Countdown City

1.

“It’s just that he promised,” says Martha Milano, pale eyes flashing, cheeks flushed with anxiety. Grieving, bewildered, desperate. “We both did. We promised each other like a million times.”

“Right,” I say. “Of course.”

I pluck a tissue from the box on her kitchen table and Martha takes it, smiles weakly, blows her nose. “I’m sorry,” she says, and honks again, and then she gathers herself, just a little, sits up straight and takes a breath. “But so Henry, you’re a policeman.”

“I was.”

“Right. You were. But, I mean, is there…”

She can’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. I understand the question and it floats there in the air between us and slowly revolves: Is there anything you can do? And of course I’m dying to help her, but frankly I’m not sure whether there is anything that I can do, and it’s hard, it’s impossible, really, to know what to say. For the last hour I’ve just been sitting here and listening, taking down the information in my slim blue exam-taker’s notebook. Martha’s missing husband is Brett Cavatone; age thirty-three; last seen at a restaurant called Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl, on Old Loudon Road, out by the Steeplegate Mall. It’s her father’s place, Martha explained, a family-friendly pizza-joint-slash-bowling-alley, still open despite everything, though with a drastically reduced menu. Brett has worked there, her father’s right-hand man, for two years. Yesterday morning, about 8:45, he left to do some errands and never came back.

I read over these scant notes one more time in the worried silence of Martha’s neat and sunlit kitchen. Officially her name is Martha Cavatone, but to me she will always be Martha Milano, the fifteen-year-old kid who watched my sister Nico and me after school, five days a week, until my mom got home, gave her ten bucks in an envelope, and asked after her folks. It’s unmooring to see her as an adult, let alone one overturned by the emotional catastrophe of having been abandoned by her husband. How much stranger it must be for her to be turning to me, of all people, whom she last laid eyes on when I was twelve. She blows her nose again, and I give her a small gentle smile. Martha Milano with the overstuffed purple JanSport backpack, the Pearl Jam T-shirt. Cherry-pink bubblegum and cinnamon lip gloss.

She wears no makeup now. Her hair is an unruly brown pile; her eyes are red rimmed from crying; she’s gnawing vigorously on the nail of her thumb.

“Disgusting, right?” she says, catching me looking. “But I’ve been smoking like crazy since April, and Brett never says anything even though I know it grosses him out. I have this stupid feeling, like, if I stop now, it’ll bring him home. I’m sorry, Henry, did you—” She stands abruptly. “Do you want tea or something?”

“No, thank you.”

“Water?”

“No. It’s okay, Martha. Sit down.”

She falls back into the chair, stares at the ceiling. What I want of course is coffee, but thanks to whatever byzantine chain of infra-structural disintegration is determining the relative availability of various perishable items, coffee cannot be found. I close my notebook and look Martha in the eye.

“It’s tough,” I say slowly, “it really is. There are just a lot of reasons why a missing-persons investigation is especially challenging in the current environment.”

“Yeah. No.” She blinks her eyes, closed and then open again. “I mean, of course. I know.”

Dozens of reasons, really. Hundreds. There is no way to put out a description on the wires, to issue an APB or post to the FBI Kidnappings and Missing Persons List. Witnesses who might know the location of a missing individual have very little interest or incentive to divulge that information, if they haven’t gone missing themselves. There is no way to access federal or local databases. As of last Friday, in fact, southern New Hampshire appears to have no electricity whatsoever. Plus of course I’m not a policeman anymore, and even if I was, the CPD as a matter of policy is no longer pursuing such cases. All of which makes finding one particular individual a long shot, is what I tell Martha. Especially—and here I pause, load my voice with as much care and sensitivity as I can—especially since many such people left on purpose.

“Yeah,” she says flatly. “Of course.”

Martha knows all of this. Everybody knows. The world is on the move. Plenty still leaving in droves on their Bucket List adventures, going off to snorkel or skydive or make love to strangers in public parks. And now, more recently, whole new forms of abrupt departure, new species of madness as we approach the end. Religious sects wandering New England in robes, competing for converts: the Doomsday Mormons, the Satellites of God. The mercy cruisers, traveling the deserted highways in buses with converted engines running on wood gas or coal, seeking opportunities for Samaritanship. And of course the preppers, down in their basements, hoarding what they can, building piles for the aftermath, as if any amount of preparation will suffice.

I stand up, close my notebook. Change the subject. “How is your block?”

“It’s fine,” says Martha. “I guess.”

“There’s an active residents association?”

“Yes.” She nods blankly, not interested in the line of questioning, not ready to contemplate how things will be for her alone.

“And let me ask, hypothetically, if there were a firearm in the home…”

“There is,” she begins. “Brett left his—”

I hold up one hand, cut her off. “Hypothetically. Would you know how to use it?”

“Yes,” she says. “I can shoot. Yes.”

I nod. Fine. All I needed to hear. Private ownership or sale of firearms is technically forbidden, although the brief wave of house-to-house searches ended months ago. Obviously I’m not going to bike over to School Street and report that Martha Cavatone has her husband’s service piece under the bed—get her sent away for the duration—but neither do I need to hear any details.

Martha murmurs “excuse me” and gets up, jerks open the pantry door and reaches for a tottering pile of cigarette cartons. But then she stops herself, slams the door, and spins around to press her fingers into her eyes. It’s almost comical, it’s such a teenage set of gestures: the impetuous grab for comfort, the immediate and disgusted self-abnegation. I remember standing in our front hallway, at seven or eight years old, just after Martha went home in the evenings, trying to catch one last sniff of cinnamon and bubblegum.

“Okay, so, Martha, what I can do is go by the restaurant,” I say—I hear myself saying—“and ask a few questions.” And as soon as the words are out she’s across the room, hugging me around the neck, grinning into my chest, like it’s a done deal, like I’ve already brought her husband home and he’s out there on the stoop, ready to come in.

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “Thank you, Henry.”

“Listen, wait—wait, Martha.”

I gently pry her arms from around my neck, step back and plant her in front of me, summon the stern hardheaded spirit of my grandfather, level Martha with his severe stare. “I will do what I can to find your husband, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, breathless. “You promise?”

“Yes.” I nod. “I can’t promise that I will find him, and I definitely can’t promise that I will bring him home. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Of course,” she says, “I understand,” and she’s beaming, hugging me again, my notes of caution sliding unheard off her cheeks. I can’t help it, I’m smiling, too, Martha Milano is hugging me and I’m smiling.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” she says.

“No, you won’t.”

“No, I know, not with money money, but we can figure out something…”

“Martha, no. I won’t take anything from you. Let’s have a look around, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

Martha finds me a recent picture of her husband, a nice full-body snapshot from a fishing trip a couple years back. I study him, Brett Cavatone, a short man with a broad powerful frame, standing at the bank of a stream in the classic pose, holding aloft a dripping wide-mouth bass, man and fish staring into the camera with the same skeptical and somber expression. Brett has a black beard, thick and untrimmed, but the hair on his head is neat and short, a crew cut only slightly grown out.

“Was your husband in the military, Martha?”

“No,” she says, “he was a cop. Like you. But not Concord. The state force.”

“A trooper?”

“Yes.” Martha takes the picture from me, gazes at it proudly.

“Why did he leave the force?”

“Oh, you know. Tired of it. Ready for a change. And my dad was starting this restaurant. So, I don’t know.”

