The climate apocalypse has come and gone, and in the end it wasn’t the temperature climbing or the waters rising. It was the trees.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Clean Air by Sarah Blake, out now from Algonquin Books.
The climate apocalypse has come and gone, and in the end it wasn’t the temperature climbing or the waters rising. It was the trees. They created enough pollen to render the air unbreathable, and the world became overgrown.
In the decades since the event known as the Turning, humanity has rebuilt, and Izabel has grown used to the airtight domes that now contain her life. She raises her young daughter, Cami, and attempts to make peace with her mother’s death. She tries hard to be satisfied with this safe, prosperous new world, but instead she just feels stuck.
And then the tranquility of her town is shattered. Someone—a serial killer—starts slashing through the domes at night, exposing people to the deadly pollen. At the same time, Cami begins sleep-talking, having whole conversations about the murders that she doesn’t remember after she wakes. Izabel becomes fixated on the killer, on both tracking him down and understanding him. What could compel someone to take so many lives after years dedicated to sheer survival, with society finally flourishing again?
CHAPTER ONE
Izabel moved through her morning routine. She poured Cami’s juice into a sippy cup. It was “spill-proof,” but that didn’t mean it didn’t leak. Izabel wedged it beside containers of snacks in Cami’s lunchbox. She zipped it up and put it in Cami’s backpack, which had flaps of fabric on the side to look like elephant ears. The trunk was embroidered on the front. Black plastic eyes had been sewn in until they were flush.
Then the shower turned off. The water stopped running through the pipes in the concrete slab beneath her. She knew Kaito was patting himself down with a towel, but she couldn’t hear that. Instead she heard the cars outside. One of her neighbors was playing music. Sometimes she felt as if she could hear every neighbor through their plastic walls.
Kaito would be stepping out of the bedroom soon. If she timed it right, the three of them would be in the kitchen together as they got ready for the day. Not that she didn’t want to be alone with Cami, only that she preferred not to be.
She broke off an oversized banana, cut it in half, and left it where Cami sat at the island. Then she poured soy milk into a bottle and took it with her into Cami’s room.
“Good morning, honey,” Izabel said.
Cami didn’t move.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up.” This time she put her hand on Cami’s leg.
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Clean Air
Cami’s eyes furrowed.
“I have your milk. Do you want your milk?”
Cami’s eyes popped open and then closed again, and then she rolled them open—with great effort it seemed—and the whites of her eyes were slightly pink.
“Good morning, mi amorcito.”
“Hi, Mommy.”
Izabel handed her the bottle of milk. She was four, but she insisted on bottles still. And Izabel couldn’t bring herself to care.
Cami sat up and drank, eyes closed again.
When Izabel tried to leave, Cami pulled at her. So Izabel turned her body to face the same direction as Cami, and she let Cami lean back into her. It was a lovely, peaceful moment. One she got to have every morning. She chided herself for spending it, mostly, thinking of what she had to do next.
She pulled herself away. “We don’t want to be late.” She went to the bins of Cami’s clothes and picked out an outfit for the day.
Cami held out the empty bottle.
“Are you done with it?”
Cami nodded, awake now, alert, a little animal.
“Then you know what to do with it. You know where it goes.”
Cami ran out of the room and put the bottle by the kitchen sink.
“What’s next?” Izabel asked, following her.
“Teeth brushing!”
“Good morning,” Kaito said, stepping into the kitchen.
“Daddy!” Cami ran into his arms, and he scooped her up and
kissed her twice on the cheek.
“Better go brush your teeth,” he said.
In the bathroom, Izabel put toothpaste on both of their toothbrushes as Cami peed in the toilet.
“Can you wipe yourself? Do you know what to do next?”
“I know!”
Izabel brushed her teeth while she watched Cami. She wiped herself with a nearly normal amount of toilet paper. She flushed the toilet. She washed her hands. She took the toothbrush from the cup.
“Did you wet this?”
