The water was slipping down the walls again, forming an uneven rhythm of dripping against the uneven grounds. Lilith dug out the massive sponges that Salva secured from the fallen construction site two blocks away, and clogged the crevices between the ocean upstairs and this rotten-smelling basement that had become Lilith’s island.
It wasn’t long before the sponges were fully soaked, and Lilith was made to climb up her self-made ladder to replace them with new ones.
The ladder was of crushed chairs and empty cans, which Lilith had plenty of. Yet even with them piled up she was too short for the ceiling, and she was made to stand on her tiptoes, almost falling off twice on the way. She had always been short for her age—when the year 14 dawned on her life 10 months ago, she stayed in her child-like shape while the rest of her classmates rushed hastily into adolescence.
Lilith tried to recount whether this was the fourth rising tide of the day. Ever since the clock that had recently become her eating plate broke down from the bacteria-occupied water that also broke down Lilith’s lungs, she had been counting tides to keep track of the days, unsuccessfully. She pretended to herself that the tides followed a pattern of rising and falling, but sometimes they just ignored her rules and kept rising, until what used to be her bedroom became a broth with a swollen mattress, several pair of sneakers, and a splintered radio floating inside.
Lilith had decided that five rises of the tide would make a day. The first was getting out of bed, second was putting the tomato cans and smelly pillows into the washing machine, third was moving them into the dryer, fourth was leaving the house for Salva’s, and fifth was going to sleep as much as she could.
She told herself to stop counting. She wasn’t going to Salva’s today, so there was no point.
Lilith threw the soaked sponges into a drier corner of the room, and returned to her usual seat: a crushed laundry basket that lay upside-down in the center of the basement. Around it, the filthy water and Lilith’s empty Doritos bags had compiled into a shallow swamp.
With the dripped quieted, the only sound that now remained was the clanging dryer, half broken but refusing to make weird sounds, this time not with tomato cans or smelly pillows spinning inside, but actual clothes. It was binge-level overloaded, yet still trying to prove its emptiness by knocking the shoelaces of the sneakers inside against the belt buckles, forming a rather steady rhythm that reminded Lilith of tap dance.
She never knew how to tap dance. She remembered proposing it when she was eight, but her mother Aria decided that she should learn ballet instead—a less ingenious choice, since ballet was the first kind of dance that the world abandoned after the Flood started. Floors were always glimmering with oily water so it was impossible to do entrechat and cabriole on them. Aria sent Lilith to two more classes after the Flood began, at the second of which Lilith fell and broke her hip. She only nearly recovered when her family decided to leave town without her.
Lilith listened to the machine’s music, closing her eyes. She tapped the rhythm with her gloved fingers on the basket, with her rubber-booted feet amongst the trash. She nodded it with her droopy head, and tracked it with the rising and falling of her shoulders. She tried to sway a little too, but her hip was still stiff from the injury, so eventually she gave up, and made do with her limbs.
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap—
Then three trumpets from the basement door broke into the song. Lilith opened her eyes.
Lilith’s basement door was a decomposing, puffed-up piece of wood that was stuck in the doorframe above a black, iron, now slippery staircase. Twice Lilith stumbled in the trash on her way over, and three times nearly slipped off the stairs on her way up.
The door was stuck twice between Lilith managed to pull it open by detaching it from one of its hinges.
“Love the doorbell.” Salva handed her two sturdy plastic bags of cans and beans.
“David picked it.”
“Oh, I hate it then.” Salva ran her gloved fingers casually through Lilith’s hair, “bad day?”
Lilith glanced over to the dryer spinning downstairs: “Getting better.”
***
Lilith didn’t quite know who Salva was, or where she came from. She might have been a neighbor, but Lilith’s parents always invited neighbors over for dinners, and Salva was never among the guests. She might have been someone who traveled from other towns, or even other countries, since she spoke with an accent that was a little foreign, yet she knew the geography of Lilith’s town so well that she must have grown up here. She could be fifteen, twenty, or thirty. She might be sick with the same Scylla fungi as Lilith was, or something unrelated to the Flood at all. Salva might be her first name, last name, neither, or both.
Lilith asked her about the name once, but Salva just said that she picked it out of a book. Which book, she couldn’t remember; or it might have been a magazine, or newspaper. But it wasn’t the name her parents gave her, if she ever had them. What her name originally was, she couldn’t remember either, since she’d been calling herself Salva for as long as time, and everyone else tagged along.
