SelectionEvent (2ed)

  SELECTION EVENT

  A NOVEL

  by

  WAYNE WIGHTMAN

  Selection Event© 2011 by the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the events or characters in this novel to the real world is coincidental in the extreme, with one exception.

  Part One

  The Earth in Mourning

  Chapter 1

  The dog sat alone in the house, its muzzle resting on the sill of the front window, watching the empty street. She remembered the way the trees and houses made shadows in the morning and she remembered the noise of cars and people leaving their homes, but it was not that way now. She remembered the man and woman who lived in this house with her and who got up and made food smells and said her name and stroked her head, and she had loved them. She still loved them. But they were gone.

  The trees and houses made shadows, like before, but there were no noises of cars or people. She only heard the sounds of birds and the occasional creaking and popping of the house. She sometimes saw packs of dogs lope down the middle of the street, their heads low to the ground, swinging side to side, and this made the hair on her back bristle.

  She waited until the empty street had filled with sun, and then she lifted her haunches and checked the bedroom, which was empty, just to be sure the man and woman had not quietly returned without her noticing.

  She coursed her nose along the carpet around the bed where they walked with their bare feet and remembered them clearly now, though their scent was fading. In the evenings, the man would sit quietly and rattle large white papers while the house filled with food smells. He would say “Isha” with his quiet voice and touch her with his hand. Then, in the kitchen, the woman gave her food while she said “Isha” and patted her back. But they were gone now, and she only had the hard dry food that the woman had left in a heap on the back porch.

  In the bedroom, the dog looked across the bed and rested her muzzle on its edge and remembered how the man and woman looked and smelled as they slept and breathed there, and how once the woman had scolded her for getting up on the blankets.

  She turned and trotted down the hallway and through the kitchen and to the back porch where she pawed some of the food away from the pile and waited a moment for the bugs to scurry away before eating it. After eating a few bites, she trotted into the coolest room, the room where her claws made the most noise on the floor, and drank from the tub. Her drinking had never sounded so loud.

  She returned to the bedroom and smelled the man and woman on the floor around the bed. They would return, she knew. They always returned. And they always said her name and touched her when they came in the door. They would return. Of this she was sure.

  At the same time, the dog remembered the woman's voice when she had scolded her for sleeping where they slept and she remembered their rich smell on the pillows.

  She whined briefly and looked around — no one was there, no sounds came from the house or the street — and then she jumped up on the bed. She pawed the spread away from the pillows, knowing she would be scolded for it, and rested her head there. She breathed in the smell of the man's skin and hair and all at once remembered his face with remarkable clarity — his eyes and the wrinkles around them and his teeth, which he showed when he was happy. And even though the woman might scold her again, she moved her head to the other pillow and smelled the woman and remembered her touch and the strange way she smelled the last time she had seen her, when she and the man had gone away.

  The dog exhaled heavily and moaned and remembered them and waited for them and knew they would return. They always came back. She would hear their car in the driveway when they returned, and then they would be at the door with clicks and jingles and they would say, “Isha, Isha!” and touch her and she would be happy again.

  She knew they would come back. She was not worried about this. They always came back.

  Around the house there was only the sound of birds.

  Chapter 2

  He'd been thinking for two weeks now that the isolation study should be just about over. Let it be over. They should be giving him the word any time. Any moment, even. In the next ten seconds, someone could knock at the door, and there they'd all be, with champagne, congratulations, maybe even a news camera or reporters to ask him what it was like to live underground, without human contact, for one full year.

  The first thing he'd say was, “It was lonely.”

  He shifted restlessly around on his cot and then stood up and paced thirteen paces to the far wall and back and sat down again.

  After a year in solitude, a few things surprised him. He missed seeing the stars more than he could have imagined a year ago, never having thought much about them. It seemed he'd never thought about much of anything before.

  He was almost thirty years old and ready to put his life on track. “Better at twenty-nine than at thirty,” he thought. “Or forty.” Not many people had the chance to be born into the world a second time. Or would want to be.

  Fresh out of high school, he had gone to college and studied architecture. But after a couple of years, the math and physics began to wear on him and he realized he wanted to work in something that dealt more directly with people, like psychology or sociology — but psychology was turning into pharmacology, i.e., biochemistry, and out in the real world, sociology was strangled by bureaucracy. It took him almost two years to find this out. Life passed him by.

  Then he fell in love with a woman named Delana. The world opened up, he got a job with no duties as a research assistant for a public housing project, got dumped out of love, lost his job when the project got defunded, tried to fall in love again, failed, held a series of paper-shuffling jobs in small offices in old buildings that paid for groceries... as life passed him by.

  One day, when he was twenty-eight, saw the ad that asked for volunteers who had a lot of time on their hands. That's what he had. A lot of time on his hands and no good ideas.

  ....

