Everything was Beautiful
When the screaming began, I pressed my face into the mesh of my window and waited. I knew how this would work. Facial muscles take about one minute to begin liquefying, which would account for the yelps of discovery like broken glass. I know this better than I want to: throat muscles will follow soon after, accounting for the new slight gurgling quality to the ululations. The sound throbbed and built (right about now is when their marrow would begin to melt). An uncomforted cacophony poured through the city like a sonic waterfall. I listened so closely to my own creation that it took me a moment to realize when it finally, finally stopped. Silence rolled over Ithaca like a warning bell.
I sat for hours as the lights in houses and office buildings winked out one by one, until I knew what to do. My feet found the familiarity of your green concrete doorstep and I rang the bell, unsure of the protocol for the end of the world. You answered by peering out at me owlishly from behind the dim crack of your door for a moment before you disappeared into the gloom of your apartment. I waited uneasily, over-aware of the stillness like snowfall on your street.
You came back carrying the purple canvas backpack you had been wearing the first time I met you. That day you sprinted past me across the tiles of the biology lab, through thousands of dollars of centrifuges and microscopes to waft the scent of a tray of e.coli bacterium that you had mutated to smell like lemon verbena, just because you loved lemon verbena. The scent trailed after you like the white wings of your open lab coat. People have said mistakes were made, but they don’t understand that out of a beginning like that there can be no mistakes, only missteps.
You shouldered the backpack and followed me into the growing darkness.
-.-
Afterwards, much later, I learn what you carried with you: a half-struck book of matches, a trowel, three plastic water bottles (two filled), a miniature Swiss army knife missing the nail clippers and actual knife, an amber necklace your favorite aunt gave you, and yellow wool socks.
I brought: our driver’s licenses, cash, a can opener, water purifying pump, whistle, box of dust masks, first aid kit, two flashlights with extra batteries, moist towelettes, two sleeping bags, a blue box containing an engagement ring I had bought a few years ago and never used, a scavenged box of meals ready to eat from the army surplus store, our lab notes and bound thesis, two complete changes of clothes, extra underwear, lots of waterproof matches, maps, two toothbrushes and toothpastes.
I wanted to be able to say later that I had taken care of you, despite all evidence to the contrary.
-.-
There are things you learn you never wanted to. Don’t open closets, boltholes, small dark places where the sick go to curl up with their bloody mouths and die. Last night’s ashes are never warm enough for this morning’s fire, just hot enough to burn questioning fingers. Guns don’t break down quickly, and after a week you’ll stop being amazed that people’s response to the end of the world is to pile guns in the corners of their living rooms like dirty laundry.
-.-
I am not sure whether to be afraid, so we scuttle under yew bushes at the sound of engines, traitors against the unified, heavy silence. Who knows what could have survived what we wrought? Better to be safe than sorry.
Some days, the rest, we walk down the middle yellow lines of freeways, between rusting sedans with flat tires. I tell you not to look in the driver’s seat. The guilt rests in the back of my head, a beautiful, reassuring tumor.
-.-
You could pretend everything was alright, if it weren’t for how all the channels on all the televisions are made of loud empty static.
-.-
Things that remained long after:
Fog horns
Cats still tried to curl around our legs, trotted after us longingly when we walked through their neighborhoods.
Automated sprinkler systems
Church bells
Sidewalk crossings
The blue polish on your nails
Sliding doors
Neatly made empty beds
Family portraits hung on walls
Asphalt
The instinct to wait for other people, to not set fire to city blocks when it was cold, because those were people’s homes. A sense of courtesy, the modesty to defecate behind and not in front of buildings. Those still linger in me.
-.-
You are almost all eyes now and you watch things too closely, the shuffle of your torn trainers across the black asphalt, or my lips when I tell you sleep here, eat this, keep walking. All softness is gone from your face. You used to be lushly padded, the kind of body that only existed after the Industrial Revolution. You used to build me custom organisms that lived in ethanol fires, because you were the pride of a small rural Indiana town, and child science prodigies did things like that.
Now you are rendered as beautifully abstract as a painting we once saw in a white museum on a class trip. Then, it reminded me of the smooth course of enzymes transported through cell walls, of binary fission, and the bold and sure progress of science. Now your face and the memory of the painting just make me think of our own human limits and how that painting is probably growing mold in its frame.
-.-
I didn’t think we were headed north, but when we started seeing signs for Niagara Falls with all the As missing, I realized we must have been. You and I found ourselves on the American side of the falls, watching the wall of water thunder and shimmer on the rocks. I make sure to keep you far away from the iron railing, thinking about the effects of spray and the lack of maintenance men. I want to hold you very tightly against my chest and say something from one of those old movies they used to play at the theater a block away from our university, like, too bad they can't play it for you now, Rose. But you don’t want any of it and pull away from me. When I follow your gaze, I can see why.
