Caleb looked like a ghost, in the light of a computer screen. The click of the computer keys demanded silence, so though a fan spun gently above, its crisp black blades pointlessly recirculating torrid air, it didn’t make a sound. The room was choked in darkness, the edges between objects made meaningless without light. Reaching out, the thin plastic of a water bottle was not as sturdy as the glass cup he’d expected, and it was wrung and crunched in his grasp.
He reached for a notebook, filigree lines and schematics printed on the surface like cracks in clay, but his hand was shaky and instead, he found himself bumping over a sample bottle. It clinked heavily against the table, the viscous liquid inside muting the sound, then spilled out slowly, running like syrup over the papers.
Quietly: “Shit.”
Caleb’s eyes didn’t move from his screen, his face expressionless. He knew he was hungry in the same way he knew that those ruined papers represented months of work, his best idea yet: as a dull contemplation, quickly ignored in favor of more important ideas.
The bolt in the apartment door slid open, cheap tin painted up as silver. Light from a flickering bulb in the hallway threw shadows under piles of clothes, sickly on the crisp linoleum floor, and reflected off the metal seams of towering filters that lay rejected against the sleek black countertop.
Silhouetted in the light, she muttered, “I don’t know why you need samples of this stuff. We have a sink.”
She turned the knob for emphasis, black water running like blood against the basin. He cleared a space on his desk and looked up from the screen. Awkward silence stretched out, only seconds, but in the dim light and the early morning it felt vast.
“Alright, Dad, love you too.” She shrugged as she switched off the faucet.
In the street below, a bottle smashed against a wailing car alarm, and muted by distance someone screamed. They wailed not in defiance or terror, but in pain. Caleb knew that scream — everyone knew that scream. When the water itself is polluted, laced with sickness, and people you know die like flies on the surface of a summer lake, you get used to those cries. He didn’t know what the other sounds were. He didn’t want to know.
It was funny, he mused, the scream jolting him out of his work. No one died of dehydration. Even the most committed, even those who knew that to drink was to die, gave in eventually.
“We’re running out, aren’t we?”
“We have a day. Maybe two.”
Caleb turned back to his work. Water dripped at a snail's pace out of the latest filter. It was a little clearer, wasn’t it? It was harder to work with shaky hands, bleary eyes, and a mouth like parchment, like sand. Neither of them bothered admitting their thirst, but it hung in the air like a stormcloud. Finally, breaking like a dam, desperation rose to the surface.
“I’m going out. There’s gotta be someth—” she started.
“No.” His eyes darted up. He spoke too quickly. “I’m almost done.” She sat down and he seized his moment, rising shakily to slide the tin bolt against further conversation. The outside world was dangerous — the desperate would drink anything, and they were both too thirsty to risk the temptation. And he was so close. He barely thought as he discarded the key down the kitchen sink. It hit the side with a bright clink.
He narrowed his eyes, filtering out thirst, hunger, and numbness from hours of work. His thoughts were muddled, Caleb thought. He needed clarity.
The blackened water that was spilled across the inventor’s desk and splashed over the sink basin had dried, now. The filter was painfully slow. But after this test, he would know that he had succeeded.
The newspapers said you’ll know the end is coming when you stop feeling pain — and slowly dehydration numbed his sore muscles, the ringing in his ears, even his sandpaper tongue. Still, he made the final adjustments on a filter that he no longer had time to test.
Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb saw his daughter stand. She approached the sink. Dehydration slowed his reaction, his eyelids trying to wet his eyes and follow her movement. He reached out, fingers closing around the cold metal. Standing up cost too much time, and too much energy. The room extended, the seams between the tiles faded in the darkness. Each step thundered in his ears, gripped in his hand a holy grail, he tried shouting from dry lungs that he had finished, that the filter was done, that they could save themselves from the cloying sickness flooding the world below, but instead all he could do was rasp, unsure if he had really spoken or just dreamt speech.
Blackness closed around the corners of his vision. He stood too soon, but with each footfall hitting like raindrops, he reached the sink; lunged over empty bottles, clothes, dishes, domestic refuse, blood pounding in his ears. The sharp pain was iron in his veins, blunted only by dehydration. He could feel his stomach flip and surge with bile. Sunlight broke over the rooftops, through the blinds.
His filter clamped onto the pipes beneath the sink, Caleb took a step back, panting, The filter — his greatest invention — gleamed in the dawn. Beneath the apartment, the plumbing groaned and shrieked, pressure building up, but the filter held fast.
They had no more tears left to cry, but if they could, they would both be weeping. The inventor's daughter laughed as she reveled in the simple pleasure of tap water! She reached out to fill a cup.
The faucet sputtered and shook. No water came up. The inventor let himself smile for the first time in days. The key to their door was discarded, the door locked, and all the water filtered out of the pipes.
He would not die a putrid death, infected, poisoned. He could not hear his daughter screaming at him, trying to tear his magnum opus off the pipes. Warm sunlight heated the room, and the fan did nothing but recirculate hot, dry air.