Year of Rain by Ilya Leybovich

It was the Year of Rain, when they hopped over puddles to reach the curb and
scraped the freckles of brown mold that sprouted on their ceiling. The walls of the
apartment were thin as sliced turkey and they could feel the heave of strangers’ lives
breathing against their own. When he lay down on the bedroom floor, the crown of his
head touched one wall and his heels pressed against the other.

They pretended to have blowouts for their neighbors’ sake, staging arguments
about ridiculous subjects.

“You swore you’d stop curling. That game is killing you!”

“I just can’t stay away. I was born to sweep the ice.”

“Sometimes I think you love that broom more than you love me!”

They lived in a shabby but affordable part of town, waiting for a nicer
neighborhood to self-generate around them, for the laundromats and bodegas to mature
into coffee shops and antiques stores like mudfish growing legs and stepping from the
sea. He insisted it was the natural progression of the urban dialectic; she took his word
for it and collected their receipts.

It was a difficult era for optimists, and they suffered the million daily tragedies
inflicted on the hopeful. They leaned into the gray mornings as the raindrops slanted
beneath their umbrellas like scissors attacking the skin. They headed in opposite
directions to catch their trains for work.

At night they came home tired and wet, and huddled together on the couch,
transfixed by shows like Black Cop-White Cop Buddies and Hopeful Girl Employed at
Fashion Magazine, sitting silent beside each other in the hours before bedtime, until one
day they unplugged the television and deposited it on the sidewalk with mutual disgust.
They returned to books: she crawled into hefty nineteenth-century tomes full of French
and Russian feelings, and he reread the philosophers that had inspired him in college,
hoping to reinvigorate himself through a kind of intellectual Viagra.

She wore itchy sweaters and he scratched her back. She fed him grilled cheese
and soup when he stumbled home wheezing. Once a week they lifted pints with friends
and commiserated about the many trials of being young and poor. Once a month they
went to an expensive restaurant and ordered appetizers and bread refills. They raced each
other through museums, got soaked in line for discount theater tickets. They had sex on
the couch, the bed, the kitchen floor (hazarding splinters) and in these ways thought they
had a life. They would have been considered insane for expecting different and better
outcomes from the same daily rituals had they not been camouflaged in love.

One day she pulled in the flower box from the window and sat with it in her lap,
mourning the marigold dissolved under three months of continuous rain.

“Where did the sun go?” she asked.

“It’s still there,” he said. “It’s always been there, just behind the clouds.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Astronomy. Physics. The natural order of the universe.”

“When you were little, did you ever get scared of the dark?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did astronomy help you then?”

“But we’re not little anymore,” he lied. “Besides, imagine the size of the rainbow
after all this is over.”

She looked at him and then out the window, as if drawing a line to connect his
confidence with the reality of the world drumming against them. If it had merely been a
bad storm the weathermen would have given it a name because all named things fade, but
this anonymous deluge, this all-invading wet, was trouble with no sign of relenting.

They let the gray infect them for a while, succumbing to the ministrations of slow
creeping ruin. There was a veterinary clinic across the street, and they’d sit for hours
watching people emerge without their pets, judging the ones who cried against the ones
who didn’t and wondering why there was no stronger word than “grief” for when a
person is made less than he was.

They visited the vast cemetery on the south side of town, its once green hills now
balding into mounds of mud. Their boots sank into the swollen soil as they slogged
between the gravestones, which too were becoming submerged like the memories that
adhered to them.

But, like the rest of us, their eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. It was the first
great shock of the rain that threw people into despair—after a while the terror passed.
They applied fresh coats of paint to the walls, invested in designer umbrellas, bought
triple-layered rubber galoshes. They learned to waterproof every crack and crevice with
the many hydrophobic gels that hit the store shelves.

In the papers they read about the Machine, about the uncountable billions being
spent on its construction so that it could part the clouds and bring salvation. Hope, that
terminal ailment, flooded their hearts again.

§

He was ambivalent about his job. Every day he sat at a desk staring at a screen
and tapping a keyboard until he got up and ate for forty-five minutes. Then he returned to
sit and tap more keys for a few hours before going home. He tried to remember the
commitment he’d once made to an authentic life and the ideas that had carried him
trembling with excitement across university greens. He felt he was unlike the drones
around him, who cared only about their mortgages and sitcoms and the egg salad they
would eat for dinner that night, while he had galaxies of thought swirling inside him.