She murmurs these fragments—tired of it, ready for a change—as if they require no further explanation, like the idea of leaving law enforcement voluntarily makes self-evident sense. I take the photograph back and slip it into my pocket, thinking of my own brief career: patrolman for fifteen months, detective on Adult Crimes for four months, forcibly retired along with my colleagues on March twenty-eighth of this year.

We walk around the house together. I’m peering into the closets, opening Brett’s drawers, finding nothing interesting, nothing remarkable: a flashlight, some paperbacks, a dozen ounces of gold. Brett’s closet and dresser drawers are still full of clothes, which in normal circumstances would suggest foul play rather than intentional abandonment, but there is no longer any such thing as normal circumstances. At lunch yesterday, McGully told us a story he heard, where the husband and wife were out for a walk in White Park, and the woman just runs, literally runs, leaps over a hedge and disappears into the distance.

“She said, ‘Can you hold my ice cream a sec?’” McGully said, laughing, bellowing, pounding the table. “Poor dummy standing there with two ice creams.”

The Cavatones’ bedroom furniture is handsome and sturdy and plain. On Martha’s night table is a hot-pink journal with a small brass lock, like a child’s diary, and when I lift it I get just the lightest scent of cinnamon. Perfect. I smile. On the opposite night table, Brett’s, is a miniature chess board, pieces arranged midgame; her husband, Martha tells me with another fond smile, plays against himself. Hung above the dresser is a small tasteful painting of Christ crucified. On the wall of the bathroom, next to the mirror, is a slogan in neat all-capital block letters: IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE, YOU WILL SET THE WORLD ABLAZE!

“Saint Catherine,” says Martha, appearing beside me in the mirror, tracing the words with her forefinger. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

We go back downstairs and sit facing each other on a tidy brown sofa in the living room. There’s a column of dead bolts along the front door and rows of iron bars on the windows. I flip open my notebook and gather a few more details: what time her husband left for work yesterday, what time her father came by, said “have you seen Brett?” and they realized that he was gone.

“This may seem like an obvious question,” I say, when I’m done writing down her answers. “But what do you think he might be doing?”

Martha worries at the nail of her pinky. “I’ve thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something good. He wouldn’t be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever.” My mind flashes on Peter Zell, the last poor soul I went in search of, while Martha continues. “If he really left, if he’s not…”

I nod. If he’s not dead. Because that possibility, too, hovers over us. A lot of missing people are missing because they’re dead.

“He’d be doing something, like, noble,” Martha concludes. “Something he thought was noble.”

I smooth the edges of my mustache. Something noble. A powerful thing to think about one’s husband, especially one who’s just disappeared without explanation. A pink bead of blood has appeared at the edge of her fingernail.

“And you don’t feel it’s possible—”

“No,” says Martha. “No women. No way.” She shakes her head, adamant. “Not Brett.”

I don’t press it; I move on. She tells me that he was getting around on a black ten-speed bicycle; she tells me no, he didn’t have any regular activities outside of work and home. I ask her if there’s anything else she needs to tell me about her husband or her marriage, and she says no: He was here, they had a plan, and then he went away.

Now all that’s left is the million-dollar question. Because even if I do track him down—which I almost certainly will not be able to do—it remains the case that abandoning one’s spouse is not illegal and never has been, and of course I have no power at this point to compel anyone to do anything. I’m unsure exactly how to explain any of this to Martha Milano, and I suspect she knows it anyway, so I just go ahead and say it:

“What do you want me to do if I find him?”

She doesn’t answer at first, but leans across the sofa and stares deeply, almost romantically, into my eyes. “Tell him he has to come home. Tell him his salvation depends on it.”

“His… salvation?”

“Will you tell him that, Henry? His salvation.”

I murmur something, I don’t know what, and look down at my notebook, vaguely embarrassed. The faith and fervency are new; they weren’t an aspect of Martha Milano when we were young. It’s not just that she loves this man and misses him; she believes that he has sinned by abandoning her and will suffer for it in the world to come. Which is coming, of course, a lot sooner than it used to be.

I tell Martha I’ll be back soon if I have any news and where she can find me, in the meantime, if she needs to.

As we stand up, her expression changes.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, I’m such a—I’m sorry. Henry, how’s your sister doing?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I’m already at the door, I’m working my way through the series of dead bolts and chains.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll be in touch, Martha. I’ll let you know what I can find.”

The current environment. That’s what I said to Martha: A missing-person investigation is especially challenging in the current environment. I sigh, now, at the pale inadequacy of the euphemism. Even now, fourteen months since the first scattered disbelieving sightings, seven months after the odds of impact rose to one hundred percent, nobody knows what to call it. “The situation,” some people say, or “what’s going on.” “This craziness.” On October third, seventy-seven days from today, the asteroid 2011GV₁, 6.5 kilometers in diameter, will plow into planet Earth and destroy us all. The current environment.

I trot briskly down the stairs of the Cavatones’ porch in the sunlight and unchain my bike from their charming cement birdbath. Their lawn is the only one mowed on the street. It’s a beautiful day today, hot but not too hot, clear blue sky, drifting white clouds. Pure uncomplicated summertime. On the street there are no cars, no sound of cars.

I snap on my helmet and take my bike slowly down the street, right on Bradley, east toward Loudon Bridge, heading in the direction of Steeplegate Mall. A police car is parked at the end of Church with an officer in the driver’s seat, a young man sitting upright in black wraparound shades. I nod hello and he nods back, slow, impassive. There’s a second cop car at Main and Pearl, this one with a driver I slightly recognize, although his wave in return to mine is cursory at best, quick and unsmiling. He’s one of the legions of inexperienced young patrol officers who swelled the ranks of the CPD in the weeks before its abrupt reorganization under the federal Department of Justice—the same reorganization that dissolved the Adult Crimes Unit and the rest of the detective divisions. I don’t get the memos anymore, of course, but the current operating strategy appears to be one of overwhelming presence: no investigations, no neighborhood policing, just a cop on every corner, rapid response to any whiff of public disturbance, as with the recent events on Independence Day.

If I were still on the force, it would be General Order 44-2 that would be relevant to Martha’s case. I can call up the form in my mind, practically see it: Part I, procedures; Part VI, Unusual Circumstances. Additional investigative steps.

There’s a guy at Main and Court, dirty beard and no shirt, whirling in circles and punching the air, earbuds in place, though I’d be willing to bet there’s no music coming out of them. I raise my hand from my handlebars and the bearded man waves back then pauses, looks down, adjusting the nonexistent volume. Once I’m over the bridge I make a small detour, weave over to Quincy Street and the elementary school. I chain my bike to the fence surrounding the playing field, take off my helmet and scan the recess yard. It’s the height of summer but there’s a small army of kids hanging out here, as there has been all day, every day, playing four-square and hopscotch, chasing one another across the weeds of the soccer field, urinating against the wall of the deserted brick schoolhouse. Many spend the night here too, camping out on their beach towels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars bed sheets.

Micah Rose is sitting on a bench on the outskirts of the playground, his legs drawn up and hugged to his chest. He’s eight. His sister Alyssa is six, and she’s pacing back and forth in front of him. I take the pair of eyeglasses I’ve been carrying in my coat pocket and hand them to Alyssa, who claps her hands delightedly.

“You fixed them.”

