Page 7 of Our Last Resort

“I’m going to ask you a question,” he said. “I want you to answer it in the way that feels the most truthful to you.”

Truth was a concept he spoke of often. Émile was big on looking inward, on not lying to yourself about who you were.

“This is a test,” he said. “Everyone here has taken it. Your answer will tell us a lot about you as a person.”

Émile got up from behind his desk. He seemed ancient to me. It would be a shock when, years later, the papers printed hisage. He was in his late thirties on the day of this test, in his late forties when the world ended.

The question was insultingly simple. I realized, much later, that he had borrowed it from the most mundane setting imaginable.

In hindsight, it was clear he’d heard it on a plane.

We didn’t know, then. We didn’t fly. Émile did. Not frequently, but he had to. He was an important man. He went to meet dignitaries, people with their fingers on the pulse of the world.

(Well, that’s what he said. When everything came out, we learned that Émile was usually visiting family. Not in his native France—for a variety of reasons, Émile couldn’t cross international borders—but in Florida, where he had an uncle and a few cousins. Improbably, he did meet the prime minister of Canada, at the very northern tip of the state of New York, once. He kept a framed photo on his desk of the two of them shaking hands. Later on, it made all the papers.)

“Chicken or fish?”

The question made no sense to a child of Émile’s world. We didn’t eat animals. They were poison, Émile said. His was a world of plants, beans, pulses. The mothers cooked together, in large batches. Stews were easy to share, one large pot and a ladle. In the mornings, oatmeal, steel-cut, gritty against the roofs of our mouths.

Émile must have sensed the need for visual aids. He switched on a small television against the back wall and fed it a black VHS tape.

“Chicken,” he pronounced.

Images flashed up on the screen. Pillowy hunks of white meat, drizzled with brown gravy. A platter of darker cuts, a family joining hands around the table. Smaller pieces, rolled in breadcrumbs, then plunged into hot oil until they emerged, hardened and—Émile adjusted the volume on the television—crispy.

There was incomplete dialogue, a cacophony of music that started and stopped haphazardly. The videos must have been spliced together from TV ads, some of them from series ormovies. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. All I knew was that I was hungry.

I stood there, stomach roiling, my mouth filling with saliva.

“Or fish?”

More delights—baked underneath a golden crust, grilled on hot stones and served with dripping tomatoes. Tender pink slabs fanning out under a tilted fork. Chunks of white flesh in paper-thin batter, stacked against French fries in a paper cone.

A whole world out there—of treasures, of appetites.

Chicken or fish?

It was the most important question of my short life, and I had no idea how to answer it.

Émile weeded out bad people. They were plucked from our lives and disappeared forever. We had no idea what happened to them. In this black hole of knowledge lived every imaginable nightmare.

Émile tapped his foot.

I had to say something. Anything.

“Chicken?”

Émile’s eyes flashed. He inhaled.

The exhale was a sigh.

Émile ejected the VHS tape, inserted another one into the VCR.

“These,” he said, “are the consequences of your choice.”

The new tape did not make sense, either. Chicks on a conveyor belt did not make sense. It was not a thing nature would let happen. Hands, gloved in plastic, shot into the frame, grabbing at the chicks like boiled tomatoes to be squished into sauce. Unbearable sights: chicks fed to a metallic machine, trapped between its jaws. Soft little lives ending in a splatter of blood.

There were chickens on the compound. We didn’t eat them—just their eggs, taken as respectfully as possible, our hands wrapped delicately around the shells, careful not to break them, grateful for our bounty.

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