  People from the University of California had leased an out-of-business underground mushroom farm and had made a section of this particular tunnel look like a normal room in a normal house. Except there were no windows. After he had taken battery after battery of tests and had been selected from hundreds of other applicants, they had encouraged him to fix the place up to his satisfaction before he moved in. He had been pleased with the job he had done, but now every square inch of the walls and floor and ceiling bored him to screaming. He bored himself to screaming.

  On the wall at the foot of his cot was a four-by-six foot map of the sky he had drawn on sheets of typing paper and taped together. Below it, the music player and a thousand hours of music — rock and roll and a lot of classical. Three Monet cut-outs hung on the adjacent wall above the sink and gas burner, and on the wall opposite his cot stood his desk and a huge corkboard where he kept notes to himself, lists of things to do back in the real world, and tacked-up pictures of his mother and father and of Delana, the woman to whom he was once more going to propose and devote himself, idiotic though he knew it was.

  And next to the corkboard was, of course, The Eye, the two-inch glass behind which a video camera observed his life. By now he knew every pock and pimple on every square inch of every surface in the place, and he was ready to come out.

  Three hundred and seventy-nine times he had slept — he had kept count with hash marks on a small slip of paper — and he knew that humans tended to develop wake-sleep cycles that were twenty-five to thirty hours long.

  So when was someone going to tell him it was over? It had to be very near to time.

  Perhaps this was part of the study. Maybe it was another test. Or maybe his wake-sleep cycle was twenty-three hours.

>   “This is getting tough,” he said to the microphone in the center of the ceiling. “If I have to stay here much longer, I may walk out and abort your study.”

  He sat on the edge of his cot and gazed longingly at the door that led out to the world. They had put five combination locks on the door and had given him an envelope with all the combinations in an easy cipher. He could walk out at any time, but he'd have to rearrange the numbers and figure which combination went with what lock. The idea was that he shouldn't be able to cancel the experiment on a whim, by simply turning a knob. Out of anticipation, he had already opened four of the locks and they hung like deformed question marks on their hasps. All he had to do was go over and open the last one and walk out.

  Of course, his failure to stay down for a year would be written up in the study, and everyone would know he hadn't been tough enough to do what he had signed up for. There probably wouldn't be any champagne either.

  He boiled some water on the gas burner and made himself a glass of tea. Having learned over the last year the pointlessness of hurrying, he sipped at it slowly and casually, and gazed around his thirty-foot-square room for what he hoped might be the last time.

  All the books he had read and notated were stacked neatly in one corner, ready to be moved back to the world above. It was an immense pile: a fourteen volume history of civilization, books on biology, genetics, the physical nature of the universe, a complete Shakespeare, several volumes on animal behavior, human physiology, several collections each of poetry and short stories, and a dozen thick novels. He had read everything except some of the novels. Next to the richness of the real world, he had found the imaginations of most fiction writers thin and colorless. After a while, their lifeless depictions of the world annoyed him. How could they have been so unappreciative, so unobservant?

  What he most wanted now was to close all books and see Delana and smell her hair and skin and touch her and walk in the open air with her, and ask her if they could start over. He wanted to see trees and green things and birds and sleep under the stars, and he wanted to talk. For someone who was always known to be “quiet,” how he missed talking. For someone always a little more drawn into himself than other people, how he missed all the things outside his thoughts and skin. He longed to see the green and blue of the world and hear someone else's voice.

  This quality of self-sufficiency had probably allowed him to remain sane during the year of isolation — but now, in truth, he bored himself beyond belief. Every thought was a repetition, every word he read was a monochrome representation of the sun-filled life-crawling world above, and every step he took, every movement he made was a clipped abbreviation of what he would do when he got out. He would run and shout and sing and travel and talk and listen and dance down the aisles of grocery stores, do things he never would have dreamed of before. He'd be a fool in public and love every breath he took doing it.

  And across the room, just beyond that one remaining combination lock, was a five-step stair and second door that opened onto the underground corridor which slanted up to the surface.

  In five minutes, he could be standing in the open air, surrounded by pastures, vineyards, peach and walnut and almond orchards. A few hundred yards away would be Highway 99 with its perpetually heavy traffic — and even that would be music.

  He went over to the door, dialed open the last combination lock and unhooked it. Then he pressed his ear against the wooden surface to find if he could hear anyone or anything. Nothing. Dead silence.

  “I'm thinking of doing it,” he said up to the microphone. “If I've miscounted, give me some kind of signal. I'll stay down here a year, but no longer. I need to get on with my life, see people, do things. I have a proposal to make.”

  There was, of course, no signal, as he knew there would not be.

  He went back to his cot which creaked predictably as he lay down.

  A year ago, he found everything in him and around him dispiriting. In the newspaper, day after day... gang-wars in the streets of his old neighborhood, the air growing thicker and grayer with a pollution which hid the stars and surrounding mountains. Nearby wildlife preserves were opened to housing developments, and, just before he had gone underground, the local newspaper had begun a weekly column titled Extinction Report with pictures and drawings of animals no one would ever see alive again. And Delana. At the time, he had thought he might never see her again either, their relationship extinct.

