Ish searches the Bay Area for survivors

Ish’s search through the Bay Area is his first sustained attempt to discover whether anyone else has survived the disaster, and its bleak encounters overturn the hope that survival alone might restore human companionship. He tries one means of communication after another—radio, telephone, signal light, and finally the horn of his car—only to find that being alive has not made the people he encounters ready or able to begin again. The search ends not with a community, but with Ish alone among the city’s remnants, carrying out a small act of care for a man who could not endure the new world.

The Search for a Reply

The search begins at night, when Ish cannot sleep. The summer fog presses around the house, and loneliness gives way to fear and then panic. He sits at the radio and turns through the bands, hearing only distant static. The telephone offers a more promising sound: its line is clear, and a number he dials rings in some faraway house. He waits through ten unanswered rings, imagining the sound traveling through empty rooms, then tries two more numbers before stopping. These attempts test not merely whether the machines still function, but whether any human being remains at the other end of them.

Ish next rigs a light with a reflector and sends the old SOS pattern from the front porch: three short flashes, three long, and three short. No reply comes from across the city. He recognizes that the still-lit streets make his signal difficult to see, but the failed attempt also establishes the scale of his predicament: working equipment can transmit a call, yet it cannot guarantee that anyone will hear or answer it. The city’s continued illumination is both a remnant of the old order and an obstacle to being noticed within it.

By morning, Ish has made the search into a practical plan. He believes that an urban district of two million people must contain other survivors; the problem, as he sees it, is making contact. He first walks through the neighborhood, looking around familiar houses for someone he knows. There is no sign of anyone. The lawns are parched and the flowers are wilting, quiet evidence that ordinary maintenance has already stopped. He looks into a narrow, cave-like space among rocks in a little park where he had hidden as a boy, but finds no refuge or person there. Nearby, round hollows in the rock mark where Indigenous women once pounded grain with stone pestles. The traces of an earlier human world sharpen his fear that the world built after it may also have ended—and that he may be its sole witness.

A City Answering Through Its Ruins

Ish then drives a route intended to expose as few areas as possible to the sound of his horn. He hoots about once a minute and pauses to listen. As he travels, he studies the city rather than passing through it blindly: many cars remain parked, the streets retain an almost ordinary early-morning appearance, and smoke rises from fires in scattered places. Bodies lie where people were overcome. Near one, two dogs remain; at a telephone pole, a dead man hangs beneath a placard identifying him as a looter. In the business district, a liquor-store window has been broken. The evidence does not describe a city wholly swept away in a single visible upheaval. Instead, familiar streets and parked cars persist alongside death, fire, and the first signs of disorder.

At the end of the business district, Ish sounds his horn again. A faint honk answers from far off. He initially suspects an echo, but repeated signals establish that someone is responding. He follows the sound through the streets, turning as its direction shifts, sometimes overshooting it and sometimes finding it closer. The reply becomes almost immediate, drawing him to a car parked by a small business district. There he finds a man slumped behind the wheel; as Ish approaches, the man collapses forward, pressing the horn into a long squawk. The anticipated first contact has arrived in a form Ish did not expect: the signal comes not from a vigorous survivor waiting to be found, but from a man too drunk to remain upright.

Mr. Barlow and the Limits of Rescue

The man is Mr. Barlow. A liquor store nearby stands open, and a half-empty bottle is within his reach. Ish’s first response is anger: after searching for anyone who might help him face the emptied city, he has found a man apparently incapable of helping himself. He shakes Mr. Barlow awake, pushes him upright, and throws the bottle onto the curb, where it breaks. Yet when Ish looks into Mr. Barlow’s eyes, anger gives way to pity. Ish reads fear and horror there, and understands that the man has seen more than he could bear. His bloated appearance and helplessness do not erase the sensitive mind Ish imagines behind them; escape and oblivion have become Mr. Barlow’s way of enduring what remains.

The encounter is physical before it is explanatory. Mr. Barlow’s eyes move without control, his breathing rasps, and his pulse is weak and irregular. Ish suspects that he has been drinking for a week and doubts that he can last much longer. He considers staying to sober him up and reform him, but his knowledge of alcoholism makes that prospect seem poor, while remaining would cost him the chance of finding someone more capable of joining him. Ish tells the collapsed man that he will return. The promise marks a minimal obligation rather than a rescue plan: Ish cannot make Mr. Barlow well, but he does not want to treat him as an object to be abandoned without acknowledgment.

Other Survivors, Another Kind of Solitude

The search does not produce a straightforward alternative. At one point Ish encounters a long-legged teenage girl with stringy blond hair standing in the street. She peers through the windshield, then runs like a startled deer, dodging through a hole in a board fence. Ish calls after her and waits, but she does not answer. He imagines that she may already have learned to treat a young woman’s safety as dependent on fleeing quickly, though he cannot know her experience. The scene makes contact itself uncertain: Ish’s wish to find another person does not mean that person will regard his approach as safe.

Later, Ish meets an unkempt man pushing a baby carriage piled with canned goods and cartons. The man takes him to a nearby house that he is filling with possessions. The collection mixes useful stores with things gathered for no clear purpose: canned food, oranges already too plentiful to eat before they spoil, beans spilling from a torn bag, boxes of light bulbs and radio tubes, a cello he cannot play, a pile of identical magazines, and a dozen alarm clocks. The old man had been married and had worked as a hardware-store clerk. Ish understands his hoarding not as preparation for a shared future, but as a retreat into material security and isolation. The man seems happier without anyone to interfere, yet Ish judges him to be already, in an essential sense, dead: the disaster has intensified an existing withdrawal until possessions take the place of human ties.

When Ish starts to leave, the old man grabs his arm in panic and asks why he was spared. Ish answers sharply, resenting the survival of someone who appears to have abandoned life while so many others died. The exchange exposes a harsher side of Ish’s search. He wants survivors, but he also measures them against an imagined standard of usefulness and resilience; the old man’s fear provokes anger because survival has not produced the kind of companion Ish hoped to find.

Return and Aftermath

Ish keeps his promise to revisit Mr. Barlow’s street. He finds the body on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store and recognizes that Mr. Barlow has died. Ish cannot bring himself to leave him exposed, though he does not know how to arrange a conventional burial. He finds blankets in a nearby dry-goods store, wraps the body carefully, places it in the car, and closes the windows. The car becomes a sealed, makeshift mausoleum. Ish says nothing; instead, he looks at the neat roll of blankets, removes his hat, and stands uncovered for a few seconds.

This return gives the search an ending shaped by care rather than discovery. Ish had left because he could not save Mr. Barlow and still hoped to find a more promising survivor. When he comes back, there is no possibility of companionship, but there remains a duty to the person he met. The other encounters have shown him distinct failures of connection: the radio and telephone receive no answer, the girl chooses flight, and the old man has enclosed himself among goods. Mr. Barlow’s death makes the cost of the disaster intimate, while Ish’s quiet farewell preserves a human gesture in a city where the old systems of help and burial no longer operate. The search confirms that others may be alive, but it does not yet provide the community Ish was looking for.