Sunday Scrawl #2: Mimicry

The knock comes at 3:31 AM, the metal bunker door reverberating with two sharp raps, and I shake myself from slumber and check the monitor.

Tammi’s face. But then, it’s always Tammi’s face. I unmute the connection.

“The summer after graduation,” I say. “The time we ended up at Pete’s place after a night out and played charades. The night Meghan got trashed and tried to kiss Akash. We played charades.”

Her eyes squeeze shut, and her face scrunches, the way it always does when she concentrates. “I remember.”

“What did Mike do for charades?”

“Toaster,” she says. “He was pretending to be a toaster.”

“Something else,” I say. “I left out a detail.”

“Say it again.”

“We’re at Pete’s,” I say. “Meghan tried to kiss Akash. We’re all tipsy playing charades. Mike pretends to be a toaster.”

“Meghan made out with who’s-his-face when Akash shut her down. Pete’s brother.”

“His name?”

“Al…no, Anthony.”

“Right.”

“Good. Something else happened.”

She shakes her head. “Something else…”

“I…the driver,” she says. “The Uber driver sucked.”

That’s not what I had in mind, but it’s still something to interrogate.

“Sucked how?”

“He was a terrible driver,” she said.

“How, specifically?”

“Didn’t he almost run a red light?”

“And what else?”

“And…um…almost hit someone while merging?”

I always hold out hope too long.

I mute the monitor and turn away from the thing that looks like my wife. It doesn’t knock again. It knows I won’t answer.

It used to be easy. Something would come to the door wearing her face, but the smile would be wrong, her eyes would be wrong, the cadence of speech would be off. I thought it’d stay easy forever.

It didn’t.

After a close call, we decided to use passwords, only to discover, one terrifying afternoon, that they knew them. It didn’t matter if we whispered them, wrote them in miniscule letters, or tapped out Morse code on each other’s fingers in the metal confines of the water heater—they knew. They always knew.

All that remained to us, then, was the past. These days I spend my bathroom breaks sifting through four short years’ worth of shared memories from a dead era, trying to recall scraps of information that were ephemeral enough to pass away undocumented, but significant enough to remember. If it was recorded, they know it.

Everything was easier back then. At the time, Ian wasn’t old enough to understand the magnitude of what had been taken from him. In those days the bunker was vast enough to be his world, and I was enough to captivate him. We had Nerf battles in forts made of canned food in the afternoon, and we’d spend the evening watching old VHS movies. It used to be enough to fill his days. Now he’s fifteen, and he chafes at the narrow confines of the meager world we’ve cobbled together from the scraps of a vaster one.

The next knock comes at 5:48 AM, and this time it really is Tammi. She remembers that was the night that Ashley told us about how her uncle tried to sabotage her mom’s business. She remembers that the driver hit a construction cone on the way home and had an over-full bottle of Sprite that he didn’t have a cap for. She comes inside, and she’s brought fresh food and fuel. Her life outside is strangely anachronistic. She hunts and forages for food. She finds firewood and hauls it home. She’s alone out there. Unprotected. Surely they have the power to stop her, to kill her—but then, surely they have the power to crack open our feeble bunker like an egg. We don’t understand why, but they have never used force.

Tammi doesn’t really need to leave. We could survive for many years on the canned food in the bunker, and we could do without the wood she gathers if we conserved power. She says we need to be responsible, that this shelter needs to last generations. She says someday she’ll find other survivors, real survivors, and has all sorts of ideas about how she’ll be able to tell if they’re real. She wouldn’t go out unless she believed that she had to. That’s why it’s so important that she believes she has to. Her eyes still gleam when she gets back from hunting. She’d rot if she stayed inside.

We have fresh venison for dinner while Tammi tells us the story of how she tracked and killed the deer. Ian doesn’t say much. He’s been quieter since he started spending so much time with the 2022 archive of the Internet. He likes videos about parkour and action movies. He likes watching girls a few years older than him vlog about traveling the world. Sometimes he reads about politics in our day, just because he’s curious and it’s hard to avoid. He asks us questions. It’s like being interviewed by an archaeologist.

I don’t think he’ll ever meet someone his own age.

We prepare him as best we can for a world we never expected. He reviews edible flora each morning, and practices with a rifle. In a few years, he won’t need my help to maintain the bunker.

Still…I can’t help but wonder what any of it will mean. If he goes outside, Tammi will have to keep him in sight at all times. He doesn’t remember a time before. If he’s separated from us, no memory verification will save us. They’ve been watching him his whole life.

And if he meets other ‘survivors’ out there, especially after we’re gone…how could he resist? Even if he knows it’s not real, maybe he’d rather pretend for a bit than carry the torch to completion. I wouldn’t blame him.

I love Ian with everything I am, and Tammi and I keep teaching him and preparing him, trying to instill hope in him. Somehow, we tell him, the world will be restored. Just wait. You’ll live to see it. Or your children will, or your children’s children. That’s why it’s so important to learn all of this. That’s why we keep going.

We play our parts well, so well that even now I’m not entirely sure she’s playing a part at all, and I’m too scared to ask.

But we never had a second child. We never even talked about it.

So we carry on. We keep to our routines and our preparations. We live like dancers, stepping and swaying to music that has long since ceased to play.