Weekend Tea

“What is that sound?” Jack gingerly walked across the dining room, hyper-conscious of every step. His body was disconnected from his brain, and every minute motion took herculean effort, like trying to run in a dream. He knew he would either fall to the ground, or freeze on the spot if he didn’t continue moving, so he continued, one step at a time.

As he walked, or tried his best imitation at walking, the sound, a shrill scream that his battered brain was unable to connect with any known sound, grew louder. He knew he had to do something about it, investigate, help, stop it – anything, but his mind refused to hop back into gear. “This must be what people mean when they say they were knocked senseless,” he thinks.

As soon as the thought entered his mind, he regained a great deal of control. His heart still beat like a thundering metronome in his chest, but his movements became more natural, and the final six steps to the kitchen were almost normal. Thoughts ran through his head too quickly to immediately process, but he was relieved to find he could think again.

The kettle stood on the stove, screaming disproportionately loudly for its small size. He removed it from the stove and dropped it in the sink, burning his hand and breaking a dirty glass as he did so. “At least the electricity is still on,” he thought, as he instinctively put his hand to his mouth to soothe the burn, and stared at the glass shards in the sink.

The kettle was a Christmas gift from his daughter. A vision of her, smiling and sitting on the floor, the tree behind her as he opened the box. “You said your afternoon coffee was keeping you up at night, maybe tea will help?”

Tears welled in his eyes, and Jack nearly lost his balance again, but he quickly, desperately buried the memory away and kept to his feet. He took a deep breath and concentrated on his senses. The shrill, piercing sound of the kettle was blissfully absent, but he was now aware of different sounds from all directions. Subconsciously, he knew that the quicker he fully regained his wits, the better off he would be. He closed his eyes. “Retrace your steps,” he whispered.

Not five minutes earlier, he was sitting on the couch, reading a novel and keeping an ear out for the whistle of the kettle. It was lightly raining, and he was feeling melancholy, as he always did after dropping his children off at their mother’s. They came to him every Friday night, and had an unremarkable but pleasant evening watching a move, eating pizza, and playing board games. As with most separated couples, he wasn’t quite sure why they had split, but knew that his job was to provide for his children the best sense of normalcy possible. His time with them was wonderful, so long as he didn’t think too hard of all the other time he now missed.

In the morning, they made pancakes and went for a hike in the woods, then he dropped them off, cheerfully waving as the familiar pangs of regret and despair struck. He stopped at the store, then decided to go home rather than on his planned run, as the rain decided the matter for him. “I suppose that rain saved my life,” he thought, without any sense of relief.

Jack had little patience for books that didn’t immediately pull him in, and this one was teetering on the edge of going back on the shelf when he heard an indescribable sound. Though he was in the basement of the apartment building, he was acutely aware of the vibration of the structure above him. As New York is not a common site for earthquakes, he couldn’t fathom what had happened – his first thought was that a car struck the building.

The book tumbled from his hands as he stood and ran to the door, faltering with the lock as he ran up the stairs and outside. He noticed a few other people similarly rushing outside, and they all looked around, from left to right, trying to identify the source of the sound. A roaring, rushing wave of noise seemed to come from every direction. “Tornado? Hurricane? Typhoon?” His mind wildly tried to connect what he heard with some known entity, though he had never experienced any of those.

After a few seconds of bewilderment, Jack noticed the dozen or so people outside were looking in the same general direction. He turned his head and saw an immense fireball in the direction of the city, filling half the sky.  He immediately thought of grainy footage of soldiers sitting in bunkers, nervously waiting for the unknown, until an incredible explosion, flash of light, and mushroom cloud changed the world forever.

As wind stronger than the fiercest storm he’d ever experienced picked up, Jack put his head down and ran back to the apartment door. Though he was born well after the “duck and cover” drills for nuclear attacks, which were commonplace in his father’s school days, he knew that he should avoid gawking like passers by of an accident, and immediately take shelter.

Fueled by adrenaline, he quickly assessed the situation. His apartment was in the basement, which he figured would give him a good deal of protection from radiation, assuming he stayed inside and away from windows. He apparently was still alive, so the blast was some distance away, affording him another layer of protection. The intensity of radiation from fallout depleted relatively quickly, so he shouldn’t need to stay inside for too long.

As he ticked off these thoughts, he briefly wondered how and why there was an attack. Russia?  An accident? China? North Korea? A lone terrorist? It didn’t make sense, there was no bluster or warning on TV or on the internet, at least not more than usual. He supposed, in a sort of philosophical sort of way, that it didn’t matter. Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11, COVID, or any other similar event from history, the why was less important than the event itself; there would be a world before this attack, and a very different one after it.

Sobered by these thoughts, yet still rather optimistic of his immediate survival, Jack continued to muse. Then, just as quickly and abruptly as the sound that drew him from his apartment, the thought that made him freeze in place and lose all connection between his brain and body occurred to him – his family.

Once he partially regained his faculties, he was choked with shame at how long it had taken him to think of them. The direction of the blast was the same as that of his wife’s house. Jack’s mouth grew dry; the thought of “ex-“ did not occur to him then, nor any time thereafter, as it no longer mattered. Their house was solid, but with a meager basement. Jack wasn’t sure she’d even think to head there, though he imagined she would as a matter of common sense. He vaguely recalled hearing a tornado warning years ago, and she suggested they head to the basement before the storm blew by without so much as a fallen tree limb.

Jack revisited his mental checklist, this time more slowly, with a different sort of adrenaline coursing through his veins. He knew he was relatively safe where he was. He checked his phone, which was predictably showing no signal; a look at the clock on the stove showed the electricity was similarly out. He vaguely recalled something about an electromagnetic pulse from nuclear explosions impacting electronics, but realized this was stretching his thin knowledge of the subject. “They really should have covered this in school,” he thought, then paused, and decided that it was probably best that they hadn’t.

Every atom in his being wanted to know how his wife and kids were, whether they were safe, and how they would cope over the next few days. Jack prided himself in living a life of logic, controlling his feelings and emotions with thought and introspection instead of passion and impulse. He thought of it as a defining characteristic, something that perhaps made him cold at times, but also immune. Logic told him the only option was to remain where he was, to wait and hope that he would be able to contact his family, or hear word they were safe. Any other action would be futile, bordering on suicidal.

He stared at the floor, thinking of nothing and everything at once. Without realizing what he was doing, he found a supply of face masks and put several on, then started looking for thick clothing. After a few minutes of scrounging for supplies and donning various seemingly protective elements, he swung a backpack on and left the apartment. He paused to lock the door, then, nearly laughing, decided there wasn’t any point.

As he walked into uncertainty, the kettle sat, completely silent.