In the Hills of the Suburbs

His name was Kevin. That was about all he knew, except that he felt very alone standing in the main thoroughfare of Hillcrest, watching the neat tract houses stretch into infinity.

The afternoon was very late, though Kevin could not say exactly what time it was. He did not own a watch. But the quality of light told him it was late afternoon. The sun lay behind blue veins of clouds from which hard, dry snowflakes broke against the frozen ground. A biting wind gathered the flakes into dusty whirls that swirled across the road in Hillcrest. Kevin expected to see tumbleweeds bounce across the empty yards.

He stood at the center of the street, his hands hanging at his sides, and stared at the rows of houses.

Cars sat idle in the ice-glazed driveways, twists of bruised snow arching from the tires to the asphalt. A sled was propped against the wall of one house, next to the front door. A mailbox door lay open, the flag up, a manila envelope jutting from inside. A spigot was encased in a multipetaled bloom of ice. A child’s tricycle lay over-turned in another yard, the back wheels hidden in a patch of snow.

And there was the quiet. Not the respectful quiet of a library, nor the funeral silence of a ritual. This was the implacable shock of a catastrophe, the moment of numbness that always divides the brain from awareness and acceptance, and the crippling pain that follows. It was the quiet that had summoned Kevin from his hideout beneath the concrete bridge that spanned the river. The river circled Hillcrest like a moat, drawing a line between it and the city that waited beyond the infinite tract of houses. Kevin lived under the bridge, belonging to neither world, and came out only to scrounge the dumpsters or hide from bored cops looking to provoke a few bums.

Except the cops had not come today. And Kevin, after daring to light a fire with wood he’d taken from a nearby construction project, had finally noticed that no cars were crossing the bridge. The world was as silent as the day it had been born.

Empty, he thought, staring at the houses. They were empty. No lights burned within. No irate men shoveled sidewalks as their perfectly healthy kids played nearby. No two-career housewives scattered sand on the driveway so they could pick up the children from swimming practice, return home in time to throw something together for dinner, then spend the next three hours grading papers while their husbands hammered at computers until midnight.

Kevin had never been part of that world. He neither envied nor pitied the people who were. But he was curious. Because now the houses were empty.

And he did not know where the people had gone.

He walked absently down the street. A front door stood open, flapping idly in the wind. A plastic garbage can traced aimless semi-circles on the sidewalk. Kevin walked to the very heart of Hillcrest, and it was the same, everywhere.

Emptiness. Abandonment. Silence.

These people who had everything they could reasonably want: Where had they gone?

Kevin stopped at the center of a cul-de-sac. The sky was growing darker. The clouds still shed brittle flecks of snow. He was surrounded by houses, and the wind could not get in here as readily, which lent a cathedral calm to the setting. The houses stood in sharp contrast to the horizon, where a streak of light leaked through the overcast.

In the yard directly in front of him: lawn ornaments. Frozen flamingos. Plaster cast fawns and bunnies and masked raccoons. Leaning against one another at crazy, off-kilter angles. Their expressions of joy and innocence distorted by crusts of ice and dirty snow.

They looked sullen and angry.

Kevin thought of the rats he had seen, hiding in culverts. Sometimes they would turn on themselves, as if all of them, in a single, defining moment, had witnessed some bleak revelation about the indifference of life. So they would kill each other, a final act of defiance. And then the water would wash their bodies away.

Kevin turned from the houses and faced the sky and thought of everything he had, and everything he was. But, it had always been enough, he told himself. It had always been enough.

Snow wheezed across the empty streets as the neat tract houses stretched into infinity.

The silence. The emptiness. And Kevin. No longer alone.