“Not me personally,” I say, eyeing Micah, who is looking stonily at the ground. “I know a guy.” I tilt my head toward the bench. “What’s wrong with my man?”

Micah looks up and scowls warningly at his sister. Alyssa looks away. She’s wearing a sleeveless jean jacket I gave her a couple weeks ago, two sizes too big, with a Social Distortion patch sewn on the back. It belonged to Nico, my own sister, many years ago.

“Come on, guys,” I say, and Alyssa glances one last time at Micah and launches in: “Some big kids from St. Alban’s were here and they were being all crazy and pushing and stuff, and they took things.”

“Shut up,” says Micah. Alyssa looks back and forth from him to me and almost cries, but then keeps it together. “They took Micah’s sword.”

“Sword?” I say. “Huh.”

Their father is a feckless character named Johnson Rose, whom I went to high school with, and who I happen to know went Bucket List very early on. The mother, unless I got the story wrong, subsequently overdosed on vodka and pain pills. A lot of the kids spending their days out here have similar stories. There’s one, Andy Blackstone—I see him right now, bouncing a big rubber medicine ball against the school—who was being raised, for one reason or another, by an uncle. When the odds rose to a hundred percent, the uncle apparently just told him to get the fuck out.

A little more gentle prodding of Alyssa and Micah, and it emerges, to my relief, that what has been lost is a toy—a plastic samurai sword that once upon a time came with a ninja costume, but which Micah had been wearing at his belt for some weeks.

“Okay,” I say, squeezing Alyssa’s shoulder and turning to look at Micah in the eye. “It’s not a big deal.”

“It just sucks,” says Micah emphatically. “It sucks.”

“I know that.”

I flip past the details on Brett Cavatone to the back of my notebook, where I’ve got certain small tasks laid out for myself. I cross out A’s glasses and pencil in samurai sword with a couple of question marks beside it. As I straighten awkwardly out of my squat, Andy Blackstone bounces the medicine ball my way, and I turn just in time for it to sproing up off the pavement and hit my outstretched palms with a satisfying, stinging whap.

“Hey, Palace,” hollers Blackstone. “Play some kickball?”

“Rain check,” I say, winking at Alyssa and clipping my helmet back on. “I’ve got a case I’m working on.”

2.

Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl turns out to be a great big brick building with black-glass windows and a hokey sign above the door—musical notes and a smiling cartoon family munching on pizza. Rocky’s sits just past the abandoned husk of Steeplegate Mall, and to get there you’ve got to go through the vast mall parking lot, through a small obstacle course of garbage cans, overturned and spilling out, and abandoned vehicles, their hoods popped by thieves to dig out the engines. In front of the doors of the restaurant, sitting atop an empty newspaper box like statuary, is a young guy, twenty maybe, twenty-one, a stubbly uneven teenager’s beard and a short ponytail, who calls out “how you doin’?” as I approach.

“Just fine,” I say, mopping my sweaty brow with a handkerchief. The kid hops down from the newspaper box and sidles up to meet me, nice and easy, his hands jammed in the pockets of his light jacket. A criminal’s trick—you don’t know if he’s got a gun or not.

“Nice suit, man,” he says. “Help you find something?”

“I’m looking for the pizza place,” I say, pointing behind him.

“Sure. Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Henry,” I say. “Palace.”

“How’d you hear about us?”

Lots of questions, rat-a-tat, not to get the answers but to get a read: How nervous is this guy? What does he want? But he’s nervous himself, eyes slipping warily side to side, and I talk slow and calm, keep my hands where he can see them.

“I know the owner’s daughter.”

“Oh, no kidding?” he says. “And what’s her name again?”

“Martha.”

“Martha,” he says, like he’d forgotten it and needed reminding. “Totally.”

Satisfied, the kid takes an exaggerated step backward to push open the door. “Heya, Rocky,” he calls. A blast of music and warm smells from the darkness within. “A friend of Martha’s.” And then, to me, as I walk past, “Sorry about the hassle. Can’t be too cautious these days, know what I’m saying?”

I nod politely, wondering what he’s got hidden up in the jacket, what means are tucked away to welcome a visitor without the right answers: a switchblade, a crowbar, a snub-nose pistol. Can’t be too cautious these days.

The music playing inside is early rock and roll, tinny but loud; there must be a battery-operated boom box tucked away somewhere, turned up to ten. Rocky’s is just one big room, wide as an airplane hangar, high ceilinged and noisy and echoey. At one end is an open kitchen with a massive wood-burning pizza oven, a couple of cooks back there with rolled-up sleeves and aprons, drinking beers, bustling around, laughing. The dining area has the classic cheap red-and-white checked tablecloths, fat little barrels of red pepper flakes, vinyl records and cardboard cutout guitars displayed along the upper moldings. There’s a sign shaped like a Wurlitzer jukebox advertising specials, all named after girls from classic-rock songs: the Layla, the Hazel, the Sally Simpson, the Julia.

A big man in a stained white apron shambles over from the kitchen, raising a bear paw of a hand in friendly greeting.

“How you doin’?” he says, just like the kid outside, same practiced geniality. Old Saint Nick belly, fading anchor tattoos on his forearms, sauce stains down his front like cartoon blood. “You wanna shoot, or you wanna eat?”

“Shoot?”

He points. Behind me are six bowling alleys that have been repurposed as firing ranges, with rifle stands at one end and paper human targets at the other. As I watch, a young woman in noise-canceling headphones narrows her eyes and squeezes off a round from a paintball gun, blasting a yellow splotch onto the upper arm of the target. She shouts happily and her husband, boyfriend maybe, claps and says “nice.” At the next alley over, a hunched and white-haired man, one of a cluster of seniors, is hobbling slowly up to the rifle stand to take his turn.

I turn back to the big man. “You’re Mr. Milano?”

“Rocky,” he says, the easy relaxed smile freezing and hardening. “Can I help you with something?”

“I hope so.”

He crosses his thick arms, narrows his eyes, and waits. It’s “Ooby Dooby”—the song playing from the boom box—vintage Roy Orbison. Love this song.

“My name is Henry Palace,” I say. “We’ve met, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” He smiles, pleasant but disinterested: a restaurateur, a man who meets a lot of people.

“I was a kid. I’ve had a growth spurt.”

“Oh, okay.” He looks me up and down. “Looks like you’ve had a couple of those.”

I smile. “Martha has asked me to try and locate your son-in-law.”

“Whoa, whoa,” says Rocky, eyes suddenly sharpening, taking me in more carefully. “What, you’re a cop? She called the cops?”

“No, sir,” I say. “I’m not a policeman. I used to be. Not anymore.”

“Well, whatever you are, let me save you some time,” he says. “That asshole said he’d be with my daughter till boomsday, and then he changed his mind and made a run for it.” He grunts, refolds his arms across his chest. “Any questions?”

“A couple,” I say. Behind us the dull dead thud of the paintball rounds smashing into their targets. This sort of thing is going on all over the city, to varying degrees, people getting “aftermath ready” in various ways. Learning to shoot, learning karate, building water-conservation devices. Last month there was a free class at the public library called “Eat Less and Live.”

Rocky Milano leads me through the restaurant to a small cluttered alcove off the kitchen. There were always rumors about Martha’s dad, silly little-kid rumors, discussed in confidential tones by those of us she babysat for: he was “connected,” he had “done time,” he had a rap sheet a mile long. Once I think I asked my mother, who worked at the police station, if she could run his file for me, a request she treated as dismissively as is appropriate for any such request coming from a ten-year-old.

