I see my husband standing on the edge of an overpass on the 101 Freeway, on the news channel that he keeps the TV tuned to at all hours. I’ve watched so many of these segments over the last few months that even though I recognize his dirty blue bathrobe, it takes me a minute to understand. I rush to my car to drive to him, to talk him down, to reassure him that we’ll figure it out, that everything will be okay, though it certainly won’t be. But there’s traffic — always in LA, there’s traffic — so I leave my car and run the rest of the way, horns honking, gasoline fumes leaking from stalled cars. When I see the crowd of people, I know. My husband, my beautiful Ben, is dead, rendering us both utterly alone. I know that if I look over the edge of the freeway, I’ll see his body, so I close my eyes and see, instead, the image of Ben’s face on our wedding night, during our first dance, his glasses slipping down his nose. He was nervous and vulnerable but willing, because he loved me most of all, better than himself.

When political factions first splintered and warred following the election, before the economic collapse but after we both lost our jobs, Ben and I dealt with our despair in different ways. I had always kept mine submerged in alcohol, and as local governments began to shut down, I wasn’t the only one. Every bar was overrun, patrons standing three deep, ordering two drinks at a time: madness, but a giddy kind. Our disintegrating nation was all anyone could talk about, like a pathological tic. Others came to know something I’d long understood: what fun it is to be swept up in the camaraderie of getting plastered.

Ben’s despair assumed the form of a plush velour bathrobe that he took to wearing day and night while standing too close to the TV; it became impossible to detach him from the cycle of breaking news and shadowy “sources say” tweets. His face blued as he worried the edge of his bathrobe. Once the bathrobe appeared, sex with my husband became less appealing, then unthinkable.

It has been so long since we’ve touched or really looked at each other that I’m shocked to rediscover his brown eyes at the morgue. I stroke the inside of his wrist, his earlobes and eyebrows, all the places he used to touch me when I was upset. Even when I was at my most drunk and abusive, Ben would pull me to him and hold me for as long as it took me to return to myself.

I go straight from the morgue to the bar. Pulsing with longing, I wait until closing, and when the gaunt, greasy bartender with a face and beard like Abe Lincoln’s finishes cleaning and locks the door, I think, Obliterate me, and that’s what he does. But I can still feel Ben’s hands on me like bruises, so outside I find a pocket of men passing around a paper-bagged bottle of booze and let one of them take me home. There’s no consequence too large — disease, pregnancy, death. Each night mirrors the last: different bar, same ending. I’m going to fuck my way to the end of the world.

Then I meet Marcus. When I wake up in his apartment the morning after the banks collapse, his naked frame silhouetted by the television’s scrolling chyrons of doom, I see Ben before my brain can catch up. Maybe that’s why I say yes when he asks me to leave with him.

Marcus and I pack all we can and start out for Yellowstone. I’d argued for Yosemite, but Marcus had a childhood affection for Yellowstone. I didn’t really understand, and it didn’t matter. Road closures force us off major highways onto routes that the GPS fails to recognize, and the booths at the entrance are abandoned when we arrive. When we come across a handful of cabins arranged in an army-barracks grid, Marcus parks, and I stay in the car while he peeks through the cabins’ windows. At the third one, he turns and waves.

Inside the cabin is a double bed, at its foot a locked chest, which I immediately try and fail to open. There is also a woodburning stove, a mirror patinaed with age, a beautiful copper sink beneath a window hung with lace curtains, and a set of everything — bowls, mugs, spoons, forks. No knives, though. No bathroom. Out back, two squirrels eye me from a scarred wooden picnic table as if I’m interrupting their meal.

“Marcus,” I call, through the back door and out the front, because the place is small enough to do that. “There’s no bathroom.”

His head pops into frame at the front door. “There’s an outhouse!”

I look at his face, cheeks round and rosied in the same hopeful way a child’s are, and think of my own face, just glimpsed in the aged mirror: yellowed and creased like an ancient letter that’s been accordioned open and closed too many times. Am I that much older than him, that much more marred by life? I reach into the box of provisions he’s carried inside and unscrew a bottle of tequila. What am I doing here, in the middle of the wilderness, what little money I have left in the world tucked inside the pocket of my fleece jacket, with this man who seems happy — no, thrilled — at the idea of taking a shit in a pine box in the woods? I don’t even know Marcus’s last name. I feel dizzy. Ben wouldn’t have done this to me. He had many flaws, but unflagging optimism wasn’t one of them.

“Hey, neighbors.”

A man and a woman stand shadowed in the open doorway. I look at Marcus; he shakes his head. Neither of us saw them when we pulled in. The man wears overalls tight across his belly, and the woman’s long silver hair is plaited into schoolgirl braids. For a moment, I think we’ve found ourselves not in Yellowstone but in one of those reconstructed historical villages.

