On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.
There was a stupid moment or two when he stood near the front door, flipping the light switches. On/off, on/off.
“Stop it,” Frank said. He was taking notes in a margin of his manuscript in the gray light that seeped in through the blinds. “You’re driving me crazy.” Frank was hiding in his project, Jeevan had realized, but he couldn’t begrudge Frank the strategy. If Jeevan had had a project, he’d have hid in it too.
“It could just be us,” Jeevan said. “Maybe just a blown fuse in the basement?”
“Of course it isn’t just us. The only remarkable thing is that the lights stayed on as long as they did.”
“It’s like the tree house,” Frank said. This was sometime around Day Thirty, a few days after the end of running water. Whole days passed when they didn’t speak, but there were inexplicable moments of peace. Jeevan had never felt so close to his brother. Frank worked on the philanthropist’s memoir and Jeevan read. He spent hours studying the lake through the telescope, but the sky and the water were empty. No planes, no ships, and where was the Internet?
He hadn’t thought of the tree house in a long time. It had been in the backyard of their childhood home in the Toronto suburbs, and they’d stayed up there for hours at a time with comic books. There was a rope ladder that could be pulled up to thwart would-be invaders.
“We can wait this out for quite a while,” Jeevan said. He was surveying the water supply, which was still reasonable. He’d filled every receptacle in the apartment with water before it stopped coming out of the taps, and more recently he’d been catching snow in pots and bowls on the balcony.
“Yes,” Frank said, “but then what?”
“Well, we’ll just stay here till the lights come back on or the Red Cross shows up or whatever.” Jeevan had been prone to cinematic daydreams lately, images tumbling together and overlapping, and his favorite movie involved waking in the morning to the sound of a loudspeaker, the army coming in and announcing that it was all over, this whole flu thing cleared up and taken care of, everything back to normal again. He’d push the dresser away from the door and go down to the parking lot, maybe a soldier would offer him a cup of coffee, clap him on the back. He imagined people congratulating him on his foresight in stocking up on food.
“What makes you think the lights will come back on?” Frank asked without looking up. Jeevan started to reply, but words failed him.
31
INTERVIEW OF KIRSTEN RAYMONDE by François Diallo, librarian of the New Petoskey Library and publisher of the New Petoskey News, Year Fifteen, continued:
DIALLO: Forgive me. I shouldn’t have asked about the knife tattoos.
RAYMONDE: Forgiven.
DIALLO: Thank you. I wondered, though, if I might ask you about the collapse?
RAYMONDE: SURE.
DIALLO: You were in Toronto, I think. Were you with your parents?
RAYMONDE: No. That last night, Day One in Toronto, or I guess it’s Night One, isn’t it? Whatever you want to call it. I was in a production of King Lear, and the lead actor died on stage. His name was Arthur Leander. You remember, we talked about this a few years ago, and you had his obituary in one of your newspapers.
DIALLO: But perhaps you wouldn’t mind, for the benefit of our newspaper’s readers …
RAYMONDE: Okay, yes. He had a heart attack onstage, like I was saying. I don’t remember many details about him, because I don’t remember very much about anything from that time, but I’ve retained a sort of impression of him, if that makes sense. I know he was kind to me and that we had some sort of friendship, and I remember very clearly the night when he died. I was onstage with two other girls in the production, and I was behind Arthur, so I didn’t see his face. But I remember there was some commotion just in front of the stage. And then I remember hearing a sound, this sharp “thwack,” and that was Arthur hitting his hand on the plywood pillar by my head. He’d sort of stumbled back, his arm flailed out, and then a man from the audience had climbed up on the stage and was running toward him—