The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Rachel lay prostrate on the ground, her thick black hair sticking out at all angles. Myrra stood over her, unsure if she was there to help or just to witness the spectacle. Rachel’s nose was bleeding. The muscles in her stomach were seizing and shaking her body; Myrra couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. She pinched her arm, trying to get her attention.

  “What did you mean, escape? Are they dying better, or surviving better?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. We’re all dying.” It was definitely laughter. Rachel’s body was shaking with morbid laughter. “Look what they make us do. I betrayed you. I shouldn’t have betrayed you,” she said. “But you betrayed me too. You should have told me… We’re the same. You should have told me.”

  The features of her face bunched up and contorted, full of anger and irony.

  “I feel like breaking things. I think that’s what I’ll do with the rest of my life. Break things.” Rachel stared up at Myrra with an intensity that made Myrra think she’d suddenly gone sober. “And if you don’t leave soon, I’m going to start with you.”

  28

  TOBIAS

  Tobias was ten when David and Ingrid were detained. It was in New London. They had left him in the apartment that morning, an apartment Tobias now recognized had been a squat. David and Ingrid had taken over the luxe high-rise apartment of some well-to-do family who were summering elsewhere. David had ruffled his hair and said, “We’ll be back later, kiddo,” and Ingrid had been too busy looking through her purse for a missing lipstick to say anything to him at all. Then they were out the door. It was the last time Tobias had ever seen them in person.

  He’d waited all day in the apartment and late into the night. It wasn’t unusual for his parents to be gone longer than they’d claimed, so he went about his day as usual, cooking noodles on the stovetop for lunch, finding bread in the cupboards for a peanut butter sandwich dinner. He watched all the late-night comedy shows, brushed his teeth, and then stumbled into bed. The next morning, he was still alone. A little rarer, but not unheard of. He scrambled himself an egg and watched the morning news. Around noon there was a knock on the door. Ingrid and David had instructed him to never answer the door when they weren’t there. He turned off the TV screen, avoided creaks in the floors, and let the person knock. They were persistent. Usually people stopped after three and went away. This person knocked five, six, eight times. Finally a deep masculine voice called through the door: “Tobias? Tobias—your mom and dad sent me. Can you open up the door?”

  Tobias still didn’t answer, but he was getting scared now. Once a loan shark had tried that tactic on him, looking for collateral to make sure David paid his debts. He stood silent and stared at the doorknob, wishing he were tall enough to reach the peephole. The person on the other end made a grumbling noise, and soon there was a scratching sound near the doorknob. He remembered wondering if the person had a key or was picking the lock. The door opened, and Tobias could tell immediately that the man wasn’t a loan shark. The agent’s badge was the dead giveaway, of course, but there was also something honest and solid about him. He had both feet planted firmly on the ground. Even back then, Barnes had sported his mustache and same haircut, though at that time his hair was more brown than gray. He had a barrel chest that, even in those days, you could foresee migrating lower and becoming a potbelly.

  He strolled up to Tobias and held out his hand to shake. Tobias, leery of the situation but not especially afraid of the man in front of him, took it.

  “I’m Agent Barnes,” he said. “I’ve come to collect you.”

  “Where are David and Ingrid?” he remembered asking.

  “Is that what you call them?” Barnes had been surprised.

  “They don’t like me calling them Mom and Dad,” Tobias said. “It makes them feel old.”

  “Age is inevitable,” Barnes said matter-of-factly. “They should let you call them Mom and Dad.” He wandered through the apartment toward the kitchen.

  “You must be hungry,” he said.

  “I made myself breakfast,” Tobias responded, following him. “Can you tell me where David and Ingrid are, please?”

  Barnes stood in the kitchen door, took in the washed-up pots and pans, the half-finished plate of scrambled eggs, the spatula, and the empty juice glass. He turned to look at Tobias, his eyes widened in appreciation.

  “You really did cook,” he said.

  Tobias nodded.

  “You do this a lot?” he asked.

