“What kind of meaning?”
“Viktor Frankl says there are only three that matter. To do work that matters to you, to care for others, and to rise to the challenge of difficult times. Work, love, courage. That’s it. Any other human pursuit is horseshit.”
“OK, Norman.”
“Don’t fucking do that.” He leaned forward and shook his head emphatically. “Do not blow past this. Look out the window. Look at what you’ve done.”
She looked up, through the window. The neighborhood was alive with activity. Phil and Scott and Celeste and Mrs. Chen and her boys, Derek and Janelle, Frank and Johnny Witzky, and half a dozen others were all sweating in the late-afternoon sun, working with a common purpose.
“I know you consider yourself a failure,” Norman said. “I know that’s hardwired into your brain for some unfathomable reason, but your life is not without meaning. Love, work, courage—you have it all. Your life is goddamn rich with meaning.”
She started to cry again. It wasn’t hopelessness this time but exhaustion.
“I love you, Norman.”
“Right back at you, kiddo.” He looked out the window, to where Phil was harvesting tomatoes. “What are you gonna do about your fella, once the lights go back on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t expect it to last.”
Norman shrugged. “Sometimes those are the ones that do.”
“I wouldn’t know. Guess it’d be nice to find out.”
“Well, he cleaned up nice, anyway.”
Aubrey smiled. She looked down at the orange slice, on the table between them, only a tiny bite taken from one corner, not enough to feed a mouse. Norman followed her gaze, then looked up at her and shrugged. “It went stale, sweetie. It happens.”
“Scott wanted to bring them himself, but—”
He saw through that and waved her off. “Don’t get mad at him. Dying isn’t a spectator sport.”
She leaned forward, wrapped both her arms around the old man’s bony shoulders, and squeezed him tight.
“Please don’t go.”
“I still don’t believe that I will,” he said. “Isn’t that just like a human? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and the experience of the billions who came before us, it’s still hard to get our heads around the idea that we are going to die.”
She pulled back and looked into his watery, brown eyes.
Norman smiled. “Now that’s what I call a hopeful species.”
Half an hour later, Aubrey walked back home as the sun set. She and Norman had eventually switched the conversation to lighter topics—how little they missed talking about politics, the quality of the sunlight through the woodsmoke, and the surprising deliciousness of unripened plums. Then he’d grown tired and drifted off. Aubrey kissed him lightly on the forehead and left him to his late-afternoon nap.
As she crossed the street, Phil looked up from where he was working and came to her, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her in close. She laid her head on his shoulder.
“You OK?” he asked.
She nodded, and her tears flowed again.
He held her for a while, letting her cry. When she stopped, he spoke softly. “You want some company tonight?”
“I’ll be fine.” She lifted her head. “I got your shirt wet.”
“And I just had this dry-cleaned.”
She smiled and looked up at him. He kissed her on the lips. “I’m around if you need me.”
“Has there ever been a lovelier sentence?” she asked. She turned, waved to one or two other neighbors, and climbed the steps of her front porch. She looked up at the hundred-year-old heap, her fixer-upper that had only ever gotten halfway fixed up, and she said a silent gratitude to the house for serving them well, for sheltering them through all the shitstorms of the past few months, the past few years. She went inside and closed the door.
By the same time tomorrow, her living room walls would be splashed with blood.
30.
Iowa City, Iowa
Thom had learned more about government cheese in an hour than he’d ever known in his life.
The hunger pangs had started five or six hours into the drive. He’d done enough intermittent fasting to know they’d pass in a while, and he attempted to direct his thoughts elsewhere. The emptiness and nausea were familiar, and as long as dizziness and confusion didn’t start up, he saw no reason why he couldn’t make it through a twenty-four-hour drive without eating. Gas hadn’t been a problem so far. Lisa, his assistant, was back in San Francisco, on generator power at the Vida offices, and in her relentless monitoring of satellite-phone and emergency-radio frequencies, she’d found him a temporary fuel station in western Nebraska. A tanker truck was parked in front of a Mobil station that was going to be open for a six-hour window, under heavy guard. Thom got there before most people knew about it and lost only an hour in line before heading back out with a full tank, ahead of his already ambitious arrival schedule.