کتاب 07-11

11

He had salt and a little tumbler of olive oil and they split the potato. The fragrant mineral smell of it filled the shed. It was so good, it made Harper feel a bit teary, and when it was gone she licked oil and salt off her hands.

“You know what I miss?” she said.

“If you say Facebook, you’ll ruin a perfectly lovely evening.”

“I miss Coca-Cola. That would’ve been so good with a Coke. You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”

“As a species, we might not live to regret melting the ice caps. That’s where it comes from, you know: the spore. I’m eighty percent sure. That’s why all the earliest cases were along the Arctic Circle. It was under the glaciers. I think it’s happened before, too. Everyone believed the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor strike, but I figure it was the spore. It hides under the ice until the world warms up enough to let it back into the air. Then it burns everything until the world is so blanketed in smoke the planet freezes over again. The mold dies out, except for a little bit that is preserved once more under the ice. There have been six extinction events in the life of this planet. I bet every one of them was the spore.”

“You’re saying it’s a planetary T cell. It attacks any infection that throws the environment out of whack. Like us.”

He nodded.

“That’s the third-best theory I’ve ever heard. I like the idea that the Russians bred a superfungus back in the seventies, out on this island for testing biological weapons. Rebirth Island, I think it was called. They had to abandon the site in 2000 after the spore got loose. But the island was in a lake that dried up and animals crossed back and forth, carrying the ash in their fur. All the early cases were in Russia.”

“You said third-best theory. Is there something better than Arctic melt or a Russian island of pure evil?”

“I also like the idea that God is punishing us with killer athlete’s foot for wearing Crocs.” She gave herself another tipple of banana liquor. In her medical opinion, another sip wouldn’t give the baby a deformed brain. “Now that the world is over, what do you most regret not getting to do?”

“Julianne Moore,” he said. “And Gillian Anderson. At the same time or separately, it really would’ve made no difference.”

“I mean what did you want to do that actually might’ve happened.”

“I wish I had discovered a new kind of mold I could’ve named after Sarah.”

“Wow. You romantic son of a bitch.”

“What about Harper Willowes? What did you always want to do?”

“Me? Julianne Moore, same as you. That hot little bitch had one fine ass.”

The Fireman went and got a dish towel and apologized over and over for spitting his banana rum on her, while he patted her shirt dry.