  Tobias nodded again.

  Barnes put his hands on his hips, assessing the situation, looking back and forth between the kitchen and Tobias.

  “You’re a bit different from your parents, aren’t you?” he asked then. Tobias remembered that Barnes had had a way of speaking to him even then, talking to him like a rational adult instead of a kid, never talking down. He’d liked that from the start.

  Barnes guided him over to the apartment’s breakfast nook, sat him down in one chair while he sat down in another, so that for the first time they were facing each other eye-to-eye.

  “Your folks were detained yesterday afternoon on charges of credit card fraud,” Barnes said. “Do you know what that means?”

  Tobias shook his head. He was getting a little scared now, but didn’t want to show it in front of the Security agent.

  “It’s OK if you don’t,” Barnes said. He leaned back in his chair and didn’t speak for a couple of minutes. He was looking at Tobias as if he was trying to figure him out, with a certain level of appreciation. It reminded Tobias of the way David would look at paintings he really liked.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do,” Barnes said finally. “I’m going to take you out for a milkshake. Whether you’re hungry or not, everyone’s always got room for a milkshake. And you can ask me all the questions you want about David and Ingrid, and what happened to them, and I promise to tell you the truth. I will not lie to you.” He bent forward and enunciated each word in that last sentence, as if it was especially important.

  He held out his hand to shake, as if they were closing a deal. Tobias took it. He was still scared, but he appreciated anyone who took the truth that seriously.

  They’d gone out for a milkshake down the street, and Tobias had asked a lot of questions, and, true to his word, Barnes took the time to answer every one, with as much clarity and detail as he could muster. The conversation ended up taking hours, and they went through two milkshakes, a plate of chicken, and two plates of fries. Barnes never showed any trace of impatience.

  And a couple of weeks later, after the paperwork had been pushed through the proper channels, Tobias was living with Barnes. It was the safest he’d ever felt.

  Alone now.

  Tobias walked past the hotel’s front doors. He was due to meet Simpson but couldn’t go inside yet. To go inside meant moving on to the next thing. He couldn’t move on just yet. The shock of grief had muffled the sounds around him, but now as he walked he observed his surroundings again and felt the cacophony of sound. Everywhere he went he bumped into people making noise, sometimes crying, but sometimes just emitting long sustained sounds. Sounds that he couldn’t fathom coming from human voices. And the bells, everywhere the bells—where in New London there would be sirens and Security protocols blaring out of speakers fixed over the streets, here the community answer to public panic came in the form of bells. They clanged at all octaves, hummed in different areas of his bones; the higher tones buzzed in the top of his skull, deeper ones in his hips. If he concentrated, he could pick out the peal of bells that resonated in his chest, thrummed at the same frequency as his sadness. He walked in the direction of those bells.

  Blocks away from the hotel—five, six, who was counting?—Tobias entered a temple, squeezed past other mourners, some panicked and loud, some still. They were mourning the world, Tobias was mourning Barnes. And the world. Everything. Tobias was mourning everything. The chiming of the bells—his bells—came from somewhere high above him and resonated down th
e walls, through the floors, through his shoes.

  The walls were bare granite, but farther in, near the center of the temple space, a crowd of people had gathered in a pool of colorful light. Every person had their neck craned up toward the ceiling. Tobias followed them and looked up too.

  A huge stained glass dome hovered several floors above him, shining color down upon his face. He scanned the fragments of color without focus until his eyes rested on one particular panel: a man with a paintbrush dripping with red, poised in front of a doorway. Tobias recognized the scene from his father’s barely used Haggadah. The lamb’s blood, painted above the door, would spare the Israelites from God’s plague. In light of what was happening, it was a terrifying image. Despite this, despite all he knew, Tobias felt his eyes well up with tears, just as the walls and floor welled up with sound. He felt acutely aware of his own body, of every nerve pricking through his skin. The color was unbearably intense. He’d never felt such an intense reaction to color before, not even with any of the paintings David had shown him.

