Departure(37)

We deserved this.

The Titans will save us.

God bless the Titans.

Humanity died years ago. This is just the cleanup.

We will win the Titan War.

On the street, the outer door to what was once a town house, long ago converted to eight flats, stands open. We climb the narrow stairwell to the third floor, where my cramped flat used to be.

As we ascend, I suddenly become self-conscious, nervous about showing my place to visitors . . . one in particular. But that’s silly. It isn’t actually my place, not now. I mean, if we are in 2147, then I certainly don’t live here, haven’t for maybe a hundred years. Yet it’s still a bit nerve-racking to show Nick where I live.

On the landing, the door to my unit stands slightly ajar. I push it open. Incredible. It’s bigger. The future owner joined it with the adjacent flat. My furniture’s gone, but the style, the feel . . . it’s mine. I must have decorated this place. Or . . . my daughter did. Someone with my taste. I’m frozen in the doorway.

Nick peeks his head around my shoulder. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine.”

I wander in, the voices and movements behind me fading away. My first stop is the bookcase. On the top row, a dozen hardcovers with dust jackets line the shelf, all authored by Harper Lane. All have the same look and feel, block letters over mostly black-and-white photos on the covers. Biographies. The first is Oliver Norton Shaw: Rise of a Titan. The next biography is of David Jackson, a name I’m not familiar with. I briefly scan the row below, looking for a different kind of book, in another style, a book about someone named Alice Carter. She’s the one I care about. But she’s not here. Just thick biographies, all in the same style. The lettering runs together as I scan again. There must but be twenty or thirty Harper Lane–penned biographies in all. Not a single work of fiction. There are also no photo albums. Picture frames cover the tables and small shelves on the wall, but they’re blank. They must be digital, their memories lost to whatever catastrophe occurred here in the absence of power. I ransack the bookshelf, hoping to find something printed, a yellowed photo of me and a smiling gentleman or a child playing in the ocean at sunset. But as I move down the shelves, I find only reference books, two dictionaries, a thesaurus, and an assortment of worn novels, favorites from my youth.

I hear Nick’s voice, my name, the word Titans, but I move to the bedroom in a trance.

Again, it’s my style.

It’s brighter in here. The moonlight glows through the two windows, almost reflecting off the blue walls with yellow accents. I collapse onto the bed, sending a cloud of dust into the air. The floating motes sparkle in the shafts of light, as if my bedroom were a life-size snow globe with me inside.

My arm drifts down, out of the moonlit haze, to the side of the bed, to the place where I hide them, where visitors, even my closest friends stopping by after a shoddy day, could never find them. I would be mortified.

This will clinch it . . .

I slip my fingers into the crack between the mattress . . .

Yes, I live here.





22





Lying in the bed that was once mine, in the flat that was once mine, I bring the two notebooks out from under the mattress. A second ticks by while I struggle to choose which to open first. In my left hand, I hold the notes for the novel I’ve been working on since university. Yellowed, tattered pages hang out of three sides. In my right hand lies my journal, a black leather-bound volume, one of many I’ve filled in my life.

Answers first.

I flip the journal open, and stare at the first entry. Third of August 2014. Incredible. This is the same journal I was writing in before I boarded Flight 305. How? I usually fill one every year. My journaling rate must have slowed considerably. Or . . . the entries stop soon after 2014. I hadn’t thought of that. This could reveal what happened here.

For a moment I consider taking the journal back out to everyone in the living room, but I need to read it first. I almost dread discovering what it will reveal about me.

I page to the place where my next entry would have been—the day after the plane should have landed.


15 Nov. 2014


Certainty. Certainty is certainly the word of the day. See what I did there? Yes, of course you do, because I would, and I do. That was certain. And so is my fate, because I’ve selected certainty.

Okay. I’m giddy. It’s the relief, the lifting of the burden, the crushing, paralyzing decision made: I will write Oliver Norton Shaw’s biography, the sure-to-be-self-aggrandizing, overhyped tome that will change nothing, except for perhaps my fate. I will be well paid. That is certain. I can then use that money to pursue my true passion: Alice Carter and the Secrets of Eternity (note: I have renamed it since yesterday, when it was Alice Carter and the Knights of Eternity; let’s face it, everybody likes a good secret, and with knights we rather know what we’re getting, don’t we?).

The biography will take a year to write, nine months if I can swing it, and it will be out in another year, after the unkind critics have had a chance to pick it apart and the printers have killed enough of a forest to get the door stopper into stores. Two years. My advance to be paid a third upon signing, a third upon approval of the finished manuscript, and the final third upon publication. Then every six months, royalties will be paid, via check, minus my agent’s fifteen percent (well worth it, I still think).