If they were open to it, she’d stop and exchange any news and information they were carrying, called across a respectable distance. She asked if they knew where the produce had gone. No one did, they shrugged, or complained with her a bit before moving on. She’d stopped asking other people why they stayed and they’d stopped asking her.

The nature of the sickness had generally lent to flight and depression more than riots and looting. Now it created an energy akin to that of people passing each other in a graveyard, each heading to a separate sadness.

She just wanted some kale. Maybe to invite someone to dinner. She wanted to have an adult conversation.

Time no longer correlated to a clock, or to numbers. Time was a dance of light and dark coming in through the windows, lapsed weather patterns, days when the outside world was bearable and days when it wasn’t. Time was both binary and a fluid spectrum, including days when she heard news on the radio or didn’t, some random measure of when she had energy and when she didn’t, a cycle of hunger and fullness.

Now that there were rarely new people to photograph, Dune spent her days piecing together words through the gasps, hitches, repetitions of phrases she’d recorded. She took these fragments and tried to weave them together into a theory of what was happening to her city, moving with her hands extended into a forever fog.

When she finally ran out of steam, Dune slept in Kama’s room, the bag of bones on her mother’s side, a boundary that had held even after her father’s death. She now slept in her father’s spot. No matter when she went to sleep, she woke up with the light, laying there in peace for a few minutes, until the present moment fully returned to her.

She hadn’t been a coffee drinker before H-8, but now she liked all the Alice in Wonderland feelings she could produce, injecting emotions into the numb cycle of her life. She would pour herself a cup and give herself ten seconds to miss real liquid milk from a cow. There was none left in the city—the distributed stuff was powder.

Such regrets were part of her cycle.

Coffee, breakfast. Vivian care, clean up.

Then back to the basement, seeking, listening and seeking.

chapter twenty-one: Vivian Waits to Die

Vivian wasn’t sick. She was old, mostly deaf, tired of being alive, grieving her daughter-in-law, and her son, and her husbands, her friends. This wasn’t supposed to be her final scene, outliving everyone.