  It wasn’t right, the beauty of it. Everything should be in monochrome now. There were studies, Tobias remembered—when people suffered from depression, apparently colors actually appeared duller. These colors were hitting his eyes with such saturated intensity, it was as if he were experiencing color for the first time. It didn’t feel right.

  The crowd shifted and shoved him, and Tobias stumbled into a pure patch of blue. He raised a hand in front of his face. In the light, his skin was blue. The most brilliant blue he’d ever seen. And if he smiled, his teeth would be blue. And if he opened his mouth, the blue would shoot down inside him, filling him up from the soles of his feet, overtaking his body. Maybe he could find Barnes again here, in this blue. Maybe that was why he felt this way; maybe Barnes was part of the blue.

  Even as he thought it, the logical part of his brain shut him down. Barnes is dead. The feelings you feel are just heightened chemical reactions due to grief. You can never find Barnes again, certainly not in a temple, under some bits of stained glass.

  And just like that, the blue was back to being a color once more. The world dulled around him. Even the bells quieted, stopped humming just for him. Tobias was abandoned; even in the throngs of people around him, he was completely and utterly isolated.

  He thought of Barnes, alone and bleeding out under rubble. What would they do with his body? Tobias wasn’t there to make arrangements. Would anyone even think to hold a funeral, in all this mess? More likely Tobias would never get to see Barnes’s body, would never get to see Barnes, in any form, again.

  His life felt half-lived, unreal. He trudged out of the church, back toward the hotel.

  Simpson stood in the hall outside Tobias’s room, looking wired.

  “It’s getting bad out there,” Simpson said. “Nobody outright tried to steal the car, but everyone was trying to steal my charging connection—had to wave my tranq gun around four, five times—”

  Tobias unlocked the door to his room, staring in wonder at Simpson’s energy. Didn’t he know that Barnes was dead? But no, of course he didn’t.

  “Are you packed?” Simpson barged in ahead of him, and Tobias let him. “I’ve got the car hidden for now, but we shouldn’t leave it for long…”

  “Barnes is dead,” Tobias said simply, cutting into Simpson’s train of thought. He barely recognized his own voice as he spoke.

  “What?” Simpson stared back at him, looking almost angry at the suggestion.

  “He’s dead.”

  Simpson’s whole body slumped.

  “What happened?”

  “There were some people panicking, running into evacuated structures, Barnes went after them and a building collapsed—I don’t—” Tobias sighed. It took a monumental amount of energy to repeat this. “I don’t really know the details. Security didn’t really know the details.”

  “Oh.” The noise came from somewhere deep in Simpson’s belly.

  He reached out an arm to Tobias, looked on the verge of pulling him in for a hug, but stopped short. Instead his arm just dangled out in space, his fingertips inches away from Tobias’s shoulder. At a loss.

  “You can stay with Ruth and me, if you want. You shouldn’t be alone.” He must have known that Tobias had nowhere else to go.

  Simpson dropped his arm and started to pace, though Tobias couldn’t figure out why. Maybe he just needed to move. Tobias felt a wave of self-pity. How broken must he look right now, for Simpson to offer him a place with his family? Simpson, who only tolerated him at best?

  “I let Myrra Dal go,” Simpson said midstride. He said it like it was an afterthought. After the news of Barnes, Tobias had almost forgotten how important this case had been to him just hours before. So Myrra was gone. His chest ached at the thought, though he couldn’t place why. It wasn’t the case. His career might as well be ash in a fire after all that had happened. No, it just felt like another person to miss. Odd as it was to think, Myrra felt like his last remaining friend.

  “It was the right thing to do,” Simpson added.

  Tobias nodded. He knew Simpson was right, but he felt the loss all the same.

  They wove the car down the mountain, inching through traffic, driving up on the sidewalks when necessary. Bells were replaced by the noise of honking.

  Every few minutes someone would bang on their windows, asking for a ride. One man flashed a wallet full of account cards at them. He wore an expensive-looking gray suit that had become rumpled with the dust of the street.

