Chapter One

 

     I went out to Islesford.  It must have been when I still cared because I knew it was infested but I had the hope that he would be out there, alive.  It was immediately clear that I was wrong.

     I went around the harbor.  Stopped by his fishing boat.  It struck me more than ever how beautiful she was.  Her high bow, still proud, sloping down so gracefully.  Oil black.  He was there, crumpled under the hauler.  I don’t remember if I felt relieved or happy or excited because the second in-between seeing him and seeing he was sick with it, was short.

     I shouldn’t have, but I hopped on board.  He was shivering.  Told me he had swum out thinking he could get free of it.  Make it to me.  He’d started to take off his soaked clothes when he noticed his skin had that look.  Realized he was through.  I shouldn’t have, but I took off my quilted jacket and I tucked him in.

     I sat back.  Watched my man leave me.  Helplessly.  Having no power to save him.  I shouldn’t have, but I let him live his last of it out.  I wanted him to go knowing everything I had for him.  All of it was his.  Wanted him to take that with him.

     Even then, he was so beautiful.  Auburn hair, eyes like the water, sun tanned skin, salty and blue just like when we used to go swimming together off the pier.  We talked for those last hours.  Said all the things you’re supposed to say, but he started to lose his words.  His eyes glazed and his shivering stopped.

     I stepped back aboard my boat.  Grabbed my gun and I shot clean and straight.

     It was a cold ride back.

She spoke the words softly as she prepared the dough to bake.  It was Friday.  Friday was bread-baking day.  It took a lot to get her talking and I was surprised at her telling me this story first, but she seemed like the kind of woman that would start at the beginning.  This was her beginning.

     She formed the dry ingredients into a circle with her clean, tough fingers.  Slow and methodically.  She mixed the yeast into a bowl of warm water, spooned in the honey.  Keeping a steady hand.  Her story came at a steady pace. 

It’s happened before.  Plagues.  Parasites.  Just not together like this.  Not as widespread as this.

     My solution was to isolate myself from it.  I didn’t think the hold out of Mount Desert Island would last, especially after the Cranberry Islands turned.  MDI was too big.  Too many unwatched ways for the desperate to clamber on.  But to my surprise it did.  As the parasite destroyed the area around the island, I blew the bridge.  There was no one left on the other side to try to get out to me.

     I was under the impression that the island had been mostly abandoned.  News of the spreading parasite had been flooding the airwaves.  People were trying to keep ahead of it.  They kept moving north.  The plan was to wait it out.  What better way to keep away from disease than to keep away from people.  What better way to keep away from people then to live on an island. 

     As luck would have it, Acadia National Park had kept a good supply of dynamite on hand to clear trails and after it shut down, I moved it all closer to the bridge.  I wanted to wait until the last second.  I wanted the most people possible to leave.  I wanted to be alone.  I guess I didn’t really think about, or understand, what would happen after I blew the bridge.

      

     She pounded out the dough.  Now mixed.  Adding a little flour here and there to the dry wood table to keep the forming bread from sticking. 

     I thought, this was a practice she had honed as the years had passed by.  I imagined her small strong hands beginning to understand the dough and how it felt.  Beginning to know what it needed and supplying just that. 

     The smell of flour and yeast held in the air heavy with the wood smoke, a thin layer coating everything in the small cabin, from the crowbar by her bed, to the fine creases in her arms.  It almost seemed to loosen her words.  Like the flour helped her from sticking too.  She went on.

The island wasn’t abandoned and everything began to go wrong.  The ugliness of human nature that I so wanted to avoid came out full force.  Luckily, I was not opposed to killing anyone.  Not if they tried to kill me first.  In desperate times that quality made me rare.  Not because I could kill, but because I was discriminate about it, unlike almost everyone else.  So, the woman who blew the bridge became the woman who policed the island.  Soon there was an entire government.

     Maybe I shouldn’t be such a cynic.  Maybe it was these people’s way of grasping at civilization because it was chaos off island.  But all I saw was pathetic high school politics.  An ego race.  To be honest, I don’t really know why I went along with being the “COP”. Suppose I didn’t trust anyone else with the job.

     The way it worked was they’d come find me.  Time to time at first, then more and more.  Once the initial killing had died down we had a happy lull, but you’d be dim to think desperation is anything less then a cancer.  It would always be the same.  Joe Shmoe’s wife just got caught with so and so and Joe’d be out for blood.  It was my job to intervene, and I had my ways.  The hippies would come down on me after it had been handled.  Called me unnecessarily brutal.  As far as I was concerned, those crispies could take their peace right back to La-La Land.

She dunked a cloth into a bucket of water and wrung it out until it was evenly soaked, but dry.  The flour matted into her skin where the water touched her.

I wanted to ask about her words.  The term “crispies”.  It made me feel the time that lived between us.  Made me sad that we were on the same continent, in completely different worlds.

She quietly reached the bread up to the shelf and draped the cloth across the loaves.  Every move she made was with the upmost care.  In a fashion, it was the same way that she spoke.  

