Page 48 of The Midnight Hour
Is it discontentment? Uncertainty? Fear? The boys who were unceremoniously marched to the gate—or ceremoniously, all things considered—remain in our collective consciousness, even without anyone saying anything, ever, about it.
I try to verbalize some of the vague thoughts swirling through my mind one evening when we are all hanging out in our tiny living room; the weather has become colder, the sky the color of steel, the nights closing in darkly so no one wants to be outside much after dinner. I’m sitting in a chair, brushing Phoebe’s hair; Ruby is reading a book and Sam is flicking through an old gaming magazine he found somewhere—all vestiges of the former world, the ghostly remnants of what was and all that is left.
“Do you think we’re building something here?” I ask, like I’m starting a debate.This house believes we are all spinning our proverbial wheels, and I’m not sure if I’m okay with that.
Sam glances up from his magazine, instantly alert, his hair—he needs a haircut—sliding into his face. It amazes and saddens me in equal measure that we have never gotten to the bottom of whatever was troubling him back at Kawartha—and clearly still does. Even now, he is not meeting my eye.
“Building something,” he repeats, without expression or, it has to be said, much interest. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Except I do know, sort of. I think back to those admittedly nothalcyon days at the cottage, when Kerry’s mother, Darlene, taught us how to set a beaver trap, and her trapper friend Joe showed me how to skin and gut the one I’d caught. When we had a garden and a greenhouse and hope, frail as it was.
At the time, it never felt like remotely enough. I was sick with anxiety, apprehension, and grief; I missed everything the way it had been—which, I realize belatedly, I’m still doing. Am I viewing our cottage time through the sepia haze of sentimentality simply because it’s gone? Maybe one day I’ll look back on our time at the NBSRC in the same way.
And maybe Iwon’t, because we’ll still be here…andthat, I know, is the real problem.
Where is any of thisgoing?
“What are we supposed to be building?” Mattie asks. She is sitting on the floor, her back against the sofa, because it’s so crowded in this little room, and belatedly I clock that Kyle is leaning back against her drawn-up knees in a way that is decidedly familiar, and this gives me the same sort of jolt I experienced back in Kawartha, only more so, so it feels for a second like I’ve stuck my finger into an electric socket. What is going on there? And for all my daughter’s eye-rolls and huffy insistences…doth she protest too much? Do I need to talk to her about it, read her the riot act, or maybe just tell her to take precautions? The thought is most unsettling. I am not ready for that, and I don’t think Mattie is, either.
“I don’t know,” I say a beat later than I should have. “Just…something.” Realizing how lame I sound, I continue a little more earnestly, “I mean, remember when Michael Duart gave us that whole song and dance about saving civilization? What happened to that?”
Mattie arches an eyebrow, clearly skeptical. “How do you see that even happening, exactly?”
“Well, we wouldn’t be stuck on this base forever,” I reply with sudden ferocity, surprising myself with the strength of my feeling. “Going about our business like some—some robot army. We need to wake up out of our—our dream sleep and dosomething.” I think of Nicole. “Start building something bigger than ourselves.”
My daughter only looks amused by my stirring little speech. “A robot army that suddenly wakes up?” she muses. “I think you’re thinking of that disaster movie that came out, like, ten years ago, Mom. Except it was zombies, not robots, and they’d all been given this electrical charge or something that turned them into killing machines. I think it was with Will Smith? Or maybe?—”
Sam suddenly comes to life, his face alert with interest. “What would you rather be,” he asks the others, “a zombie or a robot?”
“Are you sentient?” Mattie immediately flashes back, getting into the spirit of the game. “Like, do you knowthat you’re a robot or a zombie? Because that makes a difference.”
“If you don’t know, does it even matter?” Kyle ventures hesitantly, and Mattie and Sam both turn to look at him with surprised admiration.
“Truth,” Sam concedes on a sigh, and Ruby looks up from her book.
“I think I’d rather be a robot,” she remarks quietly. “They seem nicer.”
Everyone has forgotten the point I was making, even me. Not that I even know what it was in the first place. But to my surprise they drop their robots-versus-zombies debate to circle back to what I was saying.
“We can’t do anything,” Mattie tells me with authority, “until the world calms down, like, a lot.”
“How do we know the world isn’tcalm already?” I counter. “We’ve been at this place for over two months now withbasically no outside communication. Life could be going on normally somewhere.”
They are all silent; I realize they haven’t considered this, and yet these are the kinds of concerns it feels like everyone should be having—and some people already are. I see it, I feel it, in various throwaway interactions. The pile of potatoes we are ordered to peel without any discussion about whether other food can be found or grown, or what we’ll do when the food we have runs out.
Last week I had to line up with two dozen other weary souls for new clothing for Phoebe and Ruby, as they’d outgrown what they had. All clothes are kept in a warehouse and divvied out by need, a need that’s decided by the bureaucrat running the operation rather than anyone who actually needs anything.
When I got to the front of the line, I gave them Ruby and Phoebe’s sizes, and they filled a shopping bag for each girl; I came away with two pairs of jeans, a pair of leggings, two t-shirts, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers each. It was all decent stuff, if well-worn—where did it come from? And when the girls both grew again, would there be more? Already I knew I would not be the one to decide.
I didn’t ask anything about it, and no one else in the line did, either; we just took our bags and went, but I could feel the questions forming on all of our lips. I continued to see it in the dawning apprehension in everyone’s eyes, the silent, pointed looks people shared. The numb blur of the first weeks here was wearing off, and the four boys who had been kicked out were a kind of wake-up call that no one was quite yet ready to heed. So we took our bags of somebody else’s clothes and went back to our little lives without a murmur.
“The worldiscalm,” Sam says suddenly. “Too calm. It’s basically empty. Everything is.”
Mattie and Kyle both swivel to stare at him; Kyle is stillleaning against Mattie’s legs, and she’s got her hand resting casually on his shoulder. “What do you mean?” she asks.
Sam shrugs. “Part of the warehouse crew go out to get supplies from places?—”
“What kind of places?” Mattie asks, her voice sharpening.
