Monica leafed through a hardcover book titled Life after Doomsday. She noted lists of “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” target areas in the United States: “anticipated fallout zones”: “relatively fallout-free ‘refuge’ zones” (the Florida Everglades, the uplands of North Carolina, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, the sand counties of Wisconsin) where survivalists could flock.

She said, with less equanimity than she intended, “Most of us would carry our own fallout zones with us,” and Keith, as if prepared for that remark—as if, indeed, he and his brethren heard it all too often—replied, taking the book out of Monica’s fingers, “Most of you—but not all of us.”

5

Midwinter. Late winter. Snow-stubbled fields and days of bright harsh slanted sunshine alternating with days when the sun never appeared—never emerged at all. Monica was sick for a while but others were sicker, it was the annual flu, a prolonged feverish malaise, passed desultorily from person to person, among the teaching staff, the students. Monica could not reasonably object to being sick if it meant that happiness was never a possibility, hence never an issue.

She wrote on the blackboard in her classroom, in a large clear hand: Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. And what could Henry David Thoreau, so generally misunderstood as an uncritical nature lover, have meant by the enigmatic statement . . . ?

(He loves Nature, the brightest boys argued, but he hates human nature. No: he really hates Nature, beneath all the poetry. Or: he means something different from what his words seem to say.)

With a passion that might have had a good deal to do with her fevered nerves Monica threw herself into her classroom teaching; there was indeed the dizzying sense of falling . . . plunging . . . and surfacing again, greatly exhausted, at the end of the day. She did not become infatuated with her students, not even with the two or three most appealing boys, but there were certainly hours when she was so mesmerized by her own voice and her imagined image in their eyes, she felt the pangs of love; an almost carnal love; the not-wanting to break away, the not-wanting for the experience ever to end.

But of course it ended, invariably. The hours were only fifty minutes long and the weeks consisted of six days.