Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Journey into the Past
In the beginning, God created man.
And it was pretty much downhill from there.
Of course, the descent took time, and there were many points along
the way at which it could have been slowed or reversed. We all
watched, fascinated, unable to look away, as day by day an unwanted
future became an unchangeable past.
I am not an historian. The bigger picture I will leave to others.
This is the story of how I came to be here, so far from what I used to
call home, and of those who shared my journey. I have tried to record
it faithfully, as truly as memory allows. Some moments remain as
indelible scars, despite my best attempts to forget. Others are fading
even now. And parts of the story, I fear, will never be revealed.
I have attempted to see some of what happened through the eyes
of my companions, out of respect for some, and in an attempt to
understand others. I hope I have done them justice and apologise if I
have not.
I admit to having started this tale several times over the years and
having given up every attempt. Each failure has its own story, too.
But now it is time. Perhaps it was watching my own children grow
up in this new and changed world, that has finally brought me to
the task, ending years of procrastination. Maybe it was the birth of
my first grandson.
At first, and for a long time, I simply needed to heal, to forget.
Years passed, a decade and another again. Slowly, with the turn of
seasons, the pain began to recede. I lost myself in the task of remaking
our lives, bending to the work of feeding my family, building this
stone and jarrah-plank house by the sea. Now I know that I will only
ever find peace in the places I least want to go.
For it is no exaggeration to say that I have crawled to the very edge
of the abyss and gazed down into the depths of Hell. I do not offer
this lightly. I am a scientist, a teacher. Even now, in my old age, I
remain a rationalist, a determinist. But I know now that human
reality lies not in the physical, the solid stuff of the world, the bones
and tumours of our mortal bodies, but in the warped fabric of time
where our hopes and tortured dreams live.
In truth, I am running out of time. What once obeyed without
complaint now rebels. Joints ache, and old wounds throb with the
coming of the rains. Fatigue, once a stranger, is now a constant and
unwanted companion. Even simple tasks have become difficult, and
in my two grown sons I can see glimpses of the man I was, the same
man who carried and lifted and placed each of the stones in these
walls, whose hands cut and shaped the sturdy beams above me,
cleared the ground and planted the crops that feed us.
And so I must make this journey into the past, now, while I still
can. I hope this record will help my children understand the truth of
what happened and why things are the way they are, and why we
decided to bring them into such a world in the first place. Because it
was truth, or to be more precise a deficit of truth, that set us on this
path. A truth that remained hidden for far too long, ignored by some,
avoided by many, and actively concealed by a powerful few.
I will start back when we had finally begun to try to fix the problem,
after it was too late, and before we really knew what was wrong.
I still remember the letter that started it all.
I rose early, an old habit, crept downstairs to make coffee, correct
the exam papers I hadn’t got to the night before. It was back when
people still got up and made coffee and went to work, led what
they tried to imagine were normal lives. I guess we were all doing
our best to maintain the illusion of a past we couldn’t quite bring
ourselves to let go of.
By the time I left the house, dawn was hinting pale against
the autumn trees. My wife Maybelline – May – was still in bed.
I’d gone upstairs to kiss her goodbye, but when I whispered her
name, she hadn’t moved. The morning was cold. Dark clouds
massed in the west, obscuring the mountains. Out of the gate
and left towards the river, my usual route, past ragged picket-
fence gardens and modest wooden houses, lights coming on in
kitchen windows. It was that kind of neighbourhood. The last
vestiges of the middle class, still hanging on to that dream, still
pretending.
I taught my morning class, chemistry 11, and had begun physics
12 – just another Thursday among fifteen years of Thursdays. I
was standing at the blackboard describing the radiative forcing
effect of carbon dioxide and methane on Earth’s climate when the
letters arrived, placed ceremoniously on my desk by Radley, the
breathless deputy principal, a short, recently-appointed adminis-
trator whose sole joy in life seemed to be the delivery of bad news.
No calamity was too small to send him into paroxysms of
excitement: whispered news of a recent divorce, the latest teen
pregnancy, the now-ritual distribution of draft cards at the senior
assembly. The kids, predictably, called him Ratley.
I knew what my letter would say, had anticipated it for months.
I finished the class, left the letters unopened on my desk, acted as
if nothing had changed. At lunch I sat with a few colleagues,
talked about the usual stuff – the war, the shortages, the chronic
lack of mobile-phone and internet service.
Later that afternoon, after the kids had settled into the physics
12 exam, I opened my letter. It was no surprise. Except the date.
What I had initially thought must be a mistake, a typo of some
sort, right there in ragged black ink: the last digit of the year
exactly one lower than it was supposed to be, than had been
repeatedly communicated by the government over the radio and
the TV for the last six months.
It made no difference to me. I had always been well within the
cut-off. I was clearly one of theresponsibles, as they were being
called – the old ones, those the viruses hadn’t managed to kill off.
I’d accepted it long ago. But for May, it made all the difference in
the world.
I looked up at the kids, heads bent to their exam papers.
Kazinsky with his newly razed skull of stubble, Smith with the tip
of one of her long braids in her mouth, concentrating. Good kids.
No, not kids anymore. Young men and women, now. Women and
men, young, with a future even more uncertain than mine.
I looked at my watch, gave them all a few extra minutes. Then
I stood and cleared my throat. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, time is up.’
Groans from the usual suspects, eyes looking up at me,
refocusing, the afternoon sunlight in each of those uniquely
patterned, uniquely troubled pairs. A few smiles – Smith,
inevitably, beaming at me with that beautiful mouth, those
unnaturally enhanced eyes, the Cantor dust of freckles across the
bridge of her nose, that haunting intermittency. I scanned the rest
of the faces, raised the letter in my right hand. ‘I have some good
news, for some of you at least.’
Quiet, now. Thirty-two faces directed toward me.
‘This will be the last class we will have together,’ I said.
Even the new kids in the back row were paying attention now.
‘I am being relocated.’
A guffaw from the back, Hernandez and Richards high-fiving.
‘South.’
Then silence, blank stares, information being processed. All the
new kids, the ones who themselves had just been relocated, knew
immediately. You’re going where we just came from.
I considered saying more, offering some sort of defence perhaps.
Instead, I said: ‘I hope you’ve learned something during our time
together. Even you, Richards, Hernandez…’
Nervous laughter from a few.
‘Remember, wherever your lives take you, that science and
rational thought have always been a beacon for humanity. In
reason and truth lie hope.’ As I said it, I realised how old-
fashioned it sounded. I hoped one day they would understand.
More sniggering from the back.
‘Now, if you will please turn in your exam papers. I wish you
all good luck.’
Students began shuffling to the front, placing papers on the
corner of my desk. Krusch, Robertson, Ravindran. DeVilliers
silent, hoisting his bag onto his shoulder; a grunt from Rouse that
could have been goodbye; a clear ‘good luck, Teach’ from the
intelligent Blewett; a tended hand and a good, firm shake from
Glass, captain of the school football team. A fewthankyous. Most
walked out without a word.
Soon it was only Smith and Kazinsky, the two who’d been with
me the longest. Smith in her trademark short skirt and black Doc
Martens, fiddling with a braid, Kazinsky hovering near the back
window. Smith put her paper on the pile, looked at me. She was
crying.
‘I don’t think I did very well,’ she sniffled. ‘I…’ She stalled, stood
looking down at her feet.
‘You always say that, Maddy. And you always do well. Don’t
worry.’
She looked up at me. The tears in her eyes refracted the low-
angle light from the windows, prismed out through the yellow
part of the spectrum from those cat’s-eye contacts she had been
wearing for a few months now, 4.7x1014cycles per second, that
beguiling, prescient frequency.
‘Yes, but…’ She stopped herself, let the end of her braid fall to
her side. ‘What if our new teacher is, like, a troll?’
‘Don’t worry, Maddy. Miss Fenyman will take over for the rest
of the term. She’s a lot younger than I am. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
She stood there a moment, head bowed. ‘But I want you,
Teach,’ she said, fiddling with her braid again. ‘I want to do physics
at MIT. You know that. I needyou.’
That’s what everyone calls me. Teacher. Everyone who knows
me. The kids just call me Teach.
I picked Maddy’s paper from the pile, scanned the first answer,
her invariably neat script moving across the page, building from
first principles, the unit analysis helpfully displayed and balanced,
the answer perfect. ‘You’re ready, Maddy. You’ll get in. Believe me.
You don’t need me anymore.’
She stood there with her legs crossed above the knees the way
she did . ‘You’re just saying that,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Anyway,
it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to go.’
‘I’m sorry, Maddy,’ I said, struggling for words.
She straightened, glanced at Kazinsky and picked up her bag.
‘Thanks, Teach. I’ll never forget you.’
And then she was gone and it was only Kazinsky, half a foot
taller than he’d been at the start of term, standing by the window,
looking out across the mud-scarred playing fields. I stood and
walked a few unsteady paces towards him, the room suddenly
empty now that Smith was gone, as if all the air had been sucked
from the place. The late-afternoon sky burned that bewildering
shade of alder that still made me dizzy, as if the gravity of the world
had been inverted, transducing earth into sky, atmosphere into
ocean. Which in a way, of course, it had.
For several minutes we stood there by the window in the empty
classroom, saying nothing, each looking out at whatever we could
see.
After a while, Kazinsky spoke. His voice was deep, resonant.
‘I’ve been called up for the army.’
I said nothing. The latest draft of seventeen-year-old males had
just been announced to replace the catastrophic losses in Africa.
There had been the earlier experiments with females, of course,
but those had been an unmitigated disaster, and now, with the
population plummeting, it was ridiculous to send healthy young
women to be slaughtered on the battlefield.
A long silence stretched out, pierced only by the occasional
shout from the hallway. ‘I don’t agree with what we’re doing over
there,’ Kazinsky said. ‘I don’t want to kill people.’
I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder, held it there a moment.
Kazinsky glanced back towards the hallway. ‘I’m thinking of
running away.’
‘It would be dangerous, Matthew. You know what they’re doing
to draft evaders.’ My words sounded fake, an insincere apology.
‘There’s no way I’m going to go over there and kill a bunch of
people I don’t know, have nothing against. We’re only there for
the food. We’re stealing.’
I had been against the war from the beginning, demonstrated
against it, back when that was still possible, before the
Repudiation, but I continued with my fakery nonetheless. ‘The
new government is trying to get out, bring the troops home. But
it’s going to take time, Matthew, after the mess they inherited.’
‘I’m scared, Teach.’
‘So am I, Matthew.’ It was the truth.
Kazinsky turned to face me. Tears wicked his dark lashes. ‘No.
That’s not what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’m not scared for me. I’m scared
forus. All of us.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve,
glanced out towards the hallway. ‘I was just a kid when the first virus
hit. I thought that was bad. But it was nothing compared to this.’
I gripped the boy’s shoulder, held it tight. ‘The world is a fine
place, Matthew, and well worth fighting for. Do you know who
said that?’
He shook his head.
‘I guess they don’t teach you Hemingway in lit anymore.’
‘My dad readThe Old Man and the Seato me once, when we
were on holiday.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘It’s from another time, but yeah.’
I waited for him to continue.
‘You know. When everything was still pure. Not like now.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said, guilt welling up inside me.
‘I like the way the old man never gave up, even when the sharks
came and took the fish away from him. The way the young boy
loved the old man no matter what.’
‘So, in the end, he won.’ I hoped he couldn’t hear the lack of
conviction in my voice.
‘Yeah, I guess he did. If you can call it winning.’
‘He just went out too far.’
‘I guess.’
‘So,’ I said, looking into the boy’s eyes, ‘the decision each of us
has to make is: which fight? As long as you’re fighting for what
you know is right, and keep doing your best, there’s hope. It’s when
you give up that you’ve lost. Not a minute before.’
Now this I meant. Big difference between trying and winning.
I’ve always been quick to give advice. It is one of my many failings.
Kazinsky looked up and to the right for a moment, that thing
he did when he was working something through. ‘Maybe I could
head to the mountains. You know, hide in the wilderness.’
‘It’s still pretty cold up there.’
He stared out of the window. After a while he said: ‘My dad
would have known what to do. He was good in the bush. Could
get a fire going anywhere. He used to take me camping all the time
when I was a kid.’
You still are a kid. I didn’t say it. Matthew’s father had died in
the second pandemic. Young and fit, he defied the statistics and
succumbed to what later became known as the old-people’s
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disease. In truth no one had been safe. With so many succumbing,
the tails of the distribution accounted for millions. It had been a
giant crapshoot.
‘You’re smart, Matthew. With your marks, you could apply for
engineering at university. It would keep you out of the army.’
We’d been having this conversation for a couple of years now,
on and off, me trying to get him to acknowledge his obvious talent
for maths and physics, him steadfastly resisting. It’s not me, Teach,
he’d say. I want to get out of school, not back into it. I want to
live. Get out there and see some of the world before it’s all gone.
His words saddened me in a way I still cannot describe. I
couldn’t blame him one bit.
‘It’s not right, what they’re doing,’ he said. ‘You don’t look that
old.’
The truth of it was that we hadn’t tried hard enough to change
things, back when it mattered, when there was still time. We could
have. But we didn’t.
‘It won’t be good, Teach. You should run away, hide.’ Kazinsky
paused, looked into my eyes, then lowered his voice. ‘Maybe we
can go together?’
‘It will be okay. They’ll look after us.’
‘Please.’
‘It will be fine, Matthew. Thanks.’
And that was it.
After he left, I stood a long while and watched the sky go dark.
Then I put the exam papers and the letters into my briefcase and
walked out of the classroom, alongthe scuffed linoleum corridor
and down the front steps of Churchill High School for the last
time, my throat aching from holding it all back, the fear growing
inside me like a tumour, the pity I felt for these unwilling
inheritors I was leaving behind.
