Authors: Alex Adams
DATE: THEN
“Are you sexually active?”
This is not Dr. Scott. It’s an unfamiliar face atop a white coat, which may or may not mean he’s really a physician. He told me his name when I came in, but my brain slipped a gear and cast it to the sterile, air-conditioned breeze.
“No.”
He doesn’t look like a doctor. There’s a briskness to doctors this man lacks. They’re used to running from one emergency to the next. They slip their feet into comfortable shoes, not robust boots with a firmness to the toes that indicates they’re lined with steel. These boots have not seen the inside of an emergency room. Nor have they seen construction. If I knelt, held my face close to the polished leather, I’d see a distorted version of my face. A fun-house hall of mirrors lives on his boots, reminding me that ever since the mice died last week, Pope Pharmaceuticals feels like a dream version of itself. Things aren’t quite where they’re supposed to be—nothing happens quite as it did, and while the faces are the same, the souls behind them are not. Strangers nod, smile, speak to me like they’ve worked with me for two years.
Even George P. Pope’s face in the lobby is altered.
Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family
, he says like he always has, but now the words feel like a lie.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Although I don’t see how it’s any of your—”
“Any chance you might be pregnant?”
“—business. No.”
He looks like security, although I’ve seen most of the security staff around the building and in the cafeteria, and this guy isn’t one of ours. Pope Pharmaceuticals’ security force comprises men used to walking their beat under a fluorescent sun. This guy has a tan. A real one. Hard edges make up his attitude and his face. He hasn’t been counting the minutes between doughnuts.
He makes notes on a clipboard grasping papers a finger deep. Or maybe he’s checking boxes on a quiz:
Are you a closet conspiracy theorist? How well do you know your sexual health?
“Have you been sick in the last month?”
“No.”
“What about in the last week?”
“I just told you. No.”
“Have you had any sickness today?”
“No.”
“Has anyone in your immediate familial or social circle experienced any illness recently?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t believe me. It’s Etch-A-Sketched all over his face in long doubting lines. At the edge of his jaw a small twitch appears, ticking in time with his clenching and releasing jaw.
“Are you sure?” He’s a robot, unable to think outside the questions on his list or the responses he’s been given to parrot. In that he is exactly like Dr. Scott.
“Positive.”
“Do you know the whereabouts of Jorge Valdez?”
I can feel my eyebrows rise. “He’s not at work?”
“When did you last see him?”
Not yesterday, because that was my day off. Nor the day before, for the same reason. The two days before those were Jorge’s days off. Last I saw of him was the Jesus sticker slapped on his truck’s rear end as he zoomed into the evening haze.
“Friday.”
No
The day you found the mice
or
That’s interesting
. Just another check on the paper.
I sit. I wait. If he touches me I will run screaming, because those are not doctor’s hands. A callus forms a thick smooth cap over his right thumb, as if he’s dipped it in yellowing wax and let it spill into the backwards
L
it forms with his finger. The pen is alien to his hand because it’s used to holding something designed to make a less fine point. A firearm.
Don’t touch me
.
Don’t—
“You can go,” he says, although there’s a kind of calm craziness behind his eyes that suggests he’d like nothing more than to compel me to yield different answers. He reaches out to me with his left hand. We stare at each other until I break. I know he’s not a doctor. And he knows that I know.
The jar has made me paranoid. I’m seeing monsters where there are only men.
The hand stays steady, but I push off the Naugahyde-covered bed without his help. My feet hit the floor like they’re wearing cement shoes.
Ben is dead. I know
this because there are people standing outside my apartment telling me so. They have the quiet disheveled appearance of cops who’ve been on their feet too many hours for too many years. I see them mouth their names, but bees have set up house deep in my ear canals. I can’t think—not with this noise.
“How?”
Their lips move in some undefinable shapes.
“Wait.” I shake my head, bend down, grab my knees. And count to ten. When I straighten, the buzzing has subsided enough for me to hear myself. “How?”
