She nodded. "God put me up there and kept me safe there. He spoke to me. In his way. In his mercy, he saved me. And you."

Martin couldn't help himself. "He mercifully spared us after killing your daughter, the woman I wanted to marry, our parents, and, what, seven billion others? That's mercy to write home about." With every catastrophe, one god or another was always there to thanked, because humans deserved a memorable disaster every once in a while.

"You're trying to provoke me," she said. "I won't be provoked."

"I'm going to fix us something to eat." He stood up and went toward the kitchen with Isha at his heels.

While Martin boiled some pasta, he fed Isha and Mona, heated up some spaghetti sauce, some corn with a little hot sauce in it, and some asparagus. The food he divided between their plates.

His annoyance with her dissolved as they ate. He was about to ask about her family when she said, "God talks to me."

That got his attention.

Evening had darkened the rsmells goodoom, and within the falls of her hair, her face was concealed by shadow. "As long as I fast and keep myself apart from the world, He talks to me."

"What does he say? Predictions? Do this or don't do that?" It was hard not to be smart with someone who had god's ear.

"It's... good-feeling. He lets me know I'm doing the right thing. It isn't words exactly. But that's why I don't want you to rape me. It would make me a part of this world and God would stop talking to me."

"I enjoy being part of his world. I try to avoid the alternative."

"I can't eat this."

"Then don't." Now he was mad at her again. The food, the offering he was making to her, the gift, she was rejecting. "Does it smell bad, or is it your theology?"

"It smells good."

"So what's wrong with it?"

She looked up at him, light gleamed in her eyes, and then she lowered her head again. But he had figured out what she meant.

"It's warm and smells good," he said, "and you think if you like it that God will stop talking to you. You're afraid you'll like something about the world."

She nodded minutely.

"So as long as you keep having a bad time, deprive yourself, and see to it that your life stinks, you're closer to god and he talks to you."

"You make it ugly," she whispered.

"Why would god treat you that way?"

She said nothing.

People had been punishing themselves for thousands of years, in big ways and in small, to bring themselves closer to their deities. It was a Middle Ages attitude, right there in front of him.

"If he spoke to you, you'd understand." Her voice had an edge this time.

Martin was thinking that if god spoke to him, he wouldn't consider it a sign of good health. He didn't say this.

"If you don't want to enjoy the food, wait till it's cold," he said. "Pour salt over everything. Do what you want." He ate with a vengeance now, tasting nothing, finishing his plate in minutes so he could get away from her. Her disgust with the world reminded him too much of how he used to be.

While he rinsed off his plate, he said to her, "There's a bedroom down the hall. And there's a lock on the inside of the door."

"I'll sleep on the floor."

"Fine. I'll bring you a pillow and some blankets. It'll be cool tonight."

"I won't need them."

"Maybe I could find you some rocks to sleep on."

"No thank you."

"I'm going out to walk around a little, see what's happening outside. You can come if you want. If you have a good time, I can hit you with a stick." He slammed the door behind him and hoped she wouldn't follow.

Out on the sidewalk, Isha and Mona beside him, he walked along the street through the deep twilight. Near the western horizon, the sky was cream colored; higher up it was dirty yellow and then it grayed into charcoal overhead. The starlings were out now, hundreds of them, making shuddering whistles and squeaks as they picked through the lawns and gutters.

He walked to the first intersection before he calmed down enough to think straight. He'd had illusions of finding someone who would have been as happy as he was to have some company. Someone he could talk with about the past, who could fill in some blanks, and could talk with him about the future.

Instead, there was Moreen, who had her own program and it didn't include him. It didn't include much of anything except making sure she could be miserable and talk to god. Tomorrow he'd ask her to leave. She'd probably be happier sleeping out in the open, hungry, stalked by wolves.

Why couldn't people leave the dead world behind and get on with discovering a new life, a new country? It might end up being miserable or fatal, but it might not be, and anyway, there it was, waiting to be dealt with.

He thought about Delana. When he was separated from her, he wanted so badly to see her - in his memory she was always lovely, clever, and attentive. But when they were together, it was less than ideal. Sometimes she was grumpy or remote; sometimes he was. Sometimes they argued, sometimes they thought they were talking about the same thing and weren't. Sometimes he made excuses for leaving her apartment early. Sometimes she did the same.

He thought about that, watching the starlings and the charcoal gray sky creep closer to the horizon. Mona watched the birds wide-eyed and made several tentative stalking runs at them. Their noise and flapping wings frightened her enough to hold her back.

Maybe, he thought, he shouldn't expect anything. She would be someone he could talk to once in a while. Even if she didn't talk at all, just having another human being around would be some company. Wouldn't it?

Maybe he was acting too desperate and overlooking something positive about her.

All right, so they wouldn't play Adam and Eve together. He tried not to think how long it had been since he had slept with a woman, how Delana felt against him, sleeping with her head resting on his chest, her breath warm and easy, how the weight of her arm around his waist brought him closer to her in more ways than one, and he remembered the heat of her body all along his side, the muscles of her back beneath his hands....

All right, so he and Moreen wouldn't play house at the end of the world. He would go about his business and she could go about hers, meditate and starve all day if that pleased her. Even if she only talked to him to tell him what her god said. That would be worth something. Probably. Maybe.

In the middle of the night, he felt the bed move. He opened his eyes and saw her getting in next to him.

"Can I just sleep here," she whispered, "without us touching?"

"Sure." He turned his back to her and tried not to wake completely up.

It was still dark when he was startled awake by her snuggling up to his back, fitting herself against him and wrapping one arm over his side and pressing her hand against his chest. Her skin was warm and soft and he could tell she wore no clothes.

"What are you doing?" he said huskily.

"I wanted to be here."

He turned to face her, his heart pumping faster, and he got that light breathy feeling high in his chest that he had forgotten about. "Why do you want to be here?" he asked her.

"Because... because...." She put one arm around him and held him with her other hand and put her lips to his mouth.

He kissed her hard and long and touched her everywhere. It was like he was touching a woman's skin for the first time. And how different it was from his own - smoother and softer. He tasted her skin and breathed in her smell and all his thoughts evaporated. She held him to her and pushed herself hard against him and said, "You can have me," and he kissed her over and over the whole time.

Chapter 34.

The next day, they stayed in bed till afternoon, exhausted. Before finally getting up, Martin lay watching the patterns of light change on the ceiling and thought that although this was the same world that he had awakened to the day before, it certainly didn't feel like yesterday's world. Yesterday was a trial, an ordeal. Today was a delight, a banquet of possibilitie.

Moreen came back into the bedroom carrying a black lacquer tray she had found somewhere, and on it were two glasses and two bottles of wine from the garage. She wore nothing, and her perfectly straight hair fell evenly over her shoulders. She smiled at him, warm and open, her strange reticence left behind.

Since the middle of the night, she had been a different person, and if anything made Martin uneasy, it was that. What had happened to the old Moreen, the one who deprived herself so she could talk to god? Was she still in there, waiting for her next anxiety attack? When, he wondered, will the ax fall, and what kind of ax will it be?

The afternoon light dimmed and they were going to get up, but it the drizzle started again so they stayed in the warm bed a little longer to listen to the rain's dull drumming on the roof and then the drips as they fell from the eaves onto the japonica below the bedroom window.

Later, "Why did you come to my bed last night?" he asked. They were sitting outside in the damp-aired twilight, eating again, and he was enjoying watching Isha and Mona stalk and chase each other through the wet weeds.

"I couldn't help myself." She sat in a nylon webbed lawn chair with her hands curled around the ends of the armrests. "I was lonely and I'm a weak person. I gave in to my animal nature." One word slid into the next, giving her voice a liquid quality.

"I don't know if I should feel flattered or not."

She shrugged. "Feel what you want."

He did, knowing it was dangerous.

Twilight was nearly gone but there were no stars visible through the haze and clouds. Two mockingbirds on opposite sides of the house carried on a warbling interchange. Isha and Mona still romped through the weeds, though they were only dark shapes now. Animal nature didn't look so bad at the moment.

Getting in bed with her every evening was the greatest pleasure of his day. Touching her skin both soothed and excited him, and their lovemaking was always as passionate as the first time. It was the dessert for the end of the day.

In the following week, Martin was astonished at his energy. He collected gasoline for the generator, got a second one for standby, went to the library and brought home books on gardening and medicine. He found a scythe and cleared the backyard and replanted the garden with rows of tomatoes, lettuce, corn, cabbage, broccoli, and potatoes. He planted parts of rows of a dozen other vegetables.

In scouting through the neighborhood, he located dozens of fruit and nut trees, but many of them were diseased by fungus or damaged by insects and bore no fruit. The change in climate, the rain and cooler temperatures, had been more than these specialized, highly bred trees could tolerate. There would be little fresh fruit this season.

But he also found two asparagus gardens, and from one of them he collected more than a hundred spears. It had done well in the cool weather.

When he showed them to Moreen, she said, "Is that where you've been all morning?" She had taken up smoking and was in the process of lighting another cigarette when he showed them to her.

"Yes, we're beginning to find our own way, rather than live off the past." He carefully dumped the asparagus in the sink for cleaning. "This is going to be wonderful. I'll get some meat out of one of the freezers and we can have a feast! In a few weeks we may get a few apricots from a tree down the street." It excited him to see the prospect of fresh food becoming a reality instead of having to scrounge canned food from people's houses.

She nodded and blew smoke into the air. "Small things make you happy, don't they?"

He made a quick decision not to react to her tone. For some reason she was trying to pick a fight. "What have you been up to this morning?" he asked, casually as he could, as he rinsed off the asparagus.

"Do you want me to be doing something all the time, cleaning your house, like your maid, or your wife?"

He stopped and turned to her. "You're angry. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she said, tossing her head and flipping her hair behind her shoulders. She turned her head and looked out the window and blew smoke into the air.

"You don't have to clean the house," he said. "No one's ever said you had to do that. You don't have to do anything at all. I was just curious."

"Are you afraid god is talking to me?"

"No. Why are you trying to pick a fight?"

She gave him a blank look that reminded him of when he had first met her in the park.

He had decided that even having her withdrawn and cranky was preferable to not having her there at all... for now anyway. When he was out looking for food or materials, he sometimes caught himself in moments of panic, fearing that he returned, she would be gone, and he would be alone again.

Sometime later he would give her an opening to talk to him about what was troubling her, but he wouldn't press her. He needed the sound of a voice other than his own. The residue of the year alone still hung on him, like lead in his spirit.

"You're using me, aren't you?" she said over dinner that evening. She had put three asparagus spears on her plate, nothing else.

"How do you mean?"

"How do you think I mean?"

Martin ate two more bites as he considered the question. He had been without human contact for so long, he had forgotten that people often asked questions like that, guess-what-I'm-thinking questions. It was a cheap way to start a fight. And he had completely forgotten about it.

"I can't answer a question if I don't know what it means. How do you mean 'using you'?"

"You really haven't noticed, have you." Her voice was strained and tense. Another ink-blot question.

"I'm blind as a bat." He put down his fork. "How have I been using you? You get to do whatever you want. We don't have to sleep together. Did I drag you screaming to my bed?"

"You made it so easy," she said venomously. "You made it so easy for me to submit, against my better judgment, against everything I believed - and you knew that. That makes it rape."

Martin looked at his plate of now unappetizing food and had a great sinking in his stomach. "I don't know what to tell you. You're free to do whatever you want. I wanted you to stay with me because sometimes I like to talk to you. Sometimes you've made me happy."

She gripped the edge of the table, her fingers white with the pressure. "See? It's so obvious. You use me for your own benefit." She stood up suddenly and lunged away from him, out of the room. He heard a door slam down the hallway and then the turning of a lock.

Martin sat looking at the cold asparagus on his plate.

So now what was he supposed to feel? It wasn't making a lot of sense. It was getting more and more like the old world, now that he thought about it. Was he going to have to start over again?

The days of the following weeks were without confrontation, and they spent little time together, once again sleeping in separate bedrooms. During the day he never saw her eat.