his vest, always looking around as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.
“Are we all alone, Papa?” said the boy, eating.
“Yes.”
“No one else, anywhere?”
“No one else.”
“Were there people before?”
“Why do you keep asking that? It wasn’t that long ago. Just a few months. You remember.”
“Almost. If I try hard, then I don’t remember at all.” The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers. “Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, and it was true.
They had wakened one morning and the world was empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash, cars gleamed in front of other 7-A.M. cottages, but there were no farewells, the city did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.
Only the night before, he and his wife had been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, “I wonder when He will get tired of us and just rub us all out?”
“It has gone pretty far,” she said. “On and on. We’re such fools, aren’t we?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice—” he lit his pipe and puffed it—“if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and everything was starting over?” He sat smoking, the paper folded in his hand, his head resting back on the chair.
“If you could press a button right now and make it happen, would you?”
“I think I would,” he said. “Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth. Just leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man, who hunts when he isn’t hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one’s bothered him.”
“Naturally, we would be left.” She smiled quietly.
“I’d like that,” he mused. “All of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I’d like to find another way of traveling, an older way. Then, a hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty towns, and summertime forever up ahead …”
They sat a long while on the porch in silence, the newspaper folded between them.
At last she opened her mouth.
“Wouldn’t we be lonely?” she said.
So that’s how it was the morning of the new world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of saber-grass, marigold, marguerite and morning-glory. They had taken it with remarkable calm at first, perhaps because they had not liked the city for so many years, and had had so many friends who were not truly friends, and had lived a boxed and separate life of their own within a mechanical hive.
The husband arose and looked out the window and observed very calmly, as if it were a weather condition, “Everyone’s gone,” knowing this just by the sounds the city had ceased to make.
They took their time over breakfast, for the boy was still asleep, and then the husband sat back and said, “Now I must plan what to do.”
“Do? Why … why, you’ll go to work, of course.”
“You still don’t believe it, do you?” He laughed. “That I won’t be rushing off each day at eight-ten, that Jim won’t go to school again ever. School’s out for all of us! No more pencils, no more books, no more boss’s sassy looks! We’re let out, darling, and we’ll never come back to the silly damn dull routines. Come on!”
And he had walked her through the still and empty city streets.
“They didn’t die,” he said. “They just … went away.”
“What about the other cities?”
He went to an outdoor phone booth and dialed Chicago, then New York, then San Francisco.
Silence. Silence. Silence.
“That’s it,” he said, replacing the receiver.
“I feel guilty,” she said. “Them gone and us here. And … I feel happy. Why? I should be unhappy.”
“Should you? It’s no tragedy. They weren’t tortured or blasted or burned. They went easily and they didn’t know. And now we owe nothing to no one. Our only responsibility is being happy. Thirty more years of happiness, wouldn’t that be good?”
“But … then we must have more children!”
“To repopulate the world?” He shook his head slowly, calmly. “No. Let Jim be the last. After he’s grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world. They’ll get on. And someday some other species that can combine a natural happiness with a natural curiosity will build cities that won’t even look like cities to us, and survive. Right now, let’s go pack a basket, wake Jim, and get going on that long thirty-year summer vacation. I’ll beat you to the house!”
He took a sledge hammer from the small rail car, and while he worked alone for half an hour fixing the rusted rails into place the woman and the boy ran along the shore. They came back with dripping shells, a dozen or more, and some beautiful pink pebbles, and sat and the boy took school from the mother, doing homework on a pad with a pencil for a time, and then at high noon the man came down, his coat off, his tie thrown aside, and they drank orange pop, watching the bubbles surge up, glutting, inside the bottles. It was quiet. They listened to the sun tune the old iron rails. The smell of hot tar on the ties moved about them in the salt wind, as the husband tapped his atlas map lightly and gently.
“We’ll go to Sacramento next month, May, then work up toward Seattle. Should make that by July first, July’s a good month in Washington, then back down as the weather cools, to Yellowstone, a few miles a day, hunt here, fish there …”
The boy, bored, moved away to throw sticks into the sea and wade out like a dog to retrieve them.
The man went on: “Winter in Tucson, then, part of the winter, moving toward Florida, up the coast in the spring, and maybe New York by June. Two years from now, Chicago in the summer. Winter, three years from now, what about Mexico City? Anywhere the rails lead us, anywhere at all, and if we come to an old offshoot rail line we don’t know anything about, what the hell, we’ll just take it, go down it, to see where it goes. And some year, by God, we’ll boat down the Mississippi, always wanted to do that. Enough to last us a lifetime. And that’s just how long I want to take to do it all …”
His voice faded. He started to fumble the map shut, but, before he could move, a bright thing fell through the air and hit the paper. It rolled off into the sand and made a wet lump.
His
