Daimones

Unstable Stabilities

Our property included an adjacent cottage we used for when family and friends came to visit us. Mary showed Laura the place and gave her the keys. Laura held them to her heart. “You’ll never regret to have me. You rescued me.”

Annah cheered even more when Laura said that and rushed to hug her. Laura hugged her back and closed her eyes. Although there were no more than ten years, maximum, between the two girls, they hit it off quickly. The young woman fascinated Annah, and Laura probably thought of her brother who would have been about the same age as our daughter.

After dinner that evening, we all took Annah to bed. Laura promised her she would be there the next morning, and for the days to come. “You will be my little sister and I will be your big sister if you want.”

Annah smiled, happy. “Would you teach me to roller skate?”

“I’d love that. We need to make sure you get the proper equipment, then we will hit the roads. You’ll learn in no time. You’ll see.”

I felt a sweeping sense of gratitude toward Laura.

We tucked Annah in, and the three of us went to sit downstairs on the couch. I lit the fire. Mary wanted to know about Laura: her past, her ideas, what triggered her and what made her happy. Laura glanced first at Mary, then at me. She lowered her eyes and, with a sigh, she opened up.

“I was raised in Italy. My mother is French and she met dad in front of a steaming dish of spaghetti all’amatriciana. 'Hot as a volcano and as spicy as our love,' Dad used to say.”

I exchanged a smile with Mary as I took my place on the couch.

“My infancy was nothing but ordinary, surrounded by love, care, and family values. I was an only child for twelve years, then my little brother was born, somewhat unexpectedly.” She paused. “I miss him.”

Mary reached for her hand. “You don’t need to continue.”

“No, I want to.” Laura reassured us. “My dad is…was a university professor of philosophy.” Laura eyes got bright with tears, reflecting the dancing colors of the cracking fire, tears that were like the dew on our blue iris on late summer mornings. She had changed to past tense as she was talking about dead people.

“Mom was a midwife. In high school, I became passionate about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in particular. There was a time when I almost only read Freud.”

Mary started to get interested. I wasn’t particularly into humanistic studies, only math and physics, but Mary loved the arts, philosophy and literature. She changed position to get more comfortable and more apt to listen carefully, as if she needed to shut out body signals to focus on what Laura said.

“Together with philosophy, art history was my favorite subject and, in high school, I learned to truly look. I’ve always liked the whole history of art, in any period: ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque…a certain taste for surrealism that was accompanied by philosophical interest. I think I made my dad proud. Paul, my brother, was mom’s darling, and he looked up to me for everything. He always asked me to explain what dad meant when he talked philosophy.” Laura paused for a long moment, then she smiled.

“The very first time, he asked me what ‘fisolopy’ was...” She sighed, fighting some inner demons and her hands trembled. Before we could say anything, she changed the subject.

“Over the past three years, I've come to know about the great music and composers thanks to some friends…one in particular. He liked haute cuisine, too.” She paused again, and her eyes lost the inner brightness they had before, as when a dark cloud hides the sun, promising rain and cold and shivering.

“I could go on, but I prefer not to bore you any longer. I don’t have any news from him, back in Italy. He hasn’t replied to my calls or emails. I haven’t seen him since the time I left to come study here, last July. I don’t believe in God, now. Now I have even more reasons to believe I’m right not to.”

Laura’s voice broke with those last words and she couldn’t hold back her emotions anymore. She cried, big tears traced her face. It hurt us, too. Her pain flowed into us and with us, melting our agonies together. Laura collapsed into Mary’s arms. In that moment, our grievances became one. We felt the intensity of the hardship, and the misery, and maybe we started then the mourning of billions of lives.

“Why did it happen, Mary?” Laura cried. “I am sorry, I didn’t want to cry, but I miss them so much, so much. Oh, Mary… I didn’t have time to tell them anything. My brother, he was so young. Why wasn’t I there with him?”

