Page 211 of The End of the World As We Know It

For as long as I can remember, there have always been two sides. There has always been us, and there has always been them, the Chosen, the future eaters, the generation swallowers, the monsters in plain sight.

I don’t remember Captain Trips; I was told by my mother who’d been told by her mother. It came like thunder: a calamity, a terror. A human-made plague of biblical proportions. The only way to escape it was to escape humanity. So that’s what my people did. They hid from the world, from the sickness, riding out that terror in solitude. We came unfixed from everything we’d once been, everyone we’d once known, every hope we’d once had. We gave these up and waited meekly, our sole intention to survive. To outlast the virus and all who carried it. Like birds after a storm, we would rise up in the quiet to inherit and remake the still-spinning earth.

But then, an unexpected thing. We were not alone. Climbing out from the dead echo of wet coughs and stink, arose the immune. People who carried the virus, who kept it alive inside them without ever getting sick. Like newborns scraped clean of offense andtenderly raw, they walked out of houses and tunnels and prisons. They wandered empty streets, calling names of fallen friends. They mowed lawns half-naked and weeping, they jogged empty streets, reciting the names of the dead, they painted nostalgic landscapes against easels. They drank, they told terrible stories and wept and laughed and healed even as our own blight was still happening. And finally, they gathered. In ways we could not possibly do, they gathered.

My peripatetic, wandering people watched them, eyes in tall grass and behind buildings; eyes looking down from rooves and peering up from cellars. The immune measured their survival in days, blessed their luck on stars like new gods even as they carried the sickness. It lived inside them, a time bomb, a nuke, a scrap of nucleic acid gone mutated and rogue.

They could kill us with a word. A plosive letterP; a whistle. A whisper.

Months. A year. The immune turned the lights back on. They danced to dead music. They joked about old movies and convenience stores. They cleaned all the mess, but made new, mushroom cloud messes.

We stayed wandering. In order to survive, we learned to sleep by day and live by night. To stay quiet. To whisper. To avoid touch. Over time, we began to think of ourselves as less than human. We watched the living, the immune, pull weeds and tinker and fix. They slept in beds. They wore cadaver bands of gold around their ring fingers. Captain Trips had stopped human progress. Slowly and with great pain, the Chosen started it up again.

They rebuilt. They powered tiny screens and big screens and medium screens and oh so many screens. They dammed the water. They bred the livestock. They opened the glutton restaurants and offices for angry, passionate men. They had children and more children and even more children. They made it their job to repopulate the earth. Some of those children were born without immunity, but most survived.

They had their suspicions; could feel our eyes on their backs. Accidentally, they were killing our kind. Leaving virus on supplies, tainting our water, our air. Out of self-preservation, we made ourselves known. They answered swiftly. As if we were the threat, they fenced us in. We agreed to live within these encampments. In return, they promised that if wild and lawless immune marauders broke into our assigned land, they’d send their army to defend us. More importantly (because so far, invaders had not come), they’d simply stay away.

We’d live. It would be in a cage, but we’d live.

In word, they keep this truce. In deed, they ignore it. Every few years, a well-meaning student of science or a self-made anthropologist infringes. One of our own gets sick and passes that sickness like a line of fallen dominoes. We’re too tempting. Too great a fascination.

Their arrogance is our annihilation.

We hope for better times. For a day when the curse against us is lifted and we walk again by day.

Another dusk, but this one’s cloudy and without color. I’m ready with my pack and the GoodWill offerings for the month. Ferris meets me at the top of Mulholland. We’re not a ceremonial tribe; no one sees us off, though I do see a blue ribbon tied around a tree, its presence new. An anonymousgood journey.

It’ll take us two nights to reach the altar.

“You came,” he says with surprise.

“You’re my partner,” I answer.

Ferris nods with uncertainty. He’s not able to meet my eyes. How does a person so sensitive survive this world? He’s a throwback from a different time. It occurs to me that it’s not his incompetence that provokes the rest of us, but his tenderness. “I release you,” he says.

“I know I don’t have to come,” I say, but this is a lie. It’s not my nature to leave people, especially fragile people. Look what happened to Maple, and she wasn’t even fragile. She was tough. She sneakedout on a supply run without telling any of us. Just a note on her sleep sack. I have that note. I keep it in my sleep sack now.

As if reading my mind, Ferris says, “I’ll be fine.”

“Stop talking,” I say.

I walk. He follows. There are no more words for at least two miles.

The Chosen can feed themselves better than we ever could. As a result, our offerings have changed over the years. We knit baskets from palm fronds. We make pottery. These are relatively light and easy to carry. We leave them on altars at the walls of their town in Malibu. Sometimes they leave notes for us or contact us over the radio. They ask for more color in their bowls, which sell for high prices in their towns. They offer the penicillin from their laboratory, but we can no longer accept their gifts. We can’t trust them to be careful enough to wipe away the infection.

Two cars pass us on our first night. We hide both times. I realize the difference between us. My eyes have gotten keen at discerning movement in the dark; the distinctions between wind and a burrowing bird; a coyote and a deer. It’s not just the sounds, but the absence of those sounds, the vibrations you anticipate, the different stillnesses that indicate prey or predator.

Ferris doesn’t notice these things.

“You have bad eyes,” I say. “That’s why you trip. That’s why you’re so loud.”

“Do I?” he asks, as if he’s never considered it.

“Do you see that? What does it say?” I ask, pointing at a distant green road sign, whose white prismatic beads glow.

“You can read that?” he asks.

“It says Betty Deering Trail. Anybody could read that. The letters are huge.”