touch or move him, he might as well have been walking about in an astronaut’s suit. He imagined exactly that sometimes. Helmeted and carapaced, he was insulated, invulnerable to whatever toxicity (or perfume) other people released into the atmosphere he did not share. He breathed in only the fumes of his private despair. Like a floating spaceman, he drifted along on the momentum built up in the before part of his life.
Here was the bitter story Val’s parents told: With them, she had gone downstate to visit her cousins. One warm but not too hot afternoon, the cousins decided to hike a nearby riverside forest. It was a beautiful place, with impressive draws cut into limestone, their walls glowing with an emerald light filtered through the foliage of trees and vines. A well-worn trail led by these small canyons, then climbed up and up, until green gave way to blue and you burst out atop towering cliffs. Far below coursed the river. Like a placid beast of burden, it carried felled trees and resting waterfowl and massive barges. In the air above it, hawks spiraled high on thermal currents. As cozy and secure as a forest might be, there was something liberating about working your way through a dense enclosure of woods, onto a promontory from which you could see as far as forever.
Maybe it was this sudden and exhilarating sense of freedom, they said, that impelled Val to venture out on the edge of the cliff. In all events, she was nearer the rocky cusp than either of her cousins. Then the soft stone crumbled and broke away, and just like that she disappeared. Or, to be more precise about how the witnesses put it, she was “gone.” Reluctant to move any closer to the cliff’s edge, the pair of cousins shouted out her name. Only echoes of their own calls returned to them. Eventually one cousin made brave and crawled, then wriggled on her stomach, so that she could look over the drop. All the long way down, plunging into greenery below, she saw no sign of her disappeared relative. She returned to her sister’s side, then the two retreated hastily back the way they had come. They breathlessly accosted a ranger at the park’s lodge office. The ranger questioned the panicked cousins, then enlisted a colleague for the rescue.
Her body was found two hundred feet below the point where it fell. It had struck at least two abutments on its drop. That and unyielding tree branches, to say nothing of the force of final impact, had horribly bent and mangled her. Three hours later police escorted her father to the mortuary. He came back out in shambles, a much older man than he was when he entered. His daughter’s broken body and ruined face were so horrible he advised his wife against viewing it. She had never seen her husband so ravaged, and finally she relented. Since they were forgoing an open-casket funeral, they had her cremated in the downstate mortuary. They returned home a week later, bearing their only child in an urn.
At her interment her ashes, safe within a toy-sized and ornate casket, were reverently placed in a hole three feet deep. A few of the bereaved, those closest to her, grimly formed in a single file line for a turn at dropping a handful of soil into the grave. Al, still shell-shocked from the news of her death, stood in line behind her parents. For several excruciating moments, her father and mother awkwardly looked at each other. Neither wanted to commit the terribly final act of beginning to close the grave. Then her mother stepped forward brusquely, knelt on both knees, and scooped at the small earthen pile. She managed to grasp a fistful of soil and move her hand above the hole, but then her hand would not open and release the dirt. She breathed deeply and stifled her sobs. She bent down, her arm extending in the grave until her knuckles brushed her daughter’s casket. Then she opened her hand, withdrew her arm, and struggled to her feet, with a relative sidling up to assist her.
Next her father dragged himself forward, as if to his own execution. He took hold of a couple of clods and straightened up over the grave. His hand trembled, so violently that the clods jostled and crumbled in his loosely closed fingers, sifting out beside the grave as much as into it. “Oh, Jesus!” he cried out. Solicitous relatives helped him move again.
It was Al’s turn next. He sympathized with her parents. But he was numb, chronically stunned, not quite believing she was really dead, really gone. Let this be one of our lighthearted games, he thought, a kind of hide-and-seek in which he actually knew exactly where she was secluded but bumbled around as if he were clueless. Complete the ritual with the dirt, so as to be released and go to find her, to talk to her and listen to her and take her in his arms. In this state, he was able to perfunctorily enact his duty. He dropped soil into the grave, glancing at and away from the golden box at its bottom. Now I’ve completed the count: ready or not, girl, here I come! He staggered away from the graveside.
And he kept staggering, wandering in a daze for a week or two, half expecting her to bound off a car at the train stop or knock on his door some evening when the summer light had gone buttery and enshrouded everything in a tender veil. But he couldn’t find her or be found by her, and gradually grew tired and then frustrated with the game. Okay. I give up. Come out, come out wherever you are. And still she made no appearances. For several days he was flooded with unbearable anxiety, trying not to remember the funeral, the thing with the dirt, fighting and pushing it all back with memories of her pert nose, her so-alive eyes, her cinnamon-freckled breasts, her touch and embrace.
Then he was worn down and overcome. Frighteningly, bitterly, it was getting harder and harder to remember her as she was, in all her spiritual and physical vitality. More and more he could only think of her as dusty ashes and shards of incinerated bones. He could not find her, he could not recover her, in any other form. Only then, tortured beyond his endurance, could he admit to himself that she had passed away, she had departed, that she was no longer with him or anyone else on the face of the earth. She was, oh no-no-no-no but yes, gone.
5
“I have much to tell you,” Albert’s mother had written. “To be honest, I have something to tell you and much to explain . . .”
Albert had reread the note so many times he had it memorized. After discovering it and first reading it, he had somehow fallen asleep quickly. But he woke a few hours later, in the dead of night, after the alcohol’s effects had worn off. He ignited a candle and lay studying the message. She urgently wanted to see him. She wrote “in light of recent events.” He reasoned that his mother’s note, and the further information she had to convey, had something to do with the repeal of the National Anti-Natal Law. That was, after all, the most significant event of recent days. But then there was her confessional tone—“something to tell you and much to explain.” How could his mother be implicated in any of the woeful effects of that dark law? And what about such inconceivable complicity could cause Mother to owe him an explanation?
Mother Simmel, now in her mid-sixties, was a woman of indomitable character. Like Ray Simmel, she was a member of the generation that came to maturity in the early decades of the Age of the Descent. The parents of this generation had learned through hard experience that surviving in the new world, the world after cheap petroleum, would mean living without the vast array of creature comforts taken for granted before the Descent. Heat or refrigerated air with the flick of a switch, abundant food with no more effort than it took to lift hamburger from a supermarket freezer, frequent long-distance travel, endless hours of diversion via laptops or smart phones—all these were pleasures and securities no longer available, especially to subordinates. Ray and Alva Simmel grew up soaking in the common sub wisdom that the affluent inhabitants of the Western world during the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries were both scoundrels and wastrels.
A century and a half was a short period in the span of human history. And in that brief interval the privileged masses had squandered fossil fuels that geology built up over millions of years. The squandrels (as these privileged masses came to be known during the childhoods of the elder Simmels) not only eviscerated the earth’s carbon-based guts but mowed down old-growth forests, decimated entire animal species, poked holes in earth’s atmosphere, and spoiled immense oceans with their garbage. It was as if reckless and hateful children threw a party and, once started, would not stop until they had destroyed the home that so generously enabled their revelry. They tore stuffing from all the furniture, filled bedrooms with trash, ripped up the floor and dug into the ground beneath it, heaping dirt throughout the house. They gouged light fixtures from the ceiling and overturned bookshelves and clogged the toilets and broke all the windows. Finally, when they had exhausted themselves and the creation that sustained them, when they had wasted what forebears