“I dreamt last night I saw an airplane,” Dieter whispered. They were lying a few feet apart in the dark of his tent. They had only ever been friends—in a hazy way Kirsten thought of him as family—but her thirty-year-old tent had finally fallen apart a year ago and she hadn’t yet managed to find a new one. For obvious reasons she was no longer sharing a tent with Sayid, so Dieter, who had one of the largest tents in the Symphony, had been hosting her. Kirsten heard soft voices outside, the tuba and the first violin on watch. The restless movements of the horses, penned between the three caravans for safety.
“I haven’t thought of an airplane in so long.”
“That’s because you’re so young.” A slight edge to his voice. “You don’t remember anything.”
“I do remember things. Of course I do. I was eight.”
Dieter had been twenty years old when the world ended. The main difference between Dieter and Kirsten was that Dieter remembered everything. She listened to him breathe.
“I used to watch for it,” he said. “I used to think about the countries on the other side of the ocean, wonder if any of them had somehow been spared. If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky.”
“Was it a good dream?”
“In the dream I was so happy,” he whispered. “I looked up and there it was, the plane had finally come. There was still a civilization somewhere. I fell to my knees. I started weeping and laughing, and then I woke up.”
There was a voice outside then, someone saying their names. “Second watch,” Dieter whispered. “We’re up.”
The first watch was going to sleep. They had nothing to report. “Just goddamned trees and owls,” the tuba muttered. The second watch agreed on the usual arrangement: Dieter and Sayid would scout the road a half mile behind them, Kirsten and August would keep watch at the camp, the fourth guitar and the oboe would scout a half mile ahead. The scouts set off in their separate directions and Kirsten was alone with August. They circled the camp perimeter and then stood on the road, listening and watching for movement. Clouds breaking apart to reveal the stars overhead. The brief flare of a meteor, or perhaps a falling satellite. Is this what airplanes would have looked like at night, just streaks of light across the sky? Kirsten knew they’d flown at hundreds of miles per hour, inconceivable speeds, but she wasn’t sure what hundreds of miles per hour would have looked like. The forest was filled with small noises: rainwater dripping from the trees, the movements of animals, a light breeze.
She didn’t remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she’d gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn’t remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother’s face. She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. Here on this road in the forest two decades later, clouds shifted to reveal the moon and August glanced at her in the sudden light.
“Hair on the back of my neck’s standing up,” he murmured. “You think we’re alone out here?”
“I haven’t heard anything.” They made another slow circle of the camp. Barely audible voices from inside one or two of the tents, the sighs and soft movements of horses. They listened and watched, but the road was still.
“These are the times when I want to stop,” August whispered. “You ever think about stopping?”
“You mean not traveling anymore?”
“You ever think about it? There’s got to be a steadier life than this.”
“Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”
There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water. A cry, cut off abruptly? Had someone called out? If she’d been alone, Kirsten might have thought she’d imagined it, but August nodded when she looked at him. The sound had come from somewhere far down the road, in the direction from which they’d come. They were still, straining to hear, but heard nothing.