Authors: Alex Adams
“Talk to me, America. Ask me what I found, what was inside her.”
His voice comes from further away now, but I know he hasn’t moved. It’s me. I’m drifting away.
“I don’t care.”
I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until he laughs.
“Of course you care. All you do is care. Why else bring that stupid girl with you? What is she to you?”
I speak through gritted teeth. “Just a girl.”
“No, I don’t think so. I know people, America. I know people do things for reasons that they do not always understand. She told me how you took her from the farm, away from her family. Why would you do such a thing? Shall I guess?”
“Fuck you.”
“When you are a doctor, you see many different people. The women I saw always had a story for why they were in my office. Some, they wanted medicine for birth control. Some wanted an abortion. Some wanted tests for disease. All wanted me to say, ‘It is okay.’ Validation for their actions. Absolution for their sins. Redemption. Who were you trying to save, America? Not that girl. She was nobody to you. A surrogate.”
Jesse. My parents. Everybody
.
I close my eyes, hope the names remain in my head. Reality is shifting out now and something new is moving in furniture. The black spots metastasize—from my eyes to my neural pathways.
“Who were you trying to save, America? A sister, perhaps? Your family. A husband? No. No husband. No ring on your skinny finger.”
Jenny. Nick. My parents. Am I trying to save someone? Is that what I am? Some kind of wannabe hero? I don’t feel like a hero. I just feel scared. For my child. For my future, which looks to be about five minutes long; maybe fewer.
“That stupid English girl killed herself. You helped her.”
“I don’t understand.” My tongue grows thick, my words slide into one another.
“Ask me what I found inside her.”
“I’m tired of your games. Just tell me.”
Skidding, scraping. Metal on concrete. Death touches my leg and I jerk, but already my fingers are reaching for it. I know what it is. I know what it is before my fingers slide along the tight curves that make up the slick, shiny helix. The cold comes for me, arms open wide.
Let me take you
, it whispers.
Let me take you to a place where nothing can ever touch you, where you’ll never feel again. We’re all dead and soulless there
.
“You know this thing, don’t you, America?”
“Yes.”
“How? Tell me.”
“I gave it to her. So she could protect herself.”
“You provided her with the means to rip out what she believed was inside her. She pushed it through her cervix, as though her womb was a bottle of cheap wine.” Satisfied. Smiling. “Are you shocked?”
“Is that what was inside her?”
“No. She was clutching this thing in her hand as though it was precious to her when I found her. Happy. This is what the foolish girl wanted. If you are shocked, you are as big a fool as she.”
“I couldn’t save her. I can’t even save myself. I’m not a hero.”
“No, you are not.
I
could have saved her.
I
am the hero.
I
am trying to save the world from the abomination its sins have produced.”
A chuckle bubbles out of my mouth. “You?”
“I am a hero. You are nothing. What do you try to save? One stupid, blind girl. My goals are much bigger. More important. They will benefit the world. I will kill the monsters man created.”
My eyes close. The here and now is greased rope slipping through my fingers. “Why do you give a shit about me, then? I’m nobody. Just a cleaner.”
“Not just a cleaner. You worked at Pope Pharmaceuticals. Which means you belonged to George Pope.”
FOURTEEN
DATE: THEN
B
eep
.
“Mom? Dad? If you’re there, pick up. Please.”
Pause.
“Jenny and I are fine. Neither of us are sick. Just so you know. I … we miss you.”
Beep
.
It could be the dead
of winter except there’s no snow. Yet. God knows, the air is cold enough to hold a flake to its unique form. The library is still aglow, but the watch on my wrist tells me it won’t be long. I can’t stay out late. Jenny is holed up in my apartment, eating a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
“Is that all they had?” she asked when I jubilantly waved the carton at her. “I wanted rum raisin or cookie dough.”
The ice cream had cost me twenty bucks. Twenty. That was all they’d had at the drugstore unless I wanted their store brand for twelve. And that’s more air than cream.
One week since Jenny lost Mark and we discovered our parents were lost to us both. I call and call and no one answers. The phone system is dying. Calls ring off into nowhere more frequently now.
