The Ammonite Violin & Others (16 page)

You don’t say a word to me, which, I suppose is more than I deserve. I sit and smoke my cigarette and listen to you doing something in the kitchen. I think that I hear silverware and the refrigerator door open and shut. I look at the clock for the first time since you left, and it seems impossible that only a little more than six hours have passed. I think that I might hear you crying, a very brittle sound I’d rather not be hearing, and I get up and go to the bathroom because I have to piss, and I don’t want to be sitting here listening to you sobbing in the fucking kitchen. I don’t want to sit here trying to figure out what I’ll say when you walk through the bedroom door, or what I’ll see, or what you’ll say to me. In the bathroom, I run cold water in the sink and splash it on my face. I look like shit. I might have shaved two days ago. There are circles beneath my eyes the color of bruised apples. My lips are so chapped they’ve been bleeding. There’s a speck of dried blood on my chin.

I flush the toilet, and for a few seconds there’s only the urine-stained water swirling round and round the rust-stained porcelain, convenient gravity and PVC plumbing there to take away my body’s waste and spit it out somewhere faraway or far below where I’ll never have to look at it again.

I keep waiting for you to call my name.

I
keep
waiting.

I finish my cigarette and drop the butt into the toilet, where it hisses briefly before I flush again.

When I give up and open the bathroom door, you’re lying naked on the bed. You’ve pushed all the blankets off onto the floor, so there’s just the pillows and dingy white sheets that hardly ever get washed or changed, and you’re lying there on your back, staring up at the ceiling. You don’t say a word, and you don’t turn your head to look, at me, either. Your long legs are spread so I can see your cunt, your knees bent, your feet braced flat against the sheet, all of it to make me think of a pregnant woman trying to push out something wet and helpless and squalling, something parasitic that’s been carried for nine months, but enough’s enough.

I don’t need you to tell me I’ve got it all backwards. But then L always have.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, because I can’t stand the silence any longer, and for a moment or two I think you’re not going to answer me.

“No,” you say, and there’s nothing the least bit different about your voice. I’d thought that there would be, that surely it would have changed somehow, but it’s only your voice. You sound tired. You sound like you’ve been crying. And that’s when I notice the aluminum canister lying on the bed beside you. It’s not muck larger than a thermos. There are runes or some sort of Egyptian hieroglyphics etched into it, and droplets of condensation have formed on the metal.

“Are you going to watch?” you ask me, but you’re still staring at the ceiling. Your eyes are far away, and I think maybe they’re still down
there
somewhere, that, possibly, whatever it was you saw at the end of all those stairs and cellars and tunnels, it wasn’t the sort of thing you can ever
stop
seeing.

“Is that what you want?” I ask.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. But you watch, if you want. I’m not afraid to be alone, but if you want to watch, it won’t make any difference.”

Your bare feet are black with soot or dirt or whatever filth, you’ve tracked back up from the deep places below the city. There are long scrapes on your legs, like maybe you ran into a patch of brambles along the way. And then I notice the welt beneath your chin, flesh gone puffy and purple and already turning necrotic.

I might think it was only a bad spider bite, if I didn’t know better. If I didn’t know about the stingers and the venom, the kiss of Athena to switch off your immune system. To make you receptive to what’s still to come.

“My throat’s sore,” you tell me. “That’s all. I’m tired, and my throat’s a little sore.”

“I could call an ambulance,” I say, taking one hesitant step nearer the bed. “There might still be time.”

And then you do turn your head, and you look straight look at me, and I know that it’s much, much too late for ambulances and doctors and whatever they can or cannot do. Too late for intervention. I think your eyes must have drowned down there; I think this is only a corpse that has floated back up to me.

“You may watch,” you tell me again, your voice turned hard and sharp as ice. I pretend that’s not your voice at all (though it is), that they’ve already hollowed you out, and this thing on our bed is hardly more than a puppet, a crumpled marionette of flesh and
papier-mâché
with your face and your drowned blue eyes.

“I’ll just sit by the window,” I reply. “If you need anything, I’ll do what I can.”

You nod and then go back to staring at the ceiling, but your expression, your puppet’s sneer is there to say so much more, to remind me that I’ve missed my chance, so fuck me. I let you go down to the abyss alone, down to those hungry, patient whisperers huddled in places where it is never anything but night. I waited up here and stared out a goddamn window it the city lights and the night sky and a burning dirigible. I cant help you, not now, and I deserve to see everything that’s coming. I deserve to sit here in my chair and watch and know that there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help.

I know what to expect, more or less, like almost anyone these days would know what to expect. I sat through one of those interminable films the WHO or CDC or whoever it is that thinks they’re monitoring this mess keeps cranking out. That was months ago, because it was still summer. It was summer, a hundred plus in the shade but not a tree in sight, and I’d only gone into the theater because I thought it would be air-conditioned, but then it wasn’t. No luck, buddy. The AC’s busted, on the fritz, kaput, been busted for weeks now; so I sat there in the muggy darkness with half a dozen or so strangers and watched the screen through the grey haze of other people’s cigarette smoke. I had a warm bottle of beer from the concession stand, and so ’ sipped my beer and tried to ignore some guy one row in front of me and a few seats to my left who started masturbating as soon as the lights went down. Everyone else ignored him, too.