“We’re working on it,” the tall one says.
“Did you know him?” The other one is squat, like someone took the first guy and tamped him with a mallet.
“We were friends.”
Their expressions remain steady. “Anything strange about the man? Anything new?”
“He’s been sick. That’s all.”
“Sick how?” It doesn’t matter which of them speaks, it’s all coming out of the same mouth.
I tell them. They swap knowing looks like they’re passing notes in class.
“Any strange habits?”
“He was a computer geek,” I say. “Pick one.”
“Did he like to eat anything … weird?”
“Like stuff that maybe isn’t food.”
Ben snapping up the escapee shrimp replays in my mind. Maniacal? Maybe. But shrimp was definitely real food.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Like maybe computer parts. Paper. Kitty litter. Weird like that.”
Poker face is my talent show act of choice.
“No.”
We stare at each other for a time. Until they make noises like they’re leaving and I make noises like I’d be fine with that.
No tears. It’s the strangest
thing, because I know I’m crying. My body is going through the motions: quivering lips, twitching cheeks, shuddering shoulders. Yet, my eyes are the Gobi.
Nothing feels normal, not even me.
I call James, because I have a sudden need to know he’s okay.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Except for the puking. I think I’ve got what Raoul’s got.” My heart is Icarus, sailing toward the sun in one moment, spiraling to the ground in the next.
“James, do me a favor. Go to the doctor. Both of you.”
“It’s nothing. Just some bad food, probably. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I parrot. We are liars, the two of us.
We say our good-byes amidst the accumulating doom, but only I can
feel its heft on my shoulders, riding me into the ground, because I know Ben is dead.
I wander into the living room to gather my thoughts and my purse. The jar is there. Of course. It’s always there. Omnipresent and omniscient.
Poor Ben. Poor, poor, socially inept Ben. And poor Stiffy, the cat who never came back.
My mind is a millstone churning the grit into a more palatable form. Into something of which I can make sense. One moment Ben cared enough about his cat that he risked the ridicule of strangers, the next he shrugged away the cat’s disappearance over fried rice.
The cat. It started with the cat sitting in my living room, staring at the jar like it mattered. Which means it didn’t start with the cat at all.
I dial the super. When I ask him my question, I can feel him struggling to formulate a number. After a long pause, during which he chews and swallows, he abandons the specific for the facile.
“Half the building, easy. Plumbing can’t keep up. Everybody’s flushing all the time.”
EIGHT
DATE: NOW
T
he clouds lift their petticoats for just a short time, long enough for the sun to dazzle us. We three lie spread-eagle in the middle of an arterial road and soak up all she has to offer.
For a moment the world is new and glorious. We forget death. And I forget to keep watch.
That’s when the strangers appear.
At first the shimmer-people don’t seem human. And who knows, they might not be. It’s too late to run now. The bushes are over there, a good sixty-second sprint away, while the open land on the eastern lip of the highway is no friend to a person in need of a hiding place—let alone three.
Their number is also three and they, too, sit beneath the sun, luxuriating in her smile. The road has worn them as it has us, until they’re little more than coat hangers for clothing long past its wear-by date. They’re thin, tired, and when they do notice us it’s with the same measure of suspicion.
I stand and my counterpart rises. My hand lifts in a greeting. As does hers.
“It’s a mirage,” the Swiss says, from his place on the blacktop.
My hand drops. So does my other’s. I feel a fool.
“Oh.”
Lisa covers her mouth with both hands. Her good eye crinkles at the edges like what she would call crisps, but what I remember as potato chips.
I strip off my coat, my shirt and spread them out over the dry asphalt. Then I lie beside my clothes and imagine I’m on a beach with a bed of hot sand to cradle me.
The next time we see
a person, he is not a mirage, although at first I mistake the disembodied head for a basketball. The ball bobs along the horizon until shoulders appear, and a body below that.
