“Christ,” she heard Dieter mutter, behind her, “is this really necessary?”

“Tarry, rash wanton,” Sayid said, drawing out the words. “Am I not thy lord?”

10

THE PROBLEM WITH THE Traveling Symphony was the same problem suffered by every group of people everywhere since before the collapse, undoubtedly since well before the beginning of recorded history. Start, for example, with the third cello: he had been waging a war of attrition with Dieter for some months following a careless remark Dieter had made about the perils of practicing an instrument in dangerous territory, the way the notes can carry for a mile on a clear day. Dieter hadn’t noticed. Dieter did, however, harbor considerable resentment toward the second horn, because of something she’d once said about his acting. This resentment didn’t go unnoticed—the second horn thought he was being petty—but when the second horn was thinking of people she didn’t like very much, she ranked him well below the seventh guitar—there weren’t actually seven guitars in the Symphony, but the guitarists had a tradition of not changing their numbers when another guitarist died or left, so that currently the Symphony roster included guitars four, seven, and eight, with the location of the sixth presently in question, because they were done rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Walmart parking lot, they were hanging the Midsummer Night’s Dream backdrop between the caravans, they’d been in St. Deborah by the Water for hours now and why hadn’t he come to them? Anyway, the seventh guitar, whose eyesight was so bad that he couldn’t do most of the routine tasks that had to be done, the repairs and hunting and such, which would have been fine if he’d found some other way to help out but he hadn’t, he was essentially dead weight as far as the second horn was concerned. The seventh guitar was a nervous person, because he was nearly blind. He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season—summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white—in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were. He couldn’t tell if his headaches were caused by straining to see or by his anxiety at never being able to see what was coming, but he did know the situation wasn’t helped by the first flute, who had a habit of sighing loudly whenever the seventh guitar had to stop rehearsal to ask for clarification on the score that he couldn’t see.

But the first flute was less irritated by the seventh guitar than she was by the second violin, August, who was forever missing rehearsals, always off somewhere breaking into another house with Kirsten and, until recently, Charlie, like he thought the Symphony was a scavenging outfit who played music on the side. (“If he wanted to join a scavenging outfit,” she’d said to the fourth guitar, “why didn’t he just join a scavenging outfit?” “You know what the violins are like,” the fourth guitar had said.) August was annoyed by the third violin, who liked to make insinuating remarks about August and Kirsten even though they’d only ever been close friends and had in fact made a secret pact to this effect—friends forever and nothing else—sworn while drinking with locals one night behind the ruins of a bus depot in some town on the south end of Lake Huron—and the third violin resented the first violin following a long-ago argument about who had used the last of a batch of rosin, while the first violin was chilly to Sayid, because Sayid had rejected her overtures in favor of Kirsten, who expended considerable energy in trying to ignore the viola’s habit of dropping random French words into sentences as though anyone else in the entire goddamned Symphony spoke French, while the viola harbored secret resentments against someone else, and so on and so forth, etc., and this collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments lived together, traveled together, rehearsed together, performed together 365 days of the year, permanent company, permanent tour. But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone—probably Sayid—had written “Sartre: Hell is other people” in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out “other people” and substituted “flutes.”

People left the Symphony sometimes, but the ones who stayed understood something that was rarely spoken aloud. Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn’t go out of their way to welcome outsiders.