I understand how parasites work.  I went to college for a few years.  Used to be smart.  Parasites scared me to death so of course I was fascinated by them.  They take hold of the minds of plenty of organisms.  We were dumb as nails to think that one wouldn’t figure out how to grab hold of us.  See, that’s what happens.  You think you’re the top of the pyramid.  That you floss your teeth with the food chain.  That you’re God’s divine honor roll student, and reality goes with your shit to the septic.

     I remember seeing a crab as a kid, with mussels growing out of her.  The mussel tricked the crab into thinking she was pregnant.  The mussel would grow in her and the crab would take real good care of ‘em, like they were her own.  That parasite wouldn’t exist if there were no crabs, and that’s what I figured.  No people- no parasite.  That was the “cure”.

     Now, I wasn’t some yahoo that wanted to play god and kill everyone.  As long as I was ok, everyone else could be what they may.  I was going to let it all play out. 

As it was, the world was taking itself back.  My dooryard was a field of flowers like you wouldn’t believe and at night I’d stay up and listen to the wild sounds of the coyotes.  There was hardly a morning that didn’t bring at least five deer to my field.  Big beautiful deer.  Shining coats.  All muscle.  But it was when I’d shove my boat out off the beach that I really noticed it.  Clams would spit water up all around you as you walked across the mud flats.  Steamers the size of your hand.  Once I was out fishing, I’d haul in stripper and cod.  Full bodied, happy fish.  As the months went by, I started seeing schools of herring sliced apart by sterling silver tuna.  In all the wrong around me, those things were so right. 

It got me thinking a lot about Mount Desert Rock.  So many miles out, I could spend all my time with what was right.  Leave all that bothered me behind and actually be alone.  I could sit on the porch of the light-keepers house and see in all directions.  Any one who even thought about joining me would have another thing coming.  At least out there I could enjoy the view in peace as humanity died off behind me.  Life goes funny when there is no future tense. 

I spent a lot of time wondering at ways to survive.  Must have been a reflex because I didn’t really much care.  It always came down to getting away from all those other folks.  Sure, a lot of them were real nice people, but you can’t care ‘cause sooner or later it’s all gunna snap.  They’ll care themselves crazy and you’re the one who’s gunna be on the trigger. 

I realize that people are special because they’re so complex.  They have morals and values, whether noble or not.  They care about things like nothin’ else.  A fox’s kit dies, sure it goes around yelpin’ a bit, but then it goes ahead and gets full of fox again.  People- losing a kid.  A loved one.  Changes everything.  They care complexly.  That’s why they lose their minds, and that’s why they die.  I’ve had to put a bullet in plenty of people but I wont say I killed ‘em.  I just put ‘em down. And I suppose my gun became my Mount Desert Rock.  My last view of humanity.  I should’ve been sad about that I’m sure, but I wasn’t sad about anything the same way I wasn’t happy about anything.  I was numbly complacent.  I was alive and breathing, nothing extra, nothing more.  My heart wasn’t a pump, it was a grinder.  Suppose that’s why all the dirty jobs came my way.

I remember the first time I did it.  Standing at the end of the pier, looking out over the harbor.  It was so beautiful that time of day, that time of year.  The green of the trees.  The shear granite shoreline.  The gray-blue frothy ocean.  The sun was setting over the outer islands and ripped the sky apart, shredding it into yellows, reds, and oranges.  Looked just like the flames engulfing a boat and its infected cargo, drifting just outside the mouth of the harbor. 

I always thought of Dean Martin when I lit the match, which I had to do more and more as the time progressed.  Thought of him sitting at a piano in Vegas, singing “love is a kick in the head,” singing, with his eyes widening, “love is a hole in the boat”.  Of course, Dean Martin didn’t mean much to anyone anymore.  Not since it all went wrong, went sour.  And I was sure that I was one of the last people to even remember Dean, because I was one of the last people. 

I was never keen on burning boats.  Problem was, they kept coming up the coast.  Looking for salvation.  But they were all sick with it, every one.  Not knowing when they’d turn, you couldn’t get too close.  So, boat burning was born.  And thank god I was ice inside because what it involved could rip a healthy persons guts apart.  Couldn’t let anyone jump over board.  Couldn’t have infected bodies wash ashore.  Burned a lot of beautiful boats.  Real shame.

Whenever that business was done and I’d come ashore, I’d always have to deal with prying eyes.  Glances from people I once knew, searching my face for even a shadow of who I once was.  Glances that seemed to ask if I was still inside me somewhere.  I wasn’t.  And I felt I had no reason to feel shame or guilt for that.  Everyone wanted to see human in me, but they needed me to kill for them.  You can’t have both.

A heaviness set in.  We were waiting for the loaves to rise.  It would take two hours.  She paused her story as she boiled water, standing over the kettle with a kind of contemplation… a deep thinking that made me shift in my hard seat.  There was nothing comfortable in this life, and her furniture and small, ridged figure proved it.

