Martha nodded toward the coffee in Albert’s hand.

  “Keep taking sips, slowly.” And then, “Yes, women. Are you dating?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, where would it end? I’d meet someone and fall in love and be happy again?”

  “Maybe. From what I’ve seen, if you’ve done it once, you can do it again. Some people have the knack for it.”

  “And then what?”

  “The normal thing. Have fights, make up, cry, laugh, celebrate together, mourn together. Get pissed about the way he folds the laundry and how he’s always wearing holes in his socks and stealing yours.”

  Albert drank more of his coffee, slowly. Around them the morning arose, the day like a newborn baby filled with possibility. The sunlight, for that hour, golden and clear, the birds winging, diving to take a glittering fish from the living waters.

  “If I met someone, I’d fall through the hole in the ice inside myself. I can’t be happy again because then I’d know how unhappy I am.”

  “So your plan is be miserable forever?”

  “Aha. And your plan is what?”

  There was a long silence between them, filled with the sound of plashing water, the urgent calls of the birds.

  “Mike used to say: how life happens is a letting in. When he was trying to convince me about the baby. He said every time it was an act of ridiculous trust. The sperm buries itself in the egg and stops being able to move. The egg lets down all its defenses and allows a foreign object in. That’s how it happens, every time. An absolutely unjustified leap of faith. Open up, let in, be let in. Opening is dangerous, every single time. But that’s how we’re here.”

  “I feel like you’re making some sort of point here, Albert.”

  “I read about what happened at the end with the Enochites, OK? So I get how you’d have trouble with trust, after that. Trouble with getting close.”

  9. don’t look back

  Enoch, formerly Ralph Zimmerman, had been a clever man and a paranoid man and an unwell man. He had read a lot of texts and soaked them in his clever, anxious, frightened mind and produced signs and portents, warnings of disaster and promises of salvation.

  His daughter, Martha, left the compound early one morning, before anyone was awake. She took money and a gun; she must have walked and hitched rides and taken buses, and although they drove for days looking for her, she was gone and she wasn’t coming back.

  Enoch knew that Martha leaving was a sign of something—he felt the forces of chaos lurking all around. He suspected traitors, he shouted for justice, he became angry and impatient with his flock, he ruminated and chewed over Martha’s betrayal. Eventually, he asked the Lord to send him a sign. A sign of whether the community they had founded on these fifteen thousand green acres was blessed by God.

  He sent some of his followers into the woods to hunt and gather for three days and took those who remained behind—a great number, more than a hundred people—into the large basement of the main building in the compound. There he told them that they would undertake three days of fasting and prayer. They would drink only water. They would remain awake for as long as they could. He locked the door of the basement. He hurled the key through the tiny barred window to the east, the one that faced the rising sun. He prayed for guidance, called on the Lord to show them the way.

  He preached—those who were there remembered—night and day. They slept and dozed to the sound of Enoch’s preaching and woke to the same prophesying voice. It was in these hours that he preached the sermon of Rabbit and Fox for the final time, and those who heard it said that he had at last united heaven and earth in his words and it was beautiful and holy and they knew that God was listening to them and to their prayers. They became certain as the hungry hours ticked past that their community was about to experience a miraculous visitation from the Lord because the purpose of the world had been fulfilled by this small gathering and it was time now for the whole thing to be rolled up and put away. Those two days and nights of eating no food, drinking only water, sleeping in only brief snatches were the most beautiful of their lives.

  On the third day, they smelled smoke.

  Some said: It must have been the government. There had been FBI and CIA agents poking around the Enochites for years; they just got tired of them and wanted them gone.

  Some said: The electrical wiring in the compound was always unsafe. There had been two small fires in the past year, and two of the Enochites were training as electricians in order to begin to work on it themselves. It had been a hot, dry summer. Something in the workshop sparked out and caused the fire.

  Some said: It was Enoch himself who did it. He hadn’t thrown the key out; he had kept it and let himself out in the early morning when the others were sleeping. He knew where the previous electrical fires had started in the workshop. He set a fire there, next to the pile of grease-soaked rags, made sure it caught, and let himself back into the basement to wait for the Lord’s judgment.

  Some said: There was an electrical storm in the early morning of that day over the fifteen thousand green acres, and some tiny spark raised the flames. It was the Lord, himself and no seraph, himself and no messenger, himself and no stranger. The Lord who had looked at the compound and said: “Destroy them. Smite them. Wipe them out.”

  Some of the Enochites, when they smelled the smoke, worked together to smash the small eastern window near the ceiling of the basement and piled up furniture to climb out—some of them encouraged the others and hauled one another out, scrambling up through broken glass, flesh bloody and torn, choking and coughing. And those people shared the story and told how Enoch had said: “Let them go. The Lord will show us the way.”

