A Brave New Heart

Part I

It had been an ordinary afternoon. Mira had entered her sunlit kitchen after a busy day. She was carrying a knapsack with her university laptop and carrying groceries. She left one bag on the counter and, taking another huge bag of cans, walked down a set of narrow stairs. Thrilled to see his mistress, her small white dog trotted behind her.

“Oh, Dodi! Do you have to follow me everywhere? I’m just going to the panic room Dad built back in the eighties, remember? No, you wouldn’t remember, silly me. You weren’t here yet. Neither was I, for that matter. I was the youngest of the bunch. Mom was forty-four. Can you imagine? Having a kid at forty-four. An accident, my evil stepsister said, but they loved me, so who cares. Now, where do I put these?”

She was searching for a place when suddenly there was a loud noise and the whole place shook as the doors closed with a thump, locking them inside. The dog started to whine.

Mira stood frozen. “Either there was an earthquake, or the impossible happened and I’ll die here in this bunk.” She grabbed the dog, thankful he had followed her after all. Shaken, she looked around. There was a large, ancient radio inside the panic room. She remembered tinkering with it with her father, when he was still alive. Both her parents were dead.

Absentmindedly, she touched the necklace decorating her neck. It was a heart-shaped locket, golden and very rich-looking. She didn’t like it when her mother picked it as a graduation gift. Her mother had been born in India and transferred to a university, becoming fully acclimatized to Western culture within a few years. One thing she kept from her Indian background was her love of over-the-top jewelry. After buying the necklace, they were eating lunch at a restaurant, Mira focused on her plate. When she looked up, her mother’s face and neck were twice the size they had been a few seconds prior. She had had an anaphylactic shock and died within a few minutes. Mira, fourteen at the time, froze in shock then, unable to do anything. The incident taught her to always prepare for everything and brought her a love of rich jewelry. She never took off the locket, the last memento she had of her mother.

“I’m not going to freeze now,” she said, feeling the golden heart, as she stared at the antique transistor, trying to recall whatever it was that made it work. After hours of playing around, she managed to catch a weak signal. She listened. The announcer said there had been an explosion at the nearby chemical plant. Where the information was coming from, which wave she managed to catch, how she did it, remained a mystery to her. All she knew was that something impossible had happened, but then again, her whole life had trained her, in a weird way, to expect uncertainty.

Part II

Journal entry, June 20th, 2052

Dearest …

I had always been dyslexic. Even though I read a ton, I had to look up the right spelling of words all the time. The teachers laughed when I mentioned all the books I read, not believing me. They’re all gone now. Almost everybody is gone now except for the chosen few who managed to escape somehow, survive what none of us actually believed would or could happen. And ironically, the thing I didn’t like about myself, my slowness, the extra work I had to put in into all of my school papers that no one ever believed I put in, was the reason I survived. See, my friend Sara, or better yet, my friend Mariyah had averages in the high nineties without doing half the work I did and often procrastinating until the last minute with their essays. But because I had to do the extra work, and I was acutely aware of it, in the light of my ambition to be equal to them in the IQ range, I learned to be extremely organized.

It started with my time, then my surroundings, but I ended up just being an extremely cautious planner. I planned out everything. And that’s how it just happened that I had cans and cans of food in the panic room. Your grandfather built that underground panic room in the eighties, when everyone was freaked out about the Cold War, and that’s why I was prepared for the explosion. It wasn’t even planned, like someone filled with malice, like Hitler, attacked the world. No. It was a scientist who miscalculated his chemical balance and blew up half the province. It reminded me of a Kieslowski film I saw a long time ago. He was known for the Trois Couleurs: Bleu, Blanc et Rouge to commemorate the French flag — since it was the French Art Council of Europe financing his dream film — but I liked his Ten Decalogues a lot more. The first one was of a scientist who let his son go skating on a frozen lake. He miscalculated the thickness of the ice and the child drowned. The film was meant to touch on the first commandment, as in to always place God first ahead of everything. It was a deep film though, also asking how does a person forgive themselves really serious mistakes, if they ever could, especially, when those mistakes did not come out of malice but great damage was done still. And so I pondered what had happened. It would’ve been wrong to annihilate all the science from the world. But what right did that scientist have to kill all those families? Now, there is nothing but the dust and a lot of rocks. I walk around in my mask, careful of my protruding belly. The rest of the world plans on helping us rebuild, but they are afraid to enter the area. I worry about what is growing in my belly, what monster will come out, and if I’ll be able to love you…

