Work Text:
If you are writing any book about the end of the world,
what you are really writing about is
what’s worth saving about it.
-- Justin Cronin
--
Sooner or later both of us will probably wind up dead, Harold tells him once.
Harold with his mind of zeros and ones, every word between them a mathematical equation.
The line of his mouth has always been a code John could not decipher.
--
If John is very honest with himself, then Harold wasn’t wrong.
--
The antique water pump spills brown sludge into a basin with a gurgling sound.
John leans down, hands parting the thick yellow grass growing around it to see where the rust has eaten away at the sealing.
He kneels on his left leg, shifting his weight so that the pain in his knee doesn't flare up.
The mud is cool against the fabric of his jeans.
Harold stands in the shadow of the porch, his hands on the smooth white railing, pale as a ghosts’.
John waits for him to make a remark about how they already have excellent plumbing in and around the house without relying on frankly medieval machinery, thank you very much, John but Harold just turns back and returns to his chair.
His limp is more pronounced than usual, nearly dragging his leg after him: A war wound.
The Harold in John’s head still talks to him, and John yearns to hear that voice so much that it feels like the air is sucked out of his lungs, leaving him drowning on dry land.
--
Harold sinks down in his chair and takes another book off the stack on the coffee table.
When John passes him on his way inside, wiping his hands on a rag, John looks at the cover.
"The Last Man".
John wonders if Harold will ever stop reading books about the end of the world.
--
John stands in the kitchen, drops of water dripping from the faucet into the polished steel sink.
He wants to smash the glass in his hand into a million pieces, hear the satisfying crack of shards on the tile.
If there is something worse than memory, it’s silence.
--
In the evening, John takes long walks around the property.
The many miles of farmland stretch all the way to the horizon where the trees are nestled against the slope of a hill, fanning out into a stretch of forest.
Even further out, he finds the calm water of a pond mirroring the sky.
John sits down to touch his fingers to the surface of the water, blurring the clouds.
He could walk for hours and not meet a soul.
John isn't sure of the dimensions of the property that Harold bought, he'd assume it to be forty, fifty acres at least, not counting the large barn with its empty horse stalls and the main building.
He wonders if Harold bought all this - the wide expanse of land, the big farmhouse house with all of its space - because he didn't want John to feel caged, to give him room to breathe.
--
Either that, or Harold wanted to put as much space between them as possible without actually losing John out of sight.
--
There’s a wooden cross hanging over one of the doors that John keeps forgetting to take down.
Maybe it would be bad luck anyway.
--
Then again, John can’t imagine how worse would even look for them.
--
John had expected Harold to find the lack of technology troubling:
Not a single computer in their house, just the barest necessities of electricity.
Instead, Harold sits in the shade of the porch, Bear stretched out beneath his wooden chair, and reads book after book after book.
He drinks glasses of the ice-cold lemonade John makes in the kitchen in big glass bowls, small, careful sips, and turns the pages like clockwork.
On some afternoons, there is no sound at all, and John can hear the clicking of his own eyelids in the silence.
--
John works, the back of his shirt sticky with sweat, digging through the ground.
He spends the entire day that way, the sun beating down on him at noon.
Harold watches him dispassionately.
He hasn’t spoken a word since the day they arrived at the farmhouse, directing John in gestures and nods and touches on his arm.
Now, there’s just the vacant look in his eyes, the way he patiently waits for the hours to crawl by.
Sometimes, John puts his palm over Bear’s ribcage, feels his heartbeat, quicker than a human heart: Alive, alive, alive.
--
I’m sorry I couldn’t save them, John says, once.
Harold only turns a page.
John breaks open the ground with a shovel as if he was digging a line of graves.
--
John wonders if Harold sees the ghosts, too.
The woman at the gas station that curls her lips just so: Root’s ghost, smiling at him with a challenge in her eyes.
A woman at the grocery store with a black ponytail: Shaw, turning her back on him and disappearing, always disappearing, a blurred point in his peripheral vision.
John thinks that he sees Fusco once, among a group of workmen joking outside a barn, but then the man turns around and it's hard to even find an resemblance.
Once, when they still went out to get groceries together, Harold stared after a woman with long, red hair, and John could feel his heart break all over for him like something shattering inside of his ribcage.
“Come on, Harold, let’s go home,” he said, but Harold only looked at him in confusion.
--
He was right, of course, Harold always is.
What home?
--
There was a time when Harold would allow John to curl close and whisper lies into his ear, It will be okay, it will be fine, when Harold would let John put his mouth on him until Harold was incoherent with pleasure, until he could no longer remember.
--
These days, Harold sleeps on his side, curled in on himself in the darkness, and John looks up to count the cracks in the ceiling.
--
"Maybe I can set up a fence. Repair some things on the outer perimeter,” John says.
Harold absently strokes behind Bear’s ears, not looking up from his book.
“There’s a lot of space for planting. I thought maybe a vegetable garden.”
Harold closes his book and sets it down on the table.
Something constricts in John’s throat, and it takes him a moment to identify the feeling:
Hope.
Harold looks out over the wide expanse of land.
Then he reaches for another book: “The Year of the Flood.”
--
And they always said that to become a ghost, you needed to die first.
--
In the evening, John takes long walks around the property.
He could walk for hours and not meet a soul.
--
It’s not how he imagined it, but then again it never is:
No bullets raining down on them, not the sharp lightning of an explosion, no computer counting down, down, down --
--
It’s not the end of the world, John thinks, except for how it is.
--
He comes back from one of his walks to find Harold asleep in his chair, the book opened up in his lap, pages moving softly in the breeze.
“Harold,” John says, and puts his hand on Harold’s shoulder.
Harold startles awake.
“I’m sorry,” John says.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
--
He has said it over and over and over again until the words lost any meaning.
--
“Come to bed, Harold,” John says, and Harold lets John lead him back inside.
--
John lies on his back, listening to the water running in the bathroom, the sound of the closet door, the noise of fabric on fabric when Harold pulls back the blanket next to John.
John waits for him to turn away, for his breaths to even out.
Sleep is a bit like dying, John always thinks, except for the part where you wake up and are still not done.
Harold doesn’t move beside him.
Achingly slowly, Harold’s palm closes over the back of his hand.
John’s breath stills in his chest:
Harold’s touch a phantom pain on his skin.
“A vegetable garden sounds lovely, John,” Harold says, voice raw and broken in the darkness.
--
Maybe that's all there really is to death:
Forgetting everything.
-- fin