  Martha was twelve weeks gone from the compound when she heard the news of the tragic fire. She was in a corridor waiting for an interview with a GED program; they would give her funding and accommodation if she qualified for a place. The corridor was painted pale green and white, the walls scuffed like someone had driven a truck through there. Martha sat on a hard plastic chair outside an office door, and on a small table next to her was a three-week-old newspaper with a photograph of the burned-out compound on page 6. If it hadn’t been folded just like that, she might not have seen it for another month or more. The theories about the FBI or the CIA came much later. At the start it was just a tragic fire at a farm. News, but not big news.

  She put her hand to the page, touched the picture of the burned dining hall, the chain-link fence. She ripped the piece out of the newspaper, stuffed it into her jeans pocket, and then feared that she might have been seen, that they would call her a vandal. She straightened her mind—don’t think of it, don’t let it in. Don’t look back. The door opened. The woman called her name. For thirty-five minutes of the interview, Martha was enthusiastic and articulate. She got her funding. She was on her way. She didn’t look back.

  10. how we get life

  The sun was up at the wetlands. It was getting to 9 a.m. Elsewhere in the city, the woman who managed the office for Albert’s doctor was pulling on her red peacoat and lacing up her sneakers, checking her watch, and leaving time for the bus. Elsewhere in the city, the owner of an organic grocery store was pulling up the shutters and unpacking a new box of Firepit-brand kimchi onto the waiting shelves. Elsewhere in the city, Lenk Sketlish was taking a shower at his office, letting a call from his current wife go straight to voice mail. What Enoch thought is true: we are connected, one to the next to the next.

  “Well, you see,” said Martha, “it was my fault.”

  “You’ve had six whole years of therapy, right?” said Albert. “You know that’s just the narcissistic defense. You want to believe it was your fault because that’s easier than acknowledging that you had no control at all.”

  “But I could have stopped it. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t left.”

  Albert said, “I don’t believe anything’s meant to be, but don’t you think it means something that the two of us have met here, like this?”

  “I’ve been down that road before.”

  That road ended in a basement with the scent of smoke seeping in.

  “Alright, maybe it means nothing. You just saved my life and you work for Fantail and I invented Medlar. And we turn out to agree on a bunch of important things. But we could make it mean something if we wanted.”

  “What do you want to make it mean?”

  “You and I,” he said, “have helped something happen in this world. A huge wash of information. Unprecedented. The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”

  “Fragments,” said Martha. “Pieces. This is what Enoch talked about. Things falling apart more quickly than they can be put back together.”

  “Well, I think on that he was right. Not on the other stuff. On that. This is what I’d like it to mean. That you and I work together on helping get us through the information crisis as fast as humanly possible.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “What are we talking about? Some kind of conference?”

  “Oh God, not another fucking conference. Not a panel, not an event, not a convention. Something real. I just tried to kill myself,” said Albert. “You escaped a death cult with your life. We’re in extra time. We don’t really exist. We can do whatever we like. I want to consider some extreme solutions. I want to do whatever it takes.”

  The sky was gray and saxe blue, the air very still. Small birds swung through the sky, describing a parabolic curve between invisible infinities, snapping at flying creatures too small to see. Everything that has ever begun in the history of the planet has started with one tiny change, invisible to the naked eye.

  The sperm says to the egg: Knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.

  11. a special kind of king

  In Washington, DC, that winter, there was a rain of blood.

  Martha felt the blood first, warm and wet against her cheek. A trickling ooze unlike water, it had a thickness and a silky quality. The smell was not at first unpleasant: the tang of animal and iron. Martha put her hand to her cheek and it came away sticky and red. All down the steps of the courthouse, plump red droplets were bursting on the stone, on the barricades, on the protestors, on the dark gray suit of Zimri Nommik and on the lilac silk dress of Selah Nommik and on the immaculate black wool coat of Lenk Sketlish.

  Lenk looked up. A bloody mass hit him in the face. A skinned rat with a long tail, Martha thought. Lenk grunted, and the object on his face slid slowly down across his immaculate blue shirt to land with a heavy plop on the concrete. It was a blood-soaked tampon.

  On top of a squat, dark building opposite the courthouse, a group of women were unfurling a banner.

  ANVIL OPPRESSES WOMEN. PERIOD.

  NOMMIK: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T GIVE WOMEN

  TIME TO CHANGE THEIR TAMPONS

  They had black plastic buckets and pump-spray water guns filled with blood. Some of them were swinging the bloody tampons around their heads and hurling them like—what was it? Martha felt her mind slowing down. Cabers? No, hammer throwers. Behind her there were shouts, security swinging into action. Selah Nommik ran up the stairs two at a time. Zimri Nommik put his hand on the back of one of the women on the steps and swung her sideways, out of the line of fire.

  It had to be animal blood, surely. No one would have collected this amount of menstrual blood and kept it fresh. Martha, who tended toward analysis in times of trouble, wondered whether there was some way to do it—hospital anticoagulants, thousands of women timing their pills, emptying the contents of menstrual cups into a bucket. She was still fascinatedly calculating when two muscular arms grabbed her waist and one of Lenk’s security guards said in her ear, “Back inside, back inside” with such care she felt she was a child being lifted into bed when her feet came off the ground.