She handed me a mug and I took a sip quick to avoid any chance of her disapproval.  It was hard and sharp.  Hot as ice.  She chuckled, the first sign of human emotion I had seen, and told me she liked to call it her “cranky whiskey.”  Apparently she had a habit of making it herself out back in an old copper vat.  Don’t worry, she told me, I wouldn’t go blind.

My expression seemed to ease her into her own hard seat.  Ease the words.  Ease the room.      

It was quiet those first days.  The kind of quiet you didn’t know existed because without you realizing, there was always a sound in all your quiets before.  A car in the distance.  A plane flying over.  A water heater kicking on.  This, this quiet gave you the feeling you were wrapped in a snow storm that was muffling the sounds of, nothing. 

While everyone else had been panicking and moving north, I had been preparing.  We had been preparing.  It was the kind of thing that snuck up on a lot of folks even though there was nothing sneaky about it.  We had been sending our loved ones into the war against it for weeks before it engulfed us.  Weeks of time people wasted being naive.  Being in denial.  When the first case appeared in Portland, that’s when the switches flickered to ON.  The ruckus of the exodus was a sweet relief to us.  An end to the waiting.  He was so pleased, he left me for his island.  Ran home to see his mother and let her know it was all about to happen. 

Logistically it was pretty easy.  I had spent most of my days collecting the dynamite and setting it in place under the bridge.  He spent most of his days distracting anyone who happened to seek out what exactly it was I was doing.  It wasn’t hard.  People’s ability to stop logic and reasoning during crisis is spectacular and terrifying.  All he had to tell them was, “she’s making sure the bridge is sound in case we all have to evacuate”.  The fact I was doing the opposite never even occurred to them, or if it had, they shut it out for its inconvenience.

I set up a row of explosives under the road.  Another at the base of the pylons, and constructed launch-able “bombs” to deepen the tidal river and try and clear some of the rubble post explosion.  I had no idea what I was doing but was fully confident it would get done.  It was the last thing we had planned.  Life after that was a blanket of white.  We hadn’t thought beyond it.  I realize now that it was our way of coping.  I had two brothers taken into the heat of it.  Two parents that were no doubt dead, though I didn’t much have a need to know.  He had his mother and father, old and alone, to think of.  To worry for.  For some reason, people need to feel they can create and execute a solution.  Pathetically grasping at control.

When I lit the fuse, more then just a bridge blew.  Everything beyond it blew too.  There was no going back and I almost cried with joy.  Like all the years of me not understanding human beings finally was relieved.  I didn’t have to anymore.  They were all dead.

I don’t know if it was because I felt warm from her “cranky whiskey,” or if her story was something I just never expected to hear, but my body reacted to what I was listening to. 

I didn’t want to call her crazy.  She was the only person that I could find that had survived the one thing I knew nothing about.  I was a child when it happened, living in Churchill, Manitoba.  My mother had told me little about it and my eldest brother taunted me with impossible horror stories.  Horror stories that this woman survived.  That she still survives.  Man, she survives them everyday.  

You can feel it happen inside you.  These shifts and tugs in your chest.  Muscles being peeled off the bone, filling the gaps between your vital organs.  Your body closing off the spaces where someone might sneak in.  You can feel it happen, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.  It will rear its head in everything you do from that moment on.  It will poison your future and haze your past.  It will make you heavy with itself and it will change your life.

I remember every instance, because every instance has a signature.  A date.  A fear of being forgotten.  Every instance is like an artist who worries more about the bottom right corner of the painting, then the painting itself. 

The bread had risen.  She took her eyes off of a painting on the wall.  Something that had no signature, by someone I’m sure was a part of that world I missed.  She sighed privately, as if she had known and felt for them, then stood from her rocking chair by the fire.  Everything in her life was routine.  She reached for the shelf where the temperature was just right for the yeast and pulled the sweet smelling loaves down. 

She stayed silent for these next moments, letting each loaf ease back onto the flour coated counter.  I tried to see her face, but she was too good at hiding it.  A master of invisibility.

She spoke again as she began kneading the air out of the dough.

The shifts, the tugs… they ended when I shot him.  When I blew the bridge.  That, I can say with certainty.  Those moments eliminated any chance for me to change.  They screamed about a lack of future to be affected by it.  I haven’t lived since, and although I am alive still- I will never live again.

But none of that matters.  Everyone died.  I shot my future in the face, so who am I to reminisce. 

She paused then.  I would have liked to think she was crying… but I don’t know that she could.  She unfroze right before I asked her if she was ok, as if she knew and knew not to allow pity or sorrow in her favor.

Her back straightened.  She picked up the pounded loaves and put them in their pans.  She slid a sharp old knife across each one twice, perpendicular, and placed them gently into the stove.  She stoked the fire with a few small logs, settled into her chair, slowly sipped her hot whiskey, and I assumed, resigned to her memories. 

I would not hear more tonight.