I still come here every day—without Jenny. I look for Nick’s name and hope I don’t see it. Usually I come straight after work, but today Jenny called in tears.
“Can you believe this?” she asked when I let myself in the door. She’d had the television on, old episodes of some soap because they weren’t making any new ones. “He died in a plane crash before she could tell him she was pregnant with twins.” Then she started sobbing. “Mark and I were going to try for a baby this year. Then he had to go and die, just like Julian.”
“Who’s Julian?” I’d asked.
“On the show.”
So I’m late to the library because of a soap opera.
The head librarian looks up as I walk in. She’s a cliché right down to the glasses performing a balancing act on the end of her snip nose. She’s the only librarian now, aside from a young grad student who prowls the aisles with his metal cart. It looks like it should rattle, but it doesn’t: the wheels are greased into submissive silence. She nods at the round metal clock hanging on the wall like I should be aware that the doors will be locking at any moment. I nod back, to let her know that, yes, I’m aware of the impending closure. Not quite satisfied, she turns back to her work.
The list is up. The crowd has long petered out except for the lone figure standing, legs akimbo, inches from the wall. My heart accelerates. I know the lines of that body. Many a time I admired them across a coffee table, skimmed them in my fantasies. He seems taller to me now, but I’m not sure if that’s because I haven’t seen him for a while or because he’s become almost mythical in my mind these past months. Larger than my tiny life.
Then he turns. …
Oh God, he’ll see me. Not now. Not like this. I’m wearing graying underwear and no makeup. Did I shave my legs? No. There was no need. I am Sasquatch and he is magnificent
.
His face is stone. Granite. Marble. Is there something harder? I don’t
know, but the hardest rock is what I’m seeing. He’s Nick, if Nick had been carved from the sheer side of a mountain instead of flesh.
“Dr. Rose.”
The words come out stiff, formal. He told me to use his first name but I can’t.
Dr. Rose
implies there is a wall between us—me safely ensconced on one side, him on the other.
“Hello, Zoe. Are you looking for someone?”
You
. “A friend.”
He nods, glances over his shoulder at the list, then returns to me. “I hope you don’t find them there.”
“Who were you looking for?”
Across the invisible wall. “My brother, Theo.”
“I hope you didn’t find him.”
“Stay well, Zoe.” He walks away and I watch him leave without saying another word, my arms dangling helplessly at my sides. Something about the way he moves is altered. There’s a slight hitch—a limp, I guess you’d call it—on his right side. How did it happen? I want to know. But it’s too late, he’s gone, and I’m stuck to the ground like I’m trapped in one of my own nightmares. I could call him back, make him tell me, but my mouth won’t work, either.
Nick is alive. That’s good. That’s all I need to know. That’s all I wanted to know, right? I repeat the words:
Nick is alive and that’s what matters in this very moment
.
Behind me, the librarian clears her throat disapprovingly. Dusty phlegm breaks the spell and I spring forward, study the list just so the librarian doesn’t berate me further. I scan the list, double-check for Nick’s name, just in case his being here was some kind of delusion. But no, he’s not on the list.
But another name is: Theodore Rose.
I bolt out the door, into the freeze, glancing frantically each way. But night has claimed all but the faintest halo from each streetlight, and Nick is lost to me.
Beep
.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
The tape whirs onward.
Beep
.
The Pope Pharmaceuticals lobby is
no place for a receptionist. No ringing phones, no vendors buzzing through, no public left in public relations. If we still had one, she’d be filing her nails, flipping through magazines, sipping coffee.
I ride the elevator to my floor. Steel cables whine through pulleys, the brakes bump and grind to a halt. I never knew how loud my world was until there was no one to fill it. The locker rooms are empty. My every move is amplified until I sound like a multiarmed woman running the whole percussion section of a symphony. I clean, just like on every other day. I vacuum, mop, empty the trash into the designated chutes. Some lead to a furnace that belches and bellows in the basement. Others go some place I’m not privy to. And that bothers me when once I didn’t care.