A grain freighter, nearly rusted through in parts but with blue stripes and white stars still visible, loomed on the horizon. It must’ve been at least two hundred feet long, seventy feet high, a champion of industry in its day. Like a wooly mammoth lumbering into view, it slowly drifted towards the edge. Something about car crashes lingered on the tip of my tongue as we watched the stern droop of the edge, snapping the hull with a jagged sounding squeal. The bow toppled slowly over into the stern, and the whole mess lay like carcass of a whale of on the rocks.
I realized that I had forgotten to cover your eyes, but you had already done that for me.
-.-
On the forty-second day, you asked me do I know where we are going?
-.-
Once, I struggled out of sleep to see you hunched over on your heels, digging a hole with the trowel. The dark earth yawned as you unzipped your backpack and upended everything in.
-.-
Every morning, I take out the maps and plot our day’s journey. I have vague intentions of heading west- fewer bodies? But I dropped out of the Boy Scouts after a week in second grade and looking at a map gives me no idea of where we are. Cities are surprisingly the same, once the signs begin to fall down. You sit beside me patiently each morning, but I can’t tell if you believe me when I tell you we have a plan, or if you are pretending to humor me, and if so, for whose sake you are pretending.
-.-
We had been in our lab for days, after we had been ordered to find a cure for our child. At first, we had been barricaded in by what I thought might be the National Guard, but they disappeared after the fourth day. We had kept working.
The night things went bad, I found you with your head pressed against the lab wall with your eyes wired shut and your breathing like Morse code.
“Hey,” I say to you, because I am an idiot and I love you. “I think if we extrapolated the vaccine reservoir, maybe we could save New York?”
When you turn your head to look at me, with your face still pressed against the wall as if longing for some kind of solidity in the world, I was amazed that you were this wrecked. Did the skin around your eyelids really need to be full of burst veins? Did your beautiful hands, trained steady through years of lab work, really need to tremble like that? There is only so much, I wanted to tell you. There is only so much guilt you can take on. I am alive. Can that be enough?
“There never was a vaccine reservoir”, you say. “Ship’s under.”
And you turn to the wall and scream. Not this, I think, as your shoulders shake and your neck bulges with easily snapped tendons, and little flecks of spit and blood spatter the wall
“I’m done,” you say, when you finally stop. “I’m done.”
-.-
At one point I realized that the first one of us to die would be the last human being to receive a proper burial. The last one of us would just lie on the road where we collapsed, food for the cougars and wolverines we were beginning to see everywhere. This, more than anything else, sent a drip of ice down my spine.
-.-
The night we turned in our joint PhD thesis, I got really drunk on gin and tonics and announced to the bar that we might have invented the end of humanity as we knew it but this girl right here was the end of my world. That was a lie. The end of the world is dandelions growing in the side of skyscrapers like the beginning sparks of an end-all-be-all fire. It’s stoplights stuck on yellow, telling us to get ready, prepare for change, always. The end of the world looks like a rusty butcher’s knife that you picked up somewhere unclean in your steady scientist’s hand.
-.-
Sixty-first day, you say fuck you, you don’t even know where we’re going.
-.-
I can’t take the blame for any of this breakdown. Yes, we knew that a virus that unspooled human DNA like a ball of yarn dropped from a great height would be dangerous, in theory. Yes, we knew that there were people with bad intentions out there in the world, but we knew that our intentions were good. After all, nothing that happens in academia matters in the real world, right? We did know that this mass of protein coats and RNA and lipids was the future, but we did not know how right we would turn out to be.
We did not anticipate that there would be an international bidding war for our patent.
We did not anticipate that our methods would be on the internet within hours of the University of Chicago’s winning bid.
We did not anticipate that Algerian terrorists would replicate what took us three years to create in two weeks. Frankly, I was a little miffed.
We did not anticipate the rigged suitcases left in daycare centers. We did not anticipate the crop dusters flying low over the world’s major cities, spreading our brainchild like pesticides.
We did not anticipate the suicide bombers who boarded subways, breathed deeply into paper bags and then vomited chunks of their lungs and bloody foam into the packed crowd.
We did not anticipate that our virus would work faster than ebola at dissolving the cell walls that make up facial muscles, blood vessels, organs. You could tell if someone had inhaled the virus within moments, because their face would go slack as the lipid walls that composed their fine facial muscles would burst and liquefy.
We were smart. I said that we didn’t anticipate any of this, but we had designed the virus to work around our genomes. Late one night, early on in the road that led us here, we had cut our fingers and dripped blood into an agar medium. At the time, I thought this was terribly sexy and hoped we would sleep together that night, but we never did. You told me that you had a vision of a future filled with bodies that had been refined from disease and hate and ugliness, like angels. Laughing at your own superstition, you told me that you wanted us to be the last original humans. I liked the picture of us far off in the future, the last ones to have relics like liver spots and arthritis. We could sit on the boards of universities and receive our accolades with dignity, like honored vestiges of an earlier, less enlightened time.
