The Harvest

“So everybody went to bed early,” Jim offered. “The flu.”

This offended Lillian, who sat upright in her chair. “You don’t have to protect me. I know what’s happening.”

Matt and Jim exchanged glances. Matt said gently, “If you know what’s happening, Lillian, you’re one up on the rest of us.”

Her voice was raw, her eyes mournful. “Everything’s changing. That’s what’s happening. That’s why there’s nobody here tonight but us.”

There followed a silence, which Matt guessed was acquiescence, then Jim raised his glass: “To us, then. The hardy few.”

Lillian drank to show she wasn’t angry. “But I shouldn’t,” she said. “Wine puts me to sleep. Oh, and the baby. It’s bad for the baby, isn’t it? But I suppose just a sip.”

Tang, clang, said the distant flagpole.

Matt stopped to say goodnight to Rachel and found her already dozing, tucked in a pink bedsheet, the window open to admit a breath of night air.

He pulled up a chair beside the bed, mindful of its creak as he sat.

Rachel hadn’t changed her room significantly since her mother died. It was still very much a child’s bedroom, lace blinds on the window and stuffed animals on the dresser. Matt knew for a fact that she still owned all her old toys: a vanity chest full of My Little Ponies and Jem; of miniature stoves, TV sets, refrigerators; a complete Barbie Camper set neatly folded and stored. The chest was seldom opened, but he supposed it served its purpose as a shrine: to Rachel’s mother, or just to childhood, security, the kingdom of lost things.

He looked at his daughter, and the thought of the toy chest made him suddenly, inconsolably sad.

I would give it all back if I could, Rache. Everything the world stole from you.

Everything the world is stealing.

She turned on her side and opened her eyes. “Daddy?”

“Yes, Rache?”

“I heard you come in.”

“Just wanted to say goodnight.”

“Is A

“I think so.”

“Good. I like it when she’s here in the morning.” She yawned. Matt put a hand on her forehead. She was a little warm.

A troubling thought seemed to hold her attention for a moment. “Daddy? Is everything going to be all right?”

Lie to her, Matt thought. Lie and make her believe it. “Yes, Rache,” he said.

She nodded and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”

He unwound the studio bed in the basement for Jim and Lillian, who had both had too much wine, or were otherwise “etherized”: too dazed, in any case, to drive.

I know how they feel, Matt thought. Bound up in cotton. Buoyant but sleepy. There had been occasions, as a college student, when he had smoked marijuana in a friend’s dorm room. It had sometimes made him feel like this… encased in a protective and faintly luminescent fog… afloat, after he had found his way home, on the gently undulating surface of his bed.

Tonight he climbed into bed beside A

It had been a while since they’d slept together, and now he wondered why. He’d missed this, the presence of her, her warmth and what he thought of as her “A

The first time A

But Rachel had taken to A

Matt winced.

A

This was both true and maddening. “I gave Celeste up,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s a certain way you shouldn’t let her go—she’s a part of you, after all. And there’s the giving up you couldn’t help, which is her dying. And there’s the space in between. Not a very big space right now. But that’s the space where I fit in.”

Matt wondered, holding A

You’re a collector. You don’t like letting go. He guessed it was true.

Clinging to A

A cool finger of air touched the skin of his shoulder, and Matt pulled up the bedsheet and closed his eyes in the summer dark; and then, like A

A wave of sleep crossed the globe like the shadow of the sun, a line of dreaming that lagged only a few hours behind the border of the night.

It was a sleep more complete than the planet had known since the human species migrated out of Africa. Sleep tracked across North America from the tip of Labrador westward, and it possessed almost everyone equally: possessed the shift workers, the insomniacs, the wealthy, and the homeless; possessed the alcoholic and the amphetamine addict alike.

It possessed farmers, fishermen, the inmates of penitentiaries, and penitentiary guards. It possessed Methedrine-saturated truckers spi

There were isolated, and temporary, exceptions. Medical emergencies were rare, but telephone lines were maintained by a few dazed workers (who slept later); ambulances evacuated injuries to hospitals, where a few residents, functional but dazed beyond wondering at the events that had overtaken them, stanched the few wounds of a few sleeping patients… whose injuries, in any case, seemed to heal without much intervention. Fire crews remained functionally alert, though curiously sedated. No one slept until they had attended—without much conscious thought—to the obvious dangers: cigarettes were extinguished, ovens switched off, fireplaces damped.

Chapter 7

The Quiet

The fires that did break out were accidents of nature, not humanity. In Chicago, a welfare mother named Aggie Langois woke from a powerful and incomplete dream—which was not a dream—to find flames licking out of a 1925-vintage wall socket and kindling the paper curtains of her two-room apartment. She took her sleeping baby and her wakeful but calm three-year-old and hurried them downstairs, two flights to the sidewalk… and was surprised to find the other occupants of the building calmly filing out behind her. The crack dealer from 3-A was carrying the legless old man from 4-B; and Aggie’s personal nemesis, the neighbor girl who was a cocktail waitress and who liked to party after hours when the children were trying to sleep, had brought out a score of blankets and handed three of them to Aggie without comment.

Someone had paused long enough to dial 911. The fire engines arrived, not just promptly, but in eerie silence; the crew hooked up their hoses with an easy, economical motion. It was as if only a part of them was awake: the fraction necessary to do this job and do it efficiently. A man from the building next door—a stranger—offered Aggie a sofa to sleep on and a bedroll for her babies. Aggie accepted. “It’s an unusual night,” the man said, and Aggie nodded, mute with wonder. Before an hour had passed, the fire was extinguished and the occupants of the building had been dispersed to new locations, all in a strange and dignified silence. Safe and with her children safe beside her, Aggie began once more to dream.