“I’m Pa, and this here’s my wife, Deb,” the man says.

“Nice to see some new faces,” she says. “Only us out here.” I notice now the line of laundry stretched along the back of their cabin, the small mat laid before the front door. The knees of the man’s overalls are patched, and his thick flannel shirt smells like campfire. I look down at my unscuffed, low-heeled boots and think of the bottles of booze we’ve lugged into our cabin, the bags of gas-station potato chips.

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh, long enough,” she says.

“We’ll let you and your husband get settled. Just wanted to say hello.” Pa taps Deb on the back, and they raise their hands goodbye before sauntering on to their cabin. I don’t correct Pa about Marcus being my husband. Maybe he is, out here, in this new time and place.

What we brought with us, to survive the end of civilization as we know it: booze, eggs, butter, flour, sugar, salt; Marcus’s whiskey stones, which I press against my temples when a migraine hits; my book of creation myths, a wedding gift from Ben; coffee, both ground and not, and an accompanying pot; toilet paper; hand fans for hot days, heavy blankets for cold nights; sweaters, shirts, shorts, extra socks.

What we didn’t bring: A knife. A gun. A bell to signal someone at the door in the middle of the night.

It doesn’t take long for our booze to run out. Afterward, my brain pinballs. My insides are scraped loose and propelled out of me. I can’t drink enough water; every time I stand, my legs shake. I had thought we were well matched in our drinking, but when we empty the last bottle, Marcus only shrugs and says, “Oh well.”

One morning, I wake to find oily black smudges marking the wall next to the bed, ghostly paw prints careening into the kitchen, where they disappear into dust before an open kitchen window and overturned garbage can. We had slept through an entire ransacking.

“Raccoons,” Marcus says over breakfast, though how can he be sure? He sits with his leg propped up on the picnic bench, arm draped over knee, as if it’s safe here in the wilderness. On a walk yesterday, he’d popped a random berry into his mouth, then laughed at my concern. “Huckleberry,” he’d said. “Tastes like a blueberry, only wilder.”

“Raccoons? How do you know?”

“Pa told me.” He licks jam from his fingertips. Incredibly, he’s developed a sunglass tan.

“How long are we going to stay here?” I ask. “We’ll be out of food soon.”

“Go foraging,” he says. “See what you can learn from Deb.”

“We know nothing about them.”

“We haven’t gotten to know them. They’ve helped us out when they have no reason to.”

“I don’t trust them.”

“Well, then go for a walk by yourself. It’ll feel good to get away from the cabin for a bit. There’s a stream.”

“I don’t care about a fucking stream.” I sound like a petulant child, but the less he reacts, the more agitated I become.

“There’s other stuff too. You’ve barely explored.”

I don’t tell him that I have been exploring — quick passes through Deb and Pa’s cabin when they’re out. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. The only thing I’ve learned after trying on Pa’s glasses is that the lenses are clear plastic. I watch Marcus eat, oblivious to my annoyance, and feel anger rise like vomit through my esophagus.

“Does nothing faze you?” I ask.

“You think I wanted to come here, to leave everything behind?” He’s slipped his sunglasses back over his eyes. Yes, I want to say. “You think it’s been easy living here with you?” he continues. “You haven’t stopped jiggling your foot in days. I’m doing the best I can. What are you doing?”

And there it is, Ben’s face visible in Marcus’s knitted brows and frown. I didn’t realize that I’d been goading him into a fight, but of course I had. His anger is comforting in its familiarity. Ben had always found something to be angry about — the crass joke I’d made at dinner with the couple he worked with, the broken champagne vase that had been a wedding gift, the forgotten plans and slow hungover mornings. During one of our last big fights, when I was backed into a corner with no excuses, I’d asked why he stayed, if there was anything about me he still loved. He’d gone silent, adrenaline drained. “I don’t know,” he’d finally said.

When I hear a knock later that afternoon, Pa’s waiting outside with a full holster on his hip.

“I know you were expecting Deb, but you’re in luck because I’m the real expert,” he says. I’m acutely alone. Declining feels more dangerous than following.

“The morels are what you’re after,” he says as we walk. “They’re all over Yellowstone. I fry them up in butter.” I’m listening, but I’m also trying to track our path. Every tree looks the same. Have we gone seventy paces or eighty five? Have I been counting his strides or my own? When he stops and bends low to the ground, his movement deft in defiance of the stricture of his overalls and his heavy, globular frame, I feel the earth shift beneath me. Dehydration? Disorientation?

“Look.” His hand cups a tiny stalked honeycomb, dense and velvety brown. It’s beautiful.
He holds it out to me. “Want to taste?”