  He recounted the hash marks on a slip of paper. Three hundred seventy-nine. Exactly. He went back to the door and put his hand on the cool enamel knob. It was slick from his sweat.

  He thought of Delana and his mother and father and skies and traffic noise and trees, cows in pastures, the green smell of fresh-clipped lawns and the sound of hissing sprinklers. No matter what was going on above ground, he wanted to be there, he wanted to see it and be in it, even if there was no celebration or champagne. A person only had however many years — and he had spent one of those precious years in isolation. Today, he was deciding that his life was more important than the research.

  He turned the knob and pushed. The door swung easily open. Just beyond, tacked to the second door that led up to surface, hung a white envelope with his name on it.

  Chapter 3

  Two months earlier, Ted and Laura had sat upstairs in the monitoring room at a gray metal table.

  “What do we tell him?” the woman asked the man. She wore faded jeans, dirty at the knees, and a plaid shirt rolled up to her elbows. Her eyes were glassy and watery and her face a hot-looking pink. Her hair stuck to her temples. Both she and the man slumped in their chairs in front of the small screen where Martin Lake could be seen lying on his cot, reading. “What can we say to him?”

  “I don't know,” the man said. He rubbed his hot forehead. “I guess the idea should be to give him some warning. Maybe we could nail one of the doors shut.”

  “The hammering might make him suspicious,” she said. They both managed wan smiles. “I don't know if I'd want to be him or not.”

  “I don't know how to tell him.” He looked down at the blank paper in front of him. “I can't think straight anymore.” His breathing was labored.

  “Maybe we don't have to tell him anything.” The woman looked around the monitoring lab. It had been a neat, tidy place at one time. Now newspapers were heaped in a corner, styrofoam cups, food wrapping and other litter was strewn over the floor, and from the kitchenette came the faint sweet smell of decay.

  Through the windows, pale twilight lowered from the top of the sky to the orange and red smears of light at the horizon. The sky, as usual, threatened with storms and the high atmosphere churned violently. Blackbirds rose in a swarm from the peach orchard across the road and turned this way and that, making a pattern with their wings that thinned and thickened. The man put the pen down across the blank sheet of paper. “God, everything's starting to hurt. We have to tell him something. The poor son of a bitch is going to come up expecting a welcoming party. Look at this place.”

  With great effort, the woman reached across and rested her hand on the back of his neck. “Maybe you should just tell him to take it easy and stay away from other people. We can gather up some of the newspapers, leave them where he'll see them.”

  The man nodded and began writing. When he finished, he folded the note and put it in an envelope but did not lick the glue-strip; he tucked the flap inside. On the front side he wrote Martin Lake.

  When he returned from the underground corridor, the woman asked him, “Is the generator tank is full?”

  “If the power goes off, it should last him six to eight days. I reloaded his food cache this morning.” He turned toward her and with effort focused his eyes on her face. “Are you ready?”

  "Yes, I think so. The champagne is cold. His champagne. He probably won't mind us drinking it." She went into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator. Beside the green bottle of champagne was a plastic vial of phenobarbital tablets, a hundred and fif
ty of them. She brought them both out to the man.

  “Let's sit outside,” he said, when she came back, “and watch the birds and the twilight.”

  Months earlier, someone had put several lawn chairs out under a mulberry tree. Tall spring weeds now grew around the chairs, nearly hiding their legs when they sat.

  “This is better than ending up in a hospital,” she said, lowering herself into a chair. The nylon webbing hardly creaked under her weight. “I took my parents to a hospital. They'd set up big tents over the parking lots, for all the cots. My parents died in a parking lot with strangers. This is better.”

  The man sat holding the champagne bottle between his knees and twisted the cork. It was difficult work for his fevered muscles and sweat ran down the sides of his face. Finally, with both hands steadying the bottle, he filled the two glasses she held out.

  “So quiet even the fizzing sounds loud now,” he said. “I wonder what he'll think of all this.” Around them, crickets began to saw and other night bugs clicked and buzzed. In the gathering darkness, they could see a freeway overpass a quarter of a mile away, but there was no traffic, none at all, not the sound of any machine anywhere. The cool air smelled of green things growing.

  When they had finished their first glass and a dozen phenobarbs each, he said, “I wish it wasn't always overcast or stormy-looking. I'd like to see a clear sky just one more time.” The red and orange glow at the horizon had darkened to purple and cobalt. “I guess not.”

  The woman smiled and reached across and touched the lip of her glass to his. “At least it didn't rain today. In its own way, it's a pretty sky. But a few stars once in a while would have been nice.” She knocked another dozen of the white tablets from the plastic vial into her hand and gave him half.

  “I wish I'd sat out here more often and paid attention.” He finished off his second glass and they were quiet for a while. “I hope Martin does all right when he comes out. Poor son of a bitch.... Listen to that.” A mockingbird had begun warbling. It twittered and whistled and chirped and began over, repeating and then interrupting itself with chattering, as though it were telling a joke and then laughing at itself.