  Simpson kept the doors firmly locked. He was on the phone with his wife, offering reassurances as they squeezed through the cars.

  “My love, we’re leaving now. I’ll take the back roads, I promise—”

  Tobias sat in the back seat, trying to give him privacy. There was no one he could call, he thought, indulging in his sadness.

  Though that wasn’t strictly true. He felt like an orphan, carrying Barnes’s death like a cinder block weighing down his body. But he wasn’t entirely without family. David and Ingrid were alive and well and sitting in a New London jail.

  They weren’t the people he wanted to talk to. He wanted to talk to Barnes, to see him one more time behind that wood desk, giving him tough love and advice. But these were terrifying times. This was what one did in times like these—reached out to family. Maybe, he thought, this could all culminate in one last moment of connection for him. Maybe things happened for a reason.

  Simpson was still chattering away with Ruth in the front seat. If Simpson was getting a connection, Tobias should be fine. He dialed the New London Security Bureau. It rang for a long time before finally connecting. Tobias was patient.

  “Hello?” a young voice answered. Tobias was pretty sure it was the same agent he’d spoken with before. He wondered if the bureau was working with a skeleton crew. Maybe there were only a handful of agents left who were willing to stay on the job.

  “Hello—this is Agent Tobias Bendel.” There was static in the connection, making it difficult to hear clearly. “I believe you spoke to me before, to inform me about Director Barnes?”

  “What—? Oh… yes.” The agent sounded distracted. “Sorry. Yes, that was me.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I was wondering if you could help me—”

  “Sorry… the connection is a bit weak—” the agent shouted on the other end. The static was building in the background. The network must be overloaded with calls right now.

  “I wanted to know if you could help me,” Tobias shouted louder, hoping he wasn’t disturbing Simpson’s call too much. Simpson was having his own shouting match in the front seat. “I need to get connected to the New London Prison. There are two prisoners there that I wish to speak to, one on the women’s side and one on the men’s. I know it’s a big favor, but I was hoping, since I’m an agent, maybe something could be arranged—”

  The agent cut in. “Usually you’d need to set up a formal request, arrange an appointment�
��” There was a pause on the other end. The agent sighed into the receiver. When he spoke again, his tone was much less formal. “Fuck it. In the wake of what’s happened, what difference does it make? There’s only three of us left here at the bureau, and most of the prison guards have bailed. There’s comm boxes in the prisoners’ cells. If you’ve got their codes I can probably connect you.”

  Tobias searched the documents on his tablet, fishing for the prisoner ID codes that had been given to him long ago, never to be used.

  “I think I’ve got them here—”

  “OK, read it out slowly—the connection is terrible—”

  Tobias furnished him with all the information he could. The line clicked out. Some ironically cheerful hold music took its place. Digital tones, a tinny sound, hard to place the song. Beethoven? Maybe.

  Doubt settled into his stomach. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in well over a decade. What was he supposed to say to them? Tobias almost hung up the phone then and there. The bile that he’d felt for them most of his life rose up again in force. These people, these irresponsible, entitled people, who had the gall to continue living when Barnes was not. These people who were so incapable of raising him, who should have never had a child. He should never have been born. It would have been better, that sort of oblivion, than the pain he was feeling now.

  He stayed on the line anyway. His parents were not good people. Though if he thought about it, with the stark lens through which he viewed his own life, now, here at the end of it: Was he a good person? Was Barnes? What made someone worthy of regard?

  An especially pitchy Muzak high note was cut off midwhine. Tobias heard a voice through his earpiece, a voice that sounded familiar, but older and thinner and sadder. It was a voice he had not heard in over a decade.

  “Hello?” David said.

  His heart swelled for a moment, an old childish instinct, one that he didn’t fully trust.

  “Toby?”

  Only Barnes calls me Toby was his first thought, but then he remembered that David, once upon a time, had called him Toby too.