Sole Survivor

purpose you're meant for. It's your job now to find it. There's a reason you're still here.”
        “No reason,” he disagreed. “Tell me about the sky, Beth.”
        After a hesitation, she said, “The clouds to the east aren't gilded any more. The pink is gone too. They're white clouds, no rain in them, and not dense but like a filigree against the blue.”
        He listened to her describe the morning at the other end of the continent. Then they talked about fireflies, which she and Henry had enjoyed watching from their back porch the previous night. Southern California had no fireflies, but Joe remembered them from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. They talked about Henry's garden, too, in which strawberries were ripening, and in time Joe grew sleepy.
        Beth's last words to him were: “It's full daylight here now. Morning's going past us and heading your way, Joey. You give it a chance, morning's going to bring you the reason you need, some purpose, because that's what the morning does.”
        After he hung up, Joe lay on his side, staring at the window, from which the silvery lunar light had faded. The moon had set. He was in the blackest depths of the night.
        When he returned to sleep, he dreamed not of any glorious approaching purpose but of an unseen, indefinable, looming menace. Like a great weight falling through the sky above him.

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    2
        
        Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.
        He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him, and the tyres sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception of stability.
        Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.
        Horns blared and skidding tyres squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words, or made obscene gestures. This was greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass on someone else's turf might result in a thermonuclear response.
        His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if he were aboard a roller coaster, plunging along a precipitous length of track. Although he was alone in the car, he heard the screams of passengers, faint at first and then louder, not the good-humoured shrieks of thrill seekers at an amusement park, but cries of genuine anguish.
        As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering, “ No, no, no, no .”
        A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the pavement. The shoulder of the freeway was narrow. He stopped as close as possible to the guardrail, over which lush oleander bushes loomed like a great cresting green tide.
        He put the car in park but didn't switch off the engine. Even though he was sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of air-conditioning to be able to breathe. The pressure on his chest increased. Each stuttering inhalation was a struggle, and each hot exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.
        Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He tasted it too: the acrid mélange of burning oil, melting plastic, smouldering vinyl, scorched metal.
        When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red flowers of the oleander pressing against the windows on the passenger side, his imagination morphed them into billowing clouds of greasy smoke. The window became a rectangular porthole with rounded corners and thick dual-pane glass.
        Joe might have thought he was losing his mind-if he hadn't suffered similar anxiety attacks during the past year. Although sometimes as much as two weeks passed between episodes, he often endured as many as three in one day, each lasting between ten minutes and half an hour.
        He had seen a therapist. The counselling had not helped.
        His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication.