Introduction

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A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection * An Indie Next Pick * An Indies Introduce Selection * One of Reader’s Digest’s Best Summer Books of 2019 * One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2019 * One of Real Simple’s Best Books of 2019

“[This] might be the most optimistic post-apocalyptic story ever written. It’s Sleepless in Seattle meets Station Eleven.” —The A.V. Club

Carson is on the East Coast when the electrical grid goes down. Desperate to find Beatrix, a woman on the West Coast who holds his heart, he sets off along a cross-country railroad line, where he encounters lost souls, clever opportunists, and those seeking salvation. Meanwhile, Beatrix and her neighbors begin to construct a cooperative community, working to turn the end of the world into the possibility of a bright beginning.

Without modern means of communication, will Beatrix and Carson be able to find their way to each other? The answer may lie with one fifteen-year-old girl, whose actions could ultimately decide the fate of the lovers.

The Lightest Object in the Universe is a moving story about adaptation and the power of community, imagining a world where our best traits, born of necessity, can begin to emerge.

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Excerpt

At the end of a long and narrow street not far from the sea, right around the time of the spring equinox, the sun rose as a sliver between two skyscrapers. Carson Waller could see it if he stepped out onto the tiny balcony of his apartment at precisely the right time. One morning in mid-March, he woke just as the light was shifting, the beige color of his bedroom walls warming to yellow. Time to rise. To admire the light and to tend to the tasks of this strange new life: fill water buckets, forage for food, track down supplies. In a few days, he’d leave this apartment—this whole city—behind.

He rolled onto his back and exhaled. The inhale came of its own accord and, with it, a surprising and fragrant tang. Sweetness. The smell was unmistakable. Citrus. Oranges. How was that possible here, right now, near the end of winter? He breathed in again. There it was.

He thought immediately of Beatrix. Her smile, her auburn hair, her hands, the sound of her voice. Closing his eyes, he inhaled again and imagined her next to him, the weight and warmth of her almost real.

He lay still. The cold morning fell over him. When he opened his eyes, the light had shifted and the smell of oranges was gone. All that remained was a cavern inside his chest.

Shivering from the cold, he dressed and went to the bathroom sink, where he scooped enough water from a bucket into his hands to rinse them. Since the rooftop cisterns had emptied, he’d been hauling water up from the street.

He toasted two pieces of stale bread over the gas flame of the stove. Another temporary luxury. It would probably go soon as well. He sprinkled some salt over the dry toast, cut up a mushy apple, and carried his breakfast into the living room.

From the window, he could see the vendors below setting out their goods on the sidewalk. This was part of the adaptation: you could simplify and run to the country, or you could buy and trade and sell. The marketplace was immortal, but it, too, had changed. Now the collections were random and personal, spread across blankets on the ground. Coffee makers, monogrammed towels, heirloom tea sets, little motors that no longer turned, tangles of useless electrical cords. Even a good find carried a certain bitter aftertaste. And yet there was no telling what might become suddenly useful. An extension cord made for a fine clothesline. Large Tupperware storage bins could hold gallons of water.

He held binoculars to his eyes. One of the vendors was on all fours, reaching across the blanket to arrange pots and dishes and utensils into tidy rows. She was portly and blond and encumbered by a long, heavy coat. A small dog curled up near her feet. She placed clothing into piles and arranged books by color. At the far corner of the blanket, she’d put the things not easy to categorize—a game of Trivial Pursuit, a stack of file folders, a computer keyboard.

A bulky man in a leather jacket moved swiftly along the sidewalk, and Carson tracked him through the binoculars. It was Ayo, one of his building’s doormen, before the layoffs six months ago.

Ayo, a Nigerian, had immigrated to the States with his wife nearly a decade ago. He was an educated man, once a student activist. “It is not always a good idea to advertise one’s political ideas, but sometimes it is necessary,” he once said.

Carson had crossed paths with Ayo a few weeks ago on the street—the first time he’d seen him since the layoffs.

“Mr. Principal!” Ayo had called out from half a block away. “It’s you! I thought maybe you had dissolved in a solution of vinegar. You are holed up in your apartment like a mouse?”

“I have not dissolved, no,” Carson had said, smiling. “It is nice to see you, Ayo.”

“Every day is a blessing, yes,” Ayo had said.

Ayo was a hustler now, with access to the new black market, where he could get soap, butter, coffee, meat, flour, batteries, fuel, and almost anything else. “Run by Africans,” he had explained that day. “That is why they call it the ‘black market,’ sir. We Africans are quite adept at adversity. Or maybe, sir, because we are such good con artists.” He had laughed and jabbed an elbow into Carson’s ribs.

With the supermarkets stripped and dark, it was a lucky and necessary thing to have a supply man. The shipping containers had become bloated whales stuck up on the sand. It was vendors like Ayo who kept people fed, rolling shopping carts up and down the streets, selling canned beans and stale rice they’d hoarded, or vegetables they’d somehow grown or gleaned from farms outside the city.

Carson tracked Ayo from the window, watching him flow down the sidewalk.

[section break]

On the other side of the country, in the back of a wagon, Beatrix Banks felt as if she were on a choppy sea, as if all she had to do was yield to circumstance. But what circumstance was this? No metro rail to shuttle her through the city and over the bay; instead, horses. When she’d left the US nearly two months earlier, no one had yet thought to attach a horse to a cart and haul passengers around. At this moment, despite the bumpy ride, she was grateful someone had.

Exhausted and disoriented, Beatrix dug in her backpack for her cell phone. She should call her housemates, Hank and Dolores, tell them she was on her way. But the phone, of course, had been dead for weeks. She held it in both hands, like a fragile, lifeless bird.

