RAYMONDE: [silence]
DIALLO: Or to phrase it differently—
RAYMONDE: I understood the question. I’d prefer not to answer.
DIALLO: Okay. All right. I’m curious about your tattoo.
RAYMONDE: The text on my arm? “Survival is insufficient”?
DIALLO: No, no, the other one. The two black knives on your right wrist.
RAYMONDE: You know what tattoos like this mean.
DIALLO: But perhaps you could just tell me—
RAYMONDE: I won’t talk about it, François, and you know better than to ask.
22
WHEN KIRSTEN THOUGHT of the ways the world had changed in her lifetime, her thoughts always eventually circled back to Alexandra. Alexandra knew how to shoot, but the world was softening. There was a fair chance, Kirsten thought, that Alexandra would live out her life without killing anyone. She was a younger fifteen-year-old than Kirsten had ever been.
Now Alexandra walked quietly, sullen because she hadn’t been allowed to join the expedition to the school. The Symphony walked through the end of the day, clouds gathering and the air pressing down from above, rivulets of sweat running down Kirsten’s back. The sky low and dark by late afternoon. They were moving through a rural area, no driveways. Rusted-out cars here and there along the road, abandoned where they’d run out of gas, the caravans weaving carefully around them. Flashes of lightning and thunder, at first distant and then close. They waited out the rainstorm in the trees by the side of the road at twilight, pitched their tents on the wet ground when it was over.
“I dreamt last night I saw an airplane,” Dieter whispered. They were lying a few feet apart in the dark of his tent. They had only ever been friends—in a hazy way Kirsten thought of him as family—but her thirty-year-old tent had finally fallen apart a year ago and she hadn’t yet managed to find a new one. For obvious reasons she was no longer sharing a tent with Sayid, so Dieter, who had one of the largest tents in the Symphony, had been hosting her. Kirsten heard soft voices outside, the tuba and the first violin on watch. The restless movements of the horses, penned between the three caravans for safety.
“I haven’t thought of an airplane in so long.”
“That’s because you’re so young.” A slight edge to his voice. “You don’t remember anything.”
“I do remember things. Of course I do. I was eight.”
Dieter had been twenty years old when the world ended. The main difference between Dieter and Kirsten was that Dieter remembered everything. She listened to him breathe.
“I used to watch for it,” he said. “I used to think about the countries on the other side of the ocean, wonder if any of them had somehow been spared. If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky.”
“Was it a good dream?”
“In the dream I was so happy,” he whispered. “I looked up and there it was, the plane had finally come. There was still a civilization somewhere. I fell to my knees. I started weeping and laughing, and then I woke up.”
There was a voice outside then, someone saying their names. “Second watch,” Dieter whispered. “We’re up.”
The first watch was going to sleep. They had nothing to report. “Just goddamned trees and owls,” the tuba muttered. The second watch agreed on the usual arrangement: Dieter and Sayid would scout the road a half mile behind them, Kirsten and August would keep watch at the camp, the fourth guitar and the oboe would scout a half mile ahead. The scouts set off in their separate directions and Kirsten was alone with August. They circled the camp perimeter and then stood on the road, listening and watching for movement. Clouds breaking apart to reveal the stars overhead. The brief flare of a meteor, or perhaps a falling satellite. Is this what airplanes would have looked like at night, just streaks of light across the sky? Kirsten knew they’d flown at hundreds of miles per hour, inconceivable speeds, but she wasn’t sure what hundreds of miles per hour would have looked like. The forest was filled with small noises: rainwater dripping from the trees, the movements of animals, a light breeze.
She didn’t remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she’d gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn’t remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother’s face. She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. Here on this road in the forest two decades later, clouds shifted to reveal the moon and August glanced at her in the sudden light.
“Hair on the back of my neck’s standing up,” he murmured. “You think we’re alone out here?”
“I haven’t heard anything.” They made another slow circle of the camp. Barely audible voices from inside one or two of the tents, the sighs and soft movements of horses. They listened and watched, but the road was still.
“These are the times when I want to stop,” August whispered. “You ever think about stopping?”
“You mean not traveling anymore?”
“You ever think about it? There’s got to be a steadier life than this.”
“Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”
There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water. A cry, cut off abruptly? Had someone called out? If she’d been alone, Kirsten might have thought she’d imagined it, but August nodded when she looked at him. The sound had come from somewhere far down the road, in the direction from which they’d come. They were still, straining to hear, but heard nothing.