“Uh-huh,” Izabel said, toothbrush in her mouth.
And then Cami brushed her teeth and spat. For a minute, you could be convinced that she could take care of herself, that she wouldn’t start crying when she couldn’t get the Velcro on her shoes to line up exactly.
Back in the kitchen, Cami picked up her banana and held it over her head and said it was the moon both ways.
“What do you mean?” Kaito asked.
“Full moon,” she said, turning the sliced face of it at him, perfectly round and dimpled with color like any good asteroid-blemished surface. “And…” She turned it so the arc of it was above her. “And…”
“Crescent,” he said.
“Crescent moon!” she said.
“Very good,” Izabel said, taking the banana from her, pulling down the peel, and handing it back. “Now you better eat.”
Cami and Kaito looked at each other and Izabel knew it was some sort of acknowledgment that Izabel was the serious one in the house. But she didn’t know if that were true. Yes, she was serious now, with them, but she didn’t know if she would have been, if she wanted to be, if she’d started this way.
When Cami was done with her banana, Izabel took her to get dressed. Cami wanted to pick out her own outfit and Izabel reminded her that every night she asked her if she wanted to put out clothes for the next day.
“But I don’t know what I want to wear then. That’s a different day.”
“I know—so this is how it works. For now.”
“This doesn’t match with my mask.”
“Everything matches with your mask. That’s how masks work.”
“It’s not denim, Mom!”
Izabel let out a single giant laugh and then started laughing so hard she could feel tears in her eyes. “Where did you learn that?”
“It was on one of your shows.”
“It was?”
Cami nodded.
Kaito came in the room. “Are you two okay?”
Izabel couldn’t stop laughing. Her sides were hurting now.
“Mommy thinks I told a joke.”
“But you didn’t?”
Cami shook her head.
Kaito kneeled at Cami’s feet and started to dress her.
“I told her this outfit doesn’t match my mask.”
“You’re right—that doesn’t sound very funny.”
Izabel was getting her breath back. “I said her mask matches everything!”
“That’s true,” Kaito said.
“And then Cami said, ‘It’s not denim!’”
Kaito smiled at Izabel.
“See. Daddy knows it’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” Kaito said.
“Maybe you had to be there.” Izabel felt herself getting annoyed.
“He was here,” Cami said.
“Not in the room,” Izabel said. “It’s an expression.”
Kaito nodded.
Cami looked satisfied with that. She always looked to him for the final say on a matter.
“Shoes next!” Cami yelled, and she ran out of the room.
Izabel wanted to scold Kaito for not backing her up better, for not laughing, for not telling Cami to trust what her mother says. But then he stood up and kissed Izabel on the forehead. He was sweet. He was kind. She didn’t want to have a fight over a feeling she couldn’t quite articulate.
At the front doors, Cami had put her shoes on the wrong feet. Izabel switched them. Next her coat went on. Then her backpack. Then her mask, down around her neck for now.
“Are we early?”
“A little,” Izabel said. “Is it joke time?”
Cami nodded.
Izabel brought out her tablet and opened a kids’ app that had a daily joke on its main page. “What color do cats like?”
“What?”
“Purrrrrple.”
Cami laughed. “I get it.”
“Yeah, you do.”
The doorbell went off. Izabel put Cami’s mask up, around her ears, under her eyes, pinched it over the bridge of her nose. She checked it, following its black border over her cheekbones. The emerald green covered her cheeks and continued down below her jaw. A small black circle of plastic sat to the left side of her mouth. From her eyes, she could tell Cami was smiling. Izabel hugged her.
“Have a great day at school,” Izabel said. And Kaito waved from the kitchen, where he was making coffee.
Izabel pressed a button on the wall and the first set of double doors opened. Cami went through them. As soon as they closed behind her, the second set of double doors opened, and she went out those and ran to the car. There was a burst of air in the small room, a quick blast to clean it out, a small safeguard, keeping one batch of air from another. It obscured Cami for a second, but Izabel was used to that. She watched her every morning like this. As tired as she was of nearly every moment of her life, some parts still filled her with fear. Cami getting to a car was one of them.