In the light it changes from brown to red, like the mane of a chestnut horse, and smells wonderfully musky. It feels like holding a very small brain.

Pa snatches the mushroom from between my fingers and smashes it to dust, laughing.

“What are you doing?”

He brings his face close enough to mine that I can see the smudges on his lenses and smell the rancid film on his teeth. “That’s what we call a false morel. Could be fine, could give you the runs, or a heart attack. Even kill you.”

I step away from his laughter, then turn and run in no direction other than away, my counting and tracking useless. All I know is my body, the rhythm of faster, faster, faster.

Once, hiking alone in Griffith Park, I saw a coyote. It looked as misplaced as I did among the palm trees, the Hollywood sign looming behind it like a giant marquee. We’d encroached upon its world, so now it crept through ours, both parties out of place.

I lose any sense of a path as I run, tripping over roots woolly with moss, crashing through bristly overgrowth. Nothing looks familiar. I’m lost for hours, but then there is the stream, rocks rising from the clear, gurgling water like the smooth backs of sleeping animals. Leaves, sticks, a flower loosed from its stem floating by. Nothing stays. I feel my heart slowing, its beat no longer pulsing at the base of my throat. Silence, I think — or not silence, exactly, but quiet. There is the sound of the stream and the high whine of unseen insects. The camouflage of so many wild things. Though I shouldn’t, I kneel and drink the crystalline water from my cupped hands.

When I emerge from the tree line, the sun is still high. Marcus waves from the garden he’s planting for us, and Deb and Pa wave from their front porch. Pa’s beaten me here. Or were we even out there together at all? There’s not much I’m sure of anymore. I didn’t think Ben would die. I didn’t think the end of society would be so swift. I didn’t think Marcus could skin a rabbit, or build a fire to roast it over. I didn’t think I’d eat it. Hunched over, breathing heavily, I realize that I know nothing of who I was and who I might be now.

A storm comes, bringing so much rain that the roof leaks and the downpour moves indoors. We eat with our hands while our bowls catch raindrops.

“This is like the Flood,” I say to Marcus as we lie in bed. “You know, Genesis.”

“This isn’t a flood,” Marcus says, but what do we know? Maybe that’s what the people in the myth said at first.

After a week, the storm breaks. Marcus rises early to evaluate the engorged stream with Pa. I’m in charge of assessing leaks.

I head outside with my coffee and look up at the roof, which seems the same to me.

“You made it through your first storm.” From her front porch, Deb raises her mug.

“Our roof leaked.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get it patched up.”

She brings over a ladder, leans it against our cabin, and motions for me to start. I’m two rungs up when she puts a hand on my bare calf. I startle at its chill.

“You okay to climb?” She mimics drinking from a bottle.

“Yes,” I say.

“Good. Then carry this too. For thatching.” She hands me a satchel filled with dried grasses and a jar of what appears to be mud. Into her own pocket she tucks a knife and a thick coil of wire.

On the roof, Deb spreads the daub into the weak places, which she spotted from the ground, while I thatch together pine branches and grasses, tying off bundles with wire that she slices and doles out to me as needed.

“How do you know how to do all this?” I ask.

“Picked it up along the way.”

“When you lived in Idaho? What’s your life like, back there?” In my mind, I see the farm I devised for them, cows like blank spaces against rolling hills.

“This is our life,” she says, patting the roof. “Right here.”

Get to know her, I think, recalling Marcus’s urgings. We’ve talked of the weather, the men, the chance of bears and how to lock the icebox, but I wonder about the tiniest details of their life: if she brushes out her hair each night or keeps it in those braids, if he helps her, if they speak or sit in silence over meals, if she sometimes rises in the night and climbs atop him, waking him with her hand.

“There must be something,” I say. “Come on, I’ll take anything.”

She looks at me for a long moment. What does she see? She stands, dusting loose pine needles from her lap. “Roof looks good.”

I scoop up the extra needles and pocket the jar of sap. Only when I’ve cleared most of the debris do I see the knife she’s left behind. My hesitation is brief. Into my waistband it goes, resting cool against the flat of my back. Then I’m seized by the thought of Deb removing the ladder, laughing the way Pa did, another trick.

“Coming?” she calls.

Marcus takes me down to the stream. We undress at the water’s edge as the light begins to fall. His muscles, thickened from the woods, appear even more defined in the absence of clothes. I pluck at the loose skin of my stomach and thighs.

“Here come the crickets,” I say as their stridulations rise up around us, a private concerto.

“This place is agreeing with you,” he whispers.

