the array he had tested earlier, to the far right switch on the bottom row. “Last one is the front doors. No delay.”
Trying to help the librarian sit up so he could breathe easier, Eric reached around the chair and braced his hand against its back while moving Pope. Eric’s hand came away red, and he wiped it on his pants. Pope looked at the stain.
“Hardly slowed, did it.” He coughed a fine spray of blood.
“What will happen?” asked Eric, hugging the man close, as if by holding him he could keep him alive. Through the blood-soaked smock, Eric felt the rapid flutter of Pope’s heart. Pope bubbled, coughed again, and Eric thought he might die right then, but Pope took another breath and said, “Diesel bombs on timers in all the buildings and in the brush.” He moaned. “Campus… surrounded. They won’t get out.”
“How does that help?” said Eric. “We can’t burn the library ourselves.” Breathing in short, quick puffs, Pope twisted in his chair. “Got… to. For sixty years…” He grabbed at Eric’s arm and gripped. “…I’ve planned on Alexandria.”
He panted twice more, then seemed to relax, breaths coming slower and slower until after five or six, he quit.
Eric faced the array. All the switches pointed down. He thought, the last switch is the library. If Pope is right, then this might be the last library. There aren’t others in other cities. This is it. The world is empty. Just a few hundred people, maybe a thousand, and no one else. All the learning is here. All the books. Outside, shots were fired. More glass broke. Shouting.
He turned on the microphone and said, “Five minutes and counting.” He thought of Rabbit dying for a pile of books. Rabbit, who had rubbed his legs when they were sore, who smiled only secretly when he thought no one was looking, the orphan boy with scars on his face who believed everything that an old man had told him about the value of knowledge.
Using both hands, he flipped all the switches but the far right one. Their lights glowed at him. His finger rested on the last switch. Its sharp plastic edge felt sharp against his skin. He pulled up until it jumped into the upright position, and its light lit. A dull thud of a vibration against his feet and a slight pressure against his ears told him the diesel burned in the library below.
Chapter Twenty
LOST AND FOUND
A stranger’s house would feel less threatening than this, Eric thought. He stepped cautiously across the threshold. Glass littered the living room carpet. A needlepoint, a gift from one of his mother’s friends, hung crookedly on the wall. It doesn’t feel like home, he thought. Nothing’s right. We’re in the wrong house.
Eric recognized titles in the hanging bookshelf above the couch,
It didn’t smell like home. Even with the picture window broken, a rotten, wet stench permeated the room. None of the familiar smells came through: Chapstick, Old Spice, toast, fingernail polish, Mr. Clean. The light was wrong. Unimpeded sunlight cut sharp shadows on the walls instead of the soft lights and darks he recalled.
None of the right sounds. No washer groaning in the utility room. No big band tune from the stereo, no vacuum cleaner. Glass crunched beneath his foot. Like an empty church or a mortuary, the noiseless air seemed expectant and patient, even brooding. The entrance into the hallway that led to the bedrooms and his dad’s office loomed like an abyss. He heard a whimper, a tiny, beat puppy thing that sounded pathetic in the empty living room. He realized he’d made the noise himself. He stepped back and bumped Leda, who caught the backs of his arms. “Steady,” she said. “What’s the smell?”
Eric tried to speak, swallowed hard, took a deep breath and said, “In the kitchen.” He walked slowly, attempting to make no sound, and he stared, fascinated, as each step revealed more of the room: first, the pantry, next the can-opener beside the bulletin board, then the cabinets and stove, and finally the refrigerator and freezer, its doors part way open. Spoiled meat oozed gray slime from the white package’s seams, and mold choked the vegetable drawers.
“Somebody’s been in the house. Front door was unlocked,” he said. “Dad always double checked before we left. He’d unplug appliances, turn the main water off, close the curtains.” Eric shut the refrigerator. Putridness wafted past him. “He was a careful man.”
Leda’s shoe squeaked on the linoleum; Eric jumped. It sounded, for an instant, like his father’s shoe. Every line in the kitchen spoke of his father. Eric could see his dad’s hand in the smudges on the cupboard handles, in the way the three plates, three cups and three sets of silverware—remnants of the last breakfast they had eaten before leaving to the mountains—rested in the sink, in the color of the walls, each barely visible brush stroke a picture of Dad painting. Dad had said, “From the top down, son. You’ll leave dribbles that way,” when they had worked together on it two summers ago. Dad’s presence smothered the room.
Leda exhaled, and Eric jumped again. “This his?” she said as she lifted a blue and black flannel shirt from a basket around the corner in the utility room.
“Sure.” He backed away until his rump hit a counter. Was Dad wearing that shirt when he left the cave?
he thought. Was he? Eric tried to picture the last moment when he’d seen Dad at the exit to the cave holding his bicycle. He saw the graffiti on the wall, the feel of the wool blanket under his hand, the shapeless hump of his dead mother under the blanket, even his dad’s last words, “I’ll be back before sunset,” but Eric couldn’t remember what Dad had worn.
“Yes,” he said, but did it mean Dad had been here? The thought brayed in his brain. Clearly he wasn’t in the house now. The broken window would be fixed; the door would be locked; the dishes put away. But had he been here? Where was he? Balanced perfectly, the feelings that this was no longer his home, and the… the… he couldn’t come up with the word to describe the emotion… the anticipation? the hope? the dread? that his father had left some sign teetered precariously within him.
“Let’s do the rest of the house,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen, not waiting to see if she followed. He looked into the rooms in order. Diffuse light filtered through glazed glass in the empty bathroom. A purple throw rug, centered exactly in front of the sink, still sported a speck of dried toothpaste from Eric’s haste to leave the house almost six weeks earlier. He tried the faucet—his throat seemed petrified with dryness—but the fixture creaked when he spun it, and nothing came out. His closed bedroom door swung open easily. Model airplanes hung from the ceiling; rock group posters covered the walls; books and knick-knacks lined the tops of the dresser, the desk and nightstand. A wadded up sheet and some dirty clothes blocked the path to the bed. Only the gaps in the bookcase that represented the comics he’d packed when they’d left the house for the cave, the dozen empty hangers in the closet and a fine layer of dust made the room any different than it had been earlier in the year. But, like the rest of the house, it felt weird, as if aliens had come and stolen everything, replacing it with this well done but not quite right duplicate. Eric couldn’t imagine himself on that bed anymore. He could barely recollect what it was like to live in this room. And still every element screamed, Dad! Dad had given him that book; Dad had hated that album; Dad had helped him with that homework; Dad criticized that pair of pants; Dad had sat on the edge of this bed late at night asking about Eric’s grades. When the door was shut, it was to keep Dad out. When the door was open, it was to invite Dad in. No part of it lived or died or moved that it wasn’t measured in some way by Dad’s inescapable scale. Eric remembered with amazement that when he’d left the cave a few days ago, it was with the thought that maybe he could rescue Dad, that Dad needed his help, but now that Eric was home again and could feel again the atmosphere of his Dad’s house, the idea seemed ludicrous. How could a son rescue a dad?
Dad lived removed and remote from the world of the son, his only connection through a thread of rules and expectations. Dad passed laws. Dad rendered judgement, then Dad moved on. Something touched his arm, and he whirled.
“Sorry,” Leda said. “I didn’t mean to rush you.”
Concern colored her features, but all Eric could think was that for the instant he’d feared it was Dad’s hand on him, that when he turned, Dad would be there. And what would he say? Would his abandonment of the cave be