We all cried, weeping like kids who had lost their best friend, fused into one single, miserable, aching heart. We felt the crushing weight of merciless avalanches of the souls of everyone we lost, and whom we’d never see, hear, feel, or touch again.

Mary held Laura’s hand. “You’re not alone. Don’t cry. You’re with us now.” Mary managed to say while sobbing. My throat was a knot, unable to utter a word. Mary continued to soothe Laura’s ache, then she spoke in a voice full of love, words almost whispered, and it was as if she poured an ointment on our wounds.

“Laura…darling. Life has not given us the opportunity to share moments of joy. We meet in times of grief. Each of us must deal with deep wounds, the loss of family and be strong to cherish what remains. We’ve been deeply wounded. Time will never heal this pain, but we have to turn the page. We will not have the chance to forget.”

She told how it had been for us, and how we discovered what happened when I took Annah to school that morning. Our initial searches for others, the fears, the vanishing hopes, the burial of Joe and Beth. I’d almost forgot the sadness of those moments. We mourned.

Laura told us about her first days and weeks. How she woke up that day, got ready for her lessons, and left home. She called for the elevator and then the horror started. The doors opened and she screamed and could not stop.

“Monique and Sophie lived together on the fifth floor. They had collapsed in the elevator, crammed together. Their faces were swollen, and blood came out of their nose and ears. Their lips were bluish and their eyes were almost out of their sockets, everything sprayed with blood.”

Laura stared. “I screamed for help, ringing all the door bells on my floor and others. No one came out to help. I couldn’t understand why everyone ignored me, why no one came.”

She told us she had collapsed when no one answered at the first-floor corner apartment where a young couple from Italy, with their baby girl, had just moved in only weeks before.

“She was so cute, their baby, Stella. I kept banging on their door, calling their names. I kept hitting that door until my hands hurt. I was terrified.” She called out for Antonella, Stella’s mother, until her voice faltered and she fell against their door, sobbing. She realized then how everything was oppressively silent.

Laura finally ran out of the building, calling for help, and the terror grew even more after she started to see the first corpses. In a car, or a bicycle rider, a weird, unnatural, contorted figure, forever framed within his bicycle. She panicked even more when she started to realize how quiet Geneva was that early morning in February…and why.

She reached the place where some of her friends lived. A renovated old villa hosting fifteen students, not far from the Cantonal Hospital. She tried the intercom of her colleagues first, then everybody else. No one answered. She didn’t know what to do at that point. She wandered around most of the day, afraid to go back home. She reached the old town almost without realizing it, meeting no one alive. She thought she had lost her mind and does not remember much of those first hours. In the evening, she became aware of where she was or what she was doing. Maybe because she started to be cold. Inside.

In fear of everything, and in the unnatural silence of a dead town, she returned to her apartment at dark. She remembered, shivering, not to approach the elevator. She crashed into her bed and fell asleep, a heavy dreamless sleep until she awoke because someone was screaming. It took her a while to realize it was her, and then cried until dawn, when she fell asleep again, as if losing consciousness.

The next morning, Laura was more rational and tried to call everyone she knew, starting with her family. The more numbers she dialed, the more desperate she got. “I could not continue. I couldn’t see the numbers anymore because of my tears. I threw the cell phone against the wall and broke it.”

None of her family answered, neither her friends nor any colleagues. She never tried to call the police.

“Why not?” I asked. Laura had no answer. She didn’t, that’s all.

She had no Internet at home, and used only the free wireless service of the University. On her student budget, it was too expensive to get a connection at home. “I didn’t want to be even more of a financial burden for my family.”

They weren’t rich, and it was an effort for her parents to allow her to get a higher education in Geneva. Her leisure had been the rollerblades and her crossbow; she practiced shooting with it at the Archers Association of Geneva.

She looked at me mockingly. “I could have pierced your heart in a blink.”

“I am glad I gave you no reason to even think about it.”