“We have to raise the third watch.” Kirsten drew her two best knives from her belt. August disappeared among the tents. She heard his muffled voice—“I don’t know, a sound, maybe a voice down the road, I need you to take our places so we can go check it out”—and two shadows emerged to replace them, yawning and unsteady on their feet.
August and Kirsten set off as quickly and quietly as possible in the direction of the sound. The forest was a dark mass on either side, alive and filled with indecipherable rustlings, shadows like ink against the glare of moonlight. An owl flew low across the road ahead. A moment later there was a distant beating of small wings, birds stirred from their sleep, black specks rising and wheeling against the stars.
“Something disturbed them,” Kirsten said quietly, her mouth close to August’s ear.
“The owl?” His voice as soft as hers.
“I thought the owl was flying at a different angle. The birds were more to the north.”
“Let’s wait.”
They waited in the shadows at the side of the road, trying to breathe quietly, trying to look everywhere at once. The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores. Kirsten and August watched the road and the forest, but if anything was watching them back, it wasn’t apparent.
“Let’s walk farther,” August whispered.
They resumed their cautious progress down the road, Kirsten gripping her knives so tightly that her heartbeat throbbed in the palms of her hands. They walked far beyond the point where the scouts should have been, two miles, three, looking for signs. At first light they returned the way they had come, speechless in a world of riotous birdsong. There was no trace of the scouts, nothing at the edges of the forest, no footprints, no
signs of large animals, no obviously broken branches or blood. It was as though Dieter and Sayid had been plucked from the face of the earth.
23
“I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the tuba said, midmorning, after several hours of searching for Sayid and Dieter. No one understood. No one responded. The disappearances were incomprehensible. They could find no trace. The Symphony searched in teams of four, grimly, methodically, but the forest was dense and choked with underbrush; they could have passed within feet of Dieter and Sayid and not known it. In those first hours there were moments when Kirsten caught herself thinking that there must have simply been some misunderstanding, that Dieter and Sayid must have somehow walked by them in the dark, somehow gone the wrong way down the road, that they’d reappear with apologies at any moment, but scouts had gone back and forth on the road for miles. Again and again Kirsten stopped still in the forest, listening. Was someone watching her? Just now, had someone stepped on a branch? But the only sounds were of the other search teams, and everyone felt watched. They met in the forest and on the road at intervals, looked at one another and said nothing. The slow passage of the sun across the sky, the air over the road unsteady with heat waves.
When night began to fall they gathered by the lead caravan, which had once been an extended-bed Ford pickup truck. “Because survival is insufficient,” words painted on the canopy in answer to the question that had dogged the Symphony since they’d set out on the road. The words were very white in the rising evening. Kirsten stood by Dieter’s favorite horse, Bernstein, and pressed her hand flat against his side. He stared at her with an enormous dark eye.
“We have traveled so far together,” the conductor said. There are certain qualities of light that blur the years. Sometimes when Kirsten and August were on watch together at dawn, she would glance at him as the sun rose and for a fleeting instant she could see what he’d looked like as a boy. Here on this road, the conductor looked much older than she had an hour earlier. She ran a hand through her short gray hair. “There have been four times,” she said, “in all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony, and in every single instance they have followed the separation protocol, and we’ve been reunited at the destination. Alexandra?”
“Yes?”
“Will you state the separation protocol, please?” It had been drilled into all of them.
“We never travel without a destination,” Alexandra said. “If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait.”
“And what is the current destination?”
“The Museum of Civilization in the Severn City Airport.”
“Yes.” The conductor was quiet, looking at them. The forest was in shadow now, but there was still some light in the corridor of sky above the road, the last pink of sunset streaking the clouds. “I have been on the road for fifteen years,” she said, “and Sayid’s been with me for twelve. Dieter for even longer.”
“He was with me in the beginning,” Gil said. “We walked out of Chicago together.”
“I leave neither of them willingly.” The conductor’s eyes were shining. “But I won’t risk the rest of you by staying here a day longer.”
That night they kept a double watch, teams of four instead of two, and set out before dawn the following morning. The air was damp between the walls of the forest, the clouds marbled overhead. A scent of pine in the air. Kirsten walked by the first caravan, trying to think of nothing. A sense of being caught in a terrible dream.
They stopped at the end of the afternoon. The fevered summers of this century, this impossible heat. The lake glittered through the trees. This had been one of those places that wasn’t quite suburbia but wasn’t quite not, an in-between district where the houses stood on wooded lots. They were within three days of the airport now. Kirsten sat on a log with her head in her hands, thinking, Where are you, where are you, where are you, and no one bothered her until August came to sit nearby.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I think they were taken,” she said without raising her head, “and I can’t stop thinking about what the prophet was saying in St. Deborah, that thing about the light.”