I never thought I’d get pregnant at such a young age. Being stuck inside a tiny cubbyhole in the ground changes a person. I had always thought I was a loner, a hermit, completely fine with just my laptop, my books, and my dog, so it took me as a great surprise when someone managed to dig a tunnel into my cubbyhole and I was happy. I didn’t think it was possible, but as I read and tried to communicate with the world, trying to catch some waves of the broken Internet — building primitive antennas, trying to remember my physics — I was just glad to see another person’s face, I wasn’t even annoyed he dug right into my wall. And a face, which I had previously thought of as “too old for me”, during these days we spent keeping each other from going insane, became a dear face — the face of a friend.

There wasn’t much to do without Internet, cable, or being able to go outside. I had planned for food, but he planned to have tanks of oxygen to help us survive before the rest of the world thought it was safe. It wasn’t long before we ran out of activities and ended up making love. Then I discovered I was pregnant, which was a weird experience, seeing as I was still stuck in a cubbyhole with one tunnel into another cubbyhole. I’d also need a lot of extra food, but for that I had planned well. The pantry could’ve fed twenty people if need be.

Each week for three years I bought food for me and food for me in case of an apocalypse my father talked about once we discovered he had dementia. He said he saw me in the panic room, living there. I humored him and bought food. People laughed. Now they are dead. All the smart ones who always won over me, they were as certain of their fate as they had been of their academic victories. I was never certain. I always had to plan, and even then, I walked slowly, waiting for things to turn out differently than I had planned. It had seemed so irrational at the time, except to me, whose letters always danced, and I could never count on the words coming together as they were supposed to, always uncertain, always questioning if they had set into the pattern that everyone else saw. So I checked the dictionaries and the thesauruses. Sara laughed, rolling her eyes. Mariyah studied my weirdness, never guessing it was simple dyslexia I had too much pride to admit to; patterns of words I could never count on until the dictionary eased my hesitation and erased my doubts.

There would never be a world we had planned on. My weakness — or what I had always deemed a weakness, a disproportion, the thing that set me apart from others but not in a good way, making me slower — helped my character be flexible, used to uncertainty, open to whatever outcome the elements happen to fall into; but also, not just to accept but adjust by working longer, harder, being more prepared. And so now, it was me in the world who survived while they all died, unprepared.

Part III

Chad and Mira put on their gas masks and costumes and dared to go outside again. Each time was a risk. The air was yellow, sort of a rusty hue. Mira’s knees went weak seeing the actual destruction. No one would believe there was once a thriving suburban area filled with nice people, dogs, children, neighbourly debates, and laughter. They walked around picking up debris, building heaps of usable and unusable materials.

Chad wasn’t as traumatized and kept vigilant, looking around as if someone was using surveillance to observe them. He had been Mira’s chemistry partner during second-year university, except he was twenty-seven when Mira was only nineteen. Chad had worked at the chemical plant, and after years of taking blue-collar gigs, he was going “all the way” to a Ph.D. His hands had been burned. Scar tissue covered them, but he regained his mobility, even some sensation.

With some useful materials in their arms, they went back to the bunk. They fell asleep almost immediately. When Mira woke up, Chad was using his microscope, shaking his head.

“We were drugged, maybe poisoned,” he said.

“What?”

“When we went up, there was something in the air that wasn’t part of the explosion.”

“What are you saying, Chad?”

“Someone released something on purpose.”

Mira grabbed her belly. “Hasn’t enough happened?”

He kneeled in front of her. “Look, I’m sorry, but we can’t panic. We must respond and not react. Remember how the priest taught the count of Monte Cristo to deduce how he ended up in prison?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We must do the same. I think we’re in grave danger. I just don’t know why.”

Mira pondered and whispered, “What if the explosion was someone important messing up, and they’re trying to cover it up?”

“Why?”

“Because we’re the witnesses.”

“If that’s true, we must find a way out the same method I found you.” Chad took her hands in his. “My brother was an engineer for the city; he had had a scholarship. He build pipes for the whole city sewer system, and I’ve got all of the maps in my bunk.”

“Well, it’s something.”

There was nothing else to do, so they dug. For the first few weeks they came back to the bunk and slept. Eventually it proved too far. One day they packed up and left the bunk for good. Luck was with them, but one day a burst of water splashed right into them, the wave taking them with full force. The wave turned into a stream, dumping them into a pond in the middle of a meadow.