Laura paused and grinned, “I thought about it…”

We had lost Mary, so I told her how I had been waiting for Laura to show up. When I called home, Laura was actually pointing her crossbow at me.

“You are out of your mind,” Mary punched me. “And you?” She looked at Laura. “Would you really have shot this idiot here?”

Laura smiled. “No, I don’t think so.”

Laura added she thought about what to do next after she almost bumped into us at the mall. “I got the scare of my life. You were not that reassuring with your guns, and the dogs. I could think of only one thing: run.”

And she did, as fast as she was able to. She was about to fall right out of the mall but managed to regain her balance at the last instant and dash down the street profiting from the descent to gain speed.

“I was afraid you would've sent the dogs after me. I did not dare to approach the mall for days. Actually, I didn't dare to leave home for days.”

She understood we were a family; she had seen Mary and Annah and, in those split seconds, noticed how Mary reacted to protect Annah, hiding our daughter behind her body. We couldn’t be bad people, and she convinced herself that we did not have evil intentions. She needed to believe that.

“How did you manage to see us?” Mary asked. “We thought we were well hidden.”

“I was just lucky, I guess. Then, I left a message on your paperboard. The rest… it’s now our common story.”

Laura went on to tell us about her first days, alone in the city. She left the apartment each time she emptied the fridge, and only then. The shopping center, the Eaux Vives 2000, was the largest and closest to her place. She found the automatic doors worked so started to visit it regularly. The first days, she only got enough for one meal. She was afraid to be caught, even against all evidence that no one was going to complain or stop her, ever.

She soon started to replenish her fridge like it had never been before. From then on, she went once or twice every week. At first, just for food, then she started looking for other stuff as well. She went everywhere on her skates, visiting all the places she knew when she felt a bit safer. Eventually she did, bringing the worst of her mourning to a closure.

“I was emptied and devastated. I resisted the urge to jump off the Mont Blanc Bridge each time I crossed it. Get it over with, you know, and the water was hypnotizing. The idea of being alone, where everyone was dead, terrified me.”

She was glad she didn’t know that she had met us. When it happened, she wasn’t prepared. She had given up all hope of finding other survivors.

“That’s why I ran. It was so unexpected, and you scared me so.”

She was always scared, she added, ever since she saw…them. One evening in late February, she went too far to get back home during daylight. She was still half an hour away from her place, and it was sunset already. Skating fast, with a sense of urgency, even though she knew no one could hurt her because no one was alive in town. She rushed homeward as the streetlights came on. She didn’t want to be out at dark. She rushed all the time.

She was coming down fast from the rail station toward the Mont Blanc Bridge. As she reached it at full speed, she noticed something that looked like flashes of light. They were around the old Batiment des Forces Motrices. I remembered the building.

She stopped on a dime and crouched behind the first pillar of the bridge. Then she peeked out, and, in terror at what she saw, peed herself, a diffusing warmth between her legs she at first did not recognize. From the bridge, she saw strange figures with thick tails coming out of their backs. They were glowing. From afar, they looked like sideways version of a capital “T.”

Laura froze for a second then pressed her back against the pillar, gasping for air, her heart pounding. She could not breathe properly and started to sweat, a cold sweat that made her shiver. It was her first ever panic attack.

“I was petrified. On all fours, I forced myself to reach the Four Seasons Hotel across the street. I couldn’t stand up anymore, my legs were not responding.”

She advanced slowly, moaning with the effort. The sliding doors opened and she got into the elegant hall. She hid there all night, scared to death that one of those glowing figures might appear and find her.

“The next morning I ventured out only when the sun was high, and dashed home.”

From that day, she never left without the crossbow. In March, she saw them two more times, and always when the night set in. Never during the day, thank God. She would have been too scared to leave her apartment even to search for food.

I held Mary encircled in my arms, sitting with her back against me. I couldn’t see her expression, though it was evident she was moved by Laura’s story. When she mentioned the glowing figures, Mary became very tense. Her fingernails dug into my arm.