Now here’s Rocky, apologizing with a good-natured grin as he pushes a pile of paper plates off a chair for me, settling himself behind a battered metal desk. He essentially confirms everything that Martha said. Brett Cavatone married his daughter about six years ago, when still an active-duty state trooper. They didn’t have a ton in common, Brett and Rocky, but they got along just fine. The older man respected his new son-in-law and liked the way he treated his daughter: “Like a princess—like an absolute princess.” When Rocky decided to open this place, Brett left the force to work for him, to be the right-hand man.

“Okay,” I say, nodding, writing it all down. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why come work here?”

“Oh, what? You wouldn’t want to come work for me?”

I look up sharply but Rocky’s easy smile is still in place. “I meant, why would he leave the force?”

“Yeah, I know what you meant,” he says, and now the smile widens—broadens, more like, taking up more real estate on his round face. “You’ll have to ask him.”

He’s joking, of course, goofing on me, but I don’t mind. The truth is I’m enjoying the company of Martha’s father. I’m impressed by his ramshackle restaurant and his defiant insistence on keeping it open, providing some measure of normalcy and comfort until “boomsday.”

“Thing about Brett,” says Rocky, comfortable now, leaning back with his hands laced behind his head, “is that the guy was terrific. Hardworking. An ox. He was here more than I was. He built the chair you’re sitting on. He named the house specials, for Pete’s sake.” Rocky chuckles, points absently out at the dining room, where the husband and wife from the target range sit at one of the tables now, sharing a pizza. “That’s a plain they’re enjoying, by the way. This week’s special is called Good Luck Finding Any Fucking Meat.”

He chortles, coughs.

“Anyway, the plan was, we’d get the place going together, then when I died or went soft in the head, he’d take over. Obviously that isn’t happening, thank you very much Mr. Goddamn Asteroid, but when I said I’m staying open till October, Brett said ‘sure thing.’ No sweat. He’s in.”

I nod, okay, I’m writing all of this down: hardworking—built the chairs—open till October. Filling a fresh page of the blue book.

“He promised,” Milano says acidly. “But the kid made a lot of promises. As you’ve heard.”

I lower my pencil, unsure what to ask next, abruptly seized by the absurdity of my mission. As if any amount of information will prepare me to go out in the vast chaotic wilderness that the world has become and bring Martha Milano’s husband back to his promises. In the kitchen, the small cluster of cooks crack up riotously about something and slap each other five. Taped up behind Rocky in the cluttered office is one of the target forms from the bowling alleys, a silhouetted human figure, blue paint splattered all over the face: bull’s-eye.

“What about friends? Did Brett have a lot of friends?”

“Ah, not really,” says Milano. He sniffs, scratches his cheek. “Not that I know of.”

“Hobbies?”

He shrugs. I’m grasping at straws. The real question is not whether he had hobbies but vices, or maybe a new vice he wanted to take for a test drive, now that the world has slipped into countdown mode. A girlfriend, maybe? But these are not the sorts of things a father-in-law is likely to know. The boom box is playing Buddy Holly, “A Man with a Woman on His Mind.” Another great one. I’m not listening to enough music these days—no car radio, no iPod, no stereo. At home I listen to ham radio on a police scanner, jockeying between the federal emergency band and an energetic rumormonger who calls himself Dan Dan the Radio Man.

“Can you give me an idea, sir, of where your son-in-law was supposed to be going when he left here yesterday morning?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Just running errands. Milk, cheese, flour. Toilet paper. Canned tomatoes if anybody has ’em. Most days, he’d come in and open up with me, then go out first thing on the ten-speed, find what he could find, come back for lunch.”

“And where would he have gone to find those things?”

Rocky laughs. “Next question.”

“Right,” I say. “Sure.”

I turn the page of my notebook. It was worth a shot. Wherever Brett was headed yesterday morning to shop, it probably wasn’t an establishment operating within the rigorous strictures on food markets as spelled out in IPSS-3, the revised titles of the impact-preparation law governing resource allocation: rationing, barter limits, water-usage restrictions. Rocky Milano isn’t about to tell all the details to an inquisitive visitor, particularly one with ties to the police force. I wonder in passing how Brett Cavatone felt about these small negotiations of current law: a former policeman, a man with a painting of Jesus on the wall above his bed.

“Can I just ask you, sir, whether there was anything unusual in yesterday’s list? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Ah, let’s see,” he says, and he closes his eyes for a second, checking some internal log. “Yeah. Actually. Yesterday he was supposed to go down to Suncook.”

“Why Suncook?”

“Place called Butler’s Warehouse down there, a furniture place. A gal came in for dinner over the weekend, said this place was still piled with old wood tables. We thought we’d scoop ’em up, see if we could use ’em.”

“Okay,” I say, then pause. “He was on a bicycle, you said?”

“Yup,” says Milano, after a brief pause of his own. “We got a trailer hitch on the thing. Like I said, the kid’s an ox.”

He looks at me evenly, eyebrows slightly raised, and I can’t help but read a cheerful defiance in that expression: Am I supposed to believe it? I picture the short powerful man with the wooly beard from Martha’s photograph, picture him on a ten-speed bike with a trailer hitch on a hot July morning, leaning forward, muscles straining, muling a stack of round wooden tables all the way back from Suncook.

Rocky stands abruptly and I look behind me, following his gaze. It’s the kid from outside, the one with the stubbly adolescent beard and the ponytail.

“Heya, Jeremy,” says Rocky, offers the kid a mock salute. “How’s the world outside?”

“Not bad. Mr. Norman is here.”

“No kidding?” says Milano, standing up. “Already?”

“Should I—”

“No, I’m coming.” My host stretches like a bear and reties his apron. “Hey, our friend here wants to know about Brett,” he says to Jeremy. “You got anything to say about Brett?”

Jeremy smiles, blushes almost. He’s wiry, this kid, small, with delicate features and thoughtful eyes. “Brett’s awesome.”

“Yeah,” says Rocky Milano, striding out of the alcove and into the kitchen proper, on to the next order of business. “He used to be.”

Outside Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl a mangy tabby has insinuated itself under the back wheel of my bike, mewling in terror at the shrill insistent alarm sounding off one of the abandoned cars at Steeplegate Mall. A low-altitude fighter jet whooshes past overhead, fast and loud, leaving a bright white contrail against the gleaming blue of the sky. He’s pretty far inland, I think, extricating the cat and depositing her in a warm patch of sidewalk. Most of the Air Force sorties are closer to the coast, where they’ve been providing support to the Coast Guard cutters tasked with intercepting the catastrophe immigrants. There are more and more of these every day, at least according to Dan Dan the Radio Man: big cargo ships and rickety rafts, pleasure boats and stolen naval vessels, an unceasing tide of refugees from all over the Eastern Hemisphere, desperate to make their way to the part of the earth not in Maia’s direct path, where there is some slim chance of surviving, at least for a little while. The government’s policy is interdiction and containment, meaning the cutters turn back those ships that can safely be turned back, intercept the rest and shepherd them to shore. There the immigrants are processed en masse, moved to one of the secure facilities that have been constructed, or are being constructed, up and down the seaboard.

A certain percentage of the CI’s inevitably escape or are overlooked by these patrols, and manage to evade even the anti-immigrant militias who stalk them along the coasts and in the woods. I’ve only seen a handful here in Concord: a Chinese family, threadbare and emaciated, begging politely for food a couple weeks ago outside the ERAS site at Waugh’s Bakery on South Street. Inside I waited in line for three large rolls and I tore off bits, handed them to the family like they were pigeons or ducks.

On my way back I stop on the broad overgrown lawn of the New Hampshire statehouse, which is ringing right now with hoots and laughter, a small cheering crowd, spread out in groups of two and three. Small families, young couples, card tables pushed together and surrounded by smartly dressed elderly people. Picnic baskets, bottles of wine. A speaker is up on a crate, a middle-aged man, bald, his hands formed into a megaphone.

“The Boston Patriots,” bellows the guy. “The US Open. Outback Steakhouse.” Appreciative laughter; a few cheers. This has been going on for a few weeks now, someone’s bright idea that caught on: people taking turns, waiting patiently, a nonstop recitation of the things that we will miss about the world. There are two policemen, anonymous as robots in their black riot gear, machine guns strapped across their backs, keeping silent watch over the scene.

“Ping-pong. Starbucks,” the speaker says. People hoot, clap, and nudge one another. A skinny young mother with a toddler balanced on her arm stands behind him, waiting to say her piece. “Those big tins of popcorn you get for the holidays.”

I am aware of a sarcastic counterdemonstration being held on and off in a basement bar on Phenix Street, organized by a guy who used to be an assistant manager at the Capital Arts Center. There, people announce in mock solemnity all the things they will not miss: Customer-service representatives. Income taxes. The Internet.

I get back on the bike and go north and then west, toward my lunch date, thinking about Brett Cavatone—the man who got to marry Martha Milano, and then left her behind. A picture is forming in my mind: a tough man, smart, strong. And—what was Martha’s word?—noble. He must be doing something noble. One thing I know, they don’t let just anybody become a state trooper. And I’ve never met one who left to work in food service.

3.

“So this lady’s at the doctor, she’s got this strange pain, the doctor does all the tests, says, ‘I’m sorry, but you got cancer.’” Detective McGully is gesticulating like a vaudeville comedian, his bald head flushed with red, his throaty voice rumbling with anticipatory laughter. “And the thing is, there’s nothing they can do about it. Nothing! No radiation, no chemo. They don’t have the pills and the drip-drip machines don’t work right on the generators. It’s a mess. Doctor says, ‘Listen, lady, I’m sorry, but you got six months to live.’” Culverson rolls his eyes. McGully goes in for the kill. “And the lady looks at him and goes, ‘Six months? Terrific! That’s three months longer than everybody else!’”

McGully does a big freeze-frame comedy face on his punch line, waves his hands, wakka-wakka. I smile politely. Culverson scrapes honey into his tea from along the rim of the jar.

“Screw you both.” McGully dismisses us with a wave of his thick hands. “That’s funny.”

Detective Culverson grunts and sips his tea and I go back to my notebook, which is flipped open on the table beside our pile of unread menus. Ruth-Ann, the waitress here at the Somerset Diner, has kept the menus meticulously updated, editing them week by week, scrawling in changes, crossing out unavailable items with a thick black marker. McGully, still chortling at his own joke, takes out two cigars and rolls one across the table to Culverson, who lights them both and hands one back. My friends, chomping on their cigars in virtual unison: Middle-aged bald white man, middle-aged paunchy black man, peas in a pod, at their ease in a diner booth. Men in the lap of forced retirement, enjoying their leisure like octogenarians.

What I’m doing is reviewing my notes from this morning, remembering Martha, chewing on her fingernails, staring into the corners of the room.

“That’s a true story, by the way,” says McGully. “Not the bit where she says about the six months. But Beth has got a friend, just diagnosed, forty years old, not a goddamn thing they can do for her. True story.”

“How is Beth?”

“She’s fine,” says McGully. “She’s knitting sweaters. I tell her it’s summer, and she says it’s going to be cold. I tell her, what, you mean, when the sun is swallowed by ash?”

McGully says this like it’s supposed to be another joke, but nobody laughs, not even him.

“Hey, you guys hear about Dotseth?” says Culverson.

“Yeah,” says McGully. “You hear about the lieutenant governor?”

“Yeah. Nuts.”

I’ve heard all these stories already. I study the pages of my notebook. How the heck am I going to get ahold of a plastic samurai sword?

Ruth-Ann, ancient and gray headed and sturdy, stops by to clear our dishes and slide ashtrays under the cigars, and everybody nods thanks. Besides the oatmeal and the cheese, the main refreshment she can offer is tea, because its chief ingredient is water, which for now is still coming out of the taps. Estimates vary on how long the public water supply will last now that the electricity is down for good. It depends on how much is in the reserve tanks; it depends on whether the Department of Energy has prioritized our city generators over other sections of the Northeast—it depends, it depends, it depends…

“Hey, so, Palace,” says Culverson all of sudden, with practiced nonchalance, like something just occurred to him. My spine stiffens with irritation—I know what he’s going to ask. “Any word on your sister?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

He’s asked before. He keeps asking.

“You haven’t heard from her?”

“Not a thing.”

McGully chimes in: “You’re not gonna try and find her?”

“Nope,” I say. “I’m not.”

They look at each other: Such a shame. I change the subject.

“Let me ask you guys a question. How many miles would you say it is from here to Suncook?”

Culverson tilts his head. “I don’t know. Six?”

“Nah,” says McGully. “Eight. And change.” He blows out a thick cluster of smoke, which I fan away with the flat of my hand. The ceiling fan used to carry away some of the smoke, but now the fan is stilled and the thick gray cloud hangs low over the booth.

“Why?” says Culverson.

“A man I’m looking for, he was supposed to bike down to Suncook and pick up some chairs.”

“On a bike? With a trailer?”

“What man are you looking for?” says McGully.

“A missing person.”

“Bike them back from Suncook?” says Culverson. “What is he, a bull elephant?”

“Wait. Hold on.” McGully cocks his head at me, his cigar burning in the V of two fingers. “A missing person? You working on a case, detective?”

I give it to them briefly: my old babysitter, her runaway husband, the pizza restaurant by the Steeplegate Mall.

“Guy’s a trooper?” says Culverson.

“Was. He quit to work at the pizza place.”

Culverson makes a face. McGully interrupts: “What’s this chick paying you? To find her runaway man?”

“I said, she’s an old friend.”

“That’s not a kind of money.”

Culverson chuckles absently. I can tell he’s turning over the other thing, the trooper-turns-pizza-man element. McGully’s not done: “You told this chick it’s useless, right?”

“I told her it’s a long shot.”

“A long shot?” McGully, animated, thumping the table with a closed fist. “That’s one way to put it. You know what you should tell her, Ichabod Crane? You should tell her that her man is gone. He’s dead or he’s in a whorehouse or he’s smoking crack in New Orleans or Belize or some goddamn place. And that if he left her, it’s ’cause he wanted to, and the smart thing to do is to forget all about him. Pull up a chair and get ready to watch the sun go down.”

“Sure,” I say. “Yeah.”

