CHAPTER FOUR

The Old Man has been up for a few weeks. In the mornings he tries to help at breakfast. Tries to see if anyone will need assistance with their various projects. But when he does, they smile politely and tell him he needs to rest more. Then they disappear when he is not looking.

He returns to the office and watches them working in the streets below. Fixing up their new homes, salvaging in the afternoons farther out.

He takes walks at the end of the day. After the heat has given its best to destroy them all. He always walks first to see where his granddaughter is working. He tries to remember how thirteen-year-old girls spent their time when he was her age. In gymnastics and soccer and … boys? No, that was later. Or maybe I didn’t notice when. Finally, he decides, maybe they, all those long-gone girls from his youth, didn’t want anyone to know how they felt about boys when they were just thirteen years old. Her father, his son, is trying to start a farm. Their community will need fresh produce. Most of her work is done by the early afternoon and together they walk the streets and see what each neighbor has done that day. A new fence. A newfound treasure. A new life.

Look what I found today …

An antique double-barreled shotgun with scrollwork engraving.

Fifty feet of surgical tubing.

This beautiful painting. Each day at breakfast there are fewer and fewer of the villagers who come and eat in the dining hall at the Federal Building.

They are making their own lives now behind their fences in the houses where they store their treasures rescued from Before. Not like in the village where we all ate together in the evenings and the sky was our painting.

At night he returns to the Federal Building. The sentry gun, waiting on its tripod, its snout pointing toward the entrance, waits like a silent guard dog. He pats it on the head-like sensor, like he might pat a friendly dog, and returns to his room.

For a while he listens to the radio, their little station that Jason the Fixer had up and running in a day, playing the old programmed music from Before. Even Jason cannot figure how to change that. But, if they ever need to, they can interrupt the program and broadcast a message. Each night one of them takes a turn at the station. Watching the ancient computers. Just in case there is an emergency. Then all the radios in all the new homes of the once-villagers can be used to summon help.

We can still help one another that way. We are still a village.

So the Old Man leaves the radio playing softly through the night just in case there is some kind of emergency that will bring them all together again. Every so often he hears the voice of the villager whose turn it is to watch the station, saying something as the long dark passes slowly into dawn.

And he reads.

He has read the book once more.

He is glad he had his friend in the book, Santiago, there with him out in the desert. When he reaches the end of the book he is glad for Santiago, that he made it home to his shack by the sea and for the boy who was his best friend. Again.

He thinks of his granddaughter.

She is my best friend.

But for how long?

Girls become women.

He remembers being sick and hot and hearing her voice calling him back from wherever he was going.

If I think of the sickness, I will think of the nightmare and then it will come while I sleep and I will wake up to get away from it.

So he goes down to the library.

He tries to pick a new book. But so many of the modern books, books from right before the bombs, seem like they might remind him of people and times that are now gone.

I’ll pick a classic.

How will you know which is and is not a classic?

The Old Man stands before the quiet, dusty shelves inhaling their thickness and plenty, then sighing as the burden of choice overwhelms him.

A classic will be something from a time I never lived in. That way I will not be reminded of war and all that is gone because I never knew it. I’ll read about the Roaring Twenties as told by a southerner or the London fog of Dickens or even the Mississippi as it was.

I have not seen a river in forty years.

Nothing with war.

In a corner between other books he finds one that he knows is a classic, knows it from school though he cannot say whether he’d ever read it. But he knows it was a classic.

He takes it back to the office, his room, and lies down on his sleeping bag. He watches the night sky for a moment and listens to the radio playing softly on the other side of the room.

It will play all through the night, even while I am asleep. Like Before.

He opens the first page and begins to read.