‘The world is so dreadful in many ways.
Do let us be tender with each other.’
— Katherine Mansfield,
letter to Dorothy Brett, 14 August 1918
The end, when everything seemed lost, turned into the beginning. And in the beginning, there was Barton and Walker. No one who survived could really say whether it was a single big catastrophe, or a series of smaller messes, or if it was just the slow grind of excess. Probably it was all of that. Maybe Russia dropped a bomb on San Francisco. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the Nile became poisoned. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the last of the ice caps turned yellow. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe Vitamin C turned out to be carcinogenic. Maybe it didn’t. Governments of all brands, the UN, the anti-UN, the World Bank, FIFA all spoke loud and long about what needed to happen, but by then no one could tell information from lies.
The details hardly matter now. The earth, pushed past its limits, began to eat its own. Most of the eight billion victims died over a period of a few months. Quickly, slowly: these things are relative. Living another day, and another, depended on who you were and where you were. The survivors tried to eat and drink in the same way that they always had, even as they saw carp floating in rivers, even as dust invaded cities and towns, even as rain pierced skin, even as the tides went wherever they wanted.
Barton and Walker, friends since childhood, dragged themselves around their city — the city that became Rise. They looked for but never found loved ones, joined small bands when it seemed safe to do so, abandoned them at the first hint of violence, skirted fires (except when they needed to try to boil water), avoided dirty lakes where no lakes had previously sat, and took their chances by swallowing what they could scavenge.
Picture them — Walker looking like a boy but for his height, Barton already looking like herself — slinking through the centre of the city, drawn by rumours of a supermarket intact under the rubble. They are filthy. Their clothes are rags. The stress of their situation, the city’s situation, the planet’s situation, is etched on their faces. They are alive, unlike their parents, their siblings, most of their friends, but they know — they’ve talked about it, reconciled themselves to it — that they shouldn’t be and that they won’t be soon.
They find no supermarkets that night. There are none left to find; there is very little of anything to find, other than rumours and innuendo. But they do encounter a small group of people who have surrounded a shirtless man who sits on the ground in the middle of the faded bitumen road. The man wears a see-through bandage that covers one hand and runs all the way to his shoulder. He shakes his arm, which looks distorted under the plastic bandage.
‘I can’t feel it,’ he says. ‘I can’t feel my arm.’
Barton crouches in front of him and takes a knife from her pants. ‘It’s okay,’ she says to the man.
‘Give her a moment,’ Walker says to the crowd, some of whom have slipped their hands into pockets, fingering their own weapons. There is no rule of law now, other than one-to-one negotiation.
Barton makes a careful cut into the bandage at the shoulder end. She puts the knife away, easing the tension, and begins — slowly, slowly — to unravel the plastic. The arm reveals itself, withered by burns, covered in bruises and lumps, and hanging loose as if the bone has turned to rubber. Now that Barton has removed the bandage, it’s apparent that the man’s wrist is so twisted that his hand faces the wrong way.
Something about this man captivates the crowd. Not just the arm or the way he continues to swing it about, but all of him: his spirit, his hopeless resilience. They stare at him, frankly. He lets them. Walker glances at Barton. Her hand rests on her belly and she has the oddest look of hope — and, almost, contentment — on her face. She meets Walker’s gaze. Sees his puzzlement.
‘Look again,’ she whispers. ‘Look harder.’
He looks. He feels. And he begins to understand.
***
Cleave was the only person left on earth who looked back, and she did so constantly. Almost absently. No one else in the city-states of Rise or Shine dared indulge the past, except for fleeting glances, a few minutes at a time at most. To dwell on the Old Time, to think about everyone and everything lost, to remember the way the world hovered brazenly on the precipice of disaster for so long before it all unravelled: no one, except for Cleave, could bear it.
It wasn’t that Cleave cared less than the rest of them. But she had a job to do and she had no time for emotional turmoil. She often asked herself how anyone from the Old Time could possibly have been surprised by what happened. She didn’t think people were stupid, on the whole, but she did think they were malignantly complacent.
As Chief Scientist for what was left of humanity, Cleave’s job was to look back, to look forward, to look at the here and now. All at once. Aided by drones, robots, and four walls of autoscreens in the main room of her private compound, she observed and tended to the earth. By donning a headset, she could stay home but roam what used to be Shanghai, days before the fireball, and compare and contrast it with the concrete-studded swamp it had become. She could test the water for toxicity, for salinity, for pathogens. She could scan for signs of plant and animal life. Shanghai, the bottom of the former Pacific Ocean, the polar caps, the Amazon rainforests, a bend in the Volga River, a hamlet in the Hamptons. She could go anywhere, anytime. She saw everything.
Cleave hadn’t stood in the same room as another human being for over twenty years. Her private compound was her world. She served the people of Rise and the people of Shine, but she could not share their space. She needed solitude to think. Because of this, she had long ago removed herself from the people she most loved. But she thought about them, her old friends with new names. When she was lonely — it didn’t happen often, but it did happen — and she needed to remind herself of the importance of her work, she thought back to the day they had founded the New Time. Walker, Barton: the two of them standing together, already eminent, a little apart from Cleave and the others. Curtin, Holland, Hail, and her. The six of them gathered on a gentle slope in the foothills overlooking a city of rancid air and lingering fires and floods, the place stripped of plants and animals, even rats, the people bereft, sick, starved, bloody, dazed.
‘We’re going to need an enemy if we’re going to make this thing work,’ Walker had said that day.
‘I’ll be the enemy,’ Barton had said. She was the bravest of us all, Cleave thought.
They’d been so young then, the six of them. Cleave knew it was plain good luck that they’d found a solution, even if Walker and Barton were a couple of geniuses. Thirty years later, all six of them were still alive. That was a miracle too, though, like everyone, Cleave had tumours to treat and joint pain to endure.
***
In the pitch black, a plastic parrot began to whistle ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. It was a forlorn tune to start another day, less nostalgia and more a warning, a reminder that, in the Old Time, people used to love rain, used to open their mouths to it, used to dance in its muddy puddles, used to store and draw on its bounty. It was a reminder too that birds used to fly about. That they used to exist.