Across from her in the wagon, a woman, about fifty, wrapped in a purple shawl, gave Beatrix a sympathetic frown.

“You can kiss that phone goodbye,” said a man next to her. He coughed once, and Beatrix stiffened. Was there still flu here?

“No phone service at all? Landlines?” she asked, inching away from the man.

“Only if you’re willing to saw off an arm and a leg,” the woman in purple said.

There was some murmuring among the other passengers about radio communication and solar power. “What about the almighty generator that preacher uses?” someone said.

Beatrix put her phone back in her backpack.

She watched the sun inch higher into the sky. Things here had unraveled quickly. No more phone service. Intermittent power. Horses on the highway. She felt panic rise inside. Just get me to my people, she thought.

The wagon dropped Beatrix a few blocks from home, and as the sound of the horse hooves receded into the distance, she felt herself relax a little. Despite her fatigue, she walked quickly. Her house glimmered like a beacon, sunlight bouncing off the windows and warming the front porch. Beatrix headed up the walkway just as a tall man with shaggy hair came out the front door carrying a bicycle. Her downstairs neighbor—Joe, was it?

It took a moment before he recognized her. “You’re back. Where were you?”

“Mexico City,” she told him. “A fair-trade convention. Or what was supposed to be a fair-trade convention.” It dawned on her that what she’d maneuvered—flying south across the border in the midst of a global meltdown—was more of a miracle than she’d realized.

“That was brave of you,” he said.

“Or just dumb.”

He looked up from the bicycle and held out his hand. “Beatrice, right? I’m Dragon.”

“Beatrix, with an x,” she said.

“So how did you get home?”

“A complicated hitchhike,” she said, explaining how the airlines had folded, and then the bus lines, and how what was supposed to be a ten-day trip had turned into six weeks, until she’d finally found a cargo trucker with enough room, fuel, and business smarts to transport her, along with a tired diplomat and a handful of US soldiers, to Tijuana. “As soon as we crossed the border, they all knelt to kiss the fucking pavement.”

“Well, that was lucky,” he said.

Beatrix nodded, feeling grateful. “Isn’t your name Joe?”

“Yeah, formally. I go by Dragon now. A resurrected nickname. Fiercer, I guess,” he said, lifting one of his eyebrows and making it disappear behind a dark curl on his head.

She had the urge to pull him into a hug. But they barely knew each other. “It is good to be home,” she conceded, picking up her backpack.

“You know they’re gone, right?” he said as she started up the stairs. “Your roommates.”

“Hank and Dolores? What do you mean?”

“Yeah. They went north.”

“North?” Beatrix said, feeling like she’d just been punched in the stomach.

“A whole group went together,” Dragon said. “They loaded all their stuff into a wagon and headed toward wine country. More fertile, I guess.” He scoffed a little as he said this, then shrugged.

“What? You don’t think it’s safe?” Beatrix asked. “I mean, if everyone’s going.”

“If everyone were jumping off a bridge, would you?”

“So you don’t think it’s a good idea. To go north.”

“I just told you what I thought,” he said, and turned back to his bicycle.

Beatrix went upstairs, the punch to her stomach now a grip in her chest. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The book alternates between the perspectives of Carson and Beatrix, and later, Rosie. Each confronts the events of the collapse in distinct ways. Which character did you most identify with, and why?

2. One of the first characters we meet in the novel is Ayo, Carson’s former doorman. What is the significance of his presence, both in Carson’s life and in the larger story?

3. Carson learns early on to read situations quickly and use his instincts. He often trusts those he meets; sometimes, but not always, this works in his favor. Where does his trust come from and how does it serve him? Are you someone who often leads with trust?

4. Dragon and Flash are part of the People’s Bicycle Brigade (PBB), which they describe as “the internet on wheels.” What role does the PBB come to play in the book? Is there a real-life equivalent of the PBB, or another organization that functions similarly, in your community or city?

5. One of the central themes in the book is faith—from personal conviction to religious belief. How do the characters (Carson, Beatrix, Jonathan Blue, Rosie, Maria del Carmen, Flash, Dragon, and others) each define faith and in what ways are they “faithful”?

6. When Flash is consoling Rosie about her grandmother’s protectiveness, he speaks about faith as a series of “good deeds.” What are some examples of good deeds performed in the book? What are some of your own good deeds?
7. In adapting to life in her neighborhood, Beatrix takes on creative tasks to bring people together. Along the way she encounters neighbors who are willing to join her efforts, and others less so. How well do you know your neighbors? What opportunities exist for interacting with others in your neighborhood? What kind of neighbor are you?
8. What is the role of art and storytelling in the novel?
9. Carson embarks on an epic journey in traveling on foot across the country to find Beatrix. How is he changed by the journey? What long journeys have you made, either actual or metaphorical, and how have they changed you?
10. What is the interplay between individual and collective loss in the aftermath of the collapse? In what ways do personal losses become amplified or diminished by collective losses?
11. Birds appear often in the novel. Where do they appear and what do they signify for the characters? For the story?
12. Rosie comes of age during the novel, with many situations contributing to her accelerated maturity. Can you trace the arc of her development? How might you have responded to these situations as a teenager?
13. An epigraph at the opening of the novel quotes Bill McKibben naming the heaviest object in the universe. What does he mean by this? What do you think its reverse—“the lightest object”—refers to, and why is it the book’s title?
14. In what ways did the book inspire you to think about your own strategies for surviving an apocalypse, should one happen? How self-reliant are you? Whom would you turn to for help? How dependent are you on the electrical grid and how would life be different for you if you had less power?
15. The novel is set in the near future after a series of unprecedented economic and energy failures. What historical or present-day realities did it make you think about?

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