I turn away from the conversation, look down at my hands, at the redacted menus. Dirty yellow sunbeams glow through the murk of the window glass, spreading across the tabletop like wavering prison bars. When I look back, McGully is shaking his head. “Listen, you like this chick? Then don’t give her false hope. Don’t waste her time. Don’t waste yours.”

Now I look to Culverson, who smiles mildly, tapping his forehead with his fingertips. “Hey, I ever tell you guys that my next-door neighbor is Sergeant Thunder?” he says.

“What?” says McGully.

“The weatherman?” I say.

“Channel Four at six and ten. My own personal celebrity.” Culverson starts patting his jacket pockets, looking for something. Culverson and I still wear blazers, most of the time; most of the time I put a tie on, too. McGully’s in a polo shirt with his name stitched across the breast pocket.

“We never used to talk that much,” Culverson explains, “just to say hi, except now it’s just him and me on the block, so I pop in on the guy every now and then, just knock on the door, how you doing, you know? He’s pretty old.”

McGully puffs on his cigar, getting bored.

“Anyway, yesterday Sergeant Thunder comes by to show me something. Says he really isn’t supposed to, but he can’t resist.”

Culverson finds what he was looking for in the right-inside pocket of his blazer and slides it across the table to me. It’s a brochure, slim and elegant, a glossy all-color trifold with pictures of smiling elderly people in a wood-paneled lounge, sconce lit and pleasant. There are photos of heroic-jawed security men in helmets striding sterile hallways. A young couple beaming over a meal: linen tablecloth, pasta and salad. And in a tasteful and understated font, The World of Tomorrow Awaits You…

“The World of Tomorrow?” I ask, and McGully grabs the brochure. “Bull hockey,” he snorts, turning it this way and that. “A dump truck full of bull hockey.”

He tosses it back across the table and I read the pitch on the reverse side. The World of Tomorrow offers berths in a “meticulously appointed, securely constructed, permanent facility in an undisclosed location in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.” The word “permanent” is in italics. There are three levels of accommodation on offer: standard, premium, and luxury.

I lay it back on the table. “Here,” says McGully. “Take a napkin. Dab off some of the bull hockey.”

There is, I note, no admission price listed for this marvelous “World of Tomorrow.” I ask Culverson and he says drily that from what Sergeant Thunder said, it varies from customer to customer. In other words, the price is whatever you’ve got.

“Last night I watched them come and take Sergeant Thunder’s riding lawnmower, his little wine refrigerator, and his microwave,” says Culverson. “This morning they dismantled his brick shed, knocked it apart with those big masonry hammers and carted away the bricks. They wear jumpsuits, these guys. I think jumpsuits are a nice touch, if you’re looking to swindle someone out of everything they own.”

“You didn’t try and stop them?” says McGully, and Culverson rears back, gives him an are-you-crazy?

“Yeah,” he says. “I put up my dukes. You think these guys aren’t carrying?”

I turn the brochure over in my hands. State-of-the-art medical facilities. Gourmet meals. Craps tables.

“Besides,” says Culverson. “You should have seen the smile on the Sergeant’s face.” He leans back and gives us the look, fox in a henhouse. “Grinning like a sex fiend. I’ve never seen an old man look so happy.”

McGully looks agitated. He taps ash into his teacup and says, “What’s the point?” but he already knows the point, and I do, too. Culverson gives it to us anyway. “Maybe it’s false hope you’re giving this girl, your old babysitter—but it’s hope, right? Little spark in the darkness?” McGully makes an irritated sputter, and Culverson turns to him, says, “I’m serious, man. Maybe having Palace working on her case keeps this lady from going nuts.”

“Exactly,” I say. “That’s—exactly.”

Culverson takes a hard look at me, turns back to McGully. “Hell, maybe it keeps Palace from going nuts.”

I bend back over my notebook, moving on. “If you wanted to make a pizza, where would you go for ingredients? This guy’s boss sends him out yesterday morning for basics, and I presume he means at a rummage.”

“No question,” says Culverson. “No one’s running a pizza restaurant with ERAS cheese.” He doesn’t say the letters, he pronounces it out like most people, sounds like heiress. The Emergency Resource Allocation System.

“Which rummage, though? Pirelli’s?”

“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m doing fine with my little garden and Ruth-Ann’s hospitality. But my esteemed colleague is a married man and has different needs.”

There’s a long pause then, as Culverson stubs out his cigar in the ashtray and stares pointedly at McGully, who at last throws up his hands and sighs. “Fuck’s sake,” he says. “The old Elks Lodge building. On South Street, past Corvant.”

“You sure?” I’m scrawling it in my notebook, tapping my feet on Ruth-Ann’s floor. “I was just down that way to get some eyeglasses fixed at Paulie’s. The lodge looked like it’d been looted clean.”

“Not the basement,” he says. “The guy was shopping for cheese, for canned tomatoes, olives? Elks Rummage. Dollars to donuts. Tell them I sent you.”

“Thank you, McGully,” I say, laying down my pencil, beaming.

“Don’t forget, you got to bring something.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Yeah, well. Up yours.”

“Deep down inside,” says Culverson, gazing fondly at McGully, “you’re a shining star.”

“Up yours, too.”

Ruth-Ann circles back around, swift and nimble in her orthopedic shoes. I smile at her and she winks. I’ve been coming to the Somerset since I was twelve years old. “How much do we owe you?” asks Culverson like always, and Ruth-Ann says, “A zillion trillion dollars,” like always, and bustles away.

I get home and dump everybody’s leftovers into a big plastic bowl and whistle for my dog, a puffy white bichon frisé named Houdini who used to belong to a drug dealer.

“Whoa, wait,” I tell him, as he hurls his little body across the room at the food bowl. “Sit. Stay.”

The dog ignores me; he woofs with delight and plunges his tiny happy face into the leftovers. Very briefly, when we first met, I was determined to train Houdini as a search-and-rescue dog, but I have long since abandoned that project. He has zero interest in obeying orders or instructions of any kind; he remains a pure untutored child of an animal. I settle into a wooden chair at my kitchen table to watch him eat.

I lied to Culverson and McGully, earlier, as I do every time they press me on the subject of my little sister. I know where she is and I know what she’s doing. Nico has gotten herself involved with some kind of anti-asteroid conspiracy, one of the many small networks of fantasists and fools who believe they know how to avert what’s coming, or prove that it’s a massive government frame-up, like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination. The details of her particular operation I do not know, and nor do I want to. And I certainly have no interest in discussing any of this with my colleagues. There are other things I’d prefer to think about.

“Sorry, boy,” I tell Houdini, when he empties the bowl and turns up to me expectantly. “That’s it.”

I turn on my scanner and fiddle with the crystal till I get Dan Dan the Radio Man. He’s talking about the Mayfair Commission, the joint House–Senate hearings on the failure of NASA and various agencies within the departments of Defense and Homeland Security “to provide adequate warning or protection against the looming threat, over a period of years and even decades.” We had fun with that one, over at the Somerset, the other detectives and I, imagining old Senator Mayfair rooting out who knew what about 2011GV₁, and when. “Why, it’s an outrage!” McGully declaimed in character, jabbing a senatorial forefinger in the air. “Our own scientists, conspiring with the asteroid the whole time!”

Now Dan Dan the Radio Man reports with dismay that Eleanor Tollhouse, deputy director of NASA from 1981 to 1987 and now eighty-five years old, is being held on the floor of the Senate in a cage, “for her own protection.”