“I don’t think I heard it. I was packing up.”
“They call themselves the light.”
“What about it?”
“If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?”
“I suppose.”
“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”
He sighed. “We can only remain hopeful,” he said. “We have to assume that the situation will become more clear.”
But four teams set out in search of dinner, and only three and a half returned.
“I turned and she was gone,” Jackson said of Sidney, the clarinet. He’d returned to the camp alone and shaken. They’d found a stream, Jackson said, about a quarter mile down the road in the direction from which they’d come. He’d knelt on the bank to fill the water container, and when he looked up she had vanished. Had she fallen in? No, he said, he would have heard a splash, and he was downstream, so she would have passed him. It was a small stream and the banks weren’t steep. There was just the woods all around him, a sense of being watched. He called her name but she was nowhere. He noticed then that the birdsong had stopped. The woods had gone still.
No one spoke for a moment when he’d finished telling the story. The Symphony gathered close around him.
“Where’s Olivia?” Lin asked suddenly. Olivia was in the back of the first caravan, playing with a rag doll. “I want you in my sight,” Lin whispered. “Not just within sight, within reach. Do you understand?”
“She was close with Dieter,” the first oboe said. This was true, and they were all silent, thinking of the clarinet and searching their memories for clues. Had she seemed like herself lately? None of them were sure. What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem?
“Are we being hunted?” Alexandra asked. It seemed plausible. Kirsten looked over her shoulder into the shadows of the trees. A search party was organized, but the light was gone. Lighting a fire seemed too dangerous so they ate dinner from the preserved food stores, rabbit jerky and dried apples, and settled in for an uneasy night. In the morning they delayed for five hours, searching, but they couldn’t find her. They set off into another searing day.
“Is it logical that they could have all been taken?” August was walking beside Kirsten. “Dieter, Sayid, the clarinet?”
“How could anyone overpower them so silently?” There was a lump in her throat. It was difficult to speak. “Maybe they just left.”
“Abandoned us?”
“Yes.”
“Why would they?”
“I don’t know.”
Later in the day someone thought to search the clarinet’s belongings, and found the note. The beginning of a letter: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” It ended there. The date suggested that either it had been written eleven months earlier or that the clarinet didn’t know what year or month it was, one or the other. Neither scenario was unlikely. This was an era when exact dates were seldom relevant, and keeping track required a degree of dedication. The note had been folded and refolded several times, soft along the creases.
“It seems more theoretical than anything,” the first cello said. “Like she wrote it a year ago and then changed her mind. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“That’s assuming she wrote it a year ago,” said Lin. “She could’ve written it last week. I think it shows suicidal intent.”
“Where were we a year ago? Does anyone remember?”
“Mackinaw City,” August said. “New Petoskey, East Jordan, all those little places down the co
ast on the way to New Sarnia.”
“I don’t remember her seeming different a year ago,” Lin said. “Was she sad?”
No one was sure. They all felt they should have been paying more attention. Still the scouts reported no one behind or ahead of them on the road. Impossible not to imagine that they were being watched from the forest.
What was the Symphony without Dieter and the clarinet and Sayid? Kirsten had thought of Dieter as a sort of older brother, she realized, perhaps a cousin, a fixture in her life and in the life of the Symphony. It seemed in some abstract way impossible that the Symphony continued without him. She had never been close with the clarinet, but the clarinet was conspicuous in her absence. She only spoke with Sayid to argue with him now, but the thought of him having come to harm was sheer agony. Her breath was shallow in her chest and the tears were silent and constant.
Late in the day, she found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. She recognized August’s handwriting.
A fragment for my friend—
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night
She’d never seen his poetry before and was impossibly moved by it. “Thank you,” she said when she saw him next. He nodded.
The land became wilder, the houses subsiding. They had to stop three times to clear fallen trees. They used two-handed saws, working as quickly as possible with sweat soaking through their clothes, scouts posted here and there watching the road and the forest, jumping and aiming their weapons at small sounds. Kirsten and August walked out ahead over the conductor’s objections. A half mile beyond the stalled caravans, they came upon a rolling plain.
“A golf course,” August said. “You know what that means.” They’d found two full bottles of scotch and a can of miraculously still-edible cocktail olives in a golf-course clubhouse once, and August had been trying to replicate the experience ever since.