The Leftovers

sinfulness of humanity, and the certainty of the Final Judgment—while completely ignoring the figure of Jesus himself. Generally speaking, they were much more focused on God the Father, the jealous Old Testament deity who demanded blind obedience and tested the loyalty of his followers in cruelly inventive ways.
    It had taken Laurie a long time to figure this out, and she still wasn’t sure if she’d gotten it right. The G.R. wasn’t big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable.
    It was a sunny morning, much colder out than it looked, Magazine Street as still and silent as a photograph. Though he supposedly earned a good salary right out of business school, Gary was still living like a student, sharing the top floor of a shabby two-family house with two other guys, both of whom also had girlfriends. Weekends were crazy there, Meg had explained, so many people having sex in such a small space. And if you didn’t do it, if you weren’t in the mood or whatever, you almost felt like you were violating the terms of the lease.
    They must have sat on the porch for a half hour before they saw another soul, a crabby old guy out walking his shivering chihuahua. The man glared at them and muttered something that Laurie couldn’t quite hear, though she was pretty sure it wasn’t Merry Christmas. Until she’d joined the G.R., she’d never really understood just how rude people could be, how free they felt to abuse and insult total strangers.
    A few minutes after that a car turned onto Magazine from Grapevine, a sleek dark vehicle that looked like a shrunken SUV. Laurie could sense Meg’s excitement as it approached, and her disappointment as it rumbled past. She was all keyed up about seeing Gary, despite Laurie’s many warnings not to expect too much from the encounter. Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer—that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.
    *   *   *
    NORA HAD been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them—not at all—but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos. What happened in both cases was that you only remembered what you already knew, the same trusty handful of occasions and impressions. Erin was so stubborn. Jeremy had a clown at his party. She had such fine flyaway hair. He sure liked applesauce. After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.
    What she’d discovered recently was that these leftover memories were much more likely to surface if she wasn’t straining to retrieve them, if they were simply allowed to emerge of their own accord in the normal course of the day. Biking was an especially fruitful activity in this regard, the perfect retrieval engine, her conscious mind occupied by a multitude of simple tasks—scanning the road, checking the speedometer, monitoring her breathing and the direction of the wind—the unconscious part left free to wander. Sometimes it didn’t go far: There were rides when she just kept singing the same scrap of an old song over and over— Shareef don’t like it! Rockin’ the Casbah, Rock the Casbah! —or wondering why her legs felt so dead and heavy. But then there were those magical days when something just clicked, and all kinds of amazing stuff started popping into her head, little lost treasures from the past—Jeremy coming downstairs one morning in yellow pajamas that had fit the night before, but now seemed a full size too small; tiny