It was becoming more difficult to hold on to himself. He tried to keep up a litany of biographical facts as he walked, trying to anchor himself to this life, to this earth. My name is Jeevan Chaudhary. I was a photographer and then I was going to be a paramedic. My parents were George of Ottawa and Amala of Hyderabad. I was born in the Toronto suburbs. I had a house on Winchester Street. But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.” He looked up and met the eyes of an owl, watching him from a snow-laden branch.
37
DIALLO: And so when you left, you just kept walking with no destination in mind?
RAYMONDE: As far as I know. I actually don’t remember that year at all.
DIALLO: None of it?
RAYMONDE: Absolutely nothing.
DIALLO: Well, the shock would have been considerable.
RAYMONDE: Of course, but then we stopped in a town eventually, and I remember everything from that time onward. You can get used to anything. I think it was actually easier for children.
DIALLO: The children seemed awfully traumatized.
RAYMONDE: At the time, sure. Everyone was. But two years later? Five years? Ten? Look, I was eight. Nine, when we stopped walking. I can’t remember the year we spent on the road, and I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it. But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this—this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu—doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?
DIALLO: I hadn’t thought about it.
RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.
DIALLO: But you remember some things.…
RAYMONDE: But so little. My memories from before the collapse seem like dreams now. I remember looking down from an airplane window, this must have been sometime during the last year or two, and seeing the city of New York. Did you ever see that?
DIALLO: Yes.
RAYMONDE: A sea of electric lights. It gives me chills to think of it. I don’t really remember my parents. Actually just impressions. I remember hot air coming out of vents in the winter, and machines that played music. I remember what computers looked like with the screen lit up. I remember how you could open a fridge, and cold air and light would spill out. Or freezers, even colder, with those little squares of ice in trays. Do you remember fridges?
DIALLO: Of course. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one used for anything other than shelving space.
RAYMONDE: And they had light inside as well as cold, right? I’m not just imagining this?
DIALLO: They had light inside.
38
WHEN KIRSTEN AND AUGUST left the house in the woods, when they dragged and carried their new suitcases through the trees to the road, there was a moment when Kirsten stood looking back at the overgrown driveway while August made some adjustments—moving the poetry books and the water bottles from his backpack to the wheeled suitcase, to ease the weight on his back—and if not for the physical evidence, the suitcases filled with towels and shampoo and that box of salt they’d found in the kitchen, the blue silk dress she wore and the bulge of the Starship Enterprise in August’s vest pocket, she might have thought they’d imagined the house.
“A non-ransacked house,” August said, once they’d resumed walking. The suitcase wheels were stiff and Kirsten didn’t like the sound they made on the road, but otherwise the suitcases were perfect. “I never thought I’d see another one.”
“It was incredible. I almost wanted to lock the door behind us.” That’s what it would have been like, she realized, living in a house. You would leave and lock the door behind you, and all through the day you would carry a key. Dieter and Sayid probably remembered what it was like to live in houses and carry keys. All thoughts led back to them.
August believed in the theory of multiple universes. He claimed this was straight-up physics, as he put it, or if not exactly mainstream physics then maybe the outer edge of quantum mechanics, or anyway definitely not just some crackpot theory he’d made up.
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” the tuba had said, when Kirsten had asked him for confirmation a few years back. No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended. Gil had offered an uncertain reminiscence about an article he’d read once, something about how subatomic particles are constantly vanishing and reappearing, which meant, he supposed, that there’s someplace else to be, which he imagined might suggest that a person could theoretically be simultaneously present and not present, perhaps living out a shadow life in a parallel universe or two. “But look,” he’d said, “I was never a science guy.” In any event, August liked the idea of an infinite number of parallel universes, lined up in all directions. Kirsten imagined this arrangement as something like the successive planes formed when two mirrors reflect one another, the images shifting greener and cloudier with each repetition until they vanish toward infinity. She’d seen this once in a clothing store in a deserted shopping mall.