“Ah, don’t be hard on yourself. Nobody was prepared for it.”
“I don’t mean the blackout. I was prepared for that; I was a hundred percent prepared. I saw it coming, I took steps, and the day it happened I put everything into flawless motion.”
The guy looked at him, skeptical. “Did you?”
“Oh, yes. Most definitely.”
“Then I’d imagine everything has turned out fine for you?”
“It has not. It has turned out the opposite of fine.”
The guy nodded and shrugged. “Not surprising, I guess. There’s a fundamental limit to the precision with which the behavior of particles in phase space can be predicted.”
Thom looked at him and smiled. “You laying some dynamical system theory on me there, my friend?”
The guy smiled back. “Don’t get a chance to slip it into conversation very often.”
Thom took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know what’s going on. I guess I’m trying to do things in a new way because the old way wasn’t working out anymore. I believe I’m on what’s called a voyage of self-discovery. You?”
“Getting cheese for my parents.”
Thom looked at him, assessing him differently now. “What do you do for a living?”
“I work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I monitor satellites for solar flare activity.”
Thom laughed, knowing when he was being put on. “You should have worked harder.”
The guy shrugged. “Tried my best.”
Thom wrapped the plastic around the remainder of his brick of cheese and stood, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Thank you for the bread. That was generous of you.”
“Not a problem. Good luck on your voyage.”
Thom held out his hand and they shook, but he and Perry St. John didn’t exchange names. “What do you think?” Thom asked. “Power coming back anytime soon?”
“Depends who you believe,” Perry said. “People are out there working their butts off. ’Bout eighteen hundred transformers have already been replaced. Mostly the smaller ones, in rural parts of the country. But the cities are still pretty fucked and will be for a while.”
“I hear that. Well, nice to meet you.”
“You too.” Thom started to go, but Perry called him back. “Hey.” Thom turned around. “How far outside Chicago you gonna be?”
“About an hour.”
Perry nodded, thinking. “Everything I’ve heard is things get worse east of here. A lot worse. I get your whole voyage-of-discovery thing. I do, I understand trying to let things play out, to not be a control freak. But don’t take it too far.”
“How do you mean?”
Perry glanced around, then looked back at him. “If you don’t have a gun, get one.”
31.
Aurora
Scott had developed some pretty solid knife skills in the past four months, and when he was really feeling his chopping groove Celeste said it was like being at Benihana. Aubrey could have lived without some of the blade twirling, but still, she found it fun to watch. It wasn’t just that he was good, or the obvious joy he took in it, or the intense level of concentration that creased his face when he was at work in the kitchen. The real delight, for Aubrey, was that he was doing it at all. That this diffident fifteen-year-old boy, who for years had fought like a son of a bitch whenever she insisted he be a functional part of a household, was not only now a part of things; he was a vital cog. Given their largely vegetable diet, cleaning and chopping was the most important job in the house, after harvesting. And no one was as fast as Scott. He was the best at something, he took pride in it, he scheduled it himself, and he was usually done with his work in the kitchen long before the other two.
Celeste, for her part, had taken an early and intense interest in the art of fire creation and maintenance. For the high-heat, low-flame cooking fire they’d need that night, she’d had to get things started early and proceed with great patience. Back in May, Celeste had dug her first fire pit out back, but it was too deep, too big, too exposed to wind, basically too everything. She’d refined and refocused her efforts over the weeks that followed and had spent four or five days choosing rocks alone. At first, she’d started with sandstone and limestone chunks, which were the easiest to find in the holes she dug in the back yard. She was operating on the theory that they were lighter and more permeable, and therefore would conduct heat better. It was a theory she’d been disabused of after the first couple fires. They were light and permeable, all right, but that meant they filled with moisture easily and were prone to bursting at high temperatures. Exploding rocks will put a damper on any chef’s work.