The mice are all gone. Their cage doors sag on bent hinges.
“Did they die?” I ask Schultz. He’s hunched over a microscope, peering at slides.
He sniffs, swipes his dripping nostrils with the back of his hand. “I got hungry.”
I stare at him, wait for him to crack, wait for the punch line. There’s always a punch line. Right?
“You ate the mice?”
“I didn’t have change for the vending machine, okay?”
Every day we work in the same spaces and I can’t read him.
“You ever see
Demolition Man
?”
“Sure,” I say, “I saw it.”
His head pumps up and down. “They’re not so bad. Better than what’s in the cafeteria.”
There’s nothing in the cafeteria, now. We’re all brown-bagging it. I have no words. No, that’s a lie. I have two:
I quit
.
I say good-bye, try to leave, but he waves me over. “Lookit this.” Leaning to one side, he makes enough room that I can stand beside him and peer into the lens. Blobs and squiggles swimming on a green sea. Pretty. Alien. Terrifying in its otherness.
“What is it?”
“Opportunistic wanton neoplasm.”
“Neoplasm—you mean like cancer?”
“Aha. Not just any cancer. This one has a mind of its own, goes where it pleases. you never know what you’re going to get with OWN.” He laughs, snorts. “OWN. I wish I’d thought of that.” He snaps his fingers at me. “You get a dose of this and you get OWNed.” He takes in my blank look. “It’s hacker slang, meaning you take some of this and it’s taking over your body.”
“Is that what you’ve been giving the mice?”
“It’s not like people are lining up to volunteer.”
I remember the flu shot Dr. Scott gave me, and I wonder if I’ve been OWNed.
That afternoon I hand in my two weeks’ notice. When I get home I call Jesse and give him his story, because some things are bigger than a nondisclosure agreement.
“But it’s freezing,” Jenny complains
a week later. She’s regressed. I have become both parent and sister to a petulant teenager.
“Fine,
you
cook breakfast.”
She hesitates, weighs the situation, because she knows she asked me to make Mom’s pancake recipe, so I’m already doing her a favor. With a sigh that comes all the way from her feet, she snatches up the quarters I laid out on the counter, shrugs into her coat, winds a scarf around her neck, and slams the door so hard the frame shivers.
It’s no big thing, just the newspaper. You know, the newspaper that should contain Jesse’s article. The one that would make him different-good to his disapproving father. I need to know what he’s written. Every day I’ve been down at that newspaper dispenser, depositing my quarters, flicking aside the pages of the
United States Times
with no result. The paper is slimmer each day. Stories dwindle with the population.
One at a time, the pancakes turn that perfect pale gold. Soon I have two neat stacks that want to be eaten. Jenny isn’t back. The way she’s been acting, she should have been flouncing in by now, complaining
of the cold. I experience a shiver that has nothing to do with the weather.
Porkchop, the day doorman, is in the lobby peering through the glass. There’s a mouth-sized patch of mist on the glass below his nose. I think he’ll turn when my footsteps tap across the floor, but he keeps on staring through the door.
He grunts when I ask him about Jenny.
“Saw her leave, but she hasn’t come back yet. She stomped on through here with her nose in the air.” He looks abashed. “Sorry, ma’am, I know she’s your sister.”
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t rightly know. There was a noise but I don’t see anything.”
I inch up to the glass door beside him, peer through. The world outside my window is dead. A ghost town. Light wind rolls suburban tumbleweed down the street. The
United States Times
. There is no other.
Cold seeps through the windows, absconds with the heat.
Porkchop clears his throat. “Friday’s my last day. This place can’t support two doormen with just five apartments being occupied. Can’t support one. Don’t know if Mo said anything, but he’s a goner, too.”
A plastic bag rolls by. The letters have faded to yellow. When Porkchop’s words register, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Just five?”
“Uh-huh. Herb Crenshaw passed couple of days ago. His wife last week. Their son’s over in India or someplace they wear bandages on their heads. The way the news is, I doubt the kid even knows yet. Hell, could be he’s dead, too.”
He leans forward until his nose presses against the glass.