I turn off the scanner. Houdini is still looking at me, sad eyed and earnest, so I sigh and pour out a quarter cup of dry kibble, exactly what I had hoped to avoid by bringing home the table scraps. There is now just a single serving left in this bag, and after this one I have sixteen bags with ten servings per bag. Houdini eats approximately two servings a day, so we should be just about okay for the seventy-seven days remaining. But who’s counting?

I stand up and stretch and fill his water bowl. That’s one of the big jokes: Who’s counting? The answer, of course, is everyone—everyone is counting.

4.

The dog barks and I open my eyes and sit upright with my heart clenched like a fist.

“What, boy?” I say. “What is it?”

Houdini is barking at the front door, just a few feet from the dilapidated living-room sofa I’ve been sleeping on since April. Houdini keeps barking, loud and shrill and insistent, very much unlike himself. I roll off the sofa and push it aside and lift the four loose floorboards beneath. My hands fumbling in the darkness, I find the safe, find the dial, roll through the combination, pull up the door, and draw out a long serrated knife and a Ruger LCP handgun.

Houdini is still yelping and pacing, a short tight wire of anxiety, jerking one way and then the other. I order him uselessly to calm. Clutching my weapons I step past the dog, moving slowly and deliberately until my shoulder is pressed against the front door.

“It’s okay, boy,” I mutter, my heart hammering now, the handle of the knife sweating in my palm. “It’s okay.”

From out the door’s small inset window I can see a slim shiver of light, a flashlight beam darting across the lawn. And what if Palace is murdered in a home invasion before he can start looking, I ask Detective Culverson silently. Then what happens to my old babysitter and her spark in the darkness?

You hear these stories now, people trade them in stunned whispers, the tales of home invasion and physical assault. Leon James, up on Thayer, a former banker, beaten unconscious, the house stripped for copper. The two middle-aged women, old friends who had moved in together after their husbands went Bucket List. For them it was a gang of teenagers in gorilla masks, both women sexually assaulted and beaten nearly to death. The gorillas took nothing and were neither drunk nor high, simply on a rampage. That one I reported, when I heard about it—I knocked on the driver’s-side window of one of the Chevrolet Impalas planted on one of the corners, gave the house number and the woman’s name as they had been described to me. The young officer in the cruiser stared back at me blankly, said he’d fill out a report, and slowly rolled up his window.

The flashlight beam is gone. I stare at the darkness, the overhanging trees, the summer-barren branches silhouetted against moonlight. My pulse galloping; Houdini’s rapid troubled breaths.

And then a crash outside, somewhere on the lawn, the sound of breaking glass, followed a moment later by a man’s voice, low but distinct: “Shit. Fuck. Balls.”

I push open the door and rush out, screaming, gun in one hand and knife in the other, like a barbarian rushing a medieval camp.

I stop halfway across the lawn. There’s nothing. I see no one. There’s a row of streetlights along my stretch of West Clinton, but of course they’re all dead now, dimly reflecting the starlight, hanging from their poles like fossilized glass fruits. More noise: a scrape and then a crunch, glass on glass, and then more muttered cursing.

The weight of the gun is unfamiliar; it’s smaller and more compact than the SIG Sauer P229 service revolver I used to carry on patrol. My friend Trish McConnell provided me with the Ruger just last week, after I mentioned that I was adhering to IPSS firearm rules and had no gun in my home. McConnell, a former colleague still on the force, later left the gun in a small manila envelope between my screen door and front door with a note. Take it, said the note. Please.

Now I’m glad I’ve got it. I sweep the gun in a wide arc across the lawn, talking big in the darkness. “Stay where you are. Freeze and drop your weapon.”

“I’m not—I don’t have a weapon. Shit, man, I’m really sorry.” That voice, croaking from my neighbor’s lawn as I approach—it’s familiar but I can’t place it, like a voice from a dream. “Fuck, man, I’m really sorry.”

I stop walking. “Who is that?”

“It’s Jeremy.”

Jeremy. The kid outside the restaurant, three-day’s beard and a ponytail. I exhale. My pulse slows. For God’s sake.

“I think I fell in, like, a trap or something,” he says.

“Hang on,” I say. “I’m coming.”

Jeremy’s in the ditch on Mr. Maron’s lawn, in a puddle of shards and thick pieces of broken glass. My eyes blink in the moonlight and I focus and find him, disheveled and confused, a gash like a stab wound in his forehead.

“Hey,” he says weakly. “Sorry.”

“It’s not a trap,” I tell Jeremy. I peer down at him, and he gazes back at me bashfully like a wounded fawn. “It’s a solar still.”

“What’s a solar still?” he says, and then looks around him at the mess of glass. “I think I broke it.”

I laugh out loud, feeling along with my wash of relief a muddled affection for this kid who has injured himself wandering around outside my house in the middle of the night. As if the stupid thing actually was a trap, and I’ve caught myself some kind of hapless fairy.

“A solar still is a catchment system,” I say, “for capturing water from the atmosphere. My neighbor built it.”

“Oh. Tell him I’m sorry.”

“He’s dead,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

Jeremy raises a hand to the cut on his head, winces, then inspects his blood-smeared fingertips. He looks much as he did at the restaurant: small guy, sensitive dark eyes, soft and unmasculine face. My neighbor, Mr. Moran, a jovial middle-aged bachelor shoe salesman, spent three weeks building the solar still before he was shot on July fourth by a group of vigilantes from an organization called American Soil. Mr. Moran was trying to pull them off a truck driver, who was leaving for the Cape Cod immigrant camp with food and first aid. The truck driver was murdered also.

“Yeah, I’m really sorry,” says Jeremy again. “It’s just, I didn’t want Rocky to know I was coming to see you, and I couldn’t think of any particularly buyable reason to leave the restaurant early, so I had to wait till we closed.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Then I had to get over to the library to look up your address.”

“Okay.”

“You weren’t in the phone book, but there was another Palace—N. Palace?”

“My sister,” I say. “She used to use my address for credit card applications.”

“Oh.”

He’s still lying there in the glass, which is where I want him until I know exactly what’s going on here. The main branch of the Concord Public Library is open twenty-four hours a day at this point, kept clean and lit by a skeleton crew of librarians and a cadre of volunteers.

“Jeremy,” I say. “Why are you here?”

“I just wanted to say, don’t do it. Don’t bring Brett back, I mean. Leave the guy alone.”

“Come on,” I say, set down my knife and my gun and extend a hand down into the remains of the solar still. “Get up.”

“This was stupid.”

“It’s okay.”

“I feel like a dummy.”

“It’s okay.”

Jeremy is sitting at my kitchen table now, a paper towel pressed to his forehead with blood seeping around the edges.

“Seriously,” he says. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Really,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

I don’t press Jeremy about Brett, not yet, don’t ask him to expound on his purposes for trekking all the way across town to find me. I don’t want him to run, and that’s what it feels like: He’s embarrassed and disconcerted, and if pushed he’s going to say “forget the whole thing” and book it, off into the night.

I light candles, get my camp stove going, put up a kettle for tea, and ask him a couple easy and casual questions. Jeremy’s last name, as it turns out, is Canliss, which sounds familiar, so I ask him to spell it.

“Huh,” I say. “Are you from Concord?”

“No,” he says. “Yes.” Exhales, resettles himself on the chair, getting comfortable. “Well, not really.”

