The Propagational Library (1): The Finding

[Image: The Beginning
(gouache on paper, 15×21 cm, 2010), by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox]

(Have you already read the Introduction? If not, please jog on over there now.
This will still be here waiting for you.)

On the cold August morning on which Gabe Naude heard his doorbell ring for the last time, it rang when he had just entered the darkroom. Gabe sighed, loudly and melodramatically — as though whoever stood on his doorstep might hear, and reconsider the interruption. He placed on the heavy table the little open metal drum full of sodium thiosulphate fixing agent, which sloshed a bit over the lip, onto the table and floor. He sighed again, and went upstairs and to the front door.

A man and a woman stood just outside the door on his little porch. They were dressed appropriately for this day, the man in a dark, heavy overcoat of some ersatz woolen material (the few sheep left in the world could not legally be sheared), the woman in a somewhat lighter-weight khaki-esque coat but with a coarse scarf wrapped around her neck and tucked in at the collarbone. They did not look like government or law-enforcement officials (although one could never trust appearances these days); they looked like academics. Or diplomats.

The woman spoke first.

“Good morning,” she said. “Are you Gabriel Naude?” She pronounced it no-DAY, as though it had an accent mark over the e.

“Nobody in my family’s pronounced it like that for generations. It’s just one syllable, like gnawed.” Gabe’s lips drew back and he made little nibbling motions with his teeth, practically a reflexive response anymore. “But yes, that’s me. And you…?”

The man said, “My name is Eldon Lane.” He held out his leather-gloved right hand.

Gabe couldn’t remember the last time someone offered to shake hands, with him or with anyone else, but he took this Lane up on it. He looked at the woman as he did so.

“Adrienne Lane,” she said, smiling, and now extending her own right hand. “Eldon’s my husband.”

A gust of icy wind blew across the front of Gabe’s house, lifting and rearranging the hair on Eldon’s and Adrienne’s and Gabe’s own head. He looked at the strangers quickly, assessing their threat level if any, or if none, then their potential simply to annoy him for too long.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something right now,” he said, “but I can spare a couple minutes to find out what’s up. Come on in, let’s not stand out there.”

He stepped back from the door but did not let them past, positioning himself between them and the interior of the house.

Eldon held the door open to allow Adrienne to enter first, then followed and closed the door behind him. He removed his gloves and pushed his graying black hair roughly back into place; his wife, keeping her gloves on for now, simply squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head briefly, her shaggy hair settling into something resembling order.

Her casual gesture charmed Gabe. He was still waiting, however, for Eldon likewise to reassure him. He looked carefully from Adrienne to Eldon and then back again, trying not to select an interlocutor but letting them choose.

“Okay. Now that we’re all out of the cold—”

Eldon: “I know. What do we want, right? We — well…”

Adrienne laughed. “We’re a little nervous. We’ve never done anything like this before. We hope we won’t have to do it again. We’ve thought about it, talked about it, but still don’t know how to introduce ourselves or explain what we’re here for. We, well, we don’t get out much. Meet people, you know?”

“I don’t get out much myself,” Gabe said. He thought of the fixing agent down in the darkroom. He should’ve at least put the lid on it. “Is this a sales call of some kind?”

The couple looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and Gabe realized they really didn’t have any idea how to proceed. Eldon again tried first. “It’s not a sales call, no. At least not in the sense you’re probably thinking of it. We’re not here to offer you a product and we’re not here to take any money from you.”

“Or your soul,” Adrienne added. “We’re not selling religion either. We’re just after—”

“You,” Eldon interrupted.

Adrienne nodded vigorously, and a lock of hair fell down over her right eyebrow. “Yes. You. The world’s ending—”

“—and we want you to help.”

—-

In retrospect, for the rest of his life in fact, Gabe would remember that moment and laugh. The two of them looked so helpless, so silly, and something about their confusion came across as the confusion of an old silent-film comedian, beset by circumstances far beyond his control. They looked almost, well, pratfallen. But his laughter wasn’t just laughter at their joint discomfort and misfortune; it was empathetic laughter: he had no idea how he’d have begun the conversation, either.

The world’s ending. We want you to help.

Which of those two assertions seemed less likely true could, in Gabe’s eyes, pretty much be decided with a coin toss.

Everyone knew something was wrong with the world, had been wrong for decades and maybe centuries. The climate, mass culture, the pace of life, savagery of warfare, persistence of ancient fears and hatreds, extinction of species: none of that spoke to the world’s health. But all of that stuck out so starkly, Gabe had always believed, exactly because it was not the norm. The background — the context in which all that other stuff was going wrong — was a background of things going right. That’s what made the things-going-wrong literally news. So the end of the world? Sure, it would happen sometime, eventually. The sun would swell to red giant, whatever. Billions of years from now. Average likelihood of such a thing’s happening, for anyone in the world for the foreseeable future? Especially happening as a surprise? (Boy, of all bad news, that’d be the worst. Tabloid field day.) The odds approximated zero.

As for Gabe’s ability to help: if the world’s ending, you want a hero. Someone of superhuman strength, superhuman intelligence, superhuman ability to get people working together. But Gabe? He was a photographer, for chrissake. Not even a particularly successful one. Aficionado of old methods of image-making, even: black and white, analog film; darkroom processing; gallery printing and framing on archival, acid-free surfaces. He could strive heroically for perfect composition and contrast. When he wanted a really good cheeseburger, he could strive heroically to make his way across town for it. If you wanted someone to put up a mighty fight in the battle against falling asleep in the theater, Gabe might just be your man. But stave off the end of the world?

So, well, yeah: when the Lanes offered their twin reasons for standing in his foyer, Gabe burst out laughing. They were harmless nutcases. That explained everything.

It explained everything except their response to his laughter. They burst out laughing, too.

“I know!” Adrienne managed to say, once she’d gotten her breath back. Eldon had staggered back and to his right in order to lean up against the wall, doubled over slightly, and still couldn’t speak.

“I know,” Adrienne repeated, “and it is such a relief you think it sounds ridiculous, too. At least as ridiculous as we felt saying it.”

“A relief? So this—”

“No. I mean yes. This is for real. The relief—”

“The relief is real, too,” Eldon said. He’d finally recovered from the laughing fit, but was still snorting with mirth around his words. “You couldn’t possibly have done anything better, could he, Ade?”

“No. It’s a good sign. Because if you go along with us, if there’s one thing you’re going to need in the next few months, it’s a sense of humor.”

__________________________

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here. The storyline, I get that okay. I know where that’s going. But I have no idea what I’m doing by posting these first-draft chapters here at RAMH. Whatever it is, it’s probably gonna come back to haunt me. :)