPSE
REACH THE BERKSHIRE
I didn’t see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I graduated from med school, at a summer rental in the Berkshires about twenty minutes from Tanglewood.
I had been busy. I had done four years of college plus volunteer time at a local clinic and had started prepping for the MCAT a couple of years ahead of writing it. My GPA, the MCAT results, and a sheaf of recommendation letters from undergraduate advisors and other venerable worthies (plus E.D.‘s largesse) had bought me admission to the SUNY medical campus at Stony Brook for another four years. That was done, behind me, finished, but I was still looking at at least three more years of residency before I was ready to practice.
Which put me among the majority of people who continued to conduct their lives as if the end of the world had not been announced.
It might have been different if doomsday had been calculated down to the day and hour. We all could have chosen our motifs, from panic to saintly resignation, and played out human history with a decent sense of timing and an eye on the clock.
But what we were facing was merely the strong likelihood of eventual extinction, in a solar system rapidly becoming unfit for life. Probably nothing could protect us indefinitely from the expanding sun we had all seen in NASA images captured from orbital probes… but we were shielded from it for now, for reasons no one understood. The crisis, if there
was
a crisis, was intangible; the only evidence available to the senses was the absence of the stars—absence as evidence, evidence of absence.
So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction? The question defined our generation. It was easy enough for Jason, it seemed. He had thrown himself into the problem headlong:
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