He was born here, he says, but then moved at fifteen months old. It’s a typical New England story: raised outside Montpelier; limped through high school; did some outdoorsy stuff; “drifted away from my family, kind of,” ended up in Portsmouth and then went to UNH for a semester; dropped out, tried one more time, dropped out again; and then he ended up here in Concord, crashing with some friends in a “shitty little house.” Then he got a gig at the pizza place, and then they announced the end of the world.

“And what about Brett?” I say at last, very casual, pouring the tea, speaking softly and over my shoulder from the far side of the room. “Why don’t you want me to find him?”

“I mean, look, it’s none of my business,” he says, and then gets quiet, and I focus on the water and the cups. When I turn back he’s rubbing his chin, and then he just goes, “Because, man, he’s just Brett, you know?” I set down the teacups and sit, waiting.

“If he—” Jeremy raises his hands, as if literally groping for the words. “If he had to go, he had to go. You know what I mean?”

“Not really. I don’t know him. Tell me about him.”

“I don’t know.” He laughs uneasily, repeats himself: “He’s just Brett.”

In this unspecific and tautological compliment there is a respect and admiration so deep it changes the timbre of his voice. When he says “Brett” it’s like how other people might say Elvis or Jesus. He’s not just any person—he’s Brett. Houdini is still trembling beneath the table, not yet convinced that the danger has passed. I get up and pour him out the last of the bag of kibble, a treat to calm his nerves. Sixteen bags left, now, ten servings per bag.

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Jeremy blurts out. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“Man, come on,” he says, ducking his head. “You know.”

“I don’t. I really don’t. Were you close with him?”

“No.” He peels the wadded paper towel from his forehead and bobbles it from hand to hand. “Not really.”

“But he was a friend?”

“Well, like a, a work friend, you know? From the restaurant.”

“You worked together often?”

“Yeah. Definitely. More before the stupid fucking asteroid.”

I smile. A certain vividness absent from our current environment. Stupid fucking asteroid.

“At first I thought he was boring, you know? Kind of a goody-goody. He’s religious, he’s doesn’t drink, he’s the boss’s son-in-law, all that.”

I don’t have a notebook down here. No pencil. I’m nodding slowly, registering details, demanding of my midnight mind that it pay attention, catalog and order these incoming facts.

“But hanging out with Brett, you’d suddenly go: oh. This guy’s cool. He’d make these weird jokes all the time, like under his breath, when you’re driving around. Smart jokes, like where you don’t get it exactly but you know it’s brilliant. He’d help you do shit you were bad at, without making you feel stupid.”

I nod. I have known people like that, but for some reason the person who comes to mind is my grandfather Nathanael Palace, who raised Nico and me after the deaths of our parents, and who possessed the opposite sort of spirit: always ready to show you that you were bad at something, that you were doing it wrong.

“Me and Brett used to sit on my steps and watch them drive the—what do you call ’em, the trucks full of prisoners?—in and out of the jail.”

“Transport vans,” I say, shaking off the image of Grandfather, staying on target.

“Right, right. And Brett would point at the vans and say, ‘There but for the grace of God, my friend. There but for His grace.’ Like he cared about me, you know? Not just me, either. He cared about people in general.”

“And…” I pause, turn this over. “Did Brett talk about leaving? Going Bucket List, I mean?”

Jeremy looks down. His cheeks color. “Shit, man. You ask a lot of questions.”

“It’s in my nature. Did he talk about it or not?”

“No,” he says. “Not specifically. But he was ready to go. You know?”

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. No.”

“You don’t know, or no?”

“Maybe he did,” says Jeremy. “I think so, maybe, yeah.”

“What girl?” I lean forward, my heart racing now, galloping. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” he says, pulling back, recoiling from my eagerness. “I don’t know.”

“Was there a girl who came in to the pizza place?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He does know, though. He knows something. But he’s not going to tell me, not now. I rub my eyes with my fingertips. There’s something else that’s been on my mind. “Brett was a solid goody-goody, you said, religious. How did he feel about Rocky working off-ERAS?”

“What?” He looks puzzled, upset.

“I mean, sending him to the rummage, black-marketing?”

“Wait,” says Jeremy suddenly, and slaps a flat hand on the table. “Stop. Look.”

And then my anxious night visitor is talking so fast and so ardently that his mouth is like a blur in the darkness on the other side of the table. “If he wanted to go off and sow some wild oats or whatever, then he didn’t have to, like, get anyone’s permission.”

“Not even his wife?”

“No, not even his wife. I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t have the balls to just go off and do what I want. Whether it’s a chick, or parasailing, or I don’t know—whatever. Even now, I don’t have the courage.” Jeremy shakes his head in bitter self-recrimination, as if this is the ultimate character flaw, this lack of apocalyptic bravery. “But it looks like Brett did have the balls, right? And like I said, he was—he was just a solid citizen. So he should get to do what he wants, is all I’m saying. And I don’t think you or Martha or anyone should go off and try and drag him back.”

He tosses the blood-soaked paper towel on the table and pushes back his chair.

“That’s it, man. I’m sorry to bother you.”

He stands up. I stand up. “I have more questions.”

“Sorry about your neighbor’s thing, too. On the lawn. I’m really sorry.”

And that’s it, he’s out the door, and given that I am no longer vested with any powers by the city of Concord to make him stay, I just watch him go, stumbling away in the darkness, a flashlight beam bobbling unevenly through the dark shapes of the trees. I’m contemplating the force of personality that my missing man must have possessed, to inspire the intense, if peculiar, devotion I’ve just seen. This kid may feel that he lacks courage, but he took a not-insignificant cross-city walk just now, in the unprotected darkness, to argue his friend’s case. Because he admires him. Because he wishes he had gone off somewhere, too.

I go into the living room, carrying a candle on a plate like a Dickens character, and when I find a pencil and my notebook I write down what I remember, write as swiftly and carefully as I can: a chick? parasailing? Kind of a goody-goody. I sketch the tale of Jeremy’s childhood, write down his full name and stare at it. Such an old-fashioned term he used, sow some wild oats. “If he wanted to sow some wild oats or whatever…”

When I’m done writing I lay down the pencil and stare into the flickering candle flame. The big question remains the one I asked Martha, twelve hours ago or however long ago it was: What do I do if I find him? If Jeremy is right, if Brett is out there sowing oats, and if I do by some miracle manage to track down this formidable character, this former state trooper—what then? I stroll up to this adult man doing what he pleases with his remaining scraps and shards of time, and say what, exactly?

My name is Henry Palace, sir. Your wife would like you to please come home now.

I blow out the candle.

I tiptoe past my sleeping dog and hang my long legs over the edge of the sofa and close my eyes.

The memories well up as they always do, and I push them away.

These are the scenes that I have studiously blocked, and which I am aware that I have blocked. Not of my parents; my dead parents I have lived with for many years now, and I have integrated their absence and my grief deep into my character. But there is a more recent wound, a woman named Naomi whom I loved and who was torn from me, a loss as sudden and brutal as a gunshot in a darkened room. And I am aware that the appropriate thing to do, from a therapeutic perspective, would be to summon up the relevant memories, allow myself to face the trauma, expose it to the light and allow time to do its healing work.

But there is no time. Seventy-seven days—seventy-six now—less than three months—who’s counting? There is no time.

I push away the memories, roll over, and think about my case.