She came up to Lilith, five days after Lilith’s family drove away along the then-less-flooded-road, handed her an orange soda, something that magically disappeared from Lilith’s life after the flood started, and asked her how she was. Lilith said that she was dying, and Salva laughed.
She’d taken Lilith under her wings ever since then. “I’ll adopt you” were the exact words that she said when Lilith was at the bottom of the soda. Lilith didn’t say yes or no, but followed her to a half-broken neighboring house where Salva had occupied the basement, took the cans and beans Salva handed her, and stayed alive.
It had been seven months since then, and Lilith never missed a single day. Gradually, she started even looking forward to them: to rowing the boat that Salva had made out of empty plastic bottles and tin cans; to wading through the water that led to Salva’s doorstep; to smelling the rottenness inside Salva’s house, one that was different from her own, for there was a distinctive, pine-like scent in Salva’s; to ring the doorbell, which Salva had detached from a vintage shop’s door nearby; to find the small, copper-green-colored space that Salva had found refuge in, with a simple mattress, a washing machine and a dryer, the room corner occupied by hundreds of cans, and a line of windows that transformed Salva’s basement into a greenhouse. In fact, the room was so hot in the day that Salva often undressed herself until she was only in her sports bra and underwear, and Lilith would look at her and wonder out loud that Salva probably visited the gym a lot back when everything was normal, but Salva would laugh and say no, that “lifting cans and rowing boats would do this to you.”
So Lilith waited for her body to become like Salva’s from carrying cans from Salva’s house to her own, but it never did. She remained slim and short for her age, as if time had decided to freeze on her, and refused to compel her into teenage-hood no matter what she did.
Another thing that Lilith had realized from her visits to Salva’s, is that Salva kept no souvenirs from the good old days. She herself had saved a few items that she treasured dearly: the radio from the living room, which used to function a lot better than the one in her own bedroom, but which she was never allowed to use; the world map that she had ripped off her bedroom wall before it molded, with pin holes on it indicating her dream travel destinations: Brazil, France, Indonesia; a chocolate bar which she’d eaten half on the day she was supposed to die but didn’t; the English class homework from the last day she went to school, on the page of which the girl who sat behind her had left a wine-colored scratch with her newly painted nails. It was the analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet 66, “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.” She never much liked Shakespeare, so she didn’t write the essay. School had been cancelled since the second day, and her English teacher died from Scylla infection two weeks after.
But Salva had nothing. There were no clothes, no photos, no souvenirs. Nothing in that room suggested who Salva might be before the Breakdown, or anything to indicate who this house used to belong to, either. It was clean, empty, tidy. The only things Salva had were the copper-green down jackets, overalls, and rain boots that everybody dressed in these days, since they were the only things that could stop the bacteria in the water from slipping up and into their skins. There were only two sets of underwear and bras that Salva changed between, both pure white with no labels. They could easily have come from the goods that helicopters sent down from the early stages of the flood, before all helicopters stopped functioning as well.
In the first four months, Lilith brought 2 cans of tomato, 2 cans of fish, and 2 bottles of water from Salva’s house to her own each day. After Lilith’s scheduled death, Salva started bringing her to food hunts as well: the old good-dropping destinations were the first places to check, then the old supermarkets and restaurants, then people’s houses and their refrigerators.
It was always Lilith going to Salva’s basement. Never had Salva come to hers.
Until yesterday afternoon, when Salva stopped their boat—it was Salva’s boat, made of empty plastic bottles, much larger than Lilith’s—in front of Lilith’s doorstep after their food hunt, and said: “Don’t come to my place after tomorrow. I’m leaving.”
Lilith had frozen: “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere beautiful.”
“But nowhere is beautiful now.”
“Somewhere is.”
That made Lilith a little cross. “If somewhere is beautiful, then it’s beautiful here too. You don’t have to leave.”
Salva studied the pain swirling in Lilith’s dry eyes for a while, before she combed Lilith’s hair with her fingers, and repeated very gently: “But I’m leaving.”
And that was it. There was no negotiation, or any clue about where Lilith might find her in the future. Salva started rowing slowly away, while Lilith stood numb at her front door.
“Come to my place tomorrow,” shouted Lilith.
Salva paused. “Sounds good.”
Lilith looked over to her, and she might have smiled. It was hard to tell, for Lilith was looking at her against the sun, which shone blindingly and silently over the river, the trash, and Salva’s silhouette.