On rough days, when the rain was violent and great buckshots of it came spraying
onto his every inch so that he was a kind of cold soup when he finally made it to his desk,
the old frenzy would rise up in him like bubbling magma. It would take all his energy to
keep from screaming at those around him to prove they existed, to explain to him that
their so-called reality was, in fact, worthy of the name. Those moments were rare now,
but when they struck it felt as if he were being drawn toward a steep precipice.

She, however, loved her job. She taught history to children at an uptown private
school fronted with Greek columns and the wide dignified steps of a courthouse. The
students arrived wearing crisp blue-white uniforms, and their drivers spread mighty
canopies over their heads to keep them from getting soiled in the two-minute journey
from town car to front entrance. She felt a sharp pleasure in exploring the past, with its
long stretches of ugliness punctuated by displays of human virtue, and wanted nothing
more than to sink her fangs into the young minds around her.

She spoke of how great empires broke their spines on the rocks of tiny nations, of
how mankind’s mastery of the world was proven not in his fruitless ejaculations into
outer space but in the taming of the seas, the bringing together of distant shores. She
draped herself in the finery of despots and the rags of revolutionaries, acting out a vast
drama on her tiny stage.

As the rains continued and the waters rose, she noticed that the wealthy children
entrusted to her care started disappearing one by one. She was told that their families had
booked passage on the mysterious ships berthed like leviathans in the bay, and whose
gargantuan steel conning towers were now crowding out the skyscrapers in the distance.

She gnawed her lip at the sight of empty desks, and began to imagine herself as a
fading starlet watching the theater slowly empty.

“Have you seen those ships up close?” he said at dinner.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“They’re shaped like giant cubes, with seven decks and round portholes along the
sides. If I told you the price of a ticket it’d make your nose bleed.”

“Why are they there? Why do they exist?”

“As a precaution—insurance for the rich. It’s alarmism, if you ask me. The
Machine will put this problem to bed soon enough.”

“Right,” she said, and stabbed a bowtie of pasta. “Right, right, right.”

The dean called her into his office and told her things like “budget cuts” and “staff
redundancy,” while she dug a nail into a point on her scalp just behind her left ear, the
way she’d done when she was a teenager who worried about how she looked in those
jeans and what the other girls thought and what she could be if she couldn’t be normal.
On her way out, she carried her box of personal belongings past empty classrooms as
blond hair fell from her head in single strands, in case she ever needed to find her way
back.

§

In the morning, as he was leaving for the office, he noticed she was still slumped
at the breakfast table in her pajamas, poking a congealed mass that had once been an egg
on her plate.

“Aren’t you going to work?” he asked.

When her tears started, he had enough sense to put his briefcase down. It took a
pile of wadded tissues to dam the crying, after which he angled himself in the posture of a
priest accepting confession, which in his mind was the most therapeutic arrangement.

“Personally, I’d love to not have to go to work. If I were in your shoes, I’d savor
the opportunity to take some time off and collect my thoughts,” he offered, attempting to
sketch in a silver lining.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m useful. I can’t just be discarded. I’m
like… I’m like the Machine. I have a purpose.”

“I know. You’ll be up and running again in no time,” he said, but his arm around
her shoulders felt like a prom night promise, the cheapest consolation prize.

She spent her days alone, watching the cumulonimbus churn and swallow the
hours until nightfall. The patch in her hair grew wider, forcing her to comb in inventive
ways to keep it concealed. She started smoking in the house, sucking down long, thin
French cigarettes, and retreated deeper into her books, letting the Bovaries and Kareninas
plant flags in her lonely terrain.

Had he been a better reader, he would have known what was coming next.

He was sick again for the second time that month, only now he had a temperature
and knew he couldn’t work through it. He decided to leave the office early. They didn’t
really need the money anymore—the landlord hadn’t been seen in three months and there
wasn’t much left to buy in stores. On his way up to the apartment, he passed by a man
descending from their landing, though he didn’t catch a good look. Apart from a pair of
wire-rim glasses, the stranger’s face was swallowed in a fever haze.

He found her lying naked beneath the covers, a lit cigarette dangling off the edge
of the nightstand. They stared at each other for a long terrible moment. She began
speaking but he didn’t try to understand the words. Instead he moved through the
apartment breaking things in a calm and methodical way, seeing the hidden symbols and
patterns of their time together and knowing that he had to dismantle them. In his mind, it
was she who was doing the breaking.

§

Being at home with her felt like two people standing in a room trying to ignore
the pile of skulls in the corner, and so he spent his nights in bars mustering the courage to
sleep with another woman. Liquor offered the quickest escape from the rain and rising
waters, so there was never a shortage of people with which to try his luck. But when he
came to the crucial moment, the point when hair was curled around a finger and a head
drew close and he could see the languid rise and fall of eyelashes, he thought again of the
many small adulteries they would wage against each other, of the stale, stinking air they
would let in once the door was opened, and he drew back into himself.

Finally he returned home one night and switched on all the lights and told her that
if she wasn’t planning to leave and he wasn’t planning to leave then they had to agree
there would be no escalation—that Mr. Wire-Rim Glasses was an aberrant leak and they
would seal it for good.

She let out a breath and walked across the room and hugged him as if donning a
life vest.

§

The day the Machine failed was warm and spring-like and they spent the morning
imagining the many flowers that would bloom once the skies were clear. She wanted to
stay home but he insisted they see the ceremony for themselves. They waded through ten
blocks of dirty green water that came up to their thighs until a motor raft picked them up.

The crowd was so immense they could only get within a half-mile of the
Machine, but still the sight filled them with awe, as if a god greater than the one clapping
the deluge overhead had divined this mighty apparatus into being. The government had
named it TEBA, perhaps hoping that packing so many syllables into a short acronym
would be viewed as effective leadership. It was taller than any skyscraper, with two
arcing structures curved around a thin central pillar—a steel and chrome claw threatening
the heavens.

He tried to explain to her how it would work, lecturing about cadmium laser
discharge and polyacrylic acid delivery systems and deionization thresholds. His voice
rose to a childish pitch.

“It doesn’t matter,” she interrupted.

“Of course it does. These are the principles that are going to save the world.”

“This,” she said, indicating the sea of people staring wide-eyed at the Machine, as
if their desperate faith could power it. “This is what matters.”

He made a noise in his throat, the way he’d done when she told him about her
visits to a psychic.

A voice emerged from the loudspeakers on the covered platform at the base of the
Machine. A government official made a rambling speech about mankind’s boundless
ingenuity and indomitable spirit, and the crowd endured it in silence, careful not to offend
the Machine with any lapse in courtesy.

At last, the crew activated TEBA. A great rumble rippled the water in every
direction. A series of ascending lights rose up the central pillar until they reached the
aperture at the top and a blue beam lanced into the sky. The clouds massed at the point of
contact began to dissipate, and for a second the sun emerged. Then the beam cut off and
the gray became total once more.

The Machine didn’t explode, nor did it backfire and make the rains worse. It
simply sputtered and stopped and, despite hours of attention from scientists and
engineers, would not return to life. Finally, the official got on the microphone again and
issued apologies before instructing the audience to disperse.

They were lucky to be on the edge of the crowd. He stood with his hands on his
hips, wondering aloud how the technical problems could be resolved. She grabbed his
arm and hurried him down a side street before the violence began in earnest.

The apartments in the floors below them were vacant, their neighbors forced out
by the climbing water. The electric power flickered off, and so they lived by candlelight,
pulling corks out with their teeth and letting the wine rush down their throats. They spent
their afternoons beneath a tarp on the roof grilling burgers until there was no more coal,
then they brought up rods and reels and cast into the water with their feet dangling off the
roof’s edge. The noise of the city faded a little more each night, until there was only the
sound of water churning under the rain and they slept peacefully for the first time.

What died? The trees in the parks, the plants in the gardens, the animals in the
zoo, the strays on the street, the homeless, the poor, the middle-class, the sick, the
healthy, the dumb, the smart, the stores, the churches, the neighborhoods, and many,
many children. What flourished? Mosquitoes, rats, carrion birds, people who took
without remorse.

The good world was a graveyard, and there was so much mourning to be done
they knew they’d never catch up, so they didn’t make the attempt. Once a week they went
scavenging for supplies, but otherwise they never left the apartment. They told each other
jokes, secrets, painful stories, shedding the last layers that guarded their private selves
until they stood before each other like exposed nerves. They made love without fuss or
circumstance—an act as reflexive as yawning.

While fishing one day they saw one of the great ships pass by. The giant metal
cube swam smoothly through the water, borne along by an enigmatic science. They heard
the hum of its engines as it floated just a few feet away. The portholes were tinted black
and they couldn’t see inside, but they wondered if the passengers watched them with pity
or envy. The ship clipped a building on the corner, causing the entire brick façade to
crumble, but kept moving without pause, heading onward to an unknown destination, or
perhaps merely to circle the world again and again until it once more resembled what the
passengers wanted to see.

She pointed down at the destroyed building. “That used to be our laundry place,”
she said.

“Washing clothes seems a bit redundant nowadays.”

“They did dry cleaning, too.”

After they exhausted the local places, they had to go farther afield for supplies,
and each time returned with less. She opened all the cabinets and counted their cans of
fruit and bags of rice and bottles of water.

“What happens when we run out?” she asked. “Who’s going to eat who?”

“Whom,” he said.

“What?”

“Who will eat whom.”

She smiled. “You really think grammar will be the last thing to go?”

“Once the food is gone, we’ll have to fill our mouths with words.”

§

A rustling sound in the kitchen woke them up one night. He put his hand on her
shoulder, reached down for the baseball bat beside the bed, and told her to lock the door
behind him. He lit a candle in the hallway and waited. A man stepped into the light. The
stranger was tall and hollow-cheeked, and though still young he had a dirty beard and
chapped lips.

The man put his palms out slowly. “Just hungry,” he said. “Not looking for
trouble.”

“This isn’t the right place.”

“Please,” the stranger said. “A little kindness. I don’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“You need to leave right now.”

The mask of supplication fell from the man’s face.

He tightened his grip on the bat and a kind of intimacy took hold as they both
realized what would come next. The man stepped forward, the candle flickered out, and
in the darkness an ugly thing happened.

Afterward, she made him get into the tub and washed his cuts and bruises. She
asked him what had happened to the stranger. He rubbed his eyes until they were rivered
red and then told her.

He wanted to stay in the tub awhile so she left him alone. There were many things
he thought he’d known about mankind, about the right way to live and the axioms born of
high contemplation, but none of them had entered his mind when he did it. He’d felt only
a soulless relief when the bat met flesh and bone. His skin damp against the tub’s
porcelain, he released his philosophies like a rich man gone poor.

§

The water seeped into the apartment and rose a few inches each day. At first they
tried to bail with a pair of buckets, but they knew it was a futile gesture, and so they
chased their vitamin D tablets with the remainder of the wine and resolved to send their
little dingy under the waves in grand fashion. They took a can of paint from the back of
the closet and marked their names across the walls in red swooping lines. They packed
their photos, love letters, and a teardrop amulet from their third anniversary into a
waterproof canister that they chained to the radiator so that it would mark this place as
once having been more than a tomb.

On the last day, she waded into the bedroom in a white terrycloth robe covered in
orange flowers and let it fall from her shoulders. He saw her ribs and hip bones jutting
sharply against her skin as if attempting an escape, and his breath caught with sadness.
She stared back at his nakedness. He’d been made ganglier from the months of want, a
twig stripped of leaves. Still they managed to muster the old energy, at least as
reminiscence, and he kissed her thin lips until they were bee-stung swollen. She climbed
atop him and once more they were locked together, hands clawing for purchase on the
sharp angles of their bodies, while in the distance tentacles of lightning probed down into
the dead city.

§

That evening, part of the floor collapsed under the weight of the water, and they
scrambled to grab their bags before running up to the roof. When the rain tore away the
tarp, they were left exposed. They lay down on their backs beside each other, closed their
eyes, and gripped hands.

“Will you miss me?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

The night surrendered to a gray morning as they lay shivering against each other,
until the shivering finally stopped.

Another of the mighty cubes passed serenely through the water, rain sloughing off
its sheer, perfect sides.

And though we had our faces pressed against the portholes, we did not want to see
the two lovers with their hands still clasped, did not want to separate their story from the
general run of sorrow, did not want to imagine what had been.

Ilya Leybovich‘s fiction has appeared in St. Ann’s Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fiction International, deComp, Little Patuxent Review, Notre Dame Review, and Southern California Review. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.