Cami pressed a button on the car and the door opened for her. She got in, the door closed, and off the car went. Izabel would get an alert on her tablet when the school checked her in.
At this point, she would usually eat breakfast with Kaito before his workday started, but she didn’t want to talk to him right now. She knew she’d start a fight. Neither of them needed that.
She went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and peed and looked around on her tablet. She opened her favorite app. It ran news articles and newsletters and email blasts that went out years before the Turning. She could lose herself for hours in the news of the past. When humans thrived—too well. When we were drinking all the clean water. When we traveled so often we ripped holes in the ozone. When we couldn’t see another way. When we melted the ice caps and debated the commodification of natural resources and thought we would need seed stores.
She usually didn’t remember which year was which. Little memories across her childhood of local and global traumas that she couldn’t sort chronologically. Today, legs hard against the toilet seat, she tapped on 2020. The summary popped up. A bad year. A global pandemic. Everyone wearing masks then, too. She was eight years old. Her mother was alive. They were happy.
She tapped on Most Popular. An article came up about the garden eels in an aquarium in Tokyo. It was becoming hard to monitor their health. They hid from their keepers. They had grown fearful of humans as the aquariums sat empty during quarantine.
In an attempt to make them more comfortable, to make them betray their instincts, they were arranging a festival. For three days people could call in and video-chat with the eels. They were going to set up five screens in front of their tank. There were rules. You couldn’t be loud or obnoxious. They wanted smiles and waves and soft conversation.
Izabel’s tablet dinged that Cami was checked in at school. She sighed. She felt something in her chest drop, like a ball, a short but satisfying distance. She put the tablet on the floor, wiped herself, pulled up her pants, washed her hands, and picked up the tablet again. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. Kaito would still be in the kitchen.
She decided that she’d rush out, kiss him on the cheek, and go to the mall. She didn’t know what she would do there, but it was better than staying home. The days dragged on until Cami came back. And when Kaito came out of his office for lunch or for a break, she felt like he was critical of how she used her time, even though he didn’t say it, even though he insisted he didn’t think about her like that.
But she was critical of herself in that way. Even if she cleaned everything, got all the laundry done, responded to emails, ordered the groceries, scheduled dentist appointments. Even then, she wondered what she was doing inside her perfect life, where she was perfectly comfortable, and she’d survived the Turning, and she’d fallen in love, and the world had been taken back, some of it, and they’d had a child, and their child flourished, and they wanted for nothing, and no one was homeless, and no one was hungry, and what they had learned was that anything could be accomplished, if it were for few enough people.
She got dressed and went into the kitchen. Kissing Kaito’s cheek felt better than she wanted to admit. His skin was smooth and smelled good, from an aftershave he liked, something he picked out himself. It made her feel special that he used it, that he shaved, because he never had to see anyone but her.
She could feel her unhappiness with him wane. And it would come back, too. She knew that.
She pressed the button on the wall that called for a car. She looked back at him over her shoulder, and they smiled at each other as if they would have sex if she were staying. It was an easy enough smile to give when they both knew they didn’t have to deliver.
She looked back at the panel on the wall that called the cars and opened the doors. It also had the display for the air filtration system. She looked at this snapshot so often she hardly saw the specifics of it anymore, only that everything was green and well. All the filters were functioning properly. There were no errors in the system. But today she saw that the air quality was at 98 percent.
“Kaito,” she said. “The air quality is at ninety-eight percent.”
“Hmm.”
“Isn’t it usually at ninety-nine percent? Or one hundred percent?”
“There are no errors?”
“No.”
“Then I guess ninety-eight percent is fine.”
“I guess so,” she said.
Excerpted from Clean Air, copyright © 2022 by Sarah Blake.