Italy is known for its leather, and this man’s face is a testament to that: brown and smooth, baked by decades of sun. Patina, the salesperson would brag if he were trying to sell me a leather chair. His skin is stretched over a lean, muscular frame, suggesting he was fit even before the end. He takes long, purposeful strides. This is a man who knows where he is going or at least presents the illusion of being on the right path.
“There’s one of him and three of us,” the Swiss says.
The man draws closer. A cupped hand shades his eyes. His feet lose their certainty.
“Ciao.”
He halts, cocks his head as though he expects the words to echo back.
“Hi,” I say.
He raises both hands and gives a smile made of shattered piano keys.
The Swiss calls out,
“Parli Inglese?”
The newcomer stops, holds up his index finger and thumb, presses them together.
“Little.”
He’s military. Or was. Or knew someone well enough that he borrowed their uniform. Or killed for it. But his boots, though battered, cling to his feet like a second skin, which leads me to believe he served.
“Hello, friends. I am come from Taranto.”
“Is it bad there?” the Swiss asks.
The soldier shrugs. “Is bad everywhere, friend.”
As it turns out, his idea of a little is my idea of a lot. The gaps in his English he fills with Italian.
“A ship came in a month ago full of dead mans. It crashed into the port. Boom.” His hands draw a fireball in the air. “There was one still aboard. He was crazy. He stands on that ship and laughs while the dead mans burn. I never see such a thing.”
“Were you in the war?” I ask.
“No. I was here. I helped guard our enemies in the …”
“Concentration camps,” the Swiss supplies.
The soldier’s nod is weighted down by his former job. “Yes. We put our enemies there when the war started. When the disease came …” He draws a grisly line across his throat.
Dusk arrives while we talk, and with it, dinnertime.
“Is he cute?” Lisa asks.
I look at the soldier so I can tell her the truth. “He might have been, once. He has a nice face, though. Kind eyes.”
“Do you think he’s married?”
“He’s not wearing a ring.”
Lisa feels her way up the bicycle’s skeleton; it’s leaning against a tree. Her lips move slightly as she counts the supplies by touch. The too-small number draws lines on her forehead.
“Do we have to feed him? We don’t have much.”
“He eats with us,” I say.
“Why?”
“Remember what I said about holding on to what makes us human?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why he eats with us.”
The men are talking some distance away while Lisa and I pick through our canned goods. The Swiss breaks away, pulls a small box from his hand, and places it in my palm.
“Matches?”
“It’s dry enough for a fire tonight. Make one.” He and the soldier melt into the oncoming night before I have a chance to ask questions.
I’ve never made a fire before, not like this, out in the open. But I know I can do it.
“Let’s take the wrappers off the cans,” I say to Lisa. “We need the paper.”
“Where did they go?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know much. Not as much as him.”
“That’s true enough. A few months ago I was living a normal life, doing a whole lot of not much, and a couple weeks ago I was stopping a rape in progress so that a young woman might have a chance at survival. Who knows what he was learning during that time.”
“Thanks,” she says. “I don’t think I ever said that.”
“You’re welcome. I’d do it again.”
“Because you have to?”
“Because it’s the right thing. And because I like you.”
“Even though I’m stroppy and ungrateful?”
I manage a laugh. “You’re stroppy, ungrateful, and prettier than me.”
“Am I really?” Her face glows with pleasure.
“Much prettier.”
“Do you think he could love me?”
“The Swiss?”
She nods.
“If he can’t, it’s not your fault. We’re all different now.”
“I can fix him,” she says. “And he can fix me.”
If only wishes weren’t white-colored horses.
An uncomfortable silence choke-holds us
. The Swiss is no prophet, and yet, Lisa still faces the direction in which he disappeared as though she can bring him back with sheer wanting. Man as Mecca.
The fire sputters, limps across still-damp limbs until the residual moisture sizzles to steam. I sit back on my haunches, satisfied and worried. Stare into the flame as though it can foretell the future.