Ben let me bathe him once. I imagined it was what bathing our child might feel like, though it was already clear then that children weren’t part of our future. Everything assumed was falling away. He sat on the floor of our shower, and I soaped his back, behind his ears, in between his toes, then raked my hands through his hair. I stroked his dick, but nothing happened; once, we’d been unable to start a morning without surprising the other in the shower, half the fun the risk that we’d be late, again, for work. As I bathed him, he morphed from my child into my ailing father, hair graying at the temples and cheeks sunken as if he were already a skeleton. My mother remarried soon after his death, and I’d accused her of not loving him enough. Now I understood her loneliness. Ben had said nothing, but as I stood to go, he held my hand, and I sank back down into the shower, water running over us both. Things hadn’t been bad until they were. We’d missed the moment my father died, my mother and I, asleep in the other room as he took his last breath. I’d missed it with Ben too.

When it’s fully dark, Marcus and I crawl out of the water and onto the damp riverbank, where he fucks me with my back against the earth while I watch the stars spark awake and the moon rise thick and yellow. Not until we’re finished do I notice the pain at my shoulder blades and find the osseous remains coming up from the mud, the marks they’ve made on my skin. Back at the cabin, I peer in the mirror at the impressions left by another animal’s bones down my spine and across my shoulders.

Yellowstone, carving itself into my body.

The days begin to feel like an accumulation of bigger things — hair on our pillows and animal offerings at our front door. Maybe we’ve been in the woods too long and my thoughts have started walking around with the rest of the creatures of Yellowstone.

I go out into it, alone, in the middle of the night. It’s giddiness, not fear, that fills me as I make my way to the stream. This is my home now too, same as the toads lamenting from their hidden perches, the deer bending their necks to the pine-needled ground, the bugs that sting and bite. I’m calm as I step out of my clothes and into the cold water, and I remain so even as I rise up from the stream and see Pa watching me, watching my nude skin silver in the moonlight. Did he follow me, or can he, too, not sleep on nights when a full moon hangs low in the sky? I stand in the shallow stream, and he turns — to give me privacy, yielding to a decency I didn’t know was there, or to reach for the gun tucked in his holster? It doesn’t matter. What happens next has already been decided, is happening even now, as I walk out from the seclusion of the stream, make my way to my folded jeans.

The day Ben died was so much like the other days that came before it. I ate the same eggs and toast I’d always eaten, drove to the same coffee shop and ordered the same large cup of coffee. I had left him in his bathrobe in front of the TV, where I always left him, where I knew he’d be when I returned home. There should have been a sign from the universe, something out of place — an unexpectedly rainy LA day, the bathrobe spinning in the washing machine, Ben bathed, dressed, smiling.

When we were still young and in love, Ben still smiling, no bathrobe in sight, we used to play a game, the “I will love you until” game, in which we’d name all the terrible things we could do and still have our love remain. “I will love you until you kill a man, and even then” was an easy one. “I will love you until you hold an airplane hostage, and even then” was another. The best part was knowing that there was no limit, no thing we could imagine terrible enough to bring it all to a screeching halt. Present one with a body and the other would roll up their shirtsleeves and reach for a shovel.

Pa’s death takes longer than I expect; the paunched, rubbery skin and thick, meaty tendons of his throat fight against the blade. He only stops grinning when the knife goes in. While he dies, I tell him a creation myth — one from the book Ben gifted to me. Drowned deer, drowned panthers, drowned grizzlies. For there to be a new beginning, nothing old can be left behind.

Deb is a sound sleeper. We have time. I wake Marcus. What choice do I have? In his face there are so many things I can’t read. There hasn’t been time to consider that he might refuse.

“Get the tarp from the woodpile,” he says finally, not looking at me. When I return, he’s gathered shovels.

We bury the tarp-wrapped body in a dense thicket downstream. The grave is barely two feet deep, and still my arms ache from hours of effort. Animals will strip his flesh and leave the bones. The thrill of how easy it was moves through me like diving under a wave, the way I did when I was a child, not pausing to consider how icy the ocean might be.

We wash in the river, and when I realize that the blood and viscera clotted in my hair won’t rinse free, I take the knife and cut it off, watch the thick skeins float down the river, iridescent against the churning black water. After, we climb into our bed, and though I say his name several times, Marcus does not turn to me. I rub my hands over my head, again and again and again, feeling the short, blunt ends, the phantom places where my old hair should be. Since Ben’s death, I’ve been unraveling, the civilized parts of me spinning off to reveal the feral animal panting underneath. Have I always been this person, nestled inside the self I show to the outside world? If I look in the mirror, will it reveal eyes no longer my own but slitted and oddly shaped — rectangled, like a goat’s, or the deep green wells of a crocodile? Would I look and wonder, Who is this woman who scares everyone but herself?