Our child to the end, our virus had behaved exactly the way we had planned, in exactly the way we hoped it wouldn’t. I don’t remember even thinking that it could be used as a weapon. I had thought it would be useful to gene therapy. I had a vague mental picture of myself shaking the hand of darling, grateful cystic fibrosis patients and getting my picture in the paper. You told me once we could end child abuse with it, by eliminating the genes for alcoholism, attraction to risk, mental illness, but I thought you were getting ahead of yourself.
Unknowingly, we had built this destruction to blow past us unscathed. You and I were left standing like the last trees in a great forest and it was terribly, terribly lonely.
-.-
The earth retreats to her original self faster than you would think. The water stopped trickling from faucets after a week and the dogs went even sooner than that. But there are still fingerprints on the soil, miniscule ridges of intention.
We move through the pine woods one gray afternoon where the light was cracked and reluctant through the needles. As you walked in front of me, I could tell from the knotted muscles in your back that you were hungry, could tell form the lift of your shoulders that you would like to stop soon and change your socks. But when you did stop, and crouched down at the base of a tree, I almost walked into you before I looked where you looking.
There were three tiny crosses askew in the mossy earth, made of brown popsicle sticks tied together with blue yarn. For a pet, a hamster or canary. Something that was loved, kept, protected from drafts and lightening.
I would have given anything to protect you from any of this.
-.-
Your shell-like fingernails have been bitten down to the red and bleeding quick and your cuticles are ripped and painful-looking. I wondered, when you are doing this to yourself- when I am asleep?- and am jealous of this, yet another thing I couldn’t rescue you from.
-.-
Inadvertently, we had also solved global warming. I felt we deserved some credit for
that.
-.-
One day, I pulled out our research notes to show you the highlighted section that suggested certain ethnic groups, Subbotnik Jews and Cameroonian Yorubas, could possibly be immune to our destruction, through mutations in the mitochondrial DNA. You looked at me, deeply unimpressed. Later, when I double checked my figures, I realized that it was only a miscalculation, not hope. You were always the better scientist.
-.-
Day eighty-four, I break. We are rummaging through what used to be a grocery store for proteins, when I turn to you and yell, DO YOU BLAME ME? IS THIS ALL MY FAULT? BECAUSE THIS WAS YOUR IDEA, TOO. YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS FROM HAPPENING AT ANY TIME , MISSY.
You cry, but that’s all you’ve done for a while.
-.-
You would think that with all the time spent together, I would know more about you. Did you want real, non-lethal children before this? Did you want to try and have children with me to see if our immunity transferred to the next generation, or did you want to avoid one more tragedy of watching our newborn die with its first breath? What kind of plans did you have for the rest of your life now? Should we try and make clones of ourselves? Did you want to keep going, or should we pick somewhere and play house till we died? Was there someone else that you had loved, in the great before, and that’s why I had never seen you naked to this day?
You were such silent company.
-.-
Before they all died off, the all the major news anchors and editorialists blamed us for this pandemic. But we didn’t mean for any of this to happen! I refuse to carry the blame for this, when I am already carrying the burden of my dead mother, sister, cousins, fourth grade classmates, drinking buddies, ex-girlfriends, lab partners, the guy who drove the bus I rode every morning, the President.
You feel guilty, I think.
-.-
We move through the enormity of after. At first, you wanted to stop at every dozenth house. Look through photo albums, try on wedding dresses and Navy blazers, take cans of green beans from cupboards. Now you walk through the days like someone half heartedly programmed you, getting distracted partway through the job. It might have something to do with the bodies we keep finding, piles of rags and thighbones.
At first I worried over everything about you, the white blisters on your heels, the way your hands creep inconsolably when we rested, the way your backpack was a hollow cave. Now the worry is too huge to hold in me, so I let it wash over me in beautiful, drowning waves that crash only when we held still.
Maybe we are walking to the ocean.
-.-
later, I think, later we will laugh about this. when we find the survivors.
Then I realize I haven’t heard you laugh for maybe three weeks.
-.-
You are missing one morning when I wake up. I lay in my dew drenched sleeping bag thinking about efficient methods of suicide in a post-industrial world before I gave looking for you a try. I reach for my backpack out of habit, but it’s not there.
The darkest minutes of my life pass before I found you. You were perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out at all the things that used to be there but no longer exist. My backpack is sitting next to you. I don’t know what to do as I watch you toss things over the edge; our flashlight, first aid kit, what was left of the meals ready to eat. I keep waiting to see if your wrecked, beautiful body is next (which means that I would be shortly following, one flightless bird after another). When there is nothing left in the backpack, you toss that over the edge too. You get up without looking around and come to me and bury your face in the nook of my neck.
Anything, my darling, to keep you on the ground.
-.-
In one of the anonymous cities, you trip on a stair step. It’s in a town square; I can hear the empty space watching us. You lie on the brick steps not moving, your knee bleeding. Your wrist is bruised in the shape of the tug of my fingers and I want to compel you to get up laugh, complain about your knee, ask for a band-aid, cry, swear at me, anything.
I laid down beside you. There were many hours until dark, but we slept there that day. The next night, somewhere else.
