White Horse

The Swiss correctly interprets the expression dancing across my face.

“I am not sick. Disease is for the weak.”

I walk away in search of Lisa. She’s up in one of those lifeguard towers, the bare metal frames with a seat on top.

“Listening for Jaws?”

“No. There’s a boat coming.” She points the way, my broken, blinded beacon.

At first my longing to believe is so great that I can’t bring myself to trust in her words. I’ve wanted this too much. Then I bolt, boots pounding along the water’s edge, peering between the gaps, desperate for a glimpse. Then I see her. She rolls into port, an old, cold tomb. The Elpis. The Hope is my only hope.

All my strength evaporates. My infrastructure collapses in on itself and I have no choice but to crouch down, one hand reaching out in front to steady me like I’m an unwieldy tripod.

The Swiss’s jaw ticks like a time bomb.

“I told you,” I say. “I told you so.”

DATE: THEN

The jar resists me,

but not the borrowed hammer.

Cracks, splinters, mess. Bones.

DATE: NOW

She’s nothing to look at, the Elpis, with her ruby-red rivets and her pointed bow carving the sea into foamy slices. She needs no introductions, no elaborate adornments to announce that the harbor is hers and she has come for it, for she is the only vessel that displays signs of life. There are passengers on that boat, and they wait on the deck and watch. I cup my hand over my eyes and scan them for friendly faces, but see nothing but my own sadness reflecting back at me.

The captain comes ashore, the gangplank shaking with his heavy steps.

“You coming to Greece?” His mustache leaps as the words battle their way through the hairs.

“Please,” I say.

“Okay. But you must pay.”

What once passed for currency is now worthless, and I have no money anyway. What I have to offer is peace of mind, relaxation, and escape, all in a tiny white pill. He knows what they are; the greed in his eyes betrays his hunger when I pull the blister packs from my pocket and offer him payment for me and for Lisa.

He nods. Our transaction is complete. I snatch up my things so I can run, run, run to find Nick.

The Swiss and I face each other.

“Here we say good-bye. Lisa?”

“I am coming,” he says.

“No.”

“The world is free. I can go where I choose without even a passport. Who are you to tell me what I can do or not? You are a nobody.”

We stare each other down. In his eyes, I see a wasteland where nothing can survive. I am the first to break and glance away.

“You have to pay your own way,” I say.

He makes a deal with the captain but I do not see how he pays the ferryman for his passage. When they’re done, I pull the captain aside. I tell him who I’m looking for, describe him in detail. The captain chews on my request. The fisherman’s cap shakes with his head.

“I see no one like that. Each time is just a few people. But none like that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Eh. Who knows? Everyone looks the same now. Like you. Tired. Hungry. Dirty.”

The weight of the world shifts from my shoulders to my head, drags it low.

“We go now,” the captain says.

“He’s dead.” The Swiss is behind me. Privacy means nothing to him. “I knew you were coming for a man. Why else does a woman do anything?”

“He’s not dead.”

“Is he the father of your bastard?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” I say.

The captain waits.

My reflection in the terminal window is me without all the baggage. Maybe it’s me as I used to be, or maybe it’s me as I wish to be. I appear strong, determined, resolute. I believe Nick is alive and made it to Greece safely. He’s gone via some other road. I won’t believe anything else. If he’s there, then nothing will stop me moving on.

“I’m coming,” I say. Forward is the only way.

PART TWO

TEN

DATE: THEN

There is no nuclear war, no fight for land, no arguing over human rights and petty despots. The beginning of the end comes because of the weather, just like Daniel, my blind date, said it would. Only, he’s wrong about the culprit: it isn’t China, it’s us. So we’re both right.

The end begins in hurricane season, although in truth the seeds had been sown much earlier with mass filing of patents and theories about how the weather could be controlled with man’s hand and a whole lot of funding.

Weather modification. Playing God. Modern man couldn’t conquer death, had a flimsy grip on disease control, so he turned to another lost cause.

Scientists scream, but they’re soon silenced with money stuffed down the throats of their pet research projects. Which leaves the entrepreneurs, the government, and their nodding stable of scientists to tinker with the weather.

Hurricane Pandora, they name her, although it isn’t her turn alphabetically. Because, like me, they are insatiably curious. Some say she’s a typical woman, one minute hugging the coast, the next hurling winds and rains at that same jagged finger of land, daring it to look into her single eye as she hypnotizes the Gulf Coast region into a false sense of calm.

The experiment is a secret. Until it fails. Details hemorrhage into the media after that.

Pandora claims houses and lives for her own. Returns land to the ocean. Drains money from a lot of already-empty pockets.

A week later, a cyclone forms off the east coast of Australia. This time the experiment is a success and the cyclone dies before she makes landfall.

The attack comes when the U.S. and her allies are celebrating their victory.

It’s an electronic Pearl Harbor that leaves the country unable to buy books, check movie times, send pictures of funny cats with misspelled captions. It’s an outrage, people cry, until they realize how deep it goes. Suddenly they’re cognizant that their wealth exists only in a computer database. They’re virtual millionaires and billionaires. Or they are until China implements the One Way, Our Way policy, as the media aptly dubs it.

The country panics. We’ve jumped too far forward to go back to newspapers and passing paper notes in class. The Internet is gone. Cell phones are night-lights and colorful paperweights. We are hostages with all the luxuries we had twenty years ago. We are adrift….