  At the porcelain trough in the women’s bathroom, Selah Nommik—Zimri Nommik’s wife—was peeling her bloodstained lilac dress off her strong shoulders. Martha looked and flicked her eyes away. She, too, was covered in blood and was holding a clear plastic bag stuffed with sweatpants and a charity 5K T-shirt someone had found in a closet.

  Selah wadded up a ball of tissue, wet it, and tried to clean the blood off her neck. A bead of red-streaked water dribbled onto her white lace bra.

  “Fuck,” said Selah, “fuck,” then suddenly turned to Martha. “We’re going to have to get tested. HIV. Hep B. Hep C. Whatever’s in blood.”

  “I think it’s pig,” said Martha. Her mind had been working at this problem for a few minutes now. “My dad had a… farm. It smells like pig blood.”

  “Oh. That’s a relief,” said Selah, and she started to cry. Her tears carried her navy and pale blue eye shadow as far as her neck like the spring thaw carrying last autumn’s bright leaves into the creek. She scrubbed at her face and hair with the wet tissue, slowly scraping up the blood. “You work for Lenk, right? Fantail Lenk?”

  “Yeah,” said Martha.

  Selah looked at Martha’s reflection in the mirror. Both of them bloody, as if they’d been in a fight. Selah was sizing her up. Sometimes the need to talk is so strong that a person will grab anyone who is even vaguely trustworthy. Let me in, says someone. And someone who has no reason to let anyone in says, OK.

  “Does he cheat? Your boss, Lenk?” Selah asked.

  “Does he…”

  “On his wife. Does he cheat on his wife?”

  Martha looked at her. “I can’t…”

  “Right,” said Selah. “If he didn’t, you’d just have said, ‘Oh no, I work for the only angelic man in the Fortune 500; he doesn’t know other women even have tits.’ Does he cheat with you?”

  “No. I don’t do that,” said Martha.

  “Smart. But he’d cheat with you if he had the chance, right? No, don’t answer that. I get it, you don’t have to answer that. Did you see Zimri with his hand on her back?”

  Oh yes. The woman with the bright gold beads dotted at the end of her braids, Mary Mere of CodeHogs. Martha thought back to those moments on the steps, to Zimri Nommik guiding Mary Mere to safety with great care. Ah, right. It doesn’t take so much trust if you think everyone knows already.

  There was an opening in the world here, Martha saw, a crack in the mountain.

  “Yes,” said Martha, “I saw.”

  “Oh fuck, you did? If you saw, then every fucker saw. People were videoing that shit, did you see? God, it’ll be everywhere. Fuck.” Selah Nommik turned back to the mirror and applied a cream from a little pot to her face, wiped it off with tissue.

  “I’m so sorry Zimri treats you this way,” said Martha.

  Their eyes met in the mirror, a momentary connection.

  “You deserve better,” said Martha, and she knew when she said it that it was true, that Selah Nommik knew she meant it. This woman deserved a better husband than the Anvil founder, Zimri Nommik, a man obsessed with expansion of his business and apparently his sexual portfolio. A moment of sincerity in this world of symbols and evasions had more than natural worth.

  “I do, actually,” said Selah. “I know everyone thinks I’m with him for the money and like, how could anyone actually love a man like that? But I mean I did love him. I did find Zimri lovable.”

  Martha shook her head. “No one thinks that,” she said. “Everyone knows you’re impressive. They all wonder how he managed to convince you to stay for so long.”

  Selah said: “OK, you wanna know how many people he’s sleeping with?” She counted them on her fingers: “First, the PA, obviously—you saw her at the hearing, the one who looks like me but her color is cheap and her tips are frizz. She thinks she’s going to be the next Mrs. Zimri Nommik, but she’s gonna get bought off with four million dollars and stock. She’ll end up running a chinchilla farm in Tampa. I’m telling you, I see the future. Second, his kids’ nanny; he sees her when he sees the kids and he sends them to get ice cream and they bone in the changing room at his pool. Security guy told me. Also his yoga instructor, which is like so… God, what is it with men and stretchy women? And those three don’t worry me because he’s not going to leave me for the PA or the nanny or the yoga instructor. But now he’s also sleeping with Mary Mere—you know her? CEO of CodeHogs? When he touched her I could see he’d touched her naked, do you know what I mean? He’s probably with her right now. I get the public bathroom, she gets the private room with Zimri.”

  “Are you sure you want to tell me all this?”

  But Selah was in her stride.

  “Zimri thinks he’s a special kind of king because he only fucks Black girls. I knew that when I met him, and when Vashti Nommik got her settlement. I thought: Fine, let him think he’s special, all men think they’re kings anyway. But do you know what it is really? He doesn’t want me to feel safe around other Black women. I didn’t see that when we met because I was young. But I’m forty-two now, and he made a pass at my sister when she came for Thanksgiving. What he wants is to own a Black woman. I’m not kidding. He’s frightened of women; he wants to own a woman and then destroy her. If it’s not Mary Mere, it’ll be someone else.”

  Martha said, “If he wants to leave, let him go. You don’t need him. He doesn’t own you.”