The film was narrated by someone pretty. I can’t even recall if it was a man or a woman, just that they were clean and well-dressed and didn’t look sick or hungry or scared. I suppose the world must still be filled with people like that, even if I never see them anymore.

The masturbating man kept whispering to himself or his dick or someone that he only imagined was there, someone only he could see. A woman a few rows farther down turned around twice and told him to shut up, but I don’t think he heard her. I don’t think he was listening.

I remember thinking how much the warm beer tasted like a mixture of soda water and cornflakes and then wondering how long it had been since I’d last eaten a bowl of cornflakes.

Up on the screen, the pretty, clean, healthy, well-dressed person was sitting at a table with a black man in a white lab coat, a very nervous-looking man whom I could tell didn’t want to be sitting there answering the questions he was being asked, saying the things that he was saying, most of which were probably lies, anyway. He talked about the gold mines in South Africa and Siberia, the biology of extremophiles, endoliths, and cryptoendoliths, contaminated core samples, virulence, infectivity, and on and on and on. He said something like, “Epidemiology is concerned with the incidence of disease in a given population or populations, but it doesn’t address questions of the
cause
of any particular individual’s disease.” Talking smaller and smaller circles round himself, as though words could form some protective mandala. The pretty narrator smiled a lot. The man in the lab coat never even smiled once.

There was a warning, disclaimer sort of thing then, the following footage contains graphic images not suitable for anyone under the age of whatever, eighteen, twenty-one, I don’t know. The management assumes no responsibility. Etc. and etc. and so forth. The masturbating man made all excited, eager sort of noise, and I thought about getting up and moving to another seat near the back of the theater. Most of the seats were empty, after all. But I didn’t move. I kept my seat and sipped my warm beer and watched.

The narrator kept referring to the thing onscreen as a “typical patient” but there wasn’t much left that could have passed for human. It was locked inside some sort of isolation chamber, glovebox, airlock quarantine sort of contraption with tall plexiglas sides. There was someone in a white biohazard suit standing behind the glovebox reading a computer monitor. The thing inside, cradled in what looked like orange gelatin, quivered and shifted about in the tank while the narrator’s voice-over talked about advances in treatment and serums and shit like that.

So, I know what is coming.

I know what she went down there to find, and what she found, and what is coming. More or less.

“One significant hurdle facing doctors is the apparent willingness of many people to be infected, despite these horrific consequences,” the narrator said. Or they said something very similar. It was months ago, and I can’t remember precisely, and it doesn’t matter, anyway.

And then the film moved on to a psychologist and an anthropologist and a priest, all of them talking about the social and ethical ramifications, the “problem” of euthanasia and life termination, cognitive and neurocognitive consequences, the Lamb of God and the Seven Seals, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, crap like that, blah, blah, fuckity blah, and I finished my beer and set the bottle down between my feet. Rut I didn’t leave. I’d paid to see it all—no, I’d paid for air conditioning, but I
had
paid my money, and now I was going to see it all.

And I did. I saw it all. Everything they were willing to show. And whatever they weren’t, well, I’m sure I’ll be seeing very soon now.

I wasn’t watching when she finally opened the aluminum canister. I was fading in and out, dozing in my uncomfortable chair by the window, the winter sunlight falling warm across my face, but I
heard
it clearly, and the noise immediately brought me back around. First, a distinct
click
and then the loud
pop
when she broke the inner hermetic seal, a sucking sound like someone taking a deep breath through pursed lips as she pulled the plug and the negative pressure inside the canister quickly equalized with the pressure in the bedroom.

It’s loose in the room with us.

And I have nothing whatsoever to fear, not for my own safety, my own morphological integrity (as the nervous man in the lab coat might have said). Because I have not been kissed. I did not follow her down and through those dim subterranean paths to receive the gift, to offer myself up to the devouring shadows. I want to get up and leave the room. Leave the apartment. Leave the building. Call one of the government hotlines when I’m miles and miles away from this place, and the guys in the baggy Tyvek coveralls and booties can deal with her, all those hazmat sons of bitches with their protocols and respirators and decontaminates.

But I don’t leave, because I told her I’d be there if she needed anything.

I swear that I will not watch, though. I sit at the window and stare out at the early afternoon sun shining down on the slate and tarpaper rooftops and snagging in the high, bare limbs of trees, sparking on the filthy green river where no visible evidence of the fallen dirigible remains—all the world out there that may or may not have been touched by shiny aluminum canisters of their own.

“It’s what I want,” she says. “You have to understand that. Please—”

And I tell her to shut the hell up, that I don’t want to hear that shit, and she does as I’ve asked.

But there are
other
sounds, which I know better than to try to put into words. There are sounds, and describing them is more than anyone can fairly ask of a confessed coward. There are
other
sounds, that’s all. The noises
they
make, those busy, busy little fuckers, those industrious fiends, asleep in the gardens of Proserpine for however many hundreds of millions of years until someone breaks their stasis, someone wakes them up, and suddenly there’s not another second to spare.