“Mary, you are hurting me.”

She turned and gazed at me. She was dazed. “Did you know all that?”

“No. I was shocked myself when Laura told me.” I lied.

“Dan, this means…”

“Probably.” There was no need for her to finish the sentence; I knew exactly what she meant. “Laura,” I asked, “did they ever notice you?”

“I don’t know, though once I believe they must have seen me. I was completely out of view, and still one of them looked right at me for a few seconds. Then he turned around, as if he didn’t care I was there.”

I’d asked that question more for Mary’s benefit than my own. I remembered Michael had said practically the same thing: The entity did not even react to Michael shooting at him. And they let him go.

“See, it does not seem they are after the few of us who are left.” I realized immediately that maybe I had said a bit too much because Mary stared at me.

“What do you mean, and how could you say that?” She was scrutinizing me.

“I can only imagine. Also, because we haven’t seen them scavenging around, have we?”

“We haven't had romantic walks in the moonlight either, honey.”

Laura must have sensed Mary suspected I wasn’t telling the entire story and she came to my rescue. “I believe that, too, Mary. They seemed to be just observing things, like when visiting,” she hesitated, “…ruins.”

“Laura, if I were visiting the archeological site of Pompei and discovered one of the original inhabitants still alive, I would be very interested in him.” Mary shook her head.

“Maybe they already know about us.” I again regretted that as soon as I muttered the words. This time both women gazed at me. I was walking on eggshells. “I mean, enough to cull us the way they must have done. What interest would one or two inferior weaklings provide? Did the Spaniards show interest in the Incas after they massacred them? And Incas were much closer to Spaniards than we are to… them.”

They listened to me, but their faces revealed the doubts I had raised in their minds. Either I was talking bullshit or I wasn’t and knew more than I admitted. “I’m pretty sure, if they wanted, they would find any of us in no time,” I added.

This appeared to be more plausible to both Mary and Laura, but not enough to close the deal, at least with Mary. “It has been an intense day, emotionally intense for everyone,” she said, and stood up.

The lady of the house decided the evening was over. She took Laura’s hand and offered to walk her to the cottage but Laura asked to stay with us, in the house, and sleep on the couch, if possible. “I’d feel safer, at least for the first night,” she begged, and talked about how the past weeks affected her deeply. She was still shaken and Mary did not argue.

“Of course, Laura. Don’t worry.”

I brought down covers and a spare pillow. When Laura was set for the night, we left and went upstairs to our bedroom.

Mary closed the door. “Are you okay if she sleeps here in the house with us?”

“Sure, if it’s fine with you…oh, you mean for good?” I didn’t want to start any discussion, hoping Mary would not bring up what I’d said, downstairs. I should have known better.

She faced me, arms crossed in a belligerent stance. “So, when did you see these entities before?”

If Mary were a dog, she would be a hound dog. She sensed there was something behind my evasive phrases and would not let it go. “You’ve never kept anything secret from me…” She paused. “Until now.”

“Mary, it is something I kept buried for years. I never mentioned it because I had simply buried the memory.”

“This is not anything recent, then?”

“No.”

In all those years, keeping it secret had not been that difficult. What would I have said anyway? Told everyone that I saw a ghost, a spirit when I was a young boy? It would have drawn laughter, then consternation. “I see dead people” only worked for Hollywood blockbusters. Not in real life. At best, people would wonder what was wrong with me; at worst, they would be sure there was something wrong with me. Soon, I would have become the subject of conversations. When I wasn’t around, that is.

Mary waited for me to go on. She put one loving hand on my arm and squeezed it gently. "Don’t be afraid."

I sighed. “Also, Michael in New York saw them.” I blurted out.

“You didn’t tell me that. Why?”

I turned around to face my wife, who confronted me with arms crossed. My voice rose out of control and flooded Mary with words, as if not daring to give her time to reply.

“Why? Why, Mary? Because. What about preserving what we have managed until now? What about giving hope and nurturing it? Why make you worry for no reason? Why? Because I am still shocked that they do exist, and I’m still nerve-wracked. Besides, also from what Michael said, I believe they are not interested in us, and I need to figure out what that means for us, all of us.”

Mary kept silent.

I rubbed my face. “Michael shot at them. Didn’t seem to do any harm, they just looked at him and he ran away.”

“When did you see them, Dan?” Mary looked straight into my eyes.

I resigned. There was no point in keeping it to myself any longer. I told my wife everything. She knew about my tinnitus because of medical records and check-ups I went through even after I married her. I told her about the music and the uttered words I heard. I told Mary these glowing beings must have been on Earth for years. Maybe all the crazy fellas blabbering about aliens and abductions, and all the tin-foil cap buddies were not so crazy, after all. Maybe, just maybe, that is why we were alive and many others weren’t.

“Laura hadn’t seen them before in her life. And she's still alive.”

“Yes, and all her family is dead. Mine is not. Oh, c’mon, Mary, I don’t know. I don’t know, okay? I wish I knew.” I turned my gaze away from her, looking out the window. Inside, an inner voice kept telling me: You need to know, you need to know.

“You are out of your mind.”

Startled, I turned to face her, to understand what she was talking about. “What?”

“After all these years, I can read you better than you can yourself. I see what happens in your mind. You are not going anywhere. You’re not going out to find them.”

“I was not—”

“Yes, you were.”

“Mary. What should I do now? Now that I know for sure it wasn’t a hallucination. Now that I know whatever it was, it wasn’t a moment of lucid craziness. I doubted myself for years.”

“I don’t know, Dan. I don’t know.”

That didn’t sound exactly right. It didn’t sound like the Mary I knew: strong, resolute, with her ‘there are more solutions than problems’ attitude.

It was difficult for Mary and I to have a good night’s sleep that night. At times, I was awake; at others, she was. A few times, we were awake together and our hands searched for each other. We fell asleep from exhaustion in the early hours of the morning.

When we woke up a bit later, the smell of coffee and cooking had miraculously reached our bedroom. A soft chatter came from downstairs. We looked at each other. Mary put on a robe and we both went down to the kitchen. Annah and Laura were chatting and preparing a large breakfast for us all. Grilled slices of white bread, scrambled eggs and bacon, orange juice, butter, jams and marmalade.

“I didn’t know whether you preferred a salty or sweet breakfast. Annah suggested we do both.” Laura greeted us with a glorious smile and sparkling eyes.

“Well, that is definitely a good start for the day. And it’s truly welcome.” I was already hungry.

Annah smiled and ran to hug her mother. “You're not angry, are you, Mama?”

“Of course not, honey.” Mary smiled, too, as Laura’s presence seemed to have given Annah back the happy look she had lost recently.

“We discussed a lot, Annah and I.” Laura said, then she smiled at our daughter. “I now know everything about her, the school, her friends, and she knows everything about me and my university life. It has been good for both of us.”

I looked at Laura, knowingly. Ironically, it had been easier for Annah to open up to Laura, share her pains and fears with her, than to us. Mary understood that, too, and I was sure she would have asked Laura about it later, unless Laura made Annah promise to keep everything secret.

I looked out the window and wondered whether they were there. Glowing entities, invisible during the day, maybe, but definitely there, and very much real now. Why on Earth should I trust them and expose myself to that risk? Because they paid a visit to me in my childhood? Hadn't they nearly eradicated the human race from the planet? And very easily, too; rapidly, and so efficiently. How long did it take them to put an end to billions of lives on Earth? Hours, at most, it seemed. Why? This question burned and stung like a drop of acid, burning the flesh, and leaving toxic fumes that burnt the eyes.

My mind was filling up with questions like an unstoppable flood into a chasm in the ground. I knew where that would have brought me. For now, though, it was time to enjoy the moment and the rich breakfast, and start to get to know the new member of the family. For now, it was only laughter and smiles in the kitchen, and I felt better when I pushed all those torments away.

***

With a lot of help and encouragement from Mary, Laura started to fit into our lives. She participated in Annah’s teaching, and joined me in my patrol routines, preferring her crossbow to any guns. Laura took it upon herself to plan for a better search for others, too. She wanted to print leaflets to leave around in case someone out there was alive.

“If it were not for the poster you left at the shopping center, I wouldn’t be here now,” she pointed out, quelling my doubts.

She moved into our cottage after a few days. Annah spent quite some time there, too, together with Laura. They became very good friends; the 'big sister, little sister' they'd promised to become the very first night.

Mary started to stay home more often, and dedicate more time to what she loved best: gardening. She encouraged Laura to join my sorties at every occasion and we were now a steady patrolling duo. I think Laura enjoyed it, and I did, too. There was another good reason for it, at least in my mind: to have Taxi and Tarantula add Laura to their human pack.

In our patrols around nearby villages, we often split into two human-canine teams, keeping in touch with the walkie-talkies. Laura was meticulous, and she wanted to give others the new opportunity and the hope she'd received from us. She kept track of every spot we had been to, and marked on a map all visited villages, while planning for the others. She had established rallying locations for survivors to give signs of their presence in the region. Just a lingering hope. The controlled area grew quickly, even too quickly for me, but I didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm.

Laura was well educated, and Mary enjoyed discussing disparate issues with her. For myself, I just loved the intellectual fencing match between two beautiful women—very engaging and entertaining, and better than TV, especially since all TV channels were dead. One evening, Laura and Mary engaged in a lively discussion about beauty and art. Laura talked fast, and waved her hands all around.

They could go on for hours and the beauty of it was I didn’t need to participate. I only had to listen and say, "Yeah, that is an interesting concept. What do you think?" to keep the discussion alive. I enjoyed it.

One evening, when it was just the adults, with Annah sound asleep in her bedroom, we ended up talking about love and couples. At one point, while looking straight into our eyes, Laura told us, “I love that feeling of triumph that life is and… I love sex. I like to consider sexuality in all other aspects of life. I think I am a bit of a… fauve: the colors of my sexuality are the bright colors of Matisse, the ‘Sacre du Printemps,’ and Positano.” She laughed.

She told us about the short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colors over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. That sparked another discussion with Mary about Cezanne and Van Gogh post-impressionism, fused with the pointillism of Seurat.

Laura brought the discussion back to couples and their role in society. “A responsible procreation requires consideration for the rights of the unborn, rights including those set forth in theory by the Constitution: health, education, freedom, even those claimed virtually by everyone—well-being, happiness, self-realization. I think you aim at those with Annah. I envy what you have…”

The more Laura opened herself up to us, the more it pushed us to do the same. After a while, Laura was part of everything we did.

It was roughly three weeks after Laura had moved in with us that the Internet stopped working. Initially, I tried to solve the issue hoping it was a local problem: restarted the wireless, checked all configurations, reset to factory default the ADSL router unit, and then reconfigured all over again. Nothing. Either the synchronization of the signal was lost for good and could not be regained, or the signal simply had gone cold. The only alternative was to check at the CERN laboratory to see whether Internet was still up and running, as I believed it would be.

“I need to go to CERN,” I announced one evening after dinner. “We are offline, and I don't know when it went cold; today or days before. I haven't checked lately. Anyway, it’s dead.”

With Laura slowly integrating into our life routines, the Internet had taken a back seat as she stole the spotlight. Laura was way more concrete and present than Michael or any other hypothetical click on the Facebook ad campaign could ever be. If they were ever to show up, that is.

“Don’t go alone. Take Laura with you,” Mary suggested. Laura was just about to get up but I disagreed.

“No, it’ll be alright. I won’t be long.” Laura sat back down and looked away from me. I could tell she was disappointed. She